“I think you’re wrong. Most of us don’t choose to believe. We believe because we have to. Heaven represents hope. In this harsh, short, and brutal existence, people have to have something to which to cling. Instead of living lives of abject despair, heads hung in defeat, and watering the soil with our tears, we live lives of hope, heads upraised to the sun, cheerful through impossible hardships—lending our hands to our neighbors. Even if, as you seem to argue, God is simply an idea in the human mind and Heaven is only a fiction, isn’t a life strengthened by faith better than one focused on the inescapable despair of mortality?”

− Scott Davis Howard −