Religious individuals might call it your spirit, and atheists uneducated in these matters may have no answer at all. But if it is not the matter which composes us that defines us, why then are we so afraid of death? What would the atheist assume occurs after you die?

It depends on whether or not you believe you were born. I mean this quite seriously: if you define your life to have had a specific point of beginning, then you likely fear it will have a specific point of ending. I have not lost my senses when I tell you that this simply isn’t true; the concept of birth is a signifier, nothing more. It is a marker on a line upon which you can attest to having started the process of becoming a Homo sapien, but it would be very misguided to label it the start of your life.

When the atom was first discovered, it should have upset the romanticized views of religious continuity, but it did not. The atomist fully realizes that he or she is made up entirely of atoms, which are constantly being gained, expelled, and manipulated. The continuity of which I’m speaking, which we otherwise simply call ourselves, is one composed entirely of energy patterns: our cells, with their blueprints of us, are busy constantly with the act of replicating themselves, of us replicating us within ourselves to continue ourselves.

Where were you before you were born? In your mother’s womb? Were you a fertilized egg? And where were you before that? It gets a bit silly with our false notions of us, the individuals separate from the environment, but in that view we were in two places, the egg in our mothers and the spermatozoa in our fathers. And where were you before that?

The notion of the individual falls apart against this reasoning and, symmetrically, so too does the notion of death.

I’m not going to lie to you and assert that this should calm your individualist nerves as they cower at the thought of your death, but in these truths we do find some saving grace: if shown a photograph of the universe, or the cosmos or whatever, and asked to explain what you see, it is entirely correct to reply, ” That is a photograph of me.”

“and the citizens against govt waste and the other watchdog organizations. i have fought against special issues, i have fought for reform.”

i admired one talking head more than the other. the din of the fan filled the spaces between the words, not complimentary as a shoe fits its boot, but rather as a piece fits its whole. word noise, machine noise, i found the entire night noisy, restless, and the same.

and i kinda giggled b/c paused mid-word his mouth was kind full of air, like a balloon. or, like a fan making noise.

Download bootleg (.zip file containing MP3s, 150MB) (taken from Waves & Wires)

.non sono tante cose by *Gnesa on deviantART