October 2002

Not Your Revelation

This is a note to one and all - keep your revelations to yourself.

Religions are full of stories. All of them are told by men and women who want your attention, your cash and your reverence (not always in that order). From the most laid back to the strictest, they depend on people believing in the revelations given to others by God.

These revelation, as Thomas Paine put it in "The Age of Reason" are 'hearsay.' You cannot prove to anyone that God said those exact words to some guy, and then he wrote them down, or asked his insane friend who fell of a horse and hit his head to write it down, and no editorializing happened. Or, the worse case is when a 'revelation' is told of for years before it is put to paper. Sure, we trust that you heard God's word. We do. But, while our trust in God is infinite, we have little or no trust in our fellow man. What we want is our own revelation. Or at the very least, we don't want to take anyone's revelation verbatim. We all learned how the "oral tradition" can get thigns horrinle wrong by playing "telephone" in elementary school. The oral tradtion somehow puts "purple monkey dishwasher" smack in the middle of the Nicene Creed.

If God speaks to us, telling us how to live right and well, we will do so, but we promise never to share it with another person. Why should we? If God really wants us to do something, why doesn't he tell all of us and not just Pat Robertson?

Anyway, we are not interested in carrying the water for God. We were raised in two different Christian faiths, and we are confused as to why God put something as important as 'everlasting life' and it's secrets in the hands of man and his institutions. What better way to guarantee that Hell will be full of people is there than by trusting a person's soul to someone else. If God took the time to speak to EVERY person individually, or at once even, then we would all have a much better chance in being together in heaven.

It's like if the President of the United States told us, as kids, to brush our respective teeth twice a day. We would brush and floss every day with great zeal. Even though flossing wasn't part of the directive. Because we can understand the spirit of the proclamation. The same would be true if God spoke with either of us at any age. If God said, "Quit your job and serve the poor. You shall want for nothing if you serve in my name...blah blah blah." Both of us would take those words seriously and feed all kinds of dirty and hungry people. We would do so with zeal.

Yet, God chose, it must be supposed, to trust his word to a few men, and they in turn have set the world against itself. No two men agree on the will of their creator. People kill each other because they have different 'faiths'. We stand alone outside of the religious world because of what it creates in the name of God.

It only get worse. By making humans thoughtless and cruel, God is able to hide the diamond-like glory of creation and secrets of his/her wisdom under layers hard, sticky and deep crap. Then, instead of a human race basking in the glory of God's creation and wisdom, we are left to grope in the dark for a secret we don't know is even there. The lost and frustrated, lacking personal revelation, never find their way in the dark. They are easily lead astray by the cunning and shameless to fight silly wars against their families, neighbors, and themselves.

Is it a fine world in which we live.

As we, the editors, wait anxiously for a revelation, we are not going to listen to revelations thrust forth from our fellow man. No. We are watching and waiting for God, our creator, to impart his/her wisdom upon us.