An atheist finds "comfort" in thinking of death.

I largely agree with this long, thoughtful blog post about death by Greta Christina. Like her, I find the claim that religion provides "comfort" to be quite perplexing in the context of the afterlife.

Knowing that there is no afterlife would provide more comfort to me than knowing that you'll go either to heaven or to hell in the afterlife, even if I thought I'd have a much greater chance of going to heaven than to hell. As a thought-experiment, let's put aside the afterlife for a second and imagine there's a magical coin that you may choose to flip. If you flip it and it comes up heads, you'll experience a wonderfully blissful sensation beyond anything you've ever experienced for, say, one minute. If you flip it and it comes up tails, you'll experience horrible torture worse than anything you've ever experienced, also for a minute. Or, you're free not to flip the coin at all and go on with your normal life. Would you flip the coin?

Not only would I not flip the coin, but this decision seems so obvious that I find it hard to imagine anyone saying they would do it. But let's change the hypothetical so it's far more skewed in favor of flipping it. Or, rather, let's say it's not a coin but a well-shuffled deck of cards. If you draw a two of clubs, you get the torture, but if you draw any of the other 51 cards, you get the pleasure. So there's only about a 2% chance of the bad outcome. And we could skew the hypo even further by imagining that if you get the pleasure, it lasts for a whole hour; the torture is still just one minute. Even with all these stipulations, I would still readily choose not to take this gamble. That's how bad the possibility of torture is.

That's why I couldn't find comfort in any worldview in which hell — which presumably involves torture — is a possibility. The idea that hell would be eternal obviously intensifies this feeling. In fact, even if I know that the afterlife could be heaven or hell but were assured that I would get to heaven, I still couldn't feel good about this knowing that other people would go to hell. In fact, my feeling about this would be the opposite of comfort.


ADDED: After I posted this, I saw that Greta Christina has a whole other blog post on that last point, including a response from the Christian theologian William Lane Craig. Sample point from Craig:

[I]t is possible that God removes from the minds of the redeemed any knowledge of the damned. It seems to me that so doing is merciful and involves no wrong-doing on God's part.

Unsurprisingly, Greta Christina isn't convinced — she can't get past the question:

How can it be Heaven if our families aren't there?