@Sl33p:

I get where you're coming from, I'm long past the "internet atheist" days of pointing out religion's inconsistencies and damaging impact on what I saw as the progress of society. Now however, whilst I still have no belief I'm any more than worm food when the candle goes out, I can see the appeal of hoping there's nothing once your thoughts stop. Its just a fear of mortality, the fear of nothingness, literal nothingness that we cannot comprehend because our brains naturally imagine a black empty space when we think of it. Because we think, we cannot comprehend NOT thinking, a lack of self or a lack of sensation. There have been experiments in dead-sound rooms with the lights out. There's next to no smell and all you have is the ability to touch the walls for any sensory feedback, and people absolutely hate it when their actions (even basic ones such as movement and speech) have no reaction. This is what I imagine to be as close as we can get to imagining literal-nothing. I know my idea of "hell" would be something like that over a demon burning my skin and yelling about sin forever.

I've also come to understand something from the kids I teach in a post-religious society (at least when religion is dominant). The behaviour is a lot worse. Its not a popular opinion, particularly from a loony-lefty like me, but I see very often from the kids and now in adults how bored they get of freedom. When you give them 2 choices of something to do, brilliant, they pick one and dedicate time to it. If you say "pick any subject you like to write/draw/talk about", they are far more likely to produce worse work, act out, or get distracted. I could just as easily apply this to single adults without kids (well, lets say adults with lots of free time). They can be anything they want, do anything they want if they really put their mind to it right? So how many of the population are astronauts? How many of them are brilliant scientists? Do you think your local trash collectors want to be trash collectors for the rest of their life? Do you think its more likely that they'd "settle" for lack of a better word, climb a ladder to a management position and maybe executive or start their own company where they can be executive? Sure, the world needs people to do these things, maybe some of them have always wanted to do that for life, but go down to a call centre near you and I guarantee more than half of them have seriously contemplated suicide from having a job that consists of being yelled at by someone with problems caused by someone who isn't you. This ties back to religion's impact on society. It gave people a hope that this mundane, awful little world had something more to it, something that made all the BS worth it like a reward at the end for doing so well. The fewer people who have that strict structure giving them purpose, the more apathetic and miserable day-to-day life appears. Medical depression numbers are at an all time high, something in the region of 30% of people in the UK diagnosed, with a suspected number of sufferers being closer to nearly half. Remember that notion in the first paragraph about people hating the idea of no feedback, no result of their actions, a "reward" for them as it were? Apply that to the literal end of peoples' lives and think about whether everything you've ever put effort into resulted in a reward, why would death be any different?

goddamit