Death/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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…