Image via WikipediaI promise this is the last religion topic; I will switch gears after this.
One of my favorite or at least frequently read religious writers is Ronnie McBrayer, author of “Leaving Religion, Following Jesus”. He has a column in the Saturday Detroit News.
The reason I read him is because he is not the fundamentalist that many Christians have become; he is a down to earth Christian that asks where does Jesus fit in among all this fundamentalism.
In his latest article “Death challenges us to keep faith”, he disappoints me by going back to the age old emotional argument for unfair death.
He raises the old questions about why do good people have to die. Why do good people suffer? Why an all powerful and loving God allows this suffering and death to happen?
But he does not answer them but uses the same ole’ pabulum remarks made at all funerals; they are reunited with loved ones, in the presence of Jesus, no longer in pain, free of cancer.
He says that our faith tells us that one day, God’s kingdom will come and all will be right with the world. No more doctor visits, no more cancer, no more anguished families and no more unanswered questions.
Sure, these are very comforting words and maybe that is what the grieving want to hear and it may make them feel better and this is what I was talking about when I said religious beliefs are natural to humans. We don’t want questions, voids, stress…we want answers…we want someone to tell us definitively that our loved ones are in a better place and we all will be there someday.
Unfortunately faith is exactly what it means; a belief in something imagined and hoped for but not something that has a snow ball’s chance in hell of being true.
I thought that Ronnie McBrayer should have stressed our shared humanity. We are all part of this world and are all brothers and sisters in our humanness. Suffering and death are part of being human and living on this earth.
But being humans we can also strive to make our lot on this earth a better lot by joining in battles to defeat sickness and death instead of offering up pie in the sky nonsense that is soothing but in the end worthless.
We invented a God that is all powerful but has no power over our well being. We invented heaven and hell to give us direction and purpose and maybe our brains have evolved to keep inventing these beliefs that make us feel better.
I would prefer that we start putting some faith into our shared humanity and what we can do together as humans which is very real and doable and quit playing with all this supernatural mumbo-jumbo that just makes us feel good...
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