Requiem for an atheist.

 You don’t believe in any god. Okay. But you are spiritual. That is, you have an essence. You may call it a soul. (Few are the atheists who believe themselves to be merely electro-mechanical engines.) What happens to it after you are departed? Not heaven nor hell, surely. Then what?

What’s worse than hell?  Nothingness, a place or no place, where there is no vision while it’s neither dark nor light. There’s nothing to touch, to feel, to hear, or to see.  There can be no experience. There is no cold nor warmth. There are no sounds. There is no pleasure; no safety nor danger; no sanity nor the opposite. There is no thirst nor hunger. There is no looking ahead nor back, nor the passage of time. There are no hopes or expectations. There is only an eternal now, filled with void, framed by emptiness, floating in a world of nothing. You cry out, even for pain. There is none. Nothingness may be populated by millions, though each is unconscious and alone from the other. You are neither alive nor dead. There is only nothing --- forever.