in their concept of a life after death.
Now, since I cannot experience their thinking, I don't know if they are truly confident or, like some, have convinced themselves in some way, but they claim confidence.
On the other hand, death is a real thing. No confidence is required to see that death is the end of an individual's existence. I once happened on a Chumash burial site that had been exposed by a swollen creek following a rainstorm. A human skull, partly embedded in the bank of that creek, was newly exposed.
I contemplated that skull for about half an hour, trying to imagine how that person had lived, however long ago that might have been. Based on my knowledge of the Chumash culture and my knowledge of the area where that person had been buried, I could come up with a plausible image of that person's life.
However, no amount of imagination could convince me that that Chumash person still existed as anything at all. There was his or her skull, partly exposed by a flood, perhaps a few thousand years after burial. The skull was there, but the person it belonged to was no more. We have evidence of what happens after death, but no evidence that individuals continue in any way once they die.
For me, that doesn't represent a problem that I worry about. Here I am, after all. Living is the reward for being alive. I need nothing more than that to live as well as I can.
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