Religious Life

          “It Has Been Written …”

Humans of the egocentric persuasion,

of whom the world has far too many,

keep insisting that shit that people dream up,

such as – among other things –

their various apocalyptic, end-of-the-world fantasies,

actually have something to do

with a natural world and a universe

that couldn’t give less of a shit.

              Religion Logos

There they are,

clutching and brandishing

crucifixes, images of the Madonna, 

mezuzim, mogen dovids,

calligraphic verses from the Q’uran,

Vedic symbols, pictures of Krishna,

artistically rendered astrological signs,

and so forth,

not so much because doing so

provides them with spiritual nourishment

than that it makes them feel superior

to those who don’t,

rather like those who flaunt

the visibly chi-chi logos

of their luxury possessions.

Sometimes they’re the same people.

                      Beatitude

In the overwhelmingly unlikely eventuality

that the whole Jesus story

isn’t the ludicrous twaddle

that evidence and reason show it clearly to be,

the Holy Kingpin and Boss’s Kid Himself,

looking down

from wherever it is

that a Holy Kingpin and Boss’s Kid

would look down from,

must by now get the picture

that the meek aint gonna inherit the Earth

as things are now

and always have been,

and even if He were to come up with a miracle

the like of which He’s never performed before,

and managed to pull the trick off for them,

the savagely predatory

members of our species

would take it all back

within hours,

if not minutes,

anyway.

            Mourner’s Kaddish

For a year,

from the time I was nine-and-a-half

until I was ten-and-a-half,

I had to go to Beth Shalom,

the local Conservative

(middle-of-the-road)

Jewish temple

once a week

and chant the Mourner’s Kaddish for my daddy.

It was, first of all, embarrassing

for a boy my age

to stand up when almost everybody else was sitting

and looking at me –

accompanied by my nasty-piece-of-work brother,

who had an insincerely pious expression on his face –

amplifying the pain of my loss.

It was also meaningless,

as I had to do it in Hebrew,

a language I didn’t understand,

handily transliterated in my prayer book.

Shit, even the English translation on the facing page

didn’t make sense to me,

amplifying my incomprehension

about my deteriorating situation.

                      Good Christians

Despite the evil nature of their religion,

some good people who’ve known only that religion

for their entire lives since their childhood brainwashing,

and who are blind to anything better,

mistakenly profess their unwavering faith in Christianity

and somehow manage to remain good despite it.

            A Cultural Difference Noticed

For some reason Smoky,

who’d been raised a Kansas Congregationalist,

a denomination that serves the spiritual needs

of the hyper-respectable middle-to-upper-middle class

(nothing bombastic, please),

decided that since I’m Jewish

– ethnically if not religiously –

our daughters should have the experience

of going to a Jewish Sabbath service

at least once.

I think she was curious, too.

I didn’t and I wasn’t,

but that didn’t matter.

Anyway, one Saturday morning

we schlepped up to Auckland

– Hamilton having no shul –

and endured a boring hour or so of God-bothering,

Jewish style.

They put out a reception with bupkis for nosherei afterward.

On the way back home Smoky observed

that what struck her the most

was that all the prayers

used ‘we’ and ‘us’,

rather than the ‘I’ and ‘me’

favoured by the Congregationalists.

Yep, I told her, it is indeed a tribal religion,

like dancing around a fire together;

that’s why they don’t go looking for converts.

       The Persistence of Folly

I don’t think it’s genetic,

so it must be conditioning –

but even though I realise

that the whole idea

of an all-powerful supernatural being

that takes a benign interest

in the wellbeing of people

who talk to it humbly

is childishly ridiculous and patently fraudulent,

and have done so since before reaching puberty,

I still sometimes have to force myself not to pray

after buying a lottery ticket.

      The Other Side of the Street

She told me about how

two of her great-uncles

(if I understood the relationship correctly)

grew up in the 1880s

in a Catholic orphanage in Christchurch.

Just keeping the conversation going,

I offered the observation

that it probably hadn’t been

exactly a picnic for them,

or something like that.

She answered that for the rest of their lives

whenever they’d see a priest

they’d spit on the ground

and if necessary cross

to the opposite side of the street.

      Respecting What Deserves It

People who say that we have to respect

other people’s religious beliefs

have it all wrong.

To have a decent and liveable society

what we need to respect

is their right to their beliefs,

no matter how ridiculous, stupid, evil, and

contemptibly unworthy of respect

those beliefs are.