Dealing with Mortality and Fitness as an Atheist

 Note: What follows is a transcript of the video.

This video will be more personal, but it still relates to a variety of arguments for atheism or at least against theistic arguments. I don’t want anyone to worry - I’m perfectly fine now and in fact have never been better in my entire life. That said, the journey here was not a very pleasant one, and it certainly has influenced my views in my approach to atheistic philosophy of religion.

About 4 years ago at Thanksgiving we noticed that something new was wrong with my mother, eventually becoming diagnosed with dementia.

Given where everyone in my family lives, I became her defacto caretaker - driving her around wherever she needed to go, going into doctors appointments with her so she could remember what to do, straightening out her medications and ensuring she took them, eventually buying all her groceries.

Unfortunately things progressed incredibly quickly. Within a year and a half she had set some kitchen utensils on fire in her own house, and while we were having her visit us and my sister, we caught her in the kitchen just…playing with fire in a dangerous way. Given both my and my sisters family have young children and no way to give her the proper care, she had to go into an assisted living facility. There things continued to degrade extremely rapidly, within 4 months she went from assisted living to memory care, to being in a near vegetative state, to ceasing to eat, to passing away.

This entire experience was particularly painful in a variety of ways. I watched my mother’s entire personality change dramatically. As I was told by various doctors and nurses who deal with dementia and Alzheimer’s patients people will change and often it is not for the better. My mom was very much in the latter category. I was the one who had to deal with ranting and outbursts, some completely nonsensical where logical contradictions meant nothing to her. Others where she was more lucid and we had painful conversations.

One of those that I will share is when we got the results of one of her MRI’s of the brain where there was evidence of damage and we thought things were coming to an end. Being a Christian, she confronted me about my atheism - asking if I really thought that she would cease to exist when she died. I’m not one to lie, which certainly bit me in the ass later as I’ll get to in this story, I told her yes, that’s what I thought happened.

Her response stuck with me - she told me she can’t believe that this was it, not after the hard life she’s had, that it would just be it and no reward. She asked if I found my view depressing compared to hers.

I told her no, because on my view no one has to burn. If everyone ceasing to exist when they died meant no eternal conscious torture for anyone, then my view is infinitely better than her own.

Her response was to concede the point and say “Well maybe that doesn’t happen and everyone goes to heaven”.

I had the decency to not point out the ad hoc nature of her reply, or the myriad of problems of the kind of universalism she was embracing with the biblical texts.

The reason I’m telling this story is because it hammered home two important points to me:

    The belief in an afterlife of heaven is useful and important to people, especially those who have lived a hard life

    I don’t particularly care to argue people out of religion if I don’t see a harm plus logical connection between their beliefs and actions


The first point seems painfully true, although it’s hard not to come off as insulting when stating this, though I don’t mean it to be. Note that I'm not saying this is the only reason people are religious, but it is *a reason* and religious people themselves reinforce the idea when they make existential arguments for theism about how there is no meaning or purpose to life if we cease to exist when we die because atheism is true.

This fact about religion being a coping mechanism is reinforced from my experiences with organized atheism. Remember way back when New Atheism was a thing and ultra-liberal discourse ravaged through the Quote-Unquote Movement - it was discussed how atheism is a belief of the Privileged. We had a lot of Wealthy, Educated, Straight, White, Males.

Well the flipside certainly seems true at least in my personal anecdote. My mother lived a particularly hard life. She grew up dirt poor as the child of immigrants from Sicily. Before marrying my father she was in a brief marriage that was annulled with a physically abusive man. Then her marriage with my dad was…very not good. They both stayed in it as long as they did because of religion, but while my sister and I were treated well by both of them, they very much did not like one another. Then a lingering birth defect in her pancreas not fusing together caused her to live with chronic pancreatitis - one of the most physically painful diseases you can get. She lived with that for over 25 years, including being on heavy opioid based pain medication for that entire time.

She would often remark how the only thing that gave her joy was us - her kids, her dogs, and then eventually, and especially, her grandchildren.

The point is, her life was hard, in ways I can’t particularly fathom. When things were at their hardest is when she would be more obviously religious and used it as the palliative tool it can be.

Conversely, my life is almost the opposite, which may be a contributing factor to why I have absolutely zero problems thinking of ceasing to exist after death - but more on this later.

The second point was one I’ve largely had, though if you follow me on YouTube or Twitter, you may be surprised to hear it. Though even online I don’t particularly look for ways to shit on some religious persons parade. I typically try only to reply to theists when challenged by theistic arguments - in fact I go by the Counter Apologist for specifically this reason.

When I make positive arguments for atheism, I don’t go posting them on theistic forums, I typically put it out there or will use them in a formal debate people signed up for. In my personal life, I don’t argue religion with anyone unless they try to use religious belief as a basis for specific policy I find harmful.  Same sex marriage was the quintessential issue for this, last decade anyway.

Funnily enough I had a line in my conversation with Emerson Green about how I got into this public atheism advocacy because I thought that if we convinced people that their religion was wrong, then like myself they’d come to embrace particularly progressive views on certain social issues - and that very much turned out to not be the case. Those views very much need their own arguments and defenses, and often hinge on the same kinds of unfalsifiable metaphysical foundation beliefs that can be as immovable as religious ones.

I guess I’m here to say that I don’t advocate trying to argue religion when it isn’t needed, or if it’s being used in a therapeutic way. Conversely, I’m not going to lie and pretend it’s really true either. When both of my parents have died I had to deal with people trying to use it to convert me back to Christianity - as if my parents imminent or recent death was a kind of weak point for my atheism. That’s certainly how it felt when those conversations were forced upon me, and I think it reinforces the first point I noted - religion is a salve, a balm used to ease the pain or fear of death.

Every time I had someone ask me “if I really thought I’d never see them again” it really felt as if they were trying to ask if I could emotionally handle that fact. The answer was always “Yes.”

I firmly believe that when someone dies, they cease to exist. I am fully at peace with this fact and while sad, I accept it means I will never see or speak to them again.

Even more so, I found that dealing with my mothers dementia only reinforced my inclination towards hard materialism. As her brain degraded, which I observed with painful medical accuracy through regular MRI scans, I saw her mind degrade. Who she was ceased to be well before she died, both as personality changes took hold, her ability to recall memories were lost, and as she progressively lost the ability to function at all.

It also reinforced my disgust at the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, or any kind of argument from reason. Whoever says that logical thought is not inherently adaptive and beneficial evolutionarily speaking has plainly never had to deal with someone who is literally incapable of it - and I mean that very, very literally.  Without persistence of belief and logical reasoning, people would die.

One of the things you learn when you’re caring for someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s is that it progresses in stages, with some days being better or worse than others, even if the overall trajectory is downward. On the worst days my mother would have been dead if myself or someone else wasn’t there to care for her.

The final point I want to make in this section is to reiterate how atheism and death being the end of our individual existence as a belief is not something I’m holding because I find it specifically comforting - I hold it because I’m convinced it’s true.

Yes I think atheism is infinitely preferable to the most common kinds of religious theism where hell exists, but as my mother pointed out - universalism is a logically possible option. If I wanted a kind of therapeutic religion, that’s always available - but I am convinced it’s as false as the more traditional kinds.

This however isn’t the end of my story, because things got a lot more personal and painful before they got better.

My Own Mortality

Alongside dealing with my mother’s decline and death, I was not doing particularly well physically speaking.

I had been overweight for years, and this entire ordeal made it worse. We were dealing with this the year after the pandemic lockdowns, which like many people had increased the amount of alcohol I was consuming - and I absolutely used it as a coping mechanism. Now to be clear, I was very rarely drunk, I’d just get to a level of buzzed a few nights a week. My grandfather, on my mothers side speaking of her hard life, was a hard alcoholic - I saw what that was and I wouldn’t do that to my children or wife. But drinking regularly even if you don’t get wasted has its costs to your health.

Almost a mirror image to this, my professional career was going off like a rocket, with me getting promoted, increased responsibilities as an engineer and becoming the de facto team leader for a group of 16 people. With that came an incredible amount of work related stress and overtime demands.

I knew my stress levels were too high and my blood pressure was creeping up every time I went to the doctor for whatever illness got me there. So one Friday I said “screw this, I’m joining a gym again and forcing my job to let me only work 40 hours a week”.

The very next day ended up with me at the assisted living facility dealing with my mother having a major behavioral issue. I’d rather not get into the details, since it’s rather mundane, but as someone who can’t help but be blunt and forthright with the truth - let me give you some advice I got from multiple healthcare workers who specialize in dementia: Lie to dementia patients when they’re being unreasonable and illogical about something.

I wished I had followed that advice, but I didn’t, which made my mom spiral and say things that fortunately she would not have to remember saying.

Unfortunately for me, when I got home from dealing with the problems at the facility I was having chest pains, shooting arm pains, with my blood pressure and heart rate spiking.

I was roughly the same age as my father when he had a heart attack that I watched as a teenager.

Worse still, both my daughters were sick at the time, my wife caring for them while I dealt with everything for my mom. Fearing the worst but not knowing what to do, and not wanting to terrify the kids or wait for an ambulance, I threw some clothes in a bag, kissed everyone goodbye, telling the kids I had to go take care of nonni again, I drove myself to the ER that is thankfully very close to home.

The entire experience before I got into my car was surreal. Talking frantically with my wife, while discretely trying to test my blood pressure, luckily my oldest was upstairs playing on her computer and my youngest had no idea what we were doing as she was only 5 years old and sick at the time.

The pains came and went, and I was largely functional - hence driving myself and packing a bag, but when they hit it was just scary. The main fear was that each time the pains hit, it got worse.

I remember thinking to myself that there was a very real chance that this could be it, I could die today - I had to face that as a possible reality.

I will never forget my thought: “I’m going to fight this, but if I go, then that’s it. At least I had a good life.”

Almost right afterwards, I looked at my youngest daughter, only 5 years old, miserable with a fever sitting at the kitchen table trying to eat something. She looked at me and I think for the first time I saw her worried about me. She didn’t know what was going on, but she knew something was wrong.

That is what radicalized me, right there. I already didn’t want to die, even if I was ready to accept it if it came - but I HAD to live, because I needed to be there for my family. They needed me.

Fortunately at the ER they see you very quickly when you walk in the door and say you’re having chest pains and know you have elevated heart rate and blood pressure.

Eventually the conclusion was that while my blood pressure was exceptionally high, it was not high enough to be in danger of immediately having a heart attack or stroke - it was probably just a panic attack brought on by my stress. I was home by the evening.

After that, I began a long road to recovery.

I did end up using my leverage at work to get to 40 hours a week for the most part, with allowances to leave early certain days to go to the gym 3 times a week.

I made slow progress on lowering my blood pressure and weight, but when my mother died only 6 months later plus the holidays, I ended up with slightly better blood pressure, my heaviest weight in my life at 268lbs, although with a lot more muscle than when I walked into an ER for myself.

Not two months after her death I was talking to my doctor about my cholesterol being too high as well as my blood pressure still not being where it needed to be. If I didn’t make better progress I was going to start having to take medication regularly.

One month later, I saw a friend on Facebook I hadn’t seen in years post how their Brazilian Jiu Jitsu school was opening a location in New Jersey, and it was right in between my house and my job.

I was always a little interested in combat sports, and I knew I had to do more. Funnily enough one person I was speaking to when I walked in told me “Jiu Jitsu will change your life” and she was absolutely correct.

As an aside it is interesting to point out how taking fighting classes can fill the same kinds of roles that going to church regularly would fill, and I don't mean this in an existential way, but more practically: