Oorgo

Trim off the excess and get back to the fundamentals

I've been thinking alot over the last while and I think I've come up with a good theory on life, the universe and religions. My brain came up with this: most worldly accepted religions (not cults, those are a different story) started out good, and in many cases great. The supreme being(s) (whatever his/her name being) spoke to some people, or came to earth in the form of someone/thing and showed humans what they should or should not be doing, and how they should be conducting themselves so as to be successful and prosper. The fundamental goal of everyone, when you get down to it, is to procreate, eat, drink and prosper.

The unfortunate side of religion is that humans are involved in it's continuation. There are sides to humans that too often override the above fundamental goals; these being of course the 7 deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, greed, sloth, gluttony and lust. No matter what we do or how hard we try someone has some self interest involved when decisions are made. Fear of change, and fear of outsiders causes laws to be made to exclude non-believers (or in most cases other-believers) sometimes to extremes where punishment is a painful death. Humans live in little bubbles of perception until that bubble is burst and they realize others are outside that bubble, whether physically or philosophically. We also don't understand new concepts or opposing points of view unless it somehow applies to us. Here's a good example: George Bush's government denied emphatically that global warming was a problem, but now they are pushing hard to remove the US addiction to oil, only because now they are faced with opposing forces controlling the fuel source, alongside blatantly erratic and extreme weather changes. No change in perspective unless it smacks them across the face, and when it does there is no admittance to being wrong at a previous time.

Recently we were faced with a culture clash of a magnitude never seen before, where a religiously ignorant (or racially ignorant, you choose) cartoonist and (from a western perspective) mildly racy cartoon turned the Muslim world on end. Here we have an example of a people who live with an extreme set of rules where one step outside of them (in some areas of the world anyway) leads to death; no questions asked, no apologies accepted, blood must be spilled. Western religions have been jibed and poked fun at for probably a century, I mean hell, some of the most popular cartoons are out and out blasphemous, take Family Guy for example. Folks in these religions have had to exist beside other religions for many many years, and at no point were they allowed by the government to make a call to arms vs. each other. People left England and Europe and came to Canada and the U.S. to escape religious persecution and intolerance, so we have (in a perfect world) countries with a large base of people with this frame of mind. How could anyone expect us to abide by their rules and then if we did, would they abide by ours?

From what I've seen, it is partially because of the information age that this clash came to be at all. How else could these crudely drawn depictions be sent around the world and then when the item appears in the news in just days world-wide protests, burnings of embassies etc. The most destructive protests in countries where they live and breath that way of life. They can't understand how people can live any other way than they do; religion fills their life and everything they do, from what I see anything outside of religion is blasphemy. How can you expect someone who lives this 24/7 to understand jibing of a religious figure? I can't relate this to anything in my daily life because everything is up for mocking, everything in western ideology has been jibed and made fun of. What I don't understand is how persecuting the jews by denying the holocaust existed and mocking the deaths in concentration camps sneaked it's ugly head in there too. Danish - Jewish ... I'm sorry, there's a big difference. Perhaps it gave the extremists and hate-mongers on both sides (see the 7 deadly sins) a reason to show their idea of freedom of speech. Blogs and emails are still fired up around the world tossing around words of hate and intolerance, horrible words that should have long since been put to death. People scoff at politically correctness, but hell if someone would have been thinking even slightly PC maybe this shit wouldn't have even started. If people thought about consequences before they took actions then there would be much less anquish around the world.

Basically what I'm trying to say in this long drawn-out post is that it's not religions that put people against each other, it's people. People draw the lines in the sand. People write the books with the laws. People insert their own agenda into what they think their religion stands for. People make a stand when they should be making a conversation. People join a religion to make them feel superior so they can gang up on other-believers and talk down or judge. People decide they should kill each other or other-believers to appease/please their God. People do these things in the name of {insert name here}, but it is really for their own purpose.

My quest is to shred away the excess crap that religions contain and get back to the fundamentals. We want to live, eat, procreate and prosper, we all want this so why don't we accept that we don't agree and get past that? Trim off the human influence and corruption and get back to the rules about how we should act and treat each other. Children learn this at an early age and perhaps adults should re-learn these values, start sharing their toys and stop being so pushy and mean.

Posted by Oorgo at February 23, 2006 08:05 PM Permalink - Category: Ponderings | TrackBack