Anyway, as I recall, there is an episode where some rabbi is grilling JC about the afterlife marital status of a serial widow. His response is along the lines of "I'm not running a death cult here."

OK, I'm admitting to rather poor biblical study - sue me, I'm Catholic, we don't RTFM much.

But yeah, I agree - death worship runs rampant in our plastic culture. The denial of pleasure and the tendency to solve our problems by violence seem to me to go hand in hand. We "fight tooth decay" for God's sake - we invent a metaphorical enemy to fight rather than enjoy clean hard teeth.

We obsess on abortions or guns depending on our politics.

There was a wave of horror movies a while back in which the villian would profess a philosophy of hedonism, and decide that it would be fun (and therefore logicaly mandatory) to torture and kill people. Fortunately, that particular wave is over. But the fear of pleasure is not.

When we break down and enjoy, we do it hard, drinking beyond pleasure, driving instead of sitting back to enjoy the buzz, working our fun harder than our work at theme parks. We smoke fucking tobacco for pleasure. Is it any wonder that body piercing is popular?