Yes, yes, you’re right, all religious leaders everywhere are all the same, all over. It’s all the same. There is no difference between Tony Alamo and the Pope and the Dalai Lama. No difference at all. They are all pedophile bastards.
No, there is no point in evaluating and distinguishing between different religions and their leaders and followers. Because they are all the same, right? Let’s not look too closely at how certain religions exploit people, and certain religions help people. Let’s ignore the difference between Catholic missionaries all over the world, aiding people like Mother Teresa did (and BTW, I am NOT a Catholic). Let’s ignore Florence Nightangle, the Protestant Deist (more or less; she had no serious religious views), but she believed passionately in humanity. I could mention a hundred more examples of intelligent, compassionate, sincerely religious people.
Myself, I am a half agnostic, half deist. I don’t know and I don’t pretend to know. But I FEEL that there is something more. Every intelligent man has escaped the bonds of traditional, organized religion. Haven’t you? That freedom is exhilariting at first…but then you realize you have do face God – or whatever IT is – on your own merits. Much easier to fold yourself as sheep within the folds of organized religion.
I realize that I’m not making sense. But once you start getting philosophical, none of it makes much sense – and yeah, I’ve read Spinoza and Hume and the ancient Greeks. Philosophy is like that - you start spinning around in your own head, and it gets…weird.
That’s what I say to people who want to do drugs. I say, “Do you want to really? REALLY? Seriously expand your minds?” That doesn’t include smoking a joint and listening to Pink Floyd. If you seriously want to blow your mind, sit down and try to read Stephen Hawking. Don’t do drugs or alcohol. Try and read this guy. I consider myself a pretty smart guy and I understood about, uh, 2% of what he was saying in A Brief History of Time. I mean, shut the hell up about psychedelics, try and fucking read a goddamn book, you morons! I’m with Chuck D of Public Enemy on this, “She Watch Channel Zero,” a book is a kryptonite to a niggah! (as Chris Rock put it) You’ll get more psychedelia out of reading Aldous Huxley’s novels than listening to the Doors.
Well, and there you go. Most alcoholics and drug addicts, their ideas are extremely banal. I am neither - I’m just extremely eccentric. A walking, socially functioning Syd Barrett, y’know? There were these people called Flannery O’Connor (I would have married her, if she hadn’t died 10 years before I was born) and William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, who were called eccentrics and beatniks and weirdos, but had something they had to say. They were all from Mississippi. I’m a neighbor from Arkansas. But I feel a serious kinship with these lost souls. My grandmother picked apples in Mississippi, she was born there.
(Snaps out of it) Well, there you go. All of our grandparents were mere farmers two generations ago. We all have to adjust to the modern world. The industrial revolution didn’t hit everywhere at once, you know!
We’re all just people, and we are all just wanting the same basic things. It’s just a matter of advancing technology into primitive territories.
Do you seriously think that any aboriginal kid in Brazil in the rain forest is thinking, “Ugh! I can barely see! But these eye-glasses these people from beyond the pale, are an abomination! I reject them in the name of my sacred cultural purity!”
Um, no. He’s accepting those glasses and thanking whatever god he has, for the gift of sight. That he would never have had as an unspoiled caveman in the Amazon.
A couple of generations ago, a guy like me, who is legally blind, would have been dead before I was 10 years old. My entire life, I owe to modern technology. And so do most of you.
