[aislephive]

I've only skimmed this thread, but I have some thoughts on the matter as well.

For the most part, I don't really fear death. At least I don't constantly think about it or really concern myself with it. It's going to happen sometime to everybody, what keeps me sane is that I don't know when or where it's going to happen. It could be tomorrow, it could be 5 years from now, or it could be 80 years from now. I've never really been much of a religious person, but my best friend during high school was the Pastor's son at a major christian church and as a result I went to various church related activities with him including youth group, normal sunday church (not too often though), etc. Anyways, I was over his house a ton and saw his mom and dad and how they acted when they weren't at church. They were pretty normal for the most part, but very serious people although they did a fair amount of joking around.

They knew that I really wasn't religious and always tried to push me to come to church more often. I kinda pushed away because I just couldn't get myself to buy into the whole religion thing. Too many aspects of religion in general don't sit right with me and don't make sense, not to mention modern science makes much of the bible look like nothing more than a bunch of tall tales.

The thing that scares me about death is when you know you're about to die. The minutes and seconds before it would be overwhelming for me. When I'm watching a tv show and one of the characters is having a gun pointed to their face and they know it's about to be all over, I try to imagine how I would be feeling in their shoes, and I get the chills every time I think about it.

The truth is we know nothing about what is going to happen after we die or what happened before we were born. For all we know, we could die and immediately be reborn as another human. Maybe we could be reborn as an animal, or an insect, or a tree, and the cycle goes on and on.