This blog post contains the story of my daughter Emilie as well as her eulogy and obituary.  I have had this posted on another web site for years.  Today, we’re switching from Time Warner to U-Verse for internet service.  As a result, Emilie’s old web site will be taken down.  I decided to move the content over to my WordPress blog so that it would be easier to manage going forward.  If you’ve seen the old web site, there’s nothing new here.

Emilie’s Story

On April 21, 2004, we gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Emilie. Approximately 45 minutes after birth, Emilie stopped breathing for unknown reasons. She was resuscitated, but only into a deep coma with severe brain damage. Emilie lived out the remainder of her life in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). She died on May 21, 2004 as a result of breathing difficulties caused by her brain damage.

During Emilie’s life, friends, family, neighbors, and the internet community showed tremendous interest in keeping up with her latest status. During the first few days after Emilie’s birth, our phone was ringing off the hook whenever we were home from the hospital. We quickly realized that we needed a better way to spread the latest news about Emilie. So, this website was born as a place where people could go to read the latest updates. We never expected more than a handful of people to access the website. But that’s not what happened. The website took off, and soon we were receiving touching emails offering support from all over the world. To date, the website has nearly 60,000 hits.

Dawn and I have been deeply touched by the support we’ve received from the internet community. We’ll never forget it.

4/23/2004 at 10:40am

Emilie was born at Seton Northwest Hospital on Wednesday at 6:16pm after a fairly uneventful and easy labor. (I verified with Dawn, and she gave me permission to use the word “easy”. All of the tests the nurses do immediately after birth indicated that Emilie was healthy.

After the nurses finished with Emilie, Dawn took her to try to start feeding her. Emilie ate for about one minute and then went to sleep. Dawn held Emilie for the next 15-20 minutes thinking she was sleeping. Unfortunately, sometime during that period, Emilie stopped breathing. Neither Dawn nor I noticed when; it looked to both of us like she was sleeping. After 15-20 minutes, the night nurse came over to check on Emilie, and that’s when we discovered what had happened.

A large team of doctors and nurses were almost immediately in the room working to resuscitate Emilie. When they started working on her, her heart rate was extremely low. Luckily, they were able to resuscitate her and get her heart rate back to normal. She was put on a ventilator to help her breath.

About an hour after all this started, Emilie was transferred to the main Seton Medical Center downtown where they have their main NICU (neonatal intensive care unit). Dawn and I stayed at Seton Northwest that night. Dawn was discharged from the hospital around 10:00 the next morning. We went home, got cleaned up, and then went over to spend the rest of the day with Emilie at the NICU.

Emilie is currently in a coma. This was confirmed by an EEG performed yesterday morning; we got the results from the neurologist last night. She opens her eyes periodically and moves her hands and feet, but these are not signs of consciousness; they are just reflexes. Right now, she has no gag reflex, and her eyes are not tracking light. Due to the trauma from oxygen deprivation, she is experiencing swelling in her brain (edema). The neurologist told me that the swelling typically peaks over roughly a 3-day period and then slowly subsides.

Emilie is also experiencing seizures. They are giving her medicine to keep the seizures under control. They also don’t want Dawn and me to stimulate her by talking to her or touching her. Right now, the more stimulation she gets, the worse her seizures become.

That’s the bad news. There is some good news, though. Although Emilie is still on the ventilator, she is breathing on her own as well. They have been able to steadily decrease the number of breaths per minute the ventilator provides from 44 on Wednesday night to 18 late last night. The levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in her blood are also good.

Emilie’s doctors are also concerned about her kidneys. People with oxygen deprivation frequently develop kidney problems because the body diverts oxygen away from less essential organs like the kidney in order to get the brain as much oxygen as possible. However, Emilie’s creatinine levels (a measure of her kidney function) look good so far. She has also produced several wet diapers starting yesterday afternoon. That made her doctor really happy.

That’s about as much information as there is for now. We’re going to be in wait-and-see mode for a while, I’m afraid. The two big questions are: 1) What caused her to stop breathing; and 2) What damage was caused. We’ll probably never know the answer to the first question. The answer to the second question is just going to take some time. In the next few days as they get the seizures more under control, they’ll do a CT Scan or perhaps an MRI of her brain to find out more about the damage. But it could literally be months or even years before we find out the full extent of the brain damage. Also, the doctors are guessing that Emilie will be in the NICU for at least 2-3 weeks.

Dawn and I are holding up well. We were able to get some decent rest last night. My mother is in town watching Jonathon, and that has been a tremendous help. We’ve been very touched by the amount of support we’ve gotten from friends in the neighborhood, coworkers, and family. In particular, I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to the people we’ve dealt with at both Seton Northwest and at the NICU. To a person, everyone we’ve dealt with has been supportive, caring, and has gone way beyond the call of duty. This includes everyone from doctors to nurses to even the cleaning staff. Here are just two examples: Dawn’s OB came in from home on his own time late Wednesday night (wearing shorts and a t-shirt just to give Dawn a hug and tell her he was pulling for us. The same thing happened with Dawn’s labor nurse. Her shift ended at 7:00 shortly after Emilie was born. When she switched out with the night nurse at 7:00 and went home, everything about Emilie was perfect. When she found out what happened, she also came back in from home on her own time to give us support.

I’ll post more updates as we find out more.

4/23/2004 at 11:30pm

Not a whole lot of news today. Emilie ran a bit of a fever tonight, but it went down when the nurse put several wet wash clothes on her. The doctor speculated that they might be able to remove the ventilator early next week. He also speculated that she might start coming out of the coma early in the week, although he expects her to gradually come out over a period of days. Of course, that’s all speculation. They are also planning a CT Scan, probably on Monday.

So, we’re not expecting to have too much status to report over the weekend. Hopefully by Monday or Tuesday, we’ll have more information or an improvement in her condition. If I don’t post any updates over the next couple of days, it’s because there’s no news to post.

4/25/2004 at 10:00am

We spoke with the weekend neonatologist yesterday afternoon, and he painted a fairly grim picture. He said that on a scale of good/medium/serious, he would paint Emilie’s situation as being very serious. He also said that there is a high likelihood that she has severe brain damage. Also, her release from the NICU is nowhere in sight at this point; she could be in there for weeks or perhaps months.

We’re hoping that we’ll learn more about her situation over the next few days. She should be getting a CT Scan on Monday that should give us more information.

I was talking to the doctor last night, and she thought that they might try to feed Emilie a small amount of breast milk later today.

4/25/2004 at 5:00pm

The doctors were pleased with some improvement that Emilie made through the night last night. First, her levels of medicine for seizures are way down, and she is not showing signs of any seizures. Second, she’s beginning to have some movements in her arms and hands again. Third, she’s beginning to develop a bit of a gag reflex.

This afternoon, Emilie was fed a small amount of breast milk through a feeding tube.

4/26/2004 at 11:30pm

Not a bad day.

When we went in to see Emilie this morning, the doctor had just turned the ventilator off so that he could see how she did breathing on her own. By late afternoon, her breathing was going well enough that she was removed completely from the ventilator. The results of taking her off the ventilator weren’t perfect, but they weren’t horrible either. She struggled to breath a bit, and her oxygen absorption rate dropped some. That’s likely due to some strider that she has (Jonathon had that too) and perhaps swollen vocal chords from the ventilator. She has an oxygen hood over her head for the night. The hood looks kind of like an oversized space helmet. She’s getting a slightly increased level of oxygen along with water vapor pumped into the hood to help her breath and to help clear up her breathing passage. The treatment is similar to how a child with croup is treated. Emilie is breathing comfortably on her own in the hood, and it’s nice and quiet by her crib without the ventilator running!

Emilie also had her CT Scan today. Before the scan, her doctor warned us that CT Scans in infants this young frequently do not reveal brain damage even though severe damage may exist. Therefore, there were only two possible outcomes of the scan: 1) the same prognosis (a high probability of severe brain damage) or 2) a worse prognosis (not sure how that could be possible). There could be no result from the CT Scan that would make the doctors think things were looking better. So, essentially the only possibilities were no news or bad news.

We got the results this afternoon, and the CT Scan didn’t show anything. So, we got the “no news” outcome instead of the “bad news”… which I suppose is good news in a way. But to be clear, Emilie’s prognosis is still the same: She runs a significant risk of severe brain damage.

Finally, here’s something to look forward to… It’s likely that we’ll be able to hold Emilie within a few days!

4/27/2004 at 10:45pm

Emilie remains under the oxygen hood and has shown little progress in terms of responsiveness, movements, or gag reflex. She did have a tube removed from her stomach. (This tube was used for monitoring her blood pressure and for drawing blood for lab work.) Now that the tube is gone, we’re able to hold her.

We continue to be overwhelmed with the amount of support we’re receiving. This evening, Jonathon and I drove off to pick up Dawn at the hospital. When we returned, one of our neighbors was mowing our yard. We were especially touched because this neighbor and his wife lost their daughter shortly after birth at about this time last year. We’ve been deeply touched by the emails, phone calls, dinners, flowers, gifts, and offers to babysit that we’ve received.

Most parents hope that their kids achieve great things in life. Regardless of what happens with her, I believe that Emilie has already achieved something great: She has brought out the absolute best in a large group of people.

4/28/2004 at 9:30pm

There weren’t any significant changes in Emilie’s condition today. It’s likely that there will be no changes tomorrow. So, don’t be surprised if there is no update to the web site tomorrow.

Given that it’s been a pretty slow news day, I thought I’d talk a bit about our feelings on mental retardation and quality of life. Fair warning: I’m going to be fairly blunt about Emilie’s prognosis; this will be difficult reading.

When I was a senior in high school (back in 1988), I spent two weeks volunteering in a classroom of mentally retarded students (the students were mostly teenagers). At first, I felt nervous and uncomfortable around the students. I also felt sorry for them. But as I spent time with them, I realized that there was nothing about them for which to feel sorry. The students could play, laugh, experience both joy and sadness, express love, be devious, and so on. For me, being able to experience things that make you happy is what quality of life is all about. These students definitely experienced quality of life; they just found happiness in simpler things than adults do. Ultimately, I began to even admire these students a little because they would never need to experience adult worries and they seemed to exhibit only small amounts of the darker human emotions such as hate, jealousy, and pride.

I would have no problem accepting Emilie turning out like these students. I can accept her living a simple and perhaps short life as long as she can experience emotions and find things that make her happy.

Based on clinical observations, however, Emilie’s doctors believe that she is most likely severely brain damaged. Severe brain damage isn’t definite yet; it’s just currently the most likely possibility. What this means (here’s where I start to get blunt) is that she will likely never walk, talk, see, eat with her mouth, or experience emotions. She will grow to where her head is disproportionately small relative to the rest of her body. Her body will grow twisted. Due to her not being able to properly clear secretions in her throat like we do, she will be subject to lots of lung infections. She will be in and out of the Pediatric ICU so much that the doctors will all know her. Ultimately, she will die of pneumonia by at most the age of 20, and possibly much much younger than even that (perhaps after only a few years).

This is not quality of life. It will be very difficult for us to accept Emilie living for any length of time in a vegetative state with no hope of improvement.

As I said, this prognosis is not definite yet. It’s going to take some time–perhaps weeks or months–to really know what Emilie’s outlook is. Dawn and I feel like we owe it to Emilie to give her some time to try to fight back to a state where she can have some quality of life. So, for now, we continue in a wait-and-see-and-hope mode.

While we want to give Emilie a chance, we are realistic. In particular, we’re beginning to think that should her breathing take a turn for the worse so that she has to go back on the ventilator or should she need to be resuscitated again (these are both unlikely events), it would be catastrophic to the likelihood of her having any semblance of a future. Dawn and I, therefore, are seriously considering asking the doctors to add a “do not resuscitate” order to her chart. We’ve discussed this with her doctors, and they feel it would be appropriate. We will likely add this in the next day or two.

What we’re hoping to see from Emilie over the next week is improvement in her alertness, increased movement, and better reflexes (especially gag reflex). We’re hoping to see her open her eyes or at least have them start responding appropriately to light. These will be the types of signs that her brain damage is less severe. If this doesn’t turn out to be the case, then at some point in the future, we will work with her doctors to not prolong her life.

4/30/2004 at 8:45am

Emilie’s oxygen hood was removed yesterday. She seems to be breathing pretty comfortably on her own without any extra oxygen now. She’s scheduled for her second EEG today. We’ll probably have the results from the neurologist tonight.

5/01/2004 at 4:00pm

Neurologically, there hasn’t been a lot of change in Emilie over the last several days. She had a second EEG yesterday, but we’re still waiting for the results from the neurologist.

Emilie is back on oxygen. This time, instead of using an oxygen hood, she has a tube that goes a little bit into each nostril to supply oxygen. (I think this is called a cannula.) You frequently see emphesema patients walking around with a similar oxygen delivery system. More troubling is that the level of carbon dioxide in her blood has been increasing since yesterday.

We’ll have more pictures posted soon.

5/02/2004 at 7:00pm

Emilie’s carbon dioxide levels went down last night from 70 to 60 (not sure what the units are). That’s a good start. They’ll check her CO2 levels again tonight at 4:00am, and we’ll be hoping they either keep going down or at least level off. It could have been really bad if the levels had kept going up.

5/03/2004 at 5:45pm

You may have noticed some changes to the website:

• I’ve added more pictures to the site.

• Rather than go to one page that shows all pictures at once, you can now flip through the pictures one at a time. This is nicer for people on dialup connections.

• You can use the date selector at the top of the photo section to view either the old photos or the new photos.

• Updates are now shown in a popup rather than on a separate page.

• All of the old updates are still available… just select the most recent update to display the popup, and then use the popup’s selector to pick an older update.

Emilie is still having problems with her breathing. Every once in a while, her oxygen saturation drops, and the nurses have to turn up her level of oxygen. Her carbon dioxide levels stayed constant overnight. That’s a good thing after she spent several days last week with her levels rising. She’s now spent a couple of days without an increase in the levels.

Emilie’s feedings are going very well. She’s currently being fed about 70cc’s of breast milk every three hours. The doctors expect that they’ll be able to remove her IV within the next day or two. That will mean that her only tubes will be the cannula to help her breath and a feeding tube going down her nose.

Neurologically, there still isn’t much improvement. The doctor told us he saw a bit more of a gag reflex than when he checked on Friday, but the gag reflex is still not where it needs to be. We got the results of Friday’s EEG. There were no signs of seizure activity. The electrical activity in her brain was reduced although not drastically. I think the doctor said that normally you expect to see about 15V of activity and they were recording around 10V in her. Essentially, the doctor said that there was no information from the EEG that contradicts their clinical observations one way or the other.

They will give Emilie another week to see if she can improve to where she can take a bottle. If not, she’ll likely be scheduled for surgery early next week to implant a permanent feeding tube.

Oh, I was going through some of the email we’ve received, and someone asked which doctors have been seeing Emilie. I think at one time or another, she has been seen by most of the neonatologists at Seton: Hodges, Wermer, Landers, Creswell, Kelly, and Loyd (who works primarily out of Brackenridge).

5/04/2004 at 9:45pm

Today, Dawn and I had a very good talk with the social worker who works with NICU families. We’ve put together a plan of action for the next few weeks that greatly eases some of our concerns. First, Emilie will not have a feeding tube surgically inserted next week; she will continue to be fed by the temporary tube going down her nose for the next couple of weeks. Second, Emilie will have an MRI at approximately 4 weeks of age (about 2 weeks from now). We were given the option to move up the MRI, but it will provide more accurate results if we wait until Emilie is 4 weeks old. Third, Emilie will remain in the NICU until the MRI results are in. Finally, if Emilie remains in a vegetative state and if the MRI looks bad (both likelihoods), then we will have Emilie transferred from the NICU to the care of Hospice Austin after the MRI results are in. Dawn and I will tour the hospice facilities next week.

Dawn and I are both at peace with this plan of action. We’ve come to a level of acceptance about Emilie’s fate that I didn’t think would be possible for us to reach. Certainly a week ago, we wouldn’t have been emotionally ready to have a calm, rational discussion with the social worker about end-of-life options.

As we don’t anticipate many changes in Emilie, I probably won’t update the site much between now and the MRI. I’ll certainly update the site if there are any major changes in her condition, and I’ll update it as we get more pictures developed. I’ll also post once the MRI is scheduled.

5/09/2004 at 4:45pm

I’ve added some new pictures.

There have been some small changes in Emilie over the last few days. I’m somewhat reluctant to list these changes on the website because they’re small and nothing to get too excited about. I don’t want to falsely raise people’s hopes.

First, Emilie’s IV has been removed. That means that the only things connected to Emilie are her cannula (to provide her oxygen), a temporary feeding tube that goes down her nose into her stomach, an oxygen saturation monitor, a heart rate monitor, and a respiration monitor.

Second, Emilie’s gag reflex has been improving somewhat. The response of her eyes to light has also improved.

Most interestingly, Emilie is beginning to try to open her eyes. Last night, we saw her open her right eye a couple times. She slowly opened it about a quarter of the way, kept it open for about 10 seconds, and then closed it. Today, we saw her do the same thing three times with her left eye. I don’t want to make too big a deal out of this yet; she only had her eyes just barely open for perhaps a minute total over several hours of visits. But at least it’s a little change to report.

5/11/2004 at 8:00am

The doctor wasn’t overly impressed with Emilie opening her eyes. Given the results of her clinical neurological exam, the doctor felt that her opening her eyes is not a conscious action. People in vegetative states can open their eyes yet remain in the vegetative state.

Emilie’s MRI is now scheduled for May 19 (next week on Wednesday).

5/15/2004 at 9:00pm

I haven’t updated the site for a while. So, I thought I’d better post an update. Neurologically, there hasn’t been much change in Emilie. Her breathing, however, has taken a turn for the worse over the last week. The volume of oxygen she receives through her cannula has always bounced around, but prior to this week, it was almost always in the range of 25-75 CC’s. By mid-week, she was consistently over 100 CC’s. Today, she needed 200 CC’s and was still de-saturating a bit.

Emilie’s MRI has been moved up from Wednesday to Tuesday. Her doctors will confer over the results on Wednesday, and then we will meet with them on Thursday to get the results. At this point, none of us has much hope that the MRI will do anything other than confirm what we already know: Emilie is in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery. The MRI is really beginning to feel like a formality.

I probably won’t post an update again until Thursday evening.

5/20/2004 at 7:15am

We got the preliminary results back from the MRI last night. The results are pretty bad, which was what we were expecting. Emilie’s brain has undergone atrophy (shrinking), and there’s really no chance of her coming out of her vegetative state. We’re talking with the neurologist tonight. He won’t tell us anything different; we’ll just get more details.

The next step, we hope, is to get Emilie transferred into hospice care. There, she’ll have nutrition withheld so that she will die. There is a bit of a complication, though. The Child Abuse and Treatment Act of 1984 (also known as the Baby Doe Law) was passed to protect the rights of disabled children against parents who might want to withhold medical treatment because of the disabilities. Essentially, the law says that doctors are required to provide all treatment possible–even without the parents’ consent–with only a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is for babies in a permanent comatose state. So, the law doesn’t seem to apply to Emilie.

To make sure they are on strong legal and ethical ground, the hospice plays it very safe in situations like this. The hospice is convening an ethics council on Friday afternoon to examine Emilie’s case and make sure that withholding nutrition is legally and ethically defensible. I’ll post an update to the website late on Friday after we find out the decision from the council.

You can read more about the Baby Doe Law by clicking here.

On a lighter note, our son Jonathon has developed a kind of nasty diaper rash. His pediatrician recommended keeping his diaper off him for some extended periods to help the rash heal. So, his grandma let him run around naked in the backyard a bit. Jonathon was running around, having a good old time, when he stopped in the back corner of the yard and took a poop. His grandma got up to go cleanup the poop, but our basset hound Rosco beat her over there. Rosco ate the poop before he could be stopped!! Yuck! Gross!!!! Never, never let a basset hound lick you on the face!!!!!

5/21/2004 at 7:30am

This morning at 3:20, Emilie died peacefully while being rocked in Dawn’s arms with me sitting at her side. After being warned by doctors that her breathing was declining, Dawn and I stayed up with Emilie at the hospital from about 5:00 yesterday afternoon until her death.

Right now, Dawn and I are very tired and are going to get some sleep. Later, I’ll post more of the details leading up to Emilie’s death. I’ll also post the funeral arrangements as they become finalized.

For now, let me just say that Emilie going on her own without having to go to hospice was a blessing. Making the decision to send her to hospice, having her nutrition withdrawn, and watching her die over a several day period would have been so difficult.

5/22/2004 at 2:45pm

I’ve added funeral details and the text of Emilie’s obituary to the website. After the funeral on Monday, I’ll post the text of the eulogy and some more pictures. Those will be the last updates to the website.

As you’ll recall, Dawn and I were scheduled to meet with the neurologist on Thursday after 6:00. At about 4:00, I got a call at work from Dawn saying that the neurologist was going to see us at 5:00, not 6:00. Dawn also told me that Emilie’s breathing was declining. So, I left work early to go to the hospital.

When I got to the hospital, Emilie’s oxygen was turned up as high as it could go, but her oxygen saturation was bouncing around mostly in the 70′s or 80′s. It’s supposed to be in the 90′s. Her neonatologist told Dawn that he felt she was dying and had perhaps one to three days to live.

We met with the neurologist at about 5:30. He told us that Emilie had no evidence of upper-brain activity and that she had less than 90% of her brain stem functionality. He told us that if she made any improvement at all, it would only be that she might regain some of her brain stem functionality. He felt that there was no chance of Emilie regaining any level of consciousness or awareness.

After we talked with the neurologist, the neonatologist working the night-shift (Dr. Landers) told us to stick around; she did not think Emilie would make it through the night. Just down the hall from the NICU is a private room where parents can room-in with their babies. Typically, parents room-in with their babies several days before bringing them home from the NICU. The room is very comfortable with a queen size bed, a couple of rocking chairs, and a nice view of downtown Austin. Dr. Landers wrote up orders for us to get to room-in with Emilie that night. That way, we could have some privacy during Emilie’s final hours.

When Emilie was transferred to the private room, we were given the choice of keeping or getting rid of her monitors (heart rate, respiration rate, and oxygen saturation) and oxygen. We chose to keep her on oxygen but remove the monitors. We were told we could turn off the oxygen whenever we wanted. We were setup in the private room by a little before 8:00.

Throughout the evening, Emilie’s breathing became shallower and shallower. Her muscle tone decreased to almost nothing. By midnight, she was so limp that it didn’t feel like she had any muscles in her body at all.

At midnight, one of Emilie’s primary nurses drove in from home (on her day off) to say goodbye to Emilie and to offer us support. She stayed until a little after 2:30.

At 2:30, after Dawn and I had each held Emilie one last time, we removed Emilie’s cannula and turned off her oxygen. This was probably the most difficult thing Dawn and I have ever had to do in our lives. We didn’t really know how long Emilie would last without the oxygen support; we figured probably a few hours at most. After turning off the oxygen, we said goodbye to the nurse. We then laid Emilie in the bed and cuddled up with her. After at most a minute or two, Emilie opened her eyes and stopped breathing. This was the first time we had seen her open both her eyes and keep them open since the day after she was born. Emilie then started a pattern of taking one deep breath every 30 or 40 seconds.

At about 3:20, Dawn picked up Emilie, sat down in a glider, and started to rock her. Within a minute at most, Emilie breathed her last breath and died. It was as if she had been waiting for her mom to pick her up so that she could die in her mom’s arms.

After her death, we asked about organ donations. Unfortunately, few of Emilie’s organs could be donated because of the oxygen deprivation she experienced shortly after birth. She was, however, able to donate three heart valves. We hope that these will enable some other child to live a healthy life.

5/25/2004 at 9:00pm

Sorry to have taken so long to update the site. I’ve added the eulogy. I’m waiting to get some pictures back from the funeral home before adding the last sets of pictures to the website. I should get the pictures added tomorrow night.

I want to offer a special word of thanks to three businesses that have been very supportive in the last few days: Cook-Walden Funeral Homes, Rudy’s Bar-bq, and Dog Camp (Rosco and Daisy’s home away from home).

Thank you to everyone who has supported us through this difficult time. We’re going to be ok.

4/21/2005

Today would have been Emilie’s first birthday. This was supposed to be a day for cake and ice cream and friends and family. Instead, it’s a day for looking at Emilie’s urn and thinking back to a painful month from last year.

Dawn and I didn’t expect too many people to remember the importance of today to us. We expected to get through the day quietly and alone. In fact, the company I work for forgot about today and scheduled its quarterly company party for tonight. (I politely declined the invitation.)

But, quite a few people have remembered Emilie’s birthday. We’ve received a lot of support over the last few days from friends and people on the internet. It really means a lot to us that people, many of whom we’ve never met, are thinking about us and about Emilie on this day. Thank you.

Over the last year, Dawn and I have done a good job of getting on with our lives. When you have a young special-needs child (our son has been diagnosed with PDD-NOS, which means he’s borderline autistic), 2 dogs, a house, and a demanding job, you don’t really have much choice but to pick up the pieces and get back into life as best as you can. We don’t live our lives moping around about Emilie; for the most part, we’ve settled back into the lives we had before Emilie came along.

But, this doesn’t mean we don’t think about Emilie. You could probably count on one hand the number of days over the last year that I haven’t thought about her. And each time I think about her, it’s just as painful as it was a year ago. Only, this is just for 5 or 10 minutes here and there throughout the day. I don’t expect these thoughts and feelings to ever go away.

Our big news for the year is that Dawn is 30-weeks pregnant with twin boys! At the time of Emilie’s death, we weren’t sure if we were ever going to want another child. We knew we’d never be able to replace Emilie, and we weren’t sure we wanted to risk going through another tragedy. By the time a month had passed, we changed our minds and decided we wanted to get pregnant as quickly as possible. Three years earlier, we had gone through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) to get pregnant with our son. As a byproduct of the IVF procedure, we had 4 extra fertilized embryos that were frozen and stored in a lab. We decided the quickest way to get pregnant given that we’ve battled infertility was to have these embryos thawed and to try to get pregnant with them. The first 2 embryos didn’t survive the freezing/thawing process; the second 2 embryos did, and both worked out. In a weird sort of way, our son (who turns 3 in May) and the twins will be triplets since all were conceived at the same time nearly 4 years ago, even though their birthdays will be nearly 3 years apart.

So, after nearly 7 years, miscarriages, infertility, a special-needs child, Emilie, and twins, our little family will soon be complete.

5/21/2005

Today is the first anniversary of Emilie’s death. A few days ago, Dawn and I received an email from Vicky Leach, who had stumbled across Emilie’s website. It turns out that we share a tragic bond with the Leach family. On May 21, 2004 at 3:20am, the Leach’s gave birth to their stillborn son Aidan. Both Aidan and Emilie died at the same time. Our thoughts are with the Leach family as they too go through a painful anniversary. You can visit Aidan’s website by clicking here.

Pictures

4/26/2004

This picture was taken minutes after birth. You can see her weight on the scale.

Emilie was running a bit of a fever the night we took some of these pictures. So, the nurse covered her with damp towels to bring the fever down.

For the next two pictures, I snuck the damp towel off of Emilie's head while the nurse wasn't looking.

The stuffed dog is there to remind Emilie of her two hound dogs Rosco and Daisy.

5/3/2004

Mom and Emilie.

Grandma Miller and Emilie.

Four generations of trouble: Great Grandma Emilie Newman, Grandma Newman, Mom, and Emilie.

5/9/2004

The nurse temporarily removed Emilie's cannula and feeding tube for this picture.

Grandpa Miller and Dad

Uncle Matt

Aunt Cindy

5/29/2004

Emilie with Mom and Dad.

One eye partially open.

Emilie and Shelly (one of her primary nurses).

Toni, another primary nurse.

Nurse Lesa. Lesa was on the team that transported Emilie from Seton Northwest to the NICU.

Eulogy

At first, the thought of putting together a eulogy for Emilie seemed daunting.  How much can you say about someone whose life consisted of somewhat less than an hour of consciousness followed by a month-long coma?  But then, we started thinking of all the things we’ll never forget about the last month and the pregnancy that preceded it, and we realized that there is in fact quite a lot to say.  This eulogy, then, is a list of the things we’ll never forget about Emilie.

First, we’ll never forget the circumstances around Emilie’s conception.  We’ve never made it a secret that we had to undergo nearly four years of emotionally grueling infertility treatments to have our son Jonathon.  After Jonathon was born, we kind of half-heartedly tried to get pregnant again up until Jonathon’s first birthday.  After his birthday, we sat down and talked about whether we were ready to go all out to try to have a second child.  Were we ready to take on the emotional and monetary costs of more infertility treatments?  We decided that the answer was no.  We wanted to just relax and enjoy Jonathon for a few more years before trying to get pregnant again in earnest.  So, Dawn talked with her doctor, and he put her on birth control pills to preserve her fertility until we were ready.  There was a two-week window between when Dawn picked up the birth control prescription and when she could start taking the pills.

So, while getting pregnant with Jonathon took nearly four years, laparoscopic surgery, two hysterosalpingogram’s, five failed attempts on clomid, three failed attempts on clomid with intrauterine insemination, a pregnancy followed by a painful miscarriage and DNC at 10 weeks, and finally in vitro fertilization, all it took to get pregnant with Emilie was for us to decide we weren’t ready for another child yet and for Dawn to get ready to start taking birth control pills.  Sometimes life is funny.

Indeed, when Dawn told me she was pregnant, I didn’t believe her.  She had to bring out the pregnancy test to prove it to me.  As she was handing me the test, the first thing I said was “You’re not handing me the pee side, are you?”  Well, sure enough, she was pregnant, and we were so happy our feet didn’t touch the ground for the next week.

The next thing we’ll never forget about Emilie is the joy we felt at her birth.  She was such a beautiful baby!  Unfortunately, this joy quickly vanished as we discovered that she had stopped breathing.  We will never forget how we held each other and cried while teams of nurses and doctors rushed in and out of the room working to resuscitate Emilie.  Neither of us said “it will be ok” to the other; we both knew in our hearts that this was really bad.  Frankly, we were shocked when the nurses told us that Emilie had been resuscitated successfully.

Emilie, of course, was then transported to the NICU where she lived out the rest of her life.  We think of her time in the NICU as being divided into two parts, each about two weeks long.  During the first couple of weeks, we had a lot of hope that she would recover, at least somewhat.  We knew the odds were against her, but we felt like she had some chance.  We looked for every possible sign of improvement hoping for some indication that she would at least regain awareness.  But, after some initial improvements in her movements, there were no more real improvements.  The doctors’ daily reports became the same, day after day: “No real changes.”  Eventually, we stopped worrying about talking with the doctors because we knew they wouldn’t have any news.

This is when the second part of Emilie’s stay in the NICU began, that is, the second two weeks.  During this time, we came to an acceptance of Emilie’s fate, an acceptance that she was not going to improve, and an acceptance that the most merciful thing to do for her was to plan to transfer her into hospice care to help her to die legally, humanely, and quickly.  The only thing we would wait for would be her one-month MRI that would provide conclusive evidence that she would not recover, not even a little.

We will never forget our last night with Emilie.  We’ve written about it in detail on the website and won’t repeat the details here.  That night was such a mix of emotions.  First, we were thankful that Emilie was dying on her own, naturally; we would not have to carry out the awful decision we had made to send her to the hospice and have her nutrition withheld.  Second, there was a tremendous amount of love and bonding that night, particularly in Emilie’s final hour.  Finally, despite how prepared we thought we were for Emilie to die, in the end it was way more difficult than we had expected, not even close.  How could we just sit there and allow someone so beautiful to die?  We wanted more than anything to pull a code blue and get a resuscitation team in, to have Emilie put on a ventilator, or at least to turn her oxygen back on.  But we knew that wasn’t right.  It took every bit of our strength to just sit there, comfort her, and let her die.  (Make no mistake; we’re not second-guessing our decisions.  We absolutely stand behind every decision we made that night.  It’s just that executing those decisions was extraordinarily difficult.)

Enough of the bad stuff.  The thing we will remember most about Emilie’s life–the greatest miracle of her life–is you, the people in this room, our friends, family, nurses, doctors, and people following Emilie’s story on the internet.  The amount of support we’ve received has been overwhelming.

First, we want to talk about the doctors and nurses we dealt with, particularly the nurses.  We can’t even begin to express our gratitude to the medical community; to a person, everyone we’ve dealt with has been outstanding–beyond outstanding.  We’ve already mentioned on the website how Dawn’s OB and labor nurse came in after-hours, on their own time, just to offer us their support.  But that’s just the beginning.  Jonathon’s pediatrician Dr. Gill–who would have been Emilie’s pediatrician had she not ended up in the NICU–checked up on Emilie and called us several times at home just to make sure we were doing ok.  At one point, one of the neonatologists asked us if we knew Dr. Gill socially; he seemed too emotionally involved to just be our doctor.  But the reality is, he is just a man who cares deeply about his patients.

The nurses were all fantastic, and not just with Emilie but also with us.  They did a great job of answering our questions, keeping our spirits high, and comforting us.  It was obvious that the nurses really cared about Emilie; she wasn’t just another patient.  There were many, many examples of nurses going above and beyond the call of duty.  Here are just a few:

· When it appeared we would have to speak with an ethics committee before getting Emilie transferred into hospice care, one of the nurses volunteered to come in on her day off to testify in our behalf before the committee.

· During Emilie’s last night, one nurse drove in at midnight from 45 minutes away on her day off just to say goodbye to Emilie and offer us support.

· On this same night, another nurse heard that the batteries in our cell phone needed charging.  So, she gave us her personal 1-800 calling card number so that we could make long-distance calls.

· Just last night, this same nurse drove all the way from Temple to our home just to drop off some pictures she had taken of Emilie on her own camera.

Amazing!  We’re leaving lots of people out, but every nurse, doctor, respiratory technician, and social worker we’ve dealt with is fantastic.  This community is so lucky to have these people working here.

The second group of people who have been so supportive has been all the people following Emilie’s story on the Internet.  What can we say other than wow!  We have received nearly 100 emails from as far away as New Zealand.  Many have been so touching that they brought us to tears.  Many have been from other parents who lost children.  We’ve received several emails that started off with “You don’t know me, but so-and-so told me about your website.”  But, we don’t even know who “so-and-so” is!  In particular, members of INCIID [pronounced “Inside”] have been amazing.  We were peaking at INCIID’s message boards earlier today, and there were actually people posting who were so broken up over Emilie’s death that other people were posting to comfort them–and all this over a little girl and her parents that they’ve never met.  There are so many wonderful people in this world; Emilie’s story has opened our eyes to that.

Next, our friends, neighbors, and co-workers have been so incredible.  We have received so many gifts, dinners, babysitting offers, and calls of support.  The dinners and babysitting offers were particularly helpful because they allowed us to spend more time with Emilie.  We’re still blown away by the time we came home from the hospital to find our neighbor mowing our yard.

Finally, our families have been so supportive.  Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that they’ve been going through this tragedy every bit as much as we have.  After all, Emilie was their grandchild or niece.  We particularly want to thank both our mothers.  I’ve lost track of how much time my mother has been in Austin over the last couple of months watching Jonathon and helping us out.  And Dawn’s mother somehow found the strength to come up to Austin after her husband’s funeral last weekend to help us get through Emilie’s death.  (Emilie’s grandfather died of cirrhosis one week prior to Emilie’s death.  He promised to watch after Emilie for us.)

We want to repeat something we posted on the website several weeks ago.  Most parents hope their kids achieve great things in life.  Emilie did just that: She brought out the absolute best in people.

We were talking with someone the other day who said, “Life sucks.”  We had to disagree; although the last few months have “sucked”, there will be happy times again.  But, Emilie, we will never forget you and how you changed our lives.  We will always love you.

Rest in peace, little girl.

Obituary

Emilie Marguerite Miller was born on April 21, 2004 and passed away in the early morning of Friday, May 21, 2004.

Emilie is survived by her parents Clint and Dawn Miller and brother Jonathon Miller of Austin; grandmother Carole Newman of San Antonio; grandparents Sam and Barbara Miller of Houston; grandfather Randy Morbitzer of Atlanta; great grandmother Emilie Newman of San Antonio; and her great grandparents Craig and Gerry Booth of Arlington. She is also survived by her aunts, uncles, cousins and her hound dogs Rosco and Daisy.

Emilie is preceded in death by her grandfather Jesse Garcia and her great grandparents Gus and Marguerite Ayala, Harvey Newman and Walter and Olive Miller.

Emilie’s family will receive friends beginning at 12:00 noon, Monday, May 24, 2004 with funeral services following at 2:00 p.m. at Cook-Walden/Chapel of the Hills Funeral Home, 9700 Anderson Mill Road.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in Emilie’s memory to INCIID. Details are on Emilie’s website at http://home.austin.rr.com/clintdawnjonatho.

Emilie is deeply loved world wide by all she has touched.

I am an agnostic. I believe in myself; I know that I exist inside here—you just have to trust me on that. I believe in Free Will. I believe in logic and reason. I believe in the scientific process. I neither believe nor disbelieve in anything else unless it can be established through logic, reason, and the scientific process. I did grow up as a Christian in the Episcopal Church. Although always liberal in my beliefs, I was strong in my Christian faith. I attended church regularly; I served as lead acolyte in my church for years; I prayed and read the Bible regularly; I even participated in Bible study in college. After college, my faith evaporated, and I was able to look at Christianity in a more logical, rational way. The results weren’t pretty. Before explaining what I mean by that, let’s talk a bit about God (the Christian concept of God, that is) and Free Will.

God. There are three critical attributes of the Christian God:

• God is omnipresent. That is, God is everywhere. He’s sitting right beside you even now as you read my blasphemous writing.

• God is omniscient. God knows everything.

• God is omnipotent. God is all powerful. There is nothing He can’t do.

These attributes come right out of the Bible. They are well understood and agreed upon by Christians. So, I won’t spend much time explaining them here. Take a look at the following links for biblical verses backing each attribute:

• http://www.parentcompany.com/awareness_of_god/aog11.htm

• http://www.parentcompany.com/awareness_of_god/aog12.htm

• http://www.parentcompany.com/awareness_of_god/aog13.htm

Free Will. Free Will is a recurring theme in this essay. So, let’s talk about it a bit up front. I believe that Free Will is the single most important aspect of being alive. In Christian beliefs, it’s the single most important gift from God to mankind. It’s even more important than the death and resurrection of Jesus, since without Free Will, man wouldn’t be able to sin and thus wouldn’t need a savior. It’s so important that I’ll capitalize it throughout this essay. Free Will is the ability to think how you want and act how you want. Whenever you’re faced with a decision, it’s Free Will that gives you the ability to choose course A, B, or C.

It’s easy to confuse Free Will with Freedom. Freedom is a higher bar; it’s the ability to act upon your Free Will without fear of recrimination from authority figures. The ideal is that authorities leave you free to do what you want as long as you don’t interfere with the rights of others. Throughout history, authorities have suppressed freedom, but they have never suppressed Free Will. American slaves had no freedom, but they certainly had Free Will. Even under the most brutal slave masters, slaves could think whatever they wanted and take whatever actions they wanted, though certainly the consequences for asserting their Free Will could be brutal and horrifying. If a slave wanted to call his master a bastard, he could certainly do that. That’s Free Will. Would the master beat the slave and possibly kill him as a result? Sure. That’s lack of freedom.

There are two points here. First, Free Will is at the core of being human, of being alive. It’s what separates us from computers. Second, no person in history—no matter how evil, no matter how powerful, no matter how dictatorial—has succeeded in suppressing Free Will.

Given this background, here are two startling conclusions I came to when thinking logically about Christianity:

• God is evil.

• Heaven is terrifying.

Let’s consider these in detail.

God is evil. Blasphemy, you say! I’ll take it a step further: God is the most evil being in the universe, or perhaps it would be better to say that God is the most evil being that transcends the universe. Take Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam, Idi Amin, Mao Tse-Tung, and all the other butchers from history. God is more evil than any of them. He’s more evil than all of them combined!

Here’s why. Bad things happen to good people. And by bad things, I’m not talking about having a bad day at work or losing money in the stock market. I’m talking about gut-wrenching tragedies. I’m talking about death, disease, unbearable pain, both physical and emotional.

Now, a good chunk of these bad things can be attributed to Free Will. If I have Free Will, then I can choose to use it to hurt other people. That’s an unfortunate consequence of Free Will, but Free Will is so important that we have to just accept this consequence. And there’s not much that God can do to prevent these types of tragedies without taking away our Free Will. In His infinite wisdom, God realizes that Free Will is more important than the tragedies it sometimes causes. I agree with Him, and applaud his restraint in allowing these tragedies to happen.

So, when innocent people are killed in war, I don’t blame God. When people are raped or murdered, I don’t blame God. When a child is molested, I don’t blame God. When industry dumps dangerous chemicals into the environment causing mass cancer in nearby towns, I don’t blame God. When a hurricane devastates New Orleans, I don’t blame God. After all, it was Free Will that led us to build a city in a low-lying coastal area that was prone to hurricanes. It was Free Will that led New Orleans to choose to save money rather than plan proper evacuation procedures or proper levees. My point is that many of the awful things that happen in this world are the result of Free Will. And sometimes, if you think about it for a bit, tragedies that don’t initially seem to have anything to do with Free Will really do in fact have roots in Free Will. Let’s take all these types of tragedies off the table. I don’t blame God for any of them.

And sometimes older people get horrible diseases that destroy their bodies or minds and ultimately lead to death. It’s certainly tragic when an older person gets cancer or Alzheimer’s or ALS. I have lost all of my grandparents to old age and disease. My mother died of breast cancer. My father is currently battling terminal lymphoma. I certainly understand how difficult it is when people reach the end of their lives, and I don’t mean to make light of these situations. But, we all have to die sometime. While tragic, when I say that bad things happen to good people, I’m not talking about people who die after living a full life.

But sometimes, bad things happen to good people. Terrible, unspeakable things happen to innocent people. And no matter how hard you try, there is no way to make Free Will or anything else the culprit. These are the tragedies that I’m concerned with.

Here’s an example. For the last 10-15 years of her career, my mother ran the vanguard program at a school in Houston called T.H. Rogers. T.H. Rogers is an interesting school. It has no “normal” students. All students fall in one of three groups. First, there are the vanguard students. These are gifted and talented students that are bussed in from all over Houston. They are among the best and brightest students in all of Houston. Second, there are deaf students. T.H. Rogers has a large program strictly for deaf students. Third, there are multiply-handicapped students. Students in this third group range from highly functioning kids with Down’s Syndrome—kids who can walk, say at least a few words, perform some jobs—to kids who can’t talk, are wheel-chair bound, and still in diapers despite being teenagers.

At the end of every school year, T.H. Rogers has a memorial service to remember staff, former staff, and students who died during the year. After my mother died, my father and I were invited to the memorial service. The service was very nice, and a former principal gave a very moving eulogy for my mother. But what really stood out to me that day had nothing to do with my mother; rather it was the kids who were being remembered. Kids with severe mental disabilities typically don’t live long, and there were several children who had died that year. I spent the service staring at their smiling pictures. These were beautiful, happy children who were struck down in childhood. I looked at their families. These were people who had gone through a gut-wrenching emotional roller coaster… the joy of pregnancy, coming to terms with having a disabled child, seeing the beauty, joy, and love in their child, and then having it all ripped away by an all-too-early death. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain these families have been through. The pictures of those beautiful kids will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Here’s another more personal example. In 2004, my wife gave birth to a beautiful girl named Emilie. Emilie was perfectly healthy at birth. But 45-minutes after birth, Emilie stopped breathing for reasons that we’ll never know. She was resuscitated, but only after suffering severe brain damage from lack of oxygen. Emilie lived out the remainder of her life in a comatose state in the NICU. She died one month after she was born.

Any readers who have ever given birth or watched their child’s birth know that it’s the greatest emotional high of your life. When my oldest son Jonathon was born, the doctor asked me if I wanted to cut the umbilical cord. I declined. It wasn’t that I was squeamish about doing it. Rather, the moment right after Jonathon’s birth was so emotional that I felt like if I moved even one inch, I would break down crying out of joy. I was literally paralyzed by joy.

Now imagine watching a nurse pull a code blue because your child isn’t breathing, watching a resuscitation team run into the room, watching the team work feverishly on your child, not knowing if your child will live or die. Imagine seeing your child with a tube down her throat and a ventilator breathing for her. Imagine trying to hold and comfort your wife through all of this. Imagine having to call your parents—the child’s grandparents—to tell them that something terrible had happened. As you can imagine, it’s the lowest emotional low of your life.

So, in a matter of 45 minutes, my wife and I went from the highest point of our lives to the lowest point of our lives. The human body isn’t equipped for that big an emotional swing. I had a very real physical reaction. After holding my wife for a few minutes, I had to stop and sit down. My vision got blurry, I became dizzy, and my heart was pounding so hard and fast I thought it was going to explode. I should have asked for medical attention but I didn’t want to draw any medical attention away from my daughter, and I didn’t want to worry my wife; she had enough going on at the moment.

The month we spent in the NICU was so difficult. Every day, we went in hoping that the doctors were wrong and hoping that Emilie would show some signs of consciousness. Every day, we were disappointed. The night Emilie died was the most difficult of all. Several hours before she died, she lost all her muscle tone. It was as if every one of the joints in her neck, shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees were replaced by strings. It became difficult to pick her up. When we did, a leg would flop out, and then when we put the leg back in our arms, an arm would flop out, and so on. Finally, we turned off Emilie’s oxygen and laid her on the bed. She breathed for a few minutes, opened her eyes—this was the first time she had opened her eyes in a month—and then stopped breathing. My wife broke down crying thinking that Emilie had died. We both thought she had died. But after about one minute, Emilie jerked, made a loud screeching noise, took one deep breath, and then lay still again without breathing. It was horrific, and it startled us greatly. Emilie repeated this about once a minute for a full 45 minutes before she finally died while being rocked in my wife’s arms. This was without a doubt the most horrible and horrific night of my life.

We went through tremendous pain after Emilie’s death. I wanted to check out. I don’t mean that I wanted to kill myself or try to erase the pain with drugs or alcohol. I just wanted to check out. I wanted to get away from everybody and everything and just lock myself up in a room somewhere, anywhere and stare at the wall for a few years until the pain went away. But I couldn’t. I had a son and wife to take care of. I worked in a high-pressure job. I had a house. But for a full year, I struggled every day to drag myself out of the car and walk into the office for work.

These are just some of the many cases of tragedies that have nothing to do with Free Will and nothing to do with getting old and dying. There are millions and millions of other examples that are just as tragic. Bad things happen to good people, and nobody is to blame.

But wait a second. God is omnipresent. So, He is there during these tragedies. God is omniscient. So, He fully understands our pain during these tragedies. God is omnipotent. So, He fully has the power to prevent these tragedies. Why in the hell does God sit on his ass and do nothing? I tell you that God is evil. He’s sick. He’s a butcher. There’s no other explanation.

Let’s suppose you have a child in preschool and that your child’s teacher carries a gun for protection (for whatever reason, the school allows this). One day the teacher decides to walk the kids to the neighborhood playground. While the kids are walking, an unarmed man comes up, grabs your child, and begins choking him to death. The teacher—remember, who is armed with a gun—does nothing but stand there and watch as your child dies. Because the teacher is armed and the attacker is not, the teacher could have easily stopped the attacker. But for whatever reason she chose not to and instead just let your child die.

Certainly the attacker who killed your child is despicable, evil. But how would you feel about the teacher? Would you praise her? Would you give her money? Would you worship her? Would you devote your life to her? Of course not. You would hate her. You would want her to rot in jail, if not be killed herself. Yet God behaves exactly like this teacher, and we praise Him, we give Him money, we worship Him, and we devote our lives to Him. It makes no sense.

If there is a Christian God, he is evil, and he deserves every swear word and every amount of hatred we can throw at him, consequences be damned. Otherwise, we’re nothing more than a bunch of spineless worms too afraid to stand up to the Cosmic Butcher because we’re afraid of Hell. Better to maintain our integrity and dignity and rot in Hell than to worship a monster!

Heaven is terrifying. We’re all taught from an early age that Heaven is a wonderful place. It’s a place of eternal beauty and happiness. No death. No evil. No sadness. When you go to Heaven, you spend forever in bliss in the presence of a loving, kind God. Forever!

That would be nice, but unfortunately it doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny. First of all, I’ve already established that God is not loving and kind. So, Heaven is about spending eternity in the presence of a sick, murderous butcher. You get to spend eternity worshiping the most evil being imaginable. But let’s put aside the nature of God for a bit and think about the nature of Heaven. We’ll discover some horrifying subtleties.

First, what are the consequences of living in a society with nothing but good and happiness, a society without sadness, pain, or evil? My arguments here are right out of Dostoyevsky’s book Notes from Underground. It’s a fantastic book that is well worth reading. Dostoyevsky wrote about the problems of establishing perfect societies here on earth. I’m just extending his arguments to apply to perfect societies in Heaven.

Dostoyevsky says it much more eloquently than I, but quite simply, Free Will and perfect societies are incompatible. It’s impossible to have a society without sadness, pain and evil while at the same time having Free Will. Why? Because one of the consequences of having Free Will is that you can freely choose to do things that hurt other people. You can’t have Free Will without pain and suffering. If I have to make a decision between choice A and choice B, and if choice A causes happiness while choice B causes sadness, I must be able to sometimes choose choice B. Otherwise, I have no Free Will. And don’t try to argue that people in Heaven do get to decide between choice A and B, but they always choose choice A. You’re grasping at straws. Why do they always choose choice A? The answer is that something has taken away their Free Will to ever choose choice B. If people really have Free Will, then sooner or later someone must choose choice B, thus causing pain and suffering in Heaven.

Now, maybe that person who is brave enough to assert his Free Will will be cast out of Heaven and into the pits of Hell so that he can cause no more pain and suffering. But that makes Heaven even more terrifying. You have Free Will, but if you step out of line even once, even the tiniest little bit, you’ll be cast out and into Hell. You have to act good for eternity out of fear! I suspect that after a billion, billion, billion years, most everyone would have been cast out.

No. If Heaven is a place of perfect happiness, then its residents have no Free Will. And remember, Free Will is the most important aspect of being alive; it’s at the core of being human; it’s God’s greatest gift to us. Yet God is going to take it away from us so that we can spend eternity as lobotomized zombies eternally worshiping Him? No thanks.

And what about those condemned to Hell? More importantly, what about our loved ones who are condemned to Hell? Even the most hard-core Christians have loved ones, people they care about quite deeply, who aren’t Christians. Despite their best efforts at conversion, despite their best preaching, these loved ones are going to spend eternity burning in Hell. It’s tragic, more tragic than anything else we could ever dream up! So, how is the Christian going to be able to spend eternity in happiness knowing that his loved ones are suffering in Hell?

The only answer I’ve ever heard is that people in Heaven will have all their memories of those in Hell erased. Wow! God wants to erase my memories of my loved ones so that I can party it up in Heaven while they suffer in Hell? That’s just sick. And my memories, especially those of my loved ones, are things that I treasure dearly. I’ll not give them up without a fight. Frankly, I’d rather be tortured in Hell and get to keep my memories than live in Heaven without them.

And even though we won’t remember our loved ones or know of their suffering once we get to Heaven, we know them now and we can anticipate their suffering now. Isn’t this just as bad as if we knew about their suffering when we’re in Heaven? Given that we know this ahead of time, how can we continue to worship a god who would do this to us?

Finally, I’m not a Biblical scholar, but I’m not aware of any Biblical basis for this memory-erasing theory. It really smacks of being a quick, and frankly stupid, answer to a difficult question. Maybe there are verses backing this theory, and I just don’t know them.

There’s another aspect of Heaven that bothers me greatly. It’s the tediousness of eternity, especially the tediousness of an eternity without pain, suffering, or sadness. It’s the tediousness of an eternity without adventure or accomplishments. Adventure and accomplishments imply a chance of failure, a chance of sadness or pain or suffering. They’re not possible in Heaven. Heaven is really nothing more than a bunch of people sitting around smiling saying, “Yeah, this is great”… FOREVER! That would be fun for an evening, a week, maybe a month. But forever?

It’s difficult to imagine an infinite amount of time, but when I try, I can’t help thinking how tedious it would be. Think about it. After a billion, billion, billion, billion, billion years, you would have met every person that there is to meet in Heaven; you would have seen everything there is to see; you would have had every conversation there is to have; you would have done everything there is to do. But yet you wouldn’t have even served 1% of your time in Heaven, not even close. Add a few more billions to the time line, and you’ve done everything there is to do a billion times, literally! You’ve had every conversation a billion times. You’ve watched every possible combination of outcomes in a football game a billion times. And you still haven’t served anywhere close to 1% of your time in Heaven.

What exactly do people do in Heaven to stay entertained for eternity? To me, it sounds eternally tedious and boring.

Here’s a final uncomfortable question about Heaven. If Heaven is such a great place, why did Satan rebel against God knowing that he’d be kicked out of Heaven? Why was Satan able to raise an army of 1/3 of the angels when they too knew that they’d certainly be kicked out of Heaven? Satan and his army must have known they’d lose and be cast out since they were up against an omnipotent force. Yet they chose to rebel anyway. Why?

One easy answer is that Satan is pure evil. So, of course he’d rebel against God. But that answer doesn’t fly, and it’s not in line with traditional Roman Catholic thinking going back to the time of Aquinas. The problem is that if Satan is pure evil, where did he come from? The Bible tells us that God is the Creator of all things in Heaven and on earth. So, God must have created Satan. But if God is pure good (ignore my arguments above), how could He have created pure evil? It just can’t work that way.

No. The traditional Christian thinking is that God created Satan just like us, namely, good but with Free Will. Satan just chose to exercise his Free Will to a greater extent than any of us would dare do, and he completely, totally rejected God, and got tossed out of Heaven in the process. Again, this is not my thinking; it’s traditional Christian thinking, and it’s really the only way a concept of Satan makes any sense.

So Satan didn’t rebel because he was some inherently evil automaton who had no choice in the matter. Satan rebelled because he freely chose to reject God and Heaven. Which brings us back to the question of why Satan freely chose to reject Heaven if it’s such a great place? Maybe he chose to reject Heaven because he could no longer worship a god who acted like a monster. Maybe he chose to reject Heaven because he could no longer suppress his Free Will out of fear. Maybe he chose to reject Heaven because he couldn’t stand the thought of pretending to be happy in Heaven knowing that future souls would suffer terribly in Hell. Maybe he rejected Heaven because after billions upon billions upon billions of years, he was bored out of his mind, and the thought of swimming in a fiery lake sounded better than having the exact same conversation with the exact same person for the trillionth time. Maybe Satan had some other motivation. But, the point is that Satan freely chose to exchange Heaven for eternal suffering in Hell. If Heaven is such a great place, you’ve got to wonder why?

Like Satan, I too reject the terrifying concept of Heaven. Better to keep my Free Will and spend eternity being tortured in a burning lake where at least I’m free to eternally curse God for standing idly by while my daughter died. I’ll pass on spending eternity as a lobotomized zombie worshiping an evil god.

I started out by saying that I’m an agnostic, but then followed a line of reasoning that seems to conclude with, I suppose, Satanism. What gives? Well, we started by accepting the notion of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Christian God. Given that, I suppose I would be a Satanist. The problem, of course, is that I don’t believe in the concept of a Christian God. Let’s explore why.

The telephone game. Why is it that we have to come to God through faith? Why can’t He appear as a big head in the sky with a booming loud voice issuing commandments? Why can’t He show us one massive example of his power. Surely, we would all drop to our knees and worship and believe in him then! Why does God need us to believe through faith? Why is this better? Can you imagine if we had no physical evidence of the President of the United States? Can you imagine if the President had never appeared in public, or on TV, if nobody had ever seen the President or heard his voice? That would be absurd. Why is it any less absurd with God?

Of course, according to the Bible, this hasn’t always been the case. God used to physically reveal himself to mankind on a regular basis. He appeared to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He appeared to Noah and Abraham. He appeared to Moses, first as a burning bush, second as a pillar of fire leading the Israelites out of Egypt, and finally on Mount Sinai while personally delivering the Ten Commandments. God appeared as Jesus and performed miracles such as turning water into wine, casting out demons, healing the sick, and even raising the dead. But God hasn’t made a real, physical appearance in 2000 years. Why? And isn’t it convenient that when God did appear, it was at a time when there were no cameras or video cameras or news channels or computers or cell phones to record it?

It’s as if the God faucet used to run full blast, but it was shut off 2000 years ago, and all we’re left with now is a tradition of faith passed down from generation to generation.

Did you ever play the telephone game when you were a kid? In the telephone game, you line up maybe 15 or 20 people in a row. Then, you whisper a secret to the first person in line. That person whispers the secret to the second person, who whispers the secret to the third, and so on until the last person gets the secret. The last person then tells the group what he was told. Inevitably, the message from the last person is totally different from the starting message. The message was garbled as it went from person to person.

Christian faith has been passed down to us through a telephone game, only instead of having 15 or 20 people involved, the faith has passed through 2000 years of the telephone game! And to make it worse, there has been undeniable corruption in the Church along the way. Consider the corruption of the Church in the middle ages. Many priests and nuns ignored their vows of celibacy. Popes Innocent VIII and Alexander VI—supposedly infallible—fathered children. Clergy exploited their positions to live luxurious lifestyles, paying for these lifestyles by selling indulgences and charging admission fees to see religious relics. Consider the brutality of the Crusades and the Inquisition, both driven by the Church and seemingly anti-Christian. Consider Constantine who blended Christianity with paganism for political gains. In modern times, consider the child molestation abuses within the Catholic Church and the ensuing cover-ups. Or consider the evangelicals who have fallen from grace such as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker. What about Peter Popoff, the “faith healer” who was busted when radio surveillance discovered his staff in the booth transmitting secret information about sick audience members by radio to his hidden ear-piece? His staff even laughed over the radio about how one overweight lady with cancer came bouncing down the aisle to be healed.

My point isn’t to harp on and on about church corruption. Rather, my point is that the Church has been a critical link in passing down Christian faith and “truth” from generation to generation. Given 2000 years of the telephone game and given the corruption in the Church at various steps along the way, how can we be so sure that the religious “truth” we’re getting today even remotely resembles the religious “truth” that was pumped into the pipeline 2000 years ago? Christians may be preaching the exact opposite of what God intended for all we know. Couldn’t God just appear and make an undeniable statement of religious truth that we could capture on camera? Surely God must be smart enough to understand that His Word has been corrupted over the years and needs clarification.

Of course, my bigger point is that I doubt any of God’s revelations from 2000 or more years ago really happened. There’s just no credible evidence to support them.

Brainwashing children. Several years ago, I saw a website that explained some of the mythology behind Scientology (http://altreligion.about.com/od/mythologicalfigures/a/xenu.htm). I have no idea if the information on that website is really what Scientologists believe, but it really doesn’t matter for my purposes here. The claim is that there was an overlord named Xenu who ruled the Galactic Federation 75 million years ago. Due to overpopulation problems, he killed large numbers of people, captured their souls, and dumped them on the earth. He then destroyed the souls on earth with nuclear bombs. As near as I can make out from the stories, we humans are made up of the pieces of these destroyed souls. Luckily, Xenu was eventually overthrown and imprisoned on a deserted planet where he lives to this very day. My wife and I read the story and laughed wondering how anyone could believe such nonsense.

But then I started thinking about the mythology behind Christianity. Among other things, we’ve got a god who created a woman from the rib of a man. A god who wiped out nearly all life on earth with a flood. A god who brought down curses on Egypt including turning the entire Nile River (the world’s longest river) into blood, frogs, gnats, wild animals, disease, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and death of the firstborn son. A god who led his people as a pillar of fire and who separated the seas so that his people could cross. We’ve got Sampson who derived his strength from his long hair. We’ve got Jesus who performed miracles and resurrected himself from the dead.

Why is it that the mythology of Xenu seems so ridiculous to us but the mythology behind Christianity doesn’t? They’re both pretty far “out there”. I believe it’s because we’re brainwashed into Christianity when we’re children. We think Christianity is normal and we accept it as not being ridiculous only because we are immersed in it from the time we are young. Suppose you took 1,000 kids and somehow raised them in a bubble so that they were not exposed to any religious teachings. When they became adults, you then exposed them to Xenu and Jesus. What do you think would happen? A small handful would latch onto Xenu and become Scientologists. A small handful would latch onto Jesus and become Christians. But the overwhelming majority would reject both Xenu and Jesus as being absurd.

This is precisely why we focus so much on teaching religion to young kids who don’t have the capability to think logically, rationally, and critically. This is precisely why people push for prayer in school. If you teach kids from a young age that Christianity is normal, they’ll accept it. If not, you’ll lose them forever. Putting a more sinister twist on this, if you teach kids from a young age to fear Hell, they’ll be Christians forever.

Here’s a question for my Christian readers. Why are you a Christian? For the overwhelming majority of you, the honest answer is because you grew up in a Christian family, or that you were in an environment where you were surrounded by Christians. That’s obviously not true in every case, but it is true in most cases. Can you honestly tell me that you’d still be a Christian if you grew up in a Muslim family in the middle of Pakistan? Of course not! In all likelihood, you’d be a hard-core Muslim, and you’d be thinking that Christians are going to Hell. What about if you grew up in a Buddhist family in China, or a Hindu family in India? Of course, there are examples of people leaving one religion for another. I’m sure you can find examples of hard-core Christians who converted from Islam. But these are the exceptions; most people don’t convert. An impartial observer would have to look at the mess of religions and wonder if any are true or if more likely they’re just myths being passed down from generation to generation.

As an aside, I am appalled at the idea of brainwashing kids with religion. I am appalled at the idea of presenting religious “truths” to people who are too young to think critically. I much prefer teaching kids about all the religions without presenting any as the truth. When the kids become adults and can think critically, they can choose whatever religion they want, or perhaps choose no religion at all. Either way, they come about their beliefs honestly and with Free Will. If you’re so secure in your religious beliefs and so sure they’re right, why not let kids wait until they’re adults to choose their religions? If your religion is so clearly right, won’t they choose yours? What are you so worried about?

Easy answers to difficult questions. So how do religions like Christianity come about if they aren’t true? Like many non-believers, I suspect it’s because religions provide easy answers to difficult questions. Where do we come from? What happens when we die? Why is there evil in the world? In older times, why do we get sick? What are the stars? What is the moon? Sometimes it’s really hard to just say, “I don’t know.” Sometimes it’s easier to make up stories about a god than to tell the truth.

When my mother died, my oldest son was 4 years old. Because my wife and I are raising are children as agnostics, it was very difficult for me to tell my son that Grandma had died and we weren’t going to see her anymore. When my son inevitably asked what happens when you die, it was very difficult for me to say, “I don’t know.” My son was just too young to be able to deal with death without a crutch like eternal life in Heaven to fall back on. It would have been so much easier to explain death from a Christian perspective. Grandma is living in perfect happiness for eternity in Heaven. She’s looking down on us now and smiling. Someday, we’ll see her again. We should be happy for Grandma, not sad.

The point is that in difficult situations, when you really don’t have a good answer for your kids, sometimes it’s easier to try to comfort them with stories of God and Heaven. I suspect this has a lot to do with how religions propagate through the ages.

Before moving on, let’s not forget that sometimes religions’ easy answers to difficult questions are later proven incorrect by science. The Bible claims that the earth is several thousand years old; science has now proven that it is several billion years old. The Church used to claim that the earth was at the center of the universe; science has now proven that the earth is just a tiny planet on the outer edge of a galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars. This galaxy in turn is part of a universe of hundreds of billions of other galaxies. The Church used to teach that sickness was caused by demon possession. We’ve since learned about viruses, bacteria, genetic diseases, cancer, and so on. How could the Church be so wrong about so many things and yet still proclaim to teach the “truth”? How do we know what current Church teachings will later be dis-proven by science, or are we naive enough to think that all the incorrect teachings have already been weeded out?

Philosophical questions. Let’s say for the sake of argument that we were in fact created by God. Great, but in my mind, that doesn’t answer anything. Where did God come from? Don’t tell me he’s always existed. My logical mind knows that things that exist come about through some sort of process. That is, there is a point in time where they don’t exist and then a point in time where they do exist. How did God come about? I’ve got another very esoteric problem with God existing infinitely in the past and infinitely into the future. If that’s the case, do you know what the odds are that an impartial observer would look at a time line and come to the finite point on the line where earth exists? That would have a 0% chance of happening. And I mean exactly 0%, not nearly 0%. If the earth is 5 billion years old, then 5 billion divided by an infinite time span is exactly 0. There is literally no chance that we should all find ourselves together at this point in time together on our little planet if God is infinitely old.

As long as we’re dealing with mathematics, let’s talk about dimensions. We live in a universe with 4 dimensions, three spatial dimensions plus a time dimension. Actually, physicists will tell you there are lots of other dimensions. But let’s keep it simple and limit the discussion to the 4 dimensions we can easily observe in our every day lives. Now, are these 4 dimensions part of the universe, or do they transcend the universe?

Let’s assume that the 4 dimensions are part of the universe. Since God created the universe, that means God created the 4 dimensions. That means that God doesn’t live in time and spatial dimensions. I have a difficult time fathoming what that really even means. The concepts of taking up space and moving through space and time are so fundamental to everything I know that I can’t comprehend a being who takes up no space nor who moves through space and time. To complicate things further, the Bible says that we’re created in God’s image. Doesn’t that mean that we physically resemble God? But our physical appearances are driven by the space that our bodies take up. How could we be in God’s image if we take up space while God has no spacial dimensions? Clearly our assumption that the 4 dimensions are part of the universe is wrong. The dimensions must transcend the universe, they must transcend God’s creations, and He must live within the spacial and time dimensions just like we do.

But wait a minute! Either God is omnipotent or He’s not. If God is omnipotent, how can he be constrained to live within the spacial and time dimensions? Doesn’t that make the dimensions more powerful than God?

We’ve clearly reached a paradox here, or perhaps a singularity in Christian thinking. Perhaps Christian thinking needs a bit of redesign to better deal with this problem!

The human body is poorly designed. I’m a software developer. I develop complex software systems for a living. I’m a mere mortal who has only had 40 years to learn what I know. I’m not an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent being who has gathered an infinite amount of knowledge over an infinite time span. But even I know enough that when I design software systems, I always design them with redundancy for fault tolerance. Avoid single points of failure. In a real computer system, hard drives crash, computers go down, and parts of the system fail. But you always design the system so that it has enough redundancy to keep running when one part fails. So, you have multiple application servers, hot backup database servers, backup load balancers ready to go live when the primary load balancer fails, and so on. Why do you think that the entire Google application doesn’t crash when one of its computers crashes? Redundancy!

If we mere mortals can design a system with redundancy, why can’t God do the same, especially given all of His infinite wisdom? Let’s face it, the human body is a poor design. Sure we have redundancy in our kidneys. We have two but really only need one. (Ironically, kidneys—the part of our body with the most redundancy—are the body parts for which we’ve had the best luck building artificial replacements.) But, why don’t we have a backup heart or stomach or liver? Why is our brain—the control center for our entire body—way off at one side of our body where it can easily get disconnected. Our necks seem like a fragile way to connect the command center to the body. Wouldn’t you want the command center buried deep in the center of the body where it is best protected? And why is the brain connected to the rest of the body by only a single spinal cord? Isn’t that like designing a data center without a backup power source? I could go on and on. Why do we have an appendix, which serves no useful purpose but can only cause big problems when it becomes infected or ruptures?

Clearly, our bodies are an imperfect design. If we were made by God, wouldn’t you expect Him to have done a better job?

Early Christian history. I find the history of the early Church to be fascinating. I used to think that the history of the early Church was fairly simple. The disciples/apostles formed the earliest churches. Paul expanded these churches out to include non-Jewish groups. The Gospels were from people who knew Jesus personally, or at least were passed down orally from those with direct knowledge of Jesus to later generations who transcribed the oral traditions. There was little disagreement in the early Church on basic truths about God and Jesus. Sure, there was debate about little things like circumcision and inclusion of gentiles. But on fundamental issues such as Jesus being God, the Resurrection, the virgin birth, and Jesus’s teachings, there was little debate. Christianity started from a single, unified source and grew and grew, despite unspeakable persecution, until it was adopted by Constantine as the official Roman religion.

This view, however, is not true. Christianity did not evolve from a single, unified source. Nor were the Gospels passed down from the time of Jesus. Early Christians were divided into many disagreeing factions. The three most important were Jewish Christianity, Gnostic Christianity, and Pauline Christianity.

The Jewish Christian movement was a Jerusalem-based group formed by Jesus’s disciples after his death. Jesus’s brother James was the movement’s early leader. This group considered itself a reform movement within Judaism rather than a separate religion. They observed Jewish holy days, followed a kosher diet, and practiced circumcision and animal sacrifice. Most importantly, they did not view Jesus as God, but rather as a prophet and great teacher. It is critically important—and it should be somewhat unsettling to Christians—that the early Christian movement most closely linked to Jesus’s life did not view him as being part of a Holy Trinity with God and the Holy Spirit. The Jewish Christian movement was largely wiped out in 70 AD when the Romans attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. Along with other Jewish sects, the Jewish Christians were killed or enslaved, and the movement effectively came to an end.

Gnostic Christians held beliefs we would consider quite radical today. They believed that the God of the Old Testament is a false and imperfect god. To put it bluntly, God is evil and stupid. In his incompetence, God created an imperfect universe and trapped man’s perfect souls within this imperfect universe. Jesus was a pure spiritual being sent to tell mankind the truth about God and thus free mankind’s souls. Jesus was not human at all. His human body was merely an illusion. The Gnostics were a major force in early Christianity from the time of Jesus’s death until the Council of Nicea in 325 AD when Gnosticism was largely stamped out.

The final major early Christian faction, Pauline Christianity, interestingly had little direct connection to Jesus. Pauline Christianity was a movement started by Paul. We all know the story. Paul started out life as Saul. He was a devout Jew who persecuted early Christians, and was even present at the stoning of the Christian martyr Stephen. While on his way to persecute Christians in Damascus, Saul had a vision of Jesus, converted to Christianity, changed his name to Paul, and became the greatest Christian evangelist of his age. He brought the message of Jesus to the gentiles, founding many churches that became the basis for modern-day Christianity. Paul’s letters to his churches form much of the New Testament. In fact, Paul’s letters are the earliest writings in the New Testament. The Gospels, Acts, and Revelations all were written after Paul’s letters.

What is troubling about Paul is that he had little direct connection to Jesus. He had little contact with Jesus’s actual disciples, and when he did speak with them, it was only several years after he had begun his ministry. In fact, Paul writes in his letters that his teachings come directly from Jesus, not from knowledge passed on to him from other people. As a result, Paul knew remarkably little about Jesus’s life. He never mentions the virgin birth, the Sermon on the Mount, or the miracles. Paul never quotes Jesus. It’s unclear whether Paul even knows if Jesus lived hundreds of years earlier or only decades earlier. What is clear is that Paul created modern Christianity, and his writings were the earliest writings in the New Testament. The other writings in the New Testament grew out of Paul’s movement and came about later.

Now, here is a very important question you should be asking: How is it that so little was known about Jesus’s life at the time of Paul, yet so much was known several generations later when the Gospels were written? Isn’t it likely that as teachings about Jesus were passed on from generation to generation and from community to community, they were embellished so that the final product (the Gospels) didn’t match the source? I find it highly suspicious that these details about Jesus’s life skipped a generation—and not just any generation, but rather the founding generation—before being written down in detail.

And just to complicate matters, the stories that finally emerged in the Gospels were strikingly similar to other, existing non-Christian mythology. The following URL lists similarities between Jesus and other mythical figures: http://www.geocities.com/inquisitive79/godmen. I’ll repeat some of this information here:

Attis of Phrygia. Attis was born on December 25 to a virgin mother. He was crucified on March 23 to redeem mankind. He was resurrected on March 25. (Incidentally, March 23 and March 25 also coincide with early beliefs about the dates of Jesus’s death and resurrection.) His followers ate bread representing his body.

Dionysus. Dionysus was born on December 25 and placed in a manger after birth. He performed miracles and rode in a triumphal procession on a donkey. He turned water into wine. He rose from the dead on March 25. He was associated with the symbol of a lamb.

Horus. Horus, the mythical son of the Egyptian god Osiris, was viewed as being one and the same as his father. Osiris was known as the Lord of Lords, King of Kings, the Resurrection and the Life, and the Good Shepperd. He was viewed as a god-man who had suffered, died, rose from the dead, and now reigned eternally in Heaven. Three wise men announced the coming of Osiris. As with Attis, his followers ate bread symbolizing his flesh. Regarding Horus, he was born to a virgin on December 25, his father was Seb, a form of Joseph. He taught in the temple as a child at age 12 and then disappeared until his baptism at age 30. The man who baptized him was later beheaded. He had 12 disciples and performed miracles, including walking on water. He was crucified between two thieves, died, and was resurrected.

Krishna. Krishna was born to a virgin mother on December 25. His father was a carpenter who was off on a trip to pay taxes at the time of Krishna’s birth. His birth was signaled by a star. An angry leader ordered the slaughter of thousands of infants in an attempt to kill the baby Krishna. Krishna performed miracles and preached of love for the poor. When he was executed—at roughly the age of 30—the sun turned black. After his execution, he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. His believers think that he will return to judge mankind and do battle with the “Prince of Evil”.

Mithra. Mithra was born to a virgin mother on December 25. Shepherds brought him gifts at his birth. He had 12 disciples who were promised eternal life. He was sacrificed to save the world and rose from the dead on the third day. He was called the Good Shepherd and associated with the lamb. Mithra’s followers practiced the Eucharist. In fact, Mithra said, “He who shall not eat of my body nor drink of my blood so that he may be one with me and I with him, shall not be saved.”

Zoroaster. Zoroaster was born of a virgin mother, baptized in a river, and as a child, amazed wise men with his wisdom. He was tempted in the wilderness by the devil and began his ministry at age 30. He taught about heaven, hell, resurrection, judgment, and the apocalypse. He was killed. His followers expected him to return again to bring about a new age for mankind.

Just to summarize, the earliest documents from Pauline Christianity (Paul’s letters) do not speak about the details of Jesus’s life. These details only emerged later, and when they did emerge, they bore striking resemblance to other mythology.

Honestly, early Christianity is a bit of a mess. We have groups claiming that that Jesus was not God but rather a great prophet and teacher. We have groups claiming that Jesus was not a person but rather a spirit who came to bring us the truth about an evil God. And we have a group with the least direct connection to Jesus launching a successful religion that bears remarkable similarities to other religions. What are we really to believe from all of this mess?

Given this history, can you honestly look at the Gospels and believe that they are an accurate account of Jesus?

Ultimately, this mess was cleaned up due to political pressure in 325 AD at the Council of Nicea. Constantine was concerned that the disunity within Christianity would threaten the future of Rome. So, he called a council of bishops and ordered them to vote to determine the “truth” about Christianity. The religion that resulted from this vote became the official religion of Rome. Pauline Christianity won out, Jesus was God, and the Holy Trinity was established. Gnosticism came to an end as had Jewish Christianity more than two centuries earlier.

There’s frankly a bit too much controversy here and a bit too much human involvement for me to base my life and beliefs around anything that came out of this mess.

In conclusion, if you accept Christian beliefs about the nature of God, you must logically conclude that God is evil. That he inflicts unspeakable tragedies on innocent people. You must conclude that Heaven is a place where you spend eternity worshiping a monster, without Free Will. But ultimately, Christianity is bunk. It’s something that we only believe because we’re taught that it’s the truth when we’re young, impressionable children without the facilities to question it critically. Its history is questionable, at best, and it has been passed down to us through 2000 years of the telephone game, with unquestionable corruption along the way.

Are there important lessons to learn from Christianity? Absolutely. Peace. Love. Turning the other cheek. Loving and respecting everyone, even the lowliest members of society. The inherent good and value in every person. Sacrificing yourself for the good of mankind. These are all Christian values worth considering in other essays.

But, when it comes to questions of how we got here and what happens when we die, best to look for truth somewhere else besides Christianity.