I read a blog a second ago about the theism on this site. schadenfreude.joeuser.com. Made me think.
I don't think about religion as much as most people. I guess because I thought about it so much when I was younger. I know where I stand, and that's good enough for me. I have dabbled in just about every religion you can imagine -- never really practicing, but getting to know them well enough to know if they're 'for me.' Some people will call this 'Fashion Religion'. It's not. Nothing has ever felt right to me; that matter with a religion.
Religion isn't something you wear like socks. It's not something you try on and see if it makes you look thin in the mirror at Nieman Marcus. It's different than that -- maybe not more, but different. For me, nothing stuck.
But, anyway...this schadenfreude got me thinking about something a friend of mine once said. This friend of mine wasn't religious. He had been, but gave it up. God wasn't for him, at all. He asked me about something or another, and I said 'I don't know, look in the Bible.' I was joking. Then he asked me again, and I answered 'Seriously, look in Ecclesiastes. Everything is in there.'
And he said: 'I should stop a man from burning the Bible, just to spare the pages of Ecclesiastes.'
Agreed.
It is all in there. Man has been writing a long time now, since Sumer, at least. We've written in Greece, and Rome. We've perfected storytelling, and literary technique. My word...the way some of us could write! Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce, and Whitman. The list goes on. Insert your favorite writer. Hell...insert your favorite musician, or comedian, or actor, or politician.
The sad and beautiful truth is we've spent the last few thousand years trying to recreate Ecclesiastes.
If anyone tells you that you must take the Bible whole, or not at all, they are mistaken.
I am not a Christian. I've never been a Christian, really. Never baptized, or any of that. Once, I thought I might become a Buddhist; once, even, I almost became a Jew. I've studied Zoroaster, and Confucious, and know more than my fair share of my ancestors' religion. I am from the Oak people; the solstice people. But on my honor, there has never been anything written so holy and gracious as the book of Ecclesiastes.
What profit hath a man for all his labor under the Sun?