My neighbor died last month
They held his memorial service today
Last month, my neighbor, about six months older than I, died suddenly. Just driving down the road, and wham! Sudden medical event (family didn’t reveal the actual cause), and when bystanders responded to try and revive him, he was gone. Nobody else was hurt, no damage done to anything but his car (and not much since the speed limits in this town are low), so the only tragedy was his sudden demise.
Now, as I go on, make no mistake. This fellow was as good as they come. I mean, when we talk about “good Christians,” he fit the definition of a truly good man who lived his life to the letter of his beliefs, treated people well, always smiling, and had a truly snarky humor I got along with well. His church, in fact, has a female minister, and his son married a black woman, who was accepted into the family completely.
So, good people, good neighbors.
The memorial service was about an hour long, and for an atheist, yes, it was indeed torture. God this, God that, and so forth. But I knew going in I’d have to endure it, so I gritted my (new) teeth and went.
There was a slide show, accompanied by religious music that was meaningful to the family, a beginning prayer, eulogies by friends and family, everything you’d expect in a very tight knit religious community. It was very well done, in fact — tasteful, tearful, and well attended.
So, the following is no criticism of the people or the family, and certainly not of the departed.
But about halfway through the service, I suddenly realized something.
When humans lose a family member they love, yes, we go through a grieving process. That process varies with one’s society, culture, religious beliefs, family and community traditions, all of that. It’s necessary for us to recognize and deal with our emotions in moving on after that loss.
But what this particular service was doing, I saw clearly, was not only to help these folks deny that this good man was dead, it was happening so they could deny the very concept of death itself. The various eulogies weren’t just talking about the man in heaven, it was full of “we’ll meet you there,” and other such statements.
In other words, none of these people want to deal with something atheists know already and are (mostly) comfortable with. That all of us die. That with the death of the body, the person dies, too. No second chances, no do-overs, and you can’t meet that old classmate you bullied in junior high to apologize. Grandma isn’t going to be there to cook you one of her special apple pies, Grandpa isn’t going to be there to sit and play cards with you, and the spouse(s) you lost won’t be there to continue your relationship, picking up where it (temporarily?) stopped.
You’re gonna be dead.
And they are terrified of that.
One of the websites I frequent (because I love to torture myself) is Quora.com. It has a question/answer format, with various sections about different subjects. One subject I torture myself with is religion.
One of the most common questions often brings up the idea that theists wonder about — are atheists afraid of living a life without God to give them something to live for? A purpose. They seem to fail in understanding that even if you do have a religious belief, that one can determine one’s own purpose in life. That one can devote your life to something and the one thing that’s not needed is divine advice on what that should be.
This thing those people seem to be afraid of is not just dying, but the idea of dying without a purpose. But they cannot understand that the purpose can be decided by you! It’s like they are avoiding making that choice, and afraid to die as a result.
It’s as if I could feel, underlying the whole service, a fear — a desperation to not face reality. That their imaginations could use this mythology to avoid the hard questions. Not just facing the death of a loved one, but the very thought of their own death.
Reality.
But as I was talking that over later with my wife, something else occurred to me. It isn’t only Christianity that does this. Any religions that talk about an afterlife — whether imagining a deity or not — seems to be dealing with this same fear — the fear of permanent death. But if one thinks a bit deeper, something else intrudes.
It seems to me like a combination of fear and guilt.
Fear of death for oneself or members of your family or community.
But guilt about causing a permanent death of someone else.
Now, don’t get me wrong, a lot of humans especially in war, seem to feel no guilt in killing someone who is trying to kill them, and most human morality systems are ok with that. In fact, I’m ok with that. Self defense is always ok, and if death is the only way to do that, well, what can I say?
But on a larger scale — a social scale, it’s like humanity has this guilt thing going on where they’re afraid to admit that death is permanent and the end of a life, full stop. They want to believe that somehow, there may be something after all of this or the thought that killing at all might not be ok. That the unnatural wasting of a life by killing someone is just bad. So, to assuage that guilt, we make up this crap about an afterlife to help us to justify causing a death by imagining that we’re only helping them “pass on”, that the life isn’t “wasted”, but they either can come back in a do-over, or they have a chance at “eternal life” if they’re good enough. Because hey, if they were bad, their eternal torture isn’t MY fault, right?
It just seems that to me, if humanity finally realized that this one life is it, all you’ve got the chance for, that a purposeful killing or ending of a life is a total waste of a life, that maybe we’d be less violent. At least in general. (Yeah, you’ll always have the mentally deranged though.)
Because every time a person dies, their experiences, their knowledge, their skills, die with them. Who knows how far mankind could have advanced if we were educating everyone instead of killing one another off so much?
How many of those 4,000+ children just killed in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict may have been geniuses who could have invented say, Hyperspace travel? Or the medical solution to aging? Or a thousand other ways mankind could have lived better lives had they survived?
We’ll never know.
Fear is both mankind’s best friend and our worst enemy. It’ll save your life by making you cautious in the face of danger, yet prevent you from stepping up and doing the right thing.
Heroes in battle will tell you that they don’t act through a lack of fear, but because they overcome it. They learn how to use it to get past those things that hold them back.
The rest of mankind should take a hint from those people. They’re heroes not because of their actions, but because of their mental strength in learning how to use their fear.
I’ll leave you with this final thought.
The one thing that started me on the open and honest path towards admitting to myself I was an atheist was sitting by my mother’s side in the nursing home the day she died. They’d laid her out nicely, removed her roommate temporarily so I’d be alone, and gave me the time to privately sit with her.
I realized then that she was gone. She was never coming back, I’d never see her again. Her death was permanent. And I realized that I’d seen it coming and had accepted it already, months before.
Did I feel bad? No. she’d been unhappy, and felt that her God had abandoned her as she died of Myasthenia Gravis, which she had watched her aunt die of some years before. No matter how much she prayed and how often she went to church, the churches and her god, in the end, did nothing to help. She was a woman who’d been devout and church going all her life, and had devoted that life to wanting to see her beloved husband (who’d died in 1963) again in heaven, and who desperately wanted to avoid the lingering and suffering death her aunt had suffered through.
She’d finally given up.
She’d conquered her fear.
We should all learn from my mother.
