Back when I was a kid, I stumbled on a small stack of men's magazines that my father had carelessly left lying around. In a box. Way up in the top of a closet. Underneath a bunch of other stuff. Of course I read every one of them cover-to-cover. One of them (I think it was a Playboy) contained an interview with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Her work, along with that of others like her, in the study of impending death changed the way medical care is conducted for the terminally ill and helped spawn the hospice movement. I later read her book On Death and Dying, but it was there between photo spreads of gloriously naked women that I first learned about the 5 stages of grief that terminal patients pass through. In order, those stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It's the final stage, acceptance, that is most important, because it brings with it the inner peace that we all want for ourselves and our loved ones in the end.

I submit to you today that this peaceful acceptance of one's own death is the very meaning of atheism. It is simply an awakening to the facts in front of you your whole life. The realization that life is terminal, that every living thing ultimately passes out of existence. The acceptance of the randomness and inevitability of death is so freeing that it is almost spiritual in nature. The acceptance of your own death as natural renders the supernatural ideals of churches and religions unnecessary and irrelevant. Viewed from this perspective, religious dogma is really all about not getting to that final stage. There can be no acceptance. It's all denial, anger and bargaining with the invisible cloud-daddy.