Life and Death

My father, whose intellect I esteem with fervor, has suggested I write on life and death.  I will start with death, because it is much more simple.  I find these questions overall to be very simple and am baffled why they are considered otherwise by most people.

Death is the state of not being alive.  When I die I will be dead, but before I was alive I was also dead.  There is no credible evidence (the evidence for an afterlife is based on anecdotes in the same manner as Sasquatch sightings) whatsoever that a mind functions without a body, or before someone is alive.  There can be nothing unpleasant about nothing, so why fear it?  I consider the inculcation of fear of being dead perhaps the most egregious evil of mainstream religion, right up there with guilt about normal, everyday biological functions.

Life is also simple.  It is better to be happy than miserable.  Perhaps it could be said that the elusive definition of happiness is that it is a state that is better than other states.  Therefore a life with more happiness in it is better than a life with less happiness.  Life is about having the greatest amount of happiness, it is that simple.  The how of happiness is much more complicated.  To an extent I wish I was born a hundred years from now when this problem will have been addressed quite thoroughly by neurologists.

Dying, rather than death, fits in the category of life.  There all sorts of reasons to be worried about the process of dying, as far as I can tell it is generally unpleasant.  In a question between the merits of being dead and a certain life of unpleasantness until one is dead, death seems to be the best decision.  Unless I live forever it seems to me almost certain that I will commit suicide at some point based on this very question.  This will not be a bad thing, it will help to maximize the happiness of my life.