Worship with your conscience,
Receive grace with humility.
Guide with awareness,
Lead with modesty.
The altar is a tool. If we kneel before it and say we have done wrong, we are really telling that to ourselves. If we give thanks for our good fortune, we are expressing our modest appreciation for good luck. There is no outside force listening to us. There is no divine retribution for our wickedness. The altar is merely symbolic. Those who follow Tao use it to focus their self-awareness.
When we step away from the altar, we should not lose self-awareness. We should not take the fact that worship is symbolic to behave in immoral ways. Instead, we still have to act with a conscience and lead others without manipulating them or taking advantage of them.
It takes maturity to grasp that there are no gods and yet still behave as if there were. It takes insight to know that you must be your own disciplinarian. Only the wisest can lay down their own “divine laws” and find guidance as if they were truly heaven’s word.
In some primitive cultures, a rite of passage to being an adult was the special performance of the ceremony of the gods, when the adults doing the ceremony took their masks off at the end of the performance and passed them to the adolescents. The next year, those adolescents learned to perform as the gods.
One of the greatest difficulties in our society, and particularly with our religion, is that there are no rites of passage. We have a society of fully-grown adults, still believing that their god is the only way to make people behave themselves, and so they believe they must impose their god on everyone or society will become chaotic.
This is somewhat infuriating to those of us in the society who are actually adults, and know that we are responsible for our own behavior, thank you very much. The religious believe their god should dominate our courts, as if that will somehow improve society. They want their god to dominate our schools and how we teach science.
Well, guess what, people. YOU are the ones who need to grow up and recognize that YOU are responsible for your behavior, not your god. And the rest of us are very tired of you telling us that we are somehow immoral when in fact, our morality is just fine. We KNOW we are responsible for ourselves, and don’t need a god to tell us that. Your god told you to worship in private, and that is something you need to start doing again. Really.
I grew up in the Presbyterian church. As a teenager, we had an excellent Bible study class and learned what was expected of us as adults in the church, and began to take on some of the responsibilities of the church. My parents were both elders in the church at some point. My mother was very involved in Church Women United. I recognized that my parents ran the church, the church didn’t run them. The people of the church chose the ministers, who served at the will of the members. That is how religion works. It doesn’t work when there’s someone spewing crap on national television about how corrupt our society is because all the judges aren’t Christians We Approve Of. It doesn’t work when the religious try to take over the political functions of the country. Gee, shall we take away your tax-exempt status now? It doesn’t work when the religious are telling our major corporations how to act or treat their employees, for the maginificent sum of 20,000 pieces of silver per month. It doesn’t work when the religious demand that that they be allowed into our bedrooms and tell us who we can sleep with, who we can marry, who is allowed to raise children, who is allowed to control our wombs. IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY, REALLY!!!!
So. To those religious folks – go back to your room, close your door, and pray in quiet to your god. As Jesus taught you. Because that’s what I learned in church:
Matthew 6
1 Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.
2 Thus, when you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.
3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,
4 so that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
5 And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.
6 But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
That’s what worked for me and guided me growing up. And you know what? I grew up. I became an adult. And I raised my kids without the church, because I knew how to turn them into adults without the mask – just being myself.
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