DEATH

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [e-mail]

Death and dying workbook: https://atheopaganism.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/death-and-dying-workbook-blank1.docx

Freewill.com

 

S3E35 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

 

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Mark,

Yucca: And I'm the other one. Yucca

Mark: and today we are going to talk about death.

Yucca: death. Yep. It's, well, it's October. Although it's a topic which is relevant every day, every moment. Right.

Mark: That's right. But particularly we're going to talk about the naturalistic, pagan perspective on death and approaches to death. And talk about some things that we can do to prepare for our own mortality and just about the perspective that it gives us generally. Because death is. Arguably the fact of our lives more than anything else. It's, it's the thing that's hanging out there, setting the context for everything else that we do or, or that we contemplate doing.

Yucca: Right? And it happens to us.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Right. There's no, Doesn't matter what religion you are, what gender, where you live, what kind of living thing. If you are living, then eventually you stop. Right?

Mark: right. And that's why it's been called The Great Equalizer because it doesn't matter how wealthy you are, eventually you are going to kick it. And there's, you know, you can do all kinds of medical things to try to extend yourself probably with a great deal of suffering associated in most cases.

But eventually it's going to end. And so at this time of year this is the time of year when pagans often contemplate their mortality and their their relationship with the fact of their death. And so we are dedicating this show this episode to to that, to talking about exactly that.

We'll have other episodes later on in the month about sort of other facets.

Yucca: Like ancestors and decomposition and you know, that kind of stuff.

Mark: right. All those kinds of great, halloweeny wonderful topics. But this, this one is just about the blunt fact that we're gonna die and so are you. And we all have to come to terms with that in whatever manner we can.

Yucca: Right now, I wanna emphasize though, that this isn't all a doom and gloom, you know, sad, negative kind of thing. Certainly many of us are quite uncomfortable with the idea that one day we will not exist, right? But as we're gonna talk about, there's actually. Some real upsides to that. Right. And there's some really, I think that there's a tremendous amount of, of beauty in that. But a good place to start actually is how naturalistic paganism differs from some of the other branches of Paganism when it comes to our views on death, or at least on what's after.

Mark: Right, right. As naturalists, we use the scientific method and critical thinking to assess what is most likely to be true. And given, given that the evidence is that there is no afterlife, that when we stop, we stop our brains stop maintaining the, the neural net of information that constitutes our personality and memory and all those things.

And that heat radiates away from our body that that energy radiates away from our body as heat

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and the body cools and we're gone.

Yucca: And the, the pieces that were us, they break apart and become part of other things. Right.

Mark: Right? And that's the decomposition story, which is. You know, stay tuned for that cuz it's actually so exciting.

Yucca: a

Mark: It's so exciting.

Yucca: yeah, and it's, and that's the, that's the death th