I get that you don't get that his man was loved by those who miss him. And those who love and have fond memories of a beautiful old man are devastated by his loss!

Or that you believe the man, Jesus Christ, is God and to be worshipped as if he a man was God!

Even when he reputedly said, It is not I who do these things, but the father in me.

Thus defining his role to that of an instrument of God, not the Deity you worship care of the agency of Constatine, the real founder of the hybrid you label erroneously, Christianity!

And given this is so, none of you who allegedly serve this hybrid Constantine creation with its shipload of latter-day pagan ritual, imposed and mandated celibacy and man-made "holy sacraments, i.e., the sacrament of marriage and a confessional that has a man-made seal on it! The only thing that protected/protects the still frocked evil-doers in your ranks? Have any moral authority!
Alan B.

Thanks Peter Selleck.

There are two views on this. The first is personal salvation, the second is, cultural demise as we interpret the absence of a belief in God will bring to society.

A world without God is a world without hope.

My personal bible is one of those tiny ones which contain the New Testament and the book of psalms.
That small book contains all that is required for a sense of hope in the future, and spiritual guidance which will steer an honourable course of morality through life.

Dan

Dear Diver Dan,

It is the old Testament which sustains me rather than the new and therefore the notion I could get by with just the Psalms and the New does not sit well.

The Jewish Torah has sustained those of the Jewish faith for successive millennia and through trials and tribulations which would have seen off other religions. Why would you exclude those teachings from your life?

Dear Peter,

I think the sense of something lacking came specifically from you. At my grandmother's funeral the priest's words were alienating and exclusionary to many who attended. By the sounds of it the conduct of the service you attended was alienating for you but I wonder if others felt the lack of a high vaulted space as keenly as you did.

The fetishisation of death in the Islamic and Christian faiths has always been problematic for me.

It is perfectly human to keenly feel the loss of a loved one. In part they are losing some of themselves, the memories directly co-created are no longer validated by another. No more birthday calls from a grandmother or grandfather, no more recollections by that person of a childhood beyond your memory capacity. No more reflections on your development as a person from someone who has known and cared for you since you first arrived. These are all worthy of engendering sorrow and are a very human response.

It is okay to grieve. Let them be.

I have been to only a few funeral services - my mother and father, and both in laws. The first two were conducted in a Lutheran church, the latter in an Anglican. As a result of his WWII service my father had no time for the superficial pieties and faux hopefulness of the Christian religion. My mother and two in laws were only nominally religious - they seldom went to church.

All four of them suffered dreadfully in the last months of their lives, so from my perspective their deaths were a timely release from their awful suffering.

The funeral services were uniformly awful, completely empty of anything even remotely suggesting or invoking a sacred dimension - just all the naive hopefulness about "being with 'Jesus'".

But what is the Truth about death?
Is it at all possible to find it within the spiritually empty fortress of conventional exoteric Christian-ism?
Of course not!

http://www.beezone.com/death_message.html

http://www.aboutadidam.org/dying_death_and_beyond/index.html

Dear Peter,

In general an interesting article.

However, if you agree with that quote from Carl Sagan, why are you surprised that your “overwhelming impression was impoverishment”.

Belief in “afterlife” - whatever one understands by it - gave sense to Christian funerals attended by mostly Christians for centures in the past. So what you were present at was simply not meant to be a traditional Christian funeral by those who decided to “celebrate the life of the deceased" in this way, with a secularized “pseudoliturgy”. It was satisfying to the organisers - and apparently also to the majority of attendees - although a Christian might indeed find it impoverishing. The deceased - since the participants did not believe in
"afterlife" - could obviously not benefit from it.

Christians, having become a cultural minority in the West have to get used to such feelings of impoverishment at most of post Christian ceremonies, much of contemporary culture and its manifestations and occasions, not only funerals. These funerals might be as psychologically rewarding to post-Christians as the traditional form used to be to Christians.

I think impoverished is not so the individual but our Western World.

While Peter Sellick seems to be regarded by a considerable majority of
contributors and readers here to be a communicator of moderate demeanour and forgivable bigotry, the indulgence he thinks he can extract from those in opposition to his allegiances and the throw-away put-downs he hopes will slip by unnoticed, are evidence of his low opinion of that indulgence and the literary license he thinks he is entitled to.

I refer to: "The point is that the rejection of Christianity has led to the impoverished funeral during which we can only listen to the mourning of loved ones. We are left with misery and loss. There exists no other dimension. The reason we spend so much time recounting the life of the dead is because only actions in this world count. The infinite, the eternal and the invisible do not exist. Human beings are counted as being entirely in the world and of the world. This means that the world becomes no more than a charnel house." [Cont]