I'd like to apologize in advance for the length of this post. I had no intention of it becoming a huge a rant about religion but I really got carried away. Sorry if at some point this stops being a reply and more of a crazy polemic. I couldn't stop!
I don't mean to attack anyone here, but I think a lot of people dismiss religion on the very flimsy grounds that they can't accept a very limited and naive view of God and morality.
It's
obvious that there is no big old man with a long white beard, judging us from his kingdom in the clouds. It's
obvious that the church has known periods of corruption (a man-made institution being corrupt? It can ONLY be a church!)
But yet this is all that anyone needs to dismiss a profound faith that has shaped the way our society works, the way we behave, and the way we
still differentiate in between good and evil to this day. I personaly find it REALLY tiresome to still have to argue with people who use the Crusades or medieval papal corruption to attack the christian faith.
Remember that religion was meant to encourage man's communion with whatever forces are greater than him. Whenever human authority comes into play you have an
obvious case of corruption that is not in line with ANY major faith's core virtues.
But anyways... back to the point. You're absolutely right that a lot of people turn to religion for the wrong reasons. Obviously these people get little out of their experience. If you think that the reason you should adhere to religious virtues is to balance your cosmic kharma account and get into heaven then I'm afraid you just simply don't have a clue.
Western society is full of itself. Somehow people believe that the standard of human existence is to quietly suffer from depression and anxiety while building up an enormous ego to hide it. Somehow anyone who seems to have achieved any level of serenity must be diluded. Somehow it's become wrong to actually cut between good and evil. Now everything's relative to everything else, things aren't right or wrong, things are "academic" or "practical".
Growing up in this society turned me into one fucked up individual. I was hypnotised by charismatic TV figures, I was bought in by submersive commercials, I was encouraged not to descend to the level of some simple-minded hick and to learn to intellectualize everything. I was shown that I had to be a "tough guy" so that I would get girls. The people I respected the most were comedians who were the best at making fun of everything else. I was convinced that spending hours in unproductive self-contemplation was what made me a deep person! The snobbish intellectuals I learned to admire told me that to be sure of
anything you had to be a brain-washed wishful thinker. They told me that religious people were just being suckered by "corrupt" priests into not being assholes who lived for their own self-gratification (which is obviously the best you can hope to achieve while on this earth!)
So I lived on. I had plenty of fun, but yet when I was alone, when I didn't have my friends to distract me or TV to hypnotise me... I felt incomplete. You KNOW what I'm talking about! That mysterious insatisfaction that haunts us all. The best way not to feel like this was to have more fun, so that's what I did. To dull everything that hurt me I developed a sense of humour that reduced to ridicule almost every aspect of my life. Mmmm what a good plate of armour that was! I just wished that everyone could get a sense of humour as good as mine and do a better job at hiding how insatisfied they were with their lives.
I was convinced that mine was the most sophisticated and advanced society on earth. It was obvious that our
brilliance had done away with religion and all its primitive ideas long ago. Everyone knew this. How could some people call us "sinners" and say that how we were living was wrong? I guess they just weren't educated enough...
THANK GOD FOR MARIJUANA
When I smoked marijuana alone for the first time I felt SOMETHING! Obviously I couldn't even grasp at what it was at first, but it was my first hint that there was something... bigger. Something that was escaping my senses, something that my enormous ego was hiding from me. More importantly though I got a goooooood look at myself for what I really was. I didn't even quite understand what I was comparing myself to but I suddenly realised how many habits I had were
wrong. I couldn't deconstruct it further than that, I knew it was just
wrong.
Obviously when I sobered up, my "rational thinking" put an end to all that and I reminded myself that I was free to do as I pleased without any interference with morality, which was just a man-made invention after all. But yet a grain of doubt remainded.
That grain of doubt was enough to shatter my whole paradigm the first time I took LSD. With the "doors of perception cleansed" I could see creation how it really was, without being clouded by the artificial lense that I had been blocking my sight with. I felt something inside me too though. This may sound cheesy but... I thought of my family. I thought of how ridiculously badly I had been treating them, how hypocrital, how judgemental, how uncompassionate I was with the people who had brought me into this world and loved and cared for me when I couldn't possibly have survived on my own.
When I finaly faced my own evils I suddenly felt my heart EXPLODE with love! I had been so busy worshipping "myself" that I had chocked up the very lifeforce that had been pushing me forward all along.
Being selfish is what condemns our soul! Not to endless torture in an imaginary afterlife, but to endless torture HERE ON EARTH. We're convinced that because we don't outright cheat and steal or kill that we're good people. This isn't the only path to hell, and these aren't the only sins. The surest path to damnation has no signposts, no milestones... it's slow and steady. Every time we turn our back on someone else, every time we put ourselves first, every time a good intention goes unrealized, we take a step forward until we're just dead husks with only enough lifeforce to shift to work in the morning and to TV in the evening. The "pleasures" we thought we lived for have become unsatisfying since they were never indulged in for the right reasons in the first place.
I'm not a saint. I still have evil within me, I still have a pretty firm sense of self-importance that will take years to dismantle. But I thank God every day for showing me that there is something beyond our tiny little man-made worlds. I thank him for giving us such a precious plant that clears away our senses and helps us open our hearts to the glorious world that we arose from.
I thank him for giving a glimpse at our true loving a nature, a glimpse that I try to expand on every day!
