Metropol

Katherine wrote:I found your comments hurtful, insensitive, injudicious in the extreme and wholly unwarranted.

Well, in that case I will say this without any flippancy or mocking whatsoever.

I've sat through a few funerals, and I warn you, if you truly find the notion that you should be happy someone's dead on account of them going to heaven "hurtful, insensitive and injuducious in the extreme", then you could really be in for a shock, because if your grandad's funeral is anything like my grandparents' funerals, then there'll be a lot of that. Yes, from paid representatives of the church. (Maybe it won't be anything like my grandparents' funerals, but I wouldn't count on it. This is one of the most fundamental elements of christian doctrine, after all.) Seriously.

Jenny wrote:I've sat through a few funerals, and I warn you, if you truly find the notion that you should be happy someone's dead on account of them going to heaven "hurtful, insensitive and injuducious in the extreme", then you could really be in for a shock, because if your grandad's funeral is anything like my grandparents' funerals, then there'll be a lot of that. Yes, from paid representatives of the church. (Maybe it won't be anything like my grandparents' funerals, but I wouldn't count on it. This is one of the most fundamental elements of christian doctrine, after all.) Seriously.

Taking some measure of comfort in the belief that a loved one has gone to heaven is one thing.

But your notion that this is somehow mutually exclusive with the natural pain of bereavement - especially someone has died particularly suddenly or in difficult circumstances - is a bizarre one to say the least.