I don't think accepting our own demise, and believing that it is a final ending, means you're in a death cult. I want to live an exciting life, enjoy what earth has to offer, and be a part of society and make some kind of positive contribution, but I accept that my time is limited, and in my belief system death is truly the end of me. Making peace with this is not easy, but it is an important part of living for me.

I do not mean do demean anyone else's beliefs. I wouldn't try to have this conversation in church, and it is socially risky where I am to discuss this kind of belief. I think I was looking for kindred spirits, or at least understanding.

I don't know if there's anything for us after death, but I have no good reason to think that there is. My lack of belief in an afterlife (or afterlives) is a functional assumption based on available evidence rather than an assertion of fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_atheism

This is so absurdly profound. I remember being like 4 years old and taught about god. My first distinction was “I have no idea what you’re talking about, man with white beard in the clouds? Show me”

There’s as much evidence supporting the theist’s belief in their afterlife as there is evidence supporting the atheist’s belief in a lack of an afterlife: none. Both are willful imaginations of what happens after death. One difference between theists and atheists is that atheists think science is on their side in this debate (the whole ‘lack of evidence’ argument), when it’s not, because physics is meant to measure this world[•], not “the next one”. In fact if anything, some theistic notions of heaven and hell seem to be closest approximations, given the end of life DMT flood and seeing your family in your fleeting moments, and anecdotal accounts of white lights, etc. How does one even experience a final moment? Can you ever truly die? These are all super metaphysical/philosophical questions.

Also, separate but related, Newton was trying to be closer to God when he invented/discovered mechanics.

[•] Theist beliefs in mystical forces having physical interactions in this one is a completely separate discussion, which I highly doubt, but then again we don’t have an answer for how to measure dark matter, and String theorists are allowed to pedal their observationless theories.

I agree, but in general, no positive evidence means no reason to consider the existence of such a phenomenon seriously.

> a lack of evidence is the weakest form of evidence to the contrary

I'm not asserting that there is evidence to contrary, but there is as much evidence for an afterlife as there is for fire-breathing dragons, yet I am not required to declare agnosticism or a fence-sitting position on that front. Instead I am permitted to say “I don’t believe in those absent evidence, and I will happily change my mind when some is found”

> Agnosticism gets it right ...

As an agnostic atheist, I find your caricature very funny and entirely misguided. Agnosticism and atheism are two separate axes. One is a declaration of knowledge (there's no evidence, so I am agnostic) the other of belief (there's no evidence so I have no belief either).

This is really only true if you have a firm grasp on the space you would need to search to find evidence, and that you’ve done the work looking and come up empty. If you don’t know how far you have to go to know definitively, this is a dangerous assumption. The history of physics is littered with false assumptions of “finally having complete knowledge” only to find out the model was incomplete: geocentrism, Newtonian mechanics, Ultraviolet catastrophe leading to modern QM, Standard model.

How would you propose we go looking for afterlifes, to confirm that we know how big the search space is and that it is empty? No thanks, not for me, not yet at least.

> I'm not asserting that there is evidence to contrary

By claiming that “available evidence” (ie none) informs your belief that there’s no afterlife, you are arguing the lack of evidence of an afterlife supports your belief that there is no afterlife. Although frankly, you can have this one, I don’t particularly care.

> agnostic atheist

This is by definition, an oxymoron

Atheists believe there are no gods. [1]

Agnostics believe that there’s no telling whether god exists or not. [2]

> I find your caricature very funny and entirely misguided.

There’s no need to be condescending, especially if you’re going to get definitions wrong.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism

I didn’t write these definitions, so just keep in mind it’s more than just me disagreeing with you.

Only if you're making definite proclamations, which I'm not. I'm not claiming complete knowledge here, simply that there's been no evidence presented that supports the belief in such a thing, so I don't hold belief in one. There's no assumption there. To dip into physics as you seem so keen on bringing it up - there's no evidence that dark matter is really the corpses of ancient aliens, so that's not a working hypothesis for me either. I don't know what it is, I'm not sure anyone does, until we hold evidence I am a-it's-the-corpses-of-ancient-aliens-ist. I don't hold that positive belief, and I would find it weird if people came along and told me that I was making strong claims in the other direction if I said I didn't believe it.

> How would you propose we go looking for afterlifes

Most appear to be unfalsifiable propositions, and as such it seems a pointless quest. But I don't need to go looking in an exhaustive fashion to hold the position that I don't believe in one, given current evidence, because I'm not making an assertion that there is definitely not an afterlife, or that there cannot be one. It is sufficient that there's no evidence for one, so I don't hold the positive belief that there is one.

Could there be some sort of afterlife? Sure, conceptually, but so far there's no reason to think there is one, any more than there's reason to believe in fire-breathing dragons or invisible unicorns.

> By claiming that “available evidence” (ie none) informs your belief that there’s no afterlife

I don't have "a belief that there's no afterlife". There's the flaw in your thinking.

Thought experiment - I claim that that I can travel to another planet, instantaneously, and live a year of my life there because time works differently, and then travel back, all in the time of a blink of the eye. I just did it now! Anyone can do it, in fact lot's of people do! Do you believe me? No? How do you know I didn't do that? You're making a positive assertion about the nature of the universe there! Your belief that I can't do that is unevidenced!

Or... you can say that since there's no evidence, that seems pretty weird and unlikely, I'm going to go with the working assumption that humans can't do that until such time as some sort of evidence is presented. This is atheism, to me.

> This is by definition, an oxymoron

First line of the wikipedia link on atheism - "Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities"

First line from the one on agnosticism - "Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable."

These do not contradict one another. I don't claim concrete knowledge, so in the absence of evidence I hold no positive religious beliefs. If the existence of the divine is either unknown or unknowable then there's no reason to give it much thought. I don't believe in it. Which is distinct from "I believe it is impossible" or "I believe it is definitely not present", positions that you seem to want to force on me.

> There’s no need to be condescending

I'm not convinced - when someone is busy labouring to create a straw man and to tell you what you mean by your own words, I think it's probably an apposite response.

Hadn’t previously considered that positive atheism and general “not-taking-sides” atheism weren’t the same thing.

(edit - I believe it's quite common to think of them as a sort of spectrum from theism, through agnosticism and out to atheism on the other side, and I'm not sure that's wrong for everyone, but there is definitely philosophical space for agnostic atheism, and it may even be the dominant strain. May not of course!)

> Either you don’t have an opinion, or you’re actively of the opinion that other gods don’t exist and you’ll argue with people about it.

I have opinions, as do many agnostic atheists - that there is no evidence for gods, that belief in them is therefore unsupportable and ridiculous, that religions largely are harmful to society and adherents both in conception (because of the requirement for faith and the discarding of reason), and in execution (just look at what organised religion tends to do when enough people follow). Not that I'm a particular fan of his, but Richard Dawkins fits into the definition of agnostic atheist, and last I looked he had quite a lot to say on the matter!

In a perfect world, the only way humans would bother to answer the question “How did my consciousness get here? What will happen to my consciousness when I die?” is by replying “we really don’t know.” That is agnosticism to me.

And so agnosticism seems so perfectly correct in its approach that it seems silly to bother tossing in atheism to make it more specific to contrast an explicitly misguided concept at its core (theism, specifically as it is differentiated from I guess you might say personal fiction). If you’re agnostic, whether it’s gods or flarglethnacks or an endless sea of paperclips waiting for you on the other side, it hardly makes a difference whether you’re “atheist”.

But I get that I’m wishing, and that’s not how things are, agnosticism applied in the context of a world where religions matter, and thus the words have different meaning than I intend.

Many people, religious or atheist, believe that the scope of life is finite in one direction: it starts at birth. Death is essentially the same thing, backwards.

Now, there are some people who believe their existence is eternal in both directions. For example, Buddhists believe in reincarnation, and I think the question of the first incarnation and even the very notion of a "beginning" is left open.

sorry but that's extremely silly. Go read up Parmenides at the very least. If you don't exist, you don't exist, period; there's no experiencing, no you, no anything.

We fear death because our brain needs to in order to survive effectively, but self is ultimately an illusion, a narrative we construct to weave together memory, present, and projected futures. We know this because self is malleable. We are capable of extending our conception of self into our children, our compatriots, or ideals, and trading "our" life for theirs. Similarly, we can collapse self into just our neural pattern and believe that a computer simulation is still us.

Death is really not quite as big a deal as we think it is, in my opinion.

I can tell you having lost many people in my life, some of them closer than others, this is very easy to say until you're the one doing the dying. Some people accept it better than others. I dont think anyone is actually comfortable with the thought. It's just a gradient of "dealing with it".

I'm not saying death is a good time, just that some people have this conception of it like it is the greatest evil mankind faces or something.

My sister is a hospice nurse so she talks to dying people all the time. She says some people cling desperately to life through horrible agony while others are almost impatient for it to happen despite not being in any significant discomfort. So I'd agree that there's a spectrum of being able to deal and I think I will live my life better if I try to be on the "can deal" end of that.

- Louis C.K

To be dead for billions of years, means you had to be alive at all.