Mind-Forged Manacles #2: The Myth of the Linear Path

There is I think a strong desire for the faithless, religionless person, as they travel through life and begin to notice the temporal linear path their life trajectory will take and ultimately end in death, to feel a desire to give in, let go all their carefully constructed intellectual and rational support structures of thoughts and theories of life, and surrender to something beyond them, to throw themselves on the mercy of the court and ask for a lenient sentence, to ask God to take them and comfort them in their growing fear that all this life they have lived without a clear religious belief might all add up to nothing, to quell the horror that they end up on their death bed with nothing, nothing to comfort them from the coming eternity of darkness that awaits them indifferently. As the non-religious person moves through life, and comes to recognize that their birth was a point in the past, and their death of a point to come in the future, they begin to understand that their parents will die, and though they cannot fully imagine what this will feel like, something in him grows, a deep fear that once his parents are gone the world will fall out from under him, and his lack of faith will cause his sanity to crumble under the weight of uncertainty and fear of solitude.