Religion in the Kali Yuga comes in two flavors: the irrelevant and the irrational.
- Swami Vas iz Das ;)
“Irrelevant religions focus on pomp but lack all punch: flowing robes, but not flowing passions.
“Sticks and stones can break your bones, but beliefs can cut your head off.” RR
Their leaders teach what they have always taught and preach what they have always preached, and no one—not even their teachers and preachers - believes what they are saying. Their religion is simply about saying it. So they read the old words without new understandings and wonder why so few take them seriously.
“Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” Napoleon Bonaparte
“It does so by convincing the poor to murder each other.” RR
Irrational religions are where the passion is. Maybe where it has always been. People love irrationality; this is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. The irrational religions imagine a once-upon-a-time Golden Age and seek to rebuild it in the present. They celebrate a time when men were men and Gods were Gods and both got to impregnate or kill whomever they wanted; a time before science, Seinfeld, Stewart, and the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution; a time when story was history, and myth was fact, and Gods were real, and their spokesmen (the Gods almost always spoke through men) had the power to wage war, strike fear, control women, and amass great wealth. And so these passionate lovers of a romanticized past seek to reestablish their caliphates and rebuild their temples and make sure that Adam never marries Steve and Eve is forced to use the bathroom the Good Lord intended her to use.
Here’s the good news: civilization is a product of our imagination. Politics, religion, economics, music, art, dance, literature—they are all products of our imagination. That’s good news because if civilization is a product of our imagination and things aren’t going so well, we can imagine something better.
Here’s the bad news: the Kali Yuga is a time of imagination malfunction, when we cannot imagine better, or those who can imagine better are so few in number as to be rendered impotent. Imagination needs to reach critical mass if it is to shape civilization, and at this Kali Yuga moment, critical mass lies with dystopian fantasies rooted in tribalism, terror, death of neighbors, and destruction of nature.
Of course there are exceptions, but focusing on exceptions only blinds us to the rule. To pretend that we all worship the same God and that religion is all about love and peace is to ignore our competing and mutually exclusive theologies and deny our complicity in the oppression, exploitation, and murder of tens—if not hundreds—of thousands in the name of religion in this life and in the torture of millions more in our fantasies of eternal damnation in the next.
“Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.” Voltaire
The Kali Yuga must run its course. But even if we can’t win, we can resist. Resistance is the prophetic spirituality of the Kali Yuga.
“While the neutral observer may see all religions as being similar, adherents see them as categorically different and incompatible. My religion is the true one. The others are the work of Satan: falsehoods designed to trap the unwary.
Believers cannot compare religions in the way they compare cars because to the extent that they believe in one religion, the others are not viable alternatives.” STEVE BRUCE, in Religions as Brands
Holy rascals are the shock troops of the resistance, and their weapon is humor. While they may not be able to muster the critical mass needed to imagine new Gods, they can reveal the absurdity of the Gods we have. If enough people can be empowered to laugh at the Great and Terrible Wizard, if enough people can be empowered to laugh at the pious Yertles who have built their towers of power on their backs, and if enough people can be empowered to laugh at the nakedness of those who wrap themselves in illusion, we can weaken the impact of our psychopathic Gods and their (our) homicidal fantasies and prepare ourselves to imagine something better when the Kali Yuga passes.
“If you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.” Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right
The path of the holy rascal is the path of greatest resistance. To resist is to sist again and again. To sist, from the Latin sistere, means “to stand and to assist others to stand.” The holy rascal’s task is to stand against the madness that passes for religion and to assist others in doing the same. This book invites you to resist the horror of the Kali Yuga by laughing your ass off when called upon to cut your neighbor’s head off. Humor is the one thing Gods and clergy cannot fight. It is the one thing they fear the most. The surest way to slay a God is to laugh at the madness the God promotes…”
~ Introduction to ‘Holy Rascals: Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries’ by Rami Shapiro
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