I feel the need to explain the “emo” post. I’m normally not like that, but sometimes I just have the need to get these things out and felt for the first time able to do it on here. The thing was bad poetry, bad writing, and just plain bad. Yet I still feel better for doing it because it is out there.
I have had dreams of this nature for decades. One of my earliest memories as a child is waking up screaming from the dream I described. Ever since then Death and I have had a very intimate, if not long distance, relationship. The kind where we never see each other but often talk on the phone. Up until a few months ago, I hadn’t had that dream in over two years, and now I have it at least once a week again.
I’m not a religious man. At least, not anymore. But this leaves me in a strange quandary. I grew up in a household that had varying degrees of religiosity. My mother and her family are Lutherans and my father and his family are all Mormons. My immediate family never went to church, so my father’s parents decided to take up the task themselves. So I went to a Mormon church every Sunday for nearly 5 years of my life. I learned quite a bit but never really had what could have been referred to as a “religious experience.” The kind where you realize there really is a god. I noted everything everyone was trying to teach me and regurgitated it upon command like the good little sheep I was being trained to be. Eventually though I was tired of being teased by classmates about being a Mormon and so I stopped going. I started going around to the different churches in my town (we had more than our fair share with a population only several thousand strong) attempting to find one that fit what I vaguely understood as my beliefs. After getting kicked out of a Baptist church for asking too many questions I eventually followed my friends to a non-denominational Christian church every Wednesday night.
I went to bible study with the rest of the kids and asked questions. Lots of questions. Questions like, “If Adam and Eve were the only two humans on the planet, where did Cain and Able get their wives?” Also, “If Christians are supposed to ‘turn the other cheek’ as Jesus said, why are there so many wars fought in his name?” And my personal favorite, “Why does God say, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ yet commanded us to kill so many times in his name?”
The poor woman who taught the class was never happy when I showed up. I think knowing she had an intellectual fight on her hands with someone half her age was something she could not deal well with. More often than not she flatly refused to answer my questions and instead referred me to the pastor himself. On the day I asked that last question, she was teaching about the ten commandments. I was very curious to understand how God could put down so many rules for his sheep children and then ask us time and again to break them. I believe she snapped when I asked the last question. I had tested her faith one too many times and she believed she had failed. Bursting into tears she stormed out of the room and several minutes passed as the stares leveled at me in the room ranged from loathing to puzzled fascination to votes of confidence. The pastor finally came in and told everyone to leave except for me. He talked to me for a few minutes, visibly angry but keeping a level tone, and finally asked me to leave and not to come back.
Two churches in the same town ask a child to leave their walls for the simple reason of asking too many hard questions. Over the years that followed I came to the conclusion it was not the fault of the people, but the religion they professed to believe in. They were indoctrinated to believe a certain way and it prevents them from seeing the world in any different light.
I digress.
So this is one of the many reasons I’m no longer religious, but it is because of the early attempts at indoctrination that I have this fear of death. More specifically, what happens after I die. The pure scientist in me says I’m just done, and I eventually decompose to rejoin the cycle of life on the planet. The small, but very loud religious holdout in me screams about the judgment of my soul. Then finally, I have this newly acquired third voice that seems to be an amalgamation of the two. The conservation of energy law in physics “states that energy can not be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.” So if we are made of energy, and that energy cannot be destroyed, what happens to it when we die? Is it just stored in the earth until bits and pieces of it are consumed by the various plants and animals our descendants cultivate until we are eventually reborn?
This last explanation tends to comfort me momentarily.
I know there is no heaven or hell, for others there might be such places waiting for them when they die, but for me I have a sneaking suspicion that my fate lies in the cold inky black of nothing.
