It's Easter season and like many a la carte Catholics years of indoctrination forces me against my will to spend this spring festival contemplating my relationship with God. As a liberal that relationship is complicated by my fierce desire to keep other people’s conceptions of God out of my bedroom, pharmacy, scientific theories, and of course government. God more than anything makes me contradict myself. Over my wife’s objections, I was married in a church by a priest. I wanted to get married by a priest so badly that I was willing to (and in fact did) lie to said priest about reasons why I wanted to get married in order to have him say that God approved of it, and I made my wife lie too. My wife objected to lying to the priest, because lying to priests seemed wrong, and this is in fact the same woman who respected priests so much that she didn’t want any at her wedding. My relationship with my own spirituality is completely unreasonable and inconsistent. Sometimes I feel bad about that, but then I think to myself, “Well, at least I have things figured out better than that diseased donkey’s ass that used to be the Democratic Party.”

On a recent Real Time with Bill Maher (episode 74 for those with HBO On Demand) Senator Joseph Biden was a panelist. At this early point Joe Biden has my vote and Hillary is going to have to do a lot to take it from him, so I clearly like the guy. Ever since the Democrats realized that Jesus was kicking their butt at the polls, liberal aspirants have struggled to hide their cloven feet and convince self proclaimed spiritual people that in addition to lowering taxes and abusing civil liberties “New” Democrats are big fans of The Jesus. Biden’s tightrope walk above this holy roman minefield was deft and savvy and included a pitch perfect anecdote about his rosemary hailing mother. It was also almost completely full of Jesus Horse (“Dinosaur” to the uninitiated) sized excrement.

The core of Biden’s answer to the “religious question” was that liberal elites (and he was distinguishing himself from that tradition, I don’t know why) look down on religious people as quaint and unsophisticated. Generally he thought that the Democratic Party was not doing a good job of respecting other people’s beliefs, even though they themselves might not share them. The audience applauded and if you go back and listen to it, I’m sure it will sound like a wise and reasoned response to the tensions Rove and his puppets are trying to inflame. Let’s put aside for the moment the truth that the Democratic Party is in fact bending over backwards to accommodate the Jesus crowd to the point of abandoning traditional constituencies like gays and everybody who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. The real issue is that not all opinions and ideas can or should be respected on par with others, and that no opinion can properly be respected as much as objective fact. In a society of reason, provable facts must take preeminence over subjective beliefs, no matter how heartfelt those subjective opinions are held.

I am one of the more religious people in my friend group. By that I mean that I tend to gravitate towards hedonistic, atheistic bastards. My friends would gladly worship a bottle of Jose Cuervo over any historical religious figure. When I was in the church celebrating relinquishing personal control over my testicles, I was looking around trying to reacquaint myself with the vagaries of mass. My friends were looking around in wonderment that they had been allowed to enter the church without turning to ash. Some of them were even looking for tasty Catholic babies to eat. When I wasn’t staring down the front of my bride’s dress, I noticed that my best man (who also happens to write for this site) seemed uncharacteristically uncomfortable. He wasn’t uncomfortable because he didn’t know when to stand and when to kneel and when to call God: the Lord, Our Father, or He who is called I Am (although, he had no freaking clue)—he was uncomfortable because the whole thing made no sense. And you know what, the ceremony made absolutely no sense. It makes no sense to think that in order to marry, in order to publicly bond yourself to your lover and accrue the economic benefits of half of her stuff, you have to pretend that cheap wine and stale bread magically became a cannibalistic feast. It is not rational, it is not even reasonable, and to ask others to respect that isn’t all that different from asking them to respect that I am the King of Xanadu.

This is the essential difference between spirituality and religion. Spirituality is something that you practice in the privacy of your own mind. You think about what God is (if anything), what It might want, what It might do to you if you don’t do what It wants. You try to divine what is divine. Occasionally you seek out what others believe and try to determine if what they believe in any way clarifies your own musings on the matter. Atheists even have spirituality: they call it a conscience. Spirituality is a terribly personal question completely wrapped up in your individual relationship to the world. Your method for relating to others—your moral code and ethos—that is something that can be respected by others, regardless if they share your views. I say “can” be respected by others, not “must” or “should” be respected by others. Your spirituality is yours alone and it doesn’t really matter if others respect it, because it’s not like they can do anything about it. I do not require people to respect the fact that I believe that God likes me better than every Republican and wants me to destroy their evil Party. It’s what I personally believe and informs how I live my life and I see no reason why anybody not party to the divine inspiration of Me need respect my beliefs. It is my bed and I have decided to lie in it.

Religion is not personal; it is public. It is not inward looking, it is outward meddling. Religion is other people telling you what God said, what She meant when She said it, and what you must do to avoid His terrible wrath. Religion is a bunch of flawed humans getting together and coming up with a set of rituals to distinguish their new religion from some older version, and then hazing the new recruits to the fraternity. Make no mistake that religion is all about recruitment, because for some reason everybody’s God is like the popular girl in high school who needs to be told over and over again that she is the fairest of them all.

Every intellectual knows that most of the greatest atrocities ever committed in the history of our species have been carried out in the name of religion, yet most intelligent people still cling to the idea that a person’s religion is something to be respected as a matter of principle. It is not. We need not respect any person’s religion that they have twisted to the point that they think their religion is a justification for impinging on any liberty, experience, or fact you hold dear. If your religion tells you that evolution is wrong, and you actually believe that—then no, I’m sorry, I don’t have to respect your beliefs. I don’t have to respect beliefs that I know to be wrong. I don’t have to pretend that reasonable people disagree about whether or not humans evolved from Apes in Africa due to the unintelligent survival of the fittest. If tomorrow we find solid objective evidence that human kind came from Mars and the ancestors of my species were little green men who mated with an extinct species of unicorns, then I’ll be convinced by the overwhelming evidence and disrespect any would-be Church of Apetoligists religion that spring up in the aftermath of the revolutionary discovery. The Earth was never flat no matter how many people used to think so.

How can we as a society expect people to respect conventions that claim to be divine when those conventions fly in the face of every rational thought process? Clergy of all religions throw out the pithy and unsatisfying statement “God is unknowable” whenever they run up against clear headed thought, yet out of the other side of their mouth preach that we (or they, it’s always “they”) know some things that God wants without question. Jews believe that God doesn’t want us to work after sundown on Fridays. Really? There is some being that made this entire universe for us to play around in but wants us to take time every week to thank him for it … and that time has been ordained by him to be Friday nights. What if I take time every Tuesday night, is that going to piss him off? And again could somebody explain to me why an omniscient and all powerful being would be so concerned with praise that It’d be willing to condemn souls to an eternity of the most unimaginable unhappiness for whatever we did wrong in our fleeting seventy years on this earth? (I know that Jews don’t really believe in Hell, just give this gentile a break). Muslims claim to know that Allah wants them to pray seven times a day. Why not eight, why not six? I guess that’s why seven is such a lucky number. Don’t get me started on the religion I know most about, the Catholic one that I was abducted into. Suffice it to say that the almighty and all powerful Catholic God has not yet figured out how to navigate microscopic genetic material through the apparently impenetrable wall of a condom. Latex is like kryptonite to a God.

A people’s religion is entirely analogous to a person’s opinion. Religion is an unsubstantiated idea shared by many, some of whom happen to be in a position of political and social power. Yet as intelligent adults we cannot bow to peer pressure and presumptively accord the unsupportable opinions of others with a respect incongruous with the tradition of man’s ability to reason. I say to Joseph Biden, I say to my friends, and I say to my wife: it is fair and just for you to treat my dalliance with religion with the same level of disrespect that you treat everything else that comes out of my mouth. I forced those who loved me to come into a church. I did not do it because it was reasonable. I did not do it because I was right. I did it because I could. I’d rather people pay homage to my spiritual belief in my own self importance than whatever religious dogma I use to actuate the desired result.

Happy Easter!

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