I’m assuming a large number of people here are atheist or agnostic. My question for you is when the lights go out what’s next. I would be terrified of death of I thought that it would be nothingness afterwards. An on the other hand if there were nothing after death suicide would truly be a way out of the stress of life. So what’s ya’lls opinions.
Oh Boy. What happens when it’s over? Generally I get up and go to the car and go home. Wait, I pay the check and leave. No, I punch out and get in my car. Um, I get in bed and go to sleep.
Define “Over” 
(yeah, I know you are a troll, but I couldn’t resist. :))
You sit out a few rounds of the cosmic game, have a beer, and chat with your friends until you feel ready to play again.
It’s the natural order of things, not requiring a supreme being at all.
Nothing.
Yeah, and? After seeing numerous discussions on the subject here, I can assure you that some of us are not looking forward to it. But that doesn’t mean it’ll change our beliefs.
And truly an end, with no hope of ever coming back or having any sort of “life after life.” Game over.
What’s so bad about oblivion? It’s not like you’ll be around to not like it.
There is nothing after Death in much the same way as there was nothing before life .
A real shame IMHO but there you go .
You decompose.
I have a similar opinion: it fucking sucks! The thought of nothingness terrifies me, and if I think about it too much I get panic attacks that can incapacitate me for a minute or so.
I once likened it to sanity/insanity. When I realized the truth about the universe and life, which happened when I was about 15, I felt like I was a lone “sane” person in an insane world. Now I am older and feel death growing closer each day, I wish I was “insane”, and believed (what I consider to be) a lie that there was something after death, that the universe would not either end being crushed back into a singularity or in a frigid heat death, and so on.
I really really wish I was insane as I defined it - not joking here folks.
Anthracite said:
You’re not alone. When this topic came up a while ago, a number of us related similar feelings (well, maybe not quite to the extent of incapacitating panic attacks, but definitely sick feelings in the stomach). Several also were happy to find they weren’t alone in these feelings.
I dislike it when people say that nonexistence after death is “rational”. Excuse me, reason deals with facts, and until someone comes back and gives us a report, we have no facts to show one way or the other. We can’t prove that there’s life after death - but neither can we disprove it. Therefore, claims like
are specious. We cannot know as true any particular claim about what takes place after life, at least not now.
You can have faith that there’s nothing after death, much like you can have faith that there is something after death, but it behooves you not to running around calling it facts and truth.
We can, of course, know what happens to the body after death, but I take it that that is not the current issue.
Dunno. Why do you think you are more then your body (which you say you know what will happen to)?
There are the usual problems with consciousness being separate from the body. Why we lose consciousness when we are suffocating or very drunk, is a common one mentioned. Another is the casper problem. How can a completely immaterial soul interact with a very material body?
We see bodies rot and decompose. Those bodies were once living souls capable of seeing the universe each in its own unique fashion - now lost forever.
Sucks, but that’s the way it is.
I recommend buddhism.
I wasn’t around for the previous conversations but I’m glad to know ( that is I’m not glad that other people are anxious but that I’m not on my own ) that I’m not alone with this .
I was about 16 when I said to myself " Oh fuck I’m going to die and that will be the end of Peter Byrne ". I can remember the hollow in my stomach and the feeling of panic building panic . I ran out to my grandmother and told her my fears and she managed to calm me down .
I get that hollow back every now and then and it is usuallly followed by me being very quiet and withdrawn.
It is a real pain in the balls , I like being Peter Byrne but I’m completely powerless .
So all I can do is just get on with it and try to make sure that whatever legacy I leave behind me does justice to the person I think I am .
For some reason, the prospect of nothingness does not frighten me at all. If I die and cease to exist, so what? That’s not frightening, any more than to contemplate what it was like for me before I was born.
Can anyone explain the source of these panic attacks, this fear of not being? Is it instinctive in some way? Does it have any rational basis?
What exactly is there to be afraid of?
Matt said:
Just because we can’t prove it one way or the other does not automatically mean you “have faith” that there is nothing. Just like with atheism vs. theism, a lack of belief does not indicate faith any more than a lack of apples means I have some apples.
No, we cannot scientifically prove that there is something or nothing after death. Those who have faith say there is something. The rest of us don’t.
Yojimbo said:
Yup, that pretty much describes it. When I think about it, I just start to feel the sick feeling, and I immediately try to think about something else. Doesn’t always work.
Boogarrheal said:
There were several people in the previous discussion who said this as well. 
Except that before you were born, you didn’t exist. Now you do. That is why the concept of nonexistence is sickening to some of us.
No clue. It has been interesting to me to find others who share the feeling, though. But I think there is something of an instinctive basis to it. That’s one good thing about religion – it stops people from worrying too much about what happens after death. It may be the reason most religions have an “afterlife” feature.
Nonexistence. I like being around. I don’t like the idea that I won’t always be around. I don’t like it one bit.
David, some people make fun of Christians because they worship a God they can’t see. Well, based on the fact that you are stating your opinion as a fact, I’ve concluded being a skeptic takes as much faith as being religious does.
No, we’re stating the known evidence as fact.
We have a brain. We think with it. We die, the brain decomposes, we stop thinking. The “we” disappears.
You do not have consciousness when your brain is chemically impaired, how can you claim you can go on without it?
I know, I’m just reiterating what I said above, but then, Jenkinsfan is just reiterating what was said by several other people above.
There is no evidence that a separate “soul” exists, but there’s no scientific reason to doubt that human consciousness is wholly a byproduct of the electrochemical reactions within my brain. Therefore, I have reason to infer that my consciousness will cease to exist when my neurons discontinue firing. It’s not exactly an incontrovertible fact, but it’s a little better than blind faith. Call it an educated guess.
I don’t understand why it bothers people. Well, actually I do. It used to bother me quite a bit. As a kid, I would to sit up late at night and ponder the idea of absolute nothingness after death. Sometimes a had to turn on the light and read a good book just to distract my mind from such an impossible quandary (the concept of infinity has resulted in similarly sleepless nights). I eventually came to the conclusion reached by TheNerd: oblivion only sucks if you’re around to experience it.
Think about it this way: You relinquish your consciousness every night before you go to bed. It’s not so bad, is it? The only big difference with death is that you never wake up. And if death still bothers you, think of this: at least you had the opportunity to be born. Death is a small price to pay for a chance to live, right?
- JB
DavidB says:
Bull.
Agnostics do not have faith, because they do not claim to know the answer. But both athiests and theists claim to know the answer to an unanswerable question, namely whether there is a God.
To extend your apple analogy, being athiest does not mean saying you have no apples. What it means is having a box you’ve never opened and stating definitively that there are no apples in it; whereas theists state definitively that your box definitely has apples in it. In both cases, you make claims based upon some logical reasoning, but in the end you jump to a conclusion that you cannot absolutely prove or disprove.
Unless, of course, you’ve specifically disproven that God can exist, in which case, there are a lot of religions and news outlets that would love to see your thesis.
The universe simply stops expanding and then contracts until there is a big crunch and then —boom — another Big Bang and the process repeats itself into infinity. Every so often, this process gives rise to an intelligent being with the same consciousness that you possess now. You have been reincarnated simply by the law of large numbers and the power of infinity. There you have it, eternal life, without a mystical God.
The universe is not only stranger than we do understand, it is stranger than we can understand.