people, lifePossible Duplicate:
Do you fear death?
Is the motivation here to declare answers for the entire non-theistic community from the position of the moderation team or to actually discuss issues?
Because I’m an atheist, and would have answered “yes”.
And, frankly, I think any atheist who says they do not fear death is either deluded, distracted, disingenuous, or delirious.
I see no reason to fear the fact of death. It’s going to happen, and I will end. I feel perfectly sanguine with fearing the experience of dying, assuming that it’s a prolonged painful experience - which it may well not be.
That’s not to say that I don’t care. I’d much rather continue to exist than not, all things being equal, for the simple reason that I will stop existing, and after that there is nothing. Oblivion. I can’t even look forward to playing harps in the clouds, or gaining satisfaction at being proved right, or anything. I don’t fear it, but as an emergent complexity aware of its own mortality, I see no reason to actually seek it, and good reason to attempt to stave it off (given the cost/benefit analysis falling the right way).
I’d be more inclined to say that I fear death than not, but really it’s not something I think about very much. So I don’t spend my life living in fear of death.
But to understand people who say they don’t fear death, maybe it’s like this: would you say you are afraid of lightning? Most people would not (if you are, this isn’t a good example). But if you found yourself strapped to the lightning rod at the top of the Empire State Building in the midst of an electrical storm, you probably would be afraid.
Death is not looming imminently over most people, so why be afraid?
I assume that even people who are “not afraid of death” would become afraid in the face of imminent danger.
I fear the process of dying because it might involve physical and emotional suffering, but I don’t fear death. I view it as simply a loss of awareness - something that occurs every time I go to sleep. The fact that I don’t believe in an afterlife means that I’m not apprehensive about what that afterlife might involve.
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