191 Have We Misunderstood The Metaphor?
I don’t assign myself to any religion. If anything, I am agnostic as far as God goes. I prefer to think for myself thanks very much. I go inside when I have a problem, and lo and behold! I usually find the answers I need, eventually. I don’t seek solace from the discomfort of my life in any other man’s ideology. And it is an ideology of men, not women. Although women in the Church have been equally guilty of vile abuse of their fellow human beings, it has been power-hungry men at its centre. Our will to respect one another, live in harmony and acknowledge a higher order of reality is merely a convenience that allows bullish narcissistic men to take control.
It’s not only religion that has been guilty. Political ideologies have been just as destructive to society. Of course, they all start out with an apparent great idea and the best intentions, but their dogmatic idealism invariably leaves certain people out. Some pretend to be secular and inclusive, but it’s not long before cracks start to appear and the original idea becomes outdone by an individual and collective sense of importance. The institution now becomes the point of focus rather than the premise on which it was founded, and in that mode of mind, abuse of power usually follows.
If worshipping idols, be they virtual or actual, is your bag, then fire away. It’s not my intent to convince you otherwise. I just don’t understand how any human being in their right mind can bow to an organisation that is so obviously rotten to the core as the Catholic Church. I don’t know why any human being in their right mind does not see the deity in themselves, in fact. Unlike Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image, the self-deity I’m speaking of doesn’t have an image. We’ve got to get behind the veil of the self-image if we are to see it. That’s the tricky bit, and what religion does is present another layer, so instead of becoming clearer, things become more clouded.
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191 Have We Misunderstood The Metaphor?