Counter-Currents
“Death found an author writing his life. . .” from Edward Hull’s Danse Macabre, 1827.
1,180 words
It always sounds silly to me when people tell the dead to “rest in peace.”
Practically speaking, don’t you have to disturb their rest to tell them that? It makes about as much sense as nudging someone who’s snoring to say, “Hey — HEY! Wake up and go to sleep.”
The superstition about “speaking ill of the dead” likewise strikes me as entirely nonsensical. They can’t hear you — they’re dead. Speak as maliciously as you want about them, and it will still have zero effect on them. I think you should be much warier of speaking ill of the living, because you might hurt their feelings and they could wind up killing you. But being dead and all, the dead pose no such threat.
Likewise, the term “life after death” makes as much sense to me as the concept of “youth after old age.” It’s chronologically ass-backward.
I will turn 60 in about two weeks, and I sense that I’ve already had the Grim Reaper ring my doorbell more times than most people who reach this age. There was a massive brain tumor back in 2008 that caused a seizure which temporarily caused me to stop breathing, my heart to stop beating, and my face to turn blue. And during that temporary bout of clinical death, I saw absolutely nothing, which leads me to believe that once you die, you cease to exist.
Or at least the self ceases to exist — or the soul, the spirit, the animating force, whatever you choose to call it. This is why I suspect that both the Abrahamic religions and the Hindu-derived religions have it entirely backward. The only element that continues to exist after death is the body, and it is only “reincarnated” in the literal sense if worms or buzzards get to feast upon it.
The Abrahamic religions teach that the body is what dies and the soul persists. So do Buddhism and Hinduism. And my suspicion — I never profess to have any beliefs, because new evidence could always come trickling in that might undermine my suspicions — is that these belief systems have such perennial appeal to humans precisely because they offer comfort to biological organisms who are hardwired by evolution to perceive one’s eventual nonexistence as a fate worse than hell.
Speaking of hell, as someone who was raised Catholic, I had once had a third-grade teacher tell me I was going to roast in hell forever merely for singing “Happy Birthday” aloud in class when she told us that Christmas was Jesus’s birthday. In my early teens, when I started reading the Bible in earnest, I was mentally tormented after reading all the verses about the fiery furnace and the weeping and gnashing of teeth and the punishment of eternal fire, where their worm dieth not and they shall cry out for water and get none and their fire shall not be quenched and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
But then I became a man and put away such childish things and realized that exposing children and young people to the looming prospect of such unending terror was a form of child abuse. I also suspected that whatever the governing force of the universe is, it is not some allegedly loving, forgiving, but tantrum-throwing psychopath who tortures the majority of his creations for eternity simply due to their petty misbehavior over the course of 70 or so years.
Regarding heaven, promising people happiness AFTER you die was one of the sickest con games in history. Yes, I’m aware of Pascal’s wager, but I’ll flip the script and present Goad’s wager — if nothing actually comes after this life and you fritter away the hours and days and years and decades denying yourself happiness and carnal pleasure in the service of some cockamamie metaphysical fable for which there is entirely no proof, you’ve wasted all of your poker chips.
Late last September, five of the 12 biopsies the urologist took of my prostate gland came back positive for cancer. The biopsy had been ordered because my PSA levels were a highly suspicious 4.5. Back then, I only told close friends and employers about the biopsy results.
Precisely because I very strongly suspect this is the only life I will ever get and I want to strangle every last drop of enjoyment out of this life and ensure that the few that I love manage to stay happy after I inevitably go, I summoned every last electron in my thunderbolt-level willpower researching my treatment options. After about six weeks of dogged research, I selected a procedure that wouldn’t leave me impotent, in diapers, or risking a new bout of cancer from radiation. It cost me $20,000 out of my pocket, but I doubt that money would have done me any good if I was dead. Post-operatively, I soldiered through catheter bags, a 106-degree fever from sepsis due to the catheterization, and a wickedly painful round of epididymitis that had one testicle swollen to the size of an orange. My operation was in early November; in late December, my PSA levels had sunk to 1.3. A couple of months ago, the levels tested at 0.8, which my urologist claimed were “shockingly” low — so low, he declared me cancer-free.
As a sixty-year-old looking at the actuarial tables, it’s a safe bet that I’ve already seen more days than I will see in the future. It would be easy to brood and wax nihilistic, but nihilism is depressing, and I can’t afford to spend whatever time I have left on this planet being depressed. If you insist on pinning me down to one philosophical orientation, it would probably be that of the existentialist. I’ve spent enough time as an animate being in this universe to suspect that if the universe cares about us at all, it has a funny way of showing it. My feeling is that the universe is entirely indifferent to our existence. But a quirk of being human is that I sense a need is wired into us biologically — no matter how individually weak we may be, remember that at least we were the fastest and most determined spermatozoa out of the whole sticky load — a need to find meaning in life lest we go insane.
After all these years, suspecting that there is no life after death has taught me to savor how precious every moment is. The best way to live life fully is to operate under the idea that death is the end of the line for you. After death, you won’t even rest in peace, because “you” will be gone even before rigor mortis sets in. Or, as it was put in Ecclesiastes 9:5, contradicting much of the rest of the Bible:
“For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.”
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16 comments
Goad’s Wager: YOLO
If your future tombstone doesn’t say “Do Not Disturb,” I’ll be disappointed. 😎
This article strikes me as a corollary to the “Too Smart to be Happy” idea. It seems that intelligent people have difficulty believing in various religions, in modern times, but this doesn’t mean that they can’t understand the utility of religion.
Religion can be a method of controlling the masses and steering them away from hedonism. I don’t believe that’s a bad thing. There are ways of living that suit intelligent people, which don’t work well for the left side of the Bell Curve. Religiosity serves them well.
Well Doctor, I think you’ve nailed it however unintentionally and insufferably. It must be sad indeed to know everything because you are so very much smarter than the rest of us rubes. You geniuses know how everything was created and what it all means so there is just no joy to be had at that point. I guess us idiots should be grateful for our happy stupidity. Then again, maybe I am smarter than you because if I thought this was all there was and there would be no ultimate justice I would kill a whole bunch of dirtbags then myself. How about instead you consider the vast complexity of every living thing and the system that makes it all possible and know that you know next to nothing so maybe you’re wrong about God, too.
Are you for real? Your reply is a bit hysterical. I’ll pray for the redemption of your soul.
Mr Goad should read Rupert Sheldrake’s “The Science Delusion” — not to make him believe in God, merely to give him the humble pie that he so justly deserves
I retract my comment. I wrote it in haste without reading the last couple paragraphs of the article. Let’s just say the article rubbed me the wrong way until I read the closing lines. Apologies to Mr Goad.
The Buddhist take on rebirth is complex and varies according to tradition. The way I understand it is that consciousness is a component which continues to exist after death in the same way as physical components. Consciousness is what can be said to be reborn, but it is impersonal; it is not what Christians understand as the soul. In practice, Buddhist cultures have tended to embellish impersonal consciousness in a way which makes it more like a personal soul.
“These belief systems have such perennial appeal to humans precisely because they offer comfort to biological organisms who are hardwired by evolution to perceive one’s eventual nonexistence as a fate worse than hell”
This is the opposite of the truth for Buddhism. The First Noble Truth – that life is suffering – means that rebirth is nothing but the continuation of suffering. We seek to escape this by attaining nirvana. It is YOLO retards who comfort themselves by telling themselves everything’s going to be alright after death. Sorry, but you don’t escape your suffering that easily.
“Sorry, but you don’t escape your suffering that easily.”
We’ve found the armchair sadist! Even better, we’ve found a bitter Buddhist! Sounds like an evening at the bar with you would be an eternity of suffering. Pray tell, Bodhisattva, what’s your evidence that there’s life after death besides wishful thinking and stenographers’ notes from the ancients?
The wishful thinking here is that there isn’t life after death. If only Jim, if only. Not bitter, just realistic, as you flatter yourself to be.
The evidence of life after death is all around you, in the eyes of every living person you meet, and in the constant renewal of the world: where did all this life come from? The only way to sustain your worldview that ‘death is an eternal sleep’ (to recycle a popular phrase from the French Revolution, that orgiastic paroxysm of mass killing), is to pretend, as modern materialists do, that all this life is nothing but dead matter, that consciousness is just electro-chemical impulses in the brain – in other words that we’re already dead. But this is obviously a lie.
“Not bitter, just realistic, as you flatter yourself to be.”
Yeah, I stand by my previous assessment of “bitter Buddhist” and toss in a “passive-aggressive” just to underline my sense that you’re about 100,000 rebirths away from nirvana.
“The evidence of life after death is all around you, in the eyes of every living person you meet….”
You’re mistaking “Life goes on” with “YOUR life goes on.”
“But this is obviously a lie.”
I’ve trod the Eightfold Path long enough to be wary of anyone who reframes a sincere disagreement as a lie. Pretty sure that’s called “gaslighting.”
PS I’m a huge fan
I, too, was raised in the Catholic faith. As soon as I was confirmed, I left the church a committed atheist materialist. It just seemed to make more sense to me although I did have an open mind. I just thought that it was highly unlikely that there was any kind of afterlife.
And then I encountered a ghost. Not just once, but twice. “Hey wait a minute,” my brain told me, “this cannot be happening.”
Eventually I read Leslie Kean’s excellent book, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife. I passed the book along to my older brother. “If I die before you do,” I told him, “on my way out I’ll swing by your house and do something to sort of wave goodbye. I’ll monkey with the lights or something.”
He chuckled. “OK,” he said. “And if I die before you, I’ll do the same.”
Fast forward a couple of years. He died before before I did. I waited. After two weeks, it happened. He made his presence known.
And there was an instance in which my deceased mother came back to give me a message.
So how many times encounters with the spirit world are required before an intellectually-honest atheist materialist is forced to recalibrate his worldview? I’m not religious, I’m not “born again,” and I’m not the least bit annoyed by people whose experiences and study lead them to different conclusions.
Keep an open mind, listen to your intuition, and don’t be afraid to consider evidence that might shake your worldview. Some day we’ll all know with certainty – or not.
I am not a believer but I use RIP all the time. To me it means, “May your mortal remains lie undisturbed.”
@ Goad, I’m delighted to hear you have made a full recovery. I’ll do what I can. I will learn to click the beads. I will light candles and incense to Saints Luke and Roch. I will recite the intercession prayers of Saints Camillus and Peregrine. And of course I will donate.
Reading the book Homo Deus, the author writes and reminds us several times that there is no God; God is the creation of our imagination. Well, that may or may not be true. My position is that just as his imagination tells him there is no God, mine tells me that neither he nor I really know for sure. However, it doesn’t cost anything, so I’ll play on the safe side.
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