Why Richard Dawkins Pisses Me Off

I’m launching this blog because I can’t escape thoughts of death – and more specifically the sheer terror of the eternal state of non-existence that, I am rationally convinced, comes with it. I sit around Googling all sorts of terms (this morning: “intellectual critique of Richard Dawkins”) that I hope might somehow produce a new perspective that offers some hope – some rational, reasonable basis for believing that the death of my brain will not mark the death of my consciousness.

But to no avail. This is all I think about. The depression is overwhelming. I might as well write about it, since reading up on it has done nothing for me (except, alas, to further erode what little deistic hope I’d allowed myself through the years).

This fear has been with me, at times more pronounced than others, since I was around 7 years old. Even back then, when I would have matter-of-factly told anyone who’d asked that I believed in God (just like I believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy), I somehow grasped at some more basic level that death must necessarily be what life was like before I was born: Complete nothingness. When I focused on this (generally late at night), I would bolt from my bed in a panic and run frantically to my parents’ room, jumping into the bed between them. Then I’d calm down and fall back asleep. At 7, I could at least comfort myself with the thought that death was a long way off – the idea that I’d be 80 years old someday seemed almost preposterous.

Now I’m 29 years old. I am stunned at how quickly the time has passed. I can still vividly recall minute details from 15 and 20 years ago. 1998 – fully ten years ago now – feels like it took place just a few weeks back. My father was 41 when I was 7 – only 12 years older than I am now. My cousin was just starting college. Now she’s 41. When I was 7, I at least had the comfort that life was long – almost too long to comprehend. Now I know better. If I live another 29 years, I’ll be 58. 58 seemed so old when I was a child – but now I understand how the years add up. And 29 more after 58 would be 87 – a very long life by any reasonable measure. And then…an eternity of nothingness. I can feel my time here – the only conscious existence I will ever know for all eternity – ticking away. I can focus on little else. (This latest round of thanatophobia seemed to be triggered by my 29th birthday, at the end of August. Before then, I’d gone through a relatively tranquil 5 years or so of pushing thoughts of death to the back of my mind, like most people seem to.)

Obviously, there are plenty of sites on the Web dealing with these subjects. But I think there’s a void, too, since they mostly fall into two broad categories: (1) Those that encourage belief in a specific religious faith, a higher power in general, or some sort of spiritual system in which the “soul” of a human being lives on after the death of the body (sites dealing with near-death experiences, for instance); or (2) Those that proudly and merrily declare their atheism and rejoice in debunking the “logic” behind any supernatural set of beliefs.

I find neither of these categories satisfying.

I want badly (with an intensity I can’t adequately convey with words) to be one of the believers, but I find their arguments flimsy and maddeningly simple to discredit. But unlike most of the atheist voices I have encountered on the Web, I don’t regard this as cause for celebration and do not delight in ridiculing “theist-tards” and “Christ-heads.” While I acknowledge that, as best I can tell, the atheists are correct on the basic facts of our existence, I take no comfort in this. Instead, it terrifies, panics, and depresses me. (For instance, watching Richard Dawkins respond to Christian critics in this video led me to (a) nod my head in agreement at his logic and clear-thinking and (b) to cancel my plans last Friday night and sit on my couch, fighting back a panic attack as the final flicker of hope buried deep within me was extinguished.)

I have heard, over and over, the typical atheist response to questions about death. It’s nothing to be feared, they all say, because you won’t feel a thing. To which I reply: You fucking moron, that’s EXACTLY what I’m afraid of! Any relationship, any friendship, any personal connection I forge in my life will be instantly and irretrievably severed for eternity. All memories will be extinguished for eternity. All knowledge. All hope. All joy. All thought. All consciousness. Gone. Forever. There is nothing peaceful or serene or restful about this. It is the loneliest concept I can comprehend. Eternal, solitary nothingness. We’re not talking about 20,000, or 20,000,0000 or 20,000,000,000 years here. We’re talking about eternity. I am terrified of this. Utterly terrified. I find the atheist line to be a rationalization.

Another popular atheist talking point is that, since the void of death is final and non-negotiable, we ought to simply live our lives to the fullest, enjoy every day, carpe diem, etc. On the surface this is an attractive philosophy and makes sense (sort of like religious faith, I guess). But I don’t buy it. To me, the idea of living a happy and fulfilled life simply makes the prospect of death – losing all of that happiness and fulfillment and surrendering to solitary non-existence for eternity – that much worse. Better, it seems, to live a depressed, sorrowful life; then, at least, death may not seem so bad. I can't be happy knowing that I face an eternity of nothingness that will never end. It haunts me wherever I go, sapping my life of enjoyment.

But oh, the atheists counter, that’s too narrow and selfish a view: There’s your family, your children, their children, and the world itself to consider: Devote your life to improving the lives of the people around you and you will have served a purpose (and will live on through them and through whatever work you did). Again, I don’t get it. Your kids will grow up and die too, their hopes, dreams, and memories eviscerated forever. And so will their kids. If you contribute something to the culture, maybe it will survive a few generations, perhaps even a few hundred years – more, if your contribution is particularly noteworthy. But that is nothing compared to the timeline of human existence. Your contribution will ultimately be lost and forgotten as well. And so, eventually, will all of humanity. The fate of the universe, it seems, is either to retract in a big crunch or to die out because of too much expansion. There is no point to any of this, or any of us. There is no purpose in improving or contributing to human advancement – or to the happiness of an individual. It is all an illusion. The only thing that is real is the nothingness that preceded our own existences and the nothingness that will follow them.

Dawkins, in one of his videos, takes religion to task for scaring kids with images of hell and eternal damnation. I guess he has a point. But as a kid, I was never worried that much about hell. It was Dawkins’ own vision of eternal nothingness that sent me, screaming and running, into my parents’ room late at night.

Therein lies my problem with atheists. I get and accept that they are correct (although, I imagine, some part of me will always yearn for some other explanation for life for as long as I live). What I don’t get is why they are so damned happy about it.