Religion
I don’t normally talk about religion in much. it tends to be an efficient way to break friendships when you discover that your long-time friends hold diametrically opposed religious views. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.
But, for the record, here is what I believe.
I believe there is a god. Supreme being, maker of Heaven and Earth And all that jazz.
Gender? kind of irrelevant. My god has no gender, and in the English language tradition, I will use the 3rd person gender indeterminate singular pronoun “they”.
My god is also an uncaring god. Not malicious, merely not interested. They lost interest, perhaps, or god distracted, perhaps, or ran out of energy, perhaps. Whichever. They set things in motion aeons ago, and, being a lazy god, they set it up in such a way that it would continue, unattended, like some insane von Neumann machine.
But I digress. My god’s gender is irrelevant. My god’s goodness, motivation, interest, even very existence (beyond having set things in motion initially) is irrelevant. My god pays no attention to us. “Oh my god” almost takes on a new meaning for me, especially with a different intonation.
And yet…
I believe in Heaven and Hell.
And Heaven is right here, on Earth, around us as we speak.
And Hell is right here, on Earth, around us as we speak.
Oh, and reincarnation is real.
So how does it all fit together?
It’s like this. My god is, at a fundamental level, lazy. Omnipotent, sure. But even if you can run, that doesn’t mean you exert yourself constantly all the time with such activity. My god is the same. they could have chosen to judge each soul on its own merits and give each soul an appropriate afterlife. Sounds too much like hard work though. Far simpler just to reincarnate each soul back into this world.
You want heaven? Forget leading a good life. Who decides what’s good anyway. Instead, make the world more into your impression of what heaven should be. Some day, you will die. Sad, but true. And some day after that you will be reincarnated into this world. Did you make this world closer to your ideal of heaven? the more you did, the more deserving you will have been coming back into this heaven that you helped create.
Oh yes, and you can make Hell on Earth too if you like. Make the world a worse place, and when you come back, the badder you made it, the more deserving you will have been to be born back into hell.
Thus spake Warda kawabata.