I'm not afraid of the big, black void because we're ALL going there.

I'll be alone, but then again, I won't be alone. Nor will I *be*.

You will all persist eternally...just in an alternate form...a part of worms, insects, etc....then a part of fish, bird, etc...then something biger and so on until you are many parts of many humans again. That's not just reincarnation...that's multiplications!

Some replies...

obiwanobiwan, whom I vaguely remember as a jerk, has written a beautiful post, really engaging and honest. Thanks for such a detailed explanation. Still, I can't accept your reason because you found a religion in your legacy. As I said, "something will live after me" is just avoiding the issue and I won't lie to myself in such important matters. Still, great post.

dipplayer2004 and cteno4, what you call "carpe diem", I call panic. Since I'm already in that state, that doesn't help me.

KalelChase, I'm not sure how, but I feel that your "impermanence of meaning" is crucial. It is all about meaning, after all. I'll think about it.

orathaic, science is your religion and that's fine, but I don't want religions in this thread. We're talking philosophy, not atoms.

greysoni, those are great citations, he nailed it. Whether to bury one's head in the sand and be happy or to look at death and be unhappy... Yeah. I wonder how he solved it.

But it's not panic...which is a very odd way to describe it, IMO. It's acceptance.

"Very odd" as in "not cliched", I suppose. I know Hollywood has been "carpe diem" ever since the Dead Poets Society or even earlier, but it hasn't managed to brainwash me.

@Zmaj: Existence is meaningless, and the fact that existence is meaningless is itself meaningless.

Feeling more comfortable now?

"Also, if you don't care about death, don't post here, ok? I know most people make light of death because they entertain the subconscious belief they're immortal. I'm not interested in such delusions."

Why would you even ask how atheists deal with death if you're going to insult those of us who successfully do so? You don't have to believe you're invincible in order not to care about death.

PE, you maggot, why would you even talk to me? You're already dead inside, so you're disqualified.

Your trolling is so bad you're starting to make Diplomat33 and King Atom look good

"If we have no free will, how can we punish the criminal? Why do we feel guilt? How do we hold anyone accountable for anything?"

You mean, 'how could we justify it on moral grounds?' the same way we do today, people act like they wish and we punish them for it.

Cells in the human body kill off (well send self-destruct/suicide signals) to those cells deemed too old or too mutated.

The really dangerous mutant cells become cancerous and may eventually kill all the rest.

As a society we take similar measures, though our immune responce and it's chemical messages are sligthly different from society's police enforcers and medical euthanizers - with many forms of communication (like uniforms to identify them as part of their special group)

Nobody asks 'how can the immune system kill off cancerous/infected cells if they are just automata'

If we are just machines then it is little surprise that we share some common traits with these single cell machines (especially the ones which co-operate with each other and compliment their functions... Like we do in a society with a specialised workforce)

I find the law of conservation of energy to be quite consoling whenever I face existential dread.

I'm one of few that has seen death from both perspectives: from the outside and the inside. I'm not up for explaining the circumstances, but my belief is simple: Death is an end. In the same way that we fear certain things, we fear death, yet I don't see it as something to fear. Yes, it is an end. I still think though that it is something that we all will go through - like you said, immortality is nothing but a delusion - and it is nothing to be afraid of from the outside.

Now, for me, I came close to death by what would have been violent and painful means. The pain of death is something we can rationally fear. Death itself, though, is just as common as life, thus, the concept itself is nothing to fear.

It strikes me that the way we think about times has quite an impact on how we see death. As long as this universe is in existence I will be alive and well in a significant (ish) chunk of it. What does it matter that a rope has a beginning and an end? It is still a rope, and it is what it is used for that counts.

I looked through this thread again. Out of everybody who answered me, not a single person is afraid of death. It makes me feel good because I'm a step ahead. And I feel bad because none of you can help me.

It's no child's fear. It's deep and unsettling. I thought about how to describe it. Imagine being put in a sealed barrel and thrown into the deep sea. As the barrel goes deeper and deeper, you know the worst is going to happen and nothing can stop it. That's the feeling.

Old people might know more, but I don't think they would care to share it. It's a lonely pursuit.

But death is the only real enemy. I'm certain of it. Everything else is just games.

No, Zmaj, I've been there. I've come out the other side. That's the point. I've come to accept death.

@Zmaj Denial of Death is a book I can't recommend enough....It is an extraordinary work (recognized as such... 1974 Pulitzer winner). If you are facing this issue head on it might not provide you with the answers you would agree with but he explores it thoroughly and with great profundity. It still has many admirers even though it is rooted in old school psychology. The is even an Ernest Becker society (he died in 1974). I have read the book at least 5 times over the years and have always found insights with each rereading. There is a professor that gives talks on Becker's ideas. He gives a quite humorous presentation Youtube recording http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj39rM6X7rI

For those who think you can intellectualize this fear away .....Best of luck with that....trust me or not, but it is just another denial.

zmaj, you seem to be implying that nobody else "gets it" like you do, as if no one else has dealt with the existential crisis you're now experiencing. If I am interpreting that correctly: Stop flattering yourself. You're not thinking more deeply about the subject than everyone else here, you're just letting the subject overwhelm you.

Death is not the enemy, Zmaj. Death is life's greatest gift. Imagine the alternative to death and you will find the stuff of nightmares. Imagine living with 100 year's worth of mistakes... or 1000s of years worth of mistakes... weighing on your conscience. Imagine having nothing new to experience. Imagine growing bored of life, and of love.

We live on through our families and our deaths wipe the slate clean. Thank God for the gift of death.

Great point, Octavious. There's some good sci-fi along those lines, too. The Boat of a Million Years by Anderson; Time Enough for Love by Heinlein.

And my favorite piece of literature about Death is Hamlet.

More from Becker:
Man has a basic narcissism built into himself, which naturally comes with self-esteem.

The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.

To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.

What we will see is that man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small mangable pieces as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call character defenses

child has to do is to learn to abandon ecstasy, to do without awe, to leave fear and trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confidence, when he has naturalized his world. We say naturalized but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscured, the despair of the human condition hidden

…man is a robustly active creature; activity alone keeps him from going crazy. If he bogs down and begins to dwell on his situation, he risks releasing the neurotic fear repressed into his unconscious – that he is really impotent and will have no effect on the world. So he frantically drives himself to see his effects, to convince himself and others that he really counts..

For all organisms, then, opposing and obliterating power is evil – it threatens to stop experience. But men are truly sorry creatures because they have made death conscious. They can see evil in anything that wounds them, causes ill health, or even deprives them of pleasure. Consciousness means too that they have to be preoccupied with evil even in the absence of any immediate danger; their lives become a meditation on evil and a planned venture for controlling it and forestalling it.

One more:
The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic "ideas" [the characterological lie about reality] and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels him­self lost. And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost —he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.

Dostoevsky Notes from the Underground:
It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature.

I found this posted on reddit under the atheism subreddit

http://i.imgur.com/xs7VR.jpg

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

LOL NigeeBaby!

@Zmaj: I wouldn't call this panic. This is, for me, acceptance of a chronic health condition and its possible ramifications in shortening my lifespan. Panic requires far too much energy, and I can't hold onto it for most of my remaining days.

I'm ignostic myself, so I feel I'm slightly allowed to post here. (sorry if im long-winded)

I have thought long on the subject myself, and there's no real way to explain everything I believe, which is ironically the core of them. An article I found online called "kensho" helped lend heavily to it, as well as my general observations over the years.

Everything in the world (so far) seems explainable by science and logic. That which we cannot fully understand we can only give labels and guesses to. This leads to the idea that everything has a purpose in the world, we must only find the answers to their workings. This itself to me makes no sense at all. Perfectly ordered chaos from absolutely nothing. This is the only idea that I need to accept the idea that "something" is "more" than a normal living being on our speck of dirt.

I don't necessarily accept the idea though that some mystical being is governing our actions from above. I feel like there is some sort of truth to the core of religions, a "law" of the world to keep it in check, but too much has the information and lesson been put through the filter and perspectives' of man for his own doing.'' Besides this, how can a man attempt to understand something that is supposed to encompass the universe itself?

As for death itself in this idea, think of the idea put forward in this statement: "If a boat has its pieces repaired and replaced gradually over time; until eventually the boat is made of new pieces. Is the boat still the same "identity"?"

Now put this idea to a man. Scientifically speaking, a man's body is broken down and rebuilt over the course of a few years, so that after a span of time, their body is now completely composed of new material. Yet, the consciousness of ourselves' stays linked to this one spot, "tethered" by our minds.

With this thinking, you accept that the mind and body are separate, but linked. This also means that the consciousness can be transferred as long as it has the same basic "hardware" to be held by, regardless of meat or metal. And if you would like to go even further in believing than that, you accept that if a hardware supported the qualifications necessary for it, conscious thought could occur randomly should the right conditions meet, or maybe even the universe itself is conscious, though on a much larger and slower scale. This could be God, the creator of all things, because it is all things (for all we know, just putting an idea). We die and go back to the universe and bring with it all our knowledges and renewed energies to keep the wheel spinning.

Summary: Perfectly order chaos out of nothing is illogical and impossible. Religious zealotry seems to serve nobody but rich church members and kings though. Energy cannot be destroyed, and I think of the consciousness of a mind to have it's own "energy" itself. We will all continue throughout the universe, aware of it or not, and hopefully our experiences actually help shape the universe.

If not, I guess we probably rot in the ground, which honestly is the same as what I just said above, though not thinking about what happens so much.