There has only every been one compelling reason to believe in religion: the promise of the afterlife. It’s essentially the spiritual Disney World of the faithful, and it’s little wonder that all religions tend to be fairly vague about the details. It’s best to let people’s imagination run wild. Some people want to have sex with a bunch of virgins. Others want to live in mansions.

For the most part, it all seems pretty self indulgent, but the element that does have sway is the idea of being with your loved ones once again. The pain of loss is all too real, and irreversible. It’s traumatic. For some, the hope of being reunited with them is enough to ignore all the other problematic or nonsensical elements of the faith. This desire is not something that can easily be overcome, and until we mature out of this need excessive love copium, what is on offer from faith will continue to have its strong appeal.

When you believe in absurdities, however, you are bound to behave in some pretty inappropriate ways. Take this poor Minnesota woman named Charice Antoinette Goude as an example. Her mother died, and she had been her caretaker for some time. When the 55 year old went to check up on her one morning, she found her dead. Any normal person would have called the authorities, and the process of settling their loved one’s affairs would have begun. Not in this case. Charice is very religious, and was convinced that her mother would soon be resurrected. It took 2 months until someone finally reported that there was something going on, and police responded thinking it was a person in distress. What they found instead was a rapidly decaying corpse.

Now, before you feel bad for Charice, keep in mind that her mother was suffering from diabetes, but this idiot failed to give her proper medication, as she wanted to treat her “naturally”. When her mother died, she also sealed up the windows so that no one could see what was inside. Her ex-husband, who owns the home but lives in the basement like a cave dweller, noticed a terrible smell and eventually made the call to police.

If you’re hoping for some kind of justice, you can forget about it. Charice won’t be charged with negligence, since the corpse was so badly decayed that an autopsy was impossible. Instead, she’s only being charged with interfering with a body, which is a class 6 felony; the lowest someone can be charged. I doubt she’ll even do jail time for this. Isn’t religion grand?