VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Dinah|DATE|1372245284|CONTENT|Agree with all of the above, (possibly minus the cricket which I don’t understand).

I thought this merited a 5 if only on account of the sheer arrogance of Brook’s assumption that the only way that anything valid can be said or revealed about death is via the ‘church’ or ‘scripture’.  ‘Yeh, come on lads, we can have a really fun evenin’ down the pub with Rhid banging on about dyin’ an’ Jesus’ an’ that.’  
There are alternatives, like a quiz, a poetry reading, or an excerpt from a novel like Middlemarch (the last paragraph being particularly poignant, revealing the author’s humanist view of life and death):

‘But the effect of her [Dorothea] being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’ 
 
Or the view of a philosopher, a playwright, a scientist, an undertaker, or the woman in the Post Office down the road who’s just lost her daughter to cancer.

It should be remembered, too, that not all believers in ‘life after death’ believe in a religious version.  Some of the revelations of mediums present a secular, rather prosaic version of life on the Other Side with not a mention of angels, harps or judgements.  Since there is absolutely no evidence that anyone, not even Jesus, has survived their own death, there is no reason to assume a religious version of an afterlife is more valid than a secular one.
  
For those of us who believe death is the end, at least we don’t have to lie awake at night sweating in terror about the Last Judgement or burning in hellfire (though I doubt even if many believers do these things nowadays).  For me, there is consolation in knowing the dead do not suffer and that life will go on in one way or another, even when I’m no longer around to see it.
|IP-ADDRESS|79.71.119.169|MODERATIONFLAG|