When I was teaching, every semester a few hours to a week or more after the course’s final exam, a few "students" would call or email me messages with a variety of excuses asking when they could "make up " their missed or failed exam. Since the final often accounted for 30-45% of the total grade, sleeping in that day was expensive. For more than half of my life, I’ve been convinced that “a lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.” From the beginning of my teaching career, my syllabus clearly stated that final exams would only be administered on the day the exam was scheduled; a date and time clearly identified the day class began. With that as a background, my only response to those messages was, "What part of 'final' do you not understand?"
A concept that we regularly tried to reinforce in our classes was that there are “get fired moments” that can be career-stoppers. In a highly competitive business, like recording music, there is always someone right outside the door waiting to take your job. It really is a business where “there is no try, only do.”
Lately, some of my religious friends and relatives have been prying at my atheism asking, "What do you think happens after death?"
There could be a lot to unpack in that question, but for someone who does not believe in magic of any form the question has a pretty straight-forward answer. Remembering the final exam moments, this question does feel like déjà vu. It is all I can do not to rudely respond with, "What part of death do you not understand?" Because that is the rational answer, obviously. Death is the ultimate final exam.
One response to my hopefully scientific take on life and death was “it’s easier for me to believe in a divine creator than the idea that everything came from a Big Bang that was created from nothing.” Most Americans have a terrible grasp on mathematics and science, so it is pretty easy to understand how the most sophisticated and complicated field in science, astrophysics, is incomprehensible. However, many of the people who cling to religion for their information about how the world works, have almost no clue about even the most basic and well-accepted proven science. While they claim they don’t believe in the science behind astrophysics, they offer no excuses for not understanding most of the technology that is all around them: computers, television and radio, internal combustion, the internet, medicine and biology, and practically any complicated thing that has been invented or discovered in the last 100 years. If it were up to them or their religion, none of those things would exist today or tomorrow. It’s a wonder, to me, why anyone cares about the philosophy, religions, or the opinions of people who have provided so little contribution to progress of any sort.
The disinterest they express in understanding how even life works should be a disqualifying admission in any serious conversation about the complexities of the universe. Why, if you know so little about how life works, would you assume expertise on something as poorly-understood as death? For the most part, science knows a lot about life on earth and even a good bit about how life might exist on other planets with totally different atmospheres. Science knows more than most of us would like to know about the moments after a heart stops beating, too. However, science doesn’t make any claims about life-after-death; that remains in the territory of the con artists often known as “ministers,” “priests,” and the rest of the hucksters selling real estate in another dimension.
In a talk broadcast on MPR, Thomas Friedman recently said, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology, and physics. She will do whatever chemistry, biology, and physics tells her to do. She always bats last and she always bats 1.000. You do not mess with Mother Nature.” (I really recommend that you listen to Friedman’s talk on this link) and nothing more or less. Nothing about spirituality has anything to do with “chemistry, biology, and physics.” Religion and the afterlife are just weird ideas made up by sheepherders and primitive people who didn’t have “chemistry, biology, and physics” to use as tools to understand the world we live in. Of course, many American citizens are also without those tools; along with mathematics, economics, philosophy, psychology, computer science, engineering, and every other aspect of advanced, modern human knowledge. Because they are clinging to ancient religions, most of which they have barely studied, and their parents and offspring are handicapped by their devotion to dead religions and imaginary gods.
An optimistic person would imagine that the stresses from global warming, a radically changing world economics, economic and social inequality, and international competition would force a “first world country” like the USA to pull itself together and get into the game before it is too late. I have spent too much time in rural America. The thing to learn from being around marginally educated, timid conservative small town citizens and politicians, and racially isolated and deluded white nationalists is that change terrifies them and they imagine they have some control over a naturally occurring, rapidly accelerating, and unstoppable change in every aspect of human life. They hope to pray away the change. If that doesn’t work, they plan on living forever in a magical afterlife where all of the problems are solved by a god.
I’m 70. I don’t expect to see any sort of useful solutions in my lifetime. On some levels, I don’t care. I wish for solutions that will allow my kids and grandkids to live long and good lives, but I won’t be here to know how that works out. Since, as far as I’m concerned, life everywhere will end when I die it’s hard to me to get really concerned about what happens after I’m dead. Believe it or not, I’m not afraid of death at all. I expect it’s possible that the few seconds after my heart stops my brain will go into overdrive and it might even be painful, terrifying, and sad. But 2-20 seconds late, it will all be over and I’ll be dead. That will be the first final exam in my life that I will have failed.
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