Mindfield 1: Religion

By a/k/a Simon

Right around now we’re in the midst of one of the religious highpoints of the year. We’ve got Passover and Easter in the next few days. Myself, I’m a practicing agnostic, which means I question the existence of God. At least I did. But last weekend I saw the Rob Zombie movie House of 1,000 Corpses, and I think it’s safe to say there is no God. Really, if you’re going to remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and why bother?), at least call it that instead of trying to pass your pile of feces movie off as something original.

Born Again
I’ve always had some trouble with organized religion. As an amateur student of history, it’s hard for me to ignore all the pain and suffering that has been caused in the name of some omnipotent power floating above us through the ages. Even now, the U.S. President has announced that his God put him into office. If you follow that line of thinking to its natural conclusion, you have to assume that means that the Dubya was sent to us to combat the beige menace.

But besides the things people will justify as ‘God’s Will’, the other thing that really disturbs me are the people who follow along. As an independent person I have a lot of trouble relating to someone who has turned their life over to the figurehead of their religion, expecting that being will guide their life in the proper way. It eliminates the idea of freewill and self-determined happiness. And, too often, the people who conduct their lives this way have done something wrong or ‘fallen’ before they find the light, and they think their newfound pious ways make up for all the suffering they’ve caused.

A high school classmate of mine was like that. Now, he never really did anything to me when I was younger. I’d known him since we were ten and, I have to admit, he was maybe the one member of the popular crowd that never made fun of me or tried to beat me up. Mostly he was just a typical American weekend stoner/drunk going through high school, innocuous and having no real influence on most people’s lives.

But fast forward to college. Somewhere during my year off between high school and the start of college, this guy found religion. Like most people, when you go looking for Jesus, you tend to find him at the bottom of a bottle (Jesus must be very tiny). He’d hooked up with an organization called the Boston Church of Christ, which had been kicked off several campuses around town for practicing cult-like recruiting tactics. And like any good cult, they choose the directionless and weak-willed as their targets. The guy I knew was a perfect choice. He’d never been a leader, but had been popular. Removed from his comfortable group he had trouble rediscovering his place in a larger society. He needed someone to show him the way. He’d spent years attending keggers and passing around joints with his friends, and was suddenly wondering if maybe there was more to life than just a good buzz. They scooped him right up and he instantly bought into all the rhetoric. His life was restructured to fully revolve around the will of the BCC. He was no longer in charge of his own destiny.

By my third year of college I had a studio space next to his. While I worked on my illustrations I would overhear him and his fellow cult members having a Bible discussion, twisting the more vague passages in the New Testament to meet the agenda the BCC wanted propagated. At least once a week he would approach me with a friendly pitch to come with him to a meeting. My favorite happened while I was outside my cubicle, working on a large piece, listening to the latest Madonna album. Ms. Ciccone had just made her comeback and was dropping mention of the Kabbalah everywhere she went. So my friend comes along and sees the CD sitting on my radio. He looks it over and then says to me, "You know, there are a lot of candy religions out there that might seem sweet, but they’ll just leave you feeling empty in the end." Hey, I just bought the disc because I thought ‘Ray of Light’ was a kick-ass dance tune.

One Summer In North Carolina…
Another good example of the weak of will using religion as a crutch comes from an ex-girlfriend. This would be my first serious relationship, and first stupid one as well, considering how intense we were for a couple of late-teenagers. We broke up after the end of my first year of college. Two years later her parents moved from the suburbs of Boston to the middle-of-nowhere North Carolina. She was in school at Boston College by then, but she ended up spending a summer break with her parents and, over the course of a few months, managed to screw pretty much every guy in the region.

According to her side of the story, that summer was the direct result of being in an ‘oppressive relationship’ (that would be me). Never mind the fact that she was normal for two years after that, but apparently a season in North Carolina finally allowed that oppression to affect her. In her own words, she ‘almost fell to alcohol’. I always enjoy when people attach sentience to a bottle of liquid. Is alcohol like Jason, stalking you through the woods in the night, waiting for you to trip on a branch so you can become its next victim? Alcoholism as a disease I can almost accept, but alcohol as a living force is a bit more than I’m willing to concede.

So the girl is down in North Carolina and, because of my idiotic behavior (and I’ll admit I was an idiot when I was 19) two years prior, she can’t resist the power of the alcohol monster and that just leads to her opening her legs for every hillbilly who comes along. I can’t say I feel much guilt for this. But luckily, religion came along a few months later and allowed her to take the blame off her shoulders and place them on mine (at least in her mind). And that’s one of my favorite paradoxes of religion, that more desperate branches recruit under the pretense that nothing is your fault, that everything is God’s Will, and yet, Jesus had to die because God saw how sinful we all were. Huh?

Back at BC she managed to hook up with some Jesuits who set her straight. They helped her put down the bottle, which in her case seems to be a good thing. Though last I heard, she was living with some guy. Unless she’s got extremely strong willpower, I highly doubt they’re not having premarital sex. And if she had that much willpower in the first place she would have told me to go screw once I started being an asshole. I love how even the devout bend the rules so that their lives aren’t inconvenienced.

Jesus Christ, Rockstar
I’ve been working on this analogy to put the present state of Christianity into perspective. Back in the day, Judaism was like Punk; Pharaoh was making the Hebrews miserable, and so they created a raw, tough-ass desert religion. Egypt was bopping to Fleetwood Mac and the Old Testament is like The Stooges ‘Funhouse’ album. Over time, the religion grew and became bloated, corrupt, and more concerned with ritual than with the message. By the time of the Romans, Judaism was like Def Leppard’s ‘Hysteria’, the temple in Jerusalem kind of like Mutt Lange. Jesus came along, like ‘Nevermind’, and brought it all back to the rawness of Punk, but laced the New Testament with more of a Pop sensibility. Now, of course, Christianity has taken its punk roots and twisted itself into shit like Sum-41 and Avril Lavigne, corporate Bubblegum Punk that doesn’t do much but fill your head with a bunch of simplified interpretations and worn-out hooks.

Unfortunately, my analogy ends up painting Kurt Cobain like Christ, but there are flaws in everything.

Now I don’t mean to be strictly hating on Christianity. Especially in a world where we have Muslin Fundamentalists pulling off suicide bombings it would be absurd to blame solely one religion for all the stupidity in the world. But Christianity right now is like the Roman Empire at its peak, and so it has to shoulder a good amount of the current blame. And it’s really a shame, because I don’t necessarily think religion is entirely a bad thing. Organized religion is a horrible thing, but personal religion, if it gives you some hope (but doesn’t control your life) and provides a guide to making you a better person, then clearly it should have a place. But the problems arise, much like in almost anything, when the extremes become the norm.

Religion was created for two reasons. From the top down, religion was a good tool to justify the actions of the ruling class. From Gilgamesh to Rameses, straight on through to Saddam and Dubya, those in charge always like to turn to a higher power to support their questionable actions. On the flip side, from the bottom up, historically the downtrodden, lower classes, and powerless have all but had to turn to some kind of religion to make it through daily life. When you’re feeling like nothing you can do will improve the quality in which you live, it makes perfect sense to start hoping some cosmic judge is going to eventually tip the scales in your favor. Unfortunately, like I illustrated above, this desperation can easily be twisted to serve the schemes of those who are keeping you down to begin with. Next to the Constitution, the Bible is maybe the most abused document around.

I guess that makes agnosticism the religion of the middle class. When you think about it, the middle class doesn’t worry so much about being beat down by those in power, and they don’t really have that much power to abuse and need justification for. So, in the middle ground, you have the luxury to do things like question the existence of God. Myself, I believe in EMF, Electromagnetic Force. In Astronomy class I learned that EMF was the first power present after the Big Bang. Everything in the universe came from that original force. It doesn’t give a shit if I get a job or I starve to death, whether the Earth can support the billions and billions of people treading upon it every day, or whether we should go into Syria next. EMF is just there, holding everything together. If I have to believe in something, I feel safer believing in that than an old, white dude who looks kind of like Chuck Heston.

From The Monkey House
a/k/a Simon
The name may change, but the song remains the same