Ok, so here is the section where I address the death thing.
Obviously I have an obsessive interest in it. I have thought a lot about it and come to some conclusions. When I was a little kid I watched "The Day After" which is by far a scarier movie than any of the shit Hollywood tries to put out using monsters or the paranormal because "the Day After" addressed a life threatening element that could really happen to you in the real world, something that would kill you if you were lucky, but more likely contaminate you and destroy everything you value and strip life down to rusted metal frames, nuclear war.
This movie came out in the 80's when the cold war was still going on and the communists were still building warheads in the arms race and we were matching them nuke for nuke. Every single time a commercial jet went overhead I looked to see if I could discern trap doors opening on the hull of the plane to deploy a nuclear weapon. At the time I was not aware that an attack would come from an Inter-continental Ballistic Missile.
At any rate, I used to have dreams of nuclear war. The bombs would be going off and I could see the mushroom clouds rising and I could feel the air expanding outward from the shockwave and there would be this blast of heat like an oven door just opened. Then I would actually feel the radiation permeate me. It was weird, but I could feel it sink in and contaminate my skin. It felt sick, like walking in and seeing your girlfriend having sex with your best friend, you felt like you were descending and getting ill.
Now bear in mind I am like 6 years old here, so these are some pretty intense dreams to be having.
One day I am at home playing Atari 2600 and the doorbell rings. Jehovah's Witnesses. I answer and start talking with these two guys in suits. Say what you will about them but I was not threatened or irritated because they talked to me like I was not an idiot or a child, and most importantly they did not try to recruit me per se, they mostly just talked with me about their ideas. That was the first time I heard the word Armageddon.
I told them I was afraid that the world would end by nuclear war and how afraid I was. One of the guys smiled in the most reassuring way and told me that God was not going to let the world end that way. It was so absolute the way he said it, I could tell he believed it with all of his soul and at that very moment, I believed it to. From that day forward I never feared nuclear war the same way again and I always had the inner sense that God was going to look out for not only me, but the entire planet.
Coincidentally, I do believe in God. I don't believe in scripture or religion, it seems to me that God would not have left clues behind that were so obvious. Don't get me started on faith healers either. From everything I have read in the bible, I found that the only people capable of healing were Big J himself and anyone who was invited to the lovely evening dinner known as Pentecost. Since I am pretty much guessing none of the big haired bimbos from the Trinity Network were present for Pentecost, I am forced to file them under the folder marked "Bullshit" as a result of closer scrutiny into the facts.
Reincarnation seems plausible to me though. I used to have dreams as a child of another life and my mom told me that at a young age I had an unusual interest in the opposite sex, so it always seemed to me that I may have had some residual experience from a past life pointing me in forward directions early on. Laughable, to me at least, is how many Christians have embraced the idea of reincarnation. I don't have anything specific against Christianity, it offers less particles per cubic inch of moral pollution than say, pretty much every other religion, which has just gotten absurd, but reincarnation is a Buddhist belief and I find it funny they never nod in the direction of the Buddhist's when they are talking about it like they found it for themselves.
As for the existence of God, the main reason I believe in God is because I cannot imagine the absence of the universe. Think about nothing, and I mean the total absence of existence, think of a black void, a vacuum without sound or light, picture it. What do you think of?
You, if you are anything like 98% of the worlds population, think of blackness, an endless night, a void that stretches on forever.
Therein lies the catch that snared me. I was thinking of black, night. Black is a color, in color theory, it is all colors, that is why you shine a colored light on black fabric, you don't see much of it because it absorbs the majority of the spectrum and reflects very little. This is why I first of all believe in existence, because I cannot imagine non-existence.
When I try, I can only envision black, a color, something that does exist. The absence of existence has no color, no properties, no area, no mass, it is beyond our spectrum of comprehension as human beings. Since I cannot envision it physically, I accept existence. I cannot believe that all this, my life, the universe, knee socks (which rule by the way, I mean, any sock you only have to pull up ONCE a day and never fall down and cover your shins from 20 eye Doc Martin's Boots are a force to be reckoned with) just came to be without any higher force compelling them to do so. Something, someone made all this and for that I am eternally grateful and never doubt their existence.