Faith

Believe anyway

What about hedging your bets? Believe, and if you are wrong so be it. If you are right, then heaven it is. There are always downsides to all stances we take. Believing is not without cost. Do we need something grand? Something big, better, and substantive that goes beyond a humble life of endless distraction. Something that goes beyond the realms of simple biology making us more than blood and water. Something that is magical and gravity defying that gives us optimism. Perhaps, and I am envious of those that hold out for their spiritual entity to come up trumps. All I can offer is cold and brutal - or appears so at first glance.

The spectacle, the grandeur of a many a place of worship is something to behold. They have an ability to move us emotionally when we enter. So much effort by so many talented committed people to build. Surely those commissioning them did so with an unswerving belief that it was based on a foundation of something credible. How different to the palaces of consumerism.

Any get together has the potential to make a mark on our lives. Join an art group or spend a week at a festival and draw on your spiritual side. It is not just churches that can make us mellow. The greatest healing aid comes from nothing more than the virtue of having people listen to our problems. Some churches will have a sing along with no music and the heart of the human voice is appreciated. In others there is some rousing music with a beat and melody that really raises the spirits of the congregation. There are though, many places where you can experience this kind of uplifting camaraderie and clap along, vocalising and getting carried away from the soullessness of other areas of life.

You can learn a great deal from the texts of the religions, big and small, without having the perquisite of faith. The message can be powerful. A greater one need not have given it to us. Man writes and decides who to attribute the writings to.

Once you see the light you encounter the dark realm of evangelism. One man or one woman alone doesn’t make a religion. You need to build that pyramid. You can do it in so many ways. Quietly, subtly, leaving pamphlets about containing a heartfelt mini autobiography. A concise story of your former life of greed and going nowhere to this new revelatory illustriousness. Please include an experience that you had, one that imbued you with the holy nectar, in a place of reverence. Whilst you want to avoid coming across as superior you don’t want to appear shallow either, the aim is to make people feel included. Be the inspiration, a guiding force that has walked the rocky path and is there to show others the way too.

The joy of evangelism comes from the fact that everyone can take part and feel involved. You don’t have to be the biggest chief in the area by any means. Try name calling, declaring out loud that someone is a heretic, unworthy, disgusting, and cheap. It makes you feel great, better. Get the jargon right. Don’t use the term book or text, use scripture for that has much more resonance. Castigate and enjoy. Nothing and I mean no amount of successes in life or levels of narcissism reached can compare to being a spiritual proponent. It is the pinnacle of greatness and is the exact opposite of living a worthless mediocre life.

You will meet quite a few pesky awkward types that will ask difficult questions. This might dampen your enthusiasm and knock the aura of confidence you have in your faith and your religion. Despite not having all the answers people seek there and then, you can like any good salesman go and talk to a scholarly accomplice who will help you concoct a convincing response. When asked why each cult or religion has different practices, different policies and are contrary to one another tell them that they can be thought of as all aiming for the centre of a dartboard.

Logic and religion. Antonym? Relevant? Pertinent? Important? When something is prefixed by god you can always find a good way to present the reasoning. For a start no human will even hope to get close to comprehending what god can do. It is akin to us having one dimensional sight in a three-dimensional universe. We can never see beyond a single plane. Only god can.

Humanity evolves, technology improves, and attitudes change. We cannot always foresee issues that will arise in the future. This made things difficult for those producing documents that purport to have eternal resonance. Things were not envisaged at the time of writing all those years ago. However, we can reinterpret what is laid out in print. We can make it fit any situation we want. You would assume that messages from god sent through messengers would be clear and precise. Ambiguity, vagueness, and the ability to work things to suit those in power was deliberate. It is a testing test to see if we guess right or not.

Religion is not a joke, but jokes made by some of the religious are rather good. The best joke they reel off is the one where they say that god was diverted from the problems we have with malaria, violence, earthquakes, forest fires and so forth and decided to create a person who will jump a few inches further than all other men in the past. God disliked the current record holders. God also likes us to pray for our team to win. When both teams are praying the lord measures the depth of the fawning and sees which is showing the most sincerity and then facilitates their triumph.

Does god intervene? We see the signs. We see the results. We see what we want to see. As a child I did indeed pray the once, asking for help as to where my bible was. A fraction of a second after, I could see clearly where it lay. I wouldn’t have found it were it not for this divine hand. There is however no greater insult than to express fake false belief in something. The act of prayer is to calm yourself down. If you calm yourself down by other means is that not an equally reliable way to put your thoughts, memories, and hope in order. Do we see clearer when less agitated, less frenetic?

The real question is whether some ideas are so profound that no human could have come up with them without outside influence. Anyone that locked themselves in a room or went up a mountain for a few days and thought about various edicts would come up with roughly the same basic agreeable laws. No killing one another, no forcing yourself on someone, no taking without prior permission and other principles that are obvious. All the discussions you have had with assorted people in your lifetime can culminate in a vision that shows collective wisdom.

God and the universe maybe viewed as the same interchangeable thing. There again, a god may have considered running an experiment. Could I the lord almighty create a system that enables things to form. Things that get more complex and through a process of natural elimination become ever more intelligent. Right through self-awareness to a point where they are able to comprehend who I am. I would do such an experiment with no interference once set in motion. It would be interesting to see the outcome. We are in god’s fish tank.

When we are young, we look up to our parents to gauge whether our actions are right or not. Many will later transfer this reassurance that we are following the correct course to a new figure, another authoritative figure. We as parents can’t avoid some level of bias in our guidance. Those in our care will be subjected to our political, moral, and spiritual ideologies. If their mind is cluttered with all your thoughts, they are prone to become blighted by it and tend to see it from that perspective only. People do not need to be coerced into a solid faith; they will come to it on their own accord because they see its greatness by themselves. People will adopt it because of its potency rather than to keep the peace in a family unit.

There is an analogy between a child and an insect that is drawn towards the light of a fire and would get burned to death if not stopped. If a child is not led on the correct path they will end up in disarray. A better use of this analogy would be to suggest that if a child puts their fingers in the electric socket they will suffer, and it is a parent’s job to prevent them from doing so. A parent’s task is to keep them from danger, minimise the risks to the best of their ability, then allow the resulting adult the opportunity to find a route for themselves.

Why waste time debating potentially valid points when it is easier to get rid of detractors. Burn the witches. Cults banish those that have doubts. Make them nervous of missing out, stop them seeing their families. If you have a solid belief, then you ignore the few doubters rather than raise their profile by highlighting their cynicism.

The mommy monkey beats the child. The child squirms and returns. The mommy monkey beats the child. The child squirms and returns. The mommy monkey beats the child. The child squirms and returns. Experiments have shown this. Disturbing to watch but insightful. Preacher gives hope. The flock gathers. Preacher shown to be an outright fraud. The flock is unsettled briefly but returns. The church can beat, rape and torture members of the congregation and some will re-examine their faith. But return they do. Hope and reason pull us in with a magical power that no money, love, or common sense can intercept. Hope and reason encompasses the entire span of your life. The deeds of the devil are beatable.

What is the alternative? Once you are dead you are dead. When the oil in the lamp runs out, we are no more. Say it how you say it in your culture. It is vacuous, empty, and not exactly an enticing way to see things. Even a legacy will not make up for the loss of eternal life here after. However, we zookeepers have a few advantages. We are less restricted. We have the confidence to really live the life we have. We refrain from sticking our savings into a scheme offering high unsustainable rates of return. We know that if it is too good to be true then it invariably is. We aren’t fooled by seemingly obvious cons, despite the high number of adherents and endorsers. We know that people highlight positives and play down negatives.

I could do a much better job than the god we have at the moment. I would intervene on a daily basis. I would rid the world of the endless evil. I would sort things out. If you were god, would you solve some of the most pressing issues or stand by and watch the torment and terror continue? God fails us, repeatedly. He does not care. Sufferance, sacrifice, penance all chime with delusion and folly rather than with an all knowing, all understanding, all feeling entity. I believe in better the hapless do not.

You may say there are signs of his presence, but I am sceptical. We may kill someone for the greater good, sometimes it is accidental. Often a death is a result of something premeditated. Whatever the truth, if god showed himself minutes before a dastardly deed unfolds he could talk the person out of causing harm. But god does not show himself. Preachers will devise a cunning explanation, but in truth there is no explanation why a decent, feeling, caring, loving god doesn’t halt bad actions. And what sort of god is he that insists on making people believe predominantly via intimidation, violence and fear?