Religion

Superficial religiousness is the most abysmal of superficiality; it smacks one in the face the hardest, it nauseates the intellect the deepest. Go ahead, poor man, poor girl, love and live with pagan sensuality those who satisfy your own external test, who are attractive enough or well-thought of enough by others; you are a Christian, you read your bible, you pray from time to time, you hold the correct stereotypes and dogmatic conclusions; you believe that Christ has saved you, and you emit fumes that seem sincere in loving your neighbor. But then one comes along, without satisfying your external demands, without any attractive idiosyncrasies that a simple person has caught onto, leading to the admiration by the crowd and therefore yourself; the commandment is set up on pedestals in your mind, and you are demanded to make something pressing: a choice. But you refuse to engage him, and he wanders to the shadows of the crowd, justifiably bitter towards the religion you claim to worship; who can blame him for thinking otherwise? But it doesn't matter too much does it? It is, after all, their fault for refusing the value of your company, and Christ goes with the deal; they are in the wrong, they are the heretics, they deserve your sympathy -- and how expedient of sympathy to make one feel righteous, even if its roots are based in nothing at all! A narcotic.

Once the usefulness of self-deception withers away, there is nothing left for you to hold on to; you are then forced to exist, to face God in the face, and actually assert yourself. But this will never happen. You will always have the baseless sentiments of the crowd to absorb yourself in. The last thing you need to think of is -- thinking. All you want is positive attention, and you will assert whatever power within your perception to attain that end -- for to have the attention of others is also to have their love, and a desire for love is an indication of its nonexistence.

But were you to love boldly, unconditionally, without dancing with the ephemeral, then you would see that there is nothing to see in the external to judge a person by; that it is beneath this exterior that determines the person, and that this underlying life-force -- this soul --, regardless of its presentation, is something attractive, something that either needs edification, or a sharing of the brilliance it resonates.

With God and without love, or with love and without God? This is the apparent choice these days; religion is so dry a thing, so conditional, so devoid of personal relation, of benevolence towards others that actually transcends the commandment of loving your neighbor; the individual in realization of this fact is prematurely pressed with the conclusion that he must reject religion and God entirely in order to love freely in the coldness of absolute solitude. And when he takes this step, and valliantly resigns himself from the decadence of the crowd, when he is sitting in his solitude and the sorrow that comes with it, when he finally calls out to God in the authenticity of spirit perhaps for the first time in his life, his response will birth a new life for him. He will see the universe through a dialogue with the Eternal. And nothing will matter, therefore everything will become beautiful.