Consider the following

In my last post I told a story about going to the hospital. On that fated day I had the worst stomach pain I could ever remember. Perhaps the worst pain I had ever felt. I remember lying in the emergency room singing the song, I was sure I would die, "that mountain's burning in the sky... to the heart of Heaven." A Jason Upton song referring to Zion the holy city in the sky, were I would soon be. The doctor came in and told me about a bug that had been going around that was essentially the stomach flu but attached to it was stomach pain. The doctor then said I was either about to die or had the pain tolerance of a seven year old girl, unfortunately the latter was true.

The atheists response to my mindset in the hospital room would be this; you were afraid of death and because of your fear of the unknown, you applied religion as a kind of fear salve. But as a rule; are we as human's really afraid of the unknown? Let's take outer space as an example. Cold dark possible alien infested outer space is certainly the unknown but we do not have fear of it. Rather we have people who would line up by the thousands and hundreds of thousands to explore it. If I had never been to Chuck E Cheese and my Grandparents said we are going somewhere you have never been. My initial response is not fear but excitement. The excitement of discovery, even if there is a giant rat-man waiting me there.

The atheists great response to religion is that religion is primarily for old lady's afraid of death. But why should they or anyone naturally be afraid of death. The closest experience we have to death is sleep. And sleep is a thing we love, some of us love it too much.

Too say religion is a salve for the fear of the unknown is not only irrational but illogical. It reminds me of the Shackleton ad, Shackleton was going to the north pole in a time when it had not been traversed. The greatest line is, "safe return doubtful," Yet thousands of men signed up for the adventure. We as humans recognize in death not fear of the unknown but rather fear of the known.