I wonder if there is a final moment, a sort of reverse ‘big bang’ moment, during death, when you are able to reason, even for a second, “That’s it then.”
Or are you too busy screaming and moaning from the pain of whatever has killed you, or too delirious to make any sense of anything any way?
But maybe there’s a final point before switching off.
This point is a point that would be reached, let’s agree, by both atheists and theists. Or, more properly, by both those who believe in nothing after death and those who believe in something after death.
Beyond this point, this precise and final moment in time, there is nothing according to atheists.
But, to those following various forms of ‘belief’ systems, there’s a range of options to come ‘afterlife’. The larger religions offer Heaven and Hell, depending on how good or bad you’ve been, others offer being born afresh as a worm, goat, or maybe a tree.
I would probably quite like to ‘return’ as a tree, or maybe spend eternity floating around on a cloud, after my death, despite no explanation being given as to how one deals with the boredom of just standing there being a tree or the monotony of sitting on a cloud for-literally-ever. I’d like anything to follow this wonderful experience of life that I have enjoyed, well, all my life.
Life and being alive is cool.
Indeed, the thought of not being alive is quite depressing. I don’t want to not be alive. I like it.
It’s this not being happy about dying that should lead me to a nice and safe afterlife belief, rather than me accepting, as I do, that one day that’s that. Believing in an afterlife makes the horror and insecurity all go away to be replaced by something all fluffy and happy.
Most belief in an afterlife seems to be reasoned by virtue of having a huge ego. We really think we are something. We think we are so important. The idea that we just snuff out just doesn’t sit well with our ego, does it?
So many of the fluffy and happy afterlives available seem to come wrapped with loads of work to be done whilst alive. If it’s not having to pray five times a day, or adhere to strange unnatural sexual rules and codes, learn off by heart books written by children thousands of years ago, it’s having to be nice to everybody on fear of eternal punishment. Having to be nice when you don’t want to, having to forgive people who have raped and killed your child, having to spend a lifetime learning how to prepare for the next ‘life’. Heck, there’s no time left to be alive.
And those who are so sure of an afterlife and dedicate themselves to it have absolutely no concerns about people dying around them. Preserving life is not on their agenda. Death means nothing. A person’s life is unimportant to them. These are the people who enjoy films or games where a maximum number of people are killed. They think killing is fun.
Blaise Pascal’s wager from over 400 years ago mumbles something about how we should spend this life as if a god and afterlife exists because that’s a kind of insurance for after death us fluttering off to the good options of Heaven or being a tree. Yet, he argued, if there is nothing after death we’ve lost nothing.
Wrong.
See, the problem with all the religion mumbo jumbo we have to adhere to in order to ensure the life we get after death is a good one, is that it stops us enjoying this life.
If this life is all we get, if all there is is this one shot and then there’s nothing forever, then we should live it to the full. To fill this life with mumbo jumbo about an afterlife which logically is just a placebo to calm our dislike of death, is to waste this life.
So, at that final final moment of reverse ‘big bang’ when the realisation is that that’s that and there’s nowhere to go, will those who have wasted their lives pre-occupied about a next life that isn’t there regret having not lived their life to the full?
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