A few years ago, someone I know lost her younger sibling unexpectedly. I can’t remember how old he was but maybe mid-20s?
In her grief, she approached me and said “You’re an atheist, right? How do you deal with loss without believing in God?”
It was a tough question – not because I didn’t know my answer but because I found it hard to articulate that answer succinctly (I’m not the only atheist who’s struggled with this) without going into all of the books I’ve read about the subject (on both sides of the debate), the late night conversations with numerous friends, and my own deep thinking on the subject.
My difficulty was compounded as I sensed that she was groping for answers and maybe even questioning her faith in god (which I think is very common in times of loss.) And contrary to what you might think atheists try to do, I also didn’t want to try to “convert” her in her moment of weakness – just to have her understand my own reasoning, especially since she asked.
(Quick note – it goes without saying that being an atheist doesn’t somehow prevent you from feeling the various stages of grief or wishing someone wasn’t gone or believing that life can be tragically unfair.)
And that unfairness is what I was thinking of as I told her that the old “Why does god let bad things happen to good people?” question is a big part of my answer. If you don’t believe in god, it’s easier to understand that the terrible things that happen without relying on nebulous “God has a reason” or “He’s testing you” answers that are really non-answers.
If you don’t believe in god, it’s easier to understand that all the bad things that take people’s lives – from cancer to car accidents to cyclones – are (for the most part) random and uncontrollable. To put it another way, a child dying of cancer is probably one of the best proofs of the non-existence of a benevolent god that I can think of.
As we talked, she went on to ask not only how I dealt with loss generally but specifically how I could deal with my grief of losing someone close to me if I a) didn’t believe a lost loved one was in Heaven or b) that we would be reunited someday.
There are a few things that I believe that make it easier to deal with loss, even though I don’t believe in an afterlife…
* From a scientific point of view, I think the miracle that any of us are here at all is amazing (1 in 400 Trillion by one estimate) and any amount of life we get to enjoy – whether 20 or 40 or 80 years – is a blessing (I’m using “miracle” and “blessing” in the non-religious sense of those words!) 😉 In fact, arguably the fact that atheists don’t believe in an afterlife should make them appreciate their time on earth even more.
* I touched on it fairly directly in my eulogy for my Grandma Peet – for some atheists, Heaven isn’t some fantastical place in the sky, it’s a place in your heart where you live with the memories and knowledge and values that the deceased person has given you so they live on through you.
* If you’re fortunate enough to have children, that’s a form of immortality that not only carries forward but stretches back, not just through all your nearest ancestors but right back to the earliest lifeforms that aged and evolved through various permutations – always living long enough to at least reproduce and carry their genes forward – eventually reaching you and then on to your children.
* This is fairly blunt but the only reality is that we’re all gonna die someday (not even taxes are certain – if you live in certain jurisdictions or have a certain level of wealth especially!) so being able to accept that fact makes dealing with death when it happens easier. If you’re religious and believe in miracles and the many fantastical stories of the Bible (resurrection!), I always feel like that makes people more likely to think that death just might not happen to them.
* Also blunt but science always makes one realise that in the grand scheme of life on earth (and the entire history of life on earth), we’re not that special. We like to think we are because we’re all the star of our own story but thousands of people die every single day. And the lives we lead – though important in the very micro sense to our families and our employers – are ultimately fairly meaningless. Most of us aren’t great scientists or artists or world changing political leaders. Instead, whether we’re doctors or clerks at the Dollar Store, we go through life, working, eating sleeping, maybe going on the occasional holiday but ultimately, not leaving much behind to even let the world know we were here.
Here’s a good excerpt of an article that helps put it all in perspective…
Because the existence of you here now on planet earth presupposes another supremely unlikely and utterly undeniable chain of events. Namely, that every one of your ancestors lived to reproductive age — going all the way back not just to the first Homo sapiens, first Homo erectus and Homo habilis, but all the way back to the first single-celled organism. You are a representative of an unbroken lineage of life going back 4 billion years.
Let’s not get carried away here; we’ll just deal with the human lineage. Say humans or humanoids have been around for about 3 million years, and that a generation is about 20 years. That’s 150,000 generations. Say that over the course of all human existence, the likelihood of any one human offspring to survive childhood and live to reproductive age and have at least one kid is 50:50 — one in two. Then what would be the chance of your particular lineage to have remained unbroken for 150,000 generations?
Well then, that would be one in 2150,000 , which is about one in 1045,000 — a number so staggeringly large that my head hurts just writing it down. That number is not just larger than all of the particles in the universe — it’s larger than all the particles in the universe if each particle were itself a universe. – Huff Post
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