Saturday, March 11, 2017

Living in a world with a surfeit of religiosity

I was really and truly minding my own business when, in my late teens, I suddenly found myself surrounded by sisters who had embraced monotheism. In my blinkered teenage view of the world, this had happened overnight. One moment they were siblings I could amuse with my boyish antics and slapstick behavior. In the next, they were "people of the Book" whose chief interest was the discussion of Hell for people like me, who had not seen the light and, therefore the "error" of my ways.

They became boring to me.

Whereas, in the past, they engaged me with questions about my experiences, usually bad ones, during the day when my father dragged me in the hot afternoons to walkabouts in rubber and oil palm estates that I really had no interest in; unless it was to look for the odd tiger barbs that inhabited the pristine streams that meandered through the estates. I would regale my sisters with my misadventures and astute observations about the rustic personages that my father would meet in kopi tiams in the hamlets that existed before we reached the end of the world where the plantations were located.

I would tell them funny stories about how a flaying seat belt slapped my father numerous times while he was driving. How I almost choked while stifling my body's urgent need to bellow out a hearty laugh at my father; for, that was not the done thing back in the day, when your father was a distant and giant of a man; a banyan tree that sheltered us from all that was bad in the world. It was not only poor form to laugh at your father under any circumstance; well, not in front of him any way. Or, my perplexed feeling when my father bellowed with laughter at a pig's plight when a small lorry carrying pigs wrapped in rattan netting had, somehow lost one of its porcine cargo that rolled off the little lorry into a ditch in a single lane laterite road.

These things I could no longer amuse my sisters with because their agenda was the urgent need to persuade me to embrace their monotheism in order to save my soul.

I found them terribly boring.

They couldn't even articulate an answer to my show-stopping question. That question to them was, how a truly blameless and pure soul as our mother, who could never embrace their monotheism, could ever be consigned to Hell merely for being a non-believer.

I think they found me boring and, unamusing after those failed proselytizing sessions.

That was one of the indicators that I had achieved adolescence.

For many years, I lost my sisters to monotheism. In many ways, I have never found them again.

If you haven't already realized by now, I will say this; I am polytheistic in my beliefs and, happily so. I am part of a belief system that is self-empowering and absolutely benign.

I am not asked to get points for the Afterlife by chasing around for other souls to join the club. I am told to behave myself in accordance with accepted social norms and, to commit no intentional harm on any other soul; sentient or not. I am not to impinge on the peaceful existence of others. And, that is how I am living my life.

... damn! Got interrupted by the missus ...

    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.
    - TS Eliot: The Hollow Men (1925)-

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