Comforting Lies Take People to Hell

So today my Uncle Bert is in hell, in all likelihood. His daughter texted me to tell me he had died. But I received a comforting message saying he kept his independence until a week and a half ago, and he was still able to play golf.

When people die in sin, we sit around and talk about how wonderful they were, no matter how rotten or annoying they actually were. We lionized Elvis Presley, who rolled off the toilet dead, obese and full of drugs plus a hard stool six inches in diameter, at the age of 42. We say he joined heaven’s band, along with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who are actually in hell with him, screaming and crying in darkness.

Elvis was a hypocrite. As a mediocre singer who filled women with lust, he made gospel albums that made flighty girls sweat and pant, but if you go to Youtube right now, you can find video of him bragging to his sycophants about the oral sex he received from ladies he didn’t know very well. He died next to a toilet in a bathroom attached to a bedroom where his girlfriend was in the bed where they fornicated. If he’s not in hell, his salvation is an unlikely major triumph for Yeshua.

We like to sit around tables after people die, telling funny stories about them, even if we are pretty sure they’re in hell. Preachers who have no guts take money to stand beside freshly-dug holes, telling people they just met how much the deceased were loved.

I don’t believe in personal revisionist history. It does no one any good to tell pleasant lies about the dead. I believe we should speak ill of the dead, just as the Bible does, when it’s appropriate. The cultural practice of shaming those who speak ill of the dead comes from our pagan past, from morons who worshiped trees and rocks. It’s not a Christian tradition. Pagans were afraid the spirits of the dead would take offense and come after them.

Incredibly, the Jews are still concerned about their dealings with the dead. Most people don’t know this, but Jews pray for their dead, and they believe in reincarnation. They pray to the dead, just like Catholics. These pagan contaminations of doctrine are kept quiet, but they exist.

I speak ill of the dead all of the time, just as the Bible does. Cautionary tales shouldn’t go to waste.

Today I started talking about the horrible things my family members had done, and my wife got a little tired of it, but I reminded her of this: if we forget these things, our children will relive them. Then she understood.

Bert married my dad’s older sister, Ardell. Far as I can tell, she was a psychopath. My dad had a little of that, too, and in my opinion, my sister is a complete psychopath. It’s a condition that involves arrogance, total selfishness, dishonesty, an inability to feel shame, and the destruction of other people for selfish ends as well as sadistic pleasure.

Ardell was very overweight, and when she met Bert, she had a daughter from a man she had divorced. Bert had 4 kids, I believe. I am not close to my dad’s side of the family, but I have counted them up, and I’m nearly certain there were 4. One died when I was in my twenties, and I didn’t send a card, make any calls, or go to a funeral.

Bert was a Mormon, but he was also an atheist, which is less crazy than being a Mormon. Ardell was also an atheist.

My dad’s mother was kind of an empty skin. I have no idea what she believed, but I doubt she ever had a spiritual thought in her life. She had no impact on my life. Didn’t send Christmas or birthday presents. Never called. Didn’t help my mother after my sister and I were born. Lived in an apartment conspicuously free of books. She took her kids to the Presbyterian church when they were young, but it didn’t stick. It may have been my grandfather who took them. He was a politician. He died during World War Two, from drinking poisonous moonshine. He was an alcoholic who beat my grandmother in public.

I didn’t really know my cousins. My dad had another sister, and she had two kids. One died at 18. I didn’t send a card, call, or go to the funeral. I don’t know the other one. I knew the parents a little. My Uncle Johnny called me out of the blue from a nursing home last year.

I have opinions. My opinion is that Bert wanted a maid and Ardell wanted any kind of husband. I don’t recall any evidence that they felt affection for each other.

Ardell used to beat Bert’s youngest child, whom I will call Mary, since she is still alive. I barely know her, but I know we hit it off on the few occasions when we saw each other. She was very kind and gentle. Lacking affection for her stepdaughter, Ardell tormented her. She used to give her own daughter candy and let her eat it in front of Mary. When Mary and the other daughter slept in the same bed, Ardell would rest her weight on Mary while leaning across the bed to kiss her own daughter good night.

Bert and Ardell made their kids take jobs. The kids looked after the house. They worked and bought their own clothes. They resented Bert and Ardell, for good reason. Kids should do chores, but they’re not mules.

Bert liked to travel and fish, and he bought an RV. He and Ardell traveled all over the US. One of his sons became an airline pilot, so Bert and Ardell got cheap flights, and they made the most of it. Travel, fishing, and golf seemed to be their reasons for living, and my impression is that Ardell was much less excited about these things than Bert, but as an obese, hard-voiced, mannish woman with kids and a not-winning personality, she didn’t rock the boat.

When I was young, I liked Bert well enough, mostly because he was nicer than Ardell, which is saying little. As I grew older, he wore on me. I can tell stories.

My dad took them to the Bahamas on his boat. I took two adult friends with me. On big boats, everyone helps clean up and keep things orderly. Even guests. When we would dock the boat, Bert would put a chair on the dock, crack open a Coors Light, which he called “Silver Bullets,” and watch the rest of us work. Once he told me we had missed a spot, and I yelled, “WE’RE SHORTHANDED.”

Bert and Ardell came to visit one Christmas, along with Johnny, his wife, and the daughter I didn’t know. We were going to fish on the boat and use my dad’s shared condo at Ocean Reef, a resort for the wealthy. Bert would get to fish AND play golf for nothing. Score!

Bert didn’t tell us he had norovirus. Not until people started getting sick.

I moved onto the boat, abandoning my stranger-relatives, whom I didn’t really want to get to know better. Everyone started throwing up and running for the toilet every half an hour. I eventually got sick, too, because Bert didn’t tell us he was sick until I had been exposed.

Norovirus is only spread through feces, so Bert had been putting his hands in communal dishes without washing them properly, while sick with norovirus.

I could tell my cousin was offended when I went to the boat. My mother thought I was rude. I didn’t care. I didn’t know these people. What did I care about their feelings? They were going to disappear after Christmas. That actually happened. I didn’t see my cousin again for about 25 years. If she thought I was a jerk, it didn’t impact my life. I’ll never see her again.

My mother was the only one who didn’t get sick. I have no idea how she avoided it.

That’s one Bert story.

On another occasion, my dad took Bert and Ardell to the Bahamas on the boat. On the return trip, the water was very rough. Ten-foot seas. My mother and I tried to get my dad to wait, but he was a poor seaman, and he mistakenly thought his boat was big enough for any kind of sea.

Before we passed Spanish Wells, a whites-only island in the Bahamas, things started flying around inside the boat. Ardell, knowing very little about seamanship, started climbing the ladder to the flybridge so she could see what was happening.

The boat jerked, and she lost her grip on the ladder, falling into the flybridge awning. Her left hand caught on something, and he wedding ring was yanked severely by the momentum of her 250 pounds. The skin ripped open, leaving a wound that needed stitching.

We persuaded my dad to take us to Spanish Wells, where there was presumably a nurse with a needle and sutures. Ardell sat in the boat’s saloon, holding a bloody paper towel on her hand. She and Bert were under 10 feet from the fridge.

Bert said, “Honey, get me one of those Silver Bullets.” And Ardell staggered to the fridge and got him one.

Ardell became demented and died in 2014, and my dad insisted I go with him to Tennessee for the funeral. He was still practicing law, but I think he knew he was having mental issues. Also, although he had destroyed our family and had poor relations with his own, he occasionally pushed my mother, sister, and me to put on an act simulating a wonderful warm family, the product of a thoughtful and generous patriarch.

While we were in Tennessee, a bunch of us sat down in Bert’s den, and we all talked. Mary had a brother who had strayed from Mormonism, and she had convinced him to come back into the fold. She knelt by his chair and talked softly to him about Joseph Smith’s Satanic con. She really believes that stuff.

I heard her mention Lamanites. This is not a type of flooring or siding. A Lamanite is an American Indian. They come from Asia. Mormons think they are Jews, somehow transported here from Israel. How obvious is it that this is a fantasy? Do I have to even mention the fact that DNA tests prove it isn’t true? It’s like trying to debunk the tooth fairy. I would feel foolish.

Mary is warm and caring. Probably the finest first cousin I have, although I could be wrong, because I have at least 4 I don’t really know. It is tragic, but she has become some kind of Mormon teacher. She told me many women rely on her for spiritual guidance. These poor people are striving daily to push further into Satan’s trap.

Mary was abused by a gutless, selfish little boy of a father, and she was abused by a psychopatic stepmother, and now Satan is taking her to hell and using her to lead others there. An eternity of abuse is coming.

I could sit here all day and write about the reasons why Mormonism doesn’t work. I could talk about how Smith was a known con artist before he became a guru. I could point out that his story about looking at golden plates in a hat can’t be true, because the plates would have weighed so much no hat could have held them. I could say the Book of Abraham is an Egyptian text about preparing dead bodies for entombment, which it is. Mormons wouldn’t listen, because they are supernaturally blinded. They think they’re right because they’re successful and don’t drink in front of other people.

I won’t be at Bert’s funeral. If I get notice of an address, I’ll send some flowers. Not expensive ones.

The stories the family told at Ardell’s funeral, at which no minister was present, were appalling. They told about how Bert and Ardell had had a fistfight, rolling on the ground outside the RV, over some trivial thing. They thought that was hilarious.

It’s normal to tell funny stories at funerals, but if Ardell had been there, she would have told stories that were more helpful. She would have told us about hell and her regrets. She would have sobbed and begged God to save her. She would have begged her kids for forgiveness. She would have warned the rest of us. Then she would have gone back to hell, because there is no help for the dead, regardless of the fables Catholics and Jews have taken from pagans and turned into doctrine.

I remember having long talks with Bert and Ardell about the reality of Yeshua. I got nowhere. These two hard-headed, conceited, mediocre people thought they already had the answers. I am so sick of beating my head against the rocks which are the heads of other human beings. I would love to be put together with a few people who will actually listen.

I’ll never see Bert or Ardell again, or their dead son, or my dad’s mother. All my involvement with them was a waste of time. Bert and Ardell sent my dad a framed picture of themselves. I’m going to throw it out and keep the frame. To my heart, it’s like those pictures of strangers that come with wallets. Other people who are not part of my future.

Speak ill of the dead. Offend. Seriously. It’s better than going to a long series of funerals at which people bury their heads as deeply in the earth as the remains of the recently damned.

The older I get, the more people I offend, the less I care, and the more good I do. I may have given Mary the URL for my blog. I don’t remember. If she reads this, so be it. Maybe it will help her.

My wife and I prayed for her this morning, and we will keep it up for a while. It would bring me tremendous joy to find out she had finally found freedom. I would really like her to be with us forever in the place where her parents can never go.