re: "Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remember You Will Die" (The New York Times, May 14, 2021)
Meditating on death is a healthy corrective to human vanity, but not if tainted with "this intuitive sense that the soul existed."
That sort of talk speaks of death denial by fantasizing an immortal soul. Our intuitive senses are nice, and can prompt explorations of what is or might be, but they cannot constitute sound grounds for belief. The reality is that we have no soul. The very idea is hard to make sense of: does it interact with the material body in the pineal gland as Descartes thought? Or is the intersection of the supernatural with the natural really in the left big toe, which is every bit as sensible and well supported by all the evidence.
We die. Death is death. It is exactly what it seems: the end of life. We may or may not be remembered for a short time by those who knew us, but most of us will, as humans always have, pass rapidly from not existing to not being remembered. None of us now alive have any living memory of our great great great grandparents. Nor will we be remembered any better when we no longer exist.
memento mori
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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.
It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/us/memento-mori-nun.html#commentsContainer&permid=112846798:112846798
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