Mortality

"Oh for God’s sake! For everybody who was a prominent atheist – Voltaire, Paine, Ingersoll – these rumours always circulate, that they converted on their deathbed. The reason I recommend Mortality to everyone is that one of the things that’s always asked about atheists – and I think it’s a fair question – is how you can survive the terrible things that life hands out, if you don’t believe in a life beyond death. Well I think this book, which are essays of his year-and-a-half of dying and living with cancer, are among the best things he wrote in his long and prolific career. They directly address what I believe is the main reason for the survival of religion, which is not a desire to live a better life, but our fear of death, our fear of extinction. What all religion offers – whether it’s western religion with the idea of life after death or eastern religions with different forms of reincarnation – is a way to say, we do not die, we do not become just one with nature. It’s very strange in a way, when you think of the old service from the Book of Common Prayer, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, because that, of course, is the way a person of science looks at death too. Then it goes on “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ,” so there atheists differ. One of the things Christopher inevitably does as someone who is dying is talk about what it is that’s worth living for. The fact that there is, so to speak, a deadline, highlights the importance of what we do on earth in the finite time we have. We don’t get a second chance in heaven to talk to our loved ones. If there is no life after death, far from making moral choice less important, it becomes more important because this is all there is. When you read these essays in Mortality this idea is not explicit, but it is implicit in his whole discussion of how he dealt with being diagnosed with an inevitable, near-term fatal illness. I think Mortality is an important book for another reason because there are so many people who say “Well, I don’t care, even if atheism is more reasonable, religion offers comfort in suffering.” I think what Christopher’s book does is that it shows atheism can be a comfort in suffering too. I personally feel very strongly about this. I lost a partner to Alzheimer’s disease five years ago and I thought of the time when he was first diagnosed with it and the years he lived with it, when he could still do things. I thought if I were a religious person I couldn’t stand this, if I thought that there was some design where there was a God who would do this to human beings, I would be beside myself. To believe that death is the end and there is not a divine plan is the only thing, in my view, that makes you able to live with these kinds of things, which happen because they happen in nature. Some of us will die in a very bad way, by losing the very thing that makes us human, our brain. This, in my view, is much easier for an atheist to deal with than a person of religion who has to come up with all of these twisted ideas about how a loving God must have a plan. Well, leave me out of that plan, loving God! And I think Christopher’s book offers that. The fact that it is less grim doesn’t make it more true. There’s all kind of things that I believed as a child that are less grim than the reality of life, like if you lose a tooth that the tooth fairy will pay you some money for it. I agree, if it were true, that we could meet and be frolicking with our loved ones in heaven after we die, it would be less grim, although I don’t know. What if you loved more than one person in your life? You’d have to design an afterlife so there won’t be jealousy, because if all the people you loved in your life would be up there, it would probably be a problem. Then you’d have to design a heaven in which people don’t have human passions, such as jealousy. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But this Christian idea that all this suffering is intrinsically valuable because of this reward in heaven: you tell me what kind of a comfort belief is if what you’re believing in is a design for living and dying in which the most horrible pointless suffering is justified by saying “It’ll all be made right when the last trumpet sounds!” I find that vision, of a ruler of the universe who does that, far more grim than the reality, which is that all things that live die. We have our time on this earth, we have to use it in the best possible way, because it is limited. I don’t find that grim at all."