Burial Ceremonies

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My sister, brother-in-law, and I have all decided to go ahead and buy plots of land in the graveyard. We are all getting up in years, and I have leukemia. So its a good idea.
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This morning a friend of mine sent me an e-mail joke about athiests. So now is as good a time as any to make it perfectly clear: At my burial do whatever you want, but please no religious bullshit. Nothing even remotely Christian. Please. No symbols, none of their words.
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The following is some of my mutterings on organized religion.
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I really am not an athiest. I absolutely do believe there is some higher power.
Its just all this organized religion shit like Christianiaty that I think is a complete bunch of hogwash. A virgin getting pregnant? Changing water to wine. A dead man rising from the dead after a few days and moving the rock covering his little cave? Ya, right. Total fucking bullshit.

You have to have loads of faith (ie, self delusion) to believe this crap.

When my favorite dog dies, or my Dad or my brother dies. Or when I wake up in the middle of the night camping out in the high desert 100 miles from any city and see the zillions of stars. Or when I look at the incredible selflessness that some people demonstrate in times of crisis...yes I am sure that God exists.

I was trained as an acolite. I wore the dress and served in the ceremony each Sunday. I actually had mysef believing those looney stories. I've been to church services in Bethlehem and in Westminster Cathedral in England. I've been to Jerusalem and swam in the river Jordan.

Now that I've seen some of the world I don't fall for that stuff anymore. Our tiny little weak human brains are no more capable of understanding or properly describing this incredible phenomenom of intelligence and love than an ant is of describing nuclear physics.

Its the young-boy-priest-ass-fucking-bullshit I don't fall for anymore. Of course priests are perverted and many are queers; they are not allowed to have sex with women. So they butt fuck each other. And their parishoners.

In the middle ages when most people couldn't read maybe society needed "holy persons" to interpret the sacred scriptures. But no thank you, I don't need their help. I am perfectly capable of reading and making my own decisions about these important matters.

Once you start getting a religion "organized" by having sacred writings, church owned properties, and paid staff the standard organizational self perpetuation moves kick in. You see the exact same BS with AARP, Greenpeace, and the Sierra Club...the highest goal becomes keeping the organization going (and hopfully growing). More and more power, more staff, a bigger budget. All of this requres a legion of faithful who donate money to the church.

Its important that our form of religion is the only true one. So muslims or jews or even other varieties of christianity are fair game. In the final anaylsys it becomes OK to kill them. Shit. Killing in the name of God. What an anomaly.

And so many religions (and their associated power trips) have been used to have the faithful wage bloody wars against each other. Look at Israel, Northern Ireland. etc. But you don't see the fucking holy men dying in battle, just their lowly faithful.

No thank you. I'll stick to my own personal beliefs. And when I die I don't want any of this religious symbolism at my funeral.