OMG!

From a Radio Four religious affairs programme about women in the priesthood* -

Interviewer: Have you always had the ambition to join the church and become a priest?

Young woman: Oh no, I'm very keen on horses and I like tennis very much. And I'm very keen on travel and heuristics. And then one day God touched my button."

a contemporary priestess

I don't know what your immediate reaction might have been to the young woman's response to the interviewer. Mine was: Heuristics? Really? As if! 😄

I should probably state here that I don't believe any of the thousands of gods revered by different civilisations down the ages, nor any of the great or lesser religions or cults past and present, to be anything other than man-made constructs created to help us make sense of who, how, where and why we are, in the hopes of trying to variously explain, influence and placate the myriad of forces outside of our control in our evolutionary struggle to survive and thrive as a species. 

By the way, that's not to say those man-made constructs of deities, belief systems and moral codes are to be denigrated. Many are complex and impressive creations. They have all served a purpose in our past, and still today are capable of providing direction and solace - but they are largely myth, folklore and philosophising, aren't they?

Check out Wikipedia for a list of the hundreds of religions that exist or have existed beyond the 'big four' of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam: List_of_religions. It is many pages long and is a real eye-opener: Then for each religion there are numerous sects or sub-divisions.  And the majority are polytheistic, so that means literally tons of gods and goddesses (except of course they are weightless).  We are most familiar with the concept of monotheism - a single god - from the tradition of  Judaism through Christianity to Islam - but the Ancient Greeks had 12 major deities in their Olympian pantheon (as well as a host of minor ones) and Hinduism has 33 supreme divinities, though interestingly it allows for adherents to be monotheistic rather than polytheistic, or pantheistic and even atheistic if they so choose - now that's what I call a broad church, David Tennant!

My father was an intelligent man with a degree in engineering. He worked in the aircraft industry in the immediate post-WWII period until God not so much touched his button as pulled his lever. He went back to university to take a theology degree and then became a missionary in Africa (where I was born) and later a Methodist minister in the UK. Although I grew up immersed in religion, my parents believed that dedicating oneself to God should be an individual's choice. So they never had me baptised, preferring to wait until I was old enough to make that commitment for myself, which is something I never did. I couldn't find it in myself to believe, as a rational being. To this day I am a heathen and would rather worship the sun, if anything, than some imaginary construct.

the Sun, without which etc...(stolen from Facebook)

Not that I would seek to deny anybody the solace of their faith if its tenets speak a truth to them. I'll readily concede that religions have done a power of good when imparting moral codes, in externalising a sense of conscience, in nurturing spiritual growth, a feeling of belonging, of respect and compassion for all members of the collective. But the other side of the holy coin is all the bad shit that has gone down, the religious wars, inquisitions, punishment of heretics, "my God is better than your God" scenarios, power trips and oppression (religion as the "opium of the people" in Marxist theory). 

I return to my original contention that all of it, Gods, religions, their codes and customs are man-made constructs born of our deep-seated psychological need to find accommodation and purpose in existence. As the French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) so ingeniously phrased it: "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer - If God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him". Voila! That's exactly what we've done.

And how have we done it? In the only way we could, as a reflection of ourselves, with all the good, the bad and the ugly. Just look at the Greek pantheon, a dysfunctional family directing man's fate, or the 33 divinities of Hinduism, or the good and bad angels of the Old Testament - all various manifestations of humanity raised to archetypes. The Bible states (Genesis 1:27) "So God created man in His own image". But in reality, hasn't it been the other way around? And don't we touch our own buttons and pull our own levers? I, for one, think so.

I wasn't going to write a poem for this week's blog. It feels like too vast and intimidating a topic and it's not as if I could write anything with religious conviction. But then I thought that's a bit of a cop out. So here is my latest effort. It's by no means top drawer, more like third one down, but I hope it's better than no poem at all. 

Nailed On

There was that carpenter once, a very smart lad from an-Nāṣira

began turning the tables once he'd found his tongue, espousing

the Essene creed, spoke truth to power - both Roman and Jew -

until they hoist the troublemaker high on a wooden cross to die.

Some claim he did, others state he resurrected just like Lazarus

and they began raising him to the power of myth almost before

his body had grown stiff in its tomb. Everybody wanted a piece 

of him then, not least those followers who stole his corpse away.

When he lived, they flocked in multitudes to listen to his words,

some say five thousand (police estimates were much lower) but

nowadays he's got two point seven billion adherents worldwide.

He's an influencer. Scholars might be busily Dead Sea Scrolling 

to determine the roots of the religion that has taken on his name

and science has fair scuppered all that life-after-death in heaven

stuff  - but isn't it enough to take what this man supposedly said,

e.g. in the Sermon on the Mount, in the same spirit that we read

the wise words of any ancient philosopher without the trappings

of religious mumbo jumbo? His precepts were sound, nailed on.

Do as you would be done by. Be honest, be peaceable, be loving, 

be caring, be kind.- on earth for there is no heaven and this is all.

* As recounted in Laurie Lee's memoir 'Down In The Valley'

Thanks for reading, S ;-)