I met this guy while I was waiting for my car to be fixed. He was a former bishop of the LDS church. He had a near death experience. His kidneys had failed and he felt like he was going to die. He talked about how he doesn’t believe in luck. He just believes in the blessings of the lord. I didn’t quite know what to say to him. He just assumed that I was christen. He had no idea that I was an atheist.

It is that kind of ignorance that gets people into trouble. You can’t just assume that everyone you know is the same as you are. I didn’t want to speak up about it and create contention with someone that I don’t know, which I was going to have to spend the next few hours with (I had a large problem with my car).

On the other hand, I live in the middle of Utah. The largest religious denomination that populates this area is part of the LDS church. The statistics are something like 75 percent of the people who live here are Mormon. It is usually a safe assumption that the person you are talking to part of the predominant religion.

It seems that people that live near me are going a little crazy with the death of their profit. Gordon B. Hinckley died Sunday, and I am tired of having to hear about it. A few hours after he died, I got text messages telling me to wear my Sunday best to school on Monday. I wear the same kind of clothing every day. I was already wearing my Sunday best. But I know that is not what they meant. They want everyone to put on a suit and tie or to wear a skirt. The text messages that I got said that it was meant to show honor for a dead hero.

He is not my hero, nor do I think that a religious leader merits the title “hero”. The fact that they are a religious leader should not bar them from that title. The people that I consider to be heroes are people who stood up to oppression. People that risked their lives for a cause that mattered to them are heroes. People like Dr. King, or our founding fathers. Those are the kinds of people that we need to look up to.

I didn’t see Hinckley ever risking his life for the welfare of others. Now some will say that I don’t live up to my own definition of a hero. And that okay, because I am not a hero, in any sense of the word. I have never found anything that is worth me risking my life for. If the liberty of someone was ever called into question, the perhaps I would take action. But until then, I am happy to live my life just the way it is.

When I was in high school, I wrote a speech about heroism that placed first in the state. I talked about what a hero is. I compared it to the word help. H stands for hero. E stands for everyone. L stands for loss. And P stands for a pledge that I made everyone say. It was a small little pledge about the responsibility that everyone has to help others and to make other people’s lives better, even it by a small amount. I might post that speech later.