Majin finally lost a very close family member after the protracted saga we’ve been trying to deal with lately.
She’s asked me to vent on her behalf on the crappyness of what has ensued… the sting is still a bit too much for her.
So this weekend we ended up in a charismatic church in pretoria with a conglomeration of semi-astranged family and congregation members. There was a number of things I found just strange, weird, annoying, and downright irritating.
Cheifly the problem is being in a group like this and knowing that speaking up and making these people think about or consider the truth is just a bad idea, won’t achieve anything, and it’s really not the place for it either. BUT then why must I endure all their bullshit? So point 1: Religion is so one-sided and in my “respect” I just let it be, making the problem worse. But I can’t really see a healthy alternative. Especially not on a dark day like that.
Being Afrikaans there’s a level of assumed “Christian-ness” that the average person in a church won’t think twice about. Obviously this meant a lot of “(s)he is in a better place now” being flung around as a consolation. Here’s the problem: To a skeptic this just repeatedly rubs in the fact over and over that the person is dead and you will never see them again. To the skeptic, this kind of BS makes matters WORSE, not better, I really felt for Majin about this. They also played some gospel song by some chick (in afrikaans), that is supposedly your loved one speaking from the grave trying to console you by telling you how awesome heaven is and they’ll see you soon. I just wanted to puke at that point. But it got worse…
Then the pastor got to evangelising in a big way. The sermon became not so much about the dearly departed, or consolation (even though there was a fair amount of course) but more about converting any strangers that may be in the church that normally wouldn’t be there. I have to see his logic in this, not every day a bunch of strangers walk into his church as a captive audience. Oft repeated was “If there are any non-believers here today you need to look at the death of this person and repent and give your life to christ … blah blah usual schpiel”. I won’t elaborate on all the different levels that sentence pisses me off, but it’s just riddled with those. This is a pet pieve I actually had from early religion days: Why is church so horribly one-way? I wanna be able to put my claw up and ask questions damnit! (Ok I just answered myself, that’s the last thing they want, but… that would be awesome)
Then the most tacky part came when a “church elder” of some kind came up and read yet another letter written in-the-first-person-voice-of the deceased. More of “Death was a gift not something to be sad about” bullshit, “I love X and Y and I’m so glad that Y and Z”… I could go on all day about the BS being spouted that upset me, and my dear loved one, even more than actually being there to bury a very close family member.
For the most part we just sat there not praying, not singing, and generally me watching M being battered with BS at a time she was at her most fragile.
By the end of the day, I felt incredibly sad for the human race. At least, the religious part of the human race. Reality is just such a huge affront to their sensiblities… They seem SO weak to deal with the truth, that they tried their damn nearest to re-enforce something they probably suspect is false, by repeating it over and over and over to eachother all frikkin day, Non-stop, every way you turn, the same sentence came time and time again. “It’s OK, better place, (s)he’s happier now in heaven”. It is just so blindingly obvious that these people are not, or do not want to be, capable of dealing with the possibility that they someone else may die. The repetition exposes the insecurity they’re trying to hide. I could smell the fear hanging in the air thicker than ever before.
I can understand their sadness. I can understand their pain. I can actually understand their need for consolation. However I don’t think by the end of the day they felt any better than I did. Not at all, I don’t buy it. When someone dies you get your heart ripped out and stomped on and it takes a long-ass time to recover. That’s just the truth of it, and I don’t think religion is ACTUALLY making a measurable difference in these people’s hurt (I have to wonder aloud whether this has been investigated, or how you would establish a metric…)
The longer I stay away from religion the more bizarre, fucked up, and ultimately sad and pathetic the people in a church appear to me. And like I said in linked thread before, they make matters for those close to them so much worse in the process. Whilst being absolutely oblivious to it.
Actually, just absolutely oblivious. Period.
And now with a 1001 posts I can finally lay the rod down, surely the execution has been stayed.