If you are interested in near death experiences. Read up on the study by the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel. He published the biggest NDE study to date. It’s interesting. I’d recommend it.
Except, if you are extinguished at death, you don't find anything out. All the Christians get to have their cheap little gotcha saying, "Oh buddy, you're gonna find out all about Hell after you die, but then it'll be too late." However, we can't say, "Oh dude, when you die you'll find out there's no god, and you'll see what a goofball irrational person you've been." This asymmetry is just one more of life's little annoyances.
If death is a true end to experience, then nobody experiences death. The moments immediately preceding that end though, that’s where fear has possible handholds.
As an Atheist, unlike other Atheists, I don't feel the need to deny NDEs. Actually, I believe most people when I hear of what they saw. I think they saw what they saw. My Step dad had an NDE when he was getting open heart surgery. It was traumatic for him so he doesn't really like to talk about it. But from what little he's told me, he was floating above his body and looking down upon himself and the surgeons working on him. It was scary for him because he was fully aware of what was happening, and I can't imagine seeing your chest open is the most fun of experiences. I think NDEs at least count for SOMETHING. Showing that maybe it isn't as simple as death being the end of experience. It also didn't seem like a dream from what he described, because he was viewing what was actually going on in the room as it was happening, but not from within his body. He scared the hell out of the nurses because he was able to recount things that were said while he was flatlined.
Why do you take NDE's seriously, and why do you think that they can't be explained naturally( like with psychedelic experiences, which are supposedly quite similar.) I don't take NDE's seriously not because of being an atheist, but because there's no evidence that any kind of supernatural phenomena is at play( or even exists at all.) Not only are there plenty of naturalistic explanations for them, but why would NDE's be any more evidence of the supernatural/afterlife then past erroneous beliefs that humans held about the world? Anecdotal evidence isn't reliable, especially when what they are experiencing is in itself quite unreliable and culturally/subconsciously influenced. Death being annihilation is more explanatory and parsimonious, anyway. Also, don't be so gullible and believe every account you here. Most are fabricated/exaggerated anyway. NDEs aren't even related to death, just clinical death.
If you ever would like to talk to an atheist about why it's perfectly sensible to say that "I wouldn't want to live forever" even when they're not suicidal, I'm always here for you. I think there's nuances there that are kind of getting glossed over. I've personally been on both sides of the "I wouldn't want eternal life in heaven" question, even if we just assumed for sake of argument that heaven exists. I think a lot of the "I wouldn't want to live forever" kind of hinges on what we think "forever" really looks like. I think it is perfectly rational to in fact want to die at some point, given certain views about reality and what happens to us. I should also note that I seem to be far more in the Epicurean mindset of not being particularly afraid of death that you said you used to be in. LOL, as I continued watching you started talking about the points I'd make. I think it all hinges on the idea that I am convinced I can't live forever and keep from having a low quality of existence. My body will degrade, I will have pain and loss of function, eventually the heat death of the universe happens, etc. So there is always a reason to "want to die".
Once you stop viewing yourself as some all-important part of the universe, you quickly come to terms with how little it means (in the grand scheme) to die, or to live the blip of a life that we are offered. That is just cold, hard fact. Not being willing to own up to it is cowardice. And I am no coward.
Having nearly died a couple of times, I had to make peace with it early on. Even when I was religious, I never understood how heaven was supposed to make death more palatable.
@@user-vs9sd9vj1othat’s a different argument. You’re saying the idea of eternal bliss makes our finite life here a meaningless prequel to the infinity that follows. I would agree. That’s not what that guy is saying though. They are saying that at the end of this life, when it’s ultimate finitude and failure is most apparent and you are about to forget everything and everyone you ever loved, but are probably also in excruciating pain and looking forward to the end of that, wouldn’t the idea that you are about to leave the pain and retain the love make what is about to happen more palatable, whether or not it’s true. I think for most people, it would. The obvious caveat is the posited existence of hell, and the fact that the various religions all say different people end up in hell and for different reasons, so even a religious person, if they were objective, would have some fear approaching death that they were wrong and were about to leave the love behind and embrace everlasting pain. But then a religious person isn’t approaching death objectively, they are approaching it from a specific vantage point under a specific paradigm and so most of them would probably still be comfortable with the idea that they are about to be comforted. The bigger problem is for people who loved them but believe differently and are left living. I remember some Christian girl on my freshman hall in college absolutely agonizing about her atheist father’s death because she was certain that, despite him being a good man whom she loved, that he was being tortured in hell for eternity. This belief caused her untold suffering, when in all likelihood, not only had his suffering ceased but perhaps one of his final thoughts was that his daughter should be happy
Man it just seems so prima facie implausible that all this is a happy (sad) accident. Sleep is the closest thing we have to death, and during sleep you are in another realm, and you also “come back to life” after its over. Good luck everyone in your pursuit of truth.
During the deep, non-dreaming phases of sleep we are effectively dead. This also true when we're in deep anesthesia. Dying and being dead are a daily occurrence for all of us. It's nothing to be scared of. One day that non-scary state becomes permanent. That doesn't make it any scarier. We will never experience anything but the experience of being alive, so don't sweat it.
I personally find NDEs to be fairly convincing but not of a particular religious tradition . I think they tend to favor ideas of pre mortal existence and possibly reincarnation. A lot of them feature a form of divine encounter featuring a life review and overwhelming love. I don’t think this is enough to prove anything conclusively but I think it’s worth weighing in the balance.
Whether or not death anxiety makes sense to you, it seems to be a fundamental aspect of human existence. The mission is to find meaning for oneself in the present and try to extend it into eternity in the future. Not to have no meaning in the presence and extend that into infinite. Atheists do have meaningful projects. However, these projects differ from those of religious people; for example, atheists invest more in rationality, science, logic, and worldly endeavors which buffers against death anxiety. The goal is to create structures of meaning that serve as our own immortality projects, essentially transcending death. So, everybody experiences death anxiety to various degrees, so it is completely normal to feel it. Anyway, it is a very fascinating subject, to be sure.
The argument of 7:30 that Christians weep at funerals is not that good. A "blink of an eye" might mean living 30 or 40 years alone.No one looks forward to that. And friends and family are protectors too, if they leave you might become very vulnerable too in the here and now. (Ok to be fair you agree that is not that good). While I agree something like biocentrism almost inevitable leads to some form of reincarnation without any need for God THAT scares me more than the void. I guess like many intelligent people you struggle with depression too. So as someone who knows that state I wish you all the best and hope you can have some faith in some "good" meaning or purpose behind this universe. We all need some faith to survive the day (such as faith that the economy doesn't tank, that there is not a new world war behind the corner). And well often it works. Things don't get as bad as we fear. So death might just one of this things, where stuff turnes out less catastrophic than we expected.And by the way I am a bit underwhelmed too by NDEs quality on TH-cam but today everything is counted as NDE, even if you went temporarily unconsciouness because you it your head hard.
Such an amazing video and really follows alot of how I've felt and approached things over time as well. Love how you mentioned the dynamics between religious people and atheists and how people believe they need to believe this or that to fit into either group, which goes to show how even as more people start to become atheists religion still has a stranglehold over how we approach death. I remember how when I was young as someone who was mostly irreligious and started suffering from severe death anxiety I would seek out atheist approaches to dealing with it and it's always the same quotes or ideas copy pasted around or deep philosophical disccusions that were very difficult to understand. Even in this growing atheist world we very rarely have proper ways to deal with the nature of mortality that the common person can access and it just highlights how isolating being an atheist can be sometimes even among other atheists. To go onto NDEs, they've always been a very interesting topic to me as something I only started to take seriously AFTER I finally stopped suffering from such crippling death anxiety. A good book to read is The Self Does Not Die, which has a huge number of interesting NDE cases. And then in discovering NDEs and other parasychological phenomena I actually gained some death anxiety again because I came to realize that even if the world's various religions aren't real, that doesn't spare me from uncertainty. Just because god isn't real it doesn't mean there couldn't be a hell, that I could live on in some horrible semi spiritual afterlife only to cease to exist at some indeterminite point, that I could live on in some kind of mushroom like whacked out afterlife where my identity fades away. I also like NDEs as being used my Christians like in your example considering that many of them completely contradict Christianity or affirm other religions when you actually read into them more. Really people crave certainty, whether it be in a religious heaven or an atheist nonexistence, and when confronted with it they lash our to reaffirm their stable world views even if the conclusion of them is horrible or distressing. And as atheism becomes more widespread in the world I look forward to seeing how we begin to approach and deal with mortality as a thing that while bad, is perhaps not as scary as what we unfortunately feel it to bed. And damn if we don't need it, because if I have to read about how I don't actually experience death because at the point of death I no longer exist one more time eternal life will start to look a lot less appealing.
Excellent video on such an important topic. I really, really do not want to die. I have had a good life and it continues to be good. Sure life has had its ups and downs and some of the downs have been really bad. Nevertheless I am relatively contented and have much to be grateful for. However, as a believer in younger years, I think I was afraid of death. Here's why. I could never be entirely sure that I was actually saved. Worse still, around the age of 13 I thought I'd committed the unpardonable sin and that sent me into a tailspin for several years of extreme anxiety and depression. That experience played a pivotal role in my loss of faith around the age of 20. So, as a believer I was actually afraid of death. Now, as a 73 year old man, I am not afraid of death. It's more a matter of death being horribly inconvenient. The deliciousness of life will have ended while others presumably continue on enjoying it. It seems "unfair". Still, while death is near, I have many friends. Those people continue to make my life delicious. So do the things I enjoy. However it is people who are the most important. As for people who convert to, say, Christianity, because they prefer to accept Pascal's Wager? For every theist, there will always be another theist on the planet somewhere, who will look at them and say - "You are damned to hell". That is, Pascal's Wager gets believers nowhere. Believers still need to keep their fingers crossed. I do have my fingers crossed however, that my death will be quick and painless.
I actually have had the experience of dying, in a sense. I'm 75 years old. A few years back, I had a heart attack, realized what was happening, and called 911. While I was waiting, I filled up a big bowl of water for my dogs, so that they wouldn't go thirsty before someone came to take them, and then I went outside to wait for the ambulance, so that the EMTs wouldn't have to wangle me out of the house on a gurney. The idea of God, praying, or thinking about the afterlife never entered my mind. I went unconscious in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and my heart went into fibrillation on the way through the hospital doors. I came back to consciousness sometime later, after they had unblocked my carotid artery by inserting a stent through my femoral artery and using the shocker thingy to restart my heart. I probably would have died if I hadn't been living just a few blocks from the hospital. The heart attack itself wasn't super painful-- just a squeezing sensation in my chest. Nothing about the whole experience was agonizing, including my state of my mind. I was somewhat worried while waiting for the ambulance, but I just thought, "Maybe I'll die, maybe I won't." I didn't like the idea, but I didn't find it terrifying. I was more worried about whether somebody would come to take care of my dogs in a timely manner, so I told the EMT to relay the info about the dogs to my emergency contact person. I then just passed out. If I had been located farther from the hospital I would just never have awakened. The whole experience was identical to what the experience would have been if I had actually died. By the way, I did not have any remembered NDE. When I was 17 years old, I had another, very different, experience that should have killed me-- I survived against very long odds. That's too long a story for me to want to repeat here. Let's just say that it was parallel to my heart attack story in the fact that I never suffered any real pain or any anxiety about dying. My life "ended" with me just passing out. If I had died, my experience would not have been any different than what I actually experienced. So, I've had two experiences that were indistinguishable from the experiences I would have had if I had actually died. I've also been a close witness of the deaths of some others. None of those deaths were terrible. I think that people shouldn't hype up the fear of dying or the process of dying as an object of worry. There is no experience of being dead, and the experience of dying itself is often not terrible. We just go back to the state we were in before we were born, whatever that is. As Mark Twain famously said, "I was dead for billions of years before I was born, and it never caused me the slightest inconvenience." Nobody agonizes about the idea that they weren't alive when the dinosaurs were here. The time that will elapse after we're gone is exactly parallel to that in its meaning to us. There is only the experience of being alive. In that sense we're immortal.
The most valuable pursuits are those that matter now and into eternity. Everything else is meaningless in comparison. Christian faith (not necessarily religion) offers the best and most clear explanation of what those things are.
So just what is that purpose that Christianity so clearly explains? Adulating a torturer god for infinity just because he will agree to not torture you? Sounds so appealing. One of the early Christian fathers wrote about how one of the joys of heaven was getting to observe and revel in the agonies of the damned. Presumably the blessed flock will be right in-sync with their glorious god while enjoying that spectacle. Obviously, he will be at least complacent, if not in a state of sadistic glee. Christians seem unable to grasp the way their barbarian creed appears to others-- as the belief system of an early Iron Age culture, obsessed with dreams of domination, enslavement, retribution, and violent conquest. Try reading the Book of Joshua, in which Yahweh delivers the land of Canaan into the hands of his warrior cult as a reward for keeping his cult rules and rituals of animal sacrifice. In the entire book, there is not one word of argument that the people of Canaan have done anything to merit the rape, plunder, enslavement, and slaughter that is brought down upon them. Canaan is simply given to Yahweh's warrior cult as their orgiastic reward for obeisance to him and faithful performance of his blood rites. These fantasies are echoed in Revelations, the conclusion of the New Testament, in which all of Christendom gets to vicariously participate in titanic and ecstatic revenge against the whole non-believing world. Earlier in the New Testament, Yahweh decides to let up on his demands on the faithful in return for one last particularly gruesome sacrifice, this time in an incoherent scenario in which he stipulates that he will sacrifice one part of himself to another part of himself, perhaps as some kind of payback for all the horror that he has inflicted in the past. All that we have to do to participate in this weird rite and be saved from the eternal agony that he is otherwise planning for us is to agree to make this sacrificial torture ritual the focus of our permanent worship and adopt the torture instrument as our primary religious symbol. Your sickening voodoo cult is saturated with obsessions about sin, guilt, threat, retribution, the infliction of pain, and the doxastic requirements necessary to evade the hellscape of your own minds. This is obvious and inescapable to anyone who wasn't indoctrinated into your sociopath's paradigm of the universe. By the way, Jesus' vaunted agonizing sacrifice, lasting maybe a little over twelve hours from sometime Friday morning until sometime in the afternoon, is so ridiculously paltry compared to all the sin and suffering that it is supposed to atone for, not to mention the eternal torture of millions that it is weighed against, that it just makes Jesus look like a chicken$h!t. So now, do explain the uplifting, transcendent meaning of your tribal psycho fever dream. No doubt you have some kind of more felicitous meaning that you want to paste onto this bizarre construction, but the fact that you don't see what a sinister and alien vessel you want to retain for your purpose is a testament to the ability of culture to twist the mind into any contortion that is customary. If you can't see that, it is futile for you to dabble in philosophical videos and comments. Your ability to carry out rational process and moral reasoning is just too compromised for you to achieve any benefits.
What is missing in larger discussions around death is just how much Christianity changed the relationship with it. Death became not the terminus of life but a judgment point for the life eternal. Mortal life was just the preparation and death was something to be overcome instead of accepted. So much of Western Philosophy and society hasn’t moved past the very Christian view of death. Even the most ardent atheists on the topic sound more like disappointed Christians than anything else. The Existentialist movement seems to be the first steps in developing a Post Christian and Western framework for approaching death and the relationship people have with it. What emerges to deal with the problems that arose from the Death of God are just now starting to formulate into new ideas.
I don't get how someone can just decide to take Pascal's wager and "convert." I can't force myself to believe in something if I have no good reason to. Even if I told you to genuinely try to believe that elves exist, I don't think you would be able to take elves seriously since they're obviously not real and there's no evidence of their existence right? Besides, how do you know you converted to the right religion?
Everyone forces themselves to believe in something they have no good reason to. They usually just can’t see the belief because it’s too deeply held to examine.
@@scottm4975 Putting aside whether that's true or not, you seem to be referring to something unconscious which isn't what I was referring to. I don't know how one can make a conscious decision to believe in something unreasonable.
Eastern religions talk about our 'Self' which is part of a greater universal consciousness which the Vedantans call Brahman. This is not a god as such but like an ocean of consciousness or something like that. And although our body and mind dies, our true nature, the 'Self, does not die as it is part of this eternal Brahman thing. An interesting concept...
Alan Watts once made a useful analogy of the ambient air as universal consciousness, along with an upside-down glass as the illusory shell of our bodily existence, and the air within the glass as our individual consciousness under the illusion of our separateness. At the bottom of the glass, we are still actually connected to the surrounding air/consciousness in a way that we don't usually recognize. When the glass is broken the air inside losses its illusion of separateness and rejoins the whole. Perhaps death is the breaking of the glass. Perhaps enlightenment through right living and meditation is the breaking of the glass in the event that reincarnation transfers us to another glass.
As someone that is at least unsure that I would want to live forever, I would say your critique of such a view equating it to being suicidal seems like a false dichotomy. Thinking that at some point in the future you will probably stop wanting to exist is not at all equivalent to right now in this moment not wanting to exist. I freely admit I would like to live significantly longer than I am going to have allotted to me. But if I were to continue existing eternally it does seem plausible to me that at some point I would say that I have had enough and feel that I am ready, and in fact deeply desire, to have a "final rest". It comes down to what you said about being able to do "everything you are capable of doing". Given a potential eternity, it seems that after some trillions, or googols, or googolplexes of years, that will have been completed. So while I wouldn't commit to saying I KNOW that I wouldn't want to live forever, if there was a "push this and live for eternity guaranteed, no takebacks, your existence will absolutely for certain never cease" button I think I would also be extremely hesitant to take such a risk. To me the real concern in both cases is that I know I now don't have control over something very important that I'm uncertain of what the outcome will be like, and I think ultimate lack of agency is perhaps the more visceral fear behind even a lot of the fear we have of death. ETA: Based on this framing, I think it is possible that just knowing I didn't HAVE to continue living forever might be enough to make it so that I would continue to keep making the choice to keep living forever. I'm not 100% sure.
I tend to lean towards negative utilitarianism. It’s not that internal tranquility is good in it self, but suffering is bad in itself and the lack is preferable
Empirical evidence suggests that not being certain of what happens does increase death anxiety on the whole, so yeah, makes sense that not knowing increased your death anxiety. Also those “upload my mind to the cloud” type tech bros are hella cringe and that’s coming from a card carrying transhumanist.
nope, not afraid of death. I can be afraid of a painful death, but I'm more just put out that I can't experience everything. I'll just go back to what I was before I was born, just molecules.
@@AgonizedCandle I don't get why anybody would be afraid of just being molecules. You were just molecules for billions of years before you were born. Does the fact that you were molecules while the dinosaurs were roaming around traumatize you? There is no experience of being dead. How can you be scared of a non-experience? I think some people must have a fantasy of death as being some kind of experience of their consciousness floating around in a terrifying black void forever. There can be no such experience when there is no consciousness to have such an experience. If your molecules have their own little consciousness, that's molecule-consciousness, not you-consciousness having a bad time.
Really? You can't grasp the idea that natural selection has instilled an emotional bias to avoid injury and death, or that culture has reinforced that fear with a million myths and scary stories, or that those scary stories psychologically imprint that fear on people at an early age to a depth that is hard to overcome in spite of their later rational understanding? That would be the same reason that Christians weep at a funeral when they ought to be happy that their loved one has gone on to heaven. You're not a very deep thinker, are you?
Atheism on his own simple says that there is no God and an atheist can believe in an afterlife and accountability However, a world with imatirial minds is a world where the God hypothesis seems more propable.
Most of the philosophy here went over my head, without a base knowledge of the definitions and topics you were discussing. As a former Mormon I've said before and I'll say again that I appreciate you recognizing many of the intellectual guards that Mormonism has that avoids some of the problem of other religions. It did make it oddly difficult to break away from, so much of the standard problems with Christianity didn't apply. Having said that, I think in talking to the nuanced progressive Mormons you're not quite getting a full picture here. The anti-LGBT rhetoric and the second class status of women is pretty awful. To your interests, the level of intellectual stifling and the lack of acceptability on free thinking I think you'd find maddening. I'd love to see your reaction to going to a regular Sunday service and to reading or listening to some of the General Conference talks.
I'm an atheist but it seems to me that the afterlife exists in the last few minutes of brain oxygen after your heart stops. At that point, you are are done. The objective does not matter - only your death dreams with a few minutes of brain oxygen. People reporting their near death experiences would be the reason why belief in the afterlife occurred. Given that dreamers can experience significant subjective time dilation - and who can be sure about the effects in a brain that is shutting down? Might those death dreams last for a subjective eternity, even though objectively lasting for only a few minutes? It's a freaky thought to imagine that a dead person might be tripping out within their own private "eternal" afterlife while their body is being wheeled away by hospital orderlies.
@@stefanmilicevic5322 Totally true, and there are a number of perfectly plausible comforting stories. For instance, death is a non-experience which cannot possibly contain fearful experiences or death is the shattering of the illusion that our individual consciousness is separate from a greater consciousness. I actually think that one of those two stories must necessarily be true.
People have anxiety about this? The sweet sweet void of nothingness is what I look forward to. I'd have more anxiety if I was religious. Get all judged and shit
Hell is defo worse but the fear of oblivion is so evolutionarily baked into our dna that it’s difficult asf to overcome. I’d actually be open to taking psychedelics to overcome this, chronic death anxiety is destroying my finite life
I never have death anxiety. But when I stop being christian I became much more calm and way less anxious about lot of things.
For me, being a Christian was what gave me death anxiety
im mostly worried about the "pain" of death rather than not existing
Be a man..
If you are interested in near death experiences. Read up on the study by the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel. He published the biggest NDE study to date. It’s interesting. I’d recommend it.
I'm definitely agnostic with what happens after death, there is only one way to find out.
Except, if you are extinguished at death, you don't find anything out. All the Christians get to have their cheap little gotcha saying, "Oh buddy, you're gonna find out all about Hell after you die, but then it'll be too late." However, we can't say, "Oh dude, when you die you'll find out there's no god, and you'll see what a goofball irrational person you've been." This asymmetry is just one more of life's little annoyances.
If death is a true end to experience, then nobody experiences death. The moments immediately preceding that end though, that’s where fear has possible handholds.
And that's the problem, whether God exists or not , you can't know whether the dead person knew the reality of life or not
As an Atheist, unlike other Atheists, I don't feel the need to deny NDEs. Actually, I believe most people when I hear of what they saw. I think they saw what they saw. My Step dad had an NDE when he was getting open heart surgery. It was traumatic for him so he doesn't really like to talk about it. But from what little he's told me, he was floating above his body and looking down upon himself and the surgeons working on him. It was scary for him because he was fully aware of what was happening, and I can't imagine seeing your chest open is the most fun of experiences. I think NDEs at least count for SOMETHING. Showing that maybe it isn't as simple as death being the end of experience. It also didn't seem like a dream from what he described, because he was viewing what was actually going on in the room as it was happening, but not from within his body. He scared the hell out of the nurses because he was able to recount things that were said while he was flatlined.
What is NDE
@@SCIENTIST-X "near death experience"
I've been dealing with bad health issues and this was comforting to hear. Hope you and your dad are well!
Why do you take NDE's seriously, and why do you think that they can't be explained naturally( like with psychedelic experiences, which are supposedly quite similar.) I don't take NDE's seriously not because of being an atheist, but because there's no evidence that any kind of supernatural phenomena is at play( or even exists at all.)
Not only are there plenty of naturalistic explanations for them, but why would NDE's be any more evidence of the supernatural/afterlife then past erroneous beliefs that humans held about the world? Anecdotal evidence isn't reliable, especially when what they are experiencing is in itself quite unreliable and culturally/subconsciously influenced. Death being annihilation is more explanatory and parsimonious, anyway. Also, don't be so gullible and believe every account you here. Most are fabricated/exaggerated anyway. NDEs aren't even related to death, just clinical death.
If you ever would like to talk to an atheist about why it's perfectly sensible to say that "I wouldn't want to live forever" even when they're not suicidal, I'm always here for you. I think there's nuances there that are kind of getting glossed over. I've personally been on both sides of the "I wouldn't want eternal life in heaven" question, even if we just assumed for sake of argument that heaven exists. I think a lot of the "I wouldn't want to live forever" kind of hinges on what we think "forever" really looks like. I think it is perfectly rational to in fact want to die at some point, given certain views about reality and what happens to us.
I should also note that I seem to be far more in the Epicurean mindset of not being particularly afraid of death that you said you used to be in.
LOL, as I continued watching you started talking about the points I'd make. I think it all hinges on the idea that I am convinced I can't live forever and keep from having a low quality of existence. My body will degrade, I will have pain and loss of function, eventually the heat death of the universe happens, etc. So there is always a reason to "want to die".
🗣️🗣️🗣️ we making it out of the existential terror with this one
Once you stop viewing yourself as some all-important part of the universe, you quickly come to terms with how little it means (in the grand scheme) to die, or to live the blip of a life that we are offered. That is just cold, hard fact. Not being willing to own up to it is cowardice. And I am no coward.
Having nearly died a couple of times, I had to make peace with it early on. Even when I was religious, I never understood how heaven was supposed to make death more palatable.
You don't think having confidence you're about to enter a state of eternal bliss makes death more palatable?
@@peterchristeas5519i think it makes life meaningless.
@@user-vs9sd9vj1o What exactly?
@@user-vs9sd9vj1othat’s a different argument. You’re saying the idea of eternal bliss makes our finite life here a meaningless prequel to the infinity that follows. I would agree. That’s not what that guy is saying though. They are saying that at the end of this life, when it’s ultimate finitude and failure is most apparent and you are about to forget everything and everyone you ever loved, but are probably also in excruciating pain and looking forward to the end of that, wouldn’t the idea that you are about to leave the pain and retain the love make what is about to happen more palatable, whether or not it’s true. I think for most people, it would. The obvious caveat is the posited existence of hell, and the fact that the various religions all say different people end up in hell and for different reasons, so even a religious person, if they were objective, would have some fear approaching death that they were wrong and were about to leave the love behind and embrace everlasting pain. But then a religious person isn’t approaching death objectively, they are approaching it from a specific vantage point under a specific paradigm and so most of them would probably still be comfortable with the idea that they are about to be comforted. The bigger problem is for people who loved them but believe differently and are left living. I remember some Christian girl on my freshman hall in college absolutely agonizing about her atheist father’s death because she was certain that, despite him being a good man whom she loved, that he was being tortured in hell for eternity. This belief caused her untold suffering, when in all likelihood, not only had his suffering ceased but perhaps one of his final thoughts was that his daughter should be happy
Man it just seems so prima facie implausible that all this is a happy (sad) accident. Sleep is the closest thing we have to death, and during sleep you are in another realm, and you also “come back to life” after its over.
Good luck everyone in your pursuit of truth.
During the deep, non-dreaming phases of sleep we are effectively dead. This also true when we're in deep anesthesia. Dying and being dead are a daily occurrence for all of us. It's nothing to be scared of. One day that non-scary state becomes permanent. That doesn't make it any scarier. We will never experience anything but the experience of being alive, so don't sweat it.
So many important points discussed in this excellent and relatable video. Glad this appeared in my TH-cam feed!
I personally find NDEs to be fairly convincing but not of a particular religious tradition . I think they tend to favor ideas of pre mortal existence and possibly reincarnation. A lot of them feature a form of divine encounter featuring a life review and overwhelming love. I don’t think this is enough to prove anything conclusively but I think it’s worth weighing in the balance.
Whether or not death anxiety makes sense to you, it seems to be a fundamental aspect of human existence. The mission is to find meaning for oneself in the present and try to extend it into eternity in the future. Not to have no meaning in the presence and extend that into infinite. Atheists do have meaningful projects. However, these projects differ from those of religious people; for example, atheists invest more in rationality, science, logic, and worldly endeavors which buffers against death anxiety. The goal is to create structures of meaning that serve as our own immortality projects, essentially transcending death. So, everybody experiences death anxiety to various degrees, so it is completely normal to feel it. Anyway, it is a very fascinating subject, to be sure.
I like old NDE Emerson
The argument of 7:30 that Christians weep at funerals is not that good. A "blink of an eye" might mean living 30 or 40 years alone.No one looks forward to that. And friends and family are protectors too, if they leave you might become very vulnerable too in the here and now. (Ok to be fair you agree that is not that good). While I agree something like biocentrism almost inevitable leads to some form of reincarnation without any need for God THAT scares me more than the void. I guess like many intelligent people you struggle with depression too. So as someone who knows that state I wish you all the best and hope you can have some faith in some "good" meaning or purpose behind this universe. We all need some faith to survive the day (such as faith that the economy doesn't tank, that there is not a new world war behind the corner). And well often it works. Things don't get as bad as we fear. So death might just one of this things, where stuff turnes out less catastrophic than we expected.And by the way I am a bit underwhelmed too by NDEs quality on TH-cam but today everything is counted as NDE, even if you went temporarily unconsciouness because you it your head hard.
Such an amazing video and really follows alot of how I've felt and approached things over time as well.
Love how you mentioned the dynamics between religious people and atheists and how people believe they need to believe this or that to fit into either group, which goes to show how even as more people start to become atheists religion still has a stranglehold over how we approach death. I remember how when I was young as someone who was mostly irreligious and started suffering from severe death anxiety I would seek out atheist approaches to dealing with it and it's always the same quotes or ideas copy pasted around or deep philosophical disccusions that were very difficult to understand. Even in this growing atheist world we very rarely have proper ways to deal with the nature of mortality that the common person can access and it just highlights how isolating being an atheist can be sometimes even among other atheists.
To go onto NDEs, they've always been a very interesting topic to me as something I only started to take seriously AFTER I finally stopped suffering from such crippling death anxiety. A good book to read is The Self Does Not Die, which has a huge number of interesting NDE cases. And then in discovering NDEs and other parasychological phenomena I actually gained some death anxiety again because I came to realize that even if the world's various religions aren't real, that doesn't spare me from uncertainty. Just because god isn't real it doesn't mean there couldn't be a hell, that I could live on in some horrible semi spiritual afterlife only to cease to exist at some indeterminite point, that I could live on in some kind of mushroom like whacked out afterlife where my identity fades away. I also like NDEs as being used my Christians like in your example considering that many of them completely contradict Christianity or affirm other religions when you actually read into them more.
Really people crave certainty, whether it be in a religious heaven or an atheist nonexistence, and when confronted with it they lash our to reaffirm their stable world views even if the conclusion of them is horrible or distressing. And as atheism becomes more widespread in the world I look forward to seeing how we begin to approach and deal with mortality as a thing that while bad, is perhaps not as scary as what we unfortunately feel it to bed. And damn if we don't need it, because if I have to read about how I don't actually experience death because at the point of death I no longer exist one more time eternal life will start to look a lot less appealing.
Excellent video on such an important topic.
I really, really do not want to die. I have had a good life and it continues to be good. Sure life has had its ups and downs and some of the downs have been really bad. Nevertheless I am relatively contented and have much to be grateful for.
However, as a believer in younger years, I think I was afraid of death. Here's why. I could never be entirely sure that I was actually saved. Worse still, around the age of 13 I thought I'd committed the unpardonable sin and that sent me into a tailspin for several years of extreme anxiety and depression. That experience played a pivotal role in my loss of faith around the age of 20.
So, as a believer I was actually afraid of death. Now, as a 73 year old man, I am not afraid of death. It's more a matter of death being horribly inconvenient. The deliciousness of life will have ended while others presumably continue on enjoying it. It seems "unfair". Still, while death is near, I have many friends. Those people continue to make my life delicious. So do the things I enjoy. However it is people who are the most important.
As for people who convert to, say, Christianity, because they prefer to accept Pascal's Wager? For every theist, there will always be another theist on the planet somewhere, who will look at them and say - "You are damned to hell". That is, Pascal's Wager gets believers nowhere. Believers still need to keep their fingers crossed.
I do have my fingers crossed however, that my death will be quick and painless.
I actually have had the experience of dying, in a sense. I'm 75 years old. A few years back, I had a heart attack, realized what was happening, and called 911. While I was waiting, I filled up a big bowl of water for my dogs, so that they wouldn't go thirsty before someone came to take them, and then I went outside to wait for the ambulance, so that the EMTs wouldn't have to wangle me out of the house on a gurney. The idea of God, praying, or thinking about the afterlife never entered my mind. I went unconscious in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and my heart went into fibrillation on the way through the hospital doors. I came back to consciousness sometime later, after they had unblocked my carotid artery by inserting a stent through my femoral artery and using the shocker thingy to restart my heart. I probably would have died if I hadn't been living just a few blocks from the hospital. The heart attack itself wasn't super painful-- just a squeezing sensation in my chest.
Nothing about the whole experience was agonizing, including my state of my mind. I was somewhat worried while waiting for the ambulance, but I just thought, "Maybe I'll die, maybe I won't." I didn't like the idea, but I didn't find it terrifying. I was more worried about whether somebody would come to take care of my dogs in a timely manner, so I told the EMT to relay the info about the dogs to my emergency contact person. I then just passed out. If I had been located farther from the hospital I would just never have awakened. The whole experience was identical to what the experience would have been if I had actually died. By the way, I did not have any remembered NDE.
When I was 17 years old, I had another, very different, experience that should have killed me-- I survived against very long odds. That's too long a story for me to want to repeat here. Let's just say that it was parallel to my heart attack story in the fact that I never suffered any real pain or any anxiety about dying. My life "ended" with me just passing out. If I had died, my experience would not have been any different than what I actually experienced.
So, I've had two experiences that were indistinguishable from the experiences I would have had if I had actually died. I've also been a close witness of the deaths of some others. None of those deaths were terrible. I think that people shouldn't hype up the fear of dying or the process of dying as an object of worry. There is no experience of being dead, and the experience of dying itself is often not terrible. We just go back to the state we were in before we were born, whatever that is. As Mark Twain famously said, "I was dead for billions of years before I was born, and it never caused me the slightest inconvenience." Nobody agonizes about the idea that they weren't alive when the dinosaurs were here. The time that will elapse after we're gone is exactly parallel to that in its meaning to us. There is only the experience of being alive. In that sense we're immortal.
@@donnievance1942
Thank you for that.
The most valuable pursuits are those that matter now and into eternity.
Everything else is meaningless in comparison.
Christian faith (not necessarily religion) offers the best and most clear explanation of what those things are.
So just what is that purpose that Christianity so clearly explains? Adulating a torturer god for infinity just because he will agree to not torture you? Sounds so appealing. One of the early Christian fathers wrote about how one of the joys of heaven was getting to observe and revel in the agonies of the damned. Presumably the blessed flock will be right in-sync with their glorious god while enjoying that spectacle. Obviously, he will be at least complacent, if not in a state of sadistic glee.
Christians seem unable to grasp the way their barbarian creed appears to others-- as the belief system of an early Iron Age culture, obsessed with dreams of domination, enslavement, retribution, and violent conquest. Try reading the Book of Joshua, in which Yahweh delivers the land of Canaan into the hands of his warrior cult as a reward for keeping his cult rules and rituals of animal sacrifice. In the entire book, there is not one word of argument that the people of Canaan have done anything to merit the rape, plunder, enslavement, and slaughter that is brought down upon them. Canaan is simply given to Yahweh's warrior cult as their orgiastic reward for obeisance to him and faithful performance of his blood rites. These fantasies are echoed in Revelations, the conclusion of the New Testament, in which all of Christendom gets to vicariously participate in titanic and ecstatic revenge against the whole non-believing world.
Earlier in the New Testament, Yahweh decides to let up on his demands on the faithful in return for one last particularly gruesome sacrifice, this time in an incoherent scenario in which he stipulates that he will sacrifice one part of himself to another part of himself, perhaps as some kind of payback for all the horror that he has inflicted in the past. All that we have to do to participate in this weird rite and be saved from the eternal agony that he is otherwise planning for us is to agree to make this sacrificial torture ritual the focus of our permanent worship and adopt the torture instrument as our primary religious symbol. Your sickening voodoo cult is saturated with obsessions about sin, guilt, threat, retribution, the infliction of pain, and the doxastic requirements necessary to evade the hellscape of your own minds. This is obvious and inescapable to anyone who wasn't indoctrinated into your sociopath's paradigm of the universe.
By the way, Jesus' vaunted agonizing sacrifice, lasting maybe a little over twelve hours from sometime Friday morning until sometime in the afternoon, is so ridiculously paltry compared to all the sin and suffering that it is supposed to atone for, not to mention the eternal torture of millions that it is weighed against, that it just makes Jesus look like a chicken$h!t. So now, do explain the uplifting, transcendent meaning of your tribal psycho fever dream. No doubt you have some kind of more felicitous meaning that you want to paste onto this bizarre construction, but the fact that you don't see what a sinister and alien vessel you want to retain for your purpose is a testament to the ability of culture to twist the mind into any contortion that is customary. If you can't see that, it is futile for you to dabble in philosophical videos and comments. Your ability to carry out rational process and moral reasoning is just too compromised for you to achieve any benefits.
What is missing in larger discussions around death is just how much Christianity changed the relationship with it. Death became not the terminus of life but a judgment point for the life eternal. Mortal life was just the preparation and death was something to be overcome instead of accepted. So much of Western Philosophy and society hasn’t moved past the very Christian view of death. Even the most ardent atheists on the topic sound more like disappointed Christians than anything else. The Existentialist movement seems to be the first steps in developing a Post Christian and Western framework for approaching death and the relationship people have with it. What emerges to deal with the problems that arose from the Death of God are just now starting to formulate into new ideas.
It seems that I would like to live an incomprehensibly large, but finite time. Forever seems too long and anything finite seems too short. 😂
I don't get how someone can just decide to take Pascal's wager and "convert." I can't force myself to believe in something if I have no good reason to. Even if I told you to genuinely try to believe that elves exist, I don't think you would be able to take elves seriously since they're obviously not real and there's no evidence of their existence right?
Besides, how do you know you converted to the right religion?
Everyone forces themselves to believe in something they have no good reason to. They usually just can’t see the belief because it’s too deeply held to examine.
@@scottm4975 Putting aside whether that's true or not, you seem to be referring to something unconscious which isn't what I was referring to. I don't know how one can make a conscious decision to believe in something unreasonable.
Look into Generic Subjective Continuity.
Eastern religions talk about our 'Self' which is part of a greater universal consciousness which the Vedantans call Brahman. This is not a god as such but like an ocean of consciousness or something like that. And although our body and mind dies, our true nature, the 'Self, does not die as it is part of this eternal Brahman thing. An interesting concept...
Alan Watts once made a useful analogy of the ambient air as universal consciousness, along with an upside-down glass as the illusory shell of our bodily existence, and the air within the glass as our individual consciousness under the illusion of our separateness. At the bottom of the glass, we are still actually connected to the surrounding air/consciousness in a way that we don't usually recognize. When the glass is broken the air inside losses its illusion of separateness and rejoins the whole. Perhaps death is the breaking of the glass. Perhaps enlightenment through right living and meditation is the breaking of the glass in the event that reincarnation transfers us to another glass.
Is it death we are anxious about or is it the scenario that leads to it?
What do you think about transcendental argument? Are you familiar with Jay Dyer?
As someone that is at least unsure that I would want to live forever, I would say your critique of such a view equating it to being suicidal seems like a false dichotomy. Thinking that at some point in the future you will probably stop wanting to exist is not at all equivalent to right now in this moment not wanting to exist. I freely admit I would like to live significantly longer than I am going to have allotted to me. But if I were to continue existing eternally it does seem plausible to me that at some point I would say that I have had enough and feel that I am ready, and in fact deeply desire, to have a "final rest". It comes down to what you said about being able to do "everything you are capable of doing". Given a potential eternity, it seems that after some trillions, or googols, or googolplexes of years, that will have been completed.
So while I wouldn't commit to saying I KNOW that I wouldn't want to live forever, if there was a "push this and live for eternity guaranteed, no takebacks, your existence will absolutely for certain never cease" button I think I would also be extremely hesitant to take such a risk. To me the real concern in both cases is that I know I now don't have control over something very important that I'm uncertain of what the outcome will be like, and I think ultimate lack of agency is perhaps the more visceral fear behind even a lot of the fear we have of death.
ETA: Based on this framing, I think it is possible that just knowing I didn't HAVE to continue living forever might be enough to make it so that I would continue to keep making the choice to keep living forever. I'm not 100% sure.
why cope with it? why make peace with it? it doesn't seem to me that internal tranquility is a good in itself.
I tend to lean towards negative utilitarianism. It’s not that internal tranquility is good in it self, but suffering is bad in itself and the lack is preferable
Um yeah, you just can't grasp why anyone would want internal tranquility. Right.
Empirical evidence suggests that not being certain of what happens does increase death anxiety on the whole, so yeah, makes sense that not knowing increased your death anxiety.
Also those “upload my mind to the cloud” type tech bros are hella cringe and that’s coming from a card carrying transhumanist.
nope, not afraid of death. I can be afraid of a painful death, but I'm more just put out that I can't experience everything. I'll just go back to what I was before I was born, just molecules.
Yeah, that's the terrifying part.
Exactly. How is being reduced to molecules for all eternity not scary to some people? I don't get it.@@chrisAclaes
@@AgonizedCandle I don't get why anybody would be afraid of just being molecules. You were just molecules for billions of years before you were born. Does the fact that you were molecules while the dinosaurs were roaming around traumatize you? There is no experience of being dead. How can you be scared of a non-experience? I think some people must have a fantasy of death as being some kind of experience of their consciousness floating around in a terrifying black void forever. There can be no such experience when there is no consciousness to have such an experience. If your molecules have their own little consciousness, that's molecule-consciousness, not you-consciousness having a bad time.
Emerson, have you read or heard about Bernardo kastrup and his idealism? I'm ready about him now and it may be interesting to you
i have never understood the death anxiety of atheists
Really? You can't grasp the idea that natural selection has instilled an emotional bias to avoid injury and death, or that culture has reinforced that fear with a million myths and scary stories, or that those scary stories psychologically imprint that fear on people at an early age to a depth that is hard to overcome in spite of their later rational understanding? That would be the same reason that Christians weep at a funeral when they ought to be happy that their loved one has gone on to heaven. You're not a very deep thinker, are you?
Atheism on his own simple says that there is no God and an atheist can believe in an afterlife and accountability
However, a world with imatirial minds is a world where the God hypothesis seems more propable.
Learn to spell and then maybe you can learn to think rationally somewhere down the line.
Most of the philosophy here went over my head, without a base knowledge of the definitions and topics you were discussing.
As a former Mormon I've said before and I'll say again that I appreciate you recognizing many of the intellectual guards that Mormonism has that avoids some of the problem of other religions. It did make it oddly difficult to break away from, so much of the standard problems with Christianity didn't apply.
Having said that, I think in talking to the nuanced progressive Mormons you're not quite getting a full picture here. The anti-LGBT rhetoric and the second class status of women is pretty awful. To your interests, the level of intellectual stifling and the lack of acceptability on free thinking I think you'd find maddening. I'd love to see your reaction to going to a regular Sunday service and to reading or listening to some of the General Conference talks.
I'm an atheist but it seems to me that the afterlife exists in the last few minutes of brain oxygen after your heart stops. At that point, you are are done. The objective does not matter - only your death dreams with a few minutes of brain oxygen. People reporting their near death experiences would be the reason why belief in the afterlife occurred. Given that dreamers can experience significant subjective time dilation - and who can be sure about the effects in a brain that is shutting down?
Might those death dreams last for a subjective eternity, even though objectively lasting for only a few minutes? It's a freaky thought to imagine that a dead person might be tripping out within their own private "eternal" afterlife while their body is being wheeled away by hospital orderlies.
Bruuuuuh, I have my own hypothesis about it
I saw a dark version of that hypothesis on r/antinatalism which argued that this might be what he’ll actually is
the same way theists cope - by telling stories make us feel better.
The only sensible conclusion. I concur.
@@stefanmilicevic5322 Totally true, and there are a number of perfectly plausible comforting stories. For instance, death is a non-experience which cannot possibly contain fearful experiences or death is the shattering of the illusion that our individual consciousness is separate from a greater consciousness. I actually think that one of those two stories must necessarily be true.
It is not death ancient but life anxiety . People want their lives to amount to something even if that's something simple.
I don't cope with death, I cope with life. I don't want to die and I don't need a fairytale to live a good life.
We'll all know what happens when we die one day and yet we won't because we'll be dead!🙃
Yep.
People have anxiety about this? The sweet sweet void of nothingness is what I look forward to. I'd have more anxiety if I was religious. Get all judged and shit
Hell is defo worse but the fear of oblivion is so evolutionarily baked into our dna that it’s difficult asf to overcome.
I’d actually be open to taking psychedelics to overcome this, chronic death anxiety is destroying my finite life