I saw this video on Youtube year's ago, and it's stuck with me, so I thought I'd post it on this blog just to bookmark it for myself.

Parents allow child to make life or death decision

...to my mind, this situation represent the most powerful argument against the utility of atheism.  Which is not to say it means atheism is not true.  Atheism could well be true.  Maybe there isn't a God.  But what good does it do to go around telling people that?

I'm not sure that I believe in God or heaven, but I'm glad that this little girl believed in it.  And I'm glad that her parents believed in it.  I couldn't imagine how painful it would have been for them to go through this situation without the comfort of their belief in heaven.

I've thought about this video often over the past eight years.  Sometimes I think about the posts I've written on this blog over the years pointing out all the problems with the Bible (HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, ...and more), and sometimes I wonder if I'm fighting the good fight, or if I'm just adding to the amount of human misery.  Maybe I should just shut up.

On an intellectual level, I stand by most of the arguments I've made.  But I sincerely hope that the couple in that video never stumbles my blog.  I hope they go on believing that their daughter is waiting for them in heaven.  I wouldn't want to take away their faith for anything. 

And how many people are in similar situations?

Addendum 1:

See also this old post HERE for yet another reason why I should just shut up.

Addendum 2:

Just to re-emphasize, the fact that the belief in heaven is comforting does not make it true.  I feel I need to re-emphasize this, because in my experience, Christians often confuse comfort with truth, and argue that Christianity must be true because it is so comforting to them.  
However, the fact that Christians take such comfort from their religion may well be an argument for us skeptics to just shut up.

Addendum 3:

There is a dark side to traditional Christian beliefs in the afterlife, however.  According to traditional Christianity, the majority of the world's population is not headed for heaven, but headed for an eternity of unimaginable torture in hell.
Once the mathematics of this finally clicked for me in my late teens, I started to think that actually maybe this wasn't such a comforting worldview after all.

But, again, if none of it's real anyways, then what does it matter?  If some people take comfort from the fact that they believe they are going to heaven, and all other religions are going to hell, then maybe just let them have this if it helps them get through life?

[I guess the obvious answer to my own question is that it matters when this belief leads to action in the form of proselytizing, which, as I've mentioned before, causes problems in situations like this and this.  But, are these typical examples?  How much does the average American Christian engage in proselytizing?]

Several of my liberal Christian friends were able to remain Christians by just deciding that the traditional Christianity had been right about everything else, but had been wrong about hell.  And indeed, I tried this route myself for a while.  But in the end, I couldn't shake the feeling that if traditional Christianity was wrong about some things, then maybe it was wrong about other things.  And eventually I just became an agnostic.
Besides which, the alternatives to traditional Christianity never really made a lot of sense to me.

For a while, I flirted with being a Christian religious pluralist (i.e. belief in other religions are also paths to salvation).  But it was difficult to make intellectual sense of the fact that these different religions had different truth claims, so why were they also paths to salvation?  Also, were all religions paths to salvation, or only some of them?  

Then I flirted with being a Christian universalist (i.e. everyone goes to heaven).  But if everyone goes to heaven anyway, and there's no sorting out at the day of judgement, then I couldn't figure out what we were doing here on Earth in the first place.  I mean, if we're all going to heaven anyway, then why do we have to endure all this suffering on Earth?  Why can't we just all go directly to heaven now?

And then...

Wait, what am I doing?  This wasn't supposed to turn into a long post.  I wasn't supposed to debate every aspect of religion in this one blog post.  This was just supposed to post this video here so that I could remember it for future reference.  (This is why it's so hard to write about religion without going on for 3 hours.)  I'm just going to stop here.