People always talk about the great
deal of HOPE that religion gives them. But it gives just as many people – if
not far more – a great deal of fear as well. Fear of eternal damnation, for
example. Dying is scary enough, without having to add to that experience the
specter of possibly roasting for all eternity in hell, and all for the sin of
being human.
My father took comfort in his
religion his whole life. And by doing so, it made him accepting of a life he
struggled to be happy with. This was not the fault of religion, of course, as
his myriad issues came from too many sources to count. Religion simply provided
a means by which to put all of the crap he had experienced his entire life,
into some framework that made some sense. He could “live with it all,” in other
words, by know that justice would be meted out in the in, as long as he
“believed.”
But when he finally reached the end
of his life, he was terrified of dying. I do not honestly know what terrified
him. Perhaps it was just the process of letting go of life itself, and everyone
he knew and loved. Or maybe it was just the physical and psychological
experience of dying, of which I can hardly even imagine. Or perhaps, along with
all of this and more, he was also scared to death of having failed to
ultimately understand what it was his “religion” required of him, and therefore
trembled at the thought of spending all of eternity in hell, for just being
human, and making a mistake.
Either way, I don’t have much use
for a philosophy that purports to lull people into a sense of euphoric
adoration of a “being” that may or may not exist, who may or may not love us,
and even if “it” does, “it” may or may not send us to an eternal hell anyway –
because we earned it! The only sane response to such a philosophy is – to hell
with that!
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