I viewed religion as a primitive system of iconographs used to excuse excess efforts in the arts. Rendering our deities, myths, and legends gave comfortable schematics to etiological story telling and convenient legal precedence. It was simple to see the rules and legends that define a group laid bare by the very beliefs they held sacred. Don’t eat pork because it can make you sick, therefore God doesn’t want you to do that. Pray five times a day because it reorients your psychology, therefore God wants you to do it. But that’s an unfair oversimplification.
Though simple etiological story telling once gave credence to the overarching theology that now defines religious organizations, such stories created a logical scaffolding from which other ideas were built. Pragmatic in nature, many religious structures follow a degree of axiomatic and logical principality. Calvinism is a great example of this: if God knows everything that has been or will be, then predetermination must follow–since God allows sinners to sin, he already knows who will and who will not. If charity brings one closer to God, giving to the church is the noblest thing a person can do….and indulgences follow that maelstrom of connections.
Logic, however, is an imperfect system. It leads educated minds down irrational rabbit holes, resulting in a chaotic system—soon mass hysteria and the fear of contradictory knowledge sweep through societies like any other pandemic. Wars are fought, and devotees loose torrents of blood across uncountable altars. Gasping in the crimson backsplash echoes the gasp of air after baptismal rebirth, when a soul is born anew and the process starts again.
Find religion. Lose religion. Purge. Find it again.
These rituals are dangerous. These mindsets are dangerous.
And yet, finding truth buried in ancient texts generates a connection exclusively defined by metaphor. Two hands are reaching through time, and when their fingers meet, the baptismal gasp escapes the lips of the careful reader—but rather than a soul reborn, it’s the recognition of the other, the love for the other. That’s why these texts are so fascinating. Because after thousands and thousands of years, people haven’t really changed. We have new toys, we have new ideas about how things should be, but we haven’t changed.
And THAT is why, when my friend went insane and started dressing like a clown, spitting chaotic truths about religious texts, speaking in refined tongues while leaving everything they knew behind, I couldn’t simply say “you’re wrong, get help.”
I saw the reflection of my own understanding—my own baptismal gasp, as my personal brand of atheism integrated religious texts (I’ll expand on this later, but reading up on the Book of Thomas would help for the time being).
By not dismissing my friend, by listening and not being a total asshole to someone who has gone through several mental health crises, I found a mouthpiece for a (highly subjective, extrapolated from bold interpretations, etc) world view. I’m not saying I agree with everything, or even most, of what my friend Atlas believes. But I intend on understanding something, rather than interpreting it.
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