When you die, that’s it: no heaven, hell, or rebirth

I love to get straight-talking churchless email. Here's a message that recently zoomed in from cyberspace. Thanks, Nancy, for letting me share it. Hi Brian, Came across your website "Church Of The Churchless" and I give it 2 thumbs up! Yes, religion is all man-made bullshit trying to give meaning and purpose to human existence. I have delved into Hinduism and meditation and honestly, Hindus are way offtrack with such nonsense as reincarnation. No person comes back as another human to work out past karmas nor are they sent to planet earth to suffer in the next life. This I…

Self/Soul is evolution’s trick to make us think “I’m important!”

Why do humans feel that we have (or are) a Self/Soul that's distinct from the body/brain? Buddhism and neuroscience agree: there's no such thing, no self, no soul. Yet it sure seems like there is. We look at the world with a consciousness that screams, "I'm floating above my mind and body! I'm in control of my physicality, not just material brain meat doing its thing." A few weeks ago I blogged about Nicholas Humphrey's fascinating short book, "Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness." The passages I shared in that post showed how Humphrey starts with a description of seeing…

Brain damage can convince you of Christian bullshit

Recently someone emailed me about my "Heaven is NOT real, no matter what Eben Alexander says" post. She wondered why I thought his heaven seemed so Christian. To her, Alexander's account of the afterlife sounded more Hindu. Well, I'm no expert on Hinduism, but that assertion seems dubious to me. A quick check-in with the Great God Google taught me some things about Hindu notions of the afterlife. A Wikipedia article on the subject emphasizes Hindu belief in karma and reincarnation. We keep coming back to life on Earth, not an eternal life in "heaven." Heaven and hell are temporary…

Heaven is NOT real, no matter what Eben Alexander says

I'm impressed with myself. (And not for the first time, nor the last.) Noted religious skeptic and neuroscientist Sam Harris has much the same reaction as I did, albeit more fully and cogently stated, to Eben Alexander's ridiculous claim that while in a coma, when his cortex supposedly was "completely shut down," he had an experience of heaven that must have been separate from brain activity. Hence, a soul travel of some sort to God's realm. Here's what I said about the guy's story three days ago, in response to a comment on this post. Rain, I'm not much impressed with…

Uncertainty: the key to dealing with death and non-existence

Last night I had another of my Holy shit! I'm going to die and not exist forever! moments. I wrote about these disturbing experiences six years ago in "Death and the primal fear of non-existence."  I’ve come face to face with not-existing. It’s scary. Really scary. I’ve never experienced anything scarier. I can call it “fear,” but it’s more than that. Worse than that. Regular fear arises when something bad is happening or could happen. But primal fear is looking into the maw of nothing happening to you, because there will be no you around for anything to happen to. Do you get the…

How to live happily until you die

Religious believers have dogmas that comfort when death stares them in the face. Resurrection of the body. Eternal survival of the soul. Some secular "survivalists" hold onto equally unfounded hypotheses: that their body can be kept alive for a really long time through a health/medical breakthrough, or kept frozen and reanimated in some advanced technological future.  (Uploading of one's brain contents to a back-up brain or computerized alternative is another dream of those who desire immortality outside of religion.) In his "Immortality," a book I've blogged about recently here and here, Stephen Cave persuasively demolishes the efficacy of these three…

Cells, common ancestors, and Gaia — suggestions of immortality

Like I said in my post "We can never be dead (but we're not immortal," in his book Stephen Cave does an excellent job of describing ways we humans attempt to achieve immortality -- then showing why they aren't up to the job. Staying alive... we can try to make our years on Earth as many as possible, but it's obvious that everybody dies eventually. Resurrection... Jesus supposedly did it, but there's no solid evidence of this, and no proof anyone else has pulled off the trick either. Soul... nice idea, that a conscious non-physical aspect of us continues on…

We can never be dead (but we’re not immortal)

I've got some bad news and some good news for those who believe they have, or are, a soul. Bad news is, almost certainly the soul doesn't exist.  The good news is, no matter. Because we can never be dead. However, the good news doesn't mean we're immortal, which is the promise of soul. It just means, as Stephen Cave says in his fascinating book, "Immortality," that it is impossible for us humans to imagine our own nonexistence -- because whenever we try to do this, we're still alive. That's what I learned from a quote in the leadoff reader…

Dying people talk about their family, not God

I liked this post, "My Faith: What people talk about before they die," even though it's on CNN's belief blog. It shows that what's important to people isn't dogma, but life as it's lived with loved ones. We don't live our lives in our heads, in theology and theories.  We live our lives in our families:  the families we are born into, the families we create, the families we make through the people we choose as friends. This is where we create our lives, this is where we find meaning, this is where our purpose becomes clear. Family is where…

Bad news: I’m going to die. Good news: I’ll be nirvana!

Oh, the unfairness of it all. I really like being alive. Yet one day I'll be dead. Gone. Nonexistent. Forever unconscious.  Damn it, damn it, damn it! Who the hell arranged the cosmos in this fucked-up fashion?! I want to live forever, or at least much longer than I'm going to, so where's the Complaint Department, Customer Service, Warranty Fulfillment? I need to talk to who's in charge, because this death deal is totally screwed-up. That's basically how I think in my least harmonious, accepting, live-and-let-die moments. Which are quite frequent, because such thoughts enter my mind a lot. I've…

Karmic causality — believable and unbelievable

Karma... a word that both is eminently scientific, and also annoyingly religious. I've spent a lot of time exploring both meanings of karma.  Ever since I was a kid I've enjoyed learning about science. In my childhood room I set up a card table that fit oh-so-perfectly inside a corner of my closet. I'd sit down at the table, slide the closet door shut, turn on a light that I'd strung over the clothes rod, and spend many happy hours performing experiments with science kits. Then, as now, the essence of science for me was cause and effect. Do this,…

“How to Die in Oregon” made me less afraid of death

I'm going to die eventually. And I live in Oregon. So it figures that the award-winning 2011 documentary "How to Die in Oregon" would be of considerable interest to me.  In 1997 Oregon became the first state to allow terminally-ill people to end their lives through self-administered lethal medications if a physician certified they had six months or less to live. It's officially called the Death With Dignity Act, but often is midleadingly referred to as physician-assisted suicide. The movie shows that suicide isn't what terminally-ill people are doing when they choose to control the time and place of their…

Looking into the void…and waking up

Recently I got an email from someone who resonated with my take on death, not-existing for eternity, and the virtually certain unfortunate/fortunate fact that when we die, we're gone forever (aside from the atoms that make up our time-limited assemblage into a living entity). I asked the guy, Yeager St. John, if I could share his thoughts. "Sure," he emailed back. Here they are. Hey Brian, I came across your website, "Church of the Churchless" and must say, bravo. I have only read a few of your posts, but have enjoyed every bit. I came across your "death and the primal…

What’s so great about ego loss?

Yesterday I got an email from someone who asked an excellent question. Why should he engage in ego-lessening practices? Hello Mr. Hines. I have practiced Zen for several years, but in the past year or two I have ‘fallen away’ from the practice. I find myself resonating with your concepts of ‘spiritual independence’ and ‘church of the churchless’. I’m sending you this email because I thought you might have some insight on my question. Why do (why should?) I engage in ego-lessening practices?  I realize that the question comes from the ego.  It’s a sort of ‘what’s in it for me’ question.  But…

Why we can’t imagine the moment of our death

Thumbing through a recent issue of The New Yorker last night, I came across a thought-provoking paragraph about mortality in a personal history piece, "The Aquarium," by Aleksandar Hemon. There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment…

Humans are naturally optimistic. Which helps explain religion.

Most people's brains are hard-wired to generate an optimistic outlook on life. Evolution, it seems, has favored an ability to look into the future and see good things happening. Such is the message of TIME magazine's cover story this week, "The Optimism Bias." It's a highly interesting article. Tali Sharot, the author, says that "optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel, the ability to move back and forth through time and space in one's mind." This ability was naturally selected for in the course of Homo sapiens' evolution because it had so…

Yes, certainly hell is dead. Along with heaven.

When the new issue of TIME magazine arrived a few days ago, my wife noted the cover story blurb -- "What if there's no Hell?" -- and said, I can't understand how anybody can believe in hell. My reply to her: I can't understand how anybody can believe in Christianity, yet lots of people do. Well, actually I do understand, because I've also believed weird spiritual stuff that now seems untrue to me. So I was speaking from my current churchless perspective. For many years I entertained a belief that the only way back to God was to become a…

Overcoming the fear of non-existence

So far I've written 1,228 posts for this blog. Like a proud parent, I'm tempted to say that I don't have a favorite, that I love all of my writings equally. But that wouldn't be true. Some posts resonate with me more than others, because they spring from a deeper meaning-place. Notably, "Death and the primal fear of non-existence." The day I wrote it, back in 2006, I didn't have much time for blogging. For me, that post was unusually short and to the point. Which was how it had to be. There isn't anything complex or subtle about the…

Last thought before death — what it says about us

A few nights ago, as I was going to sleep, an idea popped into my mind: "There'll be a moment when I have my last thought before I die. What would I want it to be?" Intuitively, this struck me as an important question. That last thought would be infinitely precious, in a way. It'd reflect what I considered to be most important to focus on an instant before earthly existence and I parted company. (Note: I don't believe in an unearthly existence. And I realize that probably I won't know when my last thought is happening. But there's a…

If the universe is infinite, we’re immortal (sort of)

Wow, I got some great news after reading only two chapters in physicist Brian Greene's new book, "The Hidden Reality." I'm immortal! Only catch is, the "me" who exists forever isn't really the same me who is typing out these words. Though maybe it is. Just depends on how I look upon myself: (1) as a being with a unique essence peculiar to myself (I don't mean a smell, but a non-physical identity), or (2) as a configuration of atoms which could be almost exactly duplicated in another corner of the cosmos. I've read Greene's previous books, enjoying them, but…