(October 30, 2019 at 9:56 am)Dmitry1983 Wrote: I was terrified when I was an atheist. Now I'm uncomfortable about death and that's it.
Yeah, you'll never make suicide bombers out of atheists because they value life too much.
But the thing is that atheists look upon death peacefully - as Isaac Asimov explained:
Isaac Asimov Wrote:Since I am an atheist and do not believe that either God or Satan, Heaven or Hell, exists, I can only suppose that when I die, there will only be an eternity of nothingness to follow. After all, the Universe existed for 15 billion years before I was born and I (whatever “I “ may be) survived it all in nothingness.
People may well ask if this isn’t a bleak and hopeless belief. How can I live with the specter of nothingness hanging over my head?
I don’t find it a specter. There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell or eternal boredom in Heaven.
But, on the other hand, I've seen plenty of old people who were truly miserable in the last years of their lives solely because of their religious beliefs. People frightened that they'll go to hell that they would call the priest to apologize when they couldn't come to the mass that day because, up to that point, they went to church every day. Also obsessing other people with trivial deeds from their past that now haunted them because they thought that God would send them to hell on those accounts.
So stop with the BS.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
