Organized Religion

Updated from original post dated October 16, 1999…

I have very little use for it.

Okay, maybe that is a little bit terse.  I don’t have a problem with organized religion, per se, so long as it isn’t forced upon me.

My father is a retired Methodist minister.  (Yes, I have heard all the jokes about being a “preacher’s kid.”)  I was fortunate in that my upbringing was sufficiently liberal that I was able to (and even relatively encouraged to) examine things from an objective perspective and make decisions for myself.  (In our 7th Grade confirmation class — taught in part by my mother — we did a little bit of “comparative religion” study, which included visits to a Catholic cathedral and a Jewish synagogue, learning about other religions, including Judaism and Islam.)

(As an interesting aside, we used to get a magazine called Pix in Sunday School, which included Bible stories in comics form.  At some early age, I realized that these had to be drawn by someone, and in particular, that there was no way to know that the drawing of [for example] King David was how King David really looked.  Thus, these were filtered through people, and were an interpretation, not a fact.  And if these were filtered, so was anything else in religion, and I should thus listen to sermons and read the Bible and so on with the idea of needing to find the truth through the filtering.  The fact that there was once a Bible printed with the typo “Thou shalt commit adultery” was further evidence that a given bit of religion could be flat out wrong.)

The result of this upbringing is three-fold:

1. I have enough background to have respect for a variety of religious beliefs, both the mainstream ones and the alternative, even “cult” ones.  (Let’s not forget that Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, and was effectively just a “cult” for the first few hundred years, until in gained ascendancy.)


2. I don’t see any particular religion as exclusively “better” than the others (although I see some as “worse”).


3. I have little personal use for anything which dictates that people must worship in a particular manner, and especially those which dictate that someone else does the worshiping for you.

In other words, we all should be free to worship a “higher power” [or powers] as we see fit.  If that means Catholic high mass for some, great; if that means communing with nature for others, fine; if that simply means adhering to one’s own moral conscience and appreciating life, no problem.

I’ll never shed the Christian roots in my upbringing (and I wouldn’t want to).  The basic philosophy of Christianity — that God so loved the world that He let his son die to save us all — is powerful, despite how it often gets corrupted and ignored by religious extremists.  But other religions, perhaps all religions, also have powerful, valuable things to say, if we just listen.

And thus I say: make your own religion.  Pick the bits you like from one existing religion or another, and invent the remainder.  God (or the Goddess, or the gods, or whatever you want to acknowledge), what name you use for Him (Her, Them, etc.), whether you drink grape juice or wine, whether you worship in a crowd in a cathedral or by yourself in the woods, whether you are in fancy clothes or naked and covered with dried mud… that you are worshiping at all, and most especially in a way that has meaning for you, that is what is important.

The Millennium

Updated from original post dated September 23, 1999…

There has been way too much flap about the “end of the millennium”: is it the bridge between 1999 and 200, or between 2000 and 2001?

First, that’s “millennium”.  Two “n”s.  Most misspelled word of 1999.  (And 2000.)

Second, a millennium ends December 31, 2000.  Another one ends tonight.  A somewhat different millennium begins on June 3, 2004.

Third, it’s all post-dated crap anyway.  “There was no Year Zero” tout the millenniumists.  “Big whoop,” I say.  “There was no Year One, either.”  In about 532 AD of our current counting, some monk backdated events and declared a numbering system which would start with Christ being born at the start of Year One (which equated to something like Roman year 750 — look it up if you want it exact).   Alas, he was wrong.  (Does anyone still believe that other religious figure who figured out that the world was created in 4004 BC?  If not, why do we weight this guy’s figures so strongly?)  Based on historical records, Christ would have been born no later than 4 BC (by that calendar) — which means the “millennium” happened in 1996, and we all missed it!

Further, we celebrate Christ’s birthday a week before the first day of the new year, which twigs the calendar off by another week.  But shepherds watched their flocks by night — to protect the lambs — which means Christ would have been born in, say, April.  (April 15: now there’s a good day to celebrate!)  And a couple hundred years ago, they “fixed” the calendar and shifted it by a couple weeks to account for proper leap year differences (causing the late-to-adopt Russians to have their October Revolution in November).

(Side Note: Christmas is situated in December because every other religion in the area had a winter solstice celebration, so the early Christians could hide their big one by doing it when others did theirs.  The “reason for the season” is to avoid persecution.)

So, as you can see, December 31, 2000 is approximately 2000 years after absolutely nothing of significance.

At the end of December 31, 1999, however, we saw a whole bunch of digits flip over.  We concluded all years starting with “1” and started all years starting with “2”.  We held our collective breath about Y2K (and wasn’t that a yawner?).  In comparison, what is interesting about the cusp of the 2000/2001 switch?  Other than ushering in the Arthur C. Clarke year, will there be anything non-(faked up-)religious to “wow” about?  We’ll have concluded what is termed the 20th century (and whether the year numbers are “right” or not, the number of years that have passed will be fairly firm and consistent) at least, but the number switch a year before will have taken so much of the wind out of the sails that it will be rather a denouement.

Your best bet: celebrate both dates — hedge your bets — and heck, celebrate for the entire year!  Just don’t play that damn Prince song any more.

(But for the record: if the “second millennium” — if you want to call it that — doesn’t end until the conclusion of the year 2000, neither does the “twentieth century.”  We haven’t hit the 21st Century quite yet, folks!)