"you," an essay on religion

8/14/2019 "You," an essay on religion

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You

An essay on religion.

By Zachary Kyle Elmblad

For The New Scum, et al.

Spread the word, but don't be a jerk-screw plagiarism, and fuck censorship.

You. I wanted to start with that word. You-you clicked on this. You have found thisintentionally arranged series of words as a result of your own volition- an act; be it a click of a link, a

view of a website, a Google search, maybe a Google ad, the subscription to some mass E-Mail, an alert

from an RSS aggregator, or even just a whim- and we know what you've done. Somebody, somewhere,owns a server that logged the details of where, when, andwhy you've read these words. To some, that

might instill a fear of some Orwellian over-lord, some oppression-minded mechanism that brought you

here. To the easily mystified, a god. Maybe, to you (you), Orwell is just an author, and oppression just

a function of psychology and sociology, maybe even ofanthropology. A function of humankind itself,a function of our own psyche. Like gods. And, yeah, you might be right.

Someone told me to write to you about religion. I'm qualified to dish you a goodly-portioned

dose of the straight facts. That might, even to your distaste, require a brief review of my own religious

background. I'll give it to you straight, fast, and hard. I was born in 1985, A.D., that'sAnno Domini which realistic Latin scholars would transliterate as Year of the Master. Master. Slave-owner.

Dominus is what slaves called the man of the house-Pater Familias. That's, literally, father of family.

Religion surrounds us. Thursday- change one letter, add a space and apostrophe Thor's Day.

I was born in 1985 A.D., baptized Catholic that same year without much choice in the matter.My mother works as a secretary at a Catholic Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the United States of

America, North America,Earth. My father volunteers a minimum of twelve hours to that same churchevery week; fifty-two of them a year. That church owned an elementary and middle school which Iattended from 1992, when I moved South from another stupid town in Michigan named Grand

Rapids, until 1999 when I became a Confirmed Catholic. I had no choice in that matter, either. I

was not eighteen, and I could not say no. Aside from their staunch belief in the Holy, Catholic, andApostolic Church; my parents are nice people. They genuinely care about me and my wellbeing, they

are intelligent, and rational. They are normal. They believe in God because their other son, Steven,

died in 1987. From that moment on, and probably before that, they needed a way to legitimize the

tragic death of their biological output. They found that legitimization in the concept of Heaven, awonderful place where all the dead people go to live in peace and harmony for the rest of eternity.

That's a good way to introduce the anthropological function of religion. To me, religion isn't a quest for

answers or a system of explaining metaphysical existences beyond my comprehension. It affects usdeeply, as humans. From birth to death we are surrounded by religion in one facet or another. It is an

anthropological function, and deals with human existence as an entirety. In 1998, when I was in the

seventh grade, my best friend's brother died in a never really fully-explained car crash. As I franticallypedaled my bicycle to his house, the only tangible means of transportation at the time, I remember the

first time I denounced my faith in god. Screaming at the sky in spiritual anguish, as the other

neighborhood children played innocently in their parent's yards.

How dare you kill him? No god I want to believe in would ever do this!


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Continuing the brief autobiography, after 1999, I spent another two years at a Catholic High

School, finally able to convince my parents through logic and philosophy that I needed a public

education free from credit hours wasted on a fruitless attempt to indoctrinate me. Truthfully, I was

exploring Buddhism as an alternative to Catholicism. At that point, religion was still a permanentfixture in my life- a veritablefoundation of my existence. God was a part of my life, a concept I had

known since intellectual actualization. There was a strict moral code, dogmatic and unerring,

proscribed by god almighty, creator of heaven and Earth. Et cetera.Intellectual actualization, let me talk about that for just a second. Intellectual- you're probably

familiar with that word. That's a person that thinks. A state of mind, and a way to be. A verb, a noun,

and an adjective. A true-as-gravity concept. So that's half of it- what about the other? Actualization,

well that's another word. Words, as you might know, are vocal representations of concepts. Theseconcepts are aligned to an ethnicity or cultural identity. They are expressed as language, of which there

are many worldwide. That's the funny thing about religion, it's just a language-based set of traditions

and moral codes that precede our very record of our existence. Digestible explanations of fundamentaland unanswerable questions: Why are we here?', Who are we?, Whatare we?, What is time and

space?, Who/What is our creator?, How did we come to be?, What is our purpose?, What is

our heritage?, What is the meaningof life?

We have, as a cumulative whole of historically-verifiable existence, spent untold lifetimes oflanguage-driven postulation of these questions. Through our ponderings, we adopt rituals and

traditions bearing little connection with the intellectual pursuit. After I graduated from high school, I

went on to college and moved into an apartment with a Shiite Muslim. Five times a day, like

clockwork, his computer speakers belched out an Adhan and he dropped to his knees on a rug facingEast to pray to a new iteration of the same god of the Christians, the same god of the Hebrews. A

monotheistic god. Mono, meaning one. Theistic, from Theos, god. Language is a beautiful

function of anthropology, as well. If I challenge you to remember your Geography and World History,you will remember that the Mediterranean Sea is an aptly named ocean in the middle of the land-mass

known as the entirety of existence until Columbus, in 1492, fatefully sailed the ocean blue. I won't get

started on the Chinese, the vikings, or even the native occupants of the land before then. Throughout

several hegemonic iterations on all shores of the Mediterranean Sea, culture flourished for thousands ofyears before anyone got it in their mind to drop on their knees and bow to Mecca.

In 2003 I went, in tow of my Shiite roommate, to Egypt- land of the pharaohs. I left Kalamazoo

an ex-Catholic Buddhist with an open mind and a year of secular college under my belt spent studyingphilosophy and religion. I woke up every morning to the sound of a thousand muezzin screaming from

minarets in adjunct haunting harmonies. I walked among the hieroglyphs and pyramids, and I

pondered what old gods might have been forgotten in the shifting desert sands of the Nile river basin.I, a model student, scoured the bazaar looking for one thing in specific: a papyrus copy of a scene from

the Egyptian book of the dead where the departed is judged before Osiris.

The ancient Egyptians believed that, upon death, your heart would be weighed in symbolic

comparison to a feather. Pending your sin-heavy heart sunk the balance, your soul would be devouredby Ahmet, devourer of souls. Not as bad as eternal punishment in Hell at the hands of the great Satan,

you might think. I also purchased in that same bazaar a statue of Horus, the falcon god of the sky, who

will serve as a beautiful introduction to the function of a god inside a pantheon. There's another good

word for you. Pan, all, and Theon, again from Theos. All-gods. The word pantheon is a way for areligious historian to describe a set of gods from a culture. The Egyptian pantheon existed thousands of

years ago, long before Jesus, Mohammad, Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, or any of those figures. It still

persists to this day, as I'm sure you know at least something about the ancient Egyptian gods. Theypermeate our very understanding of what we are as humans. Open a history book about Western


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Civilization and you'll find Egypt and it's gods within the first three chapters.

So as I drove from the Pyramids at Giza, past a Muslim Graveyard, past a Coptic church turned

into a Mosque, past thousand year old buildings housing Pizza Huts, and past ancient statues

interceding on street corners and traffic circles like stone sore thumbs and inattentive intruders. I drovepast thousands of years of history, I drove along the Nile river itself, and I decided that religion was

something to be studied. A social science, a part of our cultural anthropology. Religion wasn't simply a

means to an end, it was an intensely human experience. One filled with myths, historical truths anduntruths, digestible dogmas and moral codes, vivid imagery and brilliant writing, and a thickly-paintedvisage of cultural tradition stemming all the way back from primordial languages long since forgotten

by the time we learned how to write it down on clay tablets or papyrus. The gods of Egypt reiterated

into the gods of Mesopotamia, the gods of Greece, of Rome, and of the Norse. The mythologiesvaried, but the means to the end remained the same. How did we get here? Where are we going?

What created the mountains, the animals, the rivers and the trees? Why do the seasons change, why

does the sun light the sky only half the time? What causes things to rot and decay? All these questions,and thousands upon thousands of other questions have been answered both directly and in-directly by

religion.

I flew out of Cairo a fundamentally changed human being. I had no faith. I lost it somewhere

between pouring shots of Jack Daniel's down my throat on the shores of the red sea and smoking hashin the sarcophagus inside the Great Pyramid. When I got back to Kalamazoo, I moved in with another

roommate who was something altogether religiously different. He was a devout LaVeyan Satanist.

Now, before you get all goose-bumply and freaked-out, let me give you a few quotes from Anton

Lavey's Satanic Bible.

It is a popular misconception that the Satanist does not believe in God. The concept of

'God,' as interpreted by man, has been so varied throughout the ages, that the Satanist

Simply accepts the definition which suits him best.

If man insists on externalizing his true self in the form of 'God,' then why fear his trueself, in fearing 'God,' - why praise his true self in praising 'God' in order to engage in

ritual and religious ceremony in his name?

Does this look like it was written by a horrible maniac? I mean, it seems almost logical. Think

about it. God is a concept, like all gods before the one we insist on capitalizing as ours, the realone.God exists only in the minds of humans. We created god in our own image, then spat that right back

into the bible by saying he created us in his own image. Speaking of the bible, the Christian bible, we

can take a few quotes from there as well.

What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor

diminish from it. Deuteronomy 12: 32

Basically, do what god wants when he wants it done.And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay

yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in,

and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our Father. Genesis 19:34

Yeah, you read that right. Basically, she said Last night I totally fucked our dad! Get him

drunk again and you can fuck him, too- that way we can keep it all in the family! Here's another one:

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? Psalms 2:1


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What the fuck does that mean? I know I'm taking all these quotes out of context and all that,

but the bible is just a book. A collection of words that were written down years after the birth of a

historical Jesus, contingent upon his existence. There's a thousand different ways to interpret any bible

passage, because it was written that way. It's written as a book meant to contain all the knowledge youneed to be a person, and if that is its self-prescribed function, I feel it falls horribly short.

You want some more quotes? I'll quote you some Ovid, that's just as bad. All out of context,

just like the bible quotes, here you go:

Depart from here, and with veiled heads and loosened robes throw behind you as you go

the bones of your great mother Metamorphoses Book I

But lo! Comes Niobe, thronged about with a numerous following, a notable figure in

Phrygian robes wrought with threads of gold Book VI

Ovid was a roman poet in the same historical context as a theoretically historical Jesus. Unlike

this Jesus, Ovid was a bestseller. He was well known throughout the empire, which was a newly-minted empire at the time. Caesar Augustus had only become the princeps a mere thirty-five years

before Ovid's poem was written. As a matter of fact, Augustus loathedit. The Metamorphoses waspublished in the year eight. That's eight. Not Eighteen-Eighty-Eight, just eight. That was two

thousand and two years ago. The bible as it exists today is an amalgam of robbed Hebrew texts

predating it by another thousand years, and a mixed grouping of contradictory books by several authors

called the new testament.

So what about written words, what about actual realistic beliefs? I had mentioned Buddhismearlier, and I'll be on to that. Buddhism is as rich in ridiculous literary garbage as any other religion. I

could take some Gong-an quotes out of context and they would stand as equally stupid monoliths to

compare with old testament drunken incest. Buddhism takes a different stand on the whole spiritualitything. In Buddhism, the goal is mental harmony and peaceful coexistence with the natural forces of the

world. That was a bit more reasonable to me. It stressed an individualized moral code that depended

upon introspect and balance. Still, however, I felt no need to sit for hours in useless meditation for thecosmic-oneness or whatever. By the time I came back from Egypt I was an atheist, plain and simple.Even atheism seems a bit outlandish to me, though, pretentious even. Not only does an atheist discount

historical gods, but it discounts the possibility of a metaphysical connection as well. It's an -ism. Amode of thinking. That's what I'm trying to escape here. We're people, on Earth. Real people, tellingmade up stories as some sort of realistic account of things that deal primarily with the forces of the

universe, things we can't understand, or what happens to us when we die. All preponderances, not even

theories. Most requiring faith, a vapid insistence that what you are right even though you can't prove it.

Religion, to me, like I've said is a means to an end. What I mean by that, exactly, is thatreligion takes a culture, a moral code, and a version of history and molds it into a digestible set of

beliefs that create boundaries on what is ultimately controllable by logic and science. Way back in the

days of Mediterranean dominance, which lasted quite a long time, there was no Internet. There was notelevision, no radio, no news, no post. No blogs, no podcasts, no E-Mail, no RSS. There was no

refrigeration, no railroads, no cars, no trucks, no mass production. There were people, still, and they

had all the questions and dreams that we have today, as people- still.

There was a special functionality to religion that was abandoned with polytheistic pantheons.The function of using gods to explain the minor intricacies of life on Earth to those with the least intent

of determining the scientific inter-relations of the natural world. Why do the fields lie fallow an entire

season? Simple. The grain god is being held captive in the underworld, hence, no grain. Why


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question that? There was no other explanation at the time. They knew nothing of the relative position

of the sun on the Earth due to a tilted axis. They knew the fields lay fallow. Winter. It happened, and

they explained it. It was a means to an end. The end being the question Why fallow, do lie our

fields? The means being the simple mythological explanation.

Around the time of the Greeks, secular questions began to hold equal weight to religious ones.

As we grew in our cumulative understanding of the world around us, we began to notice similarities

and connections therein. Other cultural functions began to make logical explanations of what hadpreviously been in the realm of the god's understanding only. From these basic notions of what wouldbecome the sciences, the cataloging and naming of natural systems and organisms, we would develop a

legacy of concrete knowledge about the world around us. Knowledge about how to speak well, how to

persuade others, how to govern a civilization, about how to construct buildings, and about how toproperly cook food was no longer required to be explained as dictations of metaphysical beings.

Philosophy was able to externalize the gods, make them into an anthropomorphic and distant effigies of

human frailty and decadence. The gods served a secondary function of allegorical knowledge ofhuman interaction. Stories that reminded us how strange and unpredictable life can be.

Wholly, religion isn't a bad thing. It can, however, lead us to do strange things like commit acts

of terrorism and genocide based on our faithful belief that what we are doing is right. This is another

aspect of what makes religion an Anthropological function of human existence. To the academic, thereaders of great books, religion can be an externalized notion. A person who studies all religions

simultaneously as an outsider looking in, can begin to see the commonalities and distinct functions that

religion serves. A quote:

There are many ways up a mountain. Zen Gong-an

That's a no-bullshit way of saying it all goes to the same place, or all roads lead to Rome.Religions, and there have been a great many throughout our historical existence on this planet, all tend

to tell you basically the same things: Don't kill each other unless it's absolutely necessary, try to

improve yourself as a person and as an individual in a society, be nice to other people, and live your lifewithout fearing what you don't understand.

To me, sitting in my bedroom listening to TED talks in the year two thousand ten, religion is a

piece of history. A source of hundreds of good books that are all worth reading, all yet falling tragically

short of serving their intended purpose of dictating the ideal existence. Why do we need this uselesshistorical skeleton in our closet? Why keep these ludicrous stories held so close to our hearts? Why

should we sacrifice ourselves in this life for a theoretical reward in a theoretical next life?

Arguing for the existence of god, is Pascal's wager. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about

Pascal's wager:

Pascal's Wager (or Pascal's Gambit) is a suggestion posed by the French Philosopher

Blaise Pascal that even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason,

a person should wager as though God exists, because living life accordingly has everything

to gain, and nothing to lose.

To paraphrase; imagine screaming all your life that god wasn't real only to find out upon yourdeath that he was indeed very real, and indeed very angry with you. Eternal bummer. Pascal tries to

use logic to convince you in some detached and pragmatic way that you might as well just stop asking

questions and settle for those which religion prescribes you. You simply aren't smart enough to dealwith it. Have a little more faith in yourself, Pascal!

Pascal's wager serves as the utmost limit of rational inquiry into the faith-based acceptance of a

metaphysical, omniscient, omnipotent, and existentmonotheistic god. This is a scientific attempt to


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pigeonhole a faith in a grand arbiter of the unknowable, a consequence of post-Christian Reformation

quandaries pointed at the scientific possibility of a real God, master and creator of the universe. We

progressed through years upon years of scientific and philosophical advances, overcoming oppression,

witch burnings, civil wars, religious wars, secular wars, ideological wars, moon landings, and civilrights movements as a collective group of people on Earth. As a self-contained worldof people with

individual belief structures grasping at wisps of ancient wisdoms for the strength to march ever onward,

religion serves as a thread in the great tapestry that is our very humanity- our cumulative existence.You, with a story of your own and a mind of your own to contemplate it with, have no reason or

need for god to bring you guidance. In this world we have nothing but ourselves and the people around

us, and we've never needed anything else. All the heady intellectual conversations in the world can't

dim the dazzling complexity of the world we live in, and the cultural need for an explanation predatesthe concept of the gods themselves, let alone the god-du-jour of the last two thousand years. Gods have

always been a part of our culture, of our humanity, of ouranthropology. It's time to treat religion as

means to an end; as part of the story, but not the whole story. With all the world around us toexperience, and billions of people to meet; what do you need gods for? You are endowed with the

power to make your own decisions, and that makesyou god.

You.

ZKE 01-01-10

"you," an essay on religion

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