Gagetory,

Your observations are astute, but at the same time, rather cliche.

It's the same old fight, IMO, between religious literalism and literal cynicism.

Religion ISN'T ABOUT the literal... was never intended to be.

I couldn't care a toss about whether, for example, Jesus actually did hop up out of the grave after three days. Now, I wasn't there, so I can't know for sure. But everything from my basic logic and reason to my gut feelings tell me it did not literally happen that way, and the "resurection" has a symbolic, spiritual meaning.

Either way, getting hung up on stuff like that is, IMO, totally beside the point anyhow. Not to be crude, but it's sort of along the same lines of focusing on a date's boobs, instead of trying to get to know her as an actual person.

Yes, people do detestible things in the name of religion. Then again, people do horrible things in the name of all sorts of things. People will do horrible things and say it was out of a love for the country.
Does that make the U.S.A. a horrible place, or our system of government and the principles of this nation horrible?

Anyway, I think it's just the fact that some people are the type who will do horrible things. And if they didn't have religion to justify it, they'd find some other justification.

As far as the whole life after death thing... well, it just makes sense to me that there's more to us than our bio-mechanical functions. It always has, even before I became a particularly religious person. Sure, it's not anything you can pinpoint, or put into a test tube, or hold in your hand and say, "here it is."

But then again, I think it's rather short-sighted and naive to think that which transcends our physical existance would have physical properties to begin with.

Sure, I could be wrong. But, even if there's nothing after death... well, then it's kind of stupid to be afraid of nothing, now isn't it?

But, until I see more compelling arguments than I've seen so far from the strict materialist side, I'm convinced there IS something after death.. and that it's not at all unpleasant. Will it involve a reckoning? Well, sure. Again, that just makes sense. But unless you're a Hitler or a Jeffery Dahmer, I don't think that reckoning will be all that horrible bad for anybody who made an honest effort to do their best.

As a side note, I once watched a program invovling a talk by a woman who was clinically dead for quite some time describing what she experienced of the "afterlife." She said that the reckoning included the rather interesting feature of experiencing everyting one had done to others from the perspective of the others. In other words, if you had been mean to somebody, you would feel your own meanness from their point of view. She said that during that experience, she learned one of the most valuable things she'd done with her life up to that point was something that at the time seemed rather insignifigant. She had during her time in school been nice and friendly and displayed a genuine interest in a retarded boy who everybody else either made fun of or ignored.
See, now that sort of thing makes absolute sense to me. If there is an afterlife, it makes perfect sense that it would involve things like that.
But people on the "good" list going to bliss and people on the "bad" list suffering for ever and ever... no, that makes no sense.