WORSHIP

Through the inner workings of Blogger.com, provider of this site, I can see various bits of info under the "stats" summary.  Apparently someone who was on my blog site entered an internal search to ask how worship is handled in The Neutral Zone.  If the wording and spelling were complete enough to mean anything to me, it seemed to indicate that the searching was being done by a reader perhaps in Russia, where nearly half my readership is located, amazingly.  At least, that's what the stats page also gives me.

Here I will freely admit that my neutrality cannot be depended upon when it comes to worship.  Neutral in my attitudes toward people who are worshippers?  Sure; I do that as devotedly as I can manage, determined to not be judgmental through the remainder of my life in the way I was during my religious years.  I have written, in a book manuscript as well as in online comments, about my years of abject devotion to a Christian sect.  The countless hours I spent on my knees during thirteen years of humble worship have made it difficult for me today to feel anything but revulsion at the thought of worship.  What I came to see as wasted time then morphed into a grudge against the whole concept.  That grudge came by way of realization that the time wasn't merely lost to me; the time spent in that devout mode had reduced me, weakened me as a person. In retrospect, I see worship as a constantly demoralizing and self-destructive activity.

Consider this:  I hit puberty during the time Marilyn Monroe was soaring to heights of stardom.  She was there in front of all of us hormone-laden teens of the nineteen-fifties, there to want and to worship.  If I had taken to this goddess so profoundly that I could delude myself into a belief that she would someday be my lover, my soul-mate, etc., then I would have been giving myself over to a pointless and demoralizing struggle, my psyche forced to survive my own folly.  Anyone who knew me and/or cared about me would have naturally been begging me to stop the madness of worshipping this unattainable goddess.  They would have watched me in pity as I continually ate away inside with wanting something I could never attain.  They would see me missing out on important activities while I sought more ways of potentially attracting Marilyn's attention.  They would tell me this obsession was destructive and that I simply had to give it up.  Other boys my age would have soared past me in development while playing baseball and joining in many typical youthful pursuits.  I would have lessened my own stature by constant wishing and by pleading to some unseen force to give me the chance to see Marilyn and to have her see me. 

Ludicrous analogy here?  Not at all.  The sad thing is, my fanciful worship of Marilyn (that didn't actually happen for me but undoubtedly did for many of my contemporaries), would have been less far-fetched than was my later worship of a traditional supreme being.  At least Marilyn was real, was visible, was approachable.  Was capable of returning attention.  The odds against my meeting and finding love with her would have been astronomical, much as the odds against winning the big Mega Lotto jackpot - but it was not beyond any possibility.  Worshippers of that traditional phantom in the skies (in any of the disparate concepts) surely believe that their chances for ultimate satisfaction are better than mine would have been with Marilyn.  While I strongly doubt there is anything at all out there to make that desired satisfaction materialize, I nonetheless leave those worshippers to their own devices.  And I wish them happiness in any way they can achieve it.  I prefer working continually on being a better human and a more devoted fan and supporter of our visible cosmos.  It is my firm and constant belief that when I bend to pick up one small piece of trash off the surface of this abused planet that I am doing infinitely more good for myself and humanity than I ever did by bending and scraping before a mystical supreme being.

IF that fictional worship of Marilyn Monroe had occurred in my youthful world, I would have expected, in fact it would have been a shame if it had not happened, that all who cared for me would have tried to convince me to give it up.  But the commonly accepted traditions of society demand of us all that we never try to pull our friends and loved ones back from the brink of madness when they express a devotion to something completely implausible, invisible, unapproachable.  And the madness is even madder than that - there is an intrinsic zaniness within the larger world of general belief!  A Catholic can be deeply convinced that a Baptist is going down a wrong road and needs to be shown the light, but this simply isn't done.  A Mormon can be absolute in his conviction that a Muslim is wrong in every way, but he cannot try to enlighten him; the right to believe any folly is sacred.  Why, in our advanced age of Man and our 21st century world of scientific knowledge, can we not look at this phenomenon and ask, "What then can be the logic in my choosing any one of the innumerable beliefs and sticking to it in a devoted worship?"  Ah, that is the question one might ask himself (unlikely though it is that anyone will), but it is a question one can never ask of others.  It's just not in good taste.

That's it for now.  No more talk of worship for this moment.  I think I will go out and pick up some more trash from our Earth during Earth Week, then come in to settle into a scotch-on-the-rocks and maybe an old Marilyn Monroe film.