All You Need to Know about Religion

While looking for an image to accompany today's entry, I found a folder of artworks that were made by my sister when she was very young. Here's one of them:

Dear diary,

All you need to know about religion is what I myself know about religion. There’s more knowledge out there, certainly, but I know all the stuff that’s actually important; and I can prove it, cuz look at me: I have a nice car and a house in the suburbs, and a hot wife who’s always dressed like a fashion model; and we visit exotic places on the regular, and talk to many leaders of foreign nations; and anything that these leaders tell me about their domain that seems wise, I keep it and remember it and add it to my store of spiritual knowledge, and anything that seems stupid I cast by the wayside.

So the first thing that you need to know about religion is that it started in the east and in the west. People looked around and wondered about their surroundings, and they made up tales about these things — they just fabricated stories out of whole cloth; because everyone was a prophet back then (prophets are basically the same thing as poets: the latter are “makers” and the former are “proclaimers” — and who would ever make something out of words, as the poets do, and not proclaim it, as a true prophet of God?) — for instance:

Let’s say your eyes alight upon an object in your environment; say that you espy a white microwave oven crouched atop a craggy realm of your kitchen. You say “This microwave is certainly an evil demon who is perched there watching me, waiting to swoop down and claw me unless I feed him.” Thus sacrificial offering was invented. Cuz if you don’t kill your household pet, King Josh the Pig, then he’ll die of natural causes, and we can’t have that.

So the parts of Josh that are inedible, like the bones and the fat and all the blood, you pour out onto an altar, and say a curse, and microwave the flesh on high for a number of moments, then you go about your way, now satiated in your carefree suburban existence; for you appeased the devil.

My wife and I chose not to have children, because kids are such a nuisance: they’re all constantly fighting with each other, and you must take care of them, get up and feed them breakfast, etc. It’s just easier when you only need to worry about yourself.

Here, Blake puts it better than I can — this is a quote from his Marriage of Heaven and Hell (& I’ll share another quote from the same tract tomorrow):

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.

So the first thing that the east and the west invented was the phenomenon of unwantedness: and they personified this idea and called it “the evil devil”. And they posited that this devil must be a female, so they referred to her as THE GODDESS and they said that she lives deep beneath the earth. (I remember all this from reading a book by Joseph Campbell — I’m just mentioning it to give credit where credit’s due.) And the earliest humans figured that the wrath of THE GODDESS would be best appeased by slaughtering pigs by slitting their throat and throwing their carcasses down into a hole in the earth, and throwing a torch down after them, then quickly shoveling dirt into the hole and filling it up, and running away.

This practice eventually evolved into the microwave ceremony that I illuminated above — note how much more civilized my version is. Either way, it keeps the devil at bay.

So then what happened is that generations began to multiply upon the earth, in both the east and the west, and there were SO many poets, and they had SO many items in their environment to look at, that they ended up populating the world with literally zillions of deities. Both the east and the west did this.

Now the problem with having an infinite and ever-growing amount of gods, which is known as polytheism or alternately animism or pantheism, is that it cannot easily lead to brutal dictatorship. For, in the beginning, life arose in imitation of art; then art began to imitate life, which, in turn, kept imitating art and continues to do so. And the state of multiple deities causes people to want to mirror the diversity of that pantheon: they begin to desire to self-govern; so they start to work to get along and cooperate and enjoy solidarity. We can’t have this either.

Thus you’ve gotta figure out a way to weed out all the gods except JUST ONE, and to label that deity MONOTHEOS, otherwise known as JEHOVAH or ZEUS or JOVE or JUPITER or LORD. And it goes without saying that this god is male, and that he is the opposite of evil: he is good. Only the devil is evil. And some say that GOD created the devil, but others say that they were born at the same time, and still others say that they’re two facets of the same entity. I tend to agree with this last view.

Anyway, the invention of monotheism occurred in both the west and the east. In the west, a man named Ur-Abram came up with the idea and patented it, and this led to what is known as the religions of ancient Israel. It was a collection of various people and beliefs, which, today, for the sake of convenience (and because we really don’t know the truth about this) we round up under a single name, as if it was a coherent doctrine.

And as Ur-Abram invented the one-god theory in the west, in the east it was Rabbi Buddha, which name means “Master Enlightened Fellow”, who came to the same conclusion.

Yet these two world-leaders arrived at their selfsame thesis, in either case, in quite different ways:

Ur-Abram said “One god named JAH is the only true God; all the other gods are only angels.” And later the angels would split into two political factions, the more democratic faction being called demons — they’re the ones that wanted to overthrow the monarchy of JAH, or, as they called it in their negative ads, his “brutal dictatorship” (to this day, that’s how the adherents of the Demons’ Party refer to Monotheism; you shall know them by their fruits). Out east, however, Rabbi Buddha reached his conclusion by way of reasoning: He said, “If we humans created all the gods in our mind, then their great power ultimately derives from us ourselves; therefore we shall rule over them, & their desire shall be for us, & they should be thanking us for their existence (not we thanking them); also it follows from all the above that IMAGINATION is the only true god, and we are all part of it, because it made us and subsists by way of us, but we did not make it because we are it. Hence the upcoming catch-phrase ‘I AM THAT I AM’ [Exodus 3:13-14].” So that’s how monotheism oozed out in both directions.

And here’s how everything came to pass. Ancient Israel, which was the important part of the western world, consisted of twelve nations that came together and made an agreement: they said, “Let us join together and worship the ‘it’ and its ‘whatness’ however we like, but let us free-wander instead of having a fixed abode.” It was like an unending road-trip.

So these twelve unique nations joined forces and created a history that explained how the world was manufactured, and they made up a story that portrayed them all as brothers coming from a single mother: Sarah, hence the name I-SARAH-el, which means “I, Sarah, am God,” and this name is now pronounced Israel. And they decided that it would be good if Sarah married Ur-Abram in their main story, which became a bestseller.

& out east, Rabbi Buddha was busy kicking over idols and blazing a trail thru the gorgeously diverse & various sparkling belief-systems of the worlds of ancient India, ancient Japan, ancient China, and the land now known as Russia when it was owned by Ivan the Good.

Now, if it seems like I have a lot less to say about Rabbi Buddha than about Ur-Abram, it’s because I’m more familiar with the exploits of the latter. Forgive me for this. And remember: What counts is that you achieve great worldly success.

Just then, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra uprose between the east and the west, and he tried to arrange a marriage between the two, so as to bring about world peace. But the hemispheres weren’t having it. So Zarathustra sent his manservant Nebuchadrezzar to follow ancient Israel around and keep them under constant surveillance. (Recall that the twelve nations had wrapped themselves in one outfit and were wandering, at the time.)

Well, it turned out that as soon as Nubuchadrezzar landed in the Promised Land Airport, ten of those twelve ancient nations decided to settle, right there on the runway. So they rooted themselves to the Promised Land Airport, just as Nebuchadrezzar was trying to duck under the canopy of the plane’s exit-ramp so that he could dismount his horse and find a motel to crash in. Cuz he couldn’t sleep on the plane: the whole way he kept attempting to read his paperback but he ended up setting it face-down on his knee and striving to rest: it was indeed a dreadful flight. Thus he arrived in the Promised Land jetlagged. Now, look: as he is riding poor Cassandra down thru the exit tunnel, he finds all these newly settled people blocking the way to the airport restrooms.

So he had no choice but to unsheathe his sword and swing it back and forth, till all ten tribes were either slain or enslaved. The tarmac ran with blood, that day.

Now when Niezteche’s Zarathustra got wind of this, he sent another messenger to chastise the first (the word “messenger” simply means “angel” in pre-American English): and this second messenger caught up with Nebuchadrezzar and said:

“I have a message for you, from your employer Zarathustra. Thus saith Zarathustra: ‘What have you done? What is this thing that I hear, that you have slain or enslaved upwards of 83 percent of the tribes that I was trying to befriend — have you lost your mind!?’”

And Nebuchadrezzar answered and said, “Say unto Zarathustra: Your servant is sorry; he was only trying to exit the ramp of the airplane, and there were too many people blocking the passageway. But I have preserved one scientist from each of the groups that I nearly annihilated: I placed them under hypnosis, and hybernated them inside of a sarcophagus, which (do not worry) is being monitored and controlled with great care by a super-computer that I recently makeshifted, named HAL-33. What I’m trying to say is that each of the scientists that I saved as a remnant during my mistaken rampage is currently alive & well — they’re not dead; they’re only sleeping: each one inside of her own electronically-controlled coffin, which is decorated elaborately, inside & out. Moreover I buried them in Antarctica. So on the day when Antarctica melts (for it’s mostly made of snow), these scientists will awaken and HAL-33 will ‘unsuspend’ them — that is to say: he’ll reanimate them (he has no permission to do otherwise) — thus he’ll grant them salvation, even if it means sacrificing everything he was programmed to believe in. And that day will come like a thief in the night. It’ll be like releasing ten caged birds back into the marketplace.”

But here’s the rub: In the meantime a savior was born from the two remaining nations that had not been made into scientists. And they called his name Jesus. And, by that time, Nebuchadrezzar had transmogrified into Herod, the “lesser evil” that ancient Rome had lobbied to rule over the People of the Future — he was unelected: the Roman spy agency simply tried to install him as a dictator by exploiting a technicality in Futurity’s Constitution — and this Herod had ordered a hit on Jesus; which means that he sent a prayer to a gang of thugs, asking them to kill this savior. But Jesus of Nazareth was a hero, so nothing bad could happen to him: not even death could touch him; he’d simply crawl out thru Death and Hell after discovering some loophole in the legal code of Tartarus, and then teleport back into Heaven.

So Jesus secretly met up with Buddha and said, “Greetings, Rabbi.” And Buddha answered and said, “Why do you call me Master — only one is Master, and that is God, Elohim.” And Jesus said, “Yea, but we are all—” But before Jesus could finish his sentence, Rabbi Buddha interrupted him and said:

“No, I know what you’re going to say, before you have spoken it. We’ve been thru this countless times in the past already. I was just testing you. Now here’s my suggestion: You should perform a Second Coming and bless one half of New America; meanwhile, I’ll perform my own Second Coming and bless the other half of New America. That way Rome won’t have a stranglehold on us anymore, with its insufferable oligarchy. For it would be better to have either one of the two following options: a direct democracy, where all of us make the decisions about how we are governed; OR an old kingship, even a dreadful tyrant, so long as this single ruler is neither dreadful nor tyrannical but compassionate and good; for the single advantage that monarchs enjoy over oligarchs is the ability, nay, the incentive to call for debt amnesty. What do you think?”

So that’s why Jesus and Buddha made all things different. They supplemented the New Testament with their Original Testament, and they even backed Past America out of the parking lot. Now, you might argue that New America was already bypassing at the time that Jesus and Rabbi Buddha accomplished this, thus, if they had simply looked where they were going, they could have avoided being shunted by their own Holy Ghost, which they’d both elected to give up eons ago — & I say: You’re correct. You’re a really good listener. Congratulations, you made it to the end of this March 9 entry.