vundervamp
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Plato
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You make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream
The way you turn me on, I can’t sleep
Let’s runaway and don’t ever look back
Don’t ever look back.
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A passage from the book I’m reading kind of sums up my ideas on religion
I remember the various times I’ve tried to find out about religion. It often starts with a logical idea: that so many people around the world believe in a god, or a way of life, that there must be something in at least one of the approaches…
… They all have the same hierarchies. They all have leaders. Even Buddhism has rules over who can really ‘belong’ and who can’t, who is in charge and who is not. And all the leaders are men…
I remember once flirting with Roman Catholicism… I got a couple of books and magazines from the local church and started to read up on it. I’d kind of bought all the stuff about the Virgin Mary, and was in the process of trying to convince myself that a religion that took a woman so seriously must have something going for it. Then I read a humorous anecdote in one of the magazines about a time when Pope John Paul II was visiting some town, and the nuns who were supposed to cook for him messed it up and ended up giving him fish fingers. Obviously the point of the story was that it was funny that the Pope had eaten fish fingers, but I couldn’t get over the detail that the Pope had nuns to cook for him. Surely religious leaders are supposed to be somehow wiser than the rest of us? But I realised then that there was nothing special about this system at all, nothing that made it more profound and extraordinary than the rest of society. If someone who had given up his whole life to thinking about goodness and rightness and truth still expected nuns to cook him his fish fingers (because, after all, nuns haven’t got anything else better to do, and none of them are ever going to be priests or become the Pope, because women aren’t good enough for that), then something was very wrong. How could he have missed the bit about everyone being equal in the eyes of God? If this was the wisest Catholic, I certainly never wanted to meet the stupidest one.
Perhaps this is similar to the anthropic principle, but I am a woman, and after a lifetime of experiment I know I am capable of everything men can do, except things that specifically require a penis (like pissing standing up). I mean, it’s so obvious it even sounds a bit silly to repeat it, a bit like saying ‘All humans have heads’. So what does religion know about me that I’m missing? Am I worth less in a priori sense? But that would be utterly nonsensical. How is it possible that religion, which claims to be more profound than anything else, still has less of a grasp on humanity than any personnel department in the country?
It’s not just Christianity, either: how could the Buddhists have missed the bits in their thinking about freedom from desire, when most of them seem to desire to be reincarnated well , and in such a way that they can be a man, and be called a ‘venerable master’, and tell other people what to do? Why is religion so disappointing? You expect it to tell you something you don’t know, and all it tells you in the stuff you’ve known for years, and that you long ago decided is wrong.
The End of Mr Y - Scarlett Thomas
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Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells, and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower, both strange and familiar.
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(Source: nirak)
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You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance and write and read and suffer and understand, for all that is life.(via mols)
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The minute you start caring about what other people think, is the minute you stop being yourself.
(Source: yanilavigne.net)
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