When you think about the ones you love and cherish, the thought of losing them is incomprehensible. When you realize that it took billions of years of evolution to create your unique special loved one and they can disintegrate right before your eyes to go back to just the parts of life its overwhelming yet so humbling. Every detail, nuance and trait of them even in their face that is so special and personal to you is profound. I remember this story of a man who lost his wife and he held her in his arms and told everyone around him to let him please just let him look on her and hold her one last time, it reminds me why we need so much to believe it is not the end. That there is something after. It is an innate calling and need in our hearts/souls to connect. Its a knowing and intelligence all its own, more important than anything else we can do to just survive or distract ourselves which seems frivolous, mockery, pales and unfulfilling in comparison. How these concepts of heaven/hell and an afterlife become so important to us the more conscious our emotions become.
Why? If your loved one is slipping down the slope to death, and there's no recourse, of what benefit is objectivity? One's own well-being (and having it feel good) is arguably as important an outcome as any objective goal.
I would feel better about dissipating into nothingness. You mean I have to die and I still can't get away from you people?
Hadn't of it that way. An atheist, in death, will finally attain a peace that no theist can ever have.
That only works regarding people you dont want to associate with though. That also says nothing about the ones who you do love or love you who are left behind. If you are dead, of course you dont care.
I would make an exception for a child that's already been indoctrinated into the idea. If the dying person was religious, I wouldn't say anything against it. But I'm not going to try and convince anyone on the fence that there is an afterlife.
If you're going to lie, why not lie big? Your brain patterns and structures will be downloaded and transferred to the worldwide digital realm.
I remember this subway story. Its of a girl singing her heart out over the phone to her dying mother in the subway. Most of these stories are based on events that happen in life in the unlikely places but thats life. Life stories that happen to us, others, witness or hear about. I love subway stories. Life happening in its myriad array.