One of the reasons I chose death as the object of our new faith is it’s obviousness. In other words, I don’t believe the people of today’s world are willing to put a belief at the center of their being that contradicts their ordinary way of assessing reality. To begin to understand how death meets this test, let’s first look at some statistics about death.
The number of people who have lived on this earth varies depending on what you count as human and your statistical methodology, but in general, we believe about 100 billion people have been born. Regardless of your methodology, however, or even your religious faith, everyone agrees that no one on our planet born before the 20th century still walks this earth. That’s an incredible statistic. No one. Over 90 billion lives and zero survivors.
Let’s consider a few notable deaths. Methuselah, by some accounts lived a long time–end result–dead. Moses–dead before he even got to the promised land. The pharaohs–mummies, but not alive. The Caesars–all dead. Jesus–crucified and died (by some historical accounts, he came back for a bit and may come back again, but he’s currently not walking among us). Siddhartha, the original Buddha, ate some bad mushrooms and died. Muhammad–died of a fever. Sir Isaac Newton–survived the apple, died in his sleep. Einstein–died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, and although Thomas Harvey did remove his brain against Einstein’s wishes, he quickly proved that brains don’t work without the rest of the body.
In the world today, it seems sometimes that no one agrees about anything. Isn’t it astonishing then that with all of our different belief systems, with all of our strategies to elude death, that no amount of wealth, no god, no belief, and no science has ever managed to keep a human alive much past 100 years? Amazingly, no one even makes that claim. Everyone agrees that everyone born before the 20th century is now dead.
That’s the first thing that makes Thanatism so special–its universality. The core premise, that you, as a human, will someday die is something that we can all believe in. Why is this so important? Well, we’ll go into greater depth later when we discuss how Thantatism affects our relationship with society, but the fact is, we humans need a core belief we can ALL believe in. If we all start with differing core beliefs, there is no chance for us to all agree on the conclusions. In fact, if we can’t start with a common core belief, we can’t really even have a meaningful discussion.
This doesn’t mean that we’ll all agree about everything as Thanatists. I don’t even think we’d want that as humans. What it does mean, however, is that we can all start in the same place, and if we can do that, we can at least have a conversation about where we go from there. Thanatism is a unique faith because it’s the only faith where its core premise is so obvious, so utterly banal, that it has a chance, no matter how small, to unite humanity.