I recently watched a video on YouTube of this young woman questioning an established evangelical pastor about Christian belief and the afterlife.the young woman identified herself as an atheist which didn’t seem to affect the pastor one way or another but her claim of belief in nothing after death did drive him to a level of frustration. I found it interesting that she told him that it was comforting for her to believe that there was nothing after death: no blissful heaven or threat of eternal fire of hell. she said that if she were a believer, the thought of someone she knew, not a believer, was suffering in eternal fire while she was in heavenly bliss, was not a comfort to her at ll and she thought it strange that anyone would think it was comforting. For course the pastor kept repeating the same old tired (but tried and true for them) gaslighting techniques they’ve used, developed, and perfected, for centuries. But people are wiser to these swindles in the last few decades because the availability of other points of view not just on the credibility of any religious belief, but on almost every subject known to human kind. Suffice to say that this brought back to me the idea of that comfort of nothingness and the strributed quite of Mark t=wain when asked about his thought of dying where he said, “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”  We should all pay attention to ourselves rather than depend on what others think of us when being confronted by those who have other intentions. At the end of the video, the pastor has become trusted enough with the young woman to tell her, definitely, that she was going to hell.

How nice. And comforting.