Ray9
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2016
- 2,707
- 4,486
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- Banned
- #1
At 72 I am an Agnostic but I’ve been thinking about religion. I was confirmed a catholic in 1960 but I have a hard time seeing the Pope as the living God especially after he leaves the bathroom. In addition, the Catholic faith has a real problem with its silence during Hitler’s extermination of Jews. And there are those piles of wealth accumulated Mafia –style. I’m no Catholic.
I want to pick the religion that has the best God but I’m not going with the Jews because they’ve got one mean God with “wrath” as his middle name. Historically, they write backwards which affected their map reading skills likely explaining why they got lost in the desert for forty years. And I’ve become fond of a part of my anatomy that I don’t want lopped off. The Jews are out.
I have no desire to return to the Middle Ages with medieval crusades and barbaric discipline that buries females up to their necks in dirt while the people test their pitching skills by launching rocks at a human head. Anything Muslim is off the table even though we are probably just around the corner from the first Sharia states in the US.
My problem is that I don’t believe in anything intensely enough to kill other people for it. I do support the Golden Rule but only those who are suicidal would kill for it. As an Agnostic, I’m not sitting on the fence; I’m hiding behind a wall.
All this religious love in the world is downright dangerous and the slings and arrows of the past are nothing compared to what’s festering just under the surface of contemporary religious human culture. Mike Pence’s injection-molded haircut does nothing to mitigate my anxiety about the atavistic direction the human race is veering toward.
I thought I had it figured out in 1973 when I rode my motorcycle to the “Summer Jam” at Watkins Glenn NY to atone for missing Woodstock. I saw naked people rolling in the mud Bonobo style, with no way to keep themselves clean. They just came home, went through penicillin by the barrel and were right back at it again. We call them Atheists today. Aleister Crowley and Rasputin are not on my list either.
I conclude that I cannot be saved by religion; I just can’t get excited enough to bayonet non-believers. If I spend an eternity in Dante’s Inferno for the sin of sloth then so be it.
I want to pick the religion that has the best God but I’m not going with the Jews because they’ve got one mean God with “wrath” as his middle name. Historically, they write backwards which affected their map reading skills likely explaining why they got lost in the desert for forty years. And I’ve become fond of a part of my anatomy that I don’t want lopped off. The Jews are out.
I have no desire to return to the Middle Ages with medieval crusades and barbaric discipline that buries females up to their necks in dirt while the people test their pitching skills by launching rocks at a human head. Anything Muslim is off the table even though we are probably just around the corner from the first Sharia states in the US.
My problem is that I don’t believe in anything intensely enough to kill other people for it. I do support the Golden Rule but only those who are suicidal would kill for it. As an Agnostic, I’m not sitting on the fence; I’m hiding behind a wall.
All this religious love in the world is downright dangerous and the slings and arrows of the past are nothing compared to what’s festering just under the surface of contemporary religious human culture. Mike Pence’s injection-molded haircut does nothing to mitigate my anxiety about the atavistic direction the human race is veering toward.
I thought I had it figured out in 1973 when I rode my motorcycle to the “Summer Jam” at Watkins Glenn NY to atone for missing Woodstock. I saw naked people rolling in the mud Bonobo style, with no way to keep themselves clean. They just came home, went through penicillin by the barrel and were right back at it again. We call them Atheists today. Aleister Crowley and Rasputin are not on my list either.
I conclude that I cannot be saved by religion; I just can’t get excited enough to bayonet non-believers. If I spend an eternity in Dante’s Inferno for the sin of sloth then so be it.