esp if you’re one of the devout ones who think they’ve been really good
Careful that’s how you end up drinking the blue Kool aid.
The ending of life is a sad thing, it can be frightening to imagine losing that control.
Faith is one form of trying to capture that control. Please try to cherish the life you have here and make the most of it. For most I suspect there’s no need to rush it.
Faith is also trying to cherish the life you have, and make the best of it. For example “God gave you a talent, don’t waste it” or saying grace and focusing on what you’re thankful for in life. I even knew people who use prayer as a form of mindfulness meditation to keep them grounded in the present.
Some of them are
I’ve been bedside at more deaths than I can accurately recall. Most of them followed some religion or another, and there were a dozen or so that expressed peace and/or joy at the thought of the afterlife promised to them. Some of the others hoped it would be there, but expressed it with some degree of fear or doubt. The rest were honestly either not in their mind at all, or were otherwise unable to communicate towards the very end.
Christians, most of them, for what that matters. Three Muslims that I recall because you don’t find many here in the rural south. All of them were awake and alert towards the end, and expresses still having faith, though they seemed to focus more on making their last days be about saying goodbye. No clue if that was them as individuals, or a facet of Islam in their lives.
The ones that were the most outright joyous were what you might call a bit obsessed with their religion, but it didn’t seem to stay along denomination lines with the caveat that Catholics aren’t much better represented here than Muslims, so protestants made up the majority of my religious patients, period.
Only ever had one Hindu patient that was dying, and he never mentioned it at all. He just wanted to cuddle with his wife and enjoy good food.
But shit, one the happiest people I ever sat with as they were dying was a secular humanist. Dude was all about going out with a smile. Kept himself just high enough to feel no pain, and was otherwise essentially partying until the cancer made that impossible. Then it was just enough medication to keep pain minimized while allowing him to be aware and able to talk. But he said he was happy with his life, and expected death to be a welcome cessation of the bullshit that comes with a body.
I think the most “impressive” Christian I sat with was an retired evangelical preacher. Despite his religion, the guy was very zen about it. “The Lord will reach down for me when it is time. I’m just going to enjoy what I have until then, and praise his name with my last breath.” But it wasn’t some kind of crazy thing, it was said very calmly, very matter-of-fact. He shrugged a little when he said it, like it was no big deal when he went.
That guy was of one of my favorite patients tbh. We’d go walking, and just chat about whatever our minds brought up. Wasn’t always deep stuff, sometimes it would just be swapping stories about ourselves. Never preached at me, not once, and I had let him know I was essentially atheist, but also Buddhist despite that. You’d think a retired preacher from the kind of church he was in would be all up my ass, but he never even hinted at that kind of thinking.
I came late to when he was passing. It was late at night, and he was a morning patient for me. He was pretty much non verbal the last two days, but he would reach out to people you hold their hands, and smile.
Some people really, truly believe. They can believe so deeply that death is either a momentary inconvenience between them and their afterlife, or is a very welcome gift from god. There’s no doubt in them, no fear, but also no desire to accelerate it.
Anyway, it’s obvious that nobody can speak for the billions of religious people in the world totally. Even as many deaths as I saw are a drop in an ocean of death. But it’s certain that religion can bring about what you’re asking.
I don’t really have anything to add, but thanks for writing this. It’s quite insightful.
It was actually her obsession with the afterlife and the coming of the end times that led to me cutting off contact with my mother in 2014 and me renouncing my faith.
My mom was a devout Christian my whole life, but she went full-on fire-and-brimstone Bible thumper during her divorce from my dad. My dad had cheated on her multiple times and she’d finally had enough of it.
She hated my dad for walking out, but vehemently denied that fact and instead projected her hatred onto God himself. She would always say my dad (and anyone who supported him on his side of the family) would be judged harshly for his actions in the next life. By the way, she said this about basically anyone she didn’t like, including people she disagreed with politically or morally; it might not surprise you to learn that she was quite a bigot as well.
In the last few years I knew her, she started to obsess over the prophecies in Revelations. She’d constantly send me chain emails about how the various conflicts in the middle east were a sign that Jesus Christ was about to return, or a misquoted article about the US government looking into identity microchips was Obama (the Antichrist, obviously) giving his followers the Mark of the Beast. The last time I spoke to her was in 2014 so I never got to ask her what she thought of Trump and his MAGA hats, but I have a strong feeling the irony would have been lost on her; I once had to explain to her that an article she showed me from The Onion was satire and her response was, “they shouldn’t be allowed to say those things.”
She died in 2020, but not from COVID. Two years earlier, she had let a kidney stone get infected which then progressed to full-on sepsis. It responded to the treatment at the time but the infection damaged her heart, which ended up killing her. For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine why she didn’t see a doctor because a kidney stone would have hurt like hell, but then I realized she probably felt that it was just God calling her home.
So yes, anecdotally speaking there are religious people out there who are obsessed with the afterlife. I think people are still inherently afraid of death, though, so they’re not exactly in a hurry to die. But for a religious person who’s ready to die, it’s likely nearly all they can think about.
There is a comfort in knowing that we shouldn’t feel like we have to take revenge on those who wronged us because God will judge them
Or, you could spend your whole life dreaming of the day that God judges your enemies for you, instead of listening to your loved ones telling you to move on and find your own happiness, or you know, learning some actual conflict management skills.
So this turned into a bit of a rant and while it’s likely nobody cares I’ll post it anyway.
I don’t know about Christianity but at least in Islam this isn’t how it works. So there’s a hadith that says that death is the worst of what comes before it and the easiest of what comes after it, because the day of judgement is just that bad. There’s another that says that in the day of judgement it will be so hard that people will want Allah to start it even if they go to hell. No matter how much you think you’ve been a good person it’s not at all something to look forward to. And that’s not counting how even as a Muslim depending on what you did in your life, you could go to hell, spend a certain time there according to your sins in life and then go to heaven. Again not something most people want to find out, especially because Islam teaches that with the exception of prophets everyone sins and that we all need Allah’s forgiveness and mercy to go to heaven. The kind of arrogance it’d take to actually hope for death because you’re confident you’re going to heaven can in fact be the reason you go to hell. A devout Muslim will never think “oh I’ve been really good in life I can’t wait to die and go to heaven”.
Then we get into how in the day of judgement people will have mountains of good deeds and mountains of bad deeds and people’s (temporary; again all Muslims will eventually go to heaven) fate will be decided over a single good or bad deed. Most people thinking seriously about the afterlife will want to live as long as possible to do good deeds and beg god for forgiveness for their bad deeds. Again, no sane Muslim will think “yep, I’m doing alright, death please”.
I grew up in the largest muslim country, and I never knew that. I’m a devout atheist, but this is helpful to frame the thoughts others have.
That’s the reason the prohibition against suicide was introduced by the Catholic Church: people were killing themselves to go to Paradise. Why wait?
buddhism has that too. if people were offing themselves in hopes of somehow reaching enlightenment thru killing, i’ve never heard of it. lol. the buddhist reasoning is that killing in general is bad but killing oneself is the worst of all because the one being that can choose to become enlightened (or at least try) and that you have control over is yourself. “so get crackin’” being the idea there.
My cult taught my 13 yo self that were I to take my own life, I would have to re-experience the life that led me to suicide in order for my soul to learn the lesson. But since I robbed another soul of the oppertunity to live as me, I’d have added bad karma and would reincarnate in (a non specified country in) africa. No more help was offered.
I’ve beaten depression, but suffered losses in cognition due to its severity and length.
Didn’t the Bible state that suicide is grounds for not getting into heaven?
The bible considers it a sin, but sin doesn’t keep you out of heaven if you’re Christian, you basically just have to try and do better.
The Catholic church decided it was a mortal sin, and because you didn’t have time to go to confession afterwards, you would go to hell.
That’s a drastic oversimplification, but it is kind of the root of it.
Suicide is only a sin, so it would theoretically be forgiven. Problem is you must atone for your sins before death, and there no way to atone if your dead by your own hand.
I am aware of no such passage. Heaven didn’t occur to the people in that area until very late in the Bible writings. It is highly likely an introduction from the Greeks.
Yes. I’ve seen a religious person on their death bed saying that they have lived long enough and are ready for god to take them.
We see this in some cultures. Classic folks songs from the antebellum United States (e.g. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot or Wayfaring Stranger ) welcome death with the promise of salvation or afterlife. And there are plenty of worship songs and hymns that praise the afterlife and the end of the world, as if these are good things to look forward to.
Part of this is because of the hierarchical system of middle ages feudalism. Death was always near anyway. Winter always had a body count. Child mortality was terrible (and it was always a happy thing when someone made majority at ~15, even if they were an idiot, antisocial or a bastard.) A bad run of harsh winters and poor crop yields — even a couple of sucky years — could spell famine for the entire region. There was always a labor shortage. Life for common folk was brief anyway, so there was seldom a need to hurry their way to heaven.
As for suicides, yes, there are proscriptions against needless suicide, but this doesn’t stop countless miserables from taking on a heroic task, that is, one in which they can die easily. Revolutionaries and suicide bombers emerge from this ilk. From the Troubles and the War on Terror, we learned that our terrorists were radicalized by circumstances in their life, and imams and priests would just point them in the direction where they could get arms or bombs and a target. When you have nothing to live for, it gets easy to look to divine wind opportunities, and consider ways to make a horrific mess, and news that bleeds.
In modern Christianity in the US, ministries look to fuel doubt in one’s own salvation. Jesus saves, but only if you’re in his in group, and He doesn’t select everyone (according to many preachers). I’ve noted this defeats the purpose, since the narrative is everyone sins, but only Jesus can forgive and making it sound like its a rare lottery ticket makes God sound more like an eldritch horror than a loving personal deity. During the protestant reformation, this was one of the reasons for the traditions Sola Fides (salvation by faith alone) and Sola Scriptura (guidance by scripture alone), so the individual parishioner doesn’t need a minister to guide them, but their salvation depends solely on their own relationship with God and scripture. In that regard, it’s possible to assume God is just and merciful and provides salvation for everyone. After all, God allegedly knows the circumstances of your life, and put you there.
But then it’s also common to imagine that we personally, and our local kin, are going to heaven and everyone we don’t like (e.g. Hitler) is burning in Hell for eternity, though that is just a failure of empathy, of recognizing that even the worst of us do not choose cruelty, suspicion and deception, rather were shaped to do so by the elements and society around us.
The good news is even the pope admits Only God knows the nature of the afterlife, how people are sorted. So we can assume He is reasonable and takes into account our circumstances, or He is an arbitrary monster, in which case our best behavior doesn’t matter. The natural world informs the latter, so we’re safer with the likelihood of oblivion ( All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain ) than an afterlife in which we are once again slaves to a parasitic system.
And speaking of us naturalists, how we define our lives and identity informs how we see mortality. An afterlife has an intersection with the transporter paradox (when Captain Kirk beams down, is it Kirk or Memorex? – that should date me.) In reality, while we don’t have breaks in consciousness by space, we have breaks in consciousness by time, hence the robots in Freefall are nervous about updates and reboots, and we may not be the same person when we wake up from a good night’s sleep (rather another iteration of ourselves, with all our bits and memories and thoughts.) End-of-life studies show that a lot of people on their death bed have more frequent, more prolonged periods of unconsciousness until one day they don’t wake up. So if we don’t exist after death, we may not exist under general anesthetic or during non-REM sleep.
(When you live, your thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations are all driven by your brain and nervous system. So when you die, if an afterlife continues your existence, it’s done by another medium, maybe a spirit-brain or magic brain or something that allows you to continue to think, perceive and exist. Otherwise, your soul could be in the center of the sun at 15 million Kelvins, and not even notice. So, assuming that Heaven and Hell exist, your physical brain won’t experience it, but some other version of you will, much like the simulation of you in Roko’s Basilisk.)
Others define our identities by any iteration of ourselves, which allows us to wake up and be the same person who went to bed. This can get interesting now that Deep South, a computer that can run computations nearly equivalent to a human brain, has been developed as proof-of-concept. Surely, our billionaires are wondering now to create a simulation of themselves, run by a Deep South system, and give it power of attorney over their estate upon the conclusion of their human life.
But that brings us to phase two of the transporter paradox, when a mishap creates a second Riker. The technician is saying hold on for a minute, we’ll get that dematerialized in a moment, but Riker-who-didn’t-leave is literally begging for his life. Who is the true Riker, and why isn’t it the other one?
And before you answer that question, Holodeck simulation Riker wants to raise a critical point about civil rights.
I’ve been reading Heaven’s River, the
thirdfourth part of the Bobiverse series (which teems with replications of computer-simulation Bob, id est Robert Johansson) which discusses questions regarding replication drift (all the Bobs personalities diverge upon activation), and it does raise a specific illusion: Even as we live and age, we change and deviate from who we are at any previous given moment. Some of this is due to experience, other is due to age and development. So even if we could attain medical immortality, or run as a computer simulation on a robust machine with a perpetual service contract, we’d still drift away from our identity as defined in any given instant of time.(Incidentally, the same thing can be said about any given religion and any given culture. They change continuously, and all efforts to preserve a given identity will prove futile as time pushes up mountains and erodes them away again.)
So yeah. Memento Mori. Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Edit: Draft pass
this is why buddhism says there is no “self” in an eternal sense. in every moment, we are different than the last. vajrayana even has exercises you can do where yu mentally try to locate the “self.” is it in your forehead? your throat? your arms? and so on (actually doing it was amazing, to me). there is no self to cling to, no self to defend. all things arise from beginningless beginning due to the circumstances for it arising, and they end when the circumstances for them to remain end. (im not as good at explaining philosophies as you are, but did feel to add this.)
this was interesting to read. thank you!
I am an atheist and have always been one, so feel free to reject what I say here, but I think I understand why they aren’t, and let me illustrate with a story from my own life:
When I was 26, I moved from the Indiana town where I had spent my whole life to Los Angeles for work. I left my parents, my friends, even my wife for six months because she was finishing grad school. I knew I would see them all again eventually, but I still didn’t want to leave them and if there were a way I could have delayed it for years but still have been able to have a dream job in L.A., I probably would have. The first night when I got to L.A., I cried and cried because of everything I had left behind even though I was looking forward to a bright new future.
So it’s not that they don’t want to go to the afterlife, it’s that they want to experience this life as long as possible. They want to be with all of their friends and family now, not wait for them all to die so they can be reunited in heaven.
I don’t know, it makes sense to me.
This makes total sense.
I think you’ve misunderstood the awesomeness of heaven. You wouldn’t miss anyone. Infinite happiness.
The more deeply you think about heaven the more hellish it sounds. Basically you get stuck in this drugged-out bliss perpetually in worship of god. Because you’re stripped of all your corporeal problems and desires. You’re not going to hang out with friends (who would they be? Do they get a say what life stage they appear as?) None of your corporeal hobbies are there. Maybe your spouse decides they want to hang out with their previous partner who died in a car crash? You don’t learn. You don’t grow. You don’t get new experiences. You have nothing to look forward to. You’re a slave to stasis.
The only answer to solving these problems is to place the person in a bubble. But that creates a whole new set of problems. Heaven sounds pretty shitty.
Religious beliefs are in no way uniform or rational on that sort of concept.
Yeah, but without the carrot, people would fight against the stick. Every religion has both the things you shouldn’t do and the reward for not doing them.
As far as I know at least.
You’re talking about what people should think. I’m talking about people’s motivations based on what I am suggesting they actually do think.
That’s absolutely fair. Sense making isn’t a requirement then.
The good afterlife is only available to them if they have been “good people” while alive, and dying early is not being a “good person”. Also, after their death, they supposedly get “judged”, and everybody is going to worry about the X number of “sins” that they did during their life that might end them up in hell.
That’s not true even for all of Christianity, let alone all religions…
For example orthodox Christians believe everyone goes to heaven, and that we are all bathed in unconditional love from God. Hell is finding yourself unworthy of that love because of how you lived.
Orthodox Christians believe that everyone has sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God, that the punishment for sin is death, Jesus is the only way to The Father and the way or forgiveness of sins. It’s not everyone. If everyone went to heaven that would mean sin would go unpunished.
Punishment is a part of catholic dogma, and makes no sense if you think of God as absolutely good and loving.
If we have allowed our hearts to be purified, then God’s presence will be healing, joyful, and life-giving. If we refuse God’s healing embrace, then His love will burn like fire, “for our God is a consuming fire” (Deut 4:24, 9:3, Isa 33:14, Heb 12:23)
Everyone is sinful and deserves hell. Forgiveness is through Jesus.
You don’t see any cognitive dissonance with that statement coming from an absolutely good and loving being?
Absolutely good and Absolutely just.
Not absolutely loving. Source: Bible
“I loved Jacob, but Esau I hated.” Malachi 1
He does love, which is why He died for us.
No matter how good the afterlife is, it’s not going anywhere. Life, however, is unique and finite and so should be savored.
Just like my peepee
When I was in primary school with mandatory religious education this is how I saw it
Yeah. As someone who really likes thinking about metaphysics I’m really excited to die and see what it feels like. That being said I also really enjoy living and I’m not in a rush to die. It’ll happen eventually and I want to try to do as much as I can while I can.
Everyone should be excited to die, not just religious people. Being excited to die means you lived a good life that you’re satisfied with.
Being excited to die means you lived a good life
The problem is, most of the current generation is well aware they haven’t lived good lives. Not to mention, the conundrum of living longer implies a chance for an accumulation of more misdeeds. Personally, the most likely scenario is almost everyone becomes aware there is likely nothing afterwards at some point. Religion is more there like the bumpers for kids cosmic bowling, ensuring zero gutter balls. Keeping you playing, until the day you’re old enough to remove them and pay taxes, revealing life is a subscription, and childhood was a free trial all along.
Read the comment but laughed when I saw your user name.
Not everyone can live a “good” life by your definition of good, but they can live a good life by their definition of good.
Current generations realize that what older people are trying to sell them is a scam, and they’re working on building a new better reality based on their fresh perspective on what reality is.
You can look at religion through many lenses, but at the end of the day religion is just an unprovable fiction we choose to believe because it’s how we want the world to work. My belief that if you want to live a good life you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you is religious. Game theory and my life experiences support my belief, but it is ultimately an unprovable belief because of Hume’s Guillotine and the fact that my definition of “good life” is subjective.
It’s 100% possible that I’m just tricking myself into thinking helping other people is good and makes me happy, but I will still choose to believe.
Is there any reason to feel different after you’ve died than before you were born?
The same reason why you feel different today than when you were just born? You don’t even need dualism to have a basis for life after death.
I feel different today as my sensory as well as sensory processing organs have developed.
Being dead, just as before being born, I possess no such organs and expect not to “feel”.
But my position isn’t the interesting one, @RadicalEagle suggested something I interpreted as still having perception beyond life, and I was wondering if that excludes having perception before life, and how that ties into their metaphysics.
I feel different today as my sensory as well as sensory processing organs have developed.
There are a lot more changes influencing your perception of reality than just sensory development.
Being dead, just as before being born, I possess no such organs and expect not to “feel”.
That’s dependent on your consciousness being limited to your physical body. Who’s to say that your consciousness wasn’t limited so a pantheistic deity could interact with itself. Both theories are equally unscientific as you can’t disprove what happens before or after life
Consciousness being tied to the physical body isn’t “unscientific”, it’s the only option that can be tested and studied.
Read a bit about falsifiability and philosophy of science. Physicalism is a metaphysical theory, and not falsifiable.
There are a lot more changes influencing your perception of reality than just sensory development.
I’d agree, but those are enough to clearly demonstrate a mechanism for changed perception in the proposed time span. The underlying question is question begging and whataboutism, so I think I’ve provided an overly generous answer to a dishonest question.
That’s dependent on your consciousness being limited to your physical body. Who’s to say that your consciousness wasn’t limited so a pantheistic deity could interact with itself. Both theories are equally unscientific as you can’t disprove what happens before or after life
As we can reliably affect consciousness though manipulating the body, it’s well established that it’s contingent on the body.
And as we can map consciousness happening in the body down to individual neurons firing, where would a non-corporeal consciousness interact with a body?
You calling these reliably reproducible facts unscientific belies a fundamental misunderstanding of science.
Though naturalism might not be the only way to investigate the universe, we have yet to encounter any reliable other paradigms. And even if we would discover them, naturalism would still be part of science, we’d just add the other paradigms to the areas they’re useful, like we’ve done with psychology, sociology, and even quantum physics.
A difficult question for unfalsifiable hypotheses is that if they’re unfalsifiable, they are also undetectable, and as such no different from figments of imagination. Why should I believe your imagination when my imaginary friend says not to?
And as we can map consciousness happening in the body down to individual neurons firing, where would a non-corporeal consciousness interact with a body?
Did I mention dualism or substance monism? Materialism doesn’t necessarily include physicalism.
You calling these reliably reproducible facts unscientific belies a fundamental misunderstanding of science.
Read up on why physicalism is not verifiable. Your imagination saying consciousness ends with death is equally verifiable as my imagination saying you’re taken away by the flying spaghetti monster.
Though naturalism might not be the only way to investigate the universe, we have yet to encounter any reliable other paradigms.
Ever heard of ontological pluralism? Naturalism is not physicalism…
Your last response wasn’t constructive, and this one does even less to further a discussion. I’ll just end this here.
Have a nice rest of your existence.
Nah. But reason and logic are just human constructs that you’ll get to let go of when you die. The process of being born is indescribable for me. I think the process of dying will also be indescribable by definition.
Jesus’ verses to us about life being a gift resonate here. The duties we have aside that may shift the balance, it’s too unique an experience to say Heaven surpasses it in gift status. I wish I enjoyed mine more though, I’m more indifferent to it.
Not religious but was watching a video this morning where Neal Brennan and Howie Mandel were discussing death. I stopped and looked at my tea and said to myself “I’ll miss this” (the tea).
I hope wherever I go after there is tea.
I had to sleep on this before coming up with a reply. As an individual who is not what you would call religiously devout, you can take it with a grain of salt. But whatever the case, here goes…
I grew up without religion for the most part but married a Catholic, and as musicians, we wound up playing at the local church.
As it stands, I would not say that I have bought into the whole religious faith thing at the deepest levels. That does not come easily for me. But I think it is fair to say that certain aspects of the religious experience have rubbed off?
In particular, I am more invested in the welfare of others ranging from my immediate family and friends (many of whom I met indirectly through church connections) to the community at large. As such, I am in no hurry to shuffle off at this point, as I feel there are people who depend on me and so I guess I still have unfinished business?
I don’t know what happens in any afterlife. Does anyone, really? Frankly, if we all just fade away into oblivion, I’d be satisfied to simply have a peaceful release from worldy concerns, but I don’t have any expectations beyond that.
