Earlier this week, I met, as I do once a month, with my atheist group.  This time, I presented, at their request, a brief survey of how the world's major religions deal with death and dying.  I also discussed how non-religious or irreligious people deal with the same.
     At one point in the evening, a member of the group, a person who had not been in at least a year, asked for the floor.  Over a year ago, Jim was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.  He was told that he had maybe six months to live.  Happily, he has already eclipsed predictions.
     Nonetheless, Jim is acutely aware that he is facing death, that he is looking the end directly in the eye.  He told us that although he doesn't believe in an afterlife, he still finds the idea of death exceedingly difficult to wrap his mind around.  How does one understand, he said, the fact of total and utter extinction?  How does one grasp the prospect of having absolutely no knowledge of anything--and not being able to know even this?  It was, he said, a thought unlike any that he had ever encountered.
     Whether we believe in an afterlife or not, I don't think any of us can disagree with Jim about the uniqueness of death.  It is an experience unlike any other and, obviously, the last one we will encounter in this present life.  We are loathe to contemplate it.
     One of the last things Jim said, this with tears in his eyes, was that he would be leaving his wife of many years behind, alone and apart.  She would be, he said, on her own, left bereft to fend with existence.  It was a poignant moment.
    I ached, however, as I contemplated, the next day, what Jim had said.  If there is indeed no God, if there is indeed no Creator, as Ecclesiastes 12 puts it, to remember, then we approach the end of our days with multiple and largely insuperable questions. We may fade away pleased with how we had lived, and we should, yet absent an overarching purpose in the universe, we are left to meditate on another of Ecclesiastes' observations that, "The dead goes to his eternal home while mourners walk through the streets."  Life is gone, and we wonder why.
     Yet it is not enough to posit belief in God to make us feel better about our lives.  It is rather to establish belief in God as the only way to explain why, not necessarily that we are here, but that we are here as beings who sense and feel purpose.  Where does purpose come from?  An impersonal beginning cannot possibly have a reason to do what it does; so why do we feel as we, products of the impersonal, have, every day, reasons to live?  Where does this come from?
     It all begins, it seems, with love, a necessarily and thoroughly personal and divine and eternal love.  Finite purpose cannot birth itself.


P.S.  My post tomorrow will present the essential text I used in my talk.