Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

When seen from a broader perspective, a planetary disaster is still much worse than our own death. Why? Simple as this question may be, you are completely incapable of answering it as long as you fail to find this perspective. For a religious person, the answer is easy: our death, no matter from what reason, is nothing very special in itself, as our mind doesn’t cease to be after the death of our body. But then, no-one can guarantee that the realm in which you suddenly find yourself after your death will be a very nice place, not even if you are a believer—especially not if you are a believer who believes in hell and demons inhabiting it. Nowadays, many people think that what is needed is sort of a lite version of traditional religions that would contain nothing ‘medieval, ugly, or unpleasant,’ and this is how Christianity Lite, Buddhism Lite, and other such bizarre phenomena emerge. I do not think that all these versions work, as they obviously do not ‘do the job,’ do not perform the task that religious knowledge shall perform. They do not move us to be better human beings than we are—they also fail to give us reliable knowledge about spiritual reality as it exists. Imagine that there is a certain social media application through which you can socialise with your friends and with anyone you like. This application is for free—but then, it has an important disadvantage: each of your posts can be disliked by others, and there is a special thumb down button in there. You do not approve of the very idea of someone disliking you, you do not want to bear that much, so you simply refuse to install its full version—instead, you go on with its lite version, manufactured by some guys from Eastern Europe, that you have found somewhere on the Pirate Bay. This lite version doesn’t allow anyone to give you thumb down, in fact, it has no thumb down button at all, and you think yourself very clever man (or woman, or whoever you are). But no, the guys from Eastern Europe have cheated you. This lite version only gets you in touch with Internet bots and other such algorithms, so it practically is of no use. You cannot socialise with real human beings via this fake application, you cannot buy or sell anything via it, you cannot ask a nice girl for a real date, because this nice girl is just an algorithm or a product of artificial intelligence in the very best case. This girl doesn’t exist in flesh, and never will be. This is what I think of Christianity Lite and other such spiritual surrogates that pretend to completely eliminate suffering from our life and from our afterlife without any special efforts of ours.

You may reject the religious perspective altogether, but the question of how to peacefully accept your own death is still there. For a believer, death may be horrible because he or she doesn’t know whether he or she ‘qualifies for Heaven,’ so to speak. For an atheist, death is horrible because life is generally pleasant, and then this pleasant continuation suddenly comes to its end, and there is nothing there ever more. In the event live is not pleasant—suicide logically is the best possible option: that is, if you stick to your atheistic views as firmly as a believer sticks to Christ, or Allah, or the Buddha. But you probably don’t.

…To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.