[b]Mary Roach
Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Coming. And, of course, only one of these can be true. Which means that for millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter.[/b]
Unless of course religion is more about comforting and consoling you here and now than in whatever might actually be your fate there and then. That’s the beauty of it.
It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?
Is that really something to joke about?
[sure, apparently]
There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother’s face. I wasn’t expecting it. We hadn’t requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-coffin. We got it anyway. They’d shampooed and waved her hair and made up her face. They’d done a great job, but I felt taken, as if we’d asked for the basic carwash and they’d gone ahead and detailed her. Hey, I wanted to say, we didn’t order this. But of course I said nothing. Death makes us helplessly polite.
Not counting mine of course.
The slang for the rectum is “prison wallet”.
Gee, I wonder what that means?
It’s possible that the reason I’ve never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren’t wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics…and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to “presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office.
Sure, it could all be as simple as that.
…think of it, said Robert Rosenbluth, a doctor whose acquaintance I made at the start of this book. No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.
Right, like that will work, among other places, here.