Learned Helplessness Is A Bitch - Tumblr Posts
It occurred to me waking up that the objective “realness” and inherent, self-determined substance of any divine being whom people place the foundations of their faith upon is.. less relevant than I thought it was, barely nine hours ago.
The faithful create their own god - a thousand thousand thousand twice over, like a strained tapestry of divine fragments, close enough to form one full picture of the almighty He until our pathetic mortal fingers try to touch and the tapestry gives - and those thousand thousand thousand twice over shards struggle away from each other, though stretched so thin the mantle already is over the shoulders of a thousand thousand twice over of the self-professed faithful.
Though I am not faithful, I can see the work of small gods everywhere - as if they sit on the shoulders like some caricature of conscience. I see the hand of small gods in fiery rhetoric in the newspapers about rightful ownership of this land and that land and this country and that country - for a truly good being would not allow his faithful to be misled so blatantly. So, I blame the small god, because I know one person does not reflect the wider faith.
It is difficult, not to condemn the faith as a whole - absolute power corrupts absolutely, yes, but the belief in an absolute power has equal potential to corrupt, both for the faithful and unfaithful, as well as to be corrupted. I hear “good works” and am reassured of the morality of faith until I recall proselytism is good works, conversion is good works. I hear “faith is the measure of morality” and “faith is the key to heaven” and panic - how do you expect a person to behave with no limits on their actions but that oh-so-malleable faith and with a key to heaven strung above their head, as opposed to round and round their neck like the millstone it should be.
Were a god real tomorrow, especially the one which occupies my thoughts given its impact in the world outside of its jurisdiction of faith, it would not deserve my faith. Any self-declared all-knowing, all-powerful god that tolerates the blatant and deliberate misuses of its creed for hundreds of years - even one day - is an outcast of my mind, an exile of my philosophy, a fugitive of my internal laws. Any god which allows its name to be used to condemn whole swathes of people it claims to have created in its own, self-claimed flawless image - will experience the same, tiny protest. I hope it bothers someone, somewhere. A minuscule mortal grit in a divine boot that is unlikely to even exist.
This isn’t to say the past, present and future of all faith is hopeless; the message of a faith is often evident through what appears to be doctoring. Faith is no tool or weapon or rallying cry - it is a box of things. You simply take from it what you need. It is those who hand out hate and say ‘this came from the box’ that deserve any vitriol I have toward faith. Those who accept all until it comes into their own home are a close second.
It has occurred to me that this likely stems from a deep-rooted hatred of unnecessary hierarchy, especially those that enact unnecessary violence and bureaucracy. Faith symbolises that, for myself, as it commands that it should not be questioned. How do you free somebody from something they’ve been conditioned, likely from the point of awareness, that they do not wish to be free from?