Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God (Greta Christina)
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God is the book every atheist with mortality on the mind needs to read. I finished this slim 100-pager in only a few hours and not a single word was wasted. It articulated exactly what’s been on my mind, made me shout out “yes!” on more than one occasion, and gave me lots to be hopeful for. I want to frame it and put it on my wall. Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God lived up to its title, and then some.
OVERVIEW
I want to tell you everything, but in the spirit of being concise, here are my favourite “comforting thoughts:”
· The slice of time you occupied doesn’t disappear when you die; death doesn’t erase your having been here
· A godless life isn’t meaningless, it’s a life where you get to create your own meaning
· A secular approach to mortality means we don’t need to agonize over why someone died, what we’re supposed to learn from their death, what god is trying to teach us, or why we’re being punished
· The prospect of death can be used to fuel a life of intention and gratitude; living with the end in mind creates focus in our lives
· The mathematical improbability of your having been born makes you cosmically lucky to have existed at all
· Feeling sad, depressed, or morose about death is normal. There is nothing that will allow us to escape the fear or despair of death, not even religion – this universality means you’re not alone in these feelings
· Things don’t have to be permanent to be valuable. The finiteness of life is what makes it vibrant
· Death connects us with the universe, returning our atoms and energy to nature
· The world is forever changed from your having been here, in ways that are obvious and ways that you could never know
· We didn’t exist for billions of year prior to being born and that was totally fine, so it stands to reason that death will be similarly peaceful
(This particular comfort has not yet crystallized in my brain, but I include it because other atheists seem to find it very consoling. I rather agree with Philip Larkin in his poem Aubade, where he argues that the consolation of ‘when you are dead you won’t be around to worry about being dead’ is the fear, not the alleviation to the fear. But if it fits for you, lace it up and wear it)
The gift of this book is that Christina is an example of an atheist who has confronted mortality and come out the other side changed for the better. In a landscape that seems to be divided into atheists who are afraid to face their own mortality and atheists who are inexplicably unperturbed by it, it’s special to find someone who illuminates a third path.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Build your own list of comforting (secular) thoughts about death
Start with the list above and add as you go. If after reading something (a quote, a chapter, an article) you find yourself feeling more at peace with mortality or death, write it down. Find common themes. Collect your comforting thoughts like treasures and pull them out every once in awhile to look at them.
Some thought experiments:
Question the assumption that atheism/naturalism can’t provide any comfort (if this is you)
Christina makes a pretty compelling case that fear of death is one of the main reasons people continue to cling to religion and faith (maybe the last reason). Many of us skeptics, not to mention most theists, have taken for a fact this notion that atheism can’t provide comfort, without really examining the truth of that claim. If, as Christina says, we want to make atheism a “safe place to land” for ourselves and anyone questioning their faith, we have to drag death out and examine it under the light of secular thinking.
Question the assumption that an afterlife would be preferable (if this is you)
I am guilty of (up until this point) believing that an afterlife would be preferable to no afterlife. Christina again challenges us to spend some time really thinking about whether that would be so great, or if there’s bullshit at the core of this comfort. For an afterlife to be truly blissful it would have to be devoid of conflict, and we would all need to be stripped of our individuality for that. And of course if you believe in separate afterlives for good and bad people, could you really be happy if you knew that others were suffering somewhere… hotter?
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes! And not just by accident, on purpose
If you had to describe the book in one sentence? An invitation for atheists and secular thinkers to better acquaint themselves with their own mortality (it’s not so bad… promise)
Who should read this book? Any atheist, skeptic, freethinker, humanist, or non-believer who wonders what comfort secularism can offer in the face of death.
Before I leave, I wanted to share this quote from Christina: “Like anyone who rejects the dominant culture, and who rejects the default answers to hard questions that get spoon-fed to us by this culture, we’ve had to come up with our own answers. The same way that LGBT people are forced to think about sexuality and gender; the same way that vegetarians are forced to think about the ethics of food… atheists are forced to think about death, and what kind of value life might have when it’s brief and finite.”
In Christina’s opinion, atheists can and should talk about death and explore where to find secular comfort and consolation. She also points out that there are lots of people teetering on the edge of faith, the last tether being that facing the finality of death is way too overwhelming without religion or belief in an afterlife. If we atheists can find real comfort for ourselves, we can offer this comfort to others too. We don’t have to cede the ground of death, mortality, and meaning to religion.