8-25-09 Tale of Two Dead Atheists....

My mind works in quirky ways.  As proof, I offer this post as evidence.  In God Is Dead, Now Zen Is The Only Truth, Osho talks about the funeral of an atheist. 

I have heard about one very famous atheist. He died, and his wife brought his best clothes, best shoes, before he was put in the coffin -- the best tie, the costliest possible. She wanted to give him a good farewell, a good send-off. He was dressed as he had never dressed in his whole life.

And then friends came, and neighbors came. And one woman said: "Wow! He's all dressed up and nowhere to go." He was an atheist, so he did not believe in God, he did not believe in heaven, he did not believe in hell -- nowhere to go, and so well-dressed!

Which piqued a memory of another tale about another famous atheist that I read in a book by Max Lucado... He Still Moves Stones.  Max says:

Several years ago I heard then Vice President George Bush speak at a prayer breakfast. He told of his trip to Russia to represent the United States at the funeral of Leonid Brezhnev. The funeral was as precise and stoic as the communist regime. No tears were seen, and no emotion displayed. With one exception. Mr. Bush told how Brezhnev’s widow was the last person to witness the body before the coffin was closed. For several seconds she stood at his side and then reached down and performed the sign of the cross on her husband’s chest.

In the hour of her husband’s death, she went not to Lenin, not to Karl Marx, not to Khrushchev. In the hour of death she turned to a Nazarene carpenter who had lived two thousand years ago and who dared to claim: “Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust in me.”

All dressed up with nowhere to go?  Hardly.