More on death and faith (some clarifications on my previous post)

The trouble with writing anything is that the moment I've written it I invariable think it misrepresents what I really think. Fortunately you can edit posts, so that's what I've done with the previous post in this blog. And why not? This is my private blog and it comes with no claims of academic credibility!

Also a couple of clarifications/further developments:

1) I'm not saying that it is OK deliberately to lie to make make people feel better. Just that you should be sensitive. Dawkins and some of the New Atheists come across as insensitive to a degree that amounts to being cruel.  I don't like people being cruel.

2) My own faith is not an easy solution to my fear of death. When I experienced le reveil mortel (the first realisation of eventual extinction - see Julian Barnes "Nothing to be frightened of") I was 13 or 14 years old, and, like John Betjeman recounts in 'Before the Anaesthetic' I was immediately aware that my Christianity - as I then formulated it - was no match for death.  Basically I believed the science before the Christianity, and I couldn't, however much I wanted to, 'choose' to believe in that way.  Forty years on, and the way I see it now is that in faith - faith, not belief - there is way forward.  For me, faith in the resurrection of Jesus contains within it - among other things - faith that we are not defeated by death.  It is not saying that extinction does not happen, but that whatever it is in extinction that I fear is not what I think it is.  That love is greater than death.