A Hopeful ["surprisingly upbeat"] Reminder: You’re Going to Die. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Fifty years on, Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" remains an essential, surprisingly upbeat guide to our final act on Earth.

...Only by confronting our own mortality, Becker argued, could we live more fully. To hold that terror is to see more clearly what matters and what does not — and how important it is to grasp the difference. Contemplating death is like a cold plunge for the soul, a prick to the amygdala. You emerge renewed, your vision clarified. "To talk about hope is to give the right focus to the problem," Becker wrote... nyt

HUMANIST VOICES

"It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. Whether or not true, humanist lyrics often go unnoticed. Maybe that is because they are sensible, reasonable and usually sung somewhat quietly, not ranted from mountaintops, preached from pulpits. Many distinguished voices are humanist even though with no ‘humanist’ label.

Humanist voices, with or without the label, deserve to be heard – such as:

Charles Darwin: I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: You take the way from man, not to man.

Mark Twain: God’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

Albert Einstein: A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Richard Rorty: The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record.

Philip Pullman: The true end of human life … is not redemption by a non-existent Son of God, but the gaining and transmission of wisdom.

We could add today, for example, the voices of Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Miller, Terry Pratchett and Christopher Hitchens, Margaret Atwood and Richard Dawkins. From earlier times, we would hear Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Bernard Shaw and Manabendra Nath Roy. Earlier, we find David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill and Giuseppe Verdi – to mention a few.

From Midwest America’s Christian fundamentalisms to Middle Eastern and Far Eastern Muslims, many believers understand that their duty is to convert, or deal in some way with, non-believers – with ‘devils in disguise’. This affects their ethics, politics and daily living, leading some determined to bring non-believers to see the religious light or, at least, to live according to religious law. When humanists become vocal about the dangers of religion, they therefore are not making a big fuss about kindly and tolerant Church of England vicars who share tea and cucumber sandwiches with parishioners. They are rightly making a big fuss about those whose godly belief leads to the repression of many here on earth, be it through death threats to questioners of religious belief, or punishment to women who dare to remove the veil in public..."

--"Humanism: A Beginner's Guide (updated edition) (Beginner's Guides)" by Peter Cave: https://a.co/1cKWQjT

Thank goodness

I'm reading Daniel Dennett's memoir "I've Been Thinking", which begins with the near-death experience that generated my favorite written testimonial of natural gratitude.

"ON OCTOBER 24, 2006, I WAS RUSHED BY AMBULANCE from my office at Tufts University to the emergency room at Lahey Clinic, where doctors discovered the problem: the inner and outer layers of my aorta had come apart—an aortic dissection—and I could die at any moment if the blood from my heart burst out into my chest cavity. The day before I had been in Mackerel Cove on Swan’s Island in Maine on my sailboat, Xanthippe. This was the last cruise of the season, joined by my Swedish friend Bo Dahlbom and his son Fredrik, and as I slowly pulled on the heavy anchor line I felt a slight pain in my chest, reminding me of the pain I had felt seven years earlier when I’d had a “silent heart attack” that had led to a triple-bypass operation. We sailed back to Blue Hill in a stiff headwind, moored the boat, took off the heavy sails, put the inflatable dinghy on the roof of my car, and went back to the farm, before I made a quick trip to the local hospital, where I was told I had not had a heart attack but should see my cardiologist as soon as I could. The next day we drove to Tufts, where I asked the department secretary if she had any Tylenol, and she wisely called the ambulance instead.

One of the little-known side effects of open-heart surgery is ministrokes caused by debris from the operation clogging up the capillaries in the brain, and my cardiologist explicitly warned the surgical team that since my mind was my life, they should strive to avoid turning me into a “pumphead”—the ugly term heart surgeons use in private for those whose brains are damaged by the heart-lung machine. After the operation, before they removed me from the machine, they reversed the flow of blood to my brain, sending it into the veins and out of the arteries, hoping to flush out any debris that was about to disable my res cogitans, my thinking thing (my brain, not, as Descartes would have it, a distinct and immaterial substance). So I’ve been brainwashed, quite literally. Did it work? As soon as I could sit up in my hospital bed after the operation I got out my trusty laptop and wrote a short piece to see if I still had my marbles. It was put on Edge.org, where it attracted a lot of attention. What do you think?

Thank Goodness! (November 2, 2006)

There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder..."

Continues: https://a.co/982hZQy

Look Death in the eye and be grateful every day

“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. I want to grow really old with my wife, Annie, whom I dearly love. I want to see my younger children grow up and to play a role in their character and intellectual development. I want to meet still unconceived grandchildren. There are scientific problems whose outcomes I long to witness—such as the exploration of many of the worlds in our Solar System and the search for life elsewhere. I want to learn how major trends in human history, both hopeful and worrisome, work themselves out: the dangers and promise of our technology, say; the emancipation of women; the growing political, economic, and technological ascendancy of China; interstellar flight. If there were life after death, I might, no matter when I die, satisfy most of these deep curiosities and longings. But if death is nothing more than an endless dreamless sleep, this is a forlorn hope. Maybe this perspective has given me a little extra motivation to stay alive. The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”

--Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

What if?

Threading the Freethought Lives of Hitchens and Sagan

BY DAVID I. ORENSTEIN • 13 DECEMBER 2023

“Humans have limitations, and no one knows this better than scientists. But a multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. At least some of the mysteries of today will be comprehensively solved by our descendants. The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a “spirit world” than a sunflower following the Sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.”

—Carl Sagan, 1995

December is a time for remembrance. We connect to others while simultaneously taking stock of another year gone by. A turn of the calendar. Perhaps some more wrinkles and a few more gray hairs. We scroll though celebrity deaths, ongoing political shenanigans, follow the latest natural disaster, or crisis, or war with angst for the future. Maybe we also focus on love and kindness if we’re eternal optimists as many in our humanist camp tend to be. We may glitter and glow from new relationships or mourn the loss of friends and family. One thing is for certain, change is constant both in terms of deprivation and the gains we make across the many social worlds we all inhabit...

When Sagan reminded us that we are all “star stuff” he was speaking about our connection to each other and the universe. An idea that demands we rethink every “us and them” scenario. Every drop of spilled blood over the eons in hate. Every war for resources and territory that have plagued and continues to plague our species on this small blue dot of a planet.

Conversely, Christopher Hitchens was tonally very different from Sagan. Hitchens was a born fighter, a journalist and a provocateur... The Humanist, continues

My comment:

I admire them both, but Sagan was more than just "tonally" different... his less pugilistic style also reflected a greater sympathy for the varieties of ways in which humans seek meaning and value in their lives. Ann Druyan rightly called attention to Carl's appreciation of William James's sense of religion as a feeling of being at home in the cosmos, a sense which he shared but which (like James) he said had less to do with God than with a deep aspiration for "life, more life..." And that makes all the more poignant the early exits of both Carl and Christopher.

The Mystical Catholic Tradition of Jon Fosse

"… I sometimes think that the modern world's true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it's a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility. I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.

As an institution, the Catholic Church is notably hierarchical and dogmatic, and it has often presented itself not just as a solution to the puzzle of life but as the only possible solution. Yet the church has also always been a home for the kind of mystical, contemplative, apophatic faith that Asle represents. It is the faith of the 13th-century and early 14th-century German friar Meister Eckhart, whom Asle quotes at several points. It is the faith of the 16th-century mystic Teresa of Avila and her follower, John of the Cross. It is the faith of the 20th-century theologian Karl Rahner, who said that "The devout Christian of the future will either be a 'mystic'—someone who has 'experienced something'—or will cease to be anything at all." Each of these figures was formally investigated for heterodox belief during their lifetimes, but all are recognized today as vital communicators of Catholic truth.

It's a mistake to treat their tradition as a watered-down version of the more certain expressions of faith typically associated with organized religion. The most sincere believers I've known have also been the most humble, the most perplexed. It may be that those who feel most powerfully the presence of God in their lives likewise feel most powerfully the impossibility of adequately capturing that presence in words. And it may be that those for whom God is not a symbol or a cudgel but a lived reality find this reality most mysterious.

Of course, this kind of faith has its critics. On the one hand, many believers consider it a capitulation to secular culture, perhaps even heretical in its mystical acceptance of the many paths to God. On the other hand, many atheists consider it an intellectual sleight-of-hand, an effort to launder with philosophical abstractions the fundamentally irrational and intolerant business of belief. You can call that religion if you want, they'll say, but we all know that's not what most people mean by the word.

To which one can only respond as Asle would: You're probably right about that too, but then again maybe it isn't so simple."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/opinion/jon-fosse-nobel-god.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The Mystical Catholic Tradition of Jon Fosse

Xian Nation?

https://www.threads.net/@honey_peye/post/C0dkUrsOMfj/