Opiate of the masses...

A friend writes that I see no point in religion. And so I'll consider it. The answer varies greatly depending on who we apply it to.

Most of my friends are religious. Almost everyone I know was raised in a religious tradition except me. I got comparative religion. I thought I was raised agnostic until I went back and looked at flashcards that my parents made for me when I was little that helped me learn about churches and temples and crosses and stars. We always celebrated Christmas and Easter. I knew Christmas was Christ's birthday, but I don't remember ever learning about the religious significance of Easter until I was grown. I also remember spinning the dradle from time to time. I do remember having discussions with one of my parents about religion and was told, believe whatever you will. My other parent is areligious, if that is a word. I don't think he really considers whether god does or doesn't exist or whether he doesn't know whether god exists, so I don't think you can consider him religious or an atheist or agnostic.

Add to that growing up in a medium sized city in the Midwest that wanted to be a small town. Lots of people were very religious. I was a little kid and when some of my neighbors found out my family didn't go to church, probably because they asked me and I told them we didn't, they promptly told me I was going to burn in hell. I'm not exactly sure when they explained to me what burning in hell was, but once I found out, I was pretty devastated. And no one told me that I could save my soul by going to church, they just told me I was dammed. A few years later I remember collecting canned goods for the pantry that my mom ran and getting turned away after I was quizzed about what church I attended. Then I went to Catholic High School.

There I learned about the fights between Catholics and Protestants. I still chuckle about that from time to time. I find it so hard to distinguish between the two, and Judaism for that matter that I really don't see what all the fuss is about. Well I was a fairly good kid in High School and even led Our Father over the PA on numerous occasions, because I used to do impressions during announcements. Around the time of graduation I learned that several of the parents of some of my friends had been told that I was a bad influence, with respect to sex, smoking and drinking. Only it was my friends who did that and not me. Conveniently enough, because I was not Christian, and would have admitted that if asked, the parents bought into to the little myth.

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Toward the end of High School I read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica entry on every religion and religious philosophy I could find, including animism, deism, polytheism, pantheism, atheism, agnosticism, and monotheism. I also had a pretty good working knowledge of history at the time. At the Catholic college I attended I also studied comparative religions.

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But enough history.

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Religion is fine for other people. Sure I'll box your ears if you want to talk to me about transubstantiation or the red heifer, but if you at least can articulate a position about those, then more power to you. Does it have a point? I guess. It helps people cope, or feel not alone or helps them have some purpose, or in the worst cases keeps them from being totally evil. For a lot of people it colors the emptiness of the space of things they do not know, or in the worst cases do not care to know.

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But zealots? I don't much care for them. Too many wars, too many conversions by genocide, too many other bad things to mention. And amazingly these people have no concept of either (1) the things that their religion has perpetrated or (2) the theistic or historic underpinnings of their religion. So they are stupid or evil, and they will get an earful from me.

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As for me, I am fine without answers. My religion changes to suit my mood. And that's how I work. Anything with dogma rubs me the wrong way, and as I stated in my first post, monotheism is not for me.

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So does it have a point? Again my friend says, that Marx's statement seems to be conflicted. He liked the masses, thought that opium was bad, but in a way opium means something more. Webster's second definition of an opiate is "something that induces rest or inaction or quiets uneasiness" and that can't always be a bad thing.