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Living With Death Without God – An Interview with author Valerie Jack

I had the pleasure of interviewing writer Valerie Jack about our usual Sentientism questions but also about how non-religious people deal with death and grieving – the subject of her wonderful book “Living With Death Without God“. In a change from our usual podcast and video format – this one’s in good-old-fashioned text. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

What’s real? Did you grow up in a religious or non-religious family? How have your views about what’s real and how best to understand our universe changed since then?

My father is atheist and my mother has some loosely Christian beliefs, but neither of them really discussed their world view with me when I was growing up. My parents felt we should make up our own minds and my sisters and I were not Christened. My mum did send me to Sunday School for a while, where I enjoyed collecting the stamps, and I attended a Church of England primary school, but I have never believed in God. I used to just mouth the words to hymns and the Lord’s prayer in school assemblies because I didn’t want to say things I didn’t believe.

I think I’ve always tended to be fairly rational in my worldview, but I am not a scientist, nor entirely a materialist. I’m happy to live with the mystery of why there’s all there is instead of nothing, and with the feeling that there’s more to us than surgeons can take apart.

What matters? How has your thinking about the roots of ethics and morality changed over time? What do good and bad or right and wrong mean to you now?

I did most of my growing up pre-internet and didn’t travel much as a child. Over the handful of decades I’ve lived so far, I’ve gradually developed some sense of the scale and diversity of our planet and its inhabitants. The Golden Rule ‘do as you would be done by’ can be a useful rule of thumb, but it has its limitations if we assume that everyone thinks in the same way as we do and has the same priorities. I hope that over time my thinking about ethics and morality has become less black and white and more nuanced. Acknowledging complexity and ambiguity can feel unsettling, but I now believe that our thinking about morality ought to be rooted in a compassionate willingness to understand the experiences and diverse contexts of others and to act, as far as possible, in the interests of everyone.

It is right to do what we can to help our fellow creatures and our planet to thrive, whilst aiming to reduce suffering and minimise any negative impact to our actions. It is wrong to fail to do those things. But ‘doing what we can’ is going to look different for different people. Those who are struggling to meet their basic and immediate needs may have limited excess capacity to broaden and lengthen their ethical focus, whilst those who are privileged enough to be operating further up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs have an obligation to do more.

Who matters? How has your moral scope changed over time – particularly how you’ve come to include non-human sentient beings in your moral thinking? How has that affected you practically and socially (e.g. veganism)? How do you think your humanism relates to your veganism (and maybe your sentientism)?

I subscribe to the sentientist position that all sentient creatures, capable of feeling pleasure and pain, matter. I stopped eating meat aged eight after I saw battery chickens on the TV. There was an ethical, empathetic element to my decision, but it was an easy decision for me to make because I didn’t enjoy the texture or taste of most meat. The only thing I regretted losing was Peperami!

As I have got older, I have become more aware of the anthropocentricity of Christian and other religious cultures and have tried to extricate my thinking from that cultural influence. We are animals. We are not a special, separate class of being with any ordained right of dominion over other creatures. Still, for a long time, veganism seemed to me like an extreme position. And I loved cheese!

It took me to the age of 36 to realise that baby cows get taken away from mothers soon after birth and that superfluous male chicks get fed into a macerator. The world is full of suffering. Most of us most of the time turn our backs, in conscious or subconscious self-preservation. It is painful to look at suffering and it often involves personal sacrifice to actively respond to the suffering we’ve witnessed.

When I became more aware of how my choices were contributing to the suffering of other sentient creatures, I decided to try a different choice. I’d go vegan for a week to test whether this was something I could do long term. Being vegan turned out to be a choice well within my capacity to commit to and I’m now seven years in.

I know I’m far from morally spotless. I still turn away from suffering sometimes. If I didn’t, I would be crushed and overwhelmed. But I will try to do what I can, and remain open to the possibility I may be capable of doing more.

How can we make a better future? Non-religious people sometimes struggle with moving away from supernatural beliefs – feeling gaps re: religious community, finding meaning, coping with death… How do people and communities with a naturalistic worldview approach those topics (as explored in Living with Death without God)? What advice would you give given what you’ve learned from them?

Non-religious people tend not to believe that everything happens for a reason, in accordance with a higher plan. While researching and writing Living with Death without God, I was reassured to discover that many non-religious people find in their worldview a freedom and a lightness of being. When we lose a loved one or receive a diagnosis of a life-limiting illness, we can be unburdened by the question ‘why me?’ No God is punishing us. Freed from these negative meanings, we may interpret events more neutrally, accepting that there is a randomness to the biological processes of living and dying.

Most people find some comfort and meaning in the idea that we and those we love will live on in some way beyond physical death. For non-religious people, there is a kind of ‘symbolic immortality’ in reflecting that we live on in hearts and minds and that the ripples of our lives will continue to spread outwards, onwards. I think there is real value to be found in the feeling that our lives will continue to matter. From an atheist perspective though, true immortality isn’t possible. There will be a final end to human life and to our planet – these facts won’t be part of our experience though, so probably they’re not the facts that really matter most. The desire to live on in some way I think has a lot to do with wanting to be loved and valued: fortunately, for most of us, these things are possible.

Though there is an inevitable element of aloneness to bereavement, illness and dying, having others with us on our journey can be immensely nourishing and supportive. For some, belonging to a community with others who share a similar worldview is important. For Living with Death without God, I attended various non-religious congregations, secular and humanist groups, where communities are being built on shared discussion, endeavour, and in some cases, song and ritual. Many people, of course, find comfort and connection in ways unrelated to being non-religious – through groups based on a common interest or on a shared circumstances of loss or illness. For me, hearing all the stories so generously shared with me, and being able to pass those on to others, has deepened my feeling of being a part of the human family.

Many of those I spoke to were older and wiser than me. From listening to them, I came to understand that if you think about what matters most to you in life and consciously apply your time and energy to those important things, as far as possible, you give yourself the best possible chance of reaching the end of life with few regrets and unafraid to die.

Many I spoke to also told me about the added pain, when going through the toughest times, felt when ‘friends’ would cross the road, pretending not to have seen them, to avoid a conversation. Grieving atheists can’t be comforted by platitudes about God or heaven. It can be difficult and daunting to find appropriate words. If you don’t know what to say, it is ok to say that. Simply being there, being willing to listen and sit with another person’s pain can make their suffering a little easier to bear.

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