Chapter5
There was a time when people believed in gods and prophets. Saints and angels watched over everyone with an eerie sense of selflessness. Churches and priests filled their holy sanctuaries with religiously biding congregations. Families gathered, children sat still, lovers prayed, and widows wept for an hour at least once a week. That is all gone now and it is easy to say that religion was not about who was right and who was wrong or that faith in one belief was stronger than conviction in another. It was not about a cross or a sword. It was not about holocausts or crusades. It was not about inquisitions, jihads, genocides or any other forms of hatred that have been documented throughout world history.
It was not about Tibetan monasteries. Religion was not about Hanukah, the belief in reincarnation, or the slight variations in man-made doctrines among different denominations of similar beliefs. It was not about a caste system. It was not about monotheism, pantheism, theocracy or democracy. It was not about Buddha or any other –ism.
Religion was about families gathering, children sitting still, lovers praying, and widows weeping beneath one roof for an hour at least once a week. It was about daily thoughts and prayers within a home or a holy sanctuary built for gathering, regardless of what those thoughts, prayers, and buildings may have been called. Everything else was ill-intended and opportunistic.
The history of religion is so vast it would take more than a lifetime to encapsulate even a significant morsel of its long, diverse origins in any one given geographic region. Yet for thousands of years leaders of men have been so pretentious and ingenuous as to control, divert, and redirect people’s beliefs and actions, generation by generation, through the power and manipulation of religion.
Now people believe in nothing. Belief and thought have been replaced by control and fear. The churches are bare and the stained glass windows are broken and boarded. Families no longer congregate, but clamor. Children are a supreme burden of overpopulation, which only the lowest and least educated classes continue to propagate with no apparent restraint for making their own and other’s lives unbearably harder. This was a time when love only complicated survival and softened one to too great a state of vulnerability. Widows wept alone and civilization as we knew it had become uncivilized for the first time in a very long time.
1,382.4 miles to go.
