Religion is Whimsy/HP/Atheism

I’ve been thinking more and more lately about becoming religious. Not because I’m looking for answers or anything; I’m just really bad at math and science and I think it would make me feel better if the answer to all of that stuff was just, “BECAUSE GOD WILLED IT! ABRA KADABRA!” It’s so whimsical! Yes, I am talking about religion still. People may not associate religion with whimsy, but once you achieve the correct perspective, you'll agree that it is whimsical, in the way I would use it, at least; not in the way some people like to use it to like, start wars, marginalize women, and force people to listen to God awful music. People need to chill out on that shit. Just use it for the whimsy! Don’t worry so much about making it to mass every week or fasting or genociding other religions; just think about how magical it is that people used to ride atop dinosaurs and live to be a thousand years old! It’s the closest thing to Harry Potter we’ll ever get.

When I turned 11, I remember being extremely disappointed about not receiving a letter from Hogwarts. It was just like earlier that year when I broke a wishbone with my older sister and won (because that’s what you call getting the bigger half of the bird clavicles in the game of wish-boning. It’s called winning, as though you must be skilled at the game in order to do so). The magic wishbone didn’t turn me into Lil Bow Wow and now I’m not a wizard? Those fuckers! We read the Sorcerer’s Stone in class a couple years before I turned 11, and the first movie was about to come out and I had seen the teaser trailers a hundred times, so I was like super into the whole dogma surrounding Harry Potter at the time. Not a lot of my classmates were, because they were a bunch of hoodlums I was months earlier, so my interest in this trend actually marked my public transition into becoming a dork. That’s right; I’m able to track that shit down to the source. Not a lot of people can do that. A lot of people will always remain oblivious about how and why they are a dork. These people are sometimes called Mormons, but that’s going back to the religion thing, and I’m talking about something much greater right now; I’ll get back to that in a moment. So on the evening before my 11th birthday, I stayed up until probably about 3 AM waiting for my letter from Hogwarts…and absolutely zero owls showed up at my house that night. I felt betrayed. I thought, “Those fuckers.” I was a dork, though, so I tried to think logically about it, and I determined that there were only two rational causes for me not getting my letter, both of which being total downers. It was either because I live in America, which is being boycotted by the wizarding community due to the Salem witch trials or it was because Harry Potter wasn’t real, which was just another thing to add to the list of shit that I had recently discovered to not be real, for example: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, happiness, etc. I went with the undisclosed third option which is that magical forces were at work preventing me from entering magical training because it was predestined that I would become an unstoppable wizard; and it worked, so now I’m just an unlistenable comedian.

I know that having your first communion as a young Catholic is nowhere near as exciting as getting a invitation to a wizard school delivered to your bedroom by an Owl, but due to the strong cultural and societal overtones, it’s much easier to trick yourself into believing in religion than Harry Potter, even though Harry Potter is way more conceivable. “Harry Potter, who art in Hogwarts. Quidditch be thy game.” I think I’m just interested in religion all of a sudden because I’ve become bored with Atheism. I’ve been an atheist for so long now that I have all of these rituals like sitting down during communion at the weddings of my siblings, eating meat on Fridays during Lint, supporting gay rights, sacrificing baptized babies to the ghost of George Carlin, seeing past Bill Maher's awful personality, enjoying life. It has pretty much become its own religion at this point. I might just start worshipping myself; Bono seems happy. On the outside, at least. On the inside I bet he feels just like all of us. Like a polyurethane statuette of a turtle, surrounded by a bunch of plastic hippos, just trying to get some marbles of his own. But the hippos care not. No, they care not about polyturtlethane Bono. I found out recently that Bono has Glaucoma, and that's actually why he's always wearing sunglasses. I just thought he wore the sunglasses because he was a total douche, and now I'm the douche. And he is still too. Having a disease doesn't make you less of a douche. It just makes people who call you a douche into a douche themselves. It's a douchious cycle.