I agree with you.
Either the person isn't a 'good follower' and isn't going to the good place.
Or they don't actually believe. Because there should be no fear or apprehension about going to the good place
A fatal car accident is different. Could be a shock scare or just not wanting to be injured.
Belief in god has no bearing in reality.
Having said that, my grandfather outlived my grandmother by 10-15 years. On his deathbed, he was holding some marriage pictures. He was looking forward to seeing her. Guy believed 100%. Still makes me tear up thinking about it.
100% it's different.
Just because a movie has a jump scare it isn't necessarily a scary movie. There's a difference between some existential dread and 'boo'.
I'd argue that the accident is a startle response with body horror mixed in.
Some people are scared of death. Doesn't matter the cause. That's what I'm talking about. It's 100% different than a fatal car accident.
You're starting to get it?
That the true believers aren't afraid of death. The believers that are scared at the concept of dying aren't actually believers at all.
You don’t get it. Your “test” is not a fair test. Your making shit up to justify your feelings. You’re either 14 and think that you’re smarter than the rest of the world, or your just really, really stupid.
Either way I’m not going to continue arguing with a pigeon who thinks it’s playing chess.
I’ve been bedside at more deaths than I can accurately recall. Most of them followed some religion or another, and there were a dozen or so that expressed peace and/or joy at the thought of the afterlife promised to them. Some of the others hoped it would be there, but expressed it with some degree of fear or doubt. The rest were honestly either not in their mind at all, or were otherwise unable to communicate towards the very end.
Christians, most of them, for what that matters. Three Muslims that I recall because you don’t find many here in the rural south. All of them were awake and alert towards the end, and expresses still having faith, though they seemed to focus more on making their last days be about saying goodbye. No clue if that was them as individuals, or a facet of Islam in their lives.
The ones that were the most outright joyous were what you might call a bit obsessed with their religion, but it didn’t seem to stay along denomination lines with the caveat that Catholics aren’t much better represented here than Muslims, so protestants made up the majority of my religious patients, period.
Only ever had one Hindu patient that was dying, and he never mentioned it at all. He just wanted to cuddle with his wife and enjoy good food.
But shit, one the happiest people I ever sat with as they were dying was a secular humanist. Dude was all about going out with a smile. Kept himself just high enough to feel no pain, and was otherwise essentially partying until the cancer made that impossible. Then it was just enough medication to keep pain minimized while allowing him to be aware and able to talk. But he said he was happy with his life, and expected death to be a welcome cessation of the bullshit that comes with a body.
I think the most “impressive” Christian I sat with was an retired evangelical preacher. Despite his religion, the guy was very zen about it. “The Lord will reach down for me when it is time. I’m just going to enjoy what I have until then, and praise his name with my last breath.” But it wasn’t some kind of crazy thing, it was said very calmly, very matter-of-fact. He shrugged a little when he said it, like it was no big deal when he went.
That guy was of one of my favorite patients tbh. We’d go walking, and just chat about whatever our minds brought up. Wasn’t always deep stuff, sometimes it would just be swapping stories about ourselves. Never preached at me, not once, and I had let him know I was essentially atheist, but also Buddhist despite that. You’d think a retired preacher from the kind of church he was in would be all up my ass, but he never even hinted at that kind of thinking.
I came late to when he was passing. It was late at night, and he was a morning patient for me. He was pretty much non verbal the last two days, but he would reach out to people you hold their hands, and smile.
Some people really, truly believe. They can believe so deeply that death is either a momentary inconvenience between them and their afterlife, or is a very welcome gift from god. There’s no doubt in them, no fear, but also no desire to accelerate it.
Anyway, it’s obvious that nobody can speak for the billions of religious people in the world totally. Even as many deaths as I saw are a drop in an ocean of death. But it’s certain that religion can bring about what you’re asking.
They still have the survival instinct and inborn fear of death. But yeah, one of the advantages of religion is that it helps to elevate this inborn fear a bit.
I’m not worried about dying. I believe if I’m here on earth I’m here for a reason and so I’m content to be here until such time as I’m not needed anymore. I enjoy being with my family and having a cup of tea with my wife, as someone here has already mentioned.
I know there are a lot of distinctions in religion but I don’t believe being “really good” is an option for humans. I believe being saved from our innate brokenness is the only way anyone could possibly go to heaven. I’m not particularly attracted to religious things or practices.
So yes, I’m excited to go be with God, but I’m not about to take matters into my own hands. It would fly in the face of humbling yourself before the Almighty.
For real. I grew up in both a cult, and with eastern orthodoxy. Where they believe the soul of the child chooses the parents. This however is only perpetuated by parents telling their kid to follow their orders. “If you disagree, you shouldn’t have chosen us as your family.”
Religion is a tool to control people and inherently abusive.
If you watch the testimonies of Near Death Experiences on YouTube, a general theme is that the sensation of dying, once you have passed over is one of a great relief like a great weight has been lifted from your soldiers. And those that get sent back often have regrets after returning to their body to complete their earthly missions, as the physical body is so heavy and uncomfortable. But there is usually a great sense of purpose attached to being here, even though most of the time these things are hidden from us. Maybe the reason these things are shrouded in mystery is so people don’t off themselves to get back to paradise. I have also seen some testimonies of suicide NDE’s and past-life regression hypnosis accounts in which people whose lives were prematurely cut short were reincarnated very soon after dying in order to learn the lessons or complete the missions/purpose of the life that was cut short.
My dad suffered a heart attack and died suddenly about a year ago. I’ve never been religious or very spiritual, but after his death I became a lot more open to peoples’ various ideas on the afterlife. There was such an unfair finality to losing him. I always feel as though he’s right there on speed dial, even at this moment, but when I go to reach out to him I’m reminded that he isn’t ever going to pick up even though he still feels close. It’s like he’s always on the tip of my tongue.
Of all the things I’ve read and heard in my exploration of the topic since, NDEs are hands-down the most comforting and convincing of them all. Even if it’s all some kind of grand and miraculous illusion that we endure across all cultures, with or without any physical brain activity, the thought of him finding peace and comfort in that moment of death and choosing not to return to his body is very beautiful to me. My dad lived a life or immense chronic pain. His leg was obliterated as a young man and reassembled with rods. He had degenerative disks in his spine, rheumatoid arthritis, etc. So many memories are of him whincing and breathing through pain. Of course he wouldn’t return to that battered and broken body.
So while it still feels shitty, and still feels unfair, I take solace in the thought of him shedding that shit, seeing his dad (suicide) and mom (cancer) with him again, and choosing to return to the ether, knowing full well that my mom, my brother, and myself will heal, and be okay, and reunite with him eventually too on the other side.
And when I die, even if it’s all a last-minute illusion, I hope it gives me the peace I need to let go too.
Not religious but was watching a video this morning where Neal Brennan and Howie Mandel were discussing death. I stopped and looked at my tea and said to myself “I’ll miss this” (the tea).
I remember in Christian fundamentalist circles after 9/11 remarking they might not be ready to die for their faiths like terrorists are. Not the best introspection to be doing, I don’t think.
Obviously, even among the truly devout, humans have innate urges to stay alive. Fear of death is often one of the last steps in any faith. After life and fear of death is also one of the bigger preoccupations with many faiths. It’s the big unknown.
Everyone has to die and no one is ever truly ready.
I am aware of no such passage. Heaven didn’t occur to the people in that area until very late in the Bible writings. It is highly likely an introduction from the Greeks.
Suicide is only a sin, so it would theoretically be forgiven. Problem is you must atone for your sins before death, and there no way to atone if your dead by your own hand.
buddhism has that too. if people were offing themselves in hopes of somehow reaching enlightenment thru killing, i’ve never heard of it. lol. the buddhist reasoning is that killing in general is bad but killing oneself is the worst of all because the one being that can choose to become enlightened (or at least try) and that you have control over is yourself. “so get crackin’” being the idea there.
My cult taught my 13 yo self that were I to take my own life, I would have to re-experience the life that led me to suicide in order for my soul to learn the lesson. But since I robbed another soul of the oppertunity to live as me, I’d have added bad karma and would reincarnate in (a non specified country in) africa. No more help was offered.
I’ve beaten depression, but suffered losses in cognition due to its severity and length.
Some good answers here, and some interesting ones. But here’s (I think) a key perspective mostly missed:
In Christian thinking, life is good. Messed up, but good. Heaven is a vague term for where God is, and the End Game is us being alive again on Earth - either this earth, healed and fixed; or a completely new earth/world from scratch, depending on who you ask.
So even though we hope for something better, living now is good. And even though the real problem of death is solved, death is still bad per se.
That’s not quite the whole picture, and those who grow closest to Jesus are often both very glad to be alive - for loving/helping others even more than for themselves - and looking forward to “going to heaven” where they can be in the undiminished presence of God.
Paul in the Bible put it:
For me to live is Christ and to die is gain
I.e. to carry on living is to do Chris’s work; but to die is gain for me personally.
And which I prefer I do not know… I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is much better. But to stay on in the flesh is necessary for your sake.
We see this in some cultures. Classic folks songs from the antebellum United States (e.g. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot or Wayfaring Stranger ) welcome death with the promise of salvation or afterlife. And there are plenty of worship songs and hymns that praise the afterlife and the end of the world, as if these are good things to look forward to.
Part of this is because of the hierarchical system of middle ages feudalism. Death was always near anyway. Winter always had a body count. Child mortality was terrible (and it was always a happy thing when someone made majority at ~15, even if they were an idiot, antisocial or a bastard.) A bad run of harsh winters and poor crop yields — even a couple of sucky years — could spell famine for the entire region. There was always a labor shortage. Life for common folk was brief anyway, so there was seldom a need to hurry their way to heaven.
As for suicides, yes, there are proscriptions against needless suicide, but this doesn’t stop countless miserables from taking on a heroic task, that is, one in which they can die easily. Revolutionaries and suicide bombers emerge from this ilk. From the Troubles and the War on Terror, we learned that our terrorists were radicalized by circumstances in their life, and imams and priests would just point them in the direction where they could get arms or bombs and a target. When you have nothing to live for, it gets easy to look to divine wind opportunities, and consider ways to make a horrific mess, and news that bleeds.
In modern Christianity in the US, ministries look to fuel doubt in one’s own salvation. Jesus saves, but only if you’re in his in group, and He doesn’t select everyone (according to many preachers). I’ve noted this defeats the purpose, since the narrative is everyone sins, but only Jesus can forgive and making it sound like its a rare lottery ticket makes God sound more like an eldritch horror than a loving personal deity. During the protestant reformation, this was one of the reasons for the traditions Sola Fides (salvation by faith alone) and Sola Scriptura (guidance by scripture alone), so the individual parishioner doesn’t need a minister to guide them, but their salvation depends solely on their own relationship with God and scripture. In that regard, it’s possible to assume God is just and merciful and provides salvation for everyone. After all, God allegedly knows the circumstances of your life, and put you there.
But then it’s also common to imagine that we personally, and our local kin, are going to heaven and everyone we don’t like (e.g. Hitler) is burning in Hell for eternity, though that is just a failure of empathy, of recognizing that even the worst of us do not choose cruelty, suspicion and deception, rather were shaped to do so by the elements and society around us.
The good news is even the pope admits Only God knows the nature of the afterlife, how people are sorted. So we can assume He is reasonable and takes into account our circumstances, or He is an arbitrary monster, in which case our best behavior doesn’t matter. The natural world informs the latter, so we’re safer with the likelihood of oblivion ( All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain ) than an afterlife in which we are once again slaves to a parasitic system.
And speaking of us naturalists, how we define our lives and identity informs how we see mortality. An afterlife has an intersection with the transporter paradox (when Captain Kirk beams down, is it Kirk or Memorex? – that should date me.) In reality, while we don’t have breaks in consciousness by space, we have breaks in consciousness by time, hence the robots in Freefall are nervous about updates and reboots, and we may not be the same person when we wake up from a good night’s sleep (rather another iteration of ourselves, with all our bits and memories and thoughts.) End-of-life studies show that a lot of people on their death bed have more frequent, more prolonged periods of unconsciousness until one day they don’t wake up. So if we don’t exist after death, we may not exist under general anesthetic or during non-REM sleep.
(When you live, your thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations are all driven by your brain and nervous system. So when you die, if an afterlife continues your existence, it’s done by another medium, maybe a spirit-brain or magic brain or something that allows you to continue to think, perceive and exist. Otherwise, your soul could be in the center of the sun at 15 million Kelvins, and not even notice. So, assuming that Heaven and Hell exist, your physical brain won’t experience it, but some other version of you will, much like the simulation of you in Roko’s Basilisk.)
Others define our identities by any iteration of ourselves, which allows us to wake up and be the same person who went to bed. This can get interesting now that Deep South, a computer that can run computations nearly equivalent to a human brain, has been developed as proof-of-concept. Surely, our billionaires are wondering now to create a simulation of themselves, run by a Deep South system, and give it power of attorney over their estate upon the conclusion of their human life.
But that brings us to phase two of the transporter paradox, when a mishap creates a second Riker. The technician is saying hold on for a minute, we’ll get that dematerialized in a moment, but Riker-who-didn’t-leave is literally begging for his life. Who is the true Riker, and why isn’t it the other one?
And before you answer that question, Holodeck simulation Riker wants to raise a critical point about civil rights.
I’ve been reading Heaven’s River, the third fourth part of the Bobiverse series (which teems with replications of computer-simulation Bob, id est Robert Johansson) which discusses questions regarding replication drift (all the Bobs personalities diverge upon activation), and it does raise a specific illusion: Even as we live and age, we change and deviate from who we are at any previous given moment. Some of this is due to experience, other is due to age and development. So even if we could attain medical immortality, or run as a computer simulation on a robust machine with a perpetual service contract, we’d still drift away from our identity as defined in any given instant of time.
(Incidentally, the same thing can be said about any given religion and any given culture. They change continuously, and all efforts to preserve a given identity will prove futile as time pushes up mountains and the oceans erode them away again.)
So yeah. Memento Mori. Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
this is why buddhism says there is no “self” in an eternal sense. in every moment, we are different than the last. vajrayana even has exercises you can do where yu mentally try to locate the “self.” is it in your forehead? your throat? your arms? and so on (actually doing it was amazing, to me). there is no self to cling to, no self to defend. all things arise from beginningless beginning due to the circumstances for it arising, and they end when the circumstances for them to remain end. (im not as good at explaining philosophies as you are, but did feel to add this.)
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