I rode my bike across campus to help some people do something, and during that time, I remembered an interview of Dick Cheney I had seen on a TV show.  At the time, he was in a fairly advanced stage of heart failure and I was pretty sure he would die soon.  When he took a machine out of his coat and explained that his heart had stopped working, I hoped the interviewer would say something like "may your death be sudden, and your eternity in hell intolerable by any mortal measure."  But instead, she didn't.  I can't understand how some people get through their days.

After helping the people, which turned out to consist of turning off a television that was bothering them, I saw the newspaper which had an article titled something along the lines of "Serial Killer Rotting in Hell, Family's Pastor Tells Them." without feeling any sense of cognitive dissonance, I felt that it was an extremely harsh thing to say.

Here's my feeling on the matter, though, so you can get a little insight into my judgement.  The serial killer in question, who, by the way is named Israel Keyes, and is maybe not actually a serial killer, was definitely a bad guy.  I would say he's about as bad a guy as Cheney is.  But telling his family that he's in Hell isn't, in my opinion what you have a pastor around for.  If a religion can't be comforting in the face of death and other bewildering stuff, what use does it have?    On the other hand, telling Dick Cheney that you'll be glad when his corpse is no longer haunted by his forever-doomed soul is, in my opinion, just a statement of a widely-held belief.  It would be impolite to lie and say that the fact that he was dying was troubling to you in the slightest.