I was showering today (as I do every day... ladies) and it occurred to me religion is a lot like a fifteen year old boy in a tight black and green striped sweater with hair combed over half his face and a penchant for saying things like "life is like dark and miserable and happiness is a bullshit lie."
Though I'd played with the idea of calling religious people members of a death cult (aside from being either redundant or worse, inaccurate — I'm pretty sure cult means, removed from it's pejorative connotations, a group smaller than "religion" but larger than a "couple of guys") this seemed to imbue the religious with an authority usually reserved for people in bands whose name can be found airbrushed on the side of someone's older cousin's bitchin'-assed-van; whiny self-important victims of cruel fate seems a better fit.
It may have been the abortion debate (unrelated note: why is it I use the nonsense term "abortion debate" to describe what I suspect is much more likely the "abortion tantrum"?) which has returned for another fifteen minutes due to recent the terrorist attack in a Kansas church, the assassination of Dr. George Tiller (another unrelated note: why is this paragraph starting to sound so newsy?).
So, I'm in the shower, thinking about how vile some people are (on better researched blogs there are collections of tweets from Jesus fans who feel the need to infect the internet with their petty sadism — remember when the internet was just porn?) and how in this — ugh — debate... the Christian sympathies are generally with the unborn, which lead me to suspect (or continue to suspect with new evidence) that Christians hate people who are alive.
This hatred also seems shared by every other religion of which I've ever heard (and likely those I haven't) and I guess more so than "a slightly larger group of guys" could be used to define exactly what separates a religion from "people who frequent internet message-boards to posts stories about what it would be like if cats could speak".
Aside from the general hate speech delivered en masse... in mass... on a weekly basis (you're all bad because two people who we admit didn't really exist but serve as a symbol for something we never really bother to explain once ate a fruit that we call an apple, but was likely originally a pomegranate — you're all bad because everything here is bad and probably not real — or even — you're all trying really hard, but if you'd just try a little harder maybe you'll get to a place that fucking rules... cause in comparrison this place sucks...), it seems to me the Christian stance is that once we pass through someone's vagina (or are surgically removed from someone's uterus by way of an advanced procedure, like me, which is why I played McDuff in my Shakespearean debute over two years ago) we begin to amass sin like a rolling stone... covered in glue... on a long slope covered in little bits of moss that are easilly gathered by said glue covered stone.
Experience, to the devout, it seems is simply the accumulation of sin and likely why the religious seem to view children as precious, innocent, little miracles while the rest of us see them as violent sociopathic little beasts who'll believe anything their told... which is actually probably why the religious actually like them so much... that and the other thing... the rape thing.
But the point remains, as we grow we learn to discern between truth and fiction, evidence and assertion, good touch and bad touch, and at the point religion loses its luster so, to them, do we.
So, it could be that being alive we have nothing but chances to sin and collect spiritual demerits, but when we're dead (or not yet alive) we're better, we're pure, and we're completely incapable of changing anything.
In Buddhism I believe (poorly translated) it's referred to as "no-thought", a state of mind in which we simply exist, in Christianity it's called absolute devotion (I forget who the figure is, but I remember reading some reverred Christian mind proclaim (poorly paraphrased) "my devotion is so great, if the church were to tell me that white wall is blue I'd become unable to see a white wall"), and I'm holding up four fingers (or showing you four lights depending on your favorite Star Trek captain) and demanding you see five.
And I suppose that's what I realized in the shower today, the ideal religious practicioner is either a fetus, a dead person, or someone who (through sheer lack of will) has crafted their mind to reflect the shared mindset of the earlier examples.
