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The Forum > Article Comments > The awful funeral II > Comments

The awful funeral II : Comments

By Peter Sellick, published 28/1/2020

Of course, funerals are sad, and people do cry, justifiably. But it was the absence of any other note than the sad that left me in such a bad way.

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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.
Posted by Alan B., Tuesday, 28 January 2020 9:50:16 AM
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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
Posted by diver dan, Tuesday, 28 January 2020 11:13:22 AM
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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.
Posted by SteeleRedux, Tuesday, 28 January 2020 11:53:06 AM
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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
Posted by Daffy Duck, Tuesday, 28 January 2020 2:02:12 PM
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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.
Posted by George, Wednesday, 29 January 2020 10:06:03 AM
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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]
Posted by Pogi, Wednesday, 5 February 2020 5:04:08 AM
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[Cont.]While society recommends that religious faith be respected and tolerated,

while I find the Golden Rule to be a useful guide in conjunction, I have no

serious difficulties in living my life accordingly. My milieu, at 82 years of age, is

filled with strands of joy and depression, of beauty and ugliness, of the

transcendental and the profane, of love and indifference, of courage and

cowardice, of intellectual rejoicing and wilful ignorance. Navigating life,

for me, has been an incredible adventure and I find it positively uplifting to

know that the Universe gave birth to me and to that Universe I will return when I

die. As far as I can discover, as with every particle in the Universe, the particles

that currently comprise me are eternal. Personal identity is an ephemeral

phenomenon that some value above all else. In society, we are what others

perceive us to be and AFAIAC there is not a whole heap of other stuff that

defines who we are. I live for the life I have with urgency and verve and a

conviction that it is the only time in our Universe that there will be something

that is me. I find it intensely ennobling to realise that I am here now and that I

will have been here and that the identity defining Warren Glover was a part of

such a remarkable agglommeration as our Universe. That identity will cease to

exist but the particles that gave me form are eternal. It is similarly ennobling to

know that I am and have been related to every other life-form that has ever

existed on this remarkable incubator and ark named Earth

It had never been my intention to reveal so much of who I am. But I realised that in order to confound and condemn the mean mind that draws upon religious faith for the temerity to brand my milieu as a charnel house, it might be the best way to destroy the impression he might impart to less experienced and less practised skeptics, enquirers and atheists. [Cont.]
Posted by Pogi, Wednesday, 5 February 2020 5:47:19 AM
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[Cont.] Nota Bene: "Human beings are counted as being entirely in the world and of the world."

This is the state of play. This is the highest station to which humans can legitimately aspire to, because there is nothing beyond that. To importune a deity further is to journey into La La Land [Disneyland for the pitifull]. Many humans find alleviation from loneliness and insecurity in an indifferent Universe through the company of an invisible friend. This yearning is found in most paragraphs of this Sellick narrative.

Sellick asks: "Why then, the Lord's prayer? Was this a failure of courage? Do we think that if we went all the way in rejecting all religious language that we would finally find ourselves alone and desperate in a cruel world?"

Or do the atheists demonstrate courtesy toward the theists among them at the funeral? You're so like the average christian, so average, so mediocre, so robotic and devoid of charity toward fellow humans.

And further: "We have lost the ability to speak into the face of death."

This is word soup, a verbal mixed salad of the "sure and certain hope" variety, designed for obliquity rather than enlightenment.

And lastly: ".......the Word has been set loose on the earth and disbelief on a massive scale will not alter that."

If you would capitalise "the Word" could not respect the Ark that gave you life and sustained you in this hostile Universe and capitalise the name that humankind has chosen for it?......" set loose on Earth" is simply acknowledging an obligation to our planet and gratitude to the courage and persistence of our ancestors.

"Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." - Carl Sagan.

A noble utterance announcing humankind's presence and its intention to persist.
Lachrymose pleadings directed at an imaginary friend for guidance demeans us and declares our unworthiness of the benefits we have inherited and of our potential that is awaiting discovery.
Posted by Pogi, Wednesday, 5 February 2020 6:08:14 AM
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