Billions of people…
Thousands of religions…

It can’t work. Organized religion must be crock-pot full of steaming feces waiting for the masses to dip their Frito-shaped souls into the vast vat of dogma-doo. Allow me to expound. Billions of people means billions of individual with billions of beliefs and billions of perspectives, resulting in billions of personalized universes. (I better be careful or I’ll start sounding like Carl Sagan, “Billions and billions…”) How can a relative thimbleful of religions appease so many? Option 1, these religions are so close to the “truth” that they touch us on a deeper level. Perhaps, but how does one explain the vast rifts between the world’s major religions? Option 2, people are lazy and have a herd mentality. “I’m to tired to develop a set of spiritual and moral beliefs on my own. Maybe I should just subscribe to religion X because it has millions of believers.” That statement does sound simplistic and generic, but it reflects enough truth about human nature to make me pause. I’m of the mind that if you claim a particular religion as your own, then you must adhere to all doctrines, rituals, and belief. None of this, “Yeah, I’m Catholic but I don’t go to church every Sunday and I think homosexuality and abortion are not sins.” Obviously, this person isn’t Catholic and should say, “The majority of my beliefs are similar to Catholicism, but I differ on some key points.” This is an all or nothing attitude, but if I’m going to claim religion X then I need to play by X’s rules. SSDiabolique pointed out a nice analogy between religious rules and societal laws. Here in the USA, more specifically Colorado, more specifically Denver, there are set laws that govern my life. If I want to live in Denver then I have to abide by those laws even if I disagree with some of them. If I find the laws utterly intolerable then I move elsewhere with different laws. Similarly, if I want to be Jewish then I must abide by those rules and if I find them utterly intolerable then I must find a new religion. The difficulty is finding a prefabricated religion that matches up perfectly to the individual’s beliefs, and when you compare billions of people to thousands of religions the odds are against it.

My pal brooklyn would say that religion is a crutch for the weak. If you view this statement from the perspective of organized religion, then it means that the individual should be strong enough to create and adhere to his or her own personal spiritual convictions. However, I believe brooklyn’s intent is that life is merely a freak cosmic accident without any meaning and without any higher power behind the evolutionary steering wheel. People who search for a noble meaning behind their existence will come up empty handed. Those who can’t deal with life-is-meaningless reality will grasp for god and religion to bail them out and give them a false sense that their existence is worth more than a puddle of piss. Traces of proof are found in the spiritual disparity between the young and the old. (This is all speculation based on my empirical experience, so take it as you may. You may have differing observations.) Young people take spirituality and religion less seriously than the elders. Perhaps this is because the elderly feel their imminent mortality and are grasping to justify their entire life. They are grasping in hopes that death is not the eternal end o’ the line. They are grasping for something bigger than their existence. They are grasping, hoping that the last seventy-five years of experience, struggle, tears, laughter, desperation, hope, and accumulated knowledge is not for naught. If you subscribe to Brooks ideology then this is proof.

What’s a mortal to due? I’ll throw caution to the wind and follow the teachings of the Old Norse deities. That’s right, Valhalla here I come. %~) Maybe not. Here’s a plan of action, take it or leave it. I’m going to write down all my beliefs (spiritual, philosophical, political, ethical) starting with the broad ones like, “Is there a god?” and “Is there an afterlife?” and ending with little nitpicky ones like, “Is the occasional white lie okay?” and “Is skipping out ½ an hour early from work on a Friday okay?” I foresee quite a large question/response style list. I may not know all the answers… ahem, I won’t know all the answers, but that’s when it’s time to turn the inward search outward and read some book or something. When all is said and done, I’ll have this nice long treatise on life that I can hold up, side by side, to other religions and philosophies and compare the two. Hey, maybe I find an organized religion or political party that I truly belong to. If I don’t, who cares? The next time someone really wants to know, I can print out my 15-page treatise and stuff it in their grubby little hands.

Valhalla I am coming...
...and so it was written, shenry at 6/20/2002 03:10:00 PM.
...and so it was appended with .