So my betta fish died the other day, and it made me wonder. What is the difference between him dying and me dying? I didn’t get the impression of an afterlife from his dead body. Mainly it just seemed like his brain stopped working and his personal identity was gone forever. Kind of scary, but I suppose there’re different ways of looking at it. Any thoughts on this appraisal? So far the best explanation I’ve heard about death is something like “Being dead is similar to being pre-born”.
A bigger corpse.
I used to be really afraid of death, but then I heard about the Epicurean philosophy and found it to be oddly comforting.
Death is like flipping a light switch.
Click
You’re gone.
If there were an afterlife, would you expect to get an impression of it from looking at a dead fish? Or, for that matter, from looking at a dead human?
To my mind, there is no way to understand your own death. You can understand the death of other living things, as you said, “his brain stopped working and his personal identity was gone forever.”
That is death in another living thing. To understand your own death, you have to understand that you are not a part of it. Try to imagine what is outside the Universe. Clear your mind and think of nothing. Not your perception of nothing, but nothing at all. You can’t do it, I would think, because all of your perceptions involve your senses.
As some some person said in one time or another, “I think, therefore I am.” Death is the loss of “I am.” You can try to imagine another person’s reaction to your death. You may even think about what the world would be like without you, but at the moment of death you have as much perception of your death as the rock that will become your headstone.
Creepy? Sorry.
SSG Schwartz
You won’t be flushed down the loo.
But to answer your question: If there is something of an afterlife following physical death, it’s obviously not visible as something leaving the body. So, I’m not sure what you expected inspection of your fish’s corpse to reveal.
Being that I don’t believe it’s possible to prove or disprove the existence of an afterlife, I don’t take the condition of a dead body as evidence either way.
How is that comforting? Somehow that is worse than excrutiating pain to me.
How can something be bad that has no bad effects? You can’t experience the badness of death. So long as you’re alive to think about death, you’re alive and not dead. You’re simply projecting yourself onto a future scenerio where you can’t be. What’s there to be afraid of?
On the other hand, it not good either. Being dead also precludes any happiness. But nothingness is better than the eternal torment that some religions have unbelivers being cast into in order to blackmail them into believing.
I think of death with neither fear nor hope. It’s better to just concentrate on life, because this is the only life I’ve got.
Hence the reason humans invented religion.
Because the event that causes one to cease to exist is the worst of all possible scenarios. What happens after is not relevant to you at the time, but if you want to continue to exist, then it is a horrible thing to complicate.
Right, well there is a difference between being irrationally fearful of death throughout your life and finding the notion of a cessation of existance to not be comforting.
Fair enough. But the operative word was ‘comforting’. Remember, there is likely that moment before cessation of existance where you feel, ‘holy shit, I am about to stop existing.’
Death involves the concept of linear time. You just think the fish is dead.
What about those of us that buy into the Judeo-Christian eschatological time?
There’s more meat on you.
Really no difference what so ever. You are both animals, and you both will cease to exist one day.
A Zen master is meditating in a deserted monastary. Deserted because some samurai have invaded the village. A samurai comes up to the zen master, puts a sword to his neck and says “You know, I can cut off you head without batting an eye.” The Zen Master replies “And I could have my head cut off without batting an eye.” The Samurai immediately bows down and calls him master. 
That’s the type of attitude I try to cultivate.
Which is better, making telling people believe things that are comforting, or teaching people to deal with reality?
How is this relevant to the discussion?
It’s an admirable trait to be certain. But that is still different from being comforted by the notion of non-existance. 
One of the reasons. The other to control the people. Religion keeps people content, in a way.
What is amusing about this idea is it presupposes an intellectual elite capable of creating a complex control mechanism to control the rest of humanity in some great antiquity.