(July 31, 2020 at 10:17 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: I wanted to address the 'fear of death' thing. Every atheist has to come to grips with their inevitable death in their own way, we don't usually have a place to go to on Sunday to give us a doctrine on what we should believe that's about. I think some of us hash it out on discussion forums. Most atheists I encounter have made their peace with it, but occasionally I run into a newbie atheists who is stressed about it.
I'm afraid of dying painfully, or very unpleasantly. I'd like to go peacefully in my sleep, and if a nice morphine drip is needed for that, I'm okay with it. Actually being dead doesn't bother me. As Sam Clemens pointed out (paraphrasing very roughly), not being alive up to the moment of his conception inconvenienced him not at all, why should not being alive after his death do so? When I'm dead I won't suffer, or have to deal with millennia after millennia after eon of some sort of afterlife that never, ever ends; I'll just be gone. But nothing will ever change the fact that I was here while I lasted. That's eternal, even if no one will know in a lifetime or two.
Another aspect of this that is rarely discussed is the absolute horror of living forever. Sure, a few thousand years might be nice. Maybe, if conditions are really nice, even a hundred thousand years.
But such time periods are *nothing* compared to an actual eternity. For myself, I would expect to start going insane before 100 million years was over. Around a billion years, and death would be a wonderful reprieve.
But even *that* is nothing compared to eternity. The prospect of a googol years is withering. Of a googolplex years unimaginable. And, how about Graham's number of years? And even that doesn't touch an eternity.
Many people want eternal life, thinking about it like an extension to what they know. But they never imagine the infinite horror of an actual eternal, conscious, life.
