The OP of this thread was good. Thanks to the bot for the necro.
I was at a funeral recently and I remember even before I left to go there that I probably shouldn't say anything because what I would want to say wouldn't help the people grieving. It was my best friend's older brother. What I want to talk about is how people are at different levels of spirituality and different levels of the human experience. This includes the ability to "let go".
Probably the religion/way that is most prominent in letting go is Buddhism. It comes from a school of thought where the mind can see suffering but simply choose to "let it go". I can't. It's fortunate that I cannot see the whole world all at once because I would be so busy caring about other people that I wouldn't be able to live my own life and my own story. Sometimes we need to see our limitations as benefits. But I do use "detachment" quite naturally in my everyday life because if you cannot manage your connection to everything then everything can make you go crazy.
Case in point: I love my wife. Sometimes she annoys me though with living as if we could die at any moment and therefore allowing the present to take away investment in our long-term future. And there's a difference between making the best of life (good) and living in fear of death (not so good). I choose not to let fear rule over me. So at this point, fear doesn't have my brain on auto-pilot.
The man who died... he knew. It wasn't sudden. He knew he was dying. Some of the people at the funeral, I don't think they realized how much they were making his death about them and their fears. When you're dying like that, and you know, often you may fight for other people but after a while you get tired and you get to this point where you are ready; ready to let go. At that point, it's only other people who aren't ready; who fear death and need there to be something else. And since they were Christians... The man who died would resist when they would bring up the subject because he had his own ideas and the wisdom gained from his personal experiences and knowledge. And he knew they weren't really interested in anything he had to say. They just wanted him to convert so they could "save him". So at the funeral, they said how he resisted but in the last weeks or days, he accepted.
Did he? Or did he get to the point where he was tired of fighting them and told them what they needed to hear in order to be comforted after he was gone. After all, him saying he accepted didn't really do or change anything in the universe. It just made them feel better and allowed them to stop bothering him with their fears. And for some people, the fear of death wasn't enough. People literally created the idea of a place of eternal torture in order to control human behavior, not in death, but in life.
Heaven is the ultimate carrot. Hell is the ultimate stick. But these are used to control human lives, not human deaths. People don't even care that there is no quote of God saying this. And they take what Yeshua said and interpret it using their fears. What was said was for their spiritual benefit. Is there a person yet who hasn't died? Of course not. Everyone dies. Death is part of life. But that's the part we don't want to accept until we're ready; until we're in pain and tired and just want to go to sleep. All the things that people worry about... all the things humans have to do to maintain their survival and their family and friends... all of this... a person who knows they are going to die soon reflects on, deals with, and gets to the point where they can let it go. They can let it all go.
At this point what are you trying to save? Ah yes, we tell ourselves that we will see them again. What? In a perfect world that has room for all the 120 BILLION people who have ever lived? And we'll just see the people we care about and they'll just see the people they care about and this won't get crowded... at all. Right. And no one will die again and no one will want to hurt each other because... what? Jesus waved a magic wand over every corpse so that when it comes back to life it cannot sin anymore? But if that was the case then the whole human experiment with sin was completely unnecessary like testing a product on lab rats that will never come to market. If Jesus could wave some sort of magic wand AND HASN'T DONE IT ALREADY then what makes anyone think that wand exists? If that wand existed then why wouldn't you simply use it on EVERYONE? Why do they have to believe in a certain god? Just wave the "believer" wand over the people who don't believe, make them believe by planting it into their brains and then wave the wand that makes them perfect people who cannot sin. Because if you can make the second wand without any ethical reservations you can surely make the first and avoid the billions of people dying in the first place, the billions who got raped, the billions bought and sold, etc etc. If that wand existed and no one thought to use it before? Then that alone is the most criminally negligent thing to have ever happened in the universe.
So either we believe in this criminally negligent version of a God who simply chooses not to stop sin but could make a perfect paradise with 120 billion people any time he wants-including right now... or now.....or .... now. OR... we grow up and see life for what it is and stop trying to escape it one day and rob someone else of it the next. We have to CHOOSE life and choose to stop hurting each other. We have to choose to create heaven on earth by being heavenly and angelic and stop choosing to create hell on earth by being hellish and demonic. If people were perfect and immortal in this life there would be no need to think about an "Afterlife".
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