The problem with talking about religion is that you are likely to anger someone. The real problem with angering someone about religion is that they tend to take it very seriously. Some people take it so seriously that they think nothing of killing or hurting the people who believe something different from what they believe. The thing about it is that there is an entire planet that seems to think they know what God thinks. They think so in such a way that, again, anyone who disagrees is completely disposable.

Let’s get some things straight right here and now. I believe in God. I do believe that there is a power at work in this universe that is beyond my understanding and may have some influence over how we got here and where we’re going. That being said, I believe what I believe for very personal reasons. I don’t think it’s my place to shove my beliefs about God down the throats of the rest of humanity. I am not the evangelical type. I am also willing to concede that if there is an all-powerful entity in the universe then that entity may be well beyond anything I could possibly understand. If that’s the case then my walking around trying to tell other people that I know what God means and what they should believe.

I have this idea that God is a lot like a kid with an ant farm. You know those ant farms you can get from educational stores, right? They come with two pieces of glass and lots of dirt or sand or something and then you get some ants. Then you get to watch the ants carefully and slowly building up their own society. They dig their tunnels and they live their little ant lives. Every so often a demonic child will give into the urge to just shake up that thing, wreaking havoc on the lives all of ants and then they have to rebuild everything all over again. Sometimes I think that’s what God is.

The thing is that there are so many religions. How is it that so many religions can have the same basic starting point and then branch off into so many different directions? I don’t know but it amazes me that so many people get so hung up on semantics. It isn’t enough just to accept that you believe in God but have different ways of reaching a better understanding of what God is. No, you have to try and convince everyone else in the world that they should believe exactly what you believe. Then you have to convince them that any deviation in that belief is tantamount to murdering the entity you want to worship.

I was raised in a mostly-Catholic family. I was raised, however, Lutheran. I went to a Lutheran grade school and then a Lutheran high school. I am very lucky that when I was going to that grade school I has two pastors who were a lot more liberal when it came to the Bible than a lot of other people you might meet. We were encouraged to question things. We were told that it was okay to wonder about the things we read.

There are those who actually believe the planet is only a few thousand years old. They do this by using some kind of biblical math and comparing it to a calendar or some damn thing. They do not believe in carbon-dating or science that says that the earth is millions of years old. I have yet to hear exactly how they believe in dinosaurs but there is a baseball player who was on the White Sox who says he doesn’t believe dinosaurs existed and all of those bones are just lies or something.

That’s pretty nutty, you have to admit, but to me the real danger comes from the people who are so desperately in need of being defined by other people that they take it to extremes. What’s funny to me is that the people who fall into this category always seem to think they are justified but the other nuts are somehow more nutty. So the guy who walks into Planned Parenthood and starts shooting actually thinks he has justification and then thinks the guy who wears a belt full of explosives into a crowded market is crazy. Oh yeah, obviously you have the right way of thinking and those guys are just crazy.

I don’t know what God thinks about all of this. I only have feelings. I have a feeling he would not get so caught up in semantics. He created us and we created the confusion. He probably shakes his head and wonders exactly why were are so caught up in the minutia and ignoring the big picture.

I became a pastor of the Universal Life Church on a whim. I thought it would be funny to tell people I could legally perform weddings in the state of Illinois. You can look up the ULC right now if you want. They believe that you should be allowed to believe whatever you want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else or interfere with anyone else’s beliefs. Like I said, it was a lark when I went through their online ordination process. However, as the years have gone on I have come more and more to believe exactly what this church preaches.

Here’s what I think the world is all about and you can believe it or you can ignore it. I think that the world is too hung up on worrying about what happens when they die. They worry so much about what happens when they die that they make up rules that prevent them from living. I think we all need to live for today. I think we need to help other people regardless of what they believe. I think we should try to spend more time looking for what we have in common rather than what we believe that’s different. I think we need to realize we all share the same planet and, therefore, the same space and its space that’s getting smaller and smaller all the time.

That’s just me. My most important belief is that you should never, ever, ever blindly follow someone else’s beliefs. Not what I say or a preacher says or some book that’s been carefully edited over centuries says should be what is used to dictate your life. I think people just need to think for themselves.

Of course that feeling isn’t easy to spread around. People want things to be easy. They want to point to that centuries-old book and say that all of the answers are there. They want to just believe the words as they’re written and not put any thought into it. They want to relax and sit back and put their brain on hold and just watch NASCAR. People don’t want to believe that life takes work.

Life does take work. Believing in something takes work. Learning to live with other people takes work. In truth, it’s the only work that really matters.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s new novel Dust is now available at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.