When you are dead, you are dead?

The Columbian published a letter on July 25, 2014 that I will analyze by splitting the author’s letter into their two distinct sections.  The intact letter is available here.

Mr. Larry Little writes in his first three paragraphs: 

"Faith. The extraordinary ability to accept something as a fact when your common sense tells you it can't possibly be true.

Prayer. A verbal or mental offering to a never-seen supreme being in which there is absolutely no evidence of actual response or existence. Evidence of a prayer response is an audio recording, not that it finally rained.

Life after death? When you are dead, you are dead. You have stopped. You are not going to meet mommy and daddy again, either."

Mr. Little criticizes the religious for the “extraordinary ability to accept something as a fact when your common sense tells you it cannot possibly be true” then exempts himself by definitively claiming, “When you are dead, you are dead. You have stopped”. 

Mr. Little claim follows logically from his presupposition of realism, that only that which is perceived is real.  Since we cannot perceive what occurs beyond the grave, he concludes nothing exists.  Mr. Little cannot know this definitively.  All he can say is that no one knows.  This he does not do. 

Nor does Mr. Little ask the question of why do human beings even have a concept of “after-life”?  The concept awareness question is vastly different from the question “why would one desire an after-life?” which he dismisses as an emotional drive “to meet mommy and daddy again”. 

Yet, billions of human beings throughout history have and do have this very concept in some form. 

Mr. Little’s denial is an appeal to his own “extraordinary ability”.