It's not just the badness of death that's in question, but the badness of the end of all complex forms, due to entropy and the "death" of the universe. The latter judgment is less anthropocentric than the former one. I'd back up both judgments in aesthetic terms which I think are more objective than anthropocentric, but that's not really the topic of this article. The question here was whether an atheist can unsettle us by saying that life is accidental. I end up saying that even if he or she can't, there's something worse than an accident, which is the monstrousness of godless causality.

I'm going to be writing another article on the weirdness in question. I suspect that the monstrousness is the flipside of sacredness.

But even in this article I try to show that this isn't just a "personal" assessment, as in an idiosyncratic one. I say it's universal, existential, and transcendental because it follows from our social nature. Enlightened spiritualists who are content with what I'm calling the world's monstrousness tend to be introverted, asocial, or ascetic, so they're exceptions that prove the rule.