{"id":802,"date":"2011-09-24T16:00:45","date_gmt":"2011-09-24T06:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=802"},"modified":"2011-09-25T09:26:07","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T23:26:07","slug":"802","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=802","title":{"rendered":"Death On The Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Question from Leon:<\/strong>
\nHey, I’m a 17 year old boy and I can’t seem to get my mind off the idea of God and religion. It all happened during the May 21 end of the world BS caused by Harold camping. I knew it wouldn’t happen but it got me thinking, if I did die what would happen to me?
\n
\nFor the past 4 months I have thought about it every day and it’s beginning to kinda scare me.
\nI am not religious at all. To be perfectly honest I don’t believe in God as there are so many contradictions and lies and things that have been logically proven against religion.
\n
\nBut I can’t stop thinking about it. Like “What if?”
\n
\nI think you stated once in another question\/answer that you had a similar problem and managed to stop thinking about it.
\nAny help would be great.
\nThank you.
\n
\nAnswer by SmartLX<\/a>:<\/strong>
\nYes, here’s<\/a> where I briefly discuss my childhood issues with death. All I really said about it was that it’s better for me now.
\n
\nWhat happened at the time was what often happens to little boys: I got distracted by other things. A few years later, though, I saw death for the first time; my grandmother died after a failed operation. I barely gave a thought to the afterlife because I was completely shattered by the fact that she was gone from my<\/em> life. That’s what really happens when you die: you leave a great big hole in the lives of those close to you. While this can be tragic, at least you know you can prepare for it.
\n
\nA month after writing the piece linked above, I did another one called Death: just curious<\/em><\/a>. There I talk about one of the really scary ideas people have about death (scarier than Hell, I think). The thing to remember is that if there is an afterlife, the possibilities are endless; if there’s something specific you’re really afraid will happen to you, the chances of it actually being what happens are vanishingly small next to the endless alternatives. It’s like the chances that the real god (if any) is the specific one a person happens to believe in. In an infinitely wide race, backing any one horse is a bad bet.
\n
\nIn just under a month you’ll have a chance to get some closure on the whole Harold Camping business. When nothing happened on May 21, Camping revised his prediction to say that the Rapture and<\/em> the end of the world would happen together on October 21. Camping had a stroke in June and it may not be possible to get his reaction to looking even sillier on October 22, but what you will see is a lot of Christians doing their best to put the whole sorry mess behind them. It will further highlight the lack of evidence that religious predictions<\/a> are worth the paper they’re written on, even if they’re in a free Gideon Bible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Question from Leon: Hey, I’m a 17 year old boy and I can’t seem to get my mind off the idea of God and religion. It all happened during the May 21 end of the world BS caused by Harold camping. I knew it wouldn’t happen but it got me thinking, if I did die … Continue reading “Death On The Brain”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[89,281,88,280],"class_list":["post-802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","tag-afterlife","tag-armageddon","tag-death","tag-end-of-the-world"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sB6tr-802","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=802"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":805,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions\/805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}