Heaven and hell.

Yesterday I went to a funeral for my wife's aunt, Pat. The service was very nice and many people showed up out of respect for the family and for Pat. One theme that seemed to come up quite frequently was the idea of heaven. Pat was no longer with us and is in a much better place. Hours before my wife's aunt had passed, she was lying bedridden in the hospital using a machine to breathe. Trying to keep her alive would have kept her in pain and continued her suffering, a purely selfish endeavor. So I also viewed that she was better off.

However, I do not believe in heaven. Or hell for that matter. Some of the people that said that Pat was in heaven seemed to be saying so in order to ease their pain and suffering. Pat was now with other deceased members of the family and everyone else with be able to rejoin them. This does sound extremely comforting for those that have just lost someone. This does not make it true and there is absolutely no truth that either heaven or hell even exists. The way that I live my life is that we only have one shot so it better be a good one. This means that I want to have as good of a relationship with my kids and spend as much time with them as possible during this lifetime.

Now, many Christians may think that it is virtually impossible to be an atheist and be a moral person. Like I just said, I want to spend as much time with my kids as possible. This also will mean my grandkids if I am so lucky. I do not want to spend my life in jail. This to me is a much bigger deterrent to acting immorally than some Christian denominations seem to offer. The pastor at the service stated that all that is needed to enter heaven was to accept Jesus into your life. So my question is, what is needed to make a Christian moral? After all, with this logic, I could be the most horrible person in the world and then on my death bed accept Jesus as my personal savior and then get into heaven. With this logic, I would want to go to hell where all the sane people are. Speaking of hell, why does it even exist. If it was this easy to avoid going to hell, I wouldn't think that anyone would be down there. But wait, hell isn't for the Christians, it is for the people that can see through the garbage that the church is trying to sell them and actually rejects their teachings. If you believe in Jesus, I guess you have no need to worry, you are going to heaven. As for me, I am going to hell. But the thing is that I do not believe in hell, or the devil for that matter (no, I am not a devil worshipper) so I will be just fine.

Besides, we don't even follow the morality proposed in the bible anyway. In the old testament there are many instances of polygamy. Moses told many of his followers to kill people that were unlike the Hebrews and then rape the women. Abraham took Sara's maidservant so that he may have a child. Jesus looked down upon divorce. I see people getting tattoos of Jesus or crosses all the time even thought the bible says not to. People eat shell fish or wear clothing of two different types of materials. Not many people in this country today could ever say that they follow the morality of the bible. I refuse to believe that someone is more of a moral person just because they have some holy book that was written by some oppressive weirdos centuries ago.

Every morning, I wake up and give my kids a great big hug and a kiss, thankful to be alive. I kiss my wife goodbye wishing her a safe trip to work. I also play around with my two year old rat terrier. I do my best to treat everyone kindly and accept them for who they are. My life is much better since I have become the Happy Atheist.