I'll Take The Meaning of Life for $500, Alex

Both Tom & Kaz have some very good & clear commentary on my original post about religion. [Even though they don’t know each other in real life, I can assure them both that they hold very similar opinions!]. I started to respond to their comments but they turned into novella length, thus becoming this post.

The original post was difficult to write - I "heard" it in my head pretty clearly but concept did not connect with computer screen as smoothly as it had in my mind, and constant editing didn't improve the offering. I posted it anyway, mostly because I was tired of tinkering, although it felt very half-baked.

As I started writing, I realized the most of my issues revolve around Christianity –arguably, the organized religion I’m most familiar with. I don’t know enough about Islam, Buddhist doctrine or other eastern religions to formulate complaints. I also assumed in the course of writing the post and specifically mentioning what’s happening in this country, that it would be critical of Christianity. I also believe spiritual demeanor has absolutely nothing to do with organized religion, and spiritual moments can be experienced throughout life without the benefit of deity or clergy.

I consider organized religion, especially the afterlife dogma, as being nothing but a 100% gamble. A metaphysical throw of the dice, as it were – a “get out of jail free” card just in case there’s something beyond death, a stack of Personal Good Points on the off chance that someone will tally up a grand total and reward one commensurately.

Organized religion mandates that one live ethically according to the laws of a god, whose existence can neither be successfully proven nor disproven, and that misbehavior will be severely punished by said deity through either personal misfortune or global calamity.

(Living ethically because it’s the most reasonable and logical way for humankind to forge thriving, rational societies doesn’t seem to occur to the religious.)

The hypocrisy behind organized religion's objection to drugs always struck me as pointless and naïve, as if they had, in this particular instance, not made any connection between opiates and their natural origins to their own god’s mandate giving Adam dominion over all animals, etc. which is curious, given their great joy in claiming many of their deity’s pronouncements of several thousand years ago to be perfectly valid in our vastly more complicated 21st century.

If Life really is all a game, I think I’d prefer it to be more on the lines of uber-highbrow Jeopardy, where the accumulation of knowledge wins the prize, rather than Marco Polo in the Atlantic Ocean, where the more blindly one follows the big voice in the sky the greater is one’s likelihood for survival.