(June 23, 2019 at 8:54 pm)Shell B Wrote: How do you feel about finding comfort in faith while dying? Please don't use my mother's situation as an example. I'm bound to take debate about it personally.
As a former evangelical, I found the comfort concerning death and misfortune to be a rather cold comfort.
The expectations that were set for me were that my faith was to render my existence, more, rather than less, comprehensible and explicable. That included things like experiencing deep, abiding purpose and meaning, to be rewarded not just in the afterlife but in THIS life for right belief and conduct, to be protected in the midst of what we saw as a spiritual conflict, to be guided to make good live decision, and so forth. So when I lost several close family members to freak illness or accident, including my wife, and when I experienced debilitating personal illness, and other such things, I had no choice but to admit that I had no sort of leg up on anyone else concerning the vicissitudes of life, and that my faith was no only no help, but was actively misleading me, often 180 degrees the wrong way.
But ... it's a compelling abstraction, at least until it's not. If a particular individual has some combination of good dumb luck in life and the personality to be sufficiently credulous and passively trusting, then I am not going to go out of my way to deprive them of their illusions.
That part of religion is relatively harmless, even though you can argue that a willingness to defer justice and closure and meaning to the afterlife makes it less likely you'll work doggedly for such things in THIS life.
The societal harms of religion lies mostly in other areas, as others have suggested.
