rant two: do geese see god (and other bad palindromes)
I have an interesting relationship with religion. I don't have a problem with it per se. My family is Jewish, my dad is a cohen (can trace his family's Jewish history back to the tribes of Israel, not the last name Cohen). It's something wonderful to walk into a seder miles away from home and see the familiar Maxwell House™ haggadah (prayer book) sitting at every place. That I could sing every verse of Daianu. And know the original words to the dreidel song in Hebrew.
There's something comforting and warm about a good family or cultural tradition that doesn't fade. Going out for Chinese every Christmas is something I look forward to, despite having it so many times during the year. It always tastes better when my family and our Jewish friends rent out a whole restaurant together. Which we never do on purpose, mind you. There's only one Chinese restaurant in my hometown, and the Jewish families have been the same set of people in our community since I was born. So we've all become friends, and, every year, we just happen to eat there. Unless Christmas falls on a Monday.
Then we're screwed, and we order from the Jewish deli and have it delivered to one of our houses. Unless that Monday is also Hanukkah. Then we're royally screwed.
Traditions like that I understand, respect, love. I understand the comfort religion provides, and the many diverse people it can bring to the table together.
Unfortunately, the world around us is far from ideal, and religion often does the opposite. It stresses us, divides us, and sometimes sends us to war.
I lived in a two bedroom, four person apartment last year. My direct room-mate was a close friend of mine, and I was talking to her about spending Rosh HaShanna (Jewish New Year's) with her, as it was also my birthday. My other room-mate overheard.
And then, as usual, the shit hit the fan. As I had gotten used to, I was about to get an onslaught of preaching. First time it was from someone I had to live with, though. "You're going to go to hell! Jesus can save you!" Wars, in normal situations, are best resolved with peace talks and treaties. This one was best resolved with earplugs. I did try reasoning with her, I really did. For about two or three months, and then December hit and it just got pointless.
I wonder how she would have felt if I told her not my cultural identity, but my actual religious belief system? How would she handle an atheist Buddhist, I wonder?
As far as my belief system goes, it came in two distinct stages. The first was a personal renunciation of my Jewish beliefs. Well, let me rephrase that: I did not really have them in the first place. It was more the point when I realized I never prayed to or believed in a god.
I was twelve.
It struck me when I received my Bat Mitzvah reading assignment. At a Bar or Bat Mitzah, one reads a segment or all of that day's bible reading. Unlike in church, where the clergy prepare a sermon with different sections of the bible, in synagogue, it is dependent on what time of the year it is. I had my bat mitzvah at the end of the Jewish year, so it was near the end of the bible, too (the bible is started from the beginning again about one month after the new year). The end of the Old Testament, or simply the Torah, is more or less a series of rules. Things that man may or may not do. Out of all the weeks of the year, all the passages, mine was highly unusual.
It was the passage on the killing and exiling of lepers and other handicapped persons.
The only thing that really crossed my mind was thus: If there really were a god, would it want death to its own creation? In a much more selfish sense, to me? If a god, the god, God, has written in stone that I should not exist, than neither should it.
And that was that.
I'm honest as to how selfish a b*st*rd I am. What I'm most surprised about is how selfish all the people who have ever tried to convert me to Christianity
(I only make this distinction, because no other religion has ever tried to do so, and that I also believe that everyone has a right to believe as they do, and that what they believe is right unto themselves, so long as it is never forced upon others. My best friend is Protestant and I regularly volunteer at her church, which will be explained later)
have been. Why? When told that not believing will lead to immediate damnation, I'm happy. I respond that I'd much rather be tortured in hell for an eternity with my family, Jewish friends, all of my Japanese pen pals, anyone who lived more than two millennia ago, and all the great minds who were blasphemous, gay, or for any other arbitrary reason sent, than bored and alone in Heaven. Even if tortured eternally alone, I'd rather be in hell knowing that I lived a good life, taught people, loved, lived and died than in heaven with people who believed but never lifted a finger for their fellow man.
The only thing these people have ever stuttered in response was that I had to. Why? I already did everything in my power to help people, and I genuinely did not believe in the existence of a god. If that was the way that the world worked when I died, that would be that.
But you have to. ("I have to! Everything I've done to get to heaven up to this point could not have been in vain!" is what I'm really hearing. That all those hours in church and all those calls up to heaven after you've thrown up your hands because something is out of your control have to be listened to by someone.)
I just can't see how a god could make such a stipulation as belief in it when, by the very nature of godhood a man can not comprehend it.
I'd much rather let the earth turn and be the butterfly in China, briefly but violently flapping my wings hoping to change the rock we live on and make it the tiniest bit better. To teach others, and be taught by them. See other walks of life, and be seen. To discourse.
Not to ridicule.
The second stage, by the way, came soon thereafter. I was no longer Jewish. I certainly was culturally, but there is some hole there that was left behind by my realization. I had a culture, a tradition, but no belief system.
And it is in that nonexistence that my own ideas sprung forth.
My goal in life was to help people. Ease their suffering, if only a little. Work in a soup kitchen, operated by my friend's church. Sing to the elderly and sick. Teach bugs and arachnids to elementary school-kids.
After all, we're neither special nor eternal. Where do we go when we die? Simple- we're shoved into the earth in a stuffy box. Eventually our coffins crack under age and pressure, and the roots of trees and fungi grow on our dead bodies. A rabbit eats the grass the fungi, or the bark, and then a fox might catch it and have a snack. Or maybe a hunter aims his gun, brings the rabbit home to his children. They eat well that night. And even in death, I'm alive. Even in death I've permitted plants, animals, even other people to eat. And the chicken I had for dinner ate grain, which was planted in the ground. And the ground's soil is rich from nutrients left behind by rotten crops and other dead animals whose nutrition fertilizes that soil.
And the endless spiral continues et inifinitus.
In short, I realized, I'm a buddhist.
(Will leak out more thoughts later.
"rant three: X and Y sittin' in a tree, k-i-s… etc." soon)
