The Anti-theist Thread

[Cirdan]

JD,

First of all, I want to pass along my condolences to you and your family.

I think that many atheists have those moments in dealing with death of loss causes an increased vacilation between the rational and the emotional aspects of belief. My feelings toward my father, while apparently quite different from those that you hold for your mother, evoke similar feelings and doubt. My father died when I was young as well, but after he had left our family. He died within a three year period when my cousin and my grandmother died. I think those events, with different people who held widely ranging beliefs and with whom I had unique relationships, contributed to the dichotomy of interest in spirituality and greater doubt about what traditional religion teaches.

I hope that in these threads I haven't downplayed the socially important role that religion plays. The ceremony and ritual have proven effective for many people as coping tools. It didn't work for me as I suspect it did not for you. I think the concept of heaven is a way to help you keep the memories of your lost loved one.

You might want to make a point of discussing your mother with your father. I found that when I became an adult, especially a parent, that it was important to me to reconcile both mine and my mother's unresolved feelings about my father. I found that the recall of the happy or important events in their relationship helped to deals with the bitterness of the loss.

I know that within a few years I will lose my mother (age, health, etc). I have made a point to openly discuss the painful and well as as the happy times of our shared history in order to build that "heaven" in my mind; that place we can play cards together when we are separated. You don't have to decide if you believe in your memories; your desires for what could be. They just are as you created them.

In my "revisionist pantheist" days I tried to construct a theory of heaven that could exist in the "physics" of the rational mind. I believed that the culmination of our deeds and our relations could create a superdimensional "dream' afterlife where, like dreams, our deepest thoughts, fears, guilt,etc would be our heaven or hell. The number of exceptions required was beyond reasonable and became like the religious explainations for what is apparently unjust (the death of a child, for instance).

I eventually found it to be unnecessary to believe this because the logical conclusion that using the existential view the people both living and dead are alive within me. Share with your father each others' "heaven" and loss. In this way we honor their lives by living ours with them in mind.