I am not afraid of being dead.

Sure, if I was being chased by an axe wielding psychopath, doubtlessly I would be absolutely terrified. But my acute fear in that situation is largely of not being hit in the face with an axe which, although I have not experienced it personally, intuitively feels like it would be quite unpleasant. If someone were to a hold a gun to my head and ask for my wallet, I think the correct decision is to hand over your wallet and run away. But again, this is not due to a fear of death itself. It’s partly a fear of being shot in the face, and partly an expression of a built in genetic desire for survival.

But we humans are unique on our planet in experiencing consciousness, and this consciousness allows us to arrive at intellectual conclusions beyond the scope of our genetic wiring. If we simply followed our genes, every man’s goal should be to father as many biological offspring as possible with the minimum amount of parental involvement. But the rarity of meeting the guy who says his life goal is to have 100 children is quite telling.

Likewise, biologically it makes complete sense to be wired to avoid things that can harm us. If we die, we may do so before we’ve had the chance to pass on our genes. And indeed intellectually most of us have genuine reasons to want to continue to live. Assuming that there are reasons for not killing yourself beyond not wanting to upset your loved ones, in any situation of danger it is perfectly logical to attempt escape.

But beyond the notion of actually being killed, most humans seem to carry a fear of being dead. Of death. As in ‘not being alive’, as in ‘non-existence’. And, in a purely logical sense, non-existence is a truly bizarre thing to fear.

If I ask you to think about the 19th century, barring an unusual perceived psychic connection to the victims of Jack the Ripper, it is very unlikely for you to be filled with dread. And yet this is a time when you didn’t exist. The concept of a 19th century where you didn’t exist should be just as terrifying as that of a 22nd century where you don’t exist. And yet, we don’t feel this way.

We seem to have an intuitive feeling that we’re going to be able to reflect on our non-existence somehow. That we’ll be trapped behind some kind of window between ourselves and reality, torturously reflecting on the fact that we will never again experience the beauty of a sunset or the smell of a freshly baked bagel. But of course, intellectually we know that there is no reason to believe this.


This requirement for self-reflection is however exactly why a fear of others dying is completely rational. The idea that your parents, brothers, sisters, friends, wives, husbands, children can and will in many cases die before you do is a sobering and terrifying thought. But it is only terrifying because you will have an opportunity to reflect on their absence, to experience the pure grief that accompanies their passing, something you cannot do with regards to your own death.

So, it seems that there are two major reasons for a human to fear personal non-existence. The first is very reasonable; you are responsible for a family and believe that should you die the people you love most will suffer in your absence, just as you would have in theirs. I think a fear of loved ones being upset is not the driving force for most fears of death, but if the absence of your income and influence would have a crippling financial impact on your family in additional to the emotional trauma, then it is an entirely valid concern. The emotional toll is unavoidable, but we can at least solve the financial part of this fear by adequately providing for our families, or by simply buying life insurance.

The second reason is confined to religious individuals, and that arises from a genuine fear of ‘hell’, or some variation of it. The principal reason I’m so concerned with this is that, unlike our first example of the head of a family with responsibilities, this concept of hell also gives children a horrifying and seemingly necessary reason to fear death.

I am not exaggerating when I refer to the teaching of hell to children as child abuse. When an 8 year old girl who attends a Catholic church asks if her recently deceased Jewish grandmother will be ok, and the girl is informed that her loved one is currently burning in hell for eternity as a result of her religious affiliation, this is morally detestable in every way. Indeed it is tough to imagine a more egregious ‘sin’ than putting a child in the position of reflecting on the ‘certainty’ that someone they loved are currently, and will always be tortured mercilessly.

Of course, hell as a concept exists as a misguided attempt at preventing misbehaviour. But children, like adults, will make mistakes. They’ll get into trouble. And filling them with the fear of a never-ending torture chamber as a result of these ‘mistakes’ is not only grossly unethical, it is an example of exceptionally lazy and poor parenting. If you teach a child that the reason they should live morally is to gain a ticket to heaven, and that the reason to avoid immorality is to avoid hell, you are leaving them with a severely stunted capacity for moral judgement.

This view will also better inform you of the reasons as to why I take such a passionate opposition to religious teachings, where other non-religious people take the laissez-faire approach of not interfering. I’m not for a second suggesting that people shouldn’t be allowed to believe whatever they want, but I am directly stating that effectively forcing these beliefs on children is fundamentally unethical, and a genuine threat to the progression of humanity.

But, crucially, this is not an indictment on religious individuals themselves. They, like any of us, are simply a combination of genes, upbringing and environment. Because I was raised by non-religious parents (not passionately so, it just never came up), and developed into someone with the often annoying trait of searching for the logical answer to every question, I could not and could never possibly believe in any religious ideology. It’s not a choice for me to not believe in a God, it’s simply impossible given the makeup of my personality.

Similarly religious people, following straightforward genetic instructions to believe their parents in their formative years, are always going to believe in God/Gods for at least some of their lives. If they were raised to truly believe that hell is a real place, a genuine danger, then when they teach their children the same thing they do not and cannot perceive it be to unethical. If hell is a real place, then warning your loved ones of that most horrible place can be the only ethical, ‘logical’ decision.

This is why the ‘leave everyone to themselves’ model of thinking is in my view unacceptable. Without any outside influences, the chain of religious parents to religious children will never be broken. And without even needing to invoke the obvious additional dangers of continued religious belief to our survival as a species, we can focus on something as simple as the morality of creating fear in children where it absolutely does not need to exist.

The counter argument to all this is that teaching our children that their loved ones are currently experiencing eternal bliss in heaven is a positive thing. And assuming they believe it, this is of course an immediately comforting notion. But the benefits come with obvious costs. Principal among these costs is not equipping your children to properly prepare for the realities of life. To properly grieve. Death is inevitable, and without the tools to combat it a child is going to emotionally struggle throughout their lives.

This emotional confusion is evident at most religiously organised funerals. While some cultures treat the event as a chance to celebrate the life of an individual, most Judaeo-Christian based services frame it as a very sad day. But if everyone in attendance was absolutely certain that the person who died was now in heaven, existing by definition with the maximum amount of happiness, then being so sad would be incredibly selfish. Sure you’re going to be sad that you won’t get to see them for a while, but if heaven truly was an entirely effective tool of comfort then the worst we should expect to see is ambivalence emotionally. A strange mixture of sadness, happiness and possibly even jealously (“why do I have to toil in this mediocre pit when he’s riding as many dune buggies as he wants?!”) . But what we find, generally speaking, is pure sadness. No less so than that found at a non-religious service.

So what do we tell our kids when a loved one dies? We’re honest with them. We teach them that the idea of non-existence is nothing to be scared of. We tell the 8 year old girl that it’s very sad that she won’t get to see her grandmother again, but she has no reason to worry about her. We tell her that the most important thing is to properly grieve, to accept the loss and to hold on to her previous memories with her grandmother with fondness.

You certainly don’t have to (nor should you) teach your children that death is absolutely 100% the end of consciousness, because scientifically we can’t say that for certain. Now personally I think that it probably is, but just as with a question such as ‘what happened before the big bang?’, the only reasonable definitive position is ‘we don’t know’. And there is no shame in admitting that we don’t know something, to ourselves or to our children. There is nothing to make us feel excited about non-existence, but there’s also certainly nothing to fear.

The inevitability of our death is not something that should hover ominously above our heads. It is simply a reminder that during life, the only time we know we have for certain, we should make every possible effort to maximize the happiness of ourselves and others.

K