The Mortal Atheist: A Secular Guide to Death and Meaning (V Spohn)
It’s been five years since I started The Mortal Atheist, and now I’ve published the blog’s best contemplations and consolations in one place. The Mortal Atheist: A Secular Guide to Death and Meaning contains my favourite grim reapings and reassurances, collected from countless conversations and research rabbit holes, hundreds of books, articles, and lectures. This is the resource I could have benefited from when I lost my faith, the guide I wish I’d had when navigating existential dread without the solace of supernatural belief (without any belief in divine purpose or celestial safety).
This book will make you laugh (hopefully) and cry (probably). It will also make you feel better. That’s the only goal of the book, really. This is not a terror-filled scream into the void (although there have been plenty of those); it’s all my most hopeful, most insightful, and most comforting secular advice on mortality and meaning.
Because we’re living through strange times, it feels pertinent to say that no AI was used in generating any of this content (though every so often it helped me decide whether I wanted a comma or an ellipsis). This entire project has been organic, and the blog will remain organic. This book doesn’t exist in e-book format, in large part because of the aforementioned strange times, so please enjoy this exclusive preview from the paperback (included with permission from the author… who is me).
PROLOGUE
“Unlike most atheists, I can identify the exact moment I lost my faith. It was Richard Dawkins’ fault.
Even though I was raised in the United Church, I never seriously believed the claims of Christianity. By university, any remaining faith was dilute – I figured there was some higher power that loved and cared for me, and that death wasn’t the end, but I didn’t worry over the specifics. I did, however, think the specifics of organized religion were bogus. This accounts for why I enjoyed watching atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris challenge dogmatic claims. Further, I felt protected from their scrutiny; after all, I wasn’t religious. But during one debate, Dawkins turned away from his critique of religion and addressed those with more inscrutable beliefs… those who pinned their hopes on an unstudied, nebulous kind of divinity, and on vague conceptions of souls, “energy,” and cosmic consciousness. To these people he said: your beliefs are equally bogus.
He was, of course, talking to me.
Cognitive calamity ensued.
That one statement ruptured whatever thread had been holding me to my remaining supernatural hopes. I clung to the fraying ends, but my faith was irretrievable.
To say I “became an atheist” is missing the point; the “becoming” was an immediate and involuntary nightmare. I didn’t cope well with this new faithlessness. Overwhelmed with anxiety and panic attacks, I ruminated endlessly about the oblivion of death and possible pointlessness of everything. Dread was a constant companion, as were thoughts about nihilism and eternal nothingness. A “dark night of the soul” would have been an apt description, if it weren’t for my new suspicion that souls didn’t exist either.
My neurons rallied to protect my sanity. Over the years, I found myself mentally sidestepping any existential contemplation. If thoughts about death or meaninglessness surfaced, I quickly diverted my attention. Psychologists have a fancy word for this: denial. This cognitive maneuvering sufficed, until it didn’t. The COVID-19 pandemic brought death (and absurdity) from the fringes of my consciousness into full awareness. Reminders were everywhere, all the time. Denial became untenable.
Sent home in 2020 to work remotely, I found myself with several extra hours no longer needed for commuting. What a great time to pick up a hobby… or to renew an existential crisis! Fear swept back in, but I engaged it. While others took up crafting and sourdough starters, I took up writing about the science and philosophy of mortality and meaninglessness.
(I can’t crochet or bake, but I can make everyone at a dinner party uncomfortable.)
This hobby (crisis) became a project: map the warp and weft of existential dread and find the best secular advice for managing it. Over the last five years, I’ve explored content from philosophers, psychologists, and palliative care specialists; from neuroscientists, biologists, poets, physicists, morticians, historians, naturalists, and skeptics. I’ve interviewed hospice workers and death doulas, professors who study death anxiety, and educators who study purpose. I’ve talked to atheists who claim to have no fear, and atheists who have plenty; atheists who are contending with nihilism, and atheists who are facing death. I’ve devoured books, essays, podcasts, and lectures; taken courses, attended death cafés, and volunteered for research studies. I’ve also spent a lot of time contemplating my own mortality and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life.
This book is a distillation of that content, those conversations and contemplations. All from the perspective of an agnostic: someone who doesn’t know for sure. And all from the perspective of a mortal atheist: someone who suspects that this life is all that matters, and that this life is all we get.”
Copyright © 2025 by V Spohn
A huge thank you to everyone for your continued support over the years. “If all we’re doing is pushing boulders, the company has been excellent.”
-V