Yesterday, a customer asked me what church I attended. I wasn’t amused with the question. He was an ornery old cuss, and he had just revealed that he was a Dodger fan, a state of being that is equal to discovering your wife’s a hooker in my opinion. I looked him square in the eye and said, “I wasn’t born with the religion gene.”
“You an atheist?” he persisted.
“No,” I replied, trying to avoid an argument.
Maybe there was something in the way I said it that made him drop the subject, except for a parting shot about me attending church and something about judgment day. I avoided the skirmish and managed to deliver the car. Whew!
The problem was that I was looking for a fight. You see I enjoy talking about God and religion as any Mormon missionary or door-to-door Seventh Day Adventist can attest. When they come preaching at me they discover a soul who as done a lot of thinking about his place in the universe and has some definite opinions of the subject.
I was born a Roman Catholic. That in itself speaks volumes about why I am religiously challenged. I remember the terror of being seven-years-old going into a darkened confessional to confess my sins to the personal representative of God. I remember making up sins because I couldn’t remember doing anything wrong!
The whole process terrorized me. I envisioned the soul as a cosmic petridish, the sins building up like bacteria. Confession cleaned the dish, but if you had the bad luck of being hit by a truck with a few swear words on there, off to Hell you go!
Being a nice Portuguese boy, I tried to live with the concept that God was just waiting for me to screw up so he could torture me for eternity. But at the age of fourteen it finally dawned on me that it was all a bunch of bullshit.
Over the years the concept of religion has always fascinated me. I developed a theory that God, or whatever controls the wheels of the universe, had very little to do with religion. I decided that the reason religious institutions exist is because of my theory of the religion gene.
In my opinion you are either born with a need for religion or not. It’s in you DNA. Sometimes the gene is buried deeply only to come out when a person decides its time to clean his act up in order to avoid an eternity of fire. People who are extremely religious have a need to have the mysteries of universe placed in a tidy, easy explainable box. They don’t want any mystery in their life, and no surprises at the end. They are not content that the cosmos (both literally and figuratively) is something far beyond human understanding. They want the sucker explained.
Religion by its very definition is the worshiping of concepts that can’t be proven. And since this lack of logic is in itself a dichotomy, they pass off the things that don’t make a lot of sense as faith. Faith is the “inconvenient truth”. It attempts to explain away the unexplainable. It makes the illogical logical. It allows hair-brain theories to take root, wars to occur in the name of God, and general mayhem to ensue.
So let me get this straight. God is a being who along with creating the universe enjoys a little torture on the side. In general he loves you, but if you should screw up he is perfectly okay with barbequing you for eternity.
I don’t think so.
Now let me say that I have nothing against a person needing religion. As Stephen Stills once said, “whatever gets you through the night”. If you need the mysteries of the universe explained to you in human terms in order to make you feel safe, that’s okay by me. Just don’t look at me cross-eyed if I test to your ideas.
I looked out the window of the church called the 4 Corners Cafe wondering why I waste my time thinking about things like this. And as my coffee cooled, I pondered the universe and my place in it.
“You an atheist?” he persisted.
“No,” I replied, trying to avoid an argument.
Maybe there was something in the way I said it that made him drop the subject, except for a parting shot about me attending church and something about judgment day. I avoided the skirmish and managed to deliver the car. Whew!
The problem was that I was looking for a fight. You see I enjoy talking about God and religion as any Mormon missionary or door-to-door Seventh Day Adventist can attest. When they come preaching at me they discover a soul who as done a lot of thinking about his place in the universe and has some definite opinions of the subject.
I was born a Roman Catholic. That in itself speaks volumes about why I am religiously challenged. I remember the terror of being seven-years-old going into a darkened confessional to confess my sins to the personal representative of God. I remember making up sins because I couldn’t remember doing anything wrong!
The whole process terrorized me. I envisioned the soul as a cosmic petridish, the sins building up like bacteria. Confession cleaned the dish, but if you had the bad luck of being hit by a truck with a few swear words on there, off to Hell you go!
Being a nice Portuguese boy, I tried to live with the concept that God was just waiting for me to screw up so he could torture me for eternity. But at the age of fourteen it finally dawned on me that it was all a bunch of bullshit.
Over the years the concept of religion has always fascinated me. I developed a theory that God, or whatever controls the wheels of the universe, had very little to do with religion. I decided that the reason religious institutions exist is because of my theory of the religion gene.
In my opinion you are either born with a need for religion or not. It’s in you DNA. Sometimes the gene is buried deeply only to come out when a person decides its time to clean his act up in order to avoid an eternity of fire. People who are extremely religious have a need to have the mysteries of universe placed in a tidy, easy explainable box. They don’t want any mystery in their life, and no surprises at the end. They are not content that the cosmos (both literally and figuratively) is something far beyond human understanding. They want the sucker explained.
Religion by its very definition is the worshiping of concepts that can’t be proven. And since this lack of logic is in itself a dichotomy, they pass off the things that don’t make a lot of sense as faith. Faith is the “inconvenient truth”. It attempts to explain away the unexplainable. It makes the illogical logical. It allows hair-brain theories to take root, wars to occur in the name of God, and general mayhem to ensue.
So let me get this straight. God is a being who along with creating the universe enjoys a little torture on the side. In general he loves you, but if you should screw up he is perfectly okay with barbequing you for eternity.
I don’t think so.
Now let me say that I have nothing against a person needing religion. As Stephen Stills once said, “whatever gets you through the night”. If you need the mysteries of the universe explained to you in human terms in order to make you feel safe, that’s okay by me. Just don’t look at me cross-eyed if I test to your ideas.
I looked out the window of the church called the 4 Corners Cafe wondering why I waste my time thinking about things like this. And as my coffee cooled, I pondered the universe and my place in it.
No comments:
Post a Comment