Welcome and may you find peace, friendship and more among equals. Just be yourself.

Fortunately, I was not raised in a religious home, but most of my childhood friends were Mormon. The indoctrination of children is so, so sad. Even if they manage to escape the church and most of their fucked-up, ignorant, ridiculous beliefs as adults, they can never quite overcome the fear that they will, indeed, go to hell. I wish I could offer some good advice, but sometimes irrational, instinctive emotions undermine the logical thoughts in your mind. Sorry, man.

You are a stranger here but once.

Welcome to the site, best one with the coolest people. Read the posts, you tube Neil deGrasse, Francesca Stavrakopoulou...so many.I learned so much here and looking forward to more learning. Maybe it will help you...there are great segments on You Tube. Anyways welcome home

Welcome this is a wonderful place!

you won't care because you will be dead. welcome by the way

Welcome, it us always nice to have new members. I can understand that the thought if never seeing you loved ones again could be worrisome. When you truly accept their is no afterlife, you begin to enjoy every moment, good or bad with them while they are still around. You make wonderful lasting memories. I lost my nephew when he was four, I remember his bright red hair, cheeky smile, and all the games of hide and seek. I see him all the time when I see Daisy's on my lawn. He use to pick them and bring them to me. An afterlife is a cope out for the guilty. Its okay not to make the effort, because I can make up for it in eternity.

Welcome, obis. I hope you enjoy this community and find it engaging.

As for how to deal with the finite nature of life, I think of the impermanence of self from moment to moment and consider every instant to be the death of one person and the birth of another, no matter how similar they seem. The me now is unaffected by the events ten years from now, or a year from now, or a day from now. All I have is the present moment. And when I die, that future "me" will cease to exist, too, and just like the me-stream before him he has no knowledge of the future. Nothing really changes for me/him. It may not be intuitive because we feel like we have persistent identity, because of the very subtle, gradual change we feel, but it's illusory, memory and anticipation. I just try to focus on the present. I still look out for those future doppelgangers, because I have the most influence on their existence and wellbeing, but that's acute empathy. In terms of experience, all I have is "now."

I don't know whether that helps with your question, but I hope it does.

Welcome! Congratulations on your awakening from the matrix, Ha! Live everyday like it's your last now, because one of these days you'll be right! Have the most fun, and do the most good you can is what I say. We all have the ability to make this life either heaven or hell, so do the things now you would want to do if you went to heaven - like hang out with your family! All anyone really has is this moment and we get out of life what we put into it, right?

Welcome and enjoy!

Do not worry yourself of which you have no control over! Live in the moment and be thankful for what you have.

Welcome to the community! Hope you enjoy your experience here. It's a pretty good group.
I have to be honest and tell you I've never had any anxiety over my lack of belief in any afterlife. I'm really okay with my death being the end for me. I've already accepted that I will never again see or be with those who have already died. It is what it is. Life is life, and is meant to be lived without dwelling on the end of it. Death is simply death. The end. Nothing to be done about it, so, why worry about it? Doing that just detracts from living one's life.

Hi and welcome @obis. I had three life threatening episodes in the last 9years-car accident, Leukemia and heart failure. The fact that I survived all three is amazing enough but praying to a god didn't do it. My hard work in therapies did. Death didn't scare me-being in pain with no control of my body is what was frightening to me. Again elcome to our freethinker community.

Hello,
I brief post can hardly do justice to such worthy questions. I would say that a goldfish in his little bowl has no concept of people getting into an airplane and flying across the country in several hours. But that does not mean that it doesn't happen. Similarly, humans have no real understanding of how an afterlife could even be possible. But, as with the goldfish, it does not mean that it doesn't happen. Perhaps life force is recycled in some way beyond our comprehension. And if so, it seems to me that could take place in ways beyond our imaginations. To me, that is one of the beauties of being agnostic....although nothing is known, ANYTHING is possible. Perhaps it could be in a form completely different from human. Perhaps there would be no form at all and it is all simply perception. Perhaps our mentality would be so high that we could actually communicate with whatever great forces may exist out there. Perhaps we have been a physical extention of "God" here on earth, and then rejoin him after our death. Anyone who says these things are impossible has not fully openen his mind. So go ahead, use your own imagination and your own spirit. See what possibilities they may conjure up for you.
Regardless of what the future may hold, try not to cling to the idea of permanence. You are alive now and so are your loved ones. All that matters is that you express your love now, and appreciate it now. Whatever the future holds, it will be alright. What matters most is that you enjoy the great gift now.

I think when Guildenstern is explaining death to Rosencrantz, he states it in a way that makes sense to me and quells any anxiety I might have had.

"Death isn't."

Since death isn't, you can't...and therefore won't.

You won't feel pain, you won't feel loss, you won't care, you won't notice. You simply aren't. There is nothing to fear because there is nothing, period.

Or does that sound even more scary? Examine in your heart the reasons why that might be, and you might find it's really the fear of the unknown that you're up against. When you single out the part of the thing that freaks you out the most, you're on the path to remedy.

Then, to find remedy, you can do one or more of these, which I state to no one in particular:

1. Work to make sure other people in your life will be taken care of (whatever that means to you) when you're gone. This makes you feel so, so much better once you've straightened it out.

2. Try to do more of those things in life that make you feel satisfied. The word "regret" needs to be systematically removed from your thought library by whatever means you have at your disposal in order to reach satisfaction.

3. Read, discover, learn, and enjoy the simple things. Don't hold yourself back from wonder...it leads to satisfaction.

I think what most people fear isn't necessarily just the unknown that death guarantees, but moreover the pain and loss and other more pertinent effects it'll have on our loved ones.

See #1 above. They'll be okay.

Welcome, @obis!

Of course there's a natural apprehension that life will be gone, and it's obviously better to be alive than not. For what it's worth, you already know what it's going to be like -- it'll be just like it was before you were born.

Accepting that one day you will be gone is a part of attaining maturity. Hopefully, you use that knowledge to live your life to its fullest!

Welcome Agnostic.com is a great site with many smart, freethinking people. I think you'll be glad you joined.

Well, I look at it this way: if there is an afterlife, you will see them. If there is not an afterlife, none of you would even know, because you would not exist anymore. So why worry about it?

I can empathize with this anxiety. I think you will find yourself in good company. If your anxiety is mental, and does not manifest symptoms in your physical body then you probably don't need medication and that is a good thing. Just comment and share. This a good place to find your own answers.

When you die, your energy, both active I.e. the spark that makes you go, and en potentia I.e. your body, go back to the earth and the universe to be reused, on and on, ad infinitum, ad museum. I think that's pretty cool in itself. Your parts are infinite and in that infinity, for a brief instant, you were a thinking being, observing the universe around you and doing your part to organize that universe through that observation (remember, simple observation effects particle behavior). Why do we need some adter-life reward? THIS is your reward. Just my tuppence. Welcome to the group!

Hey there, Welcome. I think what you've just described is one of the main reasons why people invent religions in the first place. All people are uncomfortable with many of the same things so they make up things to 'believe' in. Then the more they get others to believe it it becomes more of a possibility. We can't know everything.

As an Agnostic, I'm far less "certain" about what happens after death. So I spend a significant amount of time thinking about it. I've also experienced it. My little brother died when I was ten. I held my grandmother's hand when she took her last breath. My sister's best friend was on flight 11 which flew into the WTC on 9-11. My brother-in-law was killed in a C-130 over Mississippi in July. A day that will etched on my mind until I die.

So I think about death a lot. I think about my own death as well. But I've learned to deal with this "anxiety" by allowing myself to live in the space of "I don't know." As a species, we have this weird need to be "right," and therefore we have to "know" what happens. But we can't... not definitively anyway. So we make friends with the question. I say make friends. In my case I've written a lot about it, giving doubt and fear real personalities. So I write a story where I anthropomorphize the questions, the fears, the frustrations. There's a lot of questions they can't answer, but that's not what makes it work. It's that I get comfortable with them. I get comfortable with the "mystery."

Welcome. You did not see your family & friends before you were here so after should be similar. Your connections are for right now, right here. The moment. They are not for after or before. It is a matter of altering the mind set. How we have been indoctrinated to view the world. There is only now. There is no after, no before. Enjoy the now which may be a lifetime. You will not miss them as physics says energy can not be destroyed, only changed into a different form. So in essence you will be part of them in the pneuma which connects all things.

Welcome!
I'm not like most of the others on this website..I was born remembering past lives, as did my sister, so I don't think dying is the end, but one of many life adventures I've been having for millions of years, since energy can't be created or destroyed.

I have seen many supernatural things both where I grew up in Haiti, and here in the US, and I was also born with psychic powers and have done things I don't dare mention here for fear of offending people who think such things don't exist.

But one of the boxes I ticked off here was "spiritual." I don't attend church or believe in the Bible any more except my interest in how it parallels the Sumerian texts, written 2000 years before the Bible.

Even as an Atheist I don't rule out something after this life. We can't measure everything yet. We certainly don't Know everything there is to know. I do find comfort in telling stories about those who have passed on. Keeping the memory alive. - Also reminds me why they were important in my life.

Welcome, obis! Death, the fear of it, or the loss it brings, has been the mainstay for religions probably from the beginning. I think for most of us, we don't look forward to death, we just try to do the best we can with this one life we're given. Tho thinking we would either find all the "answers" or be reunited with loved ones after death may be comforting, I don't think wishful thinking does anyone any good in the long run, or even the short run! If one realizes that this is what we have I think one tends to try to be & do more here & now.