Deconversion stories: The void and the ramen

“If a man die, shall he live again?”

Words from Job. I mused them aloud at my father’s graveside one morning. Immediately my sister said, “Yes.” Let’s just say I was less certain. Faith was coming apart for lack of evidence, and I didn’t like it.

I always liked the Book of Job. The first part of the Old Testament makes some great promises: even if you get thrown in fiery furnaces or… um… get your hair cut off, you’ll be fine as long as you believe in god. And then when good people did believe in god and they burned up in the furnace anyway (along with their hair), then people had to write the Book of Job. You can almost hear the writers saying ‘Gee, it’s weird… believing in god doesn’t always stop bad things happening to you. It’s like the correlation between input and outcome seems almost… random.”

No shit.

The tacked-on ending was the most disappointing part. The book that tells us that good people don’t always get the goodies, ends up with Job… getting the goodies. Hope his family didn’t mind being replaced.

Dad’s death triggered a rather predictable resurgence of faith in me. I even gave a great faith-promoting eulogy. But the spiritual rush didn’t last long without evidence — I had come too far by this time — and so I found myself that morning at my father’s final resting place, coming down off of it.

Later one day, I pondered what it would be like to be dead. Not just a disembodied spirit, still aware of things and observing, but dead. Not existing. And not experiencing not existing because there’s no one there to experience it. Just not. Extinct. Mentally I recoiled from imagining it; religion was what I used to protect myself from this sensation. But I decided to press on and try to imagine non-existence. I imagined blackness, but blackness was an experience. I pushed beyond the blackness and finally… for just a few quiet seconds… imagined the void.

It was terrifying. Nothingness was waiting, everything would go on without me, and there was nothing I could do about it.

The experience didn’t prove anything, obviously. But just being able to imagine non-existence snapped me out of fairyland. Spiritual questions took on a new urgency. I no longer wanted to be fooled by comforting stories; the stories needed to be true if I was going to believe them. And if they weren’t true, I wanted to know it. What about Dad? He remained in the Church all his life, and never had any doubts, said he was absolutely certain. Had he wasted his life in something that wasn’t true? Of course he hadn’t ‘wasted his life’; he took good care of his family, and he was happy in his religion. But maybe knowing what’s true was more important than being happy.

Believers sometimes say, “You atheists must think life is pointless. If you die and that’s the end, what’s the point of it all?” But, post-void, I found myself valuing life a lot more because it was finite, and therefore precious. Except now I had to make life meaningful by myself. Life was cheap as a believer; it would go on forever, and in a much better place, so there was no need to make each day count here. And remember that dreary hymn that referred to this life as a “vail of tears”? Religion taught me that this life was a bad place, or at best inconsequential, just practice, getting ready to live in the better world to come. If you could just get through it ‘unspotted by the world’, that is. This kind of thinking makes people devalue life. People got killed in a war? That’s sad, but they’re still alive really. So no need to do anything about it. You’re not happy in your marriage? Maybe you just need to sacrifice your earthly happiness and grind through it, knowing you’ll be rewarded in the Celestial Kingdom after you die. And so on. Horrible, repellent thoughts to me now, but as a believer it made sense. What a waste. As an atheist, my life has meaning now. The only people I hear who say life on earth isn’t really all that meaningful are Christians.

And so I finally did something that, as a Christian, I could never do: I came to grips with the finality of death and the probable reality of non-existance. One day my brain, that organ of perception, will die, and my perception will stop. I will pass out of living memory. I don’t like that very much. But it’s okay. I’ve had more life than most people in history ever got. And I’m alive today.

The realisation hasn’t changed me much really, yet it has. Once I made an ordinary bowl of ramen. As I opened the little packets of flavour that they include to make you feel like you’re doing something, I thought on how one day I wouldn’t be able to have the experience of tasting ramen. I thought of generations of people who had died and were probably experiencing nothing at all. And then I experienced the flavour of the ramen, and then the sensation of feeling satisfied. All those deceased people couldn’t feel that. My father couldn’t. But I could because I was still alive. I tasted that ramen like I’d never taste anything ever again.

A bowl of ramen. Twenty cents. With the right understanding, even a simple thing can become transcendant.