That is to say, in death you stop existing so you can’t be bothered by it. “Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born - a hundred million years - and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.” Mark Twain, the deistic author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, wrote in his autobiography that: While the end of existence troubled them, the idea of being dead did not. Many philosophers who did believe in the divine, such as Epicurus, did not believe in an afterlife. Luckily, many great minds in history had thoughts on how to face death without the comfort of an afterlife.
The realization of death’s finality can be unsettling for the non-believer, and is one reason why the religious feel confronted by atheists. Death can take on an extra aura of fear without the benefit of an afterlife. It is merely the end of the one and only existence that can be confirmed. The promise of Heaven, Valhalla, Elysium, reincarnation, or even a decent hell makes death but an inconvenience.įor atheists, however, there is no such benefit to death. Billions of people, living and dead, have put their hopes on an afterlife. The question of how to deal with the reality of death is one as old as mankind.
