CARDS ON THE TABLE

Flush up against Nature

To me, religion is whistling in the dark. If curiosity about the source of one’s consciousness and the phenomena it senses within and upon the flesh from without is inhibited by fear of a threat yet to be personally experienced one has lost that much potential for exploratory deviation from the theme of the piper’s tune. Anyone who has ever told a bed time story to a child can’t help but have noticed how real the boogie men are with only the sketchiest of threats; how mere mention of their name the next day can elicit desired reactions to the imaginary threat, the fear of the unknown. Such observations must have occurred to story tellers down through time who had gathered large enough audiences with tales about the nature of their environment and the characteristics of its multitude of life forms, so convinced by the accounts’ relevance to their own observations as to begin naming local objects after characters from the yarns.

This reifying of fiction makes an authority of the author and disciples of his readers. Depending on the wisdom and benevolence of this powerful bard-become-priest, he can either mentor his followers on how to find their own story on their own vision quest or bind them to his new truths with imaginative threats of unimaginable punishment from the boogie man for deviation from the plot line. No variations allowed on the tune one must whistle while passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or else. The most manipulative amongst these inheritors of abdicated authority are able to extend their sheep’s fears beyond threats of natural disasters for their heretical behavior into the abstract realm of being guilty of thinking wrong.

To posit right and wrong requires one find a purpose to be furthered, maintained or violated. While this may work when crying injustice in the court convened to apply the test of man made law designed to accomplish man made purpose, It has no application outside the enforced world of law and order. There is no justice in nature. One is either up to living with the way things are or eaten by them for refusing. Taking civilization as a body with its pollution and alteration of our environment since it was created it seems only natural that nature’s stomach is rumbling. In such a self regulating system, whence the need to posit a controller, a creator, a bequeather of earth to mankind to do as he damned well pleases, a being from whom to beg mercy for knowingly malicious acts, a granter of …

… I think I‘ve caught on to why the priests created a deity to be the banisher of man from his idyllic symbiosis with nature in Eden to scratch a living out of the earth. The mess our ownership attitude has made of this planetary nest needs someone to blame for our doing it and someone to beseech to absolve us from suffering our natural karma. So, that’s why I think religion is whistling in the dark, major portion of reality religion refuses permission to be lit and into which we are constantly crashing with no peeking, being taught to fear the unknown the way we have.

Only believers in a creator deity can turn the spontaneous, ephemeral beauty of a sunset into some created, artificial thing, while I am blown away at how the endless, carefree dissolve from one instance of beauty to the next makes a mockery of any notion of intention imaginable. And I chuckle to myself, poor babies.

I suppose I should close before I get too specific about the relative debilitation to human evolution caused by the various sects of believers in a supreme commander so I will leave you with a quote I have just put on my sidebar that seems too tidy to argue with:

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ——— Stephen Roberts

I’ll see you on the path