Religion...

Sometimes I wonder about organized religion. There seems to be little point to it. One method of thinking cannot possibly satisfy everybody. I sometimes hear people say stuff like, “I can understand this, but this other thing doesn’t make sense.” I’ve heard it said by Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and everyone seems to have something that they disagree with in their religion. My solution: forget organized religion. Organized religion simply gives a self-righteous group of old men the right to label people as heretics and upstarts. Organized religion cannot fulfill the needs of all, so why bother with it, really? It’s my conviction that religion is something that every person needs to discover for themselves.

This isn’t to say that I believe organized religion to completely lack merit. I was raised Protestant and learned morals and life lessons from Sunday school. Organized religion, so far as I can tell, is valuable only for its Sunday school. It was mainly from Sunday school that I learned morality tales and lessons at a young age. When I was a kid, the sermons went right over my head, rendering them far less significant than the lessons I learned from Sunday school. The only thing that organized religion is good for is for teaching children important morals, the difference between good and bad. I still remember my first pang of conscience; in second grade, my neighbor wanted to prank call someone from our class and I felt guilty about it and simply removed myself from the situation. It is for this reason that—however I may disagree with organized religion—I intend on raising my children just as I was; attending church so that they can be exposed to the lessons that I learned in Sunday school and hopefully they will develop the same set of morals. I also think that it is essential for children to be raised with some sort of religious belief system. When my kids graduate from high school and they decide that they don’t want to go to church anymore, that’s fine. From then on they can figure out what they believe in on their own.

As I mentioned before, I was raised Protestant, and for lack of a name for what I believe, I still mainly consider myself Protestant. My main problem with Protestantism is that I refuse to accept that Jesus Christ was fathered by God. Does that story remind you of anyone else? How about Achilles or Hercules? Half of the ancient Greek pantheon are the illegitimate bastard-children of Zeus and a bunch of hot mortal chicks. I do, however, recognize Jesus as a prophet. He was certainly what I would call a wise man. Not the kind that supposedly attended his birth, but Jesus was a man of wisdom. My brother was singing some Christian rock song about Jesus being 100% man and 100% god, which I simply refuse to believe.

In college, I took a literary seminar based on the legend of King Arthur. It was interesting to see how small the first metaphoric rock was that started an avalanche of retellings and ultimately turned into the legend that King Arthur has become today. The first mention of anyone close to what we know as King Arthur was some Roman commander or captain named Lucius Artorius Castus, who was simply a military leader that led some troops into Gaul for the reason of quelling rebellion. With the mix of a ton of other sources (German and French literature in the Medieval period, mostly), the story developed of King Arthur, the Round Table, all of his knights, and the sword Excalibur. The legend is just that: a legend; a mix of stories from across Europe which has become a very solid and fully-constructed story which most people are acquainted with today. Because of how detailed our seminar course was and how varied each of the stories that we read were, I have come to believe quite the same about the events and people that are in the Bible. Bits and pieces have been proven to have been based on actual events, such as a massive flood, Solomon’s Temple, the Israelite slavery circuit, etc., and because it was ultimately recorded by someone within the church, the historical facts have been skewed towards their own point of view. The King Arthur legend is also quite a bit newer than the sources of the Bible and if you care to take a look at how widely varied the many different Arthur stories and sources are, you can see just how creatively they have been intertwined. If you are to parallel the Bible and Arthur, you would have to conclude that the Bible has been similarly manipulated and assembled, especially considering its age.

Have you ever considered the act of Confession? You go into a box, tell your secrets to the “anonymous” priest and he tells you how you can absolve yourself of these sins. This is just one of the many ways in which the church has convinced people that you need them if you are ever to be free from the furnace. The idea behind Confession seems to be that you should be cognizant of the “sinful” activities that you’re doing. Ultimately that’s all you should do; and recognizing the fact that you’ve done “sinful” or shameful or morally gray things ought to be enough for any proper person that knows right from wrong to want to try and correct that. I don’t believe that you should have to go through some strange ritual involving a box and a priest just so that you can be free of these “sins”.

The idea of God is sometimes hard to wrap your mind around. I do believe in a higher power. What are the chances that some random ball of gas and dust should solidify and suddenly become habitable? It seems like it should be damn near impossible. There have been no signs of life outside our earth. I know that our civilization isn’t so advanced that if there were other life out there that we would find it and recognize it, but all the planets that we’ve been seeing are just balls of dirt. I think that God is someone/something that everybody should be able to reach on a personal level; and in that sense, I like to believe that God is different for everyone. Going back to my discussion on Confession, you should be able to reach God without the aid of a mediator. I don’t think I would ever want to worship a God that I couldn’t talk to directly. “Please hold, your prayer is very important to us.” Also this Catholic fear of damnation and the fiery abyss we know as Hell is completely bizarre to me; what kind of a God would damn a person for a single act that they’ve committed. That’s not the type of God I’d like to worship.

I don’t think it’s right to push your beliefs on anyone and I’m certainly not trying to “convert” anyone with this blog. If you have read this and would care to argue any points, feel free. I certainly don’t mind providing more detailed accounts of my own personal beliefs, and I’d like to be sure that my meaning is entirely clear. I hope I haven't offended anyone in this, and if I did, I didn't mean to. On that note, please be respectful of my own opinions if you do decide to leave any comments.