Burning in hell looks pretty painful indeed, but it still contains a glimpse of hope. After eons of suffering, a redemption is still possible, potentially. Suffering from burns is still a property of Life, something that suffers must exist and must somewhat live. There is still something that exists in the burning hell...
Even worse than this, for me, is to disappear, gradually, then totally, from Existence. The eternal void is more frightening that any eternal pain. The eternal void does not leave any glimpse of hope for a better future. The eternal void is no future at all.
Philosophers and theologians are still arguing about where the existence of a human being begins. Is it at conception? Is is at birth? Is is somewhere between these marks, like when the nervous system reaches a certain state? Any given point in time seems arbitrary when compared with the situation just before and after the chosen point. There is nothing particularly different between the state before and after. Conception can fail after days without knowing it. There is not such a huge difference, morally, between breathing with your lungs and breathing with your mother's lungs. However, when we zoom out, there is a big difference between a small cell and a living human.
There is a continuum of gradual changes, each building on the previous, that goes toward a mature living human. At any point something might go wrong. Each step is not terribly different from the step before. But there is a direction, there is a potentiality toward realizing something that reaches the level when we cannot dispute it to be a human being.
I say that we gradually become more human as we grow. At a given time in our life we reach our maximum human potential. There are ups and downs, sometimes we are more close to our potential, some other times we just live to pass the days. At the end of our life, most people will start to gradually disappear from existence. Sometimes people are talking about old people, in their presence, like they are not there. This is a sad sign of starting to not exist.
But one's existence is not totally ended when dying. There may be siblings that inherits a part of the characteristics of the passed away. There might be something left in the culture by that individual. There are people that were positively touched by that human. It's hard to not matter at all for the life of the next generation. Even if someone does not do anything in it's life, there is a stream of humanity that connects him to all the other humans - by it's ancestors. A part of him/she will still continue to live as long as humanity endures.
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A rock can occupy a space. A rock can be at a given place, at a certain point in time. However, in order to exist, there must be an observer of that rock, someone that conceptualizes that it exists.
The absolute non-Existence for a human must also contain the destruction of any observer that can conceptualize even that him/she must have existed, sometime in the past. The absolute non-Existence is the total destruction of the human race. This is The Hell we should strive to avoid.
See also: On "morality derived from space colonization"
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Epicurus was a materialist; in his view reality is, fundamentally, material stuff. But what of the soul, or what we nowadays call the mind? Epicurus said it is identical to an organ in the body. He knew far less about physiology and neurology than we do now and thought the organ of thought resided in the chest. Now we say it is the brain. Such details aside, the point is that when the body dies, that organ dies and the mind or soul goes with it. There is nothing to fear about being dead because there will be nobody to experience that condition. Being dead is the complete absence of experiential mental states; it is an experiential blank. It won't hurt; it won't be pleasant; it won't be anything. Hence, there is no reason to fear it.
An extension of Epicurus' argument proposed by his follower Lucretius says that the state of being dead is just like the state before being born; there is no reason to fear either one. Lucretius says,
Look back now and consider how the bygone ages of eternity that elapsed before our birth were nothing to us. Here, then, is a mirror in which nature shows us the time to come after our death. Do you see anything fearful in it?
Excerpted from my essay "Fearing Death," available at
https://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=1806
I imagined this argument before reading your essay, sorry if it brings some sad feelings. I am sorry for your loss.
For me, after death, the individual dissipates in other people that were touched and influenced by him/her. There is no pleasant heaven or punishing hell, just a slow fading from existence. This fading never ends, a small portion remains part of the humanity flow over generations, as long as humanity endures.
A good life should be a life that touched humanity positively, no mater how short or long. On the other hand, we are only a tiny bit in humanity, so this should also teach us humbleness. Even if we fail despite our efforts, humanity could still prevail due to many others that we share humanness with.