Fear of Death

Death. What a subject! People fear it, try to avoid it as long as they can, and who can blame them? Death is a natural part of life. You live, you die. Some say it's the only justice. Woody Alan once said that he didn't fear death, he just didn't want to be there when it happened. It think that expresses pretty much everybody's feeling about the final event in our life.

I'm at the age now where most of my life is behind me. I sometimes wish I could go back and correct a few mistakes I've made, but we all know that's just wishful thinking. But I digress.



Why do we fear death so much? I think because it's an unknown, and we humans generally don't like the unknown, it scares us, especially considering the lies religions have used to scare us with death and what happens after.

They've used hell as a motivator to scare us into submission. They've used heaven as the carrot at the end of the stick. They've made us jump through hoops using the fear of death; more to the point, the fear of punishment after death. This is just one of the reasons I dislike religion. I don't hate people of faith, some of the folks I know and love are people of faith: I just don't like some of their beliefs, generally speaking.

Judaism and Christianity promise an afterlife of eternal bliss to those who believe. But Islam is even worse, because it promises pussy in the afterlife for those who go all the way with their obedience and kill themselves, along with a bunch of other folks, for Islam. How low can you get, promising pussy in the afterlife? What fools men be!

Strap up that dynamite to your body and blow yourself up, brother, and Allah will give you 72 virgins (Houris) when you get to heaven, which is guaranteed those who die as "martyrs" for the cause.

What is it about death that scares us so much that we'd be willing to believe such bullshit, such obvious lies? Oddly enough, I think one of the authors in the Bible--yeah, the Bible, of all things!--has given an answer.

In the book of Ecclesiastes 1:5-11, the authors says this:

5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
    and hastens[c] to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
    and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
    and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
    but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
    there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
    a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,    nor the ear filled with hearing.  What has been is what will be,
    and what has been done is what will be done,
    and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
    “See, this is new”?
It has been already
    in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
    nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
    among those who come after.

In one verse he says that "the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing". I think this is very significant, because it's so true for all of us. We are built so that we want to see, we want to hear, feel, taste and smell. We are living sensory organisms that thrive on these senses and the thought of loosing them permanently is devastating.

We are so afraid of loosing touch with what we regard as reality, that the thought of dying scares us no end. This is why the religious leaders and political rulers have used religion for so long in order to control us. They know the power of a lie for those who fear death.

There are two elements here, I think: one is the fear of loosing sensory input, i.e., the fear of not seeing or feeling anymore, of loosing what we have, even if sometimes it's not very pleasant. The other is the fear of the unknown, the fear that we may not have done enough to enjoy eternal bliss with our loved ones, the fear of eternal punishment, whatever form that may take. Thus, we fear dying and death, i.e., we fear loosing sensory input and we fear what happens in that unknown.

What I find really telling about religious believers is how they weep when they lose someone. Why do they weep if that person is going to heaven, or some form of paradise?  Shouldn't they instead rejoice because their loved one is finally happy in the presence of whatever deity their believed in?

I have often wondered if deep down they fear that they have lost their loved ones forever, or that he or she is not "in heaven with God". I lost my wife last year in November and it was very painful. I don't believe in any afterlife, therefore the woman I loved was no more. She was gone, never to be seen or felt again. It's been a hard adjustment for me, but I can't help wondering why believers go through the same misery I do, if they're loved ones are safe in heaven and happy beyond words with those who came before them. One would think they would be happy for that person, that they would rejoice, but no, they suffer just as much as the non-believer. 

We don't like to think about death, much less talk about it, or face it, even though it is an inescapable fact of life. It seems strange to even say "fact of LIFE" when speaking of death, but there you have it, this is how we are. We try to avoid not only the fact of death, but often the subject of it. It creeps us out and yet it is such a natural thing. Of course, getting hit by a falling tree is also a natural thing, but I sure as hell don't want that to happen to me. ;-)

We are complex and difficult creatures to understand, we humans. We pride ourselves on being of superior intelligence when compared to our fellow animals, but we can be so irrational about something as natural as death.

One last word and I'm done: "I plan to life forever, or die trying."

grgaud