If indeed there is nothing after life, then is life not pretty pointless?

Well, how does an afterlife help? If the afterlife is not eternal, you face the same problem as the afterlife comes towards its end. If the afterlife is eternal, your current life will be entirely pointless compared with an eternity of new memories and experiences. Unless the afterlife is mostly about reminiscing your former life, which sounds it would be pretty dreadful after a while.

TJ:

Anyway, has anyone else dealt with the emotional aspects of death in atheist children? The best I can come up with so far has been to tell him I love him, to remind him that life is worth living even if the inevitable end if unfair, and to try not to think about it too, too much for the next 5 years or so, until he has a little more emotional development under his belt to make him a bit better able to cope.

Interestingly, I went through such a phase around that age, too. For me the preoccupation with death passed pretty fast, and mostly on its own IIRC (my parents just told me I wasn't going to die for a while :), so let's hope you and him don't have to wait anything like 5 years. You might have already talked to your son about non-existence before birth and how that doesn't seem so dreadful. And, hopefully this doesn't sound too lame, but what about comparing life to something like a book or a movie - you know that they will inevitably end, but that doesn't mean that it feels pointless to enjoy them (although of course the difference is that you remember the book or the movie afterwards, at least for a while, but that's not the main point I think)

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
But you'll never know

Suppose I were to kidnap you and tell you that tomorrow I am going to cut off your arm. Naturally, you are rather upset about this, so to reassure you I tell you the process will be completely painless and you won't feel a thing. Should you now not fear the loss of your arm? Of course you should! There's nothing inherently terrible about living without an arm - there are people who are born that way who know no different. But that's not the point. The point is that you are better off with two arms rather than one. By cutting off your arm, I put you in a worse off state. I remove something of value. In the same way, you are better off existing than not existing, and death is detrimental because you are losing something of value.

Just because we might recognise that there probably isn't anything special after physical death doesn't mean we have to rationalise death away as some sort of OK thing. If anybody truly believed that there was nothing undesirable with death, then they wouldn't mind the prospect of some crazed gunman killing them thirty seconds from now. But I'm sure most people would prefer to go on living, they'd prefer to retain all the possibilities that come with continued existence. Fear of death is a consequence of valuing life. I think the solution to the problem of the fear of death is to recognise death for the undesirable thing it is and try to do something about it. After all, we fear things because we recognise them as things best avoided. For millennia people have tried to avoid death by hoping that performing certain bizarre rituals would encourage other magical beings to save them from death. Atheism involves accepting that no gods are going to rescue you, so naturally it's up to us to rescue ourselves. Of course, if it hadn't been for centuries of people suppressing scientific advancement because they were so sure they were going to be rescued, we'd probably all be immortal right now.

So I think we should just accept that death is a bad thing, and try to get rid of it. Death is a problem which needs to be solved. Even if we don't succeed for ourselves, then perhaps we might allow others in the future to live without it. And if we cannot completely conquer death in our lifetimes, we still might succeed in giving ourselves a few extra years with which to enjoy the wonders of existence; to learn to explore, to experience joy and witness beauty. That would still be an improvement.

I too have a ten-year-old skeptic. When he was two, my ex- (his mom) was diagnosed with breast cancer and (long story short) was subsequently told that it had metastatized and she had seven months to live. Jake was five at the time. It hurt to tell him this, but his mother and I had promised each other that we would never lie to him (except about Santa Claus, heh). I drew the unhappy task of telling him. Of course we cried. I pulled no punches, not one. I'll never forget him telling me "But I don't want her to die!" What could I say? I told him that we all shall die, no matter what, and that to worry about it when it was well outside one's control was a useless waste of energy and he'd just as well ought to get used to it. He's now like Dad -- fearing more the deaths of others, mainly because he doesn't stop to ponder his own that much. I'm not sure this'll be helpful to you; I hope it is. The only real advice I can give is this: don't bullshit your son. (Something tells me that this advice, however, is superfluous).

Good luck.

Greta:

That was beautifully written, and very moving. And it speaks many of my feelings in language which had me feeling misty eyes.

And since we're on a musical tack --

"You can choose a ready guide in
some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide,
you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears,
or kindness that can kill.
I will choose the path that's clear;
I will choose free will."

"This line of reasoning is often used by theists in support of the idea of the immortal soul. The problem is that life is fundamentally not matter and energy, but information, encoded and expressed in matter and energy. There is no conservation law for information. Just ask anyone who fails to make computer backups and has their hard drive crash."

1. No one is supporting an eternal soul here - just the idea of matter-energy coming together in the proper proportions to form a life exactly like another that came before it. I can see this happening purely by chance as the proverbial "universal dice" are thrown over and over again.

Also, you might want to look at M-theory: if it holds true, there may very well be numerous "universes" (a bit counter-intuitive as the universe is supposed to be everything) with a near infinite number of worlds exactly like ours - so exact that there may be other lives just like our own in them. From this perspective, we never truly "die" as there's always a version of ourselves that lives on.

I'm not saying this is absolutely true, but it is a perspective on death worth considering: we may already have eternal life, we just don't experience it as it happens in "universes" far removed from our own...

2. Information doesn't exist until there is an intelligent entity to process the noise of his environment and sort it into data - which is then organized into information. Where you information in nature, I just see matter-energy interactions that we catagorized for the sake of reference post facto.

On a more serious note, there's the evolutionary perspective. Death is not just a consequence of our inadequate "design". Death is a feature, not a bug. Evolution works better with death than without it. To see this, just compare the complexity and achievements of sexually reproducing mortal organisms with asexual unicellular life. For an organism of the latter kind, death is probabilistic, statistically inevitable given enough time, but never strictly a certainty. They just keep dividing into daughter cells, oozing into an indefinitely long future.

So what does that insight say to us humans contemplating our own deaths? One thing is this: we owe it to future generations to get out of the way and give them their chance someday.

Finally, to Punisher1984, who wrote

Just a thought: since life is a matter-engery interaction - and there's no way matter-energy can be created or destroyed - is it possible for the life of an individual to play out all over again if the proper circumstances came together? What if it already has happend multiple times in the past that we are unaware of?

This line of reasoning is often used by theists in support of the idea of the immortal soul. The problem is that life is fundamentally not matter and energy, but information, encoded and expressed in matter and energy. There is no conservation law for information. Just ask anyone who fails to make computer backups and has their hard drive crash.

I really enjoyed that. Awesome.

shifty

That seems a very high price to pay simply so as to remove all traces of cognitive dissonance."

As ebon said, you are wrong in your understanding of cognitive dissonance. You seem to be saying that you would rather beleive in nonsense and be content in your willful ignorance than attempt to understand anything. As for "nebulous terms", I can't imagine anything more nebulous than religion and specifically Christianity, with how its practitioners vary wildly with intepreting it.