If Life is Meaningless Anyway, then What's Wrong with Religion?

[Excited Penguin]

I admit that my feelings about 'being dead' have changed considerably since I was deeply sedated on an operating table for nine hours. It seemed like no time at all had passed, I closed my eyes and opened them somewhere else. There was nothing in between. I was truly unconscious. I knew in an intellectual way that death is nothingness, like a light going out; but 'experiencing' nothingness robbed me of all fear of it. I've got things I want to do first, and I wouldn't want to die painfully (or expensively), but my caring about anything stops the instant I do. The only thing I can leave behind are my footprints, and when the universe is an ever-expanding realm of photons flying ever farther apart, there won't be a detectable trace that I ever existed. But I did, and it meant something while it lasted.

Total speculation, the fact of the matter is you weren't dead.

What you describe, happens to people on a daily basis, it's called sleep...

The only way to know what happens when you die... is to die, period. The funny thing is that many people that experience actual clinical death don't experience nothingness.

Depends on what you mean by knowing. If that's to say no one will ever know except for ourselves - that is, it will forever remain unprovable, then I agree. But we can speculate that nothing at all will happen given what we currently know about biology. That is the most reasonable assumption to make, by far. You can imagine anything you want, of course, especially if you're brainwashed, but that is beside the point.