(November 29, 2017 at 10:11 am)Alexmahone Wrote: Suppose you have a religious person with a terminal illness. Would you as an atheist EVER try to convince him/her that there's no heaven or afterlife? I wouldn't! (Although I have a strong suspicion Dawkins would.)
No... at the end of the day, whatever gets people through the process of death is all good. But I don't any other time either really; I don't have any expectations of ever 'converting' a theist to atheism... I think that's something that can only come from within, if it comes at all. At the end of the day, when it comes to the crunch, the only difference I see between an atheist and a theist is expectations of what happens after the 'white light' as it were in an NDE or whatever... a theist expects heaven, and an atheist expects ceasing to experience... but the process of death... everything that leads up to that... the fear, the pain, the loneliness etc... is the same for everyone. Thinking of my own Christian family, if it's faith in God that gets them through all that, and makes that process a bit more bearable... then that's all good... but if it turns out that their 'faith' was more about hope than conviction, and they start to have doubts... and come to me, as an atheist, with what if questions about if it's not true, then all I'd try and do was assure them there was nothing to fear from ceasing to experience.
