Amerika

For many years, it was a struggle to not hate religion. Not just Christianity, which was delusional, but Buddhism, which was swarmy, and the exotic but incoherent revenge-cults of Islam and Judaism. The various “new age” groups seemed insane, as did the Satanists, who were dedicated to retaliation.

This peaked for Generation X in the early 1990s, when the attempt to avoid talking about race had made the culture wars discard culture, and become a battle of the religious versus the scientific instead. The scientific won out until they destroyed their reputation through censorship about race and later, COVID-19.

At that point, many of us mellowed on religion, since we like the idea of religion even if we disagree with the interpretations. At some level, all religions are vocabularies for describing the same idea, which is a mechanistic universe which tends toward good even if blindly and numbly.

That is a nice way of saying that the gods do what they can, but events are not always favorable. In fact, life is full of unfairness, sadness, and loss.

Some years later, however, it seems that religion needs an upgrade. Faith based on the literality of symbols is dead; faith based on general ideas of a benevolent universe, incomprehensible afterlife, and natural order pushing toward higher quality and goodness however are becoming more mainstream.

That is, as the world becomes less organizedly religious, it is also becoming more religious, but in a sense that understands that religion will never be literal and never be clear to us, but that we have faith because this is a good world and we appreciate it, therefore we expect it is good beyond what our eyes can see.

Symbolism strikes me as a deal with the devil in the oldest sense. A wide range of complexities become bound up in a single idea, and that seems to explain the world in good/bad terms that compel categorical actions, a classic of means-over-ends thinking.

This approach has betrayed humanity, and now we are seeing that symbolism itself may be a destroyer of spirituality, since once cracks appear in the symbols and categories, faith goes away. Faith must be based on something far more general, like an aesthetic appreciation for the beauty of life, including its necessary sadnesses.

In the end, the moralism of the Abrahamic faiths that relies on a universal sense of “good” and “evil” has not worked out for us. What works out for us is a relativity that allows us to see that not all see the same things, and the ones who see more need to have more power than the others in guiding us.

That approximates the country faith of the old times, sometimes called “pagan,” which was shuttled into the occult, Satanic, and Luciferian sphere through our intolerance of it, but has a lot to teach us. In it, there is not good and evil, only the measure of our character by our choices and actions.

This is not nice and tidy like the Abrahamic world where (in theory) all can be sorted into one of two categories. Instead, like life itself, it is mostly mystery and ambiguity, but provides us a path through which sanity and wisdom can be discovered and enhanced.

Religion may be one of those things that is not so much necessary as it is useful in making life more beautiful. Maybe it is time to let it escape from old books, ancient categories, and paranoiac symbolism. Let nature and the gods be joined once more so we can again love life on its own terms.

Tags: abrahamic religions, fundamentalism, religion, satan, symbolism