Why Atheists Terrify Believers

[Binkie The Clown]

138. Buddhist teacher Stephen Levine addressed a large gsathering once and asked the audience...

"How many of you are going to die?"

It took a really looooooong time before a few hands started to be timidly held up.

Most people cope with their own mortality by avoiding any thoughts about it. I remember once, many years ago when I was just in my 20's that, whenever I drove past them, I unconsciously averted my eyes from bus stop benches that had mortuary advertising on them. When I realized that I was doing it, a realized how foolish it was. Not confronting the issue won't make it go away.

Now many decades later, having confronted death all around me, mostly elderly relatives, but exceptions include my relatively young wife (cancer), a 30-year-old friend who dropped dead of a heart attack jst before we were going out for pizza, and a nephew who had a fatal stroke at age 22, I've come to simply accept my own impermanence. I don't have avert my eyes from billboards and change the subject when somebody mentions it.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that as an atheist, I don't have to worry about heaven or hell. I'm expecting neither. Hell doesn't frighten me any more than other fantasies like alien abduction or voodoo curses, and being dead is no different from the way I was before I was born. (I don't recall that being a bad state of affairs.)

I'm 70, and if I live another year I will have lived longer than my father. If I live another 25 years I will have caught up to my mother, who's still alive and kicking. Who knows. Who cares. Life is about living right here, right now. And I will die. And knowing that makes life all the sweeter.