He is in the music business…
Gaaah, I had forgotten how much I LOVE that song! It makes me want to go build some kind of cyberpunk megalith out of old TVs and pagers and flip phones and only when the very last Blackberry is slotted into place does it reveal itself to be a twenty story pagan megagod with a spark-spitting cock the size of a city bus, a magnificent death-flower cunt you could drive said bus into, turn around, and drive back out, a shiny neon asshole that poops gusts of glittering confetti, and huge greedy hands ready to grab the world by the hips and fuck it.
And at the moment of intromission, the whole thing explodes into a supernova orgasm of rage, cum, and tears.
So… file that under ideas for next Burning Man, I guess. Man do I get poetic.
Anyhow. I did have a point, and it was this :
Last Therapy Thursday, one of the things that came up was the idea of my essentially inventing my own religion as a way to give me access to something beyond, outside, and bigger than my conscious rational mind that I can then call on to pull me out of this grotty little grotto of mine so I can transcend my limitations and truly grow as a person.
I want to level the fuck up, man.
I was tempted to just reject the idea outright because at first glance, it seems impossible. What kind of religion could withstand the full fury of my rational analysis engine? How could anything plug the massive gap left by the total lack of any greater power than my own in my whole life? What could possibly cure the disease caused by knowing far too much far too early?
My problem is that I always knew my stuffed animals weren’t alive, that there were no imaginary friends (by definition), and when I was told there was no Santa Claus. I wasn’t disappointed, I was relieved.
Thank goodness! Things make sense again.
So it obvious can’t be anything like the religions we know of today. There can be absolutely no leaps of faith required. It can’t require me to “just believe” and I will not accept any precept or tenet that makes no sense to me or that contradicts known and demonstrable truths about the world.
I am not capable of that kind of “faith”. I can’t break my brain just to be happy. I have no escape hatch to reality built into my psyche. Make sense or go home.
Not that I’m bitter.
This means that any religion I invent would be entirely about our inner life. with absolutely no need for any connection to objective extra-cranial reality whatsoever.
It has to be a creature of pure imagination and self-sustaining belief. The sort of thing that can neither be proven nor disproven.
My putative Jesus would be exactly as real as Sherlock Holmes, Superman, and love.
And everything in the religion would be logically connected and rationally justifiable. Absolutely no arbitrary authority and not the tiniest smidgen of “because I said so” and even less of the “you wouldn’t understand, leave it to me” garbage.
If there is something you do not understand and we can’t explain it to you, and you cannot accept it, you may leave, and I apologize for having failed you.
But better that than my telling you that you just have to trust me.
More after the break.
Building a religion, part 2 : What it’s all about
Enough about what my religion won’t include. What will it include?
One thing it will have that other religions claim to have but they’re dirty rotten liars is pure and unconditional love.
Many religions claim out of one side of their mouths that God loves you unconditionally, but then tell you all the things He hates out of the other side of their mouths, knowing damned well that you’re probably guilty of at least one of them,
You know what “hate the sin, love the sinner” means to most folks?
It means, “Hate the sinner… then lie about it. ”
No, I am talking about true unconditional love. A God that loves both the wicked and the good, the malicious and the beneficial, the human monsters and the living saints.
And He loves them equally, because His love and compassion are infinite as is His perspective, and to Him we are all His lost children and He cannot deny His love to any of us flawed bits of complex carbon.
Most people cannot handle this thought. Surely Daddy loves his good children more than the bad ones, right?
I mean, I accept that there is nothing I personally can do to make Him loves me any less, but surely that doesn’t apply to really bad people too?
It’s not easy for me, either. Surely God loves me at least a little more than, say, Hitler?
But I also know that this is the way it has to work because God’s love HAS to be infinite and unconditional otherwise evil motherfuckers will turn religion into a sucking-up contest and invent all kinds of ways to “prove” whom God loves more and that destroys the very loving essence of what my religion needs to be.
So yes. There is no Hell. Hitler went to Heaven just like everyone else. You are truly equal to all others in the eyes of the Lord who made you.
And you’re just going to have to learn to live with the full unfiltered truth of that. I do not expect that to be easy. You might spend a lifetime trying to achieve it and still not make it. Our instincts towards social hierarchy are very strong.
Just remember that if you can think of reasons to exclude others from equality before God’s eyes, they can do the same to you.
Nobody ever said equality was easy. Just that it’s right.
You’re free to think yourself better than bad people in any other way.
But in God’s eyes, we are all the same.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.