RE: Atheists ONLY - Are you less happy now that you are an atheist?
November 20, 2013 at 5:42 pm
(This post was last modified: November 20, 2013 at 5:42 pm by henryp.)
I think the best you can do is guess at how you would stare down your impending death until it happens. If you're old and tired, and you had a good run, I'm sure many people can accept that.
But someone finding out they have terminal cancer at 35 with two small kids, that's going to put a different kind of pressure on someone. The sort that the platitudes aren't going to cover.
I'm not talking personally though, I'm thinking more anecdotaly. People who have a run in with death seem to run to God quite a bit. People who go to prison seem to have a high instance of God finding. People living lives of suffering seem to have high instances of God.
The point being that there is an attraction to the idea, and it seems to serve as a counter weight to people dealing with garbage in this life.
This forum is likely not filled with that demographic, so there is a bit of an empathetic disconnect going on, I suspect?
Personally, I really don't want to die. I had, as has been said, 14 billion years or so of non-existence. And I'll get another bunch of billions later. So I want to drag out this existence thing for as long as possible barring some quality of life drop off.
But someone finding out they have terminal cancer at 35 with two small kids, that's going to put a different kind of pressure on someone. The sort that the platitudes aren't going to cover.
I'm not talking personally though, I'm thinking more anecdotaly. People who have a run in with death seem to run to God quite a bit. People who go to prison seem to have a high instance of God finding. People living lives of suffering seem to have high instances of God.
The point being that there is an attraction to the idea, and it seems to serve as a counter weight to people dealing with garbage in this life.
This forum is likely not filled with that demographic, so there is a bit of an empathetic disconnect going on, I suspect?
Personally, I really don't want to die. I had, as has been said, 14 billion years or so of non-existence. And I'll get another bunch of billions later. So I want to drag out this existence thing for as long as possible barring some quality of life drop off.
