Brand New Atheist

I remember a time when Karen and I had little conversations about this. This has to be on the minds of all christians at some point in their marriage. The church and the bible give you the impression that once you marry you become one and will spend your eternity together. So inevitably one of you will ask, “If I died, would you remarry?”

It seems to be a two part question. Almost as if you’re saying, “If I died, would you desecrate our marriage by marrying someone else?” and “If I died, would you remarry and have sex and more kids?” Oddly, these things seem important when you believe in an all powerful being that left a book behind 2000 years ago with rules on how to live your life today.

In a world where you believe in such things these can be important questions. Because to you, it says a lot about the person you’re going to marry or are married to. While I think most peoples answers would be the same, you really don’t want to hear the answer. Most people will remarry and have sex and possibly have more kids.

What changes when you stop believing in the bible and your church? Well, for me, I’ve decided if my wife were to die I would not remarry. Not because of some vows I said when I was 20 years old or some feeling of entitlement towards her. The truth is, I would never marry again.

My marriage is as important to me today as it was the day I got married only for different reasons. The thought of getting married has completely lost it’s meaning. Without an all might being marriage is just a government issued legal contract. Any new relationship for me would be like Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.

I’ve been married for 17 years. For 16 of those years I became increasingly concerned about entering heaven. The thought of entering heaven and not being with my wife was hard for me to accept. I didn’t like to think about it. I would distract myself anytime I started thinking about.

I considered asking pastors and other religious people their thoughts but I knew they wouldn’t have the answers I wanted. Because no one had the answers I sought. Apparently you have to die before you get your answers. Which often lead me to wonder why any religious person thought they had any answers since they obviously hadn’t died yet.

When we were first married it wasn’t something that I even thought about. But the more often we went to church the more I began to worry that she would spend eternity with her first husband. The more I learned about divorce and vows the more I thought she had promised her life to her first husband and our marriage wouldn’t be valid to God. I was concerned that her first vows were unbreakable and that we wouldn’t be together once we had made it into heaven.

You can imagine the torture this thought process can cause in a person. There are probably thousands of people who wonder the exact same thing right now. The only comfort I can provide to them is that gods are not real and the Bible and Quran are works of fiction. The lack of evidence for any god is everywhere and the evidence for the existence of any god is nowhere.

Once I realized the truth about gods and works of fiction I immediately knew that many of the worries I had throughout my life were total wastes of time. Imagine the countless hours that people continue to waste worrying about things that don’t exist.