Been feeling off center lately. My mind wanders through various eras of human history and I keep coming back to religion. It's been a touch and go theme for most of my life, the most recurring of which is Christianity. I don't understand a lot about it. I don't understand how it is that people pick and choose which part to listen to over the rest. The whole thing is a contradiction in my eyes.
The other night, though, I began to think about it all in a slightly different light. I threw away everything I had been told about the bible. I threw away all of the stories - and I kept the subtext. The subtext alone is what's so great about it. There are still flaws there, but you have to realize that everything overlaps in history. Look:
Human history is short. We are still (in my eyes) savages. We have a long way yet to become civilized - and this ties in with my idea of God. It's been said before - I know - but any time you come to a full understanding of some belief completely independently of the original party it feels like a big deal. So yeah I began to think about God as the Christians see him. Some lone lonely bastard sitting up in space watching us. Waiting for us to fuck up in all those little details that he already has us set up to trip over. It seemed to me like a pretty heavy joke.
So I looked at the subtext of Christianity and it's beautiful. It's an attempt - a very human attempt - to capture what God is. He has all these conflicting characteristics - but then again so do we all, and God is after all, only human. So he has all these flaws, these beautiful flaws, and the story goes that he is in all of us. He breathed his essence into us so we could be animated clay - millennia before Gumby.
So he is in all of us and he becomes flesh - why does he become flesh? Some say it's because God wanted to experience life. That's the key isn't it? God is just as curious about us as we are about him, apparently. He wants to know temptation - but what is temptation if you've never given in to it before? If somebody comes to you (assuming you've never touched a drug before) and offers you heroin, it's probably a pretty simple task to refuse it. You've nothing to base your choice on. If you were told it was evil, it would be just as easy to say no as it would be to say yes. So if you give in - THEN temptation has a whole new meaning. There's a whole new depth to it.
God is supposedly in all of us already - wouldn't it make sense that an all powerful being could tap into that little piece of himself - or maybe it's just like surveillance footage. We experience life and when we "die" that footage is returned to become part of the whole so that God gains that perspective. If this were true, and it's just as likely as not, then it's our duty to explore every possible experience there is!
This view of god has ripped itself, though, from what the Christians believe, so I suppose that honestly it's not the Christian belief that's beautiful, but the idea of God in general...
I don't really know. I'm tired. I just wanted to spill a bit into nowhere before I fell asleep. Perhaps someday somewhere somebody will respond with the answer and perhaps that answer will make sense then. At the moment nothing is making sense. It's just a separation from reality.
