@Mujus, Please do not spam the forum I enjoy or I will spam this thread you enjoy, ps you know you are in trouble when obi is posting more interesting replies then you.
"obiwanobiwan (289 )
Wed 08 AM
Well, as I actually *did* come seconds from death when I was seven...
I've spent a lifetime (as short as that lifetime may have been) thinking about this...
So, here's my take, just for me, as it's part of the reason I am an atheist in the first place, and part of the reason I shun theism, and indeed, something that's really at the core of my world view as it stands, so I'll explain my position as I came by it.
Afterwards, as a child, though I believed in God, I never really believed all the things in the Bible could be true; after all, on the one hand, I had one of those Children's Bibles growing up, and for a time, my sister, father and I would read a story from it--illustrated and all--every Saturday or Sunday...
But ONLY ever from the Old Testament, which I suppose is why I never really trusted the Bible; you see, the OT passages had blue lettered titles, and the NT passages had green lettered titles...now, my father's since converted to Christianity, and how, you'd NEVER guess today that this man, who has New Testament quotes and Crosses all over his workplace and who serves as usher for his Church was the same person who would tell my sister and I not to worry about those green passages, that they were about Jesus and that we didn't believe in his being the Messiah and only the blue passages were important for us.
So I grew up believing in God as a kid, but not the Bible, so when *I* very nearly died at seven--I had a blood clot lodge in my frontal lobe which caused a very rare and very nearly fatal stroke--I felt the same thing that many people have said that they've felt after a near-death experience:
"I must have been allowed to live for a REASON...I mean, the odds were so stacked against me, the odds say I should have died, I must have been kept alive for a PURPOSE."
And for that reason--and one other I'll mention in a moment--I believed in God, if not the Bible, as even at seven I found it fishy that you could just pick which sections of this book were "important" and which were not, and that for some people, this Jesus fellow was everything, and yet for my Jewish family growing up, he wasn't really much of anything, and those green passages went unread (occasionally, like any seven-year old who's been told "no" about something, I DID sometimes very briefly peek at those green NT passages and look at the pictures of the young Baby Jesus, or Jesus as an adult, or a smiling Mary...and yet always with a slight sense of guilt, like I was looking at something I shouldn't have been...my father never said "DO NOT look at those passages," but just from his tone of voice when he said they weren't "important to us" I could tell even as a kid there was a reason he didn't necessarily want me looking at them, at least not instead of the blue, OT passages.)
So I believed in God mainly because I wanted to believe in God...
Because I wanted it to be true--I wanted it to be the case that I'd been saved by some divine act and that, indeed, God had some sort of great purpose for me...
That's a natural thought, yes...it's also, however, a very immature thought looking back, or to be more fair about it, a very self-serving thought, to feel like everything had been tilted my way for that moment just because God took a special interest in me while many others died.
And that I actually witnessed as well--just before I had my stroke, when I was in the hospital for my Crohn's Disease (which would lead to the blood clot later) I went through a miserable period where I couldn't eat anything for days and was hooked up to IVs and wires and all the rest until there was no food left in me so they could do a colonoscopy (and if you've HAD the "pleasure" of having a colonoscopy, or are understanding of medicine at all, you may be asking "Why didn't they just give you that special, foul liquid they so often give patients days before, the one that tastes foul and makes you "go" so often that you quite literally shit your bowels clean of any blockage whatsoever?" and to this very day, I don't know why...and as foul as that drink is, it would've been a LOT better than the feeling of literally eating nothing for close to a week or so and feeling increasingly week and sick everyday.)
I felt horrible. I was just seven, and this was the worst I'd ever felt in my life--I'd go on to many, many worse feelings and situations (I've already given you one, that stroke-inducing blood clot) but for the moment, this was the low for me...for more reasons than one, for lo and behold, who should be sharing this room with me but another boy, about my age, and HE WAS very literally on his deathbed, from what I can recall. So. No food for nearly a week, feeling weaker and worse every day, and my roommate actually was dying at the moment I felt physically worse than I ever had up to that point...
Maybe it's no surprise, then, all those factors included, that I started to wonder if I'd die too, and at that point in life, I hadn't yet read Shakespeare or Milton--believe it or not!--so I was far less concerned with having my life end meaninglessly with my having done nothing with it than with what I felt, at seven years, was just the scariness of death...
AND the thought of Hell--because I hadn't looked over many of those green NT passages, but I knew about Hell, and anyone who's ever read about Hell and is honest with themselves can easily think of some instances in their life where they've done something that wasn't quite kosher (shall we say) and was wrong, and whether or not you learn from those things helps determine what sort of a person you are, but me being seven, all *I* can think about is:
1. I feel like I'm dying,
2. The person next to me is dying, and
3. I don't know what death is...but it sounds scary...and what if I go to that Hell place, if it exists, I mean, I'm not a robber or murderer, but I'm no Baby Jesus either, what if not honoring my father and mother and arguing with them, or the time I accidentally hit my sister in the head with a baseball bat (true story, and a sheer accident, I was in Little League, and my sister was really little and stepped behind me when I swung, and her being so little and my being focused on my swing I didn't see her until it was too late) or something else is enough to land me in Hell...where I roast in fire forever?
All that's going through my mind--at seven.
So, I shout out "I want to kill myself!" with about half of me meaning it and too tense about the worry of going to Heaven or Hell and just wanting to find out already (and end this starvation) and half of me...being seven years old in a hospital in the worse physical shape of my life with a dying roommate and the fear of Hell put into me, and so naturally just being a (hopefully very understandably) distraught and afraid child.
But I survived that episode.
And the stroke, even though I was in a coma as well and they thought they'd have to operate.
And the many infusions that followed, because I was very anemic due to all of this.
And the seizures that followed as complications of the stroke.
And learning how to grip a pencil again and getting through physical therapy.
I got through ALL of that, going into high school...
And I felt there MUST be a God; the Bible I could leave be, I was, after all, very interested in biology (who wouldn't be, after so much first-hand experience with it in terms of medicine and human anatomy and hospital visits) and rather good at it for my age, and so I accepted evolution as fact pretty easily, and always said in public--to avoid a total conflict--that sure, evolution AND Genesis might have happened...but in the back of my mind, I already knew that wasn't true, I could just tell, and after I started actually reading Genesis in high school, I felt that even stronger.
"But surely" I felt, "SURELY I had to have survived all that for a REASON...and after all, there must be a PURPOSE to life, so I must've been allowed to live so I could complete my purpose in life!"
So that was one reason for believing in God, and coping with how close I came to death--and there was one other...
And surprise of surprises...it came from literature.
But not Shakespeare, and not Milton...
I was home-schooled for a year and a half or so, during middle school, partly because I just couldn't get along with the kids in middle school and partly because I didn't exactly have the best teachers there (though my sister did alright when her turn came)...
And though I'd always been ahead of my class in terms of reading, and though I'd already read Poe and Twain and some Dickens and the like...
NOW was when I really started to devour books--
I didn't have any friends (I was, and largely still am, rather anti-social in terms of making friends, I make a ton of acquaintances and very few friends)...
My medical conditions meant I couldn't play baseball or football or other sports with other boys (not exactly good for someone already not the best at making friends and standing out as being different and controversial and mouthy, which I've always been)...
And my dad and I...we've never gotten along very well, and he and I certainly were at a low point over these years--
So I wanted some companionship, and someone to look up to as an idea...
And so I came to read the poems and ballads and pieces of literature for King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table for the first time.
For me, that filled the void--Arthur felt like the kind of father I'd always wanted, I could identify well with Gawain (a good knight, seemingly always screwing something up along his quest, so not perfect, but still good, and bold and he tried to learn from his mistakes, such as with the Green Knight) and the other knights were like friends I'd always wanted...all had pros and cons and flaws and were great, they felt like people I could relate to as well (except Lancelot, Mr. Perfect AND the guy who spoiled everything by sleeping with Guinevere...he and I never "got along" very well...I'm not a fan of the Lancelots of the world.)
AND THIS was another way I coped with having nearly died--
Because King Arthur and all those stories employed magic and the power of God, or the Holy Grail, and I WANTED to believe this was all true, that it COULD be true. As much as I suppose those who worship Jesus want to (or genuinely do) believe he was as amazing as he's advertised, and that he WAS real and DID do all of that...I wanted that to be at least a possibility for King Arthur, I wanted it to be possible for these people to have really existed and for these things to really have happened.
They were my ideal at the time, and in some ways still are, they were my vision of everything I wanted to be as the weak, medically-challenged kid who didn't fit in--brave, strong, bold, true to one another, great friends, great individually and yet greater still as a team--and the legend ends, after all, with it stating that King Arthur and his Knights still asleep, "awaiting the day when the Land of Britain should be in its darkest hour, so that they may once again save Britain and bring forth the great kingdom of Logres."
"WHAT A PURPOSE!" I thought, "WHAT MEANING! To live your whole life a crusader for truth and justice, and then to die, and sleep until you're needed in the darkest hour, and then to bring light to darkness and save the day again and resurrect that great kingdom and reunite all these great friends that made such a great team...THAT is worthwhile!"
I wanted a purpose to life, because I felt I had none at that point (and in fairness, I really didn't) and THIS could be my purpose, maybe, in some way...that maybe I COULD be like those Knights, like Gawain, not literally, but to live like that and then die and await a day when I could live again and do even more good...THAT seemed like a just system...and it seemed like maybe it could happen, at least to me at that point; Arthur was made king because he was destined to pull a sword out of a stone, after all, surely I must have some great destiny if I was kept alive through all those chances to die, or to go into an irreversible coma, or be permanently paralyzed...
Everything in the Arthur Legend had MEANING, nothing was pointless...surely that's how life was, I felt, so my reason for wanting their to be an afterlife, for believing in God, boiled down to, in the end,
"EVERYTHING MUST HAPPEN FOR A REASON."
Again, a popular view, and one that's egoistic, but understandable.
And that's how I viewed death and came to face it--surely, I felt, my death would come in a good way, I'd die in a good way, in an important way, or at least after doing something important, after all, god had saved me before I could die an unimportant, hollow death, CLEARLY he must want me to live and have a purpose to life--like Gawain.
That's how I dealt with and justified my nearly dying for years--not believing in religion anymore, but in some sort of being (any, I didn't care what) that would justify my having survived and give my life and death purpose and make my King Arthur-fueled fantasy view of life a reality.
And then...I went to high school...and that all changed.
My grandfather on my mother's side had Alzheimer's, and badly by this point, but I'd known him before its onset, and known him well enough he told me about his time in WWII--something he never talked about with his own children. Naturally, to a kid who responds to the word "stormtrooper" by not thinking about someone he fought in a war but someone Luke Skywalker always seemed to evade easily, and who'd by this point become enamored with King Arthur and The Iliad and Robin Hood and all these stories of heroes killing for good and for God and saving the day and living with a PURPOSE, when I first heard these stories, I always got very excited, thinking they'd be like that.
My grandfather, to his undying credit, was a very wise man, surely wise enough to realize four vital things in life:
1. A little bit of humor can go a long way,
2. Turning down an Army promotion for a wife and family is probably the way to go,
3. If you want to be happy in life, root for the Yankees, not the Mets, and
4. War's not the sort of picture of glamour King Arthur or Homer or Star Wars paints it as...and it's NOT a way to live and give purpose to your life, it's a tragedy when it occurs, and purpose comes from a triumph over tragedy, rather than succumbing to it
So he never treated those stories as if they were daring exploits, and I never heard him describe one violent act or character, be it on TV or movies or King Arthur otherwise, as heroic or something to set up as a way to view life.
And so when he finally passed on in high school, I was left with that being my most lasting memory of him, and those stories all meaning something I hadn't seen at 11 or 12--it wasn't King Arthur and purpose in life through war and fighting...it was that it was a tragedy such events ever had to occur at all, and while (himself always being one to slip in a joke where he could) the stories usually had a light moment or two (which is a lesson in itself, that even in the darkest of times, there's still that small light of laughter) they made it clear death wasn't something to be seen as something glamorous.
And it was around that time I read Shakespeare and Nietzsche as well.
So between a grandfather's stories showing how purposeless and tragic death can be...
Hamlet saying speech after speech to the purposelessness of life...
And Nietzsche pushing nihilism and saying "God is Dead"...
And growing up and realizing just how good *I* had things, all my troubles aside, and just how much suffering there IS in the world, and how many people HAVE died anonymous deaths, or painful deaths, or meaningless deaths, or died as babies and never truly got to live at all...
I couldn't feel I had "been kept alive for a purpose" anymore.
It just didn't feel right...it felt all wrong--how selfish of me, to suppose I was saved and had a purpose, but that all those who died either didn't have a purpose or had already fulfilled that "purpose" when they died so young or so sick or so impoverished.
I didn't feel so special anymore, I wasn't destined for something like King Arthur was.
And so my main reason for believing for God vanished...and the more and more I read, the more and more I talked to people and saw all the logical problems of a God existing and how horrible, it seemed, life was under a God that would allow it, and finally, in college, how horrible a heaven must be, so stagnant...if there was a full eternity of purpose, after all, how much purpose could it really have? Wasn't part of what made King Arthur amazing was that he and his Knights did so much in such a short span of time? Wasn't part of what already had made Shakespeare and Nietzsche and now, slowly, Milton and Eliot into my heroes the fact that they were able to write so much and say such profound things in such a short space of time, and that they were a unique, quick burst of genius, never to be repeated?
I'd already lost the reason for wanting to believe a God existed, and lost the logical foundations for believing in one long ago, when I first learned of evolution...my reason for being an agnostic Jew leaning towards hoping there was a God had always been just that, a willingness to suspend logic in some cases in the HOPE there was a God, not because it made sense that such a thing would be true, but because I WANTED it to be true...and with that reason for wanting it to be true gone and vanished, so too, now, did God himself.
And naturally, at that point, I myself came full circle, and asked once again--
"WHY DID I SURVIVE THAT STROKE?
WHY AM I ALIVE, AND NOT DEAD?
WHAT DOES IT MATTER?
AND WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I DO DIE?"
The answer to THAT, Zmaj, comes after a very, VERY long, soul-searching journey (pardon the term, fellow atheists), and as a college student, I don't plan to pretend to tell you that the journey's anywhere near over (unless, of course, I die extraordinarily suddenly) but since it's been a journey of over 14 years or so, I feel like I can say this much:
FOR ME...dealing with death...
The first thing to realize is that the feeling I had for all those years, that is, willing to suspend logic in an area in the hope that my life would have purpose and be crowned in death, is a mistake.
Life is all you have, that's your one chance at purpose--in death, you are, as you put it, " absolute nothingness"...with one exception, and that's what turned me around.
You're nothing in death, you're dead, you're done, that's the end, you exist no longer...
Except in what you leave behind--and leaving something behind and making THAT and the life that spawned that monument to your existence as full and eventful as possible is what makes what you leave behind beautiful...and what makes it MATTER, THAT IS YOUR PURPOSE.
Shakespeare's dead--"dead and turned to clay," to quote Hamlet, as for once, it's somewhat appropriate.
Shakespeare is dead.
There is no unearthly realm I can wait for in order to meet him and chat him up.
But I don't need to wait for such a place--
I'VE MET Shakespeare--through what he left behind, I know him through his works.
It's the same with all my "heroes"--Shakespeare, Milton, Nietzsche, Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf...I know them through the words and recordings they leave behind, and those words live on and keep them, in turn, "alive," not in a literal sense, but, far greater, in a meaningful sense.
Say what you will about Shakespeare and all those other people--
But while they're dead, their words are not, and even better, they're forever "in discussion," as it were, they're forever "in the game" that is life. As long as the human race exists as it is, Shakespeare will be chatting to us, if we care to listen. So will Milton. So will Nietzsche.
What's more, what's better, they'll never run out of things to say--they have a finite amount of words, sure, but each generation sees something new, lives through something new, and so they say something new and, in turn, hear something new from Shakespeare on the matter, or Milton's old words will take on a new meaning, or, hell, Plato, dead and gone for 2,500 years, will STILL have something to say about education and the soul and ethics and politics and so much more.
It's telling, we can see it--if you've ever read "Brave New World," where society is conditioned at birth to act and think according to their roles in life, creating a "utopia" but at the cost of severely cutting personal freedoms...
That's Plato's Republic--he's been dead and gone for millenia, yet there it is, there he is, rearing his head in discussion again, in a new form, for Plato knew nothing of Shakespeare, and so certainly couldn't have ever have had his works banned...but he knew of Homer, and banned HIS works in the Republic, and so here it is again:
Huxley reiterating Plato, agreeing on some points and disagreeing on others, and in turn, he gives new life to Plato and gives himself a way to "live on" in the eternal, everlasting discussion that IS mankind's progression as a species, as a being upon this planet.
And that's just literature--I'm a citizen of the United States because my family immigrated here, but we never could've come here if the USA didn't exist, and it never would've existed without Jefferson declaring that "all men are created equal" and Washington losing battles on the field but winning the battle of morale with his troops at Valley Forge and keeping the army from disintegrating and Adams and Franklin and all the other great figures of the Revolution--without them, there's no USA for us to come to, and you and I aren't speaking today, and quite probably, you and I don't exist.
Mozart and Beethoven and John Lennon and Tupac alike, ALL of them still stir emotions in their respective audiences decades or centuries after dying...they're still part of the fabric of makind, they've died, physically, but the meaning they put into their work--
THAT, more than anything else, is their "soul," or "spirit," and it lives after them, through us, through every amateur trying to learn Mozart or every concert playing Beethoven or every record player or stereo ever to play "Imagine" or every MP3 player with Tupac's albums on it.
But it's not just about becoming "great," and leaving a famous legacy behind--that's not all there is to life and death.
NONE of us are here without our parents...and none of our parents are particularly famous.
In fact, truth be told, history suggests that, within a few generations, they'll be forgotten.
And you and I as well.
But any children you might have, should they have children, well, they'll owe their being to you, and there's your legacy...
And all the lives you may shape as a teacher or save as a soldier or doctor or police officer or firefighter, there's your legacy, for if you hadn't saved those people, who knows, maybe you'll save the life of the great-great-great-great-grandfather of a future President of the United States, or the person who first sets foot on one of Jupiter's moons, or cures Alzheimer's or invents the flying car (really, we were promised that by the Jetsons 50 years or so ago, aren't we about due for some flying cars?)
I'm not here if not for a grandfather and fellow soldiers who fought a war to stop Hitler.
And I'm not here if not for that grandfather putting aside a promotion to Sergeant in order to start a family instead.
And I'd not have this view, in fact, at all, if not for EVERYTHING that I mentioned above--
That Children's Version of the Bible,
Those feelings and worries about dying and Hell,
My stroke,
My multiple hospital visits,
The dying roommate,
The pain and loneliness and occasions of sheer terror during those hospital stays, Growing up differently from others,
Learning to read a lot faster and more proficiently than others,
Not making a lot of friends,
Not getting along well with my father,
Reading King Arthur's Legend and wishing for that sort of sense of purpose,
Having a grandfather tell me war stories and show how wrong living for death is,
Reading Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Milton, Eliot, Woolf, and every successive author,
Hating Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins because of their attitude
Coming to love Hitchens and Dawkins and seeing such an attitude is sometimes necessary,
Debating all this with friends and strangers alike,
Typing overlong posts on WebDip,
IT ALL amounts to the sum total of your life,
Which is what you put into it and what you're lucky enough to have others influence,
And THIS is what lives on after death,
And THIS is what staves off the fear of death--
And it's why I want, more than anything in the world, to be a writer, so that I can, with any luck, say something, and have that something live on in the collective health and minds and hearts of humanity as "me."
Maybe it won't be anything special.
Maybe it won't be groundbreaking.
Maybe I'll only get one book, or one article, or one poem published, and it will be panned.
Maybe someone will read that, and think they can do better...
And WILL, and so, out of sheer disgust at how poor a writer and thinker I am, perhaps the next Dickens or Woolf or Hitchens will take a step closer towards helping humanity a step closer towards another great leap for mankind.
In any case, that's how I deal with death--
At first, by fearing it and selfishly hoping there was some special purpose for my living,
And now, by accepting it and driving myself hoping I can achieve that purpose for life.
Death comes, and you and I and everyone else here will be nothingness--
But so much of what we do, what we've all done, what we may still do in our lives may affect future lives, may contribute something valuable in that everlasting conversation humanity has ongoing with itself, as that's where any and all purpose comes from, by way of humanity's manufacturing it, and learning to do so more maturely and more brilliantly with each successive generation--
So in dealing with death, I have only to think of how loud a voice I might have in that conversation...
And what I wish to do and say for all-time in that conversation...
And what, in the end, after I have ceased to be, what I want my voice to CONTINUE TO BE in that conversation.
That's life, and death, for me, as an atheist--and "The rest is silence.""
George W Bush on Race Reltions
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