The sudden talk of a state funeral got me thinking yesterday: Whenever anyone dies, why does religion automatically get involved? Following any death there is always a funeral held in and conducted by a church. Of course the argument is that religion gives people comfort, as well as hope that the person who has died might still exist in the afterlife. Yet it seems to me that this is just using death to keep us all addicted to religion. I’ve written before about how I think religion is just a form of social control: by exploiting the despair brought about by the death of someone you love, those who espouse religious dogma keep us dependent upon it. Thus the comfort funerals claim to bring merely feed into that social control and exploitation. Religions like Christianity just use death to keep people tied to their dogma, allowing those who espouse it to continue to control society, and indeed reinforce it’s hold. As someone who has now lost so many friends, this seems rather perverse, and in fact quite sickening.