We tell ourselves the stories we need to hear.

It's human nature. There are some facts/truths that are just too hard to take. So we make up stories to tell ourselves.

"He was a good boy," the mom of the murderer of three people says, when she knows perfectly well that he was a dilenquent from the age of 12 and never listened to a word she said. "She was trying to turn her life around," the dad says of his twenty-something daughter who took up with crackheads and was in the car when they robbed a bank and got caught, maybe one of them shot to death. "I've turned my life over to Jesus," says the TV preacher who has just been nabbed having sex with a young boy or girl in his congregation. "I know that Jesus will understand and forgive my weakness."

Yeah, right.

We all do stupid stuff, even criminal stuff, and we all want to say that either it wasn't our fault or that we've learned from our mistakes and won't let it happen again. Too often, though, it's not because we're really contrite -- ready to change our ways -- but because we want to be spared the punishment that we always knew came with whatever wrongdoing we're guilty of. So we rehearse our day in court by telling ourselves stories that let us off the hook. And if we're really weak and devious, we start to believe them.

But these are just day-to-day fabrications, those intended to relieve us of judgment and then a sentence of some kind. It's sort of what we expect of each other: that, confonted with bad behavior, we're going to try to weasel out. (Some don't, of course, and confess and ask to be forgiven and truly do mean to do better in the future, but they're in the minority.)

We tell ourselves stories, about ourselves, when the truth is just too hard to take. It's human.

But the big story we tell ourselves concerns religion, meaning the belief that we will survive our deaths and go on to another -- supposedly eternal -- life after this one, and that it will be filled with all our dead relatives who will welcome us with open arms. (Apparently even those we never hoped to see again, but that's a detail that will have to be worked out in a later draft of that particular story.) And that we'll live forever with the angels in perfect bliss, never needing another beer or an Oreo (or ten) or even another steak slathered with butter.

The opposite version is that we will be cast down into hell and will burn forever with all the other damned souls who committed unforgivable offenses while on this earth.

Where did these stories -- that we tell ourselves -- come from? Do they make any sense?

My guess is that they originated from the very sound observation that justice is not always done in this life, on this earth. Good people are killed, often brutally, or die of diseases, way before their good work is done. Bad people -- even terrible people -- often live normal lifespans, never prosecuted or punished, finally dying in their sleep. Not fair!

But what to do about it?

Well, the logical -- okay, not logical but human -- thing to do is to make up a story in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished, not in this life (since that's already done) but in another, a future, one. Heaven and hell.

Of course there is no empirical evidence of either: no one has come back from the dead to either verify or dispute one or the other. So we rely on what we call "faith". And what is faith? Just the notion that this or that outcome SHOULD happen, if not in this life then in another. Faith is another word for "hope", as in "I hope he gets his in the afterlife" or "I hope she is rewarded in the afterlife" or "I hope there IS an afterlife". Crossed fingers, right?

But I think it's significant that we have a need to tell ourselves stories that make us feel better. I don't think it's just wishful thinking. I think it says something about us as sentient creatures (meaning thinking beings) that we sense that something is not quite right about the way things are and that they should be/could be better, if not right now then someday, somewhere "over the rainbow". It's built into our hard drives -- our brains, our souls? -- that there is an order to all this mystery that should be observed and respected, and if it doesn't work out that way in our own lives, well then, by God -- literally -- it MUST be worked out that way somewhere else.

If it should be, it will be. That's the human motto.

Again, we have no evidence that there is justice and fairness anywhere in the universe or in all of eternity, but the very fact that we can not just imagine it but believe it with body and soul must mean that it DOES exist. Otherwise, how could we even have dreamed of it?

We tell ourselves stories because we're not satisfied with life as it presents itself to us. We just sense that there must be something more. Something better. Somewhere. Some time.

And I think we may be right.