The Fun, Small World of Religion
Posted: February 12, 2013 Filed under: InspirationStuff | Tags: Blog, Humor, Inspiration, Life, News, Pope, Religion, why are you reading the tags 7 Comments »I know I said I wouldn’t publish anything for a while. But I think religion is a funny thing that’s worth writing about, especially with the news that the Pope will remove his hat on February 28.
Catholicism is like a corporation. God, the owner of the world, smokes something that releases white smoke and thus elects a CEO to run one of his many companies: Pope Benedict the Umpteenth. The Pope does all of his papal duties, including sitting on a golden throne worth 10 years of food for 80,000 starving people, allowing his priests to have sex with young boys, and making people praise him for “serving” God. After a while of spritzing holy water on religious crowds, this CEO resigns from his holy position without the “approval” of the very one who elected him in the first place.
“Dear God, thank you for electing me, but I think I’ve had enough of popeing around. Honestly, I don’t really care what you have to say about my resignation, because it’s not about you – it’s about me, and I’m getting too old for this shit. Amen.” – Pope Benedict XVI
Religion is a man-made thing and it’s no better than the corrupt, greed- and fear-driven, money-making, slave-employing corporations that run and have been running our society for the past couple of thousands of years.
“You can’t serve God and Mammon, you idiot.” – Jesus Christ
This isn’t news to anyone, but religion has done so much wrong in its entire history. Sure, Christians build houses for the poor in Africa, but you don’t have to be a Christian to do that. Wrapping those acts of kindness in the cloth of religion subtly implies that if you don’t build houses for the poor in the name of religion, then you are morally misguided – here, pay ten bucks for spiritual advice from a holy man who beats his wife. Trust me, it’s fine, he’s a religious priest after all.
Contrary to popular belief, Jesus wasn’t an advocate of religion. He came to abolish it because he saw how screwed up it all was. He saw that people would settle for anything as long as it benefited their selfish desires (James 3:16 is an interesting verse). After 2,000 years, nothing has changed! We’re so independent of God but we’re so dependent of religion, because we make the assumption that God can’t do anything for us, but at least we get free* coffee and a nice musical performance from the worship band when we attend church on Sunday.
With this conception of the fun, small world of religion, the religious people will laugh at all the spiritually empty atheists who don’t have the privilege of serving God by praising the Pope for sitting on a golden throne, which was probably handmade by an agnostic.
*Only applies to some churches
Hmmm….
The funny thing about highly religious people is they either don’t seem very happy, or they don’t seem to think very independently. Like either they perceive that their system isn’t working for them and they get bitter about it, or they choose to remain ignorant and unaware so they can live their happy lives. I suppose they like their small rigid concepts because they can feel in control of something.
I know you like to incorporate satire, sarcasm and hyperbole into your posts, my friend, but you’re overstepping here. I like to read your blog, but this particular post comes across as more about you than about the issue you write about. Your tone is low on examination and high on frustration, and you come across as someone who is disappointed with religious expression because it has not lived up to your standards.
My biggest objection to your post is that I know that you know better. You are more reflective than this, and you are not a stranger to the art of thoughtful expression and optimistic grace. There are a lot of folks out there today who are writing blog posts and slam poems and one-man shows and devotional books that denigrate religion while praising a spirituality (in this case, following in the steps of Jesus, a.k.a. Christianity) that seemingly exists without all the bummers of stuffy rules, out-dated rituals and alleged hypocritical leaders. But like it or not, such a spirituality is still religion. It is a minimalistic expression of religious belief, but it is still religion. The truth is, religion is not the enemy and it never has been.
Slamming religion as a corruption is like razing the cotton and tobacco fields of the American south because plantation owners once cruelly oppressed a people group and forced them to work in them. It is not the cotton and tobacco fields’ fault that people can be dicks. The same is true about religion. If anything, Jesus didn’t come to abolish religion – he came to save it from the corrupting hands of selfish people. You touch on this in your post, but you’ve gotten off track, and you terribly mis-paraphrase Jesus. You know as well as I that his actual words in regard to religion were the following:
“Do not think that I’ve come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I’ve not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” (Matthew 5)
You may not like people who make an idol out of religious ritualism. You may not like it that the higher-ups in the Catholic Church have not, in your opinion, cracked down hard enough on child-molesting priests. You may not even like that the Pope has resigned (though I don’t understand why you have a problem with an old man acknowledging his limitations and boldly doing something that hasn’t been done in his post since the fifteenth century). But notice that in all this dislike, what you are reacting against is not the system itself, but the people who participate in the system. And it’s a system you are a part of, just like me. I’m proud to be a religious man, because I believe religion is much more than the definition of it provided by the masses.
So why not help people see that? Why not try to make things better? When you write (because you really do express yourself well), why not choose to embody the reconciliation of all things – to participate in the missio Dei – rather than join the masses of complainers who speak criticism with no solution?
So, don’t burn the fields. Instead, silence the plantation owners with rhetoric that lays them low and restores the beauty of that which supersedes us all.
Peace, always.
So true!
I love your highlight on the flaws of the papal system using parody. And I generally loved your post and focus on the hypocrisy of the system. But I disagree with your using an example of Africans needing houses or anything else from the west.
I do know as you say that, “corrupt, greed- and fear-driven, money-making, slave-employing corporations…have been running our society for the past couple of thousands of years.” Part of the mistaken ideology driving this machine is the belief that Africans were poor starving people waiting to be saved by a superior breed of people.
Not until their natural institutions had been corrupted by the machine did they become so dependent. These small nations/tribes in Africa perceived their environment differently and were not equipped to deal with the juggernaut of the west, which was not innately superior, just driven to technology because of the demands of a different environment, partly because they had to prepare in advance for living in colder climates.
People justify trampling Africa by saying we sold our own people — yes, but it was because Africans themselves had slaves, however it was a completely different institution. Slaves could buy themselves out of slavery and weren’t treated brutally – there is literature on this – as a student at Columbia in New York, I had the text. So the people who sold slaves to westerners did not know how the institution would transform when it came to the west.
The irony is that you see ancient African proverbs on walls of western museums, institutions, and you see people adopting some of the natural ways these tribes processed foods etc. in an effort to be ‘green’ after years of defiling the planet in ways that these cultures would never have conceived in their relationship with the earth, which they often referred to as Mother.
Now ‘Mother Earth’ is fighting back in hurricanes, tsunamis, and global warming after years of this rape and disrespect. People are suffering as well, one in five on anti-depressants, gross materialism causing loads of maladies, people going gun crazy. How much better off are we in this ‘technologically advanced’ society? I know wealthy and upper middle-class people, black and white, and they’re not all happy.
Irony can’t begin to describe the twisted mentality that has infected every corner of the earth. But the way the planet evolves is only a process. Perhaps it has evolved this way to get smaller, so that communication between the continents and an inclusive global ideology manifests itself. In this way the west might rid itself of arrogance and become informed by some of the practices of other people, merging ideologies for a greater respect of the environment that would include respecting the history of all people down to the core.
The christian story of the universe, it’s creation and our (human) role in its continued unfolding is no longer our (humankind) primary source of meaning and purpose. We are in a deep crisis because the way the story is interpreted and conveyed, especially in the churches, is inadequate for our present time and place in history.
We need to create a new story a new interpretation of the origin, nature and purpose of creation – that reflects the fullness of our current human knowledge and wisdom. A story to guide us to mature relationships with one another and creation.
If we look around, with an open mind, not blinkered by our own blindness to truth, we will see a new story unfolding. I believe its out there, on the margins and not easily visible. Its unlikely to appeal to most of us who are from a regular type of church background.