Religion.
Such a funny concept. Believing in something that isn’t there. Claiming there is a God, Heaven and Hell, depicting it in pictures yet no one’s ever visited. I dunno about you, but I’ve never been on a flight where the captain interrupts a suspenseful scene in the movie I’m watching to announce:
“And if you look over to the starboard side, you’ll see the pearly gates of Heaven. Wave ‘hello’ to Gabrielle or a loved one you might spot.”
Then, the descriptions of hell: Fire and brimstone. How does one know that? Did someone have a Tinder date with the Devil and returned to describe where all lawyers and politicians end up?
Religion is nothing more than a way to control the populace by injecting fear into us. The wrath of God comes from a supposed landlord living in the clouds upstairs.
During my travels I was constantly asked what my religious beliefs were.
“Karma,” I’d respond and explain what it meant to those who had never heard of it.
The word ‘Karma’ is Sanskrit meaning ‘actions’. And when my interrogators couldn’t understand how I don’t believe in God or take the words of the Bible to gospel I’d provide a very simple explanation, especially to those who believe that Adam and Eve were the first ones here.
“They had two kids, right?”
“Yes.”
“Two boys?”
“Yes.”
“So how did they pro-create if Eve was the only woman around? Incest is a sin, right?”
“Er, yes..?”
Same goes for the story of Noah’s Ark. How did they re-populate the planet if they’re all related?
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I was forced into an organized religious practice, as we all were, from birth. Brainwashed until I was old enough to realize, ‘Hang on, this doesn’t make sense.’ At the age of 14 I managed to rid myself of the confines of religious order and free my brain and soul.
Funny, in the animal kingdom religion doesn’t exist. Oddly enough, everything seems to flow seamlessly as it should in accordance to nature. Religion defies nature and its laws.
Religion is a collection of words that are taken, manipulated and interpreted by a ‘preacher’ to gain wealth, power and control over a populous for the ‘preacher’s’ own personal gain.
If the Church is always preaching about helping the poor and the sick and is always asking for money and exempt from taxes, then why are the poor and sick still poor and sick in the 21st century while the Church continues to grow as the richest organization on the planet?
Why does God demand his ‘representatives’ to against human nature – the very law of nature – and abstain from sex, leading to paedophilia when the Bible says ‘Pro-create’? And why then do the guilty sin-committing ‘representatives’ not get punished by the man upstairs, rather are protected from the very institute that has destroyed countless lives?
As my travels sailed me across the Indian Ocean during cyclone season, experiencing up close and personal the sheer power of H2O, like the rising sun, it dawned on me:
If we’re to worship anything and deem it holy, it should be – nay, it must be – water.
Water is the most powerful element on Earth – in fact, the Universe. According to Wikipedia, on July 22nd, 2011, a report described the discovery of a gigantic cloud of water vapor containing ‘140 trillion times more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined’ around a quasar located 12 billion light years from Earth.
According to the researchers, ‘The discovery shows that water has been prevalent in the universe for nearly its entire existence’.
The notion of God and religion have only been around for a few thousand years. The Universe has existed for billions of years.
Are we not constantly searching for water on other planets? It’s been detected in interstellar clouds within the Milky Way. Its components – hydrogen and oxygen – are among the most abundant elements in the universe – not religion.
Based on models of the formation and evolution of the Solar System and that of other star systems, most other planetary systems are likely to have similar ingredients.
Like we’re taught to believe about God, water is everywhere all the time in every form: liquid, solid and vapor. It’s in us (we are around 70% water), in the air and used for everything from washing to cooking to creating beverages and cleaning products.
Yes, we use it in religious practices and deem it ‘holy’. All religions do.
Unlike religion, the beauty of water is its transparency, so there’s no bullshit. You can see right through it so everything is clear. There are no mis-interpretations.
Empedocles, an Ancient Greek philosopher, regarded water as the ylem, or basic substance of the Universe.
Water gives life. We come from water spending nine months floating around in our mother’s womb. Before land mass rose above the seas, this planet of ours was just a giant ball of water.
Yet, we continuously disrespect this ever-essential life-giving element. We poison it, shit in it, take what it provides in abundance and with such greed that the oceans are now depleted of eco-controlling life forms like sharks, sea turtles and whales.
And when water gets pissed off? Tsunamis, avalanches, acid rain, flash floods, torrential rains, land and mud slides and rising sea levels that bore disease and harmful bacteria plague us. And then we look up and ask the man upstairs ‘Why you do me like this?’
Is that not the true wrath of a god as described in ‘holy’ books?
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Water lasts forever. From large bodies of it the sun vapors it to become clouds that then rain it back down on us to sustain the abundant life on this rock we’ve wrongly named Earth as it too, like us, is 71% water. And that water ends up in the ocean again to repeat the cycle.
We’ve always been taught to look up for answers and pray to something hidden above those clouds that no one has ever seen or proven to exist via any scientific means when the very thing that really will decide whether we live or die is right there in front of us, evaporating and rising up steadily.
Water doesn’t need to be practiced as a religion with prayers and ceremonies and once-a-week attendance in a large building that could be used for better purposes like housing the homeless or simply housing anyone in this over-populated world.
It doesn’t ask us to fast for days, practice lent, punish others in its name, grow facial hair or oppress women who, when pregnant, carry more water than man. It doesn’t demand us to have a ‘holy’ day preach about which element is truer, more righteous and wage war on ‘non-believers’ to prove its worth or anything else for that matter.
It doesn’t demand that we kill in its name.
It certainly doesn’t constantly ask for monetary donations that end up in the coffers of the preachers – not the needy.
It just needs to be acknowledged. When you’re at the beach say ‘hello’ to the ocean. I do. And when you leave, clean up your area and thank the ocean. Or the lake or river you’ve enjoyed. When it rains, look up and be thankful for there are places that lack this wondrous Universal element that carries everything we need to survive and falls on us from above.
I always tell people who are afraid of the ocean that all you need to do is respect it. Because that’s what water teaches.
We can go without food for weeks. But keep us away from water for more than three days and we’re doomed.
Water is in everything, it is everywhere, in us and all living organisms. Thales, a monist portrayed by Aristotle as an astronomer and engineer, believed that all things are made from water. It is loving and destructive at the same time. Water heals, cleanses the soul and rejuvenates us.
Water is the fountain of youth, the very Holy Grail that everyone’s been looking for.
It is, after all, called The Essence of Life.
Is that not holy enough?
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