RELIGION

And today, i admit, i am out of rant material, so for once, and hopefully for only, i shall simply randomly rant about all things pointless. God only knows, i need to.

But wait, God! That entity who we all call upon when frustrated, confused, upset, lost, desperate, or any severe emotion at all, or sometimes even when were not, sometimes simply to use to empathize our point. But we all do it, we all call upon him, this figure upon whom all religion of our modern world seems to be in some form or another based. And despite not truly knowing whether this entity exists or not, we have already gendercised (if that is already a word then I will be amused; how i mean it is that we have assigned a specific gender to this entity) it, and led human beings into battle with its name as a battle cry, and preached to the masses in its name. So what is this entity, why should we follow it, and is it really as all powerful as our religious fellow human beings would have us believe?

Gods in general have been around hand in hand with humanity for as long as we have been growing in intelligence as a race. Originally there were religions such as paganism, which is technically in itself not a religion, but a group of now long forgotten religions such as the old Greek and roman religions, and their many gods, the Greeks headed by Zeus, the Romans headed by Jupiter, the Greek gods seeming today to be more similar to aspects of nature, and the Roman ones seeming to be referring more to the Heavens, both in naming style and in placing of the various myths surrounding the various gods. Also in this category of long forgotten religions are the Druids of the Celts, who existed and practiced their religion for, evidence suggests, centuries, before the Roman empire swept through the country in the first century AD. Due to the thorough job the Romans did destroying the religion, as it would be blasphemous to believe that any God but their own horde existed, very little is left of this group in the way of information; we know they were recorders of history, to some extent bardic, and that they did not record the written word, but that they created rhyming verses to teach those who followed of their past.

Yet another religion that has disappeared into the sands of time is the Norse religion, that originated in Europe, mainly in the area of Germany, and again, very little evidence remains of these Gods. Interestingly, the Norse religion also follows a very similar story throughout as the Christian and catholic bibles; Ragnarök is the base story of the book we call the Bible, in which the world is destroyed by floods, and all the land is covered, then finally, the waters go away, and two survivors are left to repopulate the world. The only major difference appears to be that Christian and Catholic religions blame the sins of humanity for the floods, where is Ragnarök is actually described as a raging battle between the gods, and the fault of no human.

But I get ahead of myself here; currently we were attempting to pinpoint where, in fact, religion began to feature in humanity, and currently, the answer is that ti has always been there, a belief system of sorts has been in place, from the very first burials, through to current society. Never has it been directed at one single god for all people to worship, in fact often there has been a different god for every cause, from abandoned children, all the way through to the beloved tax collector. Don't believe it to be possible that the church would be so kind? Take a look for yourself.
The main point here though happens to be that no matter how advanced the civilization has been, all peoples who have existed on this earth have turned to the unexplained and unconfirmed 'God' when in need, and for a backbone upon which to base their society.

And most religions to date all agree on there having been an event in the history of the world in which the earth was engulfed in water, all the land was flooded, all life was extinguished, and then finally the waters receded and a small amount of the human race remained to repopulate the earth. The reason for the flooding varies dramatically from religion to religion, with the Christian bible giving the reason of human sin, the Norse mythology seeing it to be a war of the Gods, the Islamic belief, as shown in contrast to the Christian/Catholic religions in this article here, is that, like the Christian view, the world was over run with human sins, and god cleansed it via the floods. So we have here the example that despite the variation of the religions, they all follow the same story, which points to at least some basis for religion within them.

All versions of bible, unto a certain extent, agree on the major happenings in the natural world, and ergo we can conclude that all the religious texts, the world over, are to a degree historical records; also due to the variety of religions whom follow matching gods, we could safely assume that they all follow the same unknown deity. Now, right about here, I wish to make it clear that I am not trying to destroy faith with this rant; I in fact used to be quite a believer in the lord. But I am endeavoring to suggest that all of the various religions share a main god, and that possibly he is not as all powerful as priests and preachers and monks and nuns would teach us he is, but that in fact many of the occurrences that were marked to be acts of the gods at war, or the result of God's displeasure were simply natural events in the world, like the great flood from Noah's time, that is found also to be in Norse mythology, and Islamic and Jewish beliefs.

In some ways it is very similar, as an explanation, to the way we were taught it all in church as children. Basically, the priest taught that if you believe in God, then nothing bad will happen to you, and God will protect you. And for many years I believed this teaching, until one day I had a son, and no one could help him. Then, while he was dying, a priest from the hospital came up to me, and asked if I didn't want him baptized so the lord could take care of him? I was a little uncivil to that priest at the time, but basically, what I realized, and then told him, was that this is not an act of God, and God does not protect us all. We are not born sinners; we are born innocent and shaped by the actions of ourselves and those around us as we grow older. God does not protect us one way or another at all in our lives; he is just a name we can turn to for advice when we feel we need it, and a personage whom we can feel protects us.

Who knows, maybe there is a being out there who does fit the categories that we assign to God, or the various Gods that humanity follows. Maybe the various biblical texts are correct about how he or it acts. But most probably there is not. Most probably humanity simply needs someone to blame, or rather, a person to have responsible for past events, so long as they themselves is not that person. So the most likely answer here is that faith exists, and all of humanity believes, but God does not as such, exist as a real being, rather as some figment in our minds to whom we turn when in need, to whom we pray when lost. Humanity as a whole needs the idea that there is someone else other than themselves in charge of their lives, and so countless civilizations through time have again and again invented Gods to be the ones watching over their civilization.

The bare basic of the situation is that religion is real. Faith is real. Gods, on the other hand, are no where near as easily placed. Natural events of the past have been attributed to the wroth of god, one way or another, so the technicality of the situation seems to be that if something in our world, our lives goes wrong, as a race, we turn to someone else, blame someone else, and for this purpose, humanity invented Gods. As a race, we need to mature. We need to grow out of laying the blame for anything at the feet of an unknown entity, that most probably does not exist, and we have to realize that we, and we are the real creators of God.

Because I Can.