Does that sort of extinction of being freak out other people here

It sure does; I have a really hard time dealing with the death of a loved one because I believe they're completely gone. I don't believe my grandmother is watching me from Heaven. I don't believe she's gone to a better place. I don't believe her soul lives on. I don't believe that she'll be waiting at the end of the tunnel of light for me when I die. She's dead, and she is gone from my life forever. That's a pain that will never leave me.

Perhaps strangely, the idea of my own death and subsequent non-existance doesn't really bother me all that much. It probably will as I get older and closer to it.

On a more positive (to me, anyway) note, I'm pretty sure my admittedly extreme beliefs in nonviolence and veganism come from my disbelief in an afterlife. In my philosophy, no one has a right to take another person's life for any reason because this life is all a person gets, and taking it away means annihilating them forever. The unique person they were is gone and will never exist again. There are no higher stakes than that. A life, any life, is no one's entitlement to take. It's no one's prerogative.

And I'd go further and say that no one has a right to take an animal's life for their own benefit, be it food or amusement (like hunting/fishing). All sentient animals, even non-mammalian ones like chickens and fish, are entitled to live out the natural course of their lives without being killed and/or conscriped forcibly to feed us, since we can live in perfect health without their flesh or byproducts. One life is all they get, too, and it's not my right to end it.

But I understand that I lose most everyone there, even the folks who are as uncompromising about the nonviolence towards humans as I am.

So I'm an athesist

Yeah, no one's been able to prove a thesis statement to my satisfaction, either.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Does that sort of extinction of being freak out other people here?

Not me, and that makes the things I do here and now all the more important. I'll live on in the effect I've had on people and the works I've done (what puny works there are).

There may be reincarnation, there may not. There may be "old souls", ones that come back again or have the energy to become "ghosts" or whathaveyou. I think there are, but I'm not one of them. I have a distinct feeling that after this life, I'm done. And that's cool. I'll need the sleep, anyway.

Taxidermied goats always show up at the most inopportune times.

"Goddamn the Evil! It always approaches in the middle of dinner."

So, did I mention that I found slash in a high school literary magazine?

No, you did not.

See above: Emily "Spike's Bitches 22: You've got Angel breath" Feb 18, 2005 9:55:05 pm PST

Sorry. I'm in exactly that kind of mood. Um, it was Romeo/Benvolio Mercutio/Benvolio, with mention of Romeo/Juliet.

At this point, I'm still up because going to bed seems like too much effort.

It was the lit magazine of a really well-respected Boston high school. We looked at it in my Cultures of High School class because the teacher teaches there. I was much amused.

Okay, up off the couch. Later, dudes.

Seeing as I'm teaching R+J for the first time in a Catholic high school, I just about peed myself laughing at this.

Is there a link? I really want to read it.

God, I've just hooked into "Desperate Housewives" and find it totally hilarious. A little over the top, but funny.

Does that sort of extinction of being freak out other people here?

Frankly, it freaks me out a lot. I've come to better terms with it over the past few years, but it still gives me cold chills sometimes when I'm having trouble falling asleep at night.

So in some sense I suppose I came out of my big crisis in faith still on the believing side because I'm so thoroughly terrified by the idea of nonexistence. And I always have been. I think I've mentioned before that as a very young child, not even school-aged yet, I hated and fought sleep because it gave me the creeps to have my consciousness just disappear on me like that. What if sometime it didn't come back? So in a real sense I've been frightened of death in a world without an afterlife since I was 3 or 4 years old.

But OTOH I don't think I'd be as comfortable with where I am now if I didn't believe I had evidence for God beyond my really really hoping there's something beyond the 40 or 50 years my family history suggests I'm likely to have left, barring tragedy on one side or medical advances on the other. Not that I expect my evidence to convince anyone else besides me, because it's mostly stuff about answered prayer and a nebulous sense of God's presence.

The hardest thing for me was letting go of certainty. I waffled wildly between atheism and evangelicalism bordering on fundamentalism for a long time because both offered such beautiful, airtight certainties. But I couldn't bring myself to believe either. So my personal creed is that life is messy, and doesn't make much sense, but that God is with us regardless, and has given us the means to sanctify the mess. Oh, and to some degree I've decided that, like Puddleglum in The Silver Chair, I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it, and I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. But I'm OK with that. I'm learning to live with not knowing.