The fix is in
The comments to a relatively frivolous post I made last week forced into the open the question of my religious affiliation. It was suggested that I might be Catholic. I said my religion is flyfishing and that I worship a god named Trout. Well, I’ve consulted the Belief-O-Matic, and all confusion surrounding this matter is now settled. The top five Belief-O-Matic results are as follows (and by the way, none of the links to this site work in Safari):
- Secular Humanist (100%)
- Unitarian Universalist (98%)
- Liberal Quaker (97%)
- Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (88%)
- Neo-Paganism (87%)
I didn’t even know there was such a thing as liberal Quakers! It kind of makes you wonder how liberal. Maybe someday the liberal quakers will put a flaming transvestite on the front of those oatmeal containers.
I took the other test at that site, the ”What’s Your Spiritual Type test, and scored a 37. (That’s just shy of my personal record…I’ll try harder next time.) The scale:
You scored 37, on a scale of 25 to 100. Here’s how to interpret your score:
- 25 - 29: Hardcore Skeptic—but interested or you wouldn’t be here!
- 30 - 39: Spiritual Dabbler—Open to spiritual matters but far from impressed
- 40 - 49: Active Spiritual Seeker ? Spiritual but turned off by organized religion
- 50 - 59: Spiritual Straddler ? One foot in traditional religion, one foot in free-form spirituality
- 60 - 69: Old-fashioned Seeker—Happy with my religion but searching for the right expression of it
- 70 - 79: Questioning Believer ? You have doubts about the particulars but not the Big Stuff
- 80 - 89: Confident Believer ? You have little doubt you?ve found the right path
- 90 - 100: Candidate for Clergy
See, in my universe, these scores work like golf scores: the lower the better. Maybe this world would be a better place if people were issued a spiritual handicap.
37 is about right, actually. I think the universe is too intricately put together to have happened by a series of fortuitous accidents. So yeah, I think there’s some kind of greater power involved but I refuse to name that power or think it legislates any moral or ethical standards, and I’m not egotistic enough to think that if it did legislate such aspects of human life, I or anyone I know would know what those standards are. If that means I’m spiritual, well that’s fine with me.
As far as I’m concerned, though, religion is one of the many technologies of hate that civilizations have invented and reinvented to sort out the “them” from the “us”. Religions (particularly the various forms of Christianity) are probably responsible for more deaths in the history of human existence than any other social or even natural force. Don’t get me wrong—I think religion can play a useful and sometimes helpful role in people’s lives, and I think religion is sometimes the impetus for many good things in this world, but for me, it’s hard to reconcile all the hate and divisiveness with anything worthwhile.
Maybe I’ll study real hard, though, and bring my score down to the upper 20s next time.
[ By the way, I respect that others feel differently about religion, so please don’t feel compelled to sell anyone your religion in the comments to this post. ]
top
10 responses
Comment posted at 07:24 on Monday, February 03, 2003
Well, coffee is good this morning, but there’s ten inches of snow to shovel to get to the birdfeeders and clear them and top them out. What should my priority be, religeously speaking. Help the tweeties make it through the winter, or read what the Veg-o-matic guy has to say. Clearly, the answer - don’t just read, be a nuisance. So, was it right to name that big cancelled artillery piece-program “the Crusader”? Also, what about my people, the Rastafarians? Aren’t they ahead of the neo-Pagans? I can say I and I, and not be pregnant or have a tapeworm. Seriously, the Rasta people have a few things right, unlike most faiths. The living god is man on earth. Then, there is the new Jamacan-Italian restaurant in town, Rasta Pasta, Our Secret is the Herb in the Sauce.
Finally, with the graphics, I cannot see whether you’re positive or negative about the whole thing. Maybe like me, you’re uncertain. God bless you, Resonance. And may Trout deliver.
top
Comment posted at 08:36 on Monday, February 03, 2003
I believe in belief o matic!
see you at the next meeting 
f
1.¾ Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2.¾ Neo-Pagan (93%)
3.¾ Liberal Quakers (89%)
4.¾ Secular Humanism (88%)
5.¾ Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (88%)
top
jon
Comment posted at 11:18 on Monday, February 03, 2003
men never do evil so cheerfully and completely as when they do it from religious conviction.
- blaise pascal
top
poog
Comment posted at 13:48 on Monday, February 03, 2003
58 - the spiritual straddler. That’s actually right about where I would have put myself. Good test.
top
Comment posted at 16:01 on Monday, February 03, 2003
I went to each of the sites. On the one I got sidetracked, but I am going to slim my waistline. On the other once I finished printing out the free grocery coupons, I didn’t have time to ring on down to the dating match-making service at the bottom. Do you think they could fix R’s flaming oats box guy up with somebody she’d be compatible with?
top
Comment posted at 07:42 on Tuesday, February 04, 2003
You talk of religions as technologies of hate. Well, look at your own religion, fella, but from the perspective of the steelhead. All the poor critter wanted was sustenance - plying the river like generations of steelhead before him - and then, snagged by a hateful technology—-gutted, filleted and browned in a butter and white wine sauce. Ended, in a sacrificial ritual of hateful tools, one after another. Barely recognizable for what he was, scaleless and tailess, on a plate, with basamati and aldante asparagus. I hear they’re working on a movie now, Revenge of the Trout. Schieder, Dreyfus and Shaw, and the big robot, retooled - this upriver resort starts losing people, panic sets in, the local sheriff gets tied in with this grizzled fly fisherman and a smart-ass icthyologist —-
top
Comment posted at 04:20 on Wednesday, February 05, 2003
Hopefully the robot steelhead will take revenge on all those grizzly bears that sit by waterfalls waiting for fish to jump into their mouths.
Good quote, Jon. Or, if you’d rather: Good quote, Blaise.
top
Comment posted at 08:24 on Wednesday, February 05, 2003
Neighbors will be neighbors. There’s always the local warlords. Has there ever been a local peacelord?
Religeously, and tribally, I think one of the greater evils was the colonial practice of putting the minority in power so that staying in power rested on keeping good relations with the high-tech colonial authorities while suppressing a more and more hostile local majority. British reliance upon muslim local authority on the Indian subcontinent was a prime example. French Catholic Indochina’s civil service and landowner elite is another example that ran all the way through Diem’s death, when our government decided to back a secular military elite rather than an entrenched civil service elite.
Is Pakistan now much different in our government’s preference for military elites? Is it an “Iran”, waiting to happen?
The studied use of existing hatred does not bring out the best in anybody. I expect the effect of the aging citizenries of the US and western Europe and the consequent brain drain and labor force expansions from eastern Europe, Asia and latin America will ultimately smooth out some anti- and pro-globalism hateds. A folks-simply-having-to-get-along-with-each-other type of effect. I expect Eurocentrism’s focus upon secular technological wisdom will work its way into everybody’s culture even if Coca-Cola does not, and I expect that until economic imperialism lessens and Islam mellows a bit, there will be shocks and after-shocks. But I do not see religion being the crutch of hatred that it has been in the past.
Ashcroft, Falwell and Robertson aside, that is how I see it. Those three are aftershocks, throwbacks, whatever term you prefer; local imans of a sort. Republicanism’s Wahabianism is the term I just invented for them. They deserve that kind of a mish-mosh lable. Or do we just simply call them what they are, local warlords, pressing for heat over light?
The one term that continues to offend me, however, is the “Moral Majority.” Those people were and are and forever will be neither. Letting them go unchallenged calling themselves that is like encouraging Spiro Agnew to call himself a statesman. His closest claim to statesmanship was that he was taking tens and twenties in a brown paper bag, but leaving taking ones and fives to others.
Same rant against the “prolifers”. They should be called the “stick-your-nose-in-everybody-else’s-business-idiots”. Not that I hate them, or anything.
top
Flash
Comment posted at 19:01 on Wednesday, February 05, 2003
Where to begin? Juicy topic if ever there was one.
Bad news res, last September I found your god here in Maine on the Alagash. A 20 inch Brook trout who had a hankerin’ for my Silver Doctor. Fried up nice, that god of yours. Don’t worry; I let a few of his lesser 16” demi-gods go (18” is the minimum keep length up there).
Anywho, they wouldn’t give me a numerical score on my test, but my # 1 was Nonthiest (the crucifixion crew is probably on their way to my house right now so I better type fast). They shouldn’t have even bothered with #2. I have no place for religion in my life, organized or otherwise. I just plain don’t understand the workings of the theological mind.
I’ve heard the argument that life and existence is just too darn (sorry, I’m used to the language filters at work… freaking bastages) complex for non-creational theory. All higher animals (including humans) are amazingly, staggeringly, complex… but just because it is complex beyond our current understanding, doesn’t mean that some noncorporeal super-being who carries the sun in the back of his ‘73 Caddy while blasting tunes and pimpin’ ho’s across the night sky had to create it. All I have to say to that is, if things didn’t work out the way they are, we wouldn’t be around to worry about it.
If you look at all of the problems people have had over the last, oh 30 or 40 thousand years, most of them are over ideological differences. Recently we’ve had- Ireland, India/Pakistan, North Africa, anything and everything in the Middle east, Bosnia, etc, etc, etc…
I had hot dogs for lunch.
top
Comment posted at 00:54 on Friday, February 07, 2003
true, true. don’t forget USA vs. the world.
top
top
Comments closed