Thor's Day: What is your religion?

By Ed Rogers

Who, or what, is your god? On Tuesday last week I read, for the first time in several weeks, an article written by my dear friend Moto [Paul Calhoun]—his column  "Bah! Humbug!" He has always had a mythical approach toward being a vegan. Having been away from Paul’s writings for a few weeks, "Bah! Humbug!" opened my eyes to what I believe Voltaire said, “If there were no god, man would invent one.”
    We all have our own god; it is that thing within us that we believe in so strongly it reaches right to the very core of our being. For some it is a religious book, which binds other like-minded people together. Money does the same thing as any other religion—it too binds the like-minded together. For some other people, their god’s a life style. All these things have rules, which you must follow in order to be a true-believing member. If you don’t follow the rules with one religion, you go to hell. If you don’t follow money’s rules, you go broke. With a particular life style god, break the rules and you may become fat and lazy, and die. A strong enough belief in anything that you commit your life to becomes your god.

To disavow there is a god does the same thing. Like-minded people come together in one belief. Even the act of not believing is an act of belief.
    And some people have more than one god. There’s no theoretical limit on the number of gods you may have. You can be a rich vegan who each Sunday picks up his or her Bible, drinks a supplement, and jogs to church.

One bad thing about having a god can be that we don’t want anyone else to believe in a different god. We believe so strongly in the righteousness of our god or gods that we feel threatened by anyone else’s not believing in it or them too. When this happens, we have lost our ability to live and let live.

Most religious groups believe that their god is not happy to administer only to their needs. They believe their god demands of them that they do battle in its name. Money worshipers believe that greed is good. Life-style worshipers believe they can cheat death and we are all fools if we don’t adopt their ways.

I am no different from any of you. I too have my god; like I said at the beginning, we all have one. I have a sense of right and wrong that meets the qualifications for being my god. You may not agree with how I view something as being wrong—but you will play hell changing my mind. I have been so unbending and so sure of my righteousness, that I have lost good jobs because of it. I wish it weren’t that way, but I can no more change it than I could get Paul to sit down and eat steak with me.

There’s a saying among A.A. [Alcoholics Anonymous] people, “The drug will always look for a way to protect itself.”
    I believe that is what we do with the gods that we let control our lives. We find ways to protect our belief in them:
    When faced with somebody else’s truth, to us it becomes a lie.
    Facts that don’t agree with our belief are not to be trusted.
Then the catch-all for protecting our gods:
    They’re too stupid to understand the truth.
    Those are just a few I use. I’m sure I could add to them, and you could too.
    To believe in something so strongly that we are willing to cast reason to the wind to hold onto it—even when, at the end of the day, it means nothing to anyone but ourselves—is a form of insanity. No matter what I say to Paul or he says to me, I will still eat meat, and he will still be a vegan. Other religions cannot change to fit my beliefs any more than I can change mine to fit theirs. While the world turns to crap around us we still hold on to our gods. It is a strong drug indeed.

I don’t believe anything will change, not without a world-changing event, one that will compel us to lay our gods aside and cling to one another and know at last that we are part of a much larger group than the ones defined by our various gods.
_______________
Copyright © 2014 by Ed Rogers

Comment box is located below