Cold Comfort

by Tony O

You all know that one thing that Xians like to put forward as their justification or rationale for a belief in gawd is that gawd provides “comfort” and “consolation” for the dying, for the grieving, or for those in crisis. I would like to tell you of something that I witnessed which gives the lie to this claim. Please note that I am not generalising to all Xians, I’m simply offering this one thing as a particularly egregious example of the lie of “consolation.” Every word of the following is true.

My wife has two very good friends. These friends had a daughter. She died from an undiagnosed heart defect. She was two years old. She was taken very ill, brought into hospital and died the next day despite the best efforts of her doctors and nurses.

The funeral was held at the Methodist church that my wife’s family attend. It was, as you would imagine, dreadful. The worst part was seeing the tiny coffin being carried into the church.

The time came for the pastor to say the eulogy. The pastor knew the family well. I waited for what he would say. Do you know what he said?

Nothing.

Not a word.

In fact, his exact words were “There’s nothing that I can say that can make anything any better at this awful time”. Then the service moved on to hymns.

I had wondered what crumbs of consolation, what scraps of the comfort of jebus and resurrection this man of gawd would offer to them at this time of their public grief. But he said nothing.

Now you and I might, as lay people, also have nothing to say to people undergoing such a terrible loss. I would imagine that we could not, unless we had been through something similarly terrible, have anything to say that would make the slightest bit of difference or make these people feel any better. All we could do is be there for them.

But this was a “man of gawd”. A man of belief. A man who gets into his pulpit every Sunday to bang on about jebus and gawd and how we will all be saved and live in eternal bliss with our lord. But he said nothing.

Later, I found my self wondering “Why”? Why did he feel unable to say nothing about the alleged life everlasting, the joy and peace that can be found in our supposed rebirth in jebus?

I don’t mean to put words into anyone’s mouth or ascribe thoughts to people which may or may not have been there. But thinking about it later, the only conclusion that I could come to was that this purported man of gawd didn’t believe a word of it himself, and he must have realised that spouting the usual hollow Xian platitudes would have been the equivalent of spitting in these poor people’s faces. So much for the consolation of belief.

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