Save His Soul!

I think Religion is a terrible idea.Even Jesus was against it.He only encouraged people to worship together because it forms a community, and communities lift people up. Marx once called them opiates, pacifiers; I think they're more like golden calf cocaine, the lot of them.

I'll not be totally one-sided: I'll agree there are organizations affiliated with Religion that do wonderful things.My old church used to take in the homeless on certain frosty nights, and I once went on an Alternative Spring Break to find myself housed in a Nashville Catholic church (feeling that any moment I might suddenly ignite lying in my pink "Princess" sleeping bag).

But that is not the work of a Religion; that is the work of people operating under Belief. And beliefs are marvelous things. To an extent, we allow people to believe whatever they want. After all, we let children believe in Santa Claus until they inevitably have their bubbles burst by the shock of catching mum and dad carefully arranging presents under the tree (or in my case, gingerly placing my stocking at the foot of my bed). But to believe in a faith with a name is not to align with a belief, but to align with a history that claims superiority to the others.

Though it may not seem possible today (or maybe it does, again, recently), Religion has been responsible for throwing the known world into chaos. It happened during the Crusades, and earlier with the displacement of Paganism with incoming Christianity in the Roman world.

While the signs are still here--we have anti-gay legislation (Go California!) and terrorist attacks to prove it--the warnings will not to be heeded. Christianity has a choke-hold on America, regardless of its altruistic intentions. To deny it has detrimental effects on a segment of society, however small, is to bury ones head in the sand.

I think what has been wholly lost on the people of this world is that attending a house of worship does not save your 'soul'. It will not be cleansed by sitting inches from the pulpit on Sunday if you lead a selfish, ignoble life the rest of the week. That the body needs a physical surrounding to make real to it the conceptions of the mind is but a fluke in the design. The 'soul', whatever it is, is moved or filled or saved by a belief, and by a conscious decision to dedicate ones meager prowess to it.If a man models his life after that of Buddha (sans diseases) yet does not claim to be Buddhist, does it make him any less? Will he be condemned to 'Hell' for not letting someone else's idea of God into his heart?

So let's read the Bibles and the Torahs and the Korans and the Theravadas and the Upanishads like the interesting, wondrous tales they are; but can't involve ourselves so much in the storylines of people who lived in a wholly different world that we forget that we are capable of such acts of supreme generosity and benevolence in ours. The truth is we will never find out which one was right and live to tell about it. We need to stop thumping the text and try to recover the inspirations.Maybe then we'll find a Belief truly worth placing faith in.