Age Removes Smugness. Mine Anyways.

Religion for me, the social justice parts of it, I am ok with. The more Old Testament views that God is a Cop in the Sky just waiting to pull you over doesn't fly with me at all. You can choose to believe what you want.

The late 70's was when I was became an awful skeptic, thanks in part to higher level biology courses, heard what carbon-14 dating was about and a steady diet of National Lampoon magazines. Add to that my natural distrust of most adults during that time who said one thing, then did another. I was unable to “Respect my elders” when my elders were full of shit. On my street alone for a sampling of “elders,” we had a child fondler, alcoholic, child beaters, wife smackers and a gambling addict who blew the paycheck at the track instead of the household bills. That's something to look up to only because they were older than me and “knew better?” Respect my elders....horse shit! Hence my streak of thinking independently and distaste for conformity.

Today I find adults, including myself, to be full of shit at times still.

So, in the late 70's I easily moved towards that cliched view that religion was a crutch for weak people. I've since changed that view out of some compassion and not any agreement with any precepts I thought were wrong then.

You get older, you see more things, experience grows. I've come across many people who have literally shit in their lives in one form or another. Health problems, families that were just sick environments to begin with and a host of other maladies that people easily succumb to. These people, who I witnessed pretty closely, search, reach and claw to find a cure, and come up short. They try different avenues in hope only to find nothing worked. You could try therapy but you have to find the right therapist which clicks with you and then enjoy years of struggle as you to fix yourself. Many aren't up to that task, nor have the money. You want to find the worst enemy ever? Try yourself.

Some of them turned to religion, God and for them, it worked. I cannot, not now, criticize what works. Who am I to take away a palliative or even perhaps a transcendence? I'd be a dick if I did. I keep my damned mouth shut now in front of those I knww who have nothing else to turn to.

**

There are those of us who put everything personal on Facebook, some of us who don't out of fear of judgment and the likes of me who put up whatever the fuck they want. If you read between my lines you can discern as much as you want, positive or negative. I don't care. Judge me as you will as we all do it. The really personal shit others post is great reading, sometimes too great, as you discover just what they are.

I found an old friend from the Triassic period today and nearly all of the posts, had him praising God, telling himself that being “broken” wasn't an unacceptable thing or that finally accepting himself as he was A-OK. He hadn't discovered Jesus lately either, this has been with him since his late teens. What blew my mind, as I read between the lines, was that he was a wreck! I never knew this when he was a child! Well, I suspected some shit was going in that house as I was nearby enough but the extent, the depth of the darkness was far greater than I thought.

Wow....

I felt bad for him. Then again, as I read further, deeper, he managed to cobble together a life, family and struggled like we all do to make it day by day. Some of us have it harder going though. He managed to make it this far and that's good enough.

As for his religion...I cannot point fun at it. If it was all that worked, stabilized his life, made sense of the shitstorm that I garnered that was his childhood, good. 

Whatever works...

This Talking Heads song works for me however...enjoy the ride...even if it ends in a giant ZERO.