Death is a gateway and not an end. Something apparently an atheist philosopher began to realize shortly before his death in 2018:
In his 1996 book about death, Herbert Fingarette argued that fearing one’s own demise was irrational. When you die, he wrote, “there is nothing.” Why should we fear the absence of being when we won’t be there ourselves to suffer it?
Twenty years later, facing his own mortality, the philosopher realized that he’d been wrong. Death began to frighten him, and he couldn’t think himself out of it. Fingarette, who for 40 years taught philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara, had also written extensively on self-deception. Now, at 97, he wondered whether he’d been deceiving himself about the meaning of life and death.
“It haunts me, the idea of dying soon, whether there’s a good reason or not,” he says in Andrew Hasse’s short documentary Being 97. “I walk around often and ask myself, ‘What is the point of it all?’ There must be something I’m missing. I wish I knew.”
The day before he died, Fingarette uttered his final words. After spending many hours in silence with his eyes closed, Hasse said, his grandfather suddenly looked up and said, “Well, that’s clear enough!” A few hours later he said, “Why don’t we see if we can go up and check it out?”
“Of course, these cryptic messages are up to interpretation,” Hasse said, “but I’d like to believe that he might have seen at least a glimpse of something beyond death.”
Go here to read the rest. Prayers for the repose of his soul.
Those who have the experience of dealing with those near death know that such people at times seem to have a glimpse of something beautiful beyond our everyday world. This may be the case here.
I believe that there are many more “good thief” moments in the lives of those we think are on the verge of hell than we know though I wouldn’t want to test it myself. We cannot know what keeps an individual from believing or having no faith in all these instances. I leave that to the mercy of God.