Death is Really, Really Scary

What are your views on the afterlife? Especially, what happens to people who don’t agree that your religion is the correct one?

Anyone who has read my other posts in this series should know by now that I find a lot about religion, and especially about Christianity, to be entirely despicable. Christian doctrines relating to Hell and Salvation are among those that I find particularly toxic, and believers in such various doctrines range from entirely and purposefully hateful (e.g. Westboro Baptist Church) to blissfully (for them) unaware of whatever harm they cause (e.g. the vast majority of moderate-to-liberal Christians in the US).

"Still Life with a Skull" by Philippe de Champaigne. In this 17th century painting the flower, skull, and hourglass stand for Life, Death, and Time.

Here’s the thing: Death is really, really scary. It’s easy enough to explain what happens to our bodies and our stuff when we die. We decompose, and our things end up in landfills, thrift stores, or the dusty corners of our descendants’ attics and crawlspaces. The question that has preoccupied people for, in all likelihood, millions of years isn’t answered by that explanation, however. What we all want to know is where do we go? What happens to whatever it is that makes us, well, us?

Circumcision, Religion, Law, and My Road To Being Very Angry

So, I tried really hard yesterday to get some work done on my series on Questions for Religious Believers, but instead I ended up spending all day writing about penises on my Tumblr. It’s been a relatively interesting discussion, and I think it’s an important one so I’ll link it here (and update the links if/when it continues) for your reading pleasure.

Part 1 – In Which I Point Out the Obvious

Part 2 – In Which I Offer Some Fact Bombs

Part 3 – In Which I Recommend Some Resources and Get a Little Personal

Part 4 – In Which I Start to Get Testy

Part 5 – In Which I Get Increasingly Pedantic As Well As Grumpy

NEW! Part 6 – In Which I Just About Lose My Shit

Related Post 1 – In Which I Feel Validated For Spending So Much Time On All This

Related Post 2 – In Which I Give My Opinion On Ear-Piercing, Too

Changing the Way I Look at Poverty

When I was still waiting tables, I worked with a woman who was around my age, a single mother of a three-year-old daughter who had moved to Ohio fleeing from an abusive relationship with a man who threatened to kill her and her child. She came here because she had an aunt who lived relatively nearby, but she lived by herself with her daughter in a studio apartment in a complex that was about 3 miles from the nearest grocery store.

She had a car, but would hitch rides to work (and to and from her daughter’s daycare) with other employees because she couldn’t afford insurance and had expired out of state tags which she couldn’t afford to get replaced. She was terrified of getting in any kind of trouble here because she didn’t want to risk any chance that her ex-husband would somehow find out where she lived.

I drove her home from work a few times and spent some time with her and her daughter, at which point I found out that they were getting all of their food from a Thornton’s convenience store that was within walking distance, or what is walking distance when you have a toddler in tow and no one to babysit. She herself was basically living on peanut-butter sandwiches because they have enough calories, fat, and protein to keep one alive. She had nothing to cook with, anyway. She had packed up her daughter, herself, some clothes, and the some of the child’s toys, but little else when she came here.