In one of my college courses I learned about the death of Socrates, who was not a particularly religious man. Before his execution, he explained that he had no fear of death, because what death is is not known. The unknown should not be feared, simply because it is not known whether it is good, or bad. Or something like ...

Well, supposing his logic to be satisfactory, there's just one problem ... modern science has told us exactly what death is. Oblivion. You, as a thinking entity, cease to exist.

I had the thought this night, what if I were on my death bed, with nothing but regrets to comfort me? If I were an atheist, how would I cope with that? My memory immediately recalled the story of Socrates, and came to the conclusion above. How would an atheist, like Socrates, deal with death knowing now that death means oblivion?

TL;DR: How do you think an atheist should cope with death, if one regrets how one lived his or her life?

The unknown has always been one of mans greatest fears, a la "unclear energy" or even math.

Whenever I think there's a good chance I'm going to die in the next few minutes, I don't regret anything (not that there isn't anything to regret) but instead there's an immense sense of loss, all those things yet to be done and experienced.

Just think of it as sleeping without dreaming. Its a big void. You don't exist until you wake up in the morning.

So basically, once you are dead, its like taking an eternal nap. So don't be afraid, all your worries will disappear once you bite the dust.

That's easy to say, but hard to do, grasshopper!

Sorry, that is kind of stupid to say. Let me reword it a bit. Save your fear for just a few minutes before you die. Then be afraid as much as you want. Piss/shit your pants, cry and scream... And then, when those agonizing few minutes are gone, you are done.

• Belief in God (or any other deity) and belief in an afterlife aren't necessarily connected. You can believe in a God that doesn't give you an afterlife, and conversely, you can believe in life after death or reincarnation without any notion of a deity.

• If you pick the "no afterlife" route (as Ockham's Razor suggests), then Death means you, as a conscious being, simply don't exist anymore. The question "what happens after you die" is therefor meaningless: there can't be anything at all, not even emptiness or loss, because there's no conscious being to experience it.

That said, I'm not scared of being dead (as Mark Twain put it: "Before I was born, I had been dead for centuries, and I didn't experience the slightest discomfort"), but the process of dying might be somewhere between unpleasant and agonizingly painful.

3 options.

a) Don't give a rat's shit
b) Die unhappy
c) Clear up the mess you can, man up and deal with the rest.

There was a passage in "The Sea Wolf" by Jack London where Larsen chokes Hump and mocks his efforts to free himself, not so sure at the moment that his soul was truly immortal.

Yes? So? An immortal soul (or the absence of one) has no implications on the existance of a deity. You can believe in an immortal soul without believing in God, and vv.

Socrates wasn't very religious, but he seemed to be deeply spiritual.

You imply Socrates was an aethist, which would seem to be untrue. He just didn't believe in the model of spiritual hierarchy as promulgated by the Athenian system/elite. Though to be honest we know very little of what Socrates actually believed and said, a bit like the Buddha, and Jesus, as all the records come from their disciples, or people who were born after they died.

Though of more interest, recently I found out that supposedly Socrates was executed more for his dialogues against Athenian democracy than corrupting the young and knocking the local religious system.

I've never died once in my entire life. That or I've re-spawned a few times.

As best I can. Why worry? It's going to happen sooner or later and there ain't a lick I can do about it. It's not like it's something that comes up a lot, and frankly I don't understand why theists even feel the need to ask this question in the first place. Why is this such an engrossing question? Why is it even a problem that needs addressing?

Regrets are for the living. If you regret something, fix it or get over it. Dying ain't gonna change anything, and you're not going to exist after that to care about it.

Also modern science does not tell us that death is oblivion. It only shows that there is no evidence of the afterlife. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

If you embrace atheism and accept that you only have this life, so you better sure live life to the fullest. You can't know for sure what happens after death, until you have been there.

I will never be afraid of dying, ignoring my spiritual beliefs, its the not living anymore that scares me.

My plan is to create a program which simulates me. Then at the moment I die I'll transfer my complete memory and behavior into it. So then only my body will be gone but I'll still be alive... as long as nobody cancels my server account

However, Ockham's Razor can (and IMO should) be applied here.

Phenomenon: People die, and after they do, the rest of us cannot interact with their minds anymore.
Explanation A: When we die, our mind ceases to exist.
Explanation B: When we die, our mind goes somewhere else.

Now, there is no evidence favouring either explanation; however, explanation B yields a lot of unanswered questions (where does it go? how come we cannot contact that place? how does it get there?) that explanation A does not. So until conclusive evidence is presented for either one, Ockham's Razor says we should go with option A.

You cannot be "not alive anymore": after you die, there is no "you" anymore. Nothing to be afraid of.

Um... I think it does. The question is about who we are. And what we are. As I see it, modern science sees man as an animal living and dying. And everything man feels, thinks, believes, whatever, is just processes in his living brain. Modern science knows very well what happens with a brain when it dies. It dies.

But if I see myself as a spiritual entity trapped in a material body, science no longer can explain my existence. Only the body part of it. The atheistic/materialistic/worldly/whatever explanation of human existence doesn't actually fail. It's just not enough for spiritual/religious/believing/whatever people. I've heard many atheists saying things like they don't care what will happen with their bodies after they die. My dad is buried in a graveyard next to an old church, same church where I got married. He has a gravestone with a cross. I picture myself being buried in a similar grave, though the idea of my ashes being spread in the forest also appeals to me. It all means something to me. Denying it would be like denying love. Like saying love doesn't exist, it's just nature's way of making the genes reproduce themselves. Science has proven the latter true.

I'm an Atheist and feel luckier than people that beleive something amazing will happen after life! I know my time here is all I have and when it's done, regrets or not, it's done! So I make the most of this one knowing thats the only chance I get.

When you die, your brain ceases to function in any meaningful fashion. That neither proves or disproves if we have a soul.

The day you can provide an empirically falsifiable definition of "soul" is the day I will give its existence even the slightest consideration.

Well when you die, you will find out for sure, but I am not going to murder you so you can find out.

However, Ockham's Razor can (and IMO should) be applied here.

Phenomenon: People die, and after they do, the rest of us cannot interact with their minds anymore.
Explanation A: When we die, our mind ceases to exist.
Explanation B: When we die, our mind goes somewhere else.

Now, there is no evidence favouring either explanation; however, explanation B yields a lot of unanswered questions (where does it go? how come we cannot contact that place? how does it get there?) that explanation A does not. So until conclusive evidence is presented for either one, Ockham's Razor says we should go with option A.

You cannot be "not alive anymore": after you die, there is no "you" anymore. Nothing to be afraid of.

Something got me thinking... I once watched Stargate and when they explained how the whole thing works, this is what I thought:

Lets say humans invent teleportation devices once in the future. These would work by taking you apart at a molecular level and putting you back again on the other side.

Now, it would put you back so you would be an exact copy of yourself - memories, experiences, behavior, etc. But would that person on the other side really be you? Or would you die at the entry device?

You would die, and the copy would take your place. Assuming it is a perfect copy, with the state of the brain fully duplicated, and also assuming that the current assumption that mind and consciousness are functions of the brain and sensory organs, nobody would notice - not the original human, because he/she doesn't exist anymore, not the copy, because it is a perfect copy, and not the outside world, because they cannot tell the copy and the original apart.

An interesting side effect would be that there is nothing that mandates disassembling the original human: instead of teleporting, you could just create the copy and leave the original intact. You now have two physically identical humans with identical states of mind in two different locations; how do their lives diverge?

Would they destroy you as you went in? (Unless it was part of the reading process) or would they make sure there was not a stuff up at the other end, before destroying your old copy?

If they waited for confirmation, then for that time you would exist twice.

Or is it just creating a hard link to a file, before the original hard link is removed?

Edit:
Beaten

Why not do what all the other ones do? Convert on their deathbed.

How should anyone cope with tomorrow? Where we are tomorrow is not a promise, anything can happen between now and then, even death. But yet, tomorrow is coming nonetheless.

There is a TNG episode treading on that topic.

As others have said, I imagine that after death we just cease to exist. I believe our consciousness is a process of our brain and once our brain ceases to function I believe that our conscious and subconscious minds will cease to exist. It stands to reason, at least. Most people are an empty shell while they sleep. Unless God is flicking an off switch when you close your eyes I think that it's fair to assume that our brains produce this conscious state that we're experiencing right now. It then goes to reason that when our brain stops functioning that state will no longer exist.

It isn't the dead part that scares me, but the dying part. It can clearly be very uncomfortable or painful, and this discomfort/sensation can last a long time, with you powerless to do anything about it. That scares me. I think I'd like an instant death; a bullet to the head or something of that nature. Aside from quitting early, I don't really get to control that, and that scares me.

I couldn't care less what happens to my body after I'm gone. Donate it to science or feed it to the worms.

** APPEND **

As for the teleportation topic, I've often wondered the same thing while watching Star Trek. Assuming the teleporter is actually assembling a new body at the destination, it seems the only limiting factor would be the matter that our bodies are composed of. Then again, if one is to assume that the matter is actually being instantaneously moved from point A to B then you'd have to assume that it's the same person that moved. At least, in the same sense that we are the same person from one instance to the next.

Unless the reading process is destructive, in which case you'd have to hope there's no stuff-up, I guess the sanest solution would be to keep the original one around, properly drugged and locked away, and only administer the lethal injection and subsequent disintegration (or whatever, that's the method my sick mind imagines) after the teleporting process has been confirmed.
But then, if the teleportation is just a matter of storing the state of some matter, sending that information somewhere, and then using it as a blueprint to reconstruct that matter, you could just as easily store the information instead of an actual human being. You could even spawn several copies over time, so that the first copy can later meet a younger instance of itself.
It's also possible that one could alter the data before reconstruction, and then reassemble locally - you could mod yourself!

Why worry about something you can't control? As for your specific question:

Regret is about how past mistakes will affect your future. If you have no future, what is there to regret?

How you'd cope with things is not a question I could answer for you.
But let me turn that question around, because I don't actually understand it. What if you were on your death bed, plagued by regrets. Things you did that you shouldn't have. Things you didn't do that you should have. How does not being an atheist help? It's not like you get to do any of the things you didn't do after death just because you believe in a god, and similarly you don't get to undo things that you're not proud of. So why exactly does being a theist or an atheist make a difference here?

So here's my answer: make sure you don't have only regrets to look back to. Make sure your life has been worthwhile so you can look back on it in the end and decide that it was worth living. How hard or easy that is depends on what standards you set yourself, of course, but that's up to you.

Eh, boring question. Boring answers.

What do you think of the phrase "Live every day like it's your last one"? I've always though it was kind of funny, because if I did that, I'd never go to work, pay bills, etc.

In fact, I might do something entirely crazy because there would be no consequences. What crazy thing would you do, if you knew you were to die within 24 hours?

I'm still categorized as an atheist according to the Wikipedia definition, but I don't like that label anymore. I do believe my physical body is a vessel which carries an energy which is not entirely physical. When the vessel dies, it will lose all of it's function. It will lose all knowledge it had, it's identity, and any type of awareness which was provided by it's various systems of interpretation. It wont even know that it died. But, all of that stuff still existed, even though it's not physical matter. I believe the whole point of having a body is for the mind to experience the universe using physical matter as a medium for that activity.

I believe that

• The Universe is one.

• I am part of the Universe.

Therefore, I never really die... but the universe no longer directly experiences being Eric.

... now who wants some Kool-Aid?

I remember the days you were a normal person, and BAF was a little baby.

Being normal is highly overrated

(..not that I think I was ever "normal")

Assuming the existence of a god or not?

It makes more sense to question the validity of life before questioning death. Take the teleporter example. Nothing is "destroyed." Matter is converted to energy, transferred to the new location and converted back.

But let's just say it destroys one and makes a new copy. Even then it doesn't "kill" the original because the "new copy" is still you. It's literally everything as much as the you that was there before. When you travel through time, a new you is continually being formed. The you that was before is no longer there. Is it dead? Was it ever really alive?

It's hard to make a case that when you die, you "live on." If so, you would change dramatically in your capacity to exist because you (most certainly) no longer have the sensory functions, and anatomy that you had before. If you were to "live on" then the changes are so drastic that you would essentially have to be a completely new creature. And the creature/life that you were before ceases to be relevant and/or ceases to exist.

That doesn't matter... There's no need to explicitly state your religious opinions when answering the question.

And I don't really see how it would affect the answer much. It's not like an atheist would answer "kill a bunch of kittens" just because he's going to be dead the next day.

You just know you'll be dead; the rest of the world will continue on as normal.

I still don't really get what being an atheist has to do with it. According to wikipedia:

Which, I think, sums it up nicely.

But we're talking about two different concepts here: Belief in a deity (or deities), and belief in an afterlife (or reincarnation). Just because Christianity, Islam, and Judaism share both these concepts doesn't mean it has to be both or neither.

Why is everyone always looking for answers?

I like looking for questions!

There seems to be a disconnect between what life is and what humans want it to be. The search to find "the answers" is a quest to validate the world we want.

OR, in the scientific/atheist's mind, it's a quest to purify oneself from misconceptions.

nm

Upon my death, there are several paths which my physical body can take:

1. Disposed of (buried or cremated)
2. Donated to science
3. Organ donation (with the left over bits taking paths 1 or 2)
4. Cryopreservation (which costs about $20 dollars a month while you're living)

I plan on having my body Cryopreserved by Alcor. However, I hope to live another 60 years before I expire. At that point, I hope there is some more progress/competition in the cryonics space.

To be clear, I'm not expecting my investment in cryonics to pay off. However, given a choice of being worm food versus an infinitesimally small possibility of resurrection, I'll choose the latter.

Death must be pretty scary, or maybe what you experience in the afterlife...because everyone shits their pants when they die...

Some people get a boner.

I rather be worm food than give, what, like $15000?, to someone who is praying on peoples wish not to die, without any science to back it up. Their "business plan" is pretty much "freeze the suckers and let the future scientists handle the massive tissue damage".

I rather booze up that money than give it to a cryo scam. Go out with a bang FTW!

If cryopreservation turns out to work and you freeze your brain before you die, then what state would you say you are in while frozen? Surely you are not performing any life activities, so technically you are dead. But if you can be unfrozen at some point in the future and become "alive" then would you say you were dead the whole time?

What would $RELIGIOUS_DIETY do in such a case? If you are not dead while frozen and in fact could come back to life then you can't be whisked away to heaven, I would guess. But what if someone chisels very small amounts of brain matter from your frozen body over time. At some point they will chisel enough information away that you can't be brought back to a fully functioning human, but what point is that? Is $RELIGIOUS_DIETY monitoring all potentially life-becoming things in the universe?

I suppose this is all moot right now but I'm pretty sure cryopreservation will become a reality in the future.

I'm not sure I like the idea of cryogenic freezing.

Armed Nazi Zombie: "Ok, now that you're all thawed out, you'll be performing slave labour cleaning up nuclear fallout from the War of 2032. Put on these electrified handcuffs, and with this injection you should be able to do it forever."

That sounds like it's just the membership fee. It sounds like it's $150,000 extra for whole body cryptopreservation^[1]. If that monthly fee goes towards that $150,000 then they don't make it very clear. The math wouldn't add up though. It would take 625 years at $20/month to cover costs. I'm afraid that you won't bank up enough funds by the time of your death.

Death isn't a binary value. However, I think "irreversible loss of data" will probably be a problem.

The $20 dollars a month covers a life insurance policy which is signed over to Alcor. For a healthy 25 year old, a $150,000 USD term life insurance policy should run under $20 a month.

Depends on the deity. Cryopreservation isn't immortality, so I'd assume that $RELIGIOUS_DIETY would look at it in a way similar to other life-extending medical techniques.

decepto is going to be leading the zombie apocalypse in the future.

Oh please. Which scientifically developed process is used to cool organs while they are en-route between the deceased and those on the operating table?

The length of time an organ can be preserved and successfully transplanted into a patient is getting longer and longer. This field is intrinsically bound to cryopreservation.

If I was going to be "cryopreserved" I would want to do so while I'm in my twenties, not after I'm declared legally dead, an old man waiting to die in the first damn place. In other words, they should make it possible to cryopreserve yourself now and pay it off when they revive resurrect you.^[1]

Drop some money in a savings account or whatever, let it accrue interest, then revive you once you're worth enough to pay them (and live with moderate wealth). Is good plan, no?

It sounds like a good plan, but I'm sure somebody involved (likely the bank) would pull some fine print out of its ass.

There is a large difference in keeping something cold, and keeping something in "cryopreservation" About 200 degrees c of difference.

Agreed. But I think it's a mistake to write off cryopreservation as an unscientific pipe dream.

As an atheist, I was often more concerned with the point of living then what happens after death.

Argh! I can't stand it anymore. It's spelled "deity", people.

[EDIT]

I dub your argument "Pascal's Freezer".

Thanks. I was too lazy to point it out.

You're largely discussing this in the view of people who are consumed with the fear of death from day to day. The OP said "what if I were on my death bed", which implies the immediate emotional overload of knowing you're going to die Real Soon Now. Knocking on Death's door, then looking him in the eye when he answers it is quite scary.

I'd suppose that if there's something "larger than yourself", such as you're in the process of giving up your life for a loved one, or maybe even dying for your country (as long as it makes sense) would make it acceptable. People with a deep religious belief could benefit from this as well.

[EDIT]
The "larger than yourself" preoccupation simply substitutes one fear for another (greater fear of having your wife/child die than yourself). Much like the reason you want a cigarette right after sex is that you wanted the cigarette beforehand, but horniness overwhelmed it to being unnoticeable.

Stop having regrets. Not when you're dying, but stop having them right now. Is regret always the direct result of a mistake? A missed opportunity is just the mistake of not taking a risk. Mistakes are to be learned from, not relived. As an atheist, you're free from the threat of purgatory or of not getting into heaven, so you're free to make mistakes and live with the consequences happily.

I died once already, so I don't really worry about it.

Nobody responded to my comment!

I thought it was brilliant! Some of my best work!

Here's a comment...

I'll respond to your comment

I won't!

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This thread started with Socrates and ended with a pear...

Very good point. I suppose that it is a commonly promoted idea that, if you convert to Christianity (to make a particular example) on your death bed, you are "saved" and that mysterious act of being "saved" washes away your regret.

But you are right; in what way does admitting there is a God save oneself from what one has done or not done? I can't think of an answer to that question.

I think I might side with that pear. He seems to know what's going on.

Christians get to wonder what comes next.

But I'm afraid too many people think that way. I could imagine school killers being atheists. I could also imagine school killers being believers, who have lost their faith. And maybe some of them haven't lost their faith, but they have some weird thought of fighting a holy war. We know that school massacres usually end in the shooter shooting himself.

We play the blaming game, yes I mind, it's not your turn?

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I'm going to Valhalla!

Because I just love beating a dead horse (and I didn't even read the thread too)..

..isn't it by definition impossible to "cope" with death?

Now where's my medal?

No.

You should learn Lojban.

Obviously, what is meant by this is "cope with the fact that you are going to die some day", or simply, "cope with being mortal".

The whole mess comes from a combination of three facts:

• We are born with a really strong survival instinct

• We are mortal

• We have the brain capacity to understand both these facts, and a desire to make sense of them

While the first two are, rationally speaking, not a contradiction, they do feel like one - we are "made" to survive, yet we are destined to die eventually. Typical solutions to this perceived dilemma:

• "Our survival instinct can be overcome" (ignore fact 1 - the suicidal cult solution)

• "We aren't really mortal after all, when our bodies die, our 'soul' lives on" (ignore fact 2 - the Spiritual solution, inventing an afterlife or reincarnation)

• "Just make the best of it and enjoy while you can, don't give it too much thought" (ignore fact 3 - the Hedonist solution)

• "Let go of the separation between 'yourself' and 'the world'; it's all one. Your life and death aren't really meaningful when there is no 'you'." (the Zen solution)

• "There is no sense to it. We are born, we die, there is no plan. If we want it to make sense, we'll have to make it meaningful ourselves." (the Existentialist solution)

• "All three facts are evolutionary requirements - we need to be mortal to prevent our gene pool from going stale, we need the survival instinct to survive long enough to produce offspring, and we need the brain capacity and the desire to make sense of things to play our evolutionary strength, this horribly expensive brain of ours." (the Biologist's solution)

Note that each of these can be combined with Atheism just as well as with Theism.