CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Rejecting Other People's Silly Myths While Embracing Your Own

Sunday, January 06, 2008

this entry brought to you by menomena, "evil bee"


The thing about religion is that from an outside observer, religion seems silly. And I don't just mean from the outside perspective of an atheist or an agnostic, I mean from anyone who is an outside observer of any other religion. Baptists think Mormons are silly for thinking Christ came to America after his death and visited the Indians, and for the whole Magic Underwear thing-- because it is silly. People from the Far East think the whole Santa/Christ thing is silly-- because it is silly. And everybody reads the history books and read stories of the Greeks and Romans and their multiple Gods living up on Mount Olympia coming down from the sky and cavorting with people and thinks of them as stories you turn into cartoons. Zeus used to take all sorts of forms of all sorts of different creatures and trick people into having sex with him. Everybody recognizes this as silly, because it is silly.

But here's the thing. The Greeks and the Romans believed this stuff. They didn't just tell these stories to each other to amuse one another the way we tell their myths. They built statues to their Gods, prayed to them. This was their lives, yet we laugh at them because they're silly, and rightfully so.

Yet people don't see their own silly, ancient myths as being exactly the same silliness as everyone else's myths. We discount ancient religions as myths-- because they are-- but we somehow take our own silliness as the gospel to not be questioned. What about Zeus coming down from the skies and tricking a woman into having sex with him is any sillier than God taking the form of a burning bush to tell Moses to write down 10 rules, most of which were probably already being practiced regularly by civilized society? What's sillier about Mitt Romney thinking Jesus and the Devil were brothers, when Mike Huckabee believes the Devil and God basically had a bet going on over who could fuck Job's life more?
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with love from CRS @ 10:28 AM 

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