Hiya Nox, I agree with your views and Ratters here. I was brought up in a Catholic family, taught by nuns, even had a cousin who was a bishop, but I remain unconvinced by a lot of what the churches preach. Unlike RATTER, I am not at all sure that our death is the end of us. I had two cardiac arrests and after one the doctors pronounced my time of death and wrote out the paperwork for the morgue. While they were doing all that I experienced things that would take far too long to explain on here, not even sure I could find the words to do so, so I won't even try. I obviously came back from wherever it was I had gone and days later ceremoniously burnt the hospital death certificate in the presence of several doctors and nurses and a rather large bottle of bubbly! Since then I have felt that we do go on, obviously not in our bodily form, but that we do continue and yes, I know it sounds totally crazy. Whether I am right or not, this experience has helped me to live with the death of my darling son Kevin and in fact it helped him to die peacefully in my arms, unafraid of what was to come. But one thing I do know ... believing in God can not be seen as a guarantee of ending up in heaven as if it were, it would be a gross travesty. I would guess that far more killings / murders have been committed by believers than atheists if we are to believe the newspapers and the history books. Surely these people cannot rightly be sent to a so called heaven??? This alone would put me off believing in a just God!