I have religion. I always have. I’ve always pondered the nature of things, and how to decide what to value and what determined and what should determine values, and what such things say about about how I should behave.
Just because I don’t orient around any of the following things, doesn’t mean I don’t have “religion”:
- “faith”, “loyalty”, and all the other shortcut, lazy but easy traditionalist values (that, admittedly, are generally effective, because most of the accumulated wisdom that society is based on is still generally effective for surviving)
- a belief in or absorption with some savior or profit, and especially one who’s already absolved me of all responsibility (i.e. Jesus “saving” me by dying for all humanity’s sins long before I was ever even born and did anything or made any decision one way or any other)
- literalist interpretations of archaic mythologies
- other “dimensions” or realities such as underworlds, “after-lifes”, Heaven, Hell, “alternate” universes, etc.
- praying or worshipping as activities that have any sort of value
- remaining 100% consistent around any single ideal or belief
I every ounce the same am concerned with and decide what is appropriate to eat, like the Jews, or Muslims, or good KKKrischun Mrrikunz who only eat steak, corn, and taters.
I every ounce the same realize the importance of cleansing and keeping clean, like Jews or Muslims, even if I don’t feel the obsessive-compulsive need to wash my hands 7 times before eating, or to always avoid pigs, or fish on certain days.
My religion is composed of a realization that adaptability and openness to integrating new information is more important than stupid dumb adherence to what mommy and daddy taught you (and all the equivalents). But it recognizes every ounce as much as any “faith-based” creed that there is value in discipline and sticking with a thing, with the goal of passing through fires of hardship and renewal into new understandings and capacities. But, if I accept that there are times to recognize one is on an invalid and foolhardy path and should make adjustments that does not mean I have no religion. It very much is part of my religion — of any valid religion.
This religion that I have is every ounce as valid, even if it hasn’t been around for millennia, and even if it attempts to not be based on tradition and accumulated human lore, if traditions and lore can’t make their values evident.
I every ounce have a religion even if it doesn’t incorporate cringing at “naughty” words; even if it actively seeks to refresh and sift out the meaning of “virtue” — what it is a man “should” be; even if it also actively seeks to understand anew what it is a woman “should” be; what the nexus is of these biological forms and minds and reproductive requirements for competing in life as one particular instance of a living thing and social pressures from the society that enables us to be far stronger than we’d be alone, what those things have imposed on all of us, on myself; even if it doesn’t endorse quavering or wailing about the “innocence” and “purity” of children and making sure to instill in them mythical fantasies as truths to ensure they have as “magical” and “wondrous” a childhood as possible, and even if it doesn’t focus on misguided notions that children must be protected from all adversity — like “naughty” words — so that they may be raised to be ignorant, overbearingly large teddy bears and sweet, sweet, vacant girls who suddenly clash with reality and wail and gnash their teeth because they don’t understand why life is so hard and why “God” does such horrible things to us poor, poor, innocent human beings (while ironically preaching at these children in their innocence that they only have value if they work jobs to earn those dollars, pledge allegiance, and never make a scene (be “obscene”)).
I every ounce have a religion and desire to be comforted by it, if I, say, join the military and am facing death in the service of opposing adversaries in order to maintain the society I’m a part of and made from. I have exactly the same right as any other “religious” person to have a counselor or consultant from whom I might seek consolation, even if I think that consolation is best done without any garbage about “after-lives”, and how “God” will accept me into Heaven because I was such a good “man” for conflicting with other human beings. I have a religion that is valid, even if I won’t require the “priests” and “medicine men” and “wise women” of my culture to wear precious, fancy garb, or austere garments to indicate how righteously religious they are within my religion. Not to be distracted, it is still a valid religion to be respected and accommodated even if the agents of it do not mutter and spout and proclaim in mystical and otherworldly terms, nor thump and quote archaic collections of cultures and wisdom past.
I every ounce have a religion even if I only see these living things and the complex qualities that arise from them (“spirit” or “souls”, if you must, but only if you say such things with actual understanding of what those terms were intended to mean, or otherwise say either term as sneeringly as possible) even if I only see them as exactly what they are, and choose not to lump additional human meanings upon them as “real”. My religion is every bit as valid (moreso, actually) if I choose to focus on this world we know, and the things we know in it as we know them, and if I choose to believe and understand that this life is all we get, as “I” in this form, and so I better live it right and well, for myself but also to best serve all the other living things with which I share this existence, and which will determine the quality of life for all future “I”s. My religion is every bit as well-formed and valid even if it doesn’t entail fretting over some existence after life, or doesn’t entail fretting about having to preserve some perfect other-dimensional “essence” of a thing at all costs — like human “souls”, or every living thing as living; and even if it doesn’t see a need to put every other living thing down as less than out of arrogance and ignorance and fear for survival.
I every ounce have a religion and a valid religion, even if it allows abortions and the killing of “innocent” human babies, because it views them truly as simply partially formed living things that have no more complexity or “soul” than any of the cows, deer, pigs, birds, fish, cats, dogs, and numerous other complex, well-formed living things that the “super-religious” happily feast upon and freely manipulate and kill per their “wisdom” and “necessity” in any number of other circumstances. It is every bit as much a religious view to understand and incorporate our abilities to manipulate and control our own life processes — even where it concerns human flesh, but most especially when put in light of the selective acceptance that it is okay for humans to fly “unnaturally” in metal objects through the sky or scoot along on our asses at unnatural speeds by fart-driven machines, or to meddle with the genetics of the foods we eat, or to control, exert, and impose “economic” necessities on others within our societies vs simply valuing them for existing as humans and allowing them a space to live without having to validate their usefulness/productivity to you (even though as babies they were proclaimed to be “so precious” that we must “save” them all — no doubt to be eaten as Soylent Green later, or to be forced into labor as the human slave machine workforce they’re meant to be, the peasants that they are). Simply proclaiming one’s values as coming from the Bible, or “from God” — as willfully interpreted — doesn’t imbue a sole, righteous access to proclaiming what is good, or to validly proclaiming what is natural, or whether doing a thing is “natural” or not. It only, at best, if interpreted 100% correctly, shows what previous humans in a small quadrant of the world arrived at for determining what they thought good in the past. Maybe that was good, but maybe it was an incomplete and inthorough examination of what is good.
My religion is also valid even if it wishes to seemingly contradictorily endorse being natural and attending to the mandates of nature whenever possible in whatever arbitrary domain of living life.
My religion is every bit as valid even if it doesn’t put humans at the center of all things, as the reason for all things. However, it is, in fact, even more valid and even more validly a religion, because it understands that the point of this religion is about a human being at the center processing its own experience of all things. There’s a significant difference.
I have a religion, even if much of it is picked and chosen as appropriate from tradition and accumulated wisdom, as such things prove their value; even if much of it is new and seemingly arbitrary or whimsical or idiosyncratic; even if much of it is still being determined and sorted out. I very much have a religion, even if no proper name has been given to it. Even if it’s not “mystical”.
My religion is real, even if it does not center around “gods” or a “God”, or other such archaic concepts. I tell you this, though, too: my religion is not “atheism”, because that is a manipulative term contrived by established institutions to other those who don’t wish to follow along with their archaic versions of the story and their archaic practices so that those institutions can maintain their control of determining themselves as “the source” of goodness, and also so that the quivering, quaking traditionalists who follow them don’t have to be afeared of all the “strange” things in the world, all the adversity that might make them have to think and adapt, all the contrary words that might challenge their egotistical centeredness in the universe. This religion of mine is not atheism, because I know and understand what “gods” are, what “God” is, and understand what purpose these concepts served, and understand that we now have better understandings of such concepts — even if most people refuse to examine and integrate those understandings as being the very same thing as ancient humans applied the term “god” to. Every force that scientific observation and experimentation better describes is one less god to worship in aweful, quivering, ignorant fear, but it is one more god whose nature is better understood. It is one more god made more real and less metaphorical. And if all those individual gods can be related together as constituents of one universe that turns together, then there is one more “God” better understood, better respected, and better loved.
And even where the gods of mythology, and Jahweh of the Bible, and Allah of the Quran are meant to stand in as metaphors for the nature of the world and how we should behave in light of such (morals and philosophy), I trust that we describe such things better and better every day in psychology, counseling, sociology, philosophy, biology, mathematics … in all the endeavors of human cataloging and reasoning. I trust that those show and describe all the more accurately all the inner workings of the things we base determinations of value on — determinations of good or bad — by enlightening all the dark corners.
My religion is every ounce as much a religion as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism … even if it incorporates science, the principles of science, and the products of science into its worldview and values, even if science is indeed a part of this whole religious system. Science never was a separate thing from religion, except where controllers of the story of culture wished to other it and separate it because its products challenged their control, or because they failed to understand the role it plays, that it always played, even in the oldest of mythologies, even in the oldest of human attempts to understand the world. This is important, what I just said, so pay attention to it and contemplate it.
My religion is every ounce as capable of determining value and meaning, and providing touchstones for those determinations. Life is that touchstone, the basis — life couched in our ever-evolving understanding of physics, the nature of our world, this world. The scope and limitations of our psyche in sensing and understanding its world is that touchstone, that basis. The fact that we as successful living things rely on social interaction to survive and thrive is that touchstone, that basis. Everything you can derive by thumping the Bible, by quoting the Quran, by invoking “God” as your source of what is good or “evil”, I can derive by knowing the aforementioned qualities of the universe, or limitations of our existence in it. Even better, with greater agility and impact, in fact, because I continue to derive understanding from the living, changing world itself, rather than pretending that all knowledge and all wisdom for all time was derived by what humans of past ages happened to arrive at an understanding of, and happened to get down and persist, and happened to thrive by at the time. Even better because I have not relegated myself to the world of the dead by accepting only dead words from dead humans written on dead, stagnant pages. I listen to the living world, and seek to incorporate change and the need to adapt to that change as a living thing into an appropriate worldview. Even better, because I also understand that ancient humans also had to do the same — in fact it was far more imperative they do so, because their continued existence relied much more directly upon it. So I can also understand that those ancient humans were likewise sharp, and acquired wisdom worth heeding.
It doesn’t make me or my religion perfect, or infallible. It does mean it’s more morally consistent. It does mean it can continue to grow and adapt, and that growing and adapting isn’t inconsistent with it.
Let it be known, then, any fucking judges, legislators, executive agents of government, agents of other named religions, businesspeople, or any other self-serving human who tries to say I don’t have religion, or don’t have a valid morality, they are lying to manipulate the narrative to their own fear-driven or powermongering ends. But that is up to you yourself to assess and judge and determine for yourself.
I have religion, and it is valid.