Lessons we ignore from the bible and religion, Part II (Origins of a Beloved, but Taken Wildly Out of Context, Story, Installment II)

As I think back to my days as a young child, there’s something funny there. I remember playing the game of ‘telephone’ at my catholic preschool (at the time, there was no public alternative). I remember that the lesson or ‘moral’ of the game was that when you say something, and everyone says it to someone else, etc., as the story goes down the chain, it changes, and in the end, it is far from resemblance to your original message. Then they began trying to brainwash us all into believing the bible. What???? Obviously at the time it didn’t register for me, but it amuses me to think back that some of the lessons taught were so contradictory. The first lesson was to be careful what you believe, that sort of thing. The second was that there’s this person, or whatever, called God, and he made the earth, and everything, and then Adam and Eve spawned all of humanity in a garden with a poison apple and talking snakes; and then there’s something about this guy Jesus, and he rose from the dead. I don’t claim to be a genius, but you can’t deny there’s some sort of disconnect here.
The only part that the catholic church, and every other religious institution, forgot to teach everyone was how to connect the dots; how to see the facts at face value. Because it’s not about God, or creation, or salvation or damnation, it’s about control. Because as soon as those men wrote that killer Twilight series, they realized that-- even if it was indirect-- they had spawned with it tremendous power. And the right thing to do would have been to say, ‘hey, it wasn’t supposed to be that way’. But instead, for the sake of their own rewards and pleasures and powers, they didn’t.
In the modern world, religion has taken on an even more twisted pretense. It warps the minds of otherwise rational and intelligent people. The true crime that I see is the wasted power of man without the illusion. Friedrich Nietzsche said that “hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man”. I must admit that I concede. I am free from the illusions of god and religion, and the truth is that I am content with it. I have learned to live the mystery of life, and accept what I do not have answers for. If we as people can learn to overcome our own individual fears in life and in death, then we have no need for religion. God and religion represent comfort for people, and that is what holds them to it. If these people could only see that they don’t need god, that they are the primary holder of power within their own lives, maybe they could be free. We aren’t kids anymore. We’re adults now. And I don’t think I’m alone in saying this: we ALL need to start acting like adults, and cut the shit.

Origins of a Beloved, but Taken Wildly Out of Context, Story

Note: you can interpret the following however you so choose; be it fact or fiction, because, unlike a religious institution, I am not going to try and force you to accept a mere [wo]man’s thoughts as truth, and more…
My thoughts are that the origins of the bible as a factual book seem pretty sketchy. Basically, what we know is that some guys a few decades after some guy who maybe existed decided to write up some stories about said guy. The stories through oration become very popular, especially among kids and teens. The men who came up with the stories decide to bury them. Some other guys dig them up a few hundred years later and decide they’re so great they’re going to publish an anthology. Somehow something here got really f*#$ed up, and people started interpreting it as truth.
Ok, so here’s my modern-day version of the story. There’s this story called Huckleberry Finn, about this boy, and it’s nothing really extraordinary, but it’s adventurous and well-recieved. It’s really popular among young people for a long time. But after a while, society changes so drastically that it just doesn’t seem relevant to kids anymore, and it’s ‘boring’, and so the popularity of the story is on the decline. A few decades later, though, some kids happen to come across the story and the gap between the story’s society and their own lives has grown enough that it’s something that, instead of discouraging the kids, becomes almost interesting. Like an engaging history lesson. So this author decides they are going to pick up the story and totally revamp it and make some dough, man! How could you go wrong exploiting to the maximum a story that already exists just by tweaking a few points? So here comes Harry Potter, and it pretty much explodes in popularity. But people don’t care about Huck Finn anymore, cos now there’s something better out there. No one notices that Huck Finn has been transformed from this pretty much average kid into a superhuman, or at least they don’t consciously see that there’s anything wrong with it. And there really isn’t. Except that a couple years later, another author decides to write a new series, and it’s drastically different—and it’s the same character, just transformed again—but again, nothing really wrong with it. And this time the series is called Twilight, and masses of teens start what very closely resembles a cult following of the series. And girls start dumping their boyfriends because they aren’t enough like ‘Edward’. Edward, as in a fictional character. But somehow, the original message got lost. Convoluted beyond recognition. And this cult following was the beginning of what we now recognize as Christianity. Pretty warped? Tell me about it…

To be continued...