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What's normal about being human?
Well, among animals, being human is definitely not
normal. As numbers of species go, especially if insects, arachnids and
germs are included, we are a definitely tiny minority. But if humans only
should be considered, or even only animals with aware brains, then we are
all pretty much wary about the unknown. Every animal with survival
instincts approaches strange objects and circumstances with obvious
trepidation. Those who don't are accounted for as 'foolish' by the rest of
us.
Large numbers of us believe that represents what they call
a 'fear of dying' or a 'fear of death'. That's actually an error on their
part. If all of us knew full well what lies beyond death, we'd lose our
fear of it, and that has happened for a goodly percentage of atheists.
What sets us apart from the other wary-wart animals is our
inclination to make each other even more scared about the unknown by
making up horrible stories about it, and then parading them around as
'truth', as though the ability to create a truly ringing sensation in the
gut with a tale of terror is not enough to justify the effort. The stories
add to the flavor of mystery by prompting visions of red demons, ghouls
with glowing green eyes, ghosts with stinging barbed tails, and the fires
of a place called 'Hell' that sprang up where underground oil could erupt
in flames, and volcanoes let everybody know that rock-melting fires
awaited those whose bodies were put in the ground, unless their
fortuitously purified souls could escape to the sky somehow.
We know those are just stories, but we like to believe them
because we can pass them on to our children and scare them into something
called 'decent behavior', once Santa and the Ostara Rabbit have achieved a
state of ineffective jadedness. Hell and God stories most often last a
lifetime. They work really well for those who wish to impose their views
on a majority, because frightened people don't often bother to check such
stories out before they run to hide from what proposes to be their fate.
Even those with high levels of doubt act with caution. It's kind of like
judging a lake as holding very hot water because of a fog that hangs over
it, and then being too afraid to test the water with a toe.
It's the unknown, all by itself, that reduces us to wary
caution. It's mainly what's behind our reluctance to consider many aspects
of our own inevitable deaths. We look at the subject in our own minds and
see a wall we cannot peer beyond, nor can we hear any sounds from beyond
it, or ever meet anyone who has spent enough time there so we'd know good
and well that he or she had been fully dead while they were gone. It's
kind of like contemplating a burned out lightbulb and saying to it, "Gosh,
I wish you could come back to life and tell me what it's like." They
won't. Maybe it's because they are dead.
Rather than dying or death, what we really are afraid of is
being killed. I believe most of us expect to go "when our time comes",
maybe with regrets, but we do want to avoid pain and torment (which is why
the Hell myth is so effective). The sickness that so often precedes death
has to be included in that. The pain of a bullet or knife inflicting an
entry path into our bodies, including into a hand or foot, we seriously
wish to avoid. Death will lure us to it, and we will seek it "when our
time comes" just as hungrily as we will slumber; and we may dream even as
in sleep as we fall into it, as our nervous system burns all its fuel, and
our synapses slowly recede into some central part of our animal being,
long after awareness of reality has faded and passed.
*Even from pain,
As your life fades away,
You will find ease
And welcome its relief;
And, fear again
Will never make you say,
"Don't hurt me, please!"
If your life ends in grief.
As a Panatheist, my secular reasoning has fully resolved to
a conclusion that all that exists is what is found in Nature, and that
Nature is the culmination of a long series of events and processes that
goes on past this constantly moving point of time we recognize as the
'present'. Nature is the name we have given to the products of those
events and processes as we perceive them. Our perceptions of them are
correct for our use, and we depend on that being so for our brief span of
existence in the middle of forever, else we could not function. Our
perceptions, too, are correct when we can verify them and demonstrate to
others how they must be so. Our perceptions are incorrect when we cannot
do that, and have to lie, use political maneuvering, threats and violence
as their only defenses, and when we find ourselves forced to shun those
who actually study reality until they learn to understand it.
So, fear not death,
But still fear pain,
Not that of dying,
But that of being killed;
Fear not that breath
Won't come again;
'Twon't be you crying
When your body is stilled.
When darkness closes
Around that point of light
That you'll climb to,
As your life fades away;
When death discloses
That tunnel to the night,
Your life is through
Upon your dying day.
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