An Atheist’s Death
Shortly following the public disclosure of my illness (through an Air Force public affairs article and video) a somewhat infamous webpage published an article discussing my diagnosis. The author noted the distinctly nonreligious tone of the message and brought up the spiritual implications clearly present in my situation, addressing them briefly through the lens of a Christian with the propensity to proselytize. In writing his article the author all but outed me as an atheist (a correct assumption on his part) whilst simultaneously issuing a warning carrying with it the weight of eternal repercussion, writing, “To know that your soul will soon be required of you and to yet not be concerned of things eternal is distressing on an eternal level.” While the occasional shot across the philosophical bow is nothing new to me (as I would guess rings true for most American atheists) such a public confrontation is certainly a novel experience. Ultimately, I have no desire to engage in a tit-for-tat spiritual throw-down regarding our respective ideologies. Reasonably speaking, it is unlikely either of us are the best representations of those ideologies and such a discussion would merely add to the already massive Internet echo chamber of similar content. Instead I wish to give a personal answer to what I am sure many of you might wonder, specifically, how does an atheist deal with the ever-present reality of our mortality?
I would like to express some things before I get into discussing my perspective. I take no issue with the aforementioned writer’s article, I chose to have my personal details published online and accept the consequential commentary, subjectively good or bad. And, though it will become increasingly obvious that I disagree with the content and nature of the article, it is neither distressing nor shocking to me that it was written. The whole of the article felt intellectually soft, and I liken it more to a shark circling the spiritual waters of my own shipwreck than an article written as an earnest call for salvation. The other key consideration to contextualizing my “response” is that while I have selected an individual sentence to launch my own dive, it is certainly not representative of the entirety of his article. That said, I will let you be the judge and have linked his article. Lastly, aside from the start, I hope to stay away from using his words as a foil for my own. In shaping a written representation of one’s personal philosophy it is difficult to relate said concepts without comparing them to a known control, so while I will do my best to not relate specifically, there will likely be a hypothetical representation of what one could consider to be a mainstream christian perspective. Oh boy.
The idea that I, and thus most atheists, are not concerned with eternal matters reflects a common trope of a theistic response to atheism. Such rhetoric reveals a hypothetical atheist dancing around reality with an almost whimsical approach to existence. This depiction could not be further from the truth. It is the atypical atheist who never concerns himself with the question of how and why we got here and the corresponding spiritual implications of even asking those questions. Thus, while it is above my station to recommend any course of action to anyone, I believe it unwise for a christian with the earnest desire to understand atheistic perspective to enter into such an endeavor with the belief that their dance partner has not done the due diligence required to hold such a belief system. Maintain the same level of empathy you expect from them. It is more likely that we arrived at different conclusions from the same questions than it is that we never had those questions at all. It is not that atheists do not consider questions of eternal consequence; they simply reject traditional religious explanations to such questions. With that said it is not my intent to discourage such discussions taking place. In my experience such ventures benefit both parties and it is not uncommon for my christian contemporaries to come away from these conversations with a greater appreciation for their personal faith; something I of course take no issue with.
It would be silly of me to claim that my personal philosophy represents all atheists. Just like any section of humanity there is a wide range of people who claim to be atheists, from old-school buddhists, to newer versions of rational humanists. Instead, I offer my individual perspective and explain how it shapes my approach to both my impending death, and my place in the universe. I do not plan on offering why I believe the things I believe in this article, except when totally necessary, though I may discuss those details in the future. Now that I got the bullshit out of the way buckle up buttercup, it’s about to get real.
This may come as a shock to you, but I do not believe in god. To my understanding, the physical reality is the only reality. Anything that has happened, is currently happening, or ever will happen is contained within the material world that is our universe. My soul is not finite, nor is it eternal, because I do not have a soul, and my money is on you not having one either. My consciousness, sensory experiences, memory, personality, and inability to take a joke, are all determined by the physical structure of my brain (and maybe to some extent the gut bacteria in my stomach). My life is finite. When my body ceases to be, I will cease to be, and for those of you keeping score at home, my body seems to be doing a fairly good job accelerating the whole process. When my lights go out it will be as it was before I was born, an overwhelming totality of absence. There is no afterlife, no reincarnation, and ultimately nothing so magical as to exist outside the realm of human understanding should we be afforded the luxury of an existence long enough to create the methods of our understanding.
I want you to walk in my shoes for a bit (or, I suppose in my case, try not to trip before getting too tired and just decide that walking is overrated anyway). For a moment I want you to imagine, hypothetically, that everything I said in the previous paragraph was true. What would you do differently? How would you react? One of the darker connotations of that paragraph implies that when our loved ones die, we will never see them again. Would this realization change the way in which you interacted with them? How? I would be willing to put massive amounts of money on the notion that each of you would treat every shared moment with a renewed sense of purpose, love, and meaning. Now it would be perfectly fair to attribute my willingness to throw cash down on your behalf to my crippling gambling addiction, but I think we know better than that. An understanding of the finite nature of our collective reality does not remove meaning, it enhances it.
Collective is an important word; it notes the underlying commonality of experience. Thankfully, I am not the first atheist to die, nor the first to write about it. The wife of the late pop-astrophysicist Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, so beautifully summarized what life and death means to a nonbeliever that it seems almost criminal to not include her quote in its entirety, so here it is, in its entirety:
“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind... That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time... That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful... The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
Absolutely fucking gorgeous. Atheists don’t have a bible, but if we did, this would be on page one. This quote so elegantly demolishes the notion that atheists cannot have a spiritual connection to their existence that it’s hard for me to think anyone can read this and still maintain that belief. I choose to use the word spiritual too, in a similar manner to which Ann uses miraculous. That is to say, not as a reference to anything supernatural, rather as respect paid to the grand human experiment we all get to take part in. For believers, purpose can come to represent the total sum of a life lived according to the standards of their specific religion, personal or otherwise. For Christians, the “total sum” can be reduced to simply accepting Jesus as your lord and savior. For me, spiritual purpose became a representation of my earnest attempt at taking part. Nobody said it had to be complicated, and while we like to glamorize the actions of individuals, the greatest things to happen in human history are rarely due to just one person. The average human has more in common with worker ants than Harry Potter, it just so happens that our ant colony builds spaceships.
It becomes easy then, to concede egotistical hubris in favor of such a shift in perspective. This notion is something I believe believers and I can find common ground on and is not incompatible with an atheist perspective. That’s not where the common ground ends either. Modern day atheists and believers (at least in Western developed nations) have more in common with regards to the practical application of their morality than 21st-century believers have with nearly every generation of believers in the past. We also share, hopefully, the utter contempt of the sharia practice of putting to death homosexuals and adulterers in theocratic muslim nations. An objectively better alternative to beheading is to love the sinner, not the sin, as modern christians would say. Hopefully, they don’t get upset at my practice of loving the believer but not the belief. I bring these commonalities up to highlight that living a decidedly good life requires a combination of moral “truths,” (murder is bad) and relativities in accordance with the standards of the time (tattoos are okay, don’t stone adulterers). Believers and atheists in Western nations having more in common with each other than believers from different cultures reveals that a combination of cultural factors is more influential in procuring moral outcomes of a society than adherence to a strict religious doctrine.
Why does it matter? Because it confirms that it is possible to live an ethical life without belief in a moral code that exists outside the boundaries of space and time, a foundational belief for all three Abrahamic religions. That isn’t to say either, that I don’t lend credibility to the idea of concrete moral truths, I simply attribute their existence to the biological necessitations of our species’ survival. Survival, being only one explanation alongside others in a nuanced appreciation of our morality. It is perfectly reasonable to accept different origin stories for why murder is bad, so long as we do not commit murder. To those who lack understanding as to how living a moral life of spiritual purpose and facing death are related I (in a completely secular fashion) pray for your eventual death to be quick and without conscious realization on your part. If those conditions are not met, from personal experience I can guarantee many sleepless nights where the topic at hand will be the manner and method in which your life was lived. In short, sheer existential regret. It just so happens that personal religious belief is not a prerequisite for a successful rational confrontation of personal mortality, nor does it guarantee it. To be clear, it is never too early to consciously appreciate your death, your life, the universe, and your place in it; this is true for all people regardless of belief.
Otherwise the connection is relatively simple. My earnest attempt at living life in a manner congruent with personal spiritual worth and societal standard leaves me with an easy outlook on the fucked-up hand I’ve been dealt. For those who know me, the premise that such a terrible situation would test the structural integrity of my philosophical foundation seems laughable. For those that don’t, hopefully this article clears that up, or at a minimum disproves the idea that atheism is an arbitrary ideology to be tossed aside in favor of a sturdier spiritual response when the going gets rough. So of course I’m upset at the reality of dying an objectively early death, but that emotion is not an existentially paralyzing one, thanks not to the reward of an afterlife, but to the fulfillment of a life well-lived.