As I casually watch iCarly, sitting in a modern office chair in an empty hotel room, thinking pensively about the hours I might spend after getting my severely impacted wisdom teeth removed at the young age of eighteen in a few days, two thoughts come to distract me from the task at hand. First, I am only wearing underwear. It is a bit odd, the whole laptop + underwear combination. Not very professional. But then, who really has the courage to, day after day, look the part of a professional these days? Now ask yourself, who at eighteen doesn’t love being alone and in underwear? The second thought, perhaps a bit more morose: I will be undergoing actual surgery, with anesthesia and the whole works. And with that comes a chance of death. Maybe one is not more likely to die from analgesia than swimming off the coast of
Actually, I must confess, I don’t buy into the hypothesis that sharks will actually eat you. Sorry to divulge, but sharks are really awesome creatures, and we shouldn’t condemn them to be fear mongering creatures in our minds. But let me clarify with some real facts: It is over twenty times more likely that I will die Monday morning from a malfunction with unconsciousness being pumped into my face via mask than my entire lifetime risk of getting eaten by a shark. So don’t eat sharks.
Regardless, why would panic be mildly panging against the walls of my mind, I have no idea. Except I have every idea, so I’m going to start listing them in the driest fashion imaginable by myself. I would call it a Will of sorts, but I own very little of actual value. Perhaps a testament, of everything I’ve managed to gather together in eighteen years of being alive. First, unlike most people out in the world, I have decided to come to the decision that there are no second chances. You won’t be reawakened; your consciousness won’t persist into a second life, an after life, or for long after your brain stops beating. This is not an atheistic sentiment. It is simply being rational. And as such, I might also wish to point out that religion is pointless.
Well, not pointless. It’s rather like a crutch. It has evolutionary benefits, for keeping people optimistic. But nowadays, when plagues can be explained, religions are becoming increasingly vestigial. For me, it was quite excruciating to do away with the crutch, even though I had never really leaned upon it, and had grown up fairly unaware of the whole thing. I looked to God as the all-powerful being that everyone else looked to, for morals or lessons, or something. Which was fine, I suppose, and necessary, but I had my parents for that. When I finally reached a point where I couldn’t imagine the crutch anymore, couldn’t hold it under my arm because no amount of persuasion could get me to see it, I fell, and I fell hard. A year of intoxicating, otherworldly depression came upon me, and I attempted everything, even attempting Buddhism, a sort of step down from religion, while still giving me, hopefully, some guidance so I wouldn’t feel dejected and alone. But alone I remained. Only through working with small children, oddly enough, did I learn that life is for living, that it can be joyous if you let it, and it had not been given to me for distracted, frantic thoughts about death. Small children are vivacious, and they are engaged with discovering everything around them. They have imaginations that blend what lies in front of them; they don’t stick their heads into the clouds to search for the heavens, because they have discovered heaven on earth. It is the everything that is everything of earth. Every sense your mind can incorporate, all five, or more, or less, that is what heaven can be.
What finally made me push religion completely aside, allowed me to stand for the first time and look out at the world from a higher, more understanding plane? The solution to my salvation lied in the religious themselves. They are happier than I will ever be. They have an extra edge when rationalizing, looking to the God(s), as it were, in times when they should find themselves alone with no where to turn. But they are not saints, they are not nice, they are hardly what I would want my children to aspire to be. They are not good people. They will hurt and cheat others out of life, anything to let them remain happy and content in a trap which humanity has built and thrived in for millennia. Their competition among each other is irrelevant yet bloody. You call this God you have never seen by a different name, and the rules you fervently attempt to stick to at all times of your life are slightly more or less odd than your fellows, yet constitutes such a large difference that they must die? Or be converted? All for salvation? Which you have no evidence exists?
iCarly is back on, so I must continue this later.
1 comment:
I don't completely agree with your last paragraph; I assume you're referring to the crusades and other things of that nature in more contemporary times. While some do act in such a way, they don't do it because of the religion; they simply use religion as a way to exert power. One of the things I've realized as I've gotten older is that a majority of people will seize and use power if they're able to. It can be something as small as a PTA or as large as a global religious organization. The people making these decisions are just that -- people. They'd act this way without religion, they'd simply do it without the guise of it.
On another note, I envy that you have the strength to deny such a part of most peoples' daily lives. I don't mean that in a bad way at all. I mean that it's something I wonder about at times, but even if I decided there was no higher power, I wouldn't be able to admit it to myself.
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