I was raised to believe that Christian faith was an intellectual failure. The only Christian in two generations of that family, I couldn’t understand why the obvious is so hard to accept. Those were frequently my thoughts in my youth, and I was judged badly for my faith.
When my mom’s husband grew close to death, the entire family had a mind boggling paradigm shift. Suddenly, he was going to be sitting on a hillside with their dead dog, waiting for Mom to join them. Within months, they developed a shared vision of an idyllic eternity together. His only message to me was, ‘I’ll see you later,’ great emphasis on ‘later.’
I don’t gamble, but I think this is what you call covering your bets. You’re so very certain, until you see your kids’ lunch money circling the drain, and you draw back and place a different sort of wager.
You’re welcome to think otherwise, but I don’t believe the afterlife is simply a projection of what we want it to be. This world certainly isn’t what I would want it to be; can’t imagine the next one is. Whatever it is, it is, regardless of what we think is fair or comforting.
This universe is so much more than we can comprehend. Hard for me to swallow that reality is just an affirmation of what we’re willing to believe. If there is life after death, we don’t get to imagine it into existence. It is what it is.