ARE OUR RELIGIOUS FAITHS ABOUT BEING RIGHT OR BEING REAL?

By Edwin Cooney

First a little orientation. As a Christian, I've believed in God all my life and I always expect to believe. I also believe that there's an afterlife in Heaven. However, I read an article in the New York Times which was sent to me by two helpful friends that was about Phillip Hancock, a death row inmate in Oklahoma, who sought and found a chaplain named Devin Moss to assist him into eternity.

What Hancock and Moss have in common is their atheism. For the last year of Hancock's existence, Devin Moss, a humanist chaplain, had been struggling with Hancock to ease the prisoner's way into eternity without God.

On the morning of November 30th, 2023, Moss stood by the gurney on which Hancock lay and read from a paper he had prepared which was designed to provide the dying prisoner with what was both true and real.

What was real was friendship and love. As Hancock faded away, Moss kept reminding Hancock that he wasn't alone and that he was loved.

As a Christian, it's my understanding that God, above everything else, is love. Accordingly, he or she who endorses or is encompassed by love recognizes God.

Lifelong anger, disappointment, and hatred are usually the causes of agnosticism or atheism! After all, it's only natural to anticipate and rationalize eternity! What we seek to understand and believe in is a gift to share with those we care about enough to befriend or love. What bothers me is our insistence on the rightness of our beliefs.

I have a friend who insists on asserting that God has never and will never exist. He says that in a playful way, as he seeks truth in all things. However, I sense in his good natured teasing, there’s an element of certainty that he’s right and we believers are wrong. For my part, I wish for him the peace and love I expect to receive in Heaven.

For me, my belief in Christianity is no longer, as it once was, about being right! As I see it, those who claim the right of temporal or political power in the name of their religious beliefs or membership are ultimately seeking economic authority or popularity. That is perhaps humankind's greatest sin.

According to the story in the Times, as Devin Moss saw Phillip Hancock slip into eternity, he found himself uttering a prayer. As he drove away from the prison with tears in his eyes, he prayed that Phillip Hancock was at that very moment, experiencing the foretaste of good fortune!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY