10/27/2006
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this wednesday i attended my great-grandmother's funeral on marthas vineyard. it was surreal and weird for a lot of reasons; most notably that pretty much nobody there was old enough to have ever experienced life without her being around. however, the thing that freaked me out most was that it was a catholic funeral. this was odd because my great-grandfather's funeral had been methodist, and the truth is neither of them ever really went to church anyhow. i didn't really realize that people did that: got just *whatever* holy person happened to be nearby at the time to do the funeral for whoever happened to be dead.
now, i have no love for ANY religion - i've more or less been an athiest since birth - but a catholic funeral has got to be more depressing that anything i've ever sat through. my teeth were clenched the whole fucking time. it wasn't just that it was religious: i find religion foolish but i can tolerate it to a limited extent in situations like a family funeral. this was almost sick though. the thing that made me most angry was that... get this... there was no mention of my great-grandmother. that's right, they didn't say anything about her. the priest talked about everyone from god to jesus to thomas to fucking lazarus (what an awkward thing to bring up at a funeral, right?) but nothing about my grammie. oh sure, there was some shit about her being "resurrected in the glorious kingdom of heaven, and experiencing the glorious glory of jesus and oh by the way wasn't jesus glorious?" but there was no mention of how cool she was, no family members were asked to talk about her... nothing. it was just some guy in a robe talking about how awesome the guys who wrote the fucking bible were, which i guess is why those guys fucking wrote the bible in the fucking first place.
the thing was - and this is the thing - no one cried at all during any of the 45 minute plus speech/sermon/whatever this chump delivered. everyone either stared blankly, looked at the ground, or was scrambling to keep up with the call-and-response parts of the prayers and songs. the mood was somber, but no more somber than any other church service i've ever been to. it wasn't until AFTER, when the priest left, and everyone was just sort of milling around the graveyard and chatting with eachother; THAT'S when everyone started crying. When they cleared all the religion out of their heads and remembered "oh yeah, someone we loved just died" (the thing that got ME crying was the realization that at awkward family gatherings, my great-grandmother was usually the person i'd hang out with).
i mean, there's an obvious problem with religious funerals: if you genuinely believe that the person who died just went someplace AWESOME, why would you cry? what reason is there to be sad? it should be a PARTY, for fuck's sake... "they're in heaven now, SWEET!" but it never works that way: you know why? because deep down in our minds, we ALL know it's horseshit. we can fucking feel it. if you really believed in god, why would you step out of the way of an oncoming car? why bother? you're just gonna end up somewhere else, probably somewhere better anyway!
but the other problem with religious funerals and religion in general is the obsession with death. all this talk about the afterlife is built to comfort people about the idea of death (which i guess is alright, but still seems like a wimpy way or dealing with the world), but there's too much talk of it: it makes people forget about LIFE, which is the ONLY thing we PROVABLY have! my great-grandmother lived for 95 years and was pretty much awesome for all 95... yet no-one talked about that. the priest just wanted to talk about jesus, who may or may not have even existed (fuck that actually, DIDN'T exist) and heaven, which is more of an abstract concept than people give it credit for. talking about death at a funeral seems counter-productive and depressing: i want to talk about LIFE!we only get this short little bit of time to breathe and think and function, and live and love and laugh and whatever, it hardly seems worth the effort to think about the afterwards part.
i cried after the funeral because my great-grandmother isn't around anymore. that makes me sad, because she was a good personand i'll miss her. that's the hard part of being an atheist: facing up to reality. she's gone and it sucks. but you know what? belief in magic won't make that any easier for me. i feel guilty that i didn't spend enough time with her; that's a hard reality to face when you don't believe you'll be magically reunited after death. but i can still remember fondly the time i did spend with her, and i can still hear people tell stories about her, and i can still read things she's written. THAT'S WHY WE HAVE BRAINS. to think, and remember, and reflect. why isn't that enough for some people?
my overall point is that at this funeral there were a lot of people of a lot of races and religions. my great-grandmother was a loving lady with a large extended family and a lot of friends. every single person there responded more or less that same way, religious or not. that's the sort of thing that leads me to believe quite strongly that religion is a CULTURAL force and not a "spiritual" force. the cunning and powerful brains we've all EVOLVED know deep down that religion is only of the pettiest consolation when the logical facts of the world present themselves to us. i just wish people weren't so heavily indoctrinated that they could come out and admit that these things are silly and could easily be done away with. life's too short for all this nonsense.