Surveys show most people believe in an afterlife. I don’t know if members of this forum are a representative sample, but if you believe in an afterlife, would you mourn a loved one’s passing and if so why?
It is a simple question of love and affection – and loss. Just because I know that someone moving to Australia from Europe may have a great life ahead of them, the closer someone has become, the greater the loss and the more likely a certain phase of mourning that loss will set in.
Shalom
I agree with Bob. Whether you believe in an after-life or not the sense of loss is the same. I lost a cat friend recently, and when I think of him I say “Poor Gizmo.” Yet rationally I know that Gizmo is not poor. He either has ceased to exist as a conscious entity, or he is enjoying after-life free from this mortal coil. In either case he is not suffering. So what am I mourning? My sense of loss to the internalized object of Gizmo to which I have become attached. On the other hand I have observed people who use belief in after-life to console themselves in a manner which seems to deny the seriousness of death. I doubt the effectiveness of such a defensive strategy. But unless it becomes a rationale for murder or suicide it is legal.
I disagee with this analogy because while someone moving to Australia from Europe may likely never be seen again, believers in the afterlife are only faced with short-term separation before infinite togetherness.
If I miss a friend whilst they’re away on holiday, my mourning is nothing compared to someone faced with the prospect of never seeing a friend again. The afterlife believer’s mourning should never approach such higher degrees of mourning because infinite togetherness awaits!
Claptrap! Learn to love and show affection and you will be saddened when someone dies. I work with the elderly and am confronted with dying people on a regular basis. Even though I am not related with these people, their dying process is sometimes very tear-jerking and their smiling faces are missed.
You don’t “know” anything at all about “infinite togetherness”, you don’t know whether you’re in or out, how it will be, what you will be like, it is all part of a hope that you just repeat because someone told you about it. Your approach is fanatical coarseness, nothing else.
Shalom
Of course I’m saddened when someone dies! My point is that I don’t think the mourning of someone who truly believes in afterlife can claim to be stronger (exluding of course psychopaths) than those who don’t, as they truly face a sense of finality!
If anything, I think I’d be more saddened because I don’t entertain hopes that their existence really continues in any way.
Could you clarify this, minus the drama?
People can’t “decide” whether or not to grieve, whatever their views. It’s a natural phenomenon whose main purpose is to motivate us to stop loved ones from dying in the first place. C.f. the selfish gene.
The religious have the advantage of being able to cope better with it, thanks to their belief in the afterlife.
…hence generally heightened levels of mourning among the non-believers in afterlife.
Do you have evidence that supports this assertion?
When I, a non-believer in afterlife, hear of someone’s death I mourn because I believe their existence has come to an end. Christian funerals’ speak of how they’ve “gone to a better place” is blatantly more optimistic, and thus suffices as evidence.
Of course, the Christian can’t know their loved one went to a better place- they could have gone to Hell. To a Christian God alone can judge a person, and none deserve salvation. Mourning takes on another dimension when the person you loves not only dies but may face an eternity in torment in the afterlife. Or they may go to Heaven and you’ll go to Hell. Either event would result in everlasting seperation, presumably with both parties in full awareness of of that fact.
Why would any of us?.. Selfish reasons of course.
I don’t think it really makes a difference if we believe in an afterlife because we all know that we are all going to die anyway. It isn’t good or bad… it just is.
Why mourn? Existence involves suffering; non-existence doesn’t. Haven’t you heard, it is best never to have been born and the next best is to die immediately?
I think the point is that the mourners show, by their bereavement, that their thought of an afterlife is specious, and, that when met with the reality of death it dissipates. That’s the point of the question. He meant it as rhetorical. A genuine belief in death as just transitional to somewhere we’ll duly reunite with the decedent would mitigate sorrow and leave the survivors wishing au revoir et a biento, not rest in peace. Most people say what they wish, not what they truly believe. They mourn the finality of death.
One may mourn because, despite some inevitable suffering, the opportunity for whatever that person enjoyed doing is gone. When I die I will no longer suffer, but nor can I mix drum ‘n’ bass, read great books, smoke spliffs, etc, and am gutted as a result!
Furthermore, if you think it really is ‘best never to have been born and the next best is to die immediately’, then why haven’t you already killed yourself? I wouldn’t recommend it - but doesn’t your claim sound a tad contradictory every time it’s spoken?
Cause everyone else is doing it.
Plus, I’d look bad if people thought I wasn’t sad.
Maybe sadness is contagious, like yawning. I mean, why is everyone happy at a party, why don’t they mourn there?
Of all the answers I like this one the best. Society often designates how we should be and act. Look to Camus “The Stranger” for responses of how others actions condemn them in society. Lack of sadness is equated to lack of humanity.
When most people cry fora lost one, they cry not for those that have passed, but for themselves. They cry because they no longer have that person to confide and rely on.
I’d offer they cry because it’s our nature to grasp and cling and this causes us to suffer. You don’t cry when a little child dies horribly in Darfur, but you cry when your beloved grandma, who’s lived a long and contented life, dies. That’s because you’re holding onto something about her that is no longer about the reality of the situation. And it hurts. I’m not saying this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, I’m only saying it’s what we do and demonstrative of the root of our suffering.