I heard it best put by a young woman in a public service announcement, "I believe there are many paths to God." My friends and acquaintances follow different ones. This morning I awoke to a program about the Buddha, who existed historically five hundred years before Jesus Christ. It would seem to me that religion is essentially about providing us with skill sets to help us cope with the concepts of aging, illness, and death. The gift to sentient beings is the awareness that at some point existence will terminate and that the event, if not traumatically painful and immediate, will be a process, ugly, painful and drawn-out.
I have been a practicing Roman Catholicism after a fashion for forty years. According to the tales upon which Christianity is based, the first man and woman would have remained immortal and living in the Garden if it weren't for the sin of ignorance....no, I have that wrong. Adam and Eve WERE ignorant. It was the serpent who lead them to knowledge, thereby inciting God to cast them out of paradise. And God has been pissed at us ever since.
Talk about holding grudge. Why would God punish thousands of generations of his favorite creation who weren't even there when it all happened? He is a jealous god and a vengeful one and it strikes me as more than a little coincidental that God is frequently identified as an internal deity. Religion then becomes a form of self-delusion to engender acceptance of our end. I think there is probably more to it than that, but this is what happens when I wake up at three in the morning and cannot go back to sleep.
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