Theatrical Muse Reboot - #52 - Religion
If I am a deity?! What kind of question is that? Is there some sort of God or God-like creature out there that's wasting all of His Her Its time answering stupid little survey questions in some cosmic journal? Jesus Christ. I guess that answers what's wrong with the fucking universe, if the Almighty Whatever has nothing better to do with itself than write in its diary. Fuck. We're all doomed.
Also that paragraph alone probably tells you all you need to know about my religious beliefs.
I don't believe in God. I honestly can't stomach the idea that any sort of benevolent fucking anything would let us fuck ourselves over quite so sincerely, in the name of free will or not. It seems to me the excuse that we know what we do to ourselves and each other is merely an excuse to write off bad parenting, and I'm pretty sure that no one's going to find 'well I told my toddler not to stick his tongue in the light socket and that should have been enough, I didn't see the need to secure it or stop making it look like it was full of fucking candy' excuse goes very far. On a cosmic scale we're barely more than infants and I can't imagine something with eons of experience and knowledge under its belt excusing letting us run amock on ourselves. It just doesn't sit right with me.
Besides that, I guess I'm sort of the kind of man who relies on quantifiable evidence. I don't know that I can say I'm a particularly science-minded person because science doesn't cover a whole lot of what's out there, Horatio, but I really don't think there's any deity with their finger on the trigger if only because I really feel like the time for pushing that big red button has probably come and gone several hundred times over the course of our evolution as a race (or raceS, as the case may be, given that I suppose I am technically not human and only evolved NEXT to humans rather than part of them.) I don't think there's a big GROUP of deities either, although I suppose that would make more sense to me than one omnipotent being. After all, I am in the music business and I am well-educated on how much bureaucracy can fucking bog down even the best of ideas. There are days I legitimately feel like everything I wear and do is covered in so many layers of red tape that I can't even tell that I was one man-shaped. Or anything-else shaped. An enormous ball of double-sided red tape. Like a fucking Katamari Damacy.
Of course, this doesn't preclude me from believing some things that people would otherwise identify as religious beliefs. For me, it isn't so much about a religion or rituals or anything as it's just...literally how my world works. I have a hard time swallowing the idea of something guiding the course of things in such a subtle fashion that one can't see its effects at all, but I have a likewise hard time denying the existence of the spirits in the Echo when they're trying to eat my goddamn face. A few bloody battles and a week spent hiding from the media while your left fucking eye grows back in will learn you the difference on disbelief real quick. That fucking eye has never been quite the same since, either. Maybe I did a rush job, shit.
I believe that there must be spirits in the Echo so large and powerful that they look like deities to most people. It's like that saying, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That's especially tricky when you take into account that magic does actually legitimately exist. A spirit that's managed to survive for thousands of years is going to be able to kick anyone's ass, get into anyone's mind, possess or manifest whatever it wants. So I guess it will look like God to people who don't know any better, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be killed with the right plan, the right effort, the right weaponry. And you know, maybe that's all that's really going on. A hundred million people all riled up by the same spirit, feeding it with their prayers and egos and sweat and blood, but in the end it's just a spirit, one in a billion billion, and nothing special. Just old, and powerful. And writing in its dairy.