I was listening to KFOG the morning of May 13 this year. It was a Friday, so the talk between the music was about subjects superstitious. The featured guest was a ghost expert and the featured listener paid partial attention.

Midway through the Q&A, I started laughing out loud. Then I began sputtering. “People,” I said to my empty bathroom (as if people could fit in that space!), “we’re not conscious when we sleep. How could anyone be conscious when dead?”

I stand by that sputter. I assert that there is a conservation of logic, that it is frivolous and irresponsible to embellish the obvious with fantastic features that serve no purpose except to satisfy an immature desire for fairytale symmetry or to justify the hallucinations in your brain.

I’ve written it before, but my mind boggles at the concept of worship. I am not denying the existence of the deity; what I am doing is scoffing at the idea that the deity would be egotistical like us and desire us to bow, genuflect, or otherwise abase ourselves before Him/Her/It (It also seems obvious that the deity doesn’t need gender or language).

Likewise, you’ll have to redefine what consciousness is if you’re going to attribute that quality to corpses. Go ahead. Today seems appropriate for that. But until we accept such redefinition, we’ll just have to populate the conscious world with living creatures. And have fun tonight.