Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Responding to my post yesterday about atheism, Andrew Sullivan asks me an unexpected question:

If I may intrude, and ask a question I do not mean to be loaded, just curious: I wonder what Kevin thinks happens to him when he dies? And how does he feel about that — not just emotionally but existentially? These questions can be addressed without talking of God. And yet they reveal something about what it is to be human.

The fact that I didn’t expect this is telling in itself: this is, obviously, one of, if not the key question in most religious traditions. But I just don’t think about it very often. Still, I’ll take a crack at it.

To answer the first question: I don’t think anything happens when I die. My best guess is that my consciousness/ego/soul simply ceases to exist.

And how do I feel about this? Well, obviously in some sense I fear death. We all do. I’d have a pretty strong reaction if my doctor told me I had a month to live. But aside from that purely primal response, does it bother me that my consciousness will eventually cease to exist forever? Not really.

I understand that this is a pretty unsatisfying answer. But it’s not glib. It’s just a plain description of what my interior life is like. I don’t go through life like Woody Allen, thinking that human existence is an implacable existential horror. But neither does it bother me that my own existence won’t last forever. It never has, not in childhood and not now. And I’m not sure why. It just doesn’t.

For what it’s worth, my instinct tells me that this is primarily an aspect of temperament you’re born with. Either you have a strong emotional reaction to the idea of eventual nonexistence or you don’t. If you do, religion is the most common way of dealing with it. The particular religion you choose is obviously mostly cultural, passed down from your parents and peers the same way you learn a particular language as a child, but the motivating fear itself probably isn’t.

But either way, does this really reveal something essential about what it means to be human? In one sense, yes: a knowledge that someday we’ll die is unique to humans (though fear of death plainly isn’t), and our response to that knowledge has been a defining feature of human cultures for millennia. Still, there are hundreds of other things that are unique to humans too, and I don’t think there’s any special reason to give this one pride of place.

And one final footnote. Since Nietzsche keeps coming up in these discussions, keep this in mind: he may have had a healthy trepidation about what the world might be like if, indeed, God were truly dead, but a lot of time has passed since then and we pretty much know the answer now. In the land of Nietzsche’s birth, less than half the population believes in God and less than a quarter can be called Christian in any but the most anthropological sense. Over the past half century Europe has become essentially a secular society, and it seems to be working out fine. I suppose you might argue that this is a fool’s paradise, that they’re subsisting off the dwindling religious capital of the past two thousand years, but that case gets harder and harder to make with every passing year. They’ve basically given up religion and nothing has happened. They still produce plenty of art and science, they live happy lives, their moral sense is intact, they haven’t become nihilists, and they appear to love and cherish their families and friends just as much as they ever have. If Nietzsche were alive today, he’d probably consider the tradition of tragic atheism that he himself created to be rather quaint. Perhaps we should too.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate