I wrote this about 2 years ago. It still applies to me today.
As I walked through the grocery store on this day which many find so holy, I heard a song come over the radio. It was Walking in Memphis. There’s a verse in the song that goes like this
Now Muriel plays piano
Every Friday at the Hollywood
And they brought me down to see her
And they asked me if I would –
Do a little number
And I sang with all my might
And she said –
“Tell me are you a Christian, child?”
And I said “Ma’am, I am tonight”
This started me thinking, what am I tonight? Do I still believe in the 3 headed christian god or the unnamed one of the Hebrews? Maybe I’m more comfortable saying, “Allah abn aqbar”. Perhaps there’s even a buddhist sect which takes us meat eaters. Maybe since we came from Africa originally Mumbo Jumbo Great God of the Congo will laugh at us all in the end,
All I know for certain is that most religions trade on a fear of death and what follows. Most religions say if you’re good in this life you’ll be rewarded in your next. Regretfully this is used as an excuse for bad behavior in this one. And some of the most vicious fighting is in-fighting between sects. The Shi’te vs the Sunni, Catholics vs Protestants and so on. Half the time religion is used as an excuse to move people into the next life as fast as possible.
So “Tell me are you a Christian, child?”. I believe that the ethical system developed by a Jewish carpenter 2000 years ago is a great starting place, but there needs to be more. I am a christain tonight, but tomorrow I may be Jewish. I may be a Buddhist and an Atheist the week after. I no longer subscibe to a creed but to the ethics behind the creed.
Thou shalt not kill, treat thy neighbor as thou would be treated. Whoever who would tend me, he should tend the sick.These are not moral codes but moral lives.
In the end it is our deeds and actions which will live on even when we move on to answer the question, “What’s next”. I believe that the world will remember Martin Luther King far longer than it will remember the Sheriff of Selma.
So tonight I am a Christian, and if my world ends now I know that I will have tried to lead a life worth remembering.
Hawk, what an excellent, excellent post. You have it exactly right. Religion is supposed to be an individual, personal, private part of one’s life. It’s not a matter of belief but of how we live and a result of inner exploration. My biggest beef with athiests is their lack of interest in non-physical things. Same with the Christians. The complacency that blind belief brings is frightening.
Athiests would strongly object to my calling them blind believers, but their stubborn pointing to the Christian version of God and saying “Look! See? That’s what I don’t believe in!” binds them to that belief system by their total objection to it. This is followed by a smug laziness, challenging everyone to do the work of proving to them that God exists or that their is anything to the non-physical. It’s not impossible, but very difficult to prove to a Marxist university professor that Man isn’t entirely mud…. sorry, I ramble on. Grimmy
Comment by grimgold — December 7, 2007 @ 10:57 am
“I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’”
– Annie Dillard
“Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?”
– Epicurus
“Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?”
– Ron Patterson
Comment by RS Janes — December 8, 2007 @ 8:40 am