OHO: The glass house I live in
This is my new editorial segment that I call OHO, or One Hare’s Opinion.
Ask someone to prove their god or their faith to you and they might do different things. If they're Christian, they might offer you a bible, or take you to church. If they are Muslim, you might read the Koran and attend their Mosque. If they were a Pagan, they might take you to nature, and tell you the stories of the Old Ways before leaving you in silent reflection.
There is no doubt that if you ask someone to show you their faith, that you are in for a journey, a very personal and special one. But at the end of the journey, after your time in the Grove, the Mosque, or the Church, you will be left with your own thoughts, and naturally, you will draw your own conclusions about the experience.
This is life, dear reader. What we do everyday, what we grow into over the course of our existence. We all, at least once in our life, make some kind of decision about what and how we believe, if at all. Beyond that, culture, family, and lived experience shapes us, and calls time and again to those elements of faith which unite us to our kin and culture. The decisions of belief, even if it's that there is no belief, are so profound as to form a core for most folk.
To borrow some phrases from my Christian friends via Paul the Apostle, we see but through a mirror darkly, and it is up to all of us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. We are born into this world full of questions, and given mortal life to pursue what answers we can.
As for me, my answers were a long time in coming. Hard fought for, and dearly won. In my younger years, raised nominally Christian, I pursued that path, only to find it lacking in answers and connection. In college, this engendered in me a crisis which pushed me to reach out, and push beyond the bounds of what I knew.
Gradually, out of the murky depths I began to find my way, began to find my path of belief as Hare incarnated in human form. The conviction within me is strong, and undeniable. The question and the discomfort with human identity was always there, until that answer brought it all into sense.
It's eccentric to be sure, but it is where I found my meaning and my truth, and it led me to an interesting thought.
Have you ever realized, that all religions seem a little strange, or have wild elements, for those outside the faith? The more militant Atheists love to use these in their talking points against belief. They make a solid logic argument that the events described in virtually any holy book are too fantastic or impossible to be believed.
Nevertheless the world goes on being filled with people of every faith and way. People seem to line up in tribes, pick their sides, and then rigorously defend the borders of those ideologies come what may.
I suppose you could say its something very human.
So I challenge you dear reader. I ask you, what is the difference in believing that a Man, who was actually God, died for you sins on a cross; or that a prophet of Allah rode a winged horse to Heaven; or the Raven stole fire to bring to mankind and thus blackened its feathers; consider Woden hanging from the world tree, or any belief, why are these easier to accept, than a deeply held personal conviction, which leads to peace and truth but also long ears and a tail?
After all, there was a time in history where someone was the first Christian, the first Jew, the first Muslim, and if there is any doubt as to how those first ones were received, just spend some time googling the first 300 years or so of Christianity, I'll wait.
So maybe it's time to break the cycle, dear reader. Maybe it's time to decide that if someone isn't causing harm, and they find their happiness, that it's enough on its own, regardless whether you believe it. To fail to do so is to make the mistakes that people have made since the beginning, which does nothing but limit, divide, and damage us all.
This is, however, just one hare's opinion.
