Religion: reflections on death

"Them not busy being born are busy dying", Bob Dylan



Do you ever get the feeling that someone, or something, is looking over your shoulder?

I do.

Many people think it morbid to speak of death. I don't agree. The fact is that most people are afraid of death. The fear of death is the root cause of religion. We simply refuse to admit that dying is the end of us, so we invent a state of immortality that waits just beyond the veil.

In this afterlife we will be met by all those who have gone before. It comforts us, in this life, to believe that those loved ones who have died before us reside in the afterlife and are waiting for us. This is not new. All religions throughout time, Christianity being reletively new, describe an afterlife...and how to get there. Perhaps it is true..I don't know. But religion isn't about dying...it's about conquering death.


The Book of Common Prayer says that, "In the midst of life we are in death". I can't argue with that. But it doesn't make me uncomfortable. I can see death coming for me, waiting for me, but I am not worried by this. All life is mortal. Any belief in an afterlife that excludes all other forms of life is to me utterly arrogant and totally imaginairy. I like that whole "dust to dust" thing. Out of the darkness and void, into the light for a brief moment, and back again into the darkness and void.

Frankly, if the afterlife is filled with the kinds of assholes that filled this life, then I welcome the void. Humanity's obsession with "Paradise" has blinded us to the world in which we reside. Our view that this life, and world, is a temporary place has led us to treat it as such.

I don't want to come off sounding negative here...I love life and hope to make it last as long as possible. But death is a part of that and I will not ignore it or be afraid of it.
John Oxenham, and English poet says, " For death begins at life's first breath, and life begins at touch of death".