1Cor15.54
September 25, 2026, 1:49pm
7
knor:
The idea of oblivion may be comforting. Especially for a person who is tired of suffering, demands of life, stress, destructive behaviours of humans, and other unpleasant features of living as a human among the other humans. Even if the person has believed the message of everlasting better life rationally, the emotional reaction may weigh much
Sure but that isn’t something natural, it is something induced by negative experiences. The “default” reaction of humans when introduced to death (which, especially as children and before receiving religious education, is identified as the end of every possible form of conscious existence) is horror and rejection.
Allow me to cite myself
I have mentioned this episode on the forum before. My only clear memory from the first five or six years of my life is from when I was about two and first discovered that people could die. I had not yet received any religious education, and I had not even grasped the universal character of death (I certainly had not yet understood that I myself and my loved ones would necessarily die one day, my parents hadn’t told me that yet, at the time). Yet I remember vividly sitting in my high chair and crying inconsolably. My reaction was simply one of rejection: this is wrong; this should not happen.
My mother later (many years later) told me that, to calm me down, they took me to a pharmacy, had the doctor show me an antibiotic, and told me that thanks to that medicine people did not die anymore. Apparently, that was what finally reassured me.
I don’t remember that part (although I obviously have no reason to think my mother lied), I just remember me discovering death and sitting in my high chair crying.
Obviously, this proves nothing by itself, but I do find it philosophically suggestive. At two years old I was hardly capable of constructing any kind of rational argument, I had not even understood death as a universal fate, and yet the rejection was already there.
That is why Paul’s description of death as “the last enemy” has always struck me as so right. It is almost as though something in us recognizes the enemy before our brains are developed enough to explain what, exactly, we are objecting to.
I wouldn’t present that as a proof of the Fall, but I do think it fits remarkably well with the Christian claim that, although human beings are naturally mortal creatures, death is not the final end for which the human person was made and we instinctively know that, we know it shouldn’t happen, we know it’s not how things were supposed to be.
We don’t perceive death as natural, we viscerally loathe it, even before our brains are developed enough to understand, really understand, the implications, or even before we realize that death is something that necessarily involves every living person.
Your example is correct but it doesn’t represent the default human reaction.
Children usually react very bad when they learn about death.
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