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According to a comment by ‘barriejohn’ over at Platitude of the Day, the Bible (particularly the original Greek) tells Christians not to mourn the dead so much because they’ll get to see them in heaven anyway. Conversely, Billings is all about mourning the dead. He must be accounting for the fact that they’re not going to heaven if they didn’t make special friends with Jesus.
It’s unsurprising to think that Paul told early Christians not to mourn the dead, as early Christians used to meet in cemeteries, not to mourn, but to commune with the dead, believing them to be alive. One of Christianity’s main selling points was the whole eternal life thing, so those early Christian congregations would probably have had a lot of similarities with contemporary spiritualist churches, but with added graveyard creepiness to boot.
Billings wonders if the woman crying at the pieta was religious or a grieving mother. If she was a grieving mother, perhaps she was crying at the fact that, unlike Jesus Christ: The Ghost Who Walks, her son or daughter wouldn’t be coming back, what with that not happening outside of glorified fairy tales and all.
I wonder if Billings might have thought twice about suggesting the US government’s attempts to underplay Vietnam deaths was related to the war effort as much at was to worries of civil unrest back home. Not so much an aide to the enemy as an aide to the American people knowing a pointless bloodbath was being carried out in their name.
Britons are giving their lives to bring peace and security to Afghanistan. What point there has been to a conflict that has thusfar managed to move the heart of the problem to a neighbouring region and thereby decrease security in a nation with nuclear armaments remains to be seen.