Some 30 Day Meme thing…

…which I am currently writing as my lameh4x internet connection won’t load anything larger than a grain of rice. (And that means tumblr. Also, fuck tumblr, its full of shits.)

First, we must establish the fact that every “x day meme” has an inherent flaw – it assumes that the user of the meme will post at the rate of one segment per day. Yay, irregular updates! So don’t be too alarmed if I’m a little late to the meme party.

I think I will skip the first day (which is Belief Specific to your Childhood), because to be honest, I can’t remember much about my childhood. Do you want to know what I did when I was a child? In 1996, we got our Playstation for Christmas, and so I sat down and I played games for the entirety of my childhood. In 1997, Final Fantasy VII came out, and my sister persuaded me to get it instead of whatever shitty game it was that I wanted, and now I am a huge RPG fiend (and my sister now regrets ever getting FFVII in the first place). Rahh. Be scared.

Also, AERIS DIES. (When that happened, after that gaming session, I went to bed and cried for a bit and didn’t play for a week. So what if I’m an emotional child? Being able to empathize with people is a good thing!)

My whole childhood is pretty much playing games. And I turned out perfectly fine! (So I suppose that if Rowling wanted to kill off Harry in the final book, that would’ve been fine and the children would not have been emotionally scarred, seeing as I’m still pretty much sane even after the above event of AERIS DIES OH MY GOD I AM SO SAD AGAIN ;_;) So screw Day 1. We’re starting our shit here with…

DAY 2 PART 1: HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT GOD AND RELIGION. (This part is on religion.)

It should be okay for me to say whatever here, because I’m pretty much 12 and no one takes me seriously anyway. Also, I’m splitting this particular question into two days, because they’re both pretty massive questions on their own. And I don’t know why I capitalized the above. Maybe the idea of a title is important to me. I’ll start with religion because I know how I feel about religion. God/the concept of a God is a bit more complex.

Short answer: Keep it to yourself. And quit it with the religion bashing already.

Long answer: Last Wednesday, I found myself quietly attending a Catholic mass. Somehow my mother managed to get me to attend. It was a Wednesday, which I wasn’t aware of, which is when the local church does Eucharistic Adoration after mass, and so I had to stay for an extra five minutes or so after. (If you don’t know what Adoration is, in the Catholic sense, basically, the priest sticks part of the consecrated Eucharistic host into this spiky thing called a Monstrance, and the entire church must kneel and worship for some amount of time. Wikipedia has an article on the thing. During this time, people sing hymns and stuff.)

This is a monstrance. Pretty scary, huh? It looks even scarier wedged in your skull.

This particular Wednesday, the hymn was extra long, and I just sort of looked around, and there were people just kneeling with their heads bowed towards a golden spiky thing with a piece of cardboard tasting thing inside, some of them singing, the lady behind me singing exceptionally badly, and my thoughts were pretty much as follows: ‘What a bunch of delusional people.’ ‘This song is really long.’ ‘Fuck this shit, my knees are hurting oh my god.’

Which pretty much sums up what I think of religion, sort of, on a bad day. You’re all a bunch of lunatics, and Earth is a planet in an ever-expanding cosmos, meaning you are all insignificant quarks in an atom that makes up part of a speck of dust, really, so don’t gimme that ‘God will save us’ crap. Why would God want to save you? Or any of us, for that matter?

At best, I think of religion as being an effective example of people binding themselves together in their spirituality, which I think is pretty neat. I’ve been to other Adoration sessions, where at night, the hymns are empowering and everyone is singing, and the flickering candles are bathing the room in warm candlelight, and I feel this immense sense of sacredness and belonging. I start to thank God for all the good shit that has happened to me, and for a minute there I feel so in tune with the world, like I could tell a mountain to move and it would get up and move (as per Matthew 21:18-22. Yay, Bible verses! And now you can go and look it up.)
Its a feeling you probably won’t feel anywhere else that isn’t religious.

Yeah, and then something happens that reminds me of why God doesn’t care about us. I guess my faith isn’t very strong, huh?

There’s also something about being brought up in a family of religious people that affects your view on religion. Not that I really know what it is, but… Well, say you have the situation where a religious family (we’ll say Christian for this hypothetical situation) has a child. The parents of this child decides to baptize this child, effectively recruiting the child into the religion of the parents. Is this an acceptable practice?
If you had asked me a couple of years earlier, I would’ve been like “Fuck that shit, why can’t the child make its own decision on what religion it wants to be? That’s fucked up!” Which probably stems from the fact that I was baptized as a baby, and I didn’t get the freedom to choose what I wanted to be.
As for now, however… my stance has softened a bit, because even though I was brought up a Christian, I am still free within my mind to choose what I want to believe. (If I said I wasn’t Christian anymore though, I’d probably get kicked the fuck out of my house, partly because I’m also because I’m pretty shit to have around :’) But yes. I’m thinking that, it doesn’t matter what religion you are as a child – as you grow and mature, you will develop the ability to think for yourself (hopefully, anyway) and thus decide what it is you want to believe in.

Similar to the ‘it doesn’t matter what you were born as, but what you grow up to be’ kind of notion.

As a whole, however, I guess religion isn’t wholly (lol, wholly) a bad thing. It gives people meaning to their lives when they have none. Which raises the question of ‘do you really need meaning to live?’ And I’d hit you in the face and say ‘stop being a dick.’ Everybody’s lives are different, and just because there is no meaning in your life and you are completely fine, doesn’t mean you can extend that to the human race and say that no one needs meaning. Some people want to know that there are people out there that care about you, and some people who feel lost in the world want to fit in. Some people want to believe that there is more than just this world. (Hell, I want to believe there is more than just this world.) And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with letting people believe what they want.

Well, until you try sticking your beliefs down the throats of fellow humans. And I’m not talking about ‘not killing’ ‘not stealing’ ‘not punching a fellow human being in the face’ because those are all inherent moral ‘facts’ or whatever. I’m talking about things like… ‘not letting gays live because they’re gay’. I’m talking about ‘men are made more equal than women, so they have to live their lives serving men’. And when this extends into our Government, or into our leaders, or into those responsible for any kind of group of people, that’s totally not cool. This is what I think of religion at its worst – an excuse to do whatever obscene shit you want and get away with it. “There are Muslims everywhere! Let us arm ourselves and drive them off our lands! And lets sack the cities while we’re at it!” “I have interpreted this small part of the the Holy Book, which means we must drive trucks loaded with explosive things into this building!” “Killing babies to save gays? Preposterous! I shan’t have this stem cell thing funded any longer!”

In the end, though, everybody has their own values. People are their own worlds, with their barriers erected around them – you can never understand anyone fully, no matter how hard you try. I learned this playing through TWEWY. Which holds for religion too, I think – you will never understand it if you’re never a part of it.

One last thought I have that may loosely revolve around religion: Atheism is also a religion. I think it would be nice if certain people stopped going around on my Facebook feed, proclaiming their message that they are better than those who are religious. You can cite ‘freedom of expression’ all you want, but when it all comes down to it, you’re just being an asshole. I could punch you in the face and cite freedom of expression, but I wouldn’t, because I am not (mostly) an asshole.