How I Do Religion

I don't usually discuss religion in my columns, even though I have very strong opinions on the subject. A blatant religious slant would cloud my political agenda. The exceptions: When religion gets in the news (think Huckabee or Ken Hutcherson) or when I know that what I say won't be recognized as religion by 99.9% of my readers, so what the hell. For example, how many people would recognize that my muse Cindy Holly is actually a religious image to me?

Very few would, in part because most people don't do religion that way.

Which gets to, "Why talk about it here?" Well, 1) this is my personal blog, which I have distanced from Real Change (the blog-of-less-distance is Adventures in Bloggery) and 2) most people don't do religion my way. It occurs to me that people might be interested in how I do religion, sort of like how when people want to know how frogs have sex. It doesn't mean they want to have sex the frog way. It's just a curiosity.

So I want to start a new category of post, consisting of posts that talk about how I do religion.

The first thing that needs to be said about it is that I have a religion of one. There is no one, not even Anitra, who shares this religion. It's a religion that presupposes some concepts rarely encountered in the mainstream traditions of Abramaic religions. It has no name, other than "how I do religion", because I don't do religion the religion-naming way (naming a thing tends to freeze that thing, and a religion is the last thing you want to freeze.)

Since it's a religion of one, I am sole prophet, mystic, shaman, priest, and don't forget layman. Of those I try to be layman most of the time, because I see that as my highest calling.

My religious teachings to myself are full of nonsense and contradiction. I am proud of this. I consider contradiction a sign that I'm covering all bases, and you can't know where sense lies until you've stepped in its opposite, because it's dark out here.

I do religion the sweet-and-sour way. Sense and nonsense together, and sense against sense, contradictory sense with sense. Humor and seriousness together, humor with and against humor, humor with and against seriousness, seriousness with and against seriousness.

To be continued...