When a person dies, there is little that is more fatuously stupid than saying that the person will live on in the memory of those who loved him. A few months ago when I attended a funeral at a Diocese of Niagara church, that is more or less what the priest told the mourners: no mention of the Christian hope of resurrection at all. If it were not for the inconvenience of having to recite the liturgy, I suspect he would not even have mentioned God.<\/p>\n
The priest in question, while appearing to enjoy the pomp and pageantry his office affords, gave a passable impression of a functional atheist who hasn’t yet come out; after all, he wants to continue to collect his salary. For an evangelical atheist who has to try and make sense of mortality, it\u2019s even worse: the memory that lives on is nothing more than the mechanistically meaningless firing of a collection of synapses. Nevertheless, that is how atheists \u2013 the champions of reason \u2013 choose to comfort themselves and their children when faced with death.<\/p>\n
From here<\/a>:<\/p>\n For Julie Drizin, being an atheist parent means being deliberate. She rewrote the words to \u201cSilent Night\u201d when her daughters were babies to remove words like \u201choly,\u201d found a secular Sunday school where the children light candles \u201cof understanding,\u201d and selects gifts carefully to promote science, art and wonder at nature.<\/p>\n So when she pulled her 9- and 13-year-olds together this week in their Takoma Park home to tell them about the slaughter of 20 elementary school students in Newtown, Conn., her words were plain: Something horrible happened, and we feel sad about it, and you are safe.<\/p>\n And that was it.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve explained to them [in the past] that some people believe God is waiting for them, but I don\u2019t believe that. I believe when you die, it\u2019s over and you live on in the memory of people you love and who love you,\u201d she said this week. \u201cI can\u2019t offer them the comfort of a better place. Despite all the evils and problems in the world, this<\/em> is the heaven \u2014 we\u2019re living in the heaven and it\u2019s the one we work to make. It\u2019s not a paradise.\u201d<\/p>\n This is what facing death and suffering looks like in an atheist home.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When a person dies, there is little that is more fatuously stupid than saying that the person will live on in the memory of those who loved him. A few months ago when I attended a funeral at a Diocese … Continue reading