Like the topic says. Shouldn’t they be celebrating them instead? Throw a party? Shouldn’t they be happy for them? They believed in Jesus and surely must have won the grand prize.
They’re supposed to be in that Heaven they’re so focused on getting into. Unless deep down inside, they know the stories are bullshit and their tears are a recognition that their beliefs are complete bull and they are truly acknowledging their fear that the person they love is gone (in Oblivion) forever.
Perhaps their belief in their religion is an act of denial?
In fairness, even Christians experience personal loss when someone they love dies. Funerals are for the living, not the dead, so I’d expect them to ritualize and process that loss and come to terms with it as best they know how.
That said, there’s some truth to what you say – and in fact what’s even more apropos is how they will fight tooth and nail to stay alive rather than just submit to the cancer or whatever is taking them. To me, the pursuit of “heroic measures” regardless of quality of life or cost to the family coffers, is more of an indictment of their beliefs about heavenly destinies, than mourning at funerals. As is opposition to physician-assisted suicide, and often even palliative care for the terminally ill.
Sometimes objective reality is too obviously undeniably true for religious delusion.
If I thought I was merely being separated from loved ones for an insignificant few decades, and then would spend eternity with them, it wouldn’t warrant tears, as you say, let alone heart break.
FWIW I have asked this question many times, and the response from various religious apologists never offers a cogent or reasonable answer.
Worth noting this is not always true, I forget who the Bishop (CofE) was, but on hearing his friend (another Bishop) was dying rushed to his side and told him smilingly how jealous he was that he would get to heaven first, and see god, and said enthusiastically how excited he must be.
Not from that perspective, no – but if it were, say, your spouse or your child, you would be genuinely bereaved and those decades would loom large even if you really believed them insignificant in an eternal scope. It would still be a painful loss because the expected and desired story arc is to progress through a normal life together. For example, my parents dying in their 80s was nowhere near the loss to me as it would have been if they had died while I was still in childhood – even though my mother died via a car accident rather than by natural means, she was still 81 and long since not a part of my daily life – which is the main determinant of grief intensity, according to the research I’ve pursued.
None of this gets them off the hook for not really believing their own BS though because as i pointed out, they still will accept Heroic Measures regardless of the cost or low quality of life, to save themselves from fatal illness such as cancer. If God is really in control, then cancer would necessarily be his will, yet they will reject the cancer and fight it with all their might despite it impoverishing and stressing out their family and leaving them almost as useless to them in their ordinary family role as if they were already dead.
Even the reasons for that are a fairly complicated result of several logically inconsistent beliefs they have at the same time, such as that God always blesses the righteous and confounds the wicked, that he is in control of everything, and aware of everything. So fatal illness also represents a glitch in the matrix which they resist as much because they don’t want to see it for what it is, as anything else. Or they do not want to be seen as the receptacle of god’s wrath or of Satanic access to their lives because they weren’t sufficiently pious or righteous.
Well I don’t share their belief that this life is an infinitesimally small stepping stone to an eternity of bliss, obviously, but if I did then as I said, the death of a loved one would lose all meaning, and wouldn’t for me warrant tears, let alone grief. Like someone popping to the shops.
Not for me is all I can say, how others square this belief I can’t say, but for me it would negate grief of the death of a loved one, it would have to. Unless of course the belief couldn’t cope with the reality, but that is another matter.
Well, to be fair, the BS is hard to swallow, and that sort of loss deals the kind of real finality that is hard to ignore.
Christians, especially the authoritarian dimbulbs, can be pretty willfully stupid, but they love and have feelings, however stunted, and nothing breaks you open like losing a loved one. It is a loss, whether temporary in some large sense or not. You will be without them for the rest of your life even if you fully expect to be reunited with them eventually, to forever live in bliss with them. So, you will grieve that loss. You don’t want to be bereft of them, even temporarily. Likely, when you move on from your grief, you’ll credit your belief that you will see them again someday with making that possible, when in fact, it’s possible and happens regularly with people of all beliefs.
I have grieved as a Christian, and as an atheist, and I have, because of my experiences both sides of that fence, read up on the science of grief and loss (thanatology) to better understand how all this works, and these seem to me at least to be kind of self-evident truths. Based on what I have learned, the main takeaway is this: the main determinant of grief intensity is not (un)belief but the extent to which the person who dies was a part of your daily life and routine, and the extent to which you were emotionally invested in them.
This is why the death of my previous spouse or of my son was far tougher than the death of my oldest brother or my mother, both of whom I had been close to but neither of whom had been part of my daily life or a subject of frequent communication even, for literal decades, when they passed.
The only impact that unbelief had on these matters was to remove the useless “why” questions that religion tends to impose – the painful cognitive dissonance of, e.g., a loving protective god allowing the most important person in your life to pass from the rest of your natural life. There is no such god and shit happens – realizing this does make recovering from such losses less fraught but it does not erase the grief.
I arrived at that same conclusion, the pain of objective reality seems to be too powerful for most people’s subjective religious belief in that instant. We evolved to form such attachments, I would imagine religion can offer succour, but there will be times when the pain is simply too great to entirely ignore the truth.
I completely agree – to whatever extent afterlife beliefs and similar hopes of transcending mortality would actually neutralize temporal grief, the power of attachments remains a constant, and will usually overwhelm denial of mortality / death. Emotional attachments are real and substantive and weighty; the other stuff is just fantasy.
Indeed, but that response belies their belief that this life is an infinitesimally small stepping stone to an eternity of bliss.
The grief doesn’t reflect the belief, it’s no different than the grief of those who believe that death is the end, and you will never again see that loved one.
I agree. Christians belie their inner doubts about eternal life in other ways, but this is not really one of them IMO. Grief and loss aren’t mitigated by the cold comfort that you will eventually, in some completely different life, be reunited with the one you have lost, after having missed out on a whole life of experiences together.
Where Christians make more of a fool of themselves regarding afterlife beliefs is in fighting tooth and nail to stay alive when they have a death sentence – selfishly draining the family resources to eke out a few extra weeks, days or hours of existence; considering early death an unmitigated tragedy rather than a gift.
Sure there are tradeoffs. My wife had a cancer scare recently and was willing to consider some chemo if it were likely to truly extend her life with any ability to function, for the sake of tying up loose ends with her son, seeing him through some of the challenges he faces as only a mother can properly do. So that’s in play. But you really never see believers rejoicing that god has gifted them with early call “home”.
In fact, that is why early Christians ginned up the taboo against suicide of any kind – to prevent the religion from becoming an ungovernable death cult. If heavenly bliss awaits beyond this vale of tears, way too many people would be putting their affairs in order and throwing themselves off the nearest cliff.
An interesting thread as a study in the importance of perspective. @mordant is looking at death from an emotional perspective whereas our dear friend @Sheldon is relying on logic. Neither is saying that theirs is the only correct perspective but neither are they saying that both are equally true.
Well, I am not suggesting emotional responses are irrational of course, though they can be, I am just pointing out that people who claim to believe they will reunite with loved ones in a mere few decades, and for all eternity, exhibit or at least appear to, the same grief at their death as those who don’t share that belief, and accept the loss is permanent.
I am not sure I can describe the reaction of those who hold that belief as irrational, but it certainly appears inconsistent with the beliefs they claim to hold.
This is our point of agreement. The grief is the same. It is just that I would expect it to be the same because of how grief works; you seem to imagine that you’d have no grief at all if you believed you would eventually be reunited. However I grant you, when not grieving, believers DO imagine that these afterlife beliefs would greatly ease their suffering, and it does not seem to, at all. I put that down more to their lack of understanding of grief than to them not believing in heaven, is all. I knew people who lost loved ones while in the faith, and they would say, “I know I’ll see them again but it’s just so hard anyway”. And that’s a fair description. I’ve mourned both ways and it really doesn’t matter.
I would agree on both points, as I suspect that the grief and the way we evolved are too strong for subjective religious beliefs to cope with, **during such times. **
Well of course the belief itself is the issue, humans didn’t evolve to live eternally, the experience itself would be anathema to us, but all I am saying is the grief wouldn’t be the same if I genuinely believed it was just a separation of a few decades, compared to an eternity together.
I don’t think at that point they abandon their beliefs, just that the evolved instinct to grieve is more powerful than a subjective unevidenced belief, and of course it is precisely at those moments theists claim their faith comforts them the most, and this is not the impression I get, though this is of course not always the case I grant you.
Perhaps it is because I have never held such a belief that I find those positions incongruous?
I can’t really credit half the stuff that buzzed around in my head in those days. I just can verify that the emotional impact of losing a close family member is the same both ways, the only advantage as an unbeliever being that you aren’t tortured with all those pointless “why” questions once you understand that life is just an unstructured bunch of things happening, not all of which you are going to like. In other words I lost the sense of entitlement I used to have, to my life being stable and orderly and predictable and entirely explicable, and with some kind of protection and reward for doing things the “right” way.
Or it might be that you are wired to apply logic to answer questions even those that are inherently illogical. Don’t know if you’ve watched the tv show, “Young Sheldon”. He was often flummoxed by the reactions of those around him and would often turn to his Mee Mah for an explanation. Inevitably those situations were rooted in emotion and from his perspective made no sense.
everyone cries when someone they deeply care about dies. Grief is human nature. This applies to both theist and atheist.
One day, I fear that when my mother and father will die of old age or some other circumstances someday, I will cry too. I hate them, but I don’t think hate can override what it means to be human.
Depending on the exact circumstances at the time, you might end up surprising yourself.
My wife fully expected to weep at the death of her father (her mother died of cancer when my wife was nine), but the tears never came. They still haven’t. It feels weird to her, but she just isn’t sad in that way. I think in her case it is because she gradually mourned the loss of her father for decades while he was still alive. He was emotionally unavailable, cowardly, and self-centered. He did a few things right and a lot of things either wrong or were just left undone. My wife basically grew up feral, and was a surrogate mother to her two younger siblings from the age of about six. For all practical intents and purposes she never had a father. So when he actually died, the basic reaction was, “oh well.”