It's fascinating to encounter the vast separation between the intensity and sincerity with which a sentiment is held by someone else, and how far away that sentiment is from anything relatable to me.
I have never for one moment been frightened, or left despairing, at the thought of ceasing to be. I have the instinctual, biological fear of death, as for example when you're standing at a great height and lose your balance slightly, and feel a sharp and sudden fright shoot through your body. I have a certain dread in contemplating my life as lived in relation to its end, in the event that my life would be unlived, wasted. But as a pure fact of not existing? Nothing.
One of the things that annoyed me in the late-00s atheist wave was a common presumptuousness on questions like these. Like it had to be that someone was frightened of death to be drawn to religion.
Life frightens me, death does not.
