Seconding Matt’s praise of the late comedian George Carlin, a reader remarks that there must be a lot of laughter now inside the Pearly Gates—or alongside the Lake of Fire, depending on where Mr. Carlin wound up.

Matt responds:

Where people go in the next world is a decision for someone whose pay grade is much higher than ours.  I think we have a hard enough time living our own life, without wondering what’s going to happen after other people die.  But we can comment and debate and learn from all sides of the spectrum.

To me, open-mindedness, paying attention to reality, and caring about what really is good and what really is terrible, are the important things.  Paying attention to what our own problems are and solving them...  not worrying about wasting time on criticizing what other people are doing...  That’s an important lesson, which I believe comes under the broad word “tolerance.”

With tolerance comes some form of understanding.  After we get to that point, we have hope that we can live in both worlds.  We’re living in a world which we enjoy and understand and which we’ve been brought up in—but then all of a sudden we’re faced with an alternate world, which is very hostile to us because we don’t understand it and don’t want to know about it, and it challenges what we feel comfortable with.  If I’m a Christian, how can I feel comfortable in a world that is non-Christian?

It’s accepting that there are other people thinking other things, and they are probably diametrically opposed to what I think.  That gives me the license to debate and to question, but not to kill. When we finally come to an agreement that we’re never going to agree with each other, do I then have to spend the rest of my life hating you?  If you’re a vegetarian and I eat meat, be done with it!  You eat your grass, and I’ll eat my pig!

Once we come to that, we come to love, where we not only tolerate but accept and put away killing and misunderstanding.  Beyond that, finally we get to the all-ellusive peace.  We have a long way to go before we get there.  Talking and thinking and writing about it, commenting on it from all angles, keeps us from our seemingly natural instincts to fight physically, abuse, and kill.  Those people who are placed on this world to agitate through words, to make us think, are truly needed at all times.

So amen, amen, and away we go!

Matt