two days ago my grandma found out that her brother had scheduled his medical-assistance-in-dying appointment for today. of course the air has been stirring with emotion- grief, hope, hopelessness. given that i’ve probably only met this man once or twice, what’s been most upsetting to me is my family’s unremitting anxiety around the status of his faith. christians use pascal’s wager to suggest that it’s only non-believers who have something to lose if christianity turns out to be untrue, yet it’s hard to see this as anything but false as i watch my family squirm in discomfort, wondering how they might be able to use these last 48 hours of my grandma’s brother’s life to ensure that he’s capital-s Saved (or at least put their minds at ease about it). it’s depressing to see this time spent in fear and detriment rather than in reflection on life’s best moments. what’s been had, rather than what could be lost.
when a non-believing loved one is dying, it’s ironic that the most hopeful idea to a christian would be that their own fundamentalist beliefs about the afterlife aren’t true. yet devastatingly, stronger than the pull to embrace that hope is their dependence on those very beliefs; without them, they have no means of mitigating their own fear of death and the uncertainty that surrounds it. from a biblical standpoint, i believe there to be substantial evidence for views of the afterlife that don’t conclude with eternal conscious torment (i.e. universalism and annihilationism) yet christians can’t give credence to this without calling into question the foundations of that which they base so much of their security on. in this way, fundamentalist christianity feels nefarious in that it binds people through the very fears it claims to soothe. and it makes me soooo frustrated because it’s nearly impossible to get out of
all that to say, christians are known for wanting to share the “good news” so it’s weird feeling like i’m now the one who has good news to share with them- news that a belief is just a belief and there are more hopeful ways of being and seeing the universe and our place in it. ways that extinguish fear rather than stoking it.