i’ve nothing against religion per se, but I do get annoyed by the attitude that you simply can’t have ‘decent’ values unless you belive in Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, (insert patriarchal, pre-industrial revoloutionary leader of choice).
Actually, to a man (and they’re all men too, funny that…., all the above (and others) said pretty much the same things:
be nice to each other, treat other people with respect and try and be as happy as you can without impinging on others happiness in the process.
What’s not to like?
Its a universal message to humanity to ‘play nice’. You don’t need a bunch of people to ‘interpret’ that for you, its common sense.
But, unfortunately, humans always have put a spin on it – what started out as a simple message of love and understanding gets twisted into dogma and restrictions over the ages, by whomever is in power, and to thier taste.
Its like watching a snowball go downhill – it starts out as a small ball of pure Sprituality and ends up as a big glommy mess at the bottom of the hill, full of pointy twigs and gravel that have absoloutely nothing to do with the initial snowball.
I love and adhere to the Original Snowball, but have no use for the juniper branches and pinecones in the resulting mess. They’re extraneous detritus.
How on earth do you get from ‘play nice’ to non-sequituers like – “only men can be priests”, or “its an abomination for two people of the same sex to love and marry each other”, or “don’t eat meat on fridays”, or “pork is unclean” to name a few.
Thats not Sprituality, that’s social engineering, and most of anachronistic too.
It may have made sense not to eat pork or shellfish when you were part of a nomadic desert people, several hundered years before refridgeration, but, really, will god love me less if I tuck in to a tenderloin roast every once in while?
Why does having female genetalia preclude me from tapping into my spiritualty and helping others to do so as well – if, as everyone keeps telling me, I’m created ‘in god’s image’?
Does god really care if kids are brought up in a loving, caring, same-sex family rather than an opposite-sex one? I think…not
God doesn’t give a flying whoop-tee-doo. All god wants is for people to ‘play nice’, in the best way that they can.
Every time I hear people using the words ‘moral’, ‘decent’, ‘standards’ etc.. my first reaction is ‘Ok, but whose moralty, standards and decency are we talking about here?’
No one has the high ground when it comes to these things, and if someone claims they do, then I often find myself quelling the desire to shout, in a Tourettes-like way, the all-encompassing adage of Bender:
