In my experience, some of the most painful things we experience can be quite difficult for us to blather on about. We tend to keep brevity when it is a sensitive issue. A close friend of mine committed suicide at a ripe-old-twenty-one years of age, and her death is still quite painful to talk about. My wife and I visited her gravesite back at Xmas, and I haven’t really talked much about it since.

I think that the pain and shittiness of life, as you poignantly wrote, can lead us to religion. And the reason is simple: we are promised that we will find peace and more understanding, if only we have a relationship with the Creator of the universe. If it were true, we would. The pain and confusion doesn’t change, though, does it? And in fact, the confusion only gets worse, and disillusionment and bitterness can often set in afterwards.

Thank you for sharing this.

You’ll find both. Though, the nastier bits you’ll pretty much only find on the orthodox end. I never heard a reconstructionist or reform Jew tell someone else they’re not “really” Jewish.

I’m currently atheist/agnostic/Buddhist and still not fully formed, as it were, in my religious/non-religious identity.

I was raised Xian (intermittently, for which I’ll always be grateful. The intermitent part, I mean. Made it easier to extricate myself.), but have always felt a pull toward Judaism (hency my yiddish pen name).

This post is a little peek into why.

Thank you for writing it.

Looking forward to your next post.

We planned to scatter his ashes over a lake he loved as a child — instead the ashes were taken by his mother and buried in a place he had no fondness for in the Southwest. She did this by flying in at the 11th hour and telling the funeral home that the father was responsible for the boy’s death (an outrageous falsehood, considering her own many-year absence at the time) and to not let him anywhere near the proceedings. It was very ugly and took years of reconciliation between my sister and me… Who were pawns in the whole thing.

All of this was to prove to us that her son was in heaven and that she was damned if she was going to let us say otherwise. All we were saying was that he was an atheist, something she did not understand nor even know about him, and that he would not have wanted all of this misery and infighting over his remains.

The point isn’t punishment, however. They’re not xians. They don’t think god will personally punish them for writing their name on the sabbath. The point is that the sabbath is supposed to be a day of rest – total rest. Handling a pencil could lead to writing, which is forbidden. The same with everything else.

Sean – I’m very sorry to hear that. Religion even creates problems for you after your dead. I hope your brother got the burial he would have wanted, if nothing else.