How likely are you to die as a result of ....? Odds of Dying

clipped from www.nsc.org

Grief Without God

I'm an atheist. I'll just say that up front, so there's no confusion. I suffered a horrible tragedy, and continue to endure lasting effects. My grief process is something I will go through for the rest of my life. And I will do it without the aid of religion, a belief in God, a church support group, or prayer.

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,576,n,n

America may be the land of religious freedom (though some might debate the accuracy of that) but I have discovered that it is not a land of freedom from no religion. The writer and scientist Richard Dawkins lists numerous examples of discrimination against and prejudice towards atheists in his recent book The God Delusion. There are many more of us than most people realize, partly because American atheists stay in the closet. What do you think the chances are of an atheist becoming a member of Congress? But no where is there more shock and disbelief concerning atheism than when someone is dying.

In October of 2000, my test pilot husband of 20 years was in a fatal plane crash. I lived by Eric's side in the burn center of the hospital for 36 days before he died. I didn't know what 4th degree burns were until I saw them covering almost half of my husband's body, mostly on his face and hands. The experience left me with a terrifying fear of fires, compulsive behaviors about the safety of my children, and insomnia.
Eric was an amazing person, full of love and kindness and strong ethics. He possessed several degrees and pondered deep philosophical questions. He lived his life with a strong sense of responsibility for his own actions: no blaming, no excuses, no whining. He was a good friend, an outstanding husband, a loving patient father. He was also an atheist.

Before I arrived at the hospital just hours after the accident, Eric had been given the last rites by a Catholic priest. On whose authority? During the entire time I lived at the hospital I heard the following comments over and over: "God has a plan", "God never gives us more than we can handle", "Put your faith in our Lord Jesus Christ." One respiratory therapist even told me that unless I prayed for Eric, he would die. She'd seen it happen before, she repeated. When the family doesn't pray, the patient dies. Almost without exception, every single person who visited, called, or sent cards said the same thing "I'm praying for your husband."

After Eric died I heard the same statements but with a new even more infuriating one thrown in: "He's in a better place." What place? He was dead! I can assure everyone that Eric loved life, his family, his job. There was no better place for him than right here. And what of God's plan? Did these people really believe that their God was watching Eric, out of all the beings in the universe? If so, why didn't he answer the prayers of more than half the city of Wichita? If there is a God and he has a plan, maybe this is what he was thinking:
Gee, I think I'll cause a really great guy to crash on takeoff. He's a test pilot who tries to make the skies safe for everyone, but just for fun I'll cause the jet to stall, plow into the runway, and catch fire. Then, just to torture the wife, I'll make her watch the test pilot suffer horrible injuries and burns for 36 days. Then as the final blow, I'll make sure the small children are present at the moment of death so their lives will be screwed up forever. I will ignore their pleas not to let their Daddy die because hey, I'm God and I can do whatever I want.

A plan? I certainly hope not.

So how can we avoid all these painful religious comments spoken to people already enduring an unbelievable amount of torture? How about listening? People are being thoughtless in thinking that everyone is comforted by these kinds of statements. I repeatedly asked people not to pray (though I understand that sometimes people don't know what to say, so responding they'll pray seems like a safe comment). I threw the priest out of Eric's room, and I refused any more rites or prayers to be mumbled over him. People still didn't get it. They thought perhaps Eric would change his mind about not believing in God, that I would too. I'd suddenly come out of the atheist closet. What was the point now? I was going to make sure Eric got the funeral he wanted, and I knew he didn't want people praying over him.

Eric's service was held in a hangar with various memorabilia and awards lovingly displayed under the outstretched wings of his favorite test plane. There were no pews; no religious leader conducted the service. There were no prayers, no reading of scripture. Fellow pilots wore their flight suits, speeches were given honoring Eric's life, and a microphone was passed around. It was a moving tribute to a man who had dedicated his life to aviation.

My mother, a strict Catholic who had once enrolled in a convent, said to me afterwards, "Well, that was a nice, well whatever it was. I guess it wasn't really a service, but I guess it was nice." Many of the hundreds present seemed to be confused about the lack of religious content of the service, but the closet atheists were all too obvious─and there seemed to be more than a few. They were the ones who were most obviously overwhelmed. From them I heard comments like "I never knew a service could be so beautiful", or "It's the most moving service I've ever attended", or "I couldn't have imagined a better tribute to Eric." They didn't say "Eric is in a better place."

During the years since Eric's death, I have been told repeatedly to "put yourself in the Lord's hands and he will help you." But I learned that if there was any helping and healing to do, I'm the one who has to do it. Does God really help you get better? Does he make the grief go away? Even the little happy pills known as antidepressants didn't make it go away. The psychiatrists hurt more than they helped, the counselors made no difference, and though the family tried, they really couldn't do anything. Listening to me talk about Eric did help somewhat, but in the end, it was me who had to deal with the grief. Not God.

An important part of my recovery process has been in honoring Eric and in keeping my promise to him that the world would know who he was. I donated the entire sum of money given to me from The Challenger Fund to Eric's favorite museum─the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. Every year a full scholarship is awarded to a deserving high school student to attend the Future Astronaut Training Program. A magnificent display has been set up to honor Eric.

Additional money has been donated to Eric's alma mater, where another display has been erected in his memory. I set up a program at the burn center where Eric was a patient. The Eric Basket Program is designed to help burn victims and their families. I have given several speeches in honor of burn patients and survivors.

I have tried to heal myself by performing various charity works in my own little town: Meals on Wheels, wildlife rehabilitating, conservation work, donating money and items for homeless people. One of the ways I have found to fight grief is by helping others.

I have spent many years of my life writing a book about Eric, his life, my experience at the hospital, and our incredible love. I continue to edit and polish the work. I am even going back to school to acquire better writing skills, so that I can better accomplish my goals.

I still miss Eric every day and maybe it would be easier to believe that he is safe and happy in a beautiful garden with a kind God and pretty angels. But it would be a lie. I try to be thankful that I had the love and support of such an amazing man as Eric, even if it was for such a short time. Maybe I was actually one of the lucky ones. I had the kind of love that people dream about. It was real and tangible, not a dream about some other world

A Good Death - a gutsy, scientifically informed existential courage in the face of personal extinction.

reposted from Edge.org

GEOFFREY MILLER
Evolutionary Psychologist, University of New Mexico; Author, The Mating Mind

Death

I'm optimistic about death. For the first time in the history of life on Earth, it is possible—not easy, but possible—for conscious animals like us to have a good death. A good death is a great triumph, and something to be sought, accepted, and cherished. Indeed, a good death should be recorded and broadcast as a moral example to us all.

What do I mean by a good death? I do not mean opiate-fuelled euthanasia, or heroic self-sacrifice during flash-bang tactical ops, or a grudgingly tolerated end to a millennium of grasping longevity. I do not mean a painless, clean, or even dignified death. I mean a death that shows a gutsy, scientifically informed existential courage in the face of personal extinction. I mean a death that shows the world that we secular humanists really mean it.

There is, of course, no way to escape the hardwired fears and reactions that motivate humans to avoid death. Suffocate me, and I'll struggle. Shoot me, and I'll scream. The brain stem and amygdala will always do their job of struggling to preserve one's life at any cost.

The question is how one's cortex faces death. Does it collapse in mortal terror like a deflated soufflé? Or does it face the end of individual consciousness with iron-clad confidence in the persistence of virtually identical consciousnesses in other human bodies? My optimism is that in this millennium, well-informed individuals will have a realistic prospect of sustaining this second perspective right through the end of life, despite death's pain and panic.

When I die in 50 years, or next week, or whenever, here's what I hope I remember:

• My genes, proteins, neural networks, beliefs, and desires are practically identical to those sustaining the consciousness of 6 billion other humans, and countless other animals, whose experiences will continue when mine do not.
• Since life must be common throughout the universe and resilient across time, such subjective experiences will continue not just on Earth in the short term, but across many worlds, for billions of years.
• There is no spooky personal after-life to fear or hope for, only this wondrous diversity of subjectivity that trillions of individuals get to partake in.
• The more science one knows, the more certain and comforting this knowledge is.

These life-lessons are, to me, the distilled wisdom of evolutionary psychology.

Many people resist this knowledge. They listen only to the hair-trigger anxieties of the amygdala—which constantly whispers 'fear death, fear death'. They construct pathetic ideologies of self-comfort to plug their ears against such mortal terror. They nuzzle through reality's coarse pelt for a lost teat of supernatural succor. I call them the Gutless, because they aren't bright enough or brave enough to understand their true place in the universe. A whole new branch of psychology called Terror Management Theory studies the Gutless and their death-denying delusions.

A great ideological war is raging between the Godless—people like me, who trust life—and the Gutless—the talking heads of the extreme, religious right, who fear death, and fear the Godless, and fear ongoing life in the future when they no longer exist. I'm also optimistic about the outcome of this war, because people respect guts and integrity. People want moral role models who can show them how to live good lives and die good deaths. People want to believe that they are participating in something vastly greater and more wonderful than their solipsism. Science quenches that thirst far more effectively, in my experience, than any supernatural teat sought by the Gutless.