What happens when you die?
That’s the beginning, the middle and the end—the Alpha and the Mu and the Omega—of all three Abrahamic religions—Judaism(perhaps less so than the other two,) Christianity and Islam. The central question. The source of all theology. It isn’t God, or Sin, or Satan. It isn’t the Pope or the Imam or the Rabbi. It is, just that, a seemingly simple question: “What happens when I die?”
The Theistic Approach
From a theistic standpoint, the answer is simple: your soul—your immortal self—leaves your corpse and ascends to Heaven(if you’ve been good) or descends to Hell(if you’ve been bad). Of course, there are other possible destinations for the newly departed souls, destinations such as Purgatory and Limbo. They don’t matter in the context of this discussion because, like Heaven and Hell, they are merely additional destinations for the soul.
For thousands of years, all Christian theology—and given the state of Islam these days, I’d say theirs also—has been compulsively obsessed with the afterlife, and how to get into the better version. Books have been written about who can get into Heaven and how and why, and who is going to Hell and how and why. And in the thousands of years, nobody has ever been able to show that not only is there an actual Heaven and Hell, but that the soul really exists.
When Christians talk about being saved, they don’t mean to become better people, they mean to ensure their eventual entry to Heaven. Which is kind of interesting, because I always thought that’s what Jesus was supposed to have done in the first place. Otherwise, what’s the point to the Christian human sacrifice worship?
Thinking about death as a theist, especially a Christian one, manifests feelings of fear(“Was I pious enough?” “Did I love Jesus enough?”) and also anticipation(“I will meet my beloved Grandma once I die.”) And also feelings of comfort(“Don’t cry, Timmy, Poodles isn’t dead, she’s just gone to kitty heaven.”) A theist will quote Genesis 2:7 and make stuff up about the soul and the afterlife from there.
2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Despite the verse quoted above, the explanation of life is without meaning or understanding, and ultimately fruitless. Clamping unto a thousands-of-years old idea of what life means with both hands, the theist shrieks that that is all the explanation we need and need look no further. God did it, that’s all you need to know. Except, from what I could tell, the Old Testament uses “soul” to mean living person and nothing more.
The Atheistic Approach
From an atheistic standpoint… Well, now, we have a problem. An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in the same Gods that Jews, Christians and Muslims also don’t believe in, he just goes one God further. The problem with any thought of an afterlife, from an atheistic standpoint, is that theists have usurped the idea of an afterlife, tying it inextricably with their version of God and faith. This is also linked with the common theistic bombast, “If we’re just a bunch of chemicals, why does anything matter?” Or “If we’re just a bunch a chemicals with no higher authority or purpose or accountability, why aren’t you out there raping and murdering and thieving and being ultimately atheistic?”
Thinking about death as an atheist presents a challenge because atheists don’t really have a doctrine that describes life, or what it really means. Scientists(theistic and atheistic alike) can describe the processes of life, the chemical reactions. Using the Theory of Evolution, the scientist can even describe how the lifeforms we see around us, including ourselves, became what they—we—are.
What the science doesn’t answer, however, is what life is. And neither does atheism; in fact, it doesn’t even ask the question. That’s not it’s job.
The Meaning of Life
And that’s the crux of the matter.
One cannot know death unless one knows life.
I find it telling that “alive” is not an attribute of God. I checked out the following(admittedly not an exhaustive collection of sources): Precept Austin and also All About God. In all the thousands of years of Abrahamic disputation, no one has ever defined life. None of holy books certainly do. Oh, they have instructions on how to live a Godly life—when boiled down, it is basically “Obey God and be afraid of Him, very, very afraid and those who purport to speak for him”—but they don’t tell you what life is. How could they? The men who wrote those books had no idea themselves.
Without knowing life, we can’t know death. In that respect, as atheists we are in exactly the same position as the theists. We don’t understand life or death, nor do we understand what happens afterwards. The difference is, though, that atheists tend not to make sweeping generalizations about the nature of eternal life post-death and then condemning all non believers(or different-believers) to hell. Or death.
Reaching Higher
Modern science concentrates exclusively on the mechanics of life, and death. That is certainly a worthy goal. By better understanding our own biology we can prevent(or even eradicate) and heal disease, improve injury repair methods and generally improve our quality of life in ways that religion can only dream of. Understanding the mechanics of death can help us understand the mechanics of life, and also to catch criminals. All worthy goals. It also teaches people how to think, how to ask the questions nobody else wants answers to. In other words, we don’t need to know the philosophical meaning of life to develop a polio vaccine.
Psychiatry concentrates on the mind and mental diseases. What was once thought to be possession of devils is now understood to be mental illness. That, also, is a step forward. You can’t cure mental illness with prayer—or throwing down with devils—but you can with better science. At the very least, you can provide the ill with palpable, if not permanent, relief and help these people live relatively normal lives.
Theism, in turning to ancient texts for all its answers, can only frighten and cajole and beat people into submission; it can’t answer any of their higher questions. About the only thing it can do is convince people that the only questions they should ask are the ones already answered by millenia-old texts written originally in now-dead languages, and to shame into submission those that dare ask uncomfortable questions anyway.
God is moral and cultural stasis: Deuteronomy 4:2.
4:2 Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.
No progress can be made in such an environment. I wonder if this injunction applies equally to those chapters Leviticus that discuss how to deal with disease and those contaminated with it.
Atheism, ultimately a negation of theism and nothing more, forces you to look forward. By denying you simplistic solutions driven by fear—or anything else, for that matter—it expects you to find your own meaning, to reject dogmatic strictures of the past—and even the present. Quality of life will improve only when we start imagining the future and not living in the past. Quality of life cannot be improved by looking backward for moral guidance to a time when it was thought acceptable to murder a woman for not screaming loudly enough during her own rape.
The Meaning of Death
The meaning of death, as I noted before, has been the preoccupation of humans since we first recognized ourselves for what we are: beings different from—better than!—all the other animals; animal lovers will hate me for this, but there it is. In all that time, perhaps tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of years, no one has been able to answer it. Our arts, our literature, our entertainment, our religions are all obsessed with death. Somebody dies, somebody tries to figure how and why. Trouble is, we can only understand death as it relates to life, which we also don’t understand, but at the very least, we have 6 billion walking examples of it. We have no examples of death; no one has ever come back and conclusively said, proven 100% and beyond any doubt, what it is like on the other side. If there is another side.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to die, and it’s a hard concept to understand, and I don’t know if I ever will. To be conscious and aware one moment, and the next to be simply… turned off and gone scares people. It scares me. It’s incomprehensible; I simply can’t conceive of being… and then simply not. I’m walking on a sidewalk, whistling a happy tune, thinking about my next blog post. Suddenly a piano falls on me and crushes me to death. What happens then? I haven’t a clue.
This is the reason religions start. They act as cushions for humans with fears of mortality. Of course, then they grow up and demand more and more of your attention, like children that haven’t been taught their place. Money, time, fear, love: all these things religions demand and, in return, offer no more truth than an atheist can in regards to death—or anything else. They’re like vampires who suck the life out of you until you’re bone dry while giving you an orgasm to cover up the terror and the agony.
Final Thoughts
Perhaps I, as an atheist, make too many assumptions about the universe. I don’t believe in Gods because there is no proof, but is the assumption that there is likewise no soul and that everything stops at death equally valid? Why is the concept of a soul tied in so closely with religion? What if theism is right, but for entirely different reasons, reasons that would make theists’ heads exploded with shock? What would it mean to be human if the soul really does exist, but decoupled from any theistic meaning or idea, and at death it simply moves forward? Or backward? Or maybe it circles?
Perhaps there is reincarnation and your soul circles from the death to life and back to death and then life again until you get it right—whatever it happens to be—and then move you forward to… whatever.
Atheism demands evidence. Of course, there isn’t any to be had anywhere. This world seems perfectly insulted from everything incorporeal, but is that because a) there is nothing beyond our physical form or b) because our incorporeal selves put those barriers in place or c) because that’s the only way they could even make it down to the corporeal world if there was a pre-existing barrier? I have no idea; there is no way to know, not until you’re dead. The perfect veil, but is it perfect because it doesn’t exist or because it is that impenetrable?
Perhaps it is much simpler than this. Perhaps the meaning of death isn’t so much about where you go afterward, but what you leave behind. That would make life of primary concern, something we should be concentrating on far more than on death.
