Life after Death...

Do you want an exorcise that I found interesting and, admittedly, a little disconcerting? Here is the prelude to the exercise.

I am an atheist. If you ask me, I will tell you that I do not believe in a god. Any god. Your god. His god. Their god. None of them. In fact, I gave up the belief in gods before I gave up the belief in a continued existence beyond physical death. But that too, went away.

I don't believe that I (me, myself whatever that means) will continue beyond the point where my brain ceases to function. When your brain dies, you die. Period.

The reason for both of these decisions on my part to “not believe” is the same as my reason for not accepting the existence of alien visits from other planets. There is no evidence. None.

Now don't get me wrong. I would love to discover that some how, some way, there is an after life existence. I like the idea of sticking around this big ol' universe now that I'm here. Though I have to admit that the idea of an unending existence strikes me as unlikely and undesirable. I can truly get that after a few thousand years, things could get boring. Well maybe a few thousand thousand years.

I understand that there is no reason to believe that I existed prior to my birth in 1953. And I say prior to my birth because there is no reason to believe that there was any kind of identifiable “me” conciseness prior to my birth. While the brain has some pre-birth programming, there is no great awareness.

So when the time comes, there will be an end to this ride I'm on. However it happens, one day I will cease to be, just as I was before my birth. There will be no me. So this was the birth of this little exorcise.

One night I was thinking about all this, and I closed my eyes and put myself in that moment before death. (As best as I could being I haven't had to do that for real yet.) I put it in terms of an accident. Seeing that truck coming at me and then bam. Blackness. Only I would not be aware of the blackness. I wouldn't know that I was dead because there is no longer a me.

I would see that truck coming and then nothing. As there would no longer be a me, there would be no memory of the truck hitting me, or of the years before that moment. Just an end.

My honest reaction was one of being somewhat disturbed. I like existing. It's something of a comfortable rut that I've fallen into, and I'm in no rush to get off the ride. And frankly, it's hard to really put yourself into a place where you can even get a sense of what not existing would be like.

So I find it disturbing. Does this mean that I must now hope for something beyond this life? No.

Does my desire for continued existence warrant my believing in such because it is comforting? No.

Does it give any support to “Life after Death”? No.

It just means that I am human. This is my only guarantee of having a life, and I am not going to waste it going to church, believing in gods, or an “after life” or anything else that takes away from living in the now. Because then is done, and later only goes on so long.