by
Shannon Scott
I’m in U.L. Light junior high school when my grandfather dies. Papaw lived right across the street. My grandmother died many years later, I was out of graduate school by then. The most gentle woman I’ll ever know. My older brother Kenny died while I was in Baltimore for a professional conference. He wasn’t forty years old. I was at work at Ohio University when my father called me to tell me my mom died. I was at my father’s side hours before he died. My wife was pregnant with our first child, what would have been his fifth grandchild. I attended their wakes and funerals and those of other loved ones over the years but I never once gave thought to an afterlife.
Mine or theirs.
Not one.
Never.
Didn’t need to.
Certainly didn’t want to. Wants derive from needs. I haven’t wasted a second pining for an afterlife, here’s why.
THE ARGUMENT FROM SACRIFICE
I’m reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, invigorated from the I Am Not Your Negro documentary, when I come across this:
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: it is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
And I realize, slapped awake, I’m not the only one! I’m not alone! Other people, people like James Baldwin, believe in death. Believe it’s real! I’m vindicated. He knew, James Baldwin knew. He knew we’re not eternal and all this posturing we do, the self-built prisons are but denials of the only fact that can give value to a life: It’s finiteness, that it ends. He knew.
I know.
What does Baldwin mean when he writes that death is the only fact we have? He means that death defines our life. Death is the only thing that demarcates life, reigns it in, gives it shape; otherwise life is unruly, a limitless mess. Consider a jigsaw puzzle: the first thing most solvers do with a jigsaw puzzle is find the edge pieces. But consider that without death there are no temporal edges to your life. Life simply bleeds out everywhere and spills away. An unsolvable puzzle. How can a life be precious, diamond-rare and beautiful to behold, when it is said to be eternal, like sand-everpresent, with no end in sight? A life must end for it to have value. This is no doubt disconcerting. No doubt. But why is it that no one frets about, postures recklessly to the point of self-built prisons about the nothingness before birth? Thus, it is so important to hear from Pascal on this:
"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished being here rather than there, why now rather than then."
Swallowed up. A space can only be little if it has edges. Your life, your individual life must end, can’t be eternal, if it is to be defined. I am so sorry to be the bearer of bad news but as someone once said, “The truth shall set you free.” Free from self-built prisons and open to a radically new view of life, one that doesn’t sacrifice beauty.
One wonders, in light of Baldwin’s revelation, how does it help to believe that we are each eternal; that your life doesn’t end? Is it benign to state that we don’t know what happens at death? When it seems so unequivocally obvious that we cease to live? That the logic that makes you, me, and Dupree, up...ends? Like that. 
THE ARGUMENT FROM SPECIES
You’ve probably heard that bit about how closely our DNA resembles that of Bonobos. DNA carry the instructions for proteins to build stuff: eyes, spleens, intestines, brains. I tell you this because no one ever says that we don’t know what happens after death for other mammals, even though we’re all made of the same stuff, with similar instructions and organs. Before you laugh this off, chuckling to yourself, hollerin’, “I ain’t no bonobo, I’m a person!” you might consider this simple, yet devastating argument from Peter Singer in his Animal Liberation:
Premise: Animals are sentient and experience pain
Conclusion: It is wrong to eat animals
It’s called Speciesism and the definition is - a prejudice or bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species against those members of other species. Crux Query: Why is our life more valuable than theirs? Especially in light of the fact that the material (atoms, cells, bones, organs, neurons, brains) that constitutes us, makes us both capable of experiencing pain...and suffering. I’m not crying, you’re crying:
(*wipes tears) And yet, we don’t hear about other individual members of other species possessing eternal lives. Speciesism in this life and the next. Aren’t humans just awful? It is reasonable to cite the ways in which you are different from bonobos and other mammalia, it is also reasonable to cite the ways in which you are alike.
Or maybe I’ve misread you, and your beloved pet (Poochie, MacGreagor, Laverne, Spinoza, Woody, Sunny, Gracie, Percie [my own pets to date]) will be there in heaven with you.
Right about now I can hear some of you saying, “But we have souls. We are endowed with souls.” Ah yes, the ole soul. Believe it or not, souls are more trouble than they’re worth. You see souls are immaterial and nowhere, they don’t occupy space. Alas, human beings do, occupy space. But don’t fret because this material world provides us with so many things we love: like the chemicals involved in the emotion of love, bodies and brains to give and receive love, a hippocampus to remember love. With souls in the picture there are two more problems: 1. How do souls that are immaterial and nowhere (lacking extension) interact with bodies that are material and spatiotemporal (in time and space)? Philosophers call this the problem of parallelism. Souls and matter can run parallel but never interact. 2. If our essence is our soul, how can we have those pesky human experiences that require bodies?
Ditch souls. You don’t need ‘em. Souls are just another Baldwinian denial of the beauty of our lives; a beauty that necessitates our finite nature.
THE ARGUMENT FROM ENTROPY
Entropy is the universal tendency for structures to dissolve into randomness. You are not exempt.
THE ARGUMENT FROM DEATH IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE SUBJECTS
I would love to tell you that this is about my midlife crisis. Love to coyly explain it away by telling you that I’ll turn fifty this September and that I’m not-so-coyly freaking out because of all the usual reasons people freak out when they hit the half-century mark: unmet expectations, stalled career, regrets galore, consistently on the precipice of financial and ergo marriage/family ruin, and of course realizing my mortality as the obituaries of my parents, aunts and uncles, famous people, and especially people younger than me, begin to stack up like the bills I can’t pay. (Master’s degree in philosophy - what was I thinking?!) Look me in the eye: I would love to tell you that.
But I can’t.
Because it’s not true. The truth is I’ve been into death for as long as I can remember.
You might call me a lifelong thanatist. 
This is why the movie City Slickers resonated with me years ago when Bruno Kirby and Daniel Stern help Billy Crystal realize that death is his favorite subject:
Crystal: You know, it makes you stop and think.
Stern: Stop the clock. That's 25 minutes. I win.
Crystal: Win what?
Stern: I had under a half an hour before you started to talk about death.
Crystal: Why would you think I would talk about death?
Kirby: We just came from a funeral. And it's your favorite subject.
Death is one of my favorite subjects, along with foods that begin with Q. Death is very important to me. I remember latching onto Leo Buscaglia way, way, back in the late eighties in high school psychology and I still remember this:
“I don’t brood over death. I’m too busy living.”
And who has time in this day and age to brood over death, what with tweets to tweet and posts to post and yadi yada?
Still, in an earlier piece I postulated that beliefs are indicators of, if not causal factors in, health. I postulated that behaviors are largely based on beliefs; in short, that belief health is behavioral health. You are what you believe. And so I ask, in all seriousness, is it healthy to believe that you don’t die?
This is where it becomes important to define our terms. I define death as the cessation of life, a single life (yours, mine, a pet) that began at a certain point in time and will end, cease to be, at a certain point in time. It is also important to note what death is not. Death is not a transition from an earthly plane to a spiritual plane, where presumably the individual life (yours, mine, a pet) continues on, just in some different form. If the individual life goes on, just in another time or place or form, well then, death has not occurred. Seems pretty straight forward. Right?
Here is what I blogged after the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Florida:
Radical Belief
Talking to myself about “radical”
Important word…
especially today, in light of recent events…
and let's add on “belief”…
radical belief….
Hmmm, I think that I die, that is, that I cease living…
Is this radical seeing that most people don’t believe this…
Does radical belief then come down to a numbers game…
What MOST people believe…
Or does logic or truth or fact dictate radical belief…
Hmmm, seems evident that I die, I have this instinct to live but why would I have it…why would I have a fight or flight response if I never really die…
So strange…that most people believe they are immortal and never die…
Isn’t that a radical belief…
so odd…
what other radical beliefs might flow from believing you never die…
I mean how could life have value if it never ends…
Life can’t be precious if it’s always available, never ending…
Maybe believing we are immortal leads to the idea that life is cheap on this plane…
And can therefore easily be taken, ended, shot up, cut up, blown up, snuffed out, burned down???
You tell me what is and is not a radical belief.
If death is just crossover, from one plane to another, how is it that our physiology and our brains don’t know this? We have an incredible, innate survival instinct, preloaded into our genes (as do all other mammals) that allows us to fight or flee when faced with a threat to our survival. But if death is transition, there is no threat to survival.
What I’m not so subtly asking: what is the behavioral health fallout from believing individual human lives are eternal, from believing death is mere transition? Isn’t it intuitively, the devaluing, the depreciation of life, before the transition?
I feel like I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about death and, somehow, defending death. Propping death up one a placard, as if I’m on strike for death, chanting:
What do we want?
Death.
When do we want it?
At some point.
The Kobe Bryant memorial was February 24, 2020. It was as emotional as you might expect the memorial of a famous person to be. Wrenching just to watch. His widow concluded her speech with the following:
We love and miss you, Boo-Boo and Gigi. May you both rest in peace and have fun in heaven until we meet again one day. We love you both and miss you forever and always, Mommy.
No death, just transition.
Question: How can eternal life have value?
I wrote this blog piece on 9/6/16:
I was being a lazy parent Labor Day and my son was watching a show on Netflix called Ask The StoryBots.
The premise for the show is a child asks a question like, “How does a plane fly?” and the StoryBots do the research leg-work to come up with an answer. Like the four forces of lift, drag, thrust and weight, all with musical and comedy interludes designed to delight your child and give you an opportunity to make dinner.
The episode my child watched had the question “How does night happen?” Which, to make a long story short, leads us to the sun and the rotating earth for our answer.
Two funny things happened when the StoryBots interviewed the sun:
1. He coughed up a solar flare. I don't care who you are, that’s funny.
2. He said “Only six billion years till I retire.”
So the sun, the source of everything we kooky humans need, will go out. Die.
Funnier thing, we humans don’t die.
Just seems so cheap to me sometimes. So very cheap to avoid the truth of death and finitude.
I wrote that years before I sat mesmerized, reading James Bladwin but well after I’d heard of Dane Cook. There’s a very funny Cook bit about his interaction with an atheist after the atheist sneezes and Cook says, “God Bless You.” Hilarious bit. My favorite part is but a tiny moment when he’s answering the atheist’s question, “What do you believe happens to you after you die?” To which Cook replies:
“And I said uhh... okay. Well, hopefully I live a good life and my soul goes to heaven and when I get there all my ancestors will be waiting for me like it's an airport. ‘HEYYY! Whatsupp? Guess who's dead sucker. Hahahaaa. Come here. Float over here.”
Again, funny.
But also again, no such thing as death, only transition.
You may think referencing James Baldwin and then Dane Cook in the same essay is cheap and stacking the deck but it’s worth pointing out that Dane Cook ends up in the same exact spot as philosopher/theologians of the highest order, be they Thomas Aquinas, Saul of Tarsus, or Kant, and Cook does so with humor and without hoighty words like ‘hermeneutics’, transcendence’, or ‘elucidation’. Good luck getting something funny out of Kant. If your endpoint is a ludicrous concept like an afterlife, you might as well get there with a ludicrously funny story, as opposed to use of the philosophical equivalent of ‘moist’, ‘elucidation’.
My younger brother is one of my closest friends. We played on the same football and baseball teams growing up and he was the best man in my wedding. We usually talk once a week and he is beloved by my children. We have similar tastes in movies and one of the pinnacles of our 80’s adventure flicks was Raiders of The Lost Ark. To this day we can still quote the movie (“If only you spoke Hovitos.”) and somehow reference it way more than can be healthy. There are two scenes in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark that have stayed with me in my own adventure to understand the denial of death. One scene sets up the other. In the first, the Nazi’s, under the direction of Belloch, are hot on the trail of the Ark but their Staff of Rah is the incorrect height and so Indy and Sallah realize with glee that, “They’re digging in the wrong place!” The follow up scene I wrote about while I was reading William Barrett’s Irrational Man:
Just enjoying and contemplating the hell out of William Barrett's Irrational Man.
The chapter on Kierkegaard gives us:
"He [the aesthete] chooses himself and his life, resolutely and consciously in the face of the death that will come as certain; and his choice by its very consciousness and resoluteness, is a piece of finite pathos in the face of the vast nothingness stretching before and after his life. The aesthete may not wish to dwell on this somber background to his choice, but that background is surely there even if we, to use Tolstoy's phrase, are not able to stand face to face with it. It is thus by an act of courage that we begin to exist ethically. We bring ourselves to ourselves for a lifetime."
Who is and who isn't standing face to face with death?
Is Unamuno? "If there is no immortality, what use is God?" Unamuno quotes an old peasant approvingly.
I have always wondered: how can a life have value if it never ends?
Mustn't life be demarcated?
"Find the edges!" Cried Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
As an atheist, I am my ownmost possibility which cannot be outstripped; a being-unto death. Death, my finitude, is the background that forms my figure, gives definition, gives value, because...
I FOUND THE EDGES!
Does your faith require you to stand face to face with death?
If it doesn't you could find yourself digging in the wrong place.
Just to beat this dead (if you believe in that sort of thing) horse a little more, here is a Jack London poem that I had read...at my wedding.
I would rather be ashes than dust
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them
I shall use my time
What kind of thanatic freak has a poem about death read at his wedding? Apparently, one in magnificent glow.
THE ARGUMENT FROM LACK OF COMMUNICATION
Not one person I have loved in my life, that has died, has reported back to me about life after death. I’m not saying or bragging that I’m not crazy here because Joe Pesci knows I’ve said and thought some outlandish shit in my time but still, no messages or voices from beyond the grave. Would you call me crazy if I told you I have received communications from my deceased loved ones?
Why?
If they are eternal, what is preventing their communication with the living? We’re all sharing the same universe/multiverse correct? What does dead/alive have to do with communication? Relationship therapists will tell you that communication is key. The supposed dead/alive dichotomy (Forced! Fallacy! Excluded Middle!) is no excuse not to communicate. Isn’t it laziness on the part of the dead not to communicate with the living about them, well, not actually being dead but, just, somewhere else? “We’re over here,” doesn’t seem like too much to ask. This would resolve a lot of ambiguity on the earth planet we living beings occupy. Just lazy. But hell, they could be having way too much fun I suppose, to busy themselves with earthly/living relative matters. From what I hear, living in the light of god is heavenly. But who am I kidding, my relatives, most anyway, are not living in the light of god. Oh no. They are, ahem, down there, and due to this fact, they get a complete pass on not communicating with me about eternal life. Hard to send a letter or shoot an email when you're writhing, gnashing, burning—what have you. As I said, they get a pass. But if I come to learn that they get breaks, I’ll be pissed. At this point, how can they not be unionized? If you get ten minutes to not writhe, you can communicate. No excuses.
Now I know some people do talk/communicate with people beyond the grave but let’s face it, they’re too expensive in today’s market. A quick google search of psychics in my zip code revealed some outlandish rates. My kid needs new shoes! The other, “psychics/mediums/beyond seers” are usually a little jarring, what with being naked under the sandwich board, defecating on the salad bar at Wendy’s, or ambling interstate 95 without any shoes, or teeth. It’s hard to communicate with your deceased loved ones when you can’t get past the body odor emanating off the psychic medium like radiation at Three Mile Island circa 1979.
Of course, I kid. I make light, to get a little perspective. A different viewpoint.
The truth is, death is a serious matter. Some will call it a serious business but dealing with the rigor in rigor mortis is not what this is about. (SLAP🗲 -Get serious!)
Ok, death is serious. It’s just that this eternal life schtuff can be so...eternal-ly boring, that (bring it back!) just researching this stuff can bring you down to the point where you need some heavy levity if you get my drift.
Alright here we go: death is serious.
Very serious.
Gravely serious.
But is it though? What if we are eternal and death is, as they say, a transition? Why all the seriousness, why all the mourning, why all the five stages of grief if death is a transition? We transition all the time. We move, we change jobs, husbands, wives, lovers, friends, and we treat none of those transitions with the whole death seriousness. Sure, it might be a while till we see our loved ones again but that has to be tempered with the fact that they are partying balls up in heaven. And if we know we’re going to see them again, because we’ll transition too, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance seem useless at best and hypocritical at worst. No offense to Kubler-Ross, because I know we all have to make a buck while we’re here, but honest bucks spend the same. Am I wrong?
We need to put death/transition in the proper perspective. Death is a waiting game. And we’ve all been to the DMV, christmas shopping, boarded/deboarded planes, played monopoly, occupied concert restroom lines—we know how to wait. I wait, therefore I am. Death is just more waiting. Exponential waiting if you like. Transition delay. Pick a phrase.
Just so we’re clear, death isn’t the end.
e·quiv·o·ca·tion
/iˌkwivəˈkāSH(ə)n/
noun
the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself
THE ARGUMENT FROM WAITING TO DO
There are, alas, some peeps hold anyway, —they’re wrong, you don’t need to worry about it, totes wrong, so off, stupid idea I know, that, this is so dumb—that death is the end. I know right? C’mon. Who in their right mind would believe that? Fools. Utter fools. Closed-minded cynics these people. But, I suppose, in the sense of fairness, we need to give them a chance at the lectern here. Pointless. This shouldn’t take long. I mean we’ve all got some serious waiting to do, am I right? Who’s up? Which fool among you is going to stand up here and advocate that death is the end? We triple-dog dare you!
“I’m your Huckleberry,” he said.
(The crowd gasps!)
For the black-robed creature was, well, black-robed. And his hood covered his face in darkness. Is it even a he? Can’t tell. This room is fully lit, why can’t we see his face? And, and he has a scythe!
(The crowd gasps!) (Again, but this time with more feeling)
There aren’t even any crops in this room. What’s with the scythe? What is this, a tobacco field in 1850?
He slowly, laboriously, made his way to the lectern. Still, with his face hidden in darkness—this guy won’t even show his face—he spoke:
“Chess anyone?”
Oh for Pete’s sake, this guy thinks he’s Bergman. C’mon already. We’ve got waiting to do. I saw The Seventh Seal...and it sucked!!!
He finally lowered his hood and showed his face and it was just...Shannon Scott.
“Just kidding,” he said. “Though, I liked The Seventh Seal. Wild Strawberries was the better film.”
This definitely would not take long.
We’ll be waiting in no time.
“Death…death, let me count the ways. No wait:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I die
And you do too
What in Sam Hill do you people think you are going to do for eternity? Watch reruns? And where exactly will you be in this eternity you spout so much? Any where is a spatiotemporal concept, so logically, one has to also be a spatiotemporal entity to exist in a where. But ‘obvi’ as the kids say, your body decomposes in the grave or the casket or the bottom of a river if you crossed the mafia, or your Last Will and Testament required you to be cremated. Fun fact: People often call cremated remains “ashes.” Although ashes coming from a fire seems natural, the remains left after cremation are not actually ashes. Instead, all that is left is bone fragments. These fragments are broken down until they resemble a coarse sand. Now you know. And it’s not like bone fragments can enjoy eternity, even if it does involve limitless Seinfeld reruns.
I can hear you now: our souls will be in eternity. Souls can’t be anywhere. But I’ll look past this and still ask, how are you going to enjoy eternity when you can’t grab anything? What’s even the point if you can’t grab a beer, hold a lover, whack a golf ball, strum a guitar, grip a pencil and write a haiku like
I know this girl, she
Can put her toe in her ear
But then she can’t hear
What is even the point of postulating eternal life? How does the concept help with the fear of death? It’s like knowing you’re going to be late for work, arriving late for work, and then telling the boss, “Time is relative.” We all fear death but telling ourselves it isn’t real doesn’t eliminate the fear. If you don’t believe me, hold your breath for longer than you should by a minute -till your face turns beet-purple and the veins in your neck resemble garden hoses- and right before you pass out, merely tell yourself that you don’t die, then... hold your breath for a wholenother© minute. See, your body knows more than you do. Your body knows you die. Your body knows your eternal life is eternal bullshit. In Jurassic Park, Jeff “I forgot my mantra” Goldbloom says, “Life finds a way.” In this case, life finds a way to say, “Hey dipshit, take a breath, pronto!” and you inhale like your life depends on it. Because it does; no matter what foolish concept you peddle the species. Why evolve a flight or fight response over a gazillion years when there is nothing to fight or flee from?” Evolution schmevolution you retort. “But again, you just go on there and hold your breath for six minutes and report back to me. Unless you’re David Blaine or one of those divers that can hold their breath all the way through a Seinfeld rerun.”
THE ARGUMENT FROM THOUGHT
I don’t have a personal connection to my personal death because I haven’t died. Of course loved ones have died but I feel as if I’m, in the parlance of our times, 100% with you, when I tell you that none of their deaths affected my attitude/belief that I’m not eternal, that I am finite. What does mourning have to do with rationality? How would mourning be relevant to an exposition on humans’ finite nature? It isn’t. Of course it isn’t like my belief about death has no narrative or personal connection but do you really want to hear about how much I thought about death and how I studied philosophy? Should I whip out words like ‘hermeneutics’, transcendence’, or ‘elucidation’? Prolly not as the kids say. I guess you want to know why, but the so-dissatisfying answer is, I think about these things. Much to my demise. Try being popular when you’re the lone thanatist in a world of eternals.
What has steeled my resolve? What has made me so cocksure that I die? What has rendered the arguments for eternal life ineffective and impotent, even though they are raised and articulated by minds so much more worthy than mine—my mind a veritable junk heap of much-hated sociobiology, dated existentialism, and jazz no one really appreciates? Why have I given such short shrift to individual eternal life? Why have I asked so many goddamn questions? One answer is facticity. I was raised by agnostics who never said a single solitary word about anyone going to heaven or hell or being reincarnated as a dung beetle, especially themselves; and never feared asking questions, even if they didn’t like the answers. Facticity, in this context, is boring though because I had no choice who I was born to and raised by. I suppose I could have run away and hopped a train or joined the circus but my Mom made these little bone-in pork chops (when we had the money, which was three times a year maybe) that to this day, I still pine for and you know how friggin’ old I am; my Dad was one of the funniest and strongest people I’m sure I’ll ever know. Call me a closed minded cynic if you wish, I’ve been called worse, but it isn’t exactly factual that I haven’t thought about counter arguments. You see, I earned a master’s degree in philosophy and my areas of concentration were the Continental Rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz), Epistemology, and Logic but this is more boring than facticity. The most boring truth is that (yawn) I’ve thought about this stuff. When I’ve been to funerals and when I’ve been present at my wife’s catholic mass, probably the two places where people talk the most about individual eternal life, I’ve thought about what is said. See, isn’t that exciting? What’s that, you dozed off for a minute? Tell me where to restart. Page 4!
I can’t make it easy for you! Just because I believe I’m not eternal when the numbers are against me (see the PEW graph above for a refresher of just how stacked the odds are against me) doesn’t mean, doesn’t follow, that I haven’t given thought to the other side—the belief that individual life is eternal. Remember that abnormality is a numbers game revolving around what most people do and per the damn graph, I don’t believe what most people believe. But my abnormality so defined doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about these things.
I have!
Did you hear me?
I have.
The real discomfort here is not about how I’ve arrived at my Baldwinian abnormality—through thinking about it, no no no it’s not about how at all. Your hatred of me is about where I am and where I am is directly in front of you, holding up a mirror, showing you to yourself, in all your finite humanity with all of its pain and suffering but also its self-actualization and love and love and love and love and telling you, that despite what you’ve learned, despite your hatred of me, despite the fact that your sun will one day go down for the last, last time, that you are beautiful, so damn beautiful and with the mirror still poised as the tears roll down our faces, I won’t sacrifice that beauty for your eternal ugliness. I won’t make that trade because I am responsible to (finite) life, not just mine, ours. Don’t worry. I know you won’t. I know it’s lonely over here. I still love you anyway.
I know what you’re thinking: Why would you care what other people believe about death or afterlife? Because beliefs, all of them, are not benign. Beliefs don’t sit idly by while actions beam during the post-game interview after hitting the game-winning home run in extra innings; beliefs speak up and make themselves known. “I knew we could do it. I knew if I got deep into the count, I’d get a heater; I was waiting on that fastball.” And they also speak up after atrocities are committed. Other people’s beliefs cause their earthly actions. Belief in individual eternal life has consequences, namely the Baldwinian sacrificing of the beauty of our individual lives. And a truly dreadful cheapening of not only individual life and potential but (it gets worse?!) the cheapening of collective life and potential. Believing in eternal life is the equivalent of erecting a house with cheap, rotten materials from lazily drafted blueprints with errata throughout, and then complaining when the roof leaks and toilet backs up. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and to not sacrifice the beauty of our lives and imprison ourselves, costs. A lot. It will cost jettisoning your belief in individual eternal life. This too, naturlich as the Germans say, has a cost. Finitude. Temporal boundary. An end. A beautiful life must end. Are you willing to pay the cost?
THE ARGUMENT FROM ALL THE ARGUMENTS COMBINED
Naturally, each argument proposed, in and of itself is completely unassailable but in the aggregate comprise a tour de force of thanatic logic unseen since Socrates imbibed hemlock like it was free beer at a frat party. In conclusion: you die, cease to be, kick the bucket, reach your expiration date, croak, bite the dust, check out, cash in your chips, conclude (pun very intended). Live accordingly. And remember, if you’re busy living, you won’t have time to brood over death. By accepting death, as the only fact you have, as the fact before all others, you will be responsible to life without sacrificing beauty. And we all need a little beauty.
POSTSCRIPT
Death will undergo a huge transformation. Death will rarely be thought of as transition. Because death will rarely occur. Per thinkers like Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Harari, death is a technical problem. A problem that can be solved like other technical problems humans have solved. Harari in Homo Deus: “Modern science and modern culture have an entirely different take on life and death. They don’t think of death as a metaphysical mystery, and they certainly don’t view death as the source of life’s meaning. Rather, for modern people, death is a technical problem that we can and should solve.” I sense your skepticism, so I googled it for you.
