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Death: Absence of life.
It is a curious fact that many religious persons have led lifes
guided by notions about what would happen to them, or their souls, after
their deaths, where they believed themselves to be rewarded or punished
for the deeds they committed while alive.
Even so, each could have known that there is no good
evidence at all that there is
anything left that experiences after the body that the experiences were
associated with has died, which is a state of affairs quite similar for
what was the case and where one was, if anywhere at all, before one's
conception.
This is one instance of a very common human feature: That humans seek
inspiration and motivation from theories
they might know are based on
wishful thinking - the decision to believe what one desires to be
true rather than investigate rationally whether what one desires to be
true might be false - rather than rational
evidence. This human penchant
for wishful thinking has caused the deaths of very many millions, and
miserable and deluded lifes for many more millions.
It is a remote logical possibility that there is more to be
experienced after death, but the probability seems small, and the
probability that anyone knows it in this life even smaller, wherefore Epicurus
seems quite correct:
"Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us,
since when we exist, there is no death, and when there is death we do
not exist."
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