I was watching Drag Me to Hell tonight at a discount theater.  My wife had ordered Australia from Netflix and I just needed to get away.  It was while watching this amusingly silly flick that I found myself thinking about how much all things religious are just superstitions run wild.  There's a scene involving a seance, a badly crafted one involving an Indian fortune teller sitting down with a Mexican oracle, flanked by a Hungarian named Melosh in an Addams Family mansion somewhere in the greater Bay area.  As they dragged in the goat, I couldn't help but think of all the idiot prayer circles that get less scrutiny because they happen to be more familiar.

It's all the same thing.  Only the names of the deities, saints, angels, sprites, demons or dead celebrities have been changed - not to protect the innocent but to deceive them.  Break it all down and you end up with a universal form for groveling before an invisible buddy for guidance or protection.  There's a Greek version, a Hebrew version, an Arabic version, an Indian version and who knows what else.  It's all just make-believe silliness, proferred by the manipulative to capture the imaginations of the gullible.  That same silliness sells a lot of merchandise when it's not providing careers for those with the gift of gab and a grifter's skillset.

Jul 24, 2009 -- 8:19AM, Stoic-sage wrote:

Bill, I agree when it comes to contemporary religious practices and dogmas.  However, I truly think if one deconstructs and strips away all the modern religious connotations, getting to the root of the message, there can be some value there.  The value I speak of is the same shared value of all cultures and societies of a myth or oral tradition of passing on lessons for life, not religious creeds and rites.  If people viewed religious texts, such as the bible for example, through the lens of mythology and being in the same sense a collection of literature similar to that of Aesop's fables, there can be value found in it.  But, not something that should ever be an authoritative voice or viewed as a historical record.  Just my take on it.

Yes.  Grampawombat says much the same thing and I think you're both right.  The primary difference between religion and poetry is that lovers of poetry can tell the difference between metaphor and stereo instructions.  I'm not at war with the imagination.  I'm at war with the system of control.