Opiate of the Masses

Rick Edwards

8/12/10

The views, opinions, beliefs and philosophies expressed in the following article in no way, manner, shape, fashion or form represent the views, opinions, beliefs nor philosophies of Playgrounds Magazine, its Publisher, Editor, writers, contributors, staff or advertisers.

My dear departed Grandma used to tell me to put my brain in gear before I set my mouth in motion; even before I entered the first grade I knew what that meant.  I asked a lot of questions when I was a kid and was often scolded for it but I learned,  both from what answers I could pry out of those around me and from the scoldings I received.  I knew little of God and nothing of Jesus until I started first grade at St. Patrick’s Catholic School and I didn’t know there was anything wrong with that until I was assimilated into the Catholic Church; they really dwelt heavily on the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus but hell, at five years old I didn’t have a clue what a virgin was nor what amounted to an immaculate conception.  Yet, I was not confused, I could read and write before I started school, and continued to ask questions, but the answers became fuzzier and fuzzier and I was told on many occasions that I simply had to believe some things and that meant having faith; needless to say, that raised even more questions.  And, I was scolded some more, actually rather violently by Sister Rose Anita as she administered corporal punishment in the form of a ruler smashed across the outstretched palm.  However, from these vague answers a personal and highly individual thought process began to emerge with such power that at the end of second grade my Mother was told that I would no longer be welcome as a student at St. Patrick’s Catholic School and they strongly recommended that I attend a public school the following year: I was seven years old and had already read all the third grade books that they had in their library and still nobody had been able to explain religion to me.  I never understood, until later in life, why I was asked to leave that school; I had learned their arithmetic, English, science and geography and had mastered the art of fighting a kid named Aubrey Freiberg every day at both recesses but I simply could not grasp their religion and that has continued to be a source of inquiry, study and scrutiny to this day. 

                When I was in fifth grade two sisters and their family moved into an apartment behind ours, Francis and Patsy Sanders; devout Catholics both.  Both were very pretty, funny and smart; we hit it off immediately and became fond friends, which was very unusual for me . . . and those girls could sing beautifully together and I would get them to sing for me as often as I could persuade them.  I used to use curse words, well I still do, but then when I did they would tell me to ask God’s forgiveness each time and those little mistakes wouldn’t be included on my permanent record in Heaven, so I cursed a little bit more than usual around them but always asked forgiveness from their God.  They helped me understand, at least a little, of what this seemingly ultra-important concept of religion is about.  But I still couldn’t get a firm grip on what the big fuss was over the Immaculate Conception achieved by the Virgin Mary; we didn’t talk much about that sort of thing in those days, those were the fifties: we had no T.V., no internet and very little radio.  But we had encyclopedias and books of wonder and I spent many days absorbed in them under the shade of an old elm down on the banks of the ol’ Chattahoochee River.  In an effort to try and comprehend what all the hoopla was about I began reading my Grandmothers Bible, starting before the first day dawned all the way through Armageddon.  By now the questions were really piling up and answers were getting scarcer and scarcer and the vagueness, the vagueness crept in upon me, eased its slimy way into my brain and the vagueness became my primary concern; since I couldn’t bring this religion thing into focus then I had to adjust, fine tune my thought process: a leap for a ten year old but not a leap of faith, a leap of self-preservation.  I had no way of knowing at that time that this method of fine tuning my thought process would guide me into and through all the bullshit that has inundated my life since then.

                Because I learned to modify my thought process, I learned that in so doing, in incorporating new information into my knowledge base, that my views and opinions in some areas were altered, some slightly, some drastically; I call this the Immaculate Contradiction, from this fodder flows creativity;  spiritually, intellectually, and philosophically.  I have had some extremely fascinating conversations with myself over the years, especially when the information is being collected rapidly and in volume, so to avoid a total shutdown I have learned to process information quickly, to recognize the sweet and the sour, the good and the evil, the black and the white and to understand the infinite, varying degrees of each.  In other words, to be totally confused and still have the wherewithal to trust myself, to truly believe that my thoughts have value and that I have enough pertinent information to formulate an informed judgment, opinion and/or philosophy. 

                Though I have determined, through much thought and study, that I am not a religious man; in my opinion, the evidence (information) is overwhelming.  However, I am a spiritual individual and do have a spiritual belief system in operation; like the universe we live in it is always changing, forever in motion, mutating at every twist and turn and infinite in its variations and is still easier for me to understand than religion, organized or otherwise.  Spirituality doesn’t have a very good track record when it comes to war; religion, in one form or another, always triumphs: just look at what religion did to the American Indians and their spirituality.  Religions love war.  The religious will fight to the death to prove that their God is infinitely better than the other guys God and the religious will send countless young people to die in His name and spend billions of dollars, nay, trillions of dollars to drive the nails into the hands and feet of the other guys God.  The Bible is full of blood and gore, of plagues, locusts, floods, pestilence, the sacrificing of sheep . . . and children, all in an effort to show their God that they are worthy of his love.  Now the ol’ thought process kicks in and I cannot help but ask myself, “Is this God worthy of my love?”   And what of love, this most abstract of emotions, it too is located in the “thought process”, should it not also be held up to the light and examined like any other, thought/idea/emotion that might flash across our mind.  I say, “yes” and I’m not gonna’ let some unknown, omnipotent bully of a deity jerk me around by the very energy that holds all the pieces in place.  Why do you think we have so many religions?  If you’ve read the Bible and know the story of the Tower of Babel then you already know the answer, you just didn’t know that you knew.  The fable goes that the people were building a tower that would reach into heaven in an effort to actually visit their invisible God.  So, God, in his immaculate wisdom decided that this wouldn’t do and he made them all to speak different languages so they could not communicate and thus could not complete the tower into His domain; it’s the ol’ divide and conquer maneuver , still very much in use today.  Now, do you know why we have so many religions?

                As I entered the tenth grade I had my first real girlfriend, a steady gal and a good Baptist.  She was the love of my life; we argued a lot about religion but we truly loved each other and spent an inordinate amount of time together.  She was a majorette in the band and later became a cheerleader, I was the consummate athlete, football, baseball, track and wrestling; school was boring and I probably wouldn’t have graduated high school if not for the sports.  Like any other female she had the mothering instinct and believed that she could turn me into a good Christian Baptist person.  In time, because it meant so much to her, she was dragging me to church every Sunday and even choir practice on Wednesdays; I just wanted to be close to her and cling to that delicate thread that binds two people together in love.  I continued this course of action both with her and the religion until I graduated high school; she still had two years left.  At that time the military draft was in affect and I was regarded as a “1-A”, blue chip candidate for Uncle Sam and the war was on in Viet Nam in 1965.  Suffice it to say that life got in the way and I was spirited away from her, whoosh, like a leaf in a gale and she was gone from my life.  By that time I had a good grasp of what the Immaculate Conception was and how inconceivable and ridiculous a virgin giving birth was but I found that religion was still a concept I just couldn’t wrap my brain around.

                In the ensuing years I traveled extensively, Southeast Asia with the Army and then the Mediterranean Sea with the Navy.  In some cultures religion takes on a wholly different persona: I found that terribly intriguing and spent the next four years discovering and experiencing firsthand a multitude of strange new religions (new to me) and cultural variations of the ones I was familiar with.  I visited temples, mosques and cathedrals of every variety, many of them thousands of years old; I was hoping that somehow, someway this God might contact me if I made myself available in these ancient, holy places.  But, alas, I received no word from God and was sorely disappointed.  I studied Buddhism and Hinduism with all their Zen, transcendental meditation and incense but their little statues of Buddha and other deities laughingly reminded me of the plastic Jesus statues that Americans used to stick on the dashboards of their cars.  I was more confused than ever but I just kept on reading, after all, information fed my thought process, which was going through yet another metamorphosis. 

                And, now, forty years after all that and countless volumes of the written word concerning religion, the Apocrypha, the omitted books of the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Urantia Book and many other strange, mystical and thought provoking books.  I studied Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet, Joseph Campbell and his mythology theories, Kahlil Gibran and his Christ-like writings and anything I thought might offer a clue as to even one answer to my many questions concerning religion, all to no avail.  I have read philosophy from Plato to Emerson to George Carlin and I pay close attention to the discovery of new texts being found that may shed some light on the subject.  Yet, I stand here now with the same view on religion as when my quest began, a little more enlightened, a little more educated but still clueless as to why so much emphasis is placed on religion, the opiate of the masses.