Gavin Scott wrote:Jenny wrote:Hold on a second, I was the ONLY person in this whole thread to actually take her religion seriously. Everybody else said "oh that's a bad thing", which is about as blunt a rejection of the most basic tenets of christianity as you can get.
Come off it Jenny. You weren't taking it seriously, you were taking the piss.
I wouldn't say "taking the piss" exactly. Of course I was mocking her beliefs, but I was doing it by extrapolating logically the consequences of believing in an afterlife as whoop-de-do as the one described by her religion. I've been to a few religious funerals and they do speak very highly of the state of being dead. Paradise, streets of gold, blah blah blah. And I looked around at all the people crying and thought "not only is this bollocks, but you all know it's bollocks. If you really believed all this, you'd be delighted". And let's face it, without the "reward" aspect, there's no point in believing any of the rest of it. If you don't believe in heaven, then the whole edifice crumbles (oooh, nice cliche).
I'm a great beleiver in that (goodness knows I've needled Kat enough myself), but there is a time and a place.
No. I don't accept that the comforting lie should have a free run at
any point, especially this point - the exact point where religion moves in and preys on the insecure, feeding them cock-and-bull tales of immortality. I've always been very aware of my mortality, and it took me ages to figure out that other people
weren't, that they blocked it from their minds as much as possible. And death is a fundamental -
the fundamental - fact of, well, life. It's not nice, but there it is. So of course it angers me when institutions try to peddle the myth of immortality.
You don't honestly expect a Christian (or anyone) to be joyful when a relative they love dies, do you?
That depends on whether they genuinely believe in the afterlife or are just desperately clinging to the comforting lie because they can't stand to face up to the fact they're going to die and there's nothing awaiting them "on the other side". If they truly believed in the afterlife as described by centuries of christian tradition, then yes, I certainly would expect them to be joyful. That they don't truly believe it at least provides a glimmer of hope (oooh, another nice cliche!) that they have some inkling of reality, even if they do suppress it. You know the saying that "Man is the only animal to be aware of his own mortality"? Well, you do now. But I've always felt if was the wrong way round. Man is the only animal capable of denying his own mortality. It makes sense evolutonarily: combine large brain power with an instinct for survival, and of course man is going to try to "explain away" death. But we should have moved past that by now. We should have moved past it long ago.
We've made great progress in this country during my lifetime as regards religion. Twenty years ago, a random person picked off the street was C-of-E until proven otherwise. Now a random person picked off the street is No Organised Religion until proven otherwise. That's pretty good going. But there's still an inclination to view religion, and particularly christianity, as basically harmless. But the fact is, it's still lying to people about
themselves, saying "no, it's OK, death isn't the end". If anything in human existence is truly evil (and yes, I accept that's a humungously big "if"), then peddling the immortality myth would have to be right up there. It's bad enough that people die, but being so reluctant to face it that you live a lie as well is doubly so. Or more.
It was a flippant remark in my view - and I'm usually pretty sharp at spotting them, if I say so myself.
Do not mistake my anger for flippancy. (That sounded very pretentious. Let's have another cliche to end on instead.)
Phew, what a scorcher!