The Divine Tragedy

ACT 1 - In the beginning there were prophets...

There I was… Sitting front row at a Baptist Christmas show in a church packed to the rafters… I had taken my Great Great Aunt there for her to enjoy the choir singing “Silent Night” and other seasonal classics. She is born and raised a practicing catholic and never misses a mass, but she always tells me she will come back as a Baptist in her next life so she is secretely jumping the gun a little by attending the occasional Baptist musical here and there. I always feel like telling her that as a Catholic she is supposedly going to Heaven when she dies and won’t get the chance of becoming a Baptist but who am I, the family nihilist, to tell her anything about her post-life whereabouts?

Anyway… There we are, one of us enjoying the show immensely – the other one waiting for people to start fainting as hands are thrown to the sky in religious ecstasy… I am not going to bullshit you… I don’t really go to church much at all. I sometimes did as a kid, whenever my mother felt guilty she didn’t believe in God anymore and she even put me in some kind of after school program the church ran for unbaptized kids, but as an adult I tend to avoid those places like the plague.

Why? I’ll get to that…

The singing is now over… The pastor of the congregation (do the Baptists call it that as well? – I don’t know) comes out on stage to offer his blessings and call for prayers. He finishes with something along these lines:

“Isn’t it remarkable how we sit in here today? 2000 years after a man was executed for his teachings, his words lived on and are embraced and celebrated to this day… How incredible that a life that ended in so much pain and agony thus released the world from sin and spread so much love!”

OK… That’s it… There are a couple of things in life I just can’t stand. Hypocrisy, fanaticism, stupidity… To me, organized religion epitomizes all of those things in one big clusterfuck of an institutionalized philosophy.

I don’t deny that Jesus walked on earth, spread the word and died for it. He probably affected a lot of people with his teachings and the fact that he was considered uncomfortable enough by the powers that was in the society of that time to be executed for it, of course adds a punch to the momentum of his truths.

But hey… So did Socrates 500 years earlier. He died for spreading his teachings about how man should focus less on the trivial materialistic things in life and more on his spirit. He challenged politicians and authorities in intellectual debates, thus dismantling their presumed wisdom and he cast down the way man worshipped the deities of Athens. He was sentenced to death and after a famous last speech of defense (as recorded by Plato in “Apology of Socrates”) he assembled his friends and followers, talked to them at great length about the immortality of the spirit and then took the poison…

Rings a bell?

So why don’t we have a church of Socrates today? Why wasn’t I sitting in a temple singing praise to his truths under a mural of him croaking from the poison eating away his innards? Simple… He forgot the number one thing on every major prophet’s to-do list: Claim you are the son of God or sent by him to do his work.

Had Socrates only added that minor detail to his last speech we would today be talking about the Socratian crusades, people would be wearing little poison bottle pendants and for his birthday we would all be running around naked beating shadows with sticks while singing praise to the Oracle of Delphi.

Of course there are major differences in the teachings of Christ and the teachings of Socrates, but none more than the differences in the teachings between other world religion founders… You have to throw in the God part… It’s political suicide not to. That’s the thing that gets people going every time.

So who is God then…? Is he the be all and the end all of our existence? Did he create man in his image as little mini-mes to run around and do his biddings and to be struck by a bolt of his unforgiving judgment when we err, or did we create God in our image so we had something to strive for and still relate to when we fail as man does?

When in doubt the common sense of reasoning tells us to go with the likeliest scenario. Why doesn’t that apply to religion?

Easy… Because we have the writings! Those wonderful records of the Truth put down by men acting in their own interests hundreds of years after the actual events take place. The scriptures used in religions across the world provide hard evidence for what the prophets are preaching. “Here are the words of God! Listen and obey!”

Did God write them? Did he climb down from his silver lined cloud, grab a pen and say: “Dear people of earth… I would just like to share with you some thoughts I have on life, death and everything in between…"

No, he didn’t… He uses “vessels” to fill with his truth that then have to work their asses off to convince their doubtful surroundings the legitimacy of their claims only to later be put to death for it. Prophet is not really a career with any bright future prospects unless you’re looking WAY into the future… Wait a minute! Maybe that’s what God’s intentions were all along? Sow a seed now, reap the harvest later? That kind of thing?

Yeah right…

Why is it then that the Almighty always speaks in riddles and cryptic messages? Fine if you’re a scholar priest, thoroughly educated in the ways of the Lord, but what about the common man? The guy who yet didn’t get his God Club decoder ring with the breakfast cereal. What of him? He is left to listen to the interpretations of the “wise ones” and either take it or leave it.

First questions he should ask when being told what the Lord says is:

“Says who? You or the Lord? How do I know that’s what God says and who are you to know?”

If I write in a book that the sky is green, bury it in the desert with a PS saying that “Oh, by the way – I am the son of God” for the future to find 1000 years from now, it doesn’t make it so. Damn sky is still blue unless I also staple a Polaroid snapshot of the sky at the time of writing.

So it all comes down to that… Believing…

We are human beings… Made out of flesh with a mind that works overtime trying to decipher the meaning of life. We so desperately need there to be a meaning of life that we believe in things to make it so. We all seek out our own truths… Some of us subscribe to the teachings of major religions and find strength in the community that springs from such worship, while others seek it out on their own, wandering the desert alone with bells in their beards – whipping themselves with donkey tails. To each his own…

This all only turns bad though when you start telling others to subscribe to the same ideas you do. It’s when those beliefs are being imposed on others through laws, crusades, holy wars, recruitment and a holier-than-thou attitude that organized religion rears its ugly face. It’s when people start pulling values out of a hat at times when it suits their purpose that you choke on hypocrisy.

It’s when people go blind with fanaticism for the “cause” and the “truth” without ever opening up their eyes to the whole picture that religion can be a dangerous weapon.

This is exactly what I will take up in the next installment of this article series.