In an age when many people do not believe in immortality, Paradise is truly lost. Or is it?
I like to question people about their views of life after death or, as the case may be, of non-life after death. Often, their ideas do not include a heavenly resurrection, but a state of long and lasting sleep. “I will simply fall asleep,” they say. “I will close my eyes and never wake up.”
For them, there is Paradise. Heaven is a very strong anaesthetic and a firm mattress. Perhaps the ceaseless vitality and busyness of modern life makes the idea of doing anything after death unappealing. This is the perfect reward for a life well-lived, an eternal coma.
On the face of it, immortal sleep bears the marks of common sense. Death resembles sleep. It resembles sleep if one has never seen real death, if one encounters the end of life only in its doctored form, with none of the gruesome grimaces a fresh corpse displays before the mortician arrives.
The truth is the idea that the afterlife resembles sleep makes less sense than the idea of some form of resurrection. Both beliefs imply immortality. To be in a state of sleep, one must exist. To rest one must breathe. What sort of God would want to superintend an eternal state of dormancy?
I would not mind sleeping forever. Good night and Farewell. God of Endless Bedtime and Heavenly Mattresses, grant me a blissful sleep. A night of dreams. Dreams of Paradise, not fire.
James M. writes:
You write, ”I will simply fall asleep. I will close my eyes and never wake up.”
I’ve always thought atheists told themselves this in order to assuage the horror of someday not existing. A person who fearlessly anticipates death as being literally an endless sleep, is a person who does not value life. I imagine though, that they do fear the grave, if not their mattress.
Laura writes:
It’s certainly a clever way around the oblivion of non-existence, isn’t it?
“A person who fearlessly anticipates death as being literally an endless sleep, is a person who does not value life.”
One time a friend was chatting with me and happened to mention her seemingly benign view of death. When the time came, she was going to drift off. I felt sudden outrage. I didn’t say anything, but I was insulted. If she thought she was only going to fall asleep then she thought I was only going to fall asleep. If her life had no meaning, mine didn’t either. A person’s private-most thoughts about the afterlife are not so private, not so innocent. They are deeply connected with their thoughts about others and their estimation of all life.
James says:
Yes!
I had a similar experience in high school. I was dating and very infatuated with a girl who expressed these same thoughts to me. I wasn’t able to pin-point the cause of my reaction at the time, but I remember getting very upset. Only now can I see it. What I felt was: “Here I am having invested all this emotional energy into you, caring about you and pining after you. But you can’t value yourself enough to fear your own death?”
This makes me think of an interesting question: What is the nature of love between materialist-atheists?
Laura writes:
Well, first of all, we have to remember that the majority of atheists are atheists out of intellectual laziness and the encouragement of their milieu, which constantly gratifies them in the belief that there is no death, let alone an afterlife.
Nevertheless, doesn’t the very experience of love heighten the unthinking atheist’s awareness of death and thus of his need for explanations? After all, one may not care about one’s own life, but presumably if one genuinely loves, it is painful to think of the beloved as no longer existing, or of going to hell.
Charles Darwin said that the main reason he rejected theism, or at least a belief in Christianity, was that he could not accept that his decent relatives who had been atheists would end up in hell. In other words, it was his love for them that made him an atheist. He was a very lazy thinker when it came to theological issues. He couldn;t reconcile their decency with divine judgment so he rushed to conclude their lives had no ultimate meaning. It seems he hardly did them a favor, did he? He presumed they would end up in hell and that there is no opportunity of expiation after death. And so, he cast them into oblivion.
At least he understood that love and the issue of immortality are intimately related.
Melissa writes:
I think that the reason people express death as sleep is that they in some sense the immortal nature of the soul. The being remains extant if not active in sleep. The soul continues.
Laura writes:
I agree. They think of the soul as a mindless, quiescent force within themselves, rather than something that permeates their minds and bodies, something that thinks and acts. If you think of the soul this way, as sleeping even when you are alive, it’s easy to envision immortality as a form of sleep as well. Nothing is left but this tranquilized inner thing. A soul such as this is really not capable of good or bad. The terms are irrelevant. This inactive soul is swept along on the currents of circumstance and the death of the body comes to it as no surprise.
Rose writes:
I am a Deist. I try valiantly to maintain my faith in immortality, but sleep is still terrifying to me because it seems to so resemble death. Like Shakespeare says in Sonnet 73, sleep is “Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest…” Macbeth considers sleep to be “the death of each day’s life,” and there is also Hamlet’s “To die: to sleep; no more.”
Saying one is merely “going to sleep” when dying is no comfort, for sleep itself is just awful and if it were possible, I would have nothing at all to do with it.
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