A dear friend...

I lost a dear friend recently. I would love to write a eulogy, but her best friend did such a good job - a better job than I ever could - that I won't even attempt it.

The eulogy was clever. Clever in a way that I did not think a eulogy could be; and insightful about our mutual friend in a wonderful, and moving way. Jesse talked about her higher power, and that of our too-soon departed friend. Jesse described her higher power as science, and that is the higher power I claim for myself. But in my mind there were only a few options:

1. Religion
2. Science
3. Apathetic consideration of nothing

Jesse, though, described another higher power - community. Our friend, she said, believed in community. In making the world better by caring for each other.

Now some Christians (and probably other religions) would say that that is the point of their religion, but I have never seen that work in practice*.

Our friend lived life in the way Jesse described. Genuinely putting her needs and desires behind those of those less well-off (materially, but most importantly, psychologically and due to circumstances such as homophobic parents and peers, racist institutions, or drug addiction).

The reason I started writing this post: I wonder if the good really do die young. Maybe those of us who try to be good, and look good from the outside, fail just enough not to be taken quite yet? Maybe our mutual friend really was as good as my memories of her think?

* The most religious Western country has the worst outcomes in all sorts of measures of quality of life. Maternal mortality, for example, is higher in the US (excl. California) than it is in the rest of the developed world, according to last month's Scientific American. That's just one example of many. There are no tent cities in European countries, for example, except when those tent cities are filled with asylum seekers unwilling to ask for assistance in the country they are in.

On the subject of churches, and tithes, they raise a lot of money in the USA, and they spend a lot of it on flashy lighting, music, on 'capital works' such as church buildings, on church plants, and on 'show' rather than the day-to-day problems of the church-goers and their communities. If churches spent more of their money on the needy, more like the Salvation Army, then perhaps the USA would not look like Scandinavia's poor cousin, when in fact it's richer. And if churches fail - and they do at the moment - to take the place of government, then I think the will of the people for others not to suffer, should be taken up by our elected officials. Just my two pennies.