Escape the setup

I couldn’t agree more with Joe, Lorna and Leann. To me family, religion, God, genetics, love, and all the emotional involvement around them are this gigantic horrifying creature that traps people with its sticky tentacles and little by little suffocates the life out of them.

My family loves me, but they don’t care about my happiness and well being if it’s related with me being physically immortal because it makes me different, out of the norm, and of course out of the flock who prefers to die instead of deserting their families and God . I don’t want this kind of love; religion operates under the same principles. I grew up in Christianity, and although I stopped being involved in all the religious rituals during my teens I can see now how religion was actively present in my everyday life.

I refuse to remain faithful to someone or to some form of creed that doesn’t care about me. For them, their structures are more important than my life. My freedom is priceless! The more I see the big setup the more I appreciate and value my life, my people. I experienced a new love, and I don’t have to pay with my life to keep this love.

The Trap of Tradition

On my way to NYC, I've stopped for a family visit in DC. It has been a real adventure. My niece had her Bar Mitzvah, which entailed me attending a synagogue service for the first time in 15 years or so. The whole thing was like one long pep rally for God. Every sentence seemed to mention how great and powerful God was over and over as to self-hypnotize the reader. It was absurd and almost comical. God, god, god! And not a word about the good people who were in that room. I thought, if such an entity actually existed, it must be one insecure son of bitch to need all that propping up.

It struck me how tradition ties people to the past in such a constricting way. Being raised Jewish, I could see how absorbed people get by stories, rituals and traditions of the past. Trying to connect back to some moment of revelation that nobody can really remember. I saw how religious texts preoccupy the mind and distract people from really feeling their bodies. At one point, I had tears well up in my eyes because I felt such gratitude for having escaped that trap. It feels so wonderful to be free of tradition and religion, to be experiencing revelation now, the revelation of my full, physical aliveness.