BIOLOGY AT THE SHRINE:...Are We Science, or Are We Religion?...

"I can talk for days about modern religion, only what will it get me? The planet is lost I've come to decide. It will take more than everybody suddenly deciding to read a very old book to save it and chances of ever uniting the world on the subject of God is long-gone. There is no reason to lie anymore; the sinners have taken control. You can sit in church and look up at the marble statues lining the pretty walls with nice captions like "On the third day, Jesus was stripped of his clothes" and you know everybody sitting there instantly places a sexual image in his or her brain before turning to its true meaning, which is that this guy, rare as anything, gave his life so that all who came after him could live. It was, I thought, a tremendously Big Sell, perhaps too big a thing to accomplish..." - Eduardo Paz-Martinez, Playing A Spanish Number

By ELIOT ELCOMEDOR
Editor-In-Chief

SAN JUAN, Texas - My quarrel with the church I served as altar boy all those years ago goes much, much deeper into the past, certainly farther than the eye can see in any direction, the sky included. My walks along the 14 Stations at the Catholic Shrine here are but a handful, not because I don't enjoy it out in the open, but more because I never feel satisfied, spiritually or otherwise. What is it about the simple question that has chased Human Beings through the ages. Yeah, that one: What are we?

The words in italics above are said to come from my first novel. Who knows? I don't remember them, but then I don't remember much of what I wrote in my other four novels. Maybe it's because I spent so much time with those stories that letting them go was the equivalent of letting a woman go - when it's over, you just have to let her go, go into your backpages. They say I'm good at that, although I sense that as age has crept-up on me...that I may be losing that worthless talent.

Anyway, I do think often and hard about religion, about whether there is a God and about whether we're nothing more than multi-cell biology - descendants of early tadpoles, that stuff. Apes? Yes, I am sure we share much with the ape. If only they could talk and give us their opinion. Apes have no ability to bullshit, unlike our ballyhooed Priests, Rabbis, Medicine Men, Ayatollahs or Imams. Those self-serving guys have blown it for everybody, and we're paying the price. Faith is an empty a word as is the top half of a bag of potato chips. Trust has gone fishing, as in Wall Street. God? Lennon was right: God is a concept by which we measure our pain. So, you must be asking, what brings me here, with this?

Well, it began a few weeks back, when I was telling a friend who's become more than just a friend that I hated the idea of having a freakish skeleton inside my body. I asked whether a God would design that into a Human Being, or whether that was merely cells reproducing themselves into such an odd thing. Apes have very similar skeletons, as do monkeys, and, yes, most living things have a form of a skeleton or another. The funny one for me has to be the skeleton of the giraffe. What God would design that skeleton? You'd have to be drunk to come up with a giraffe, a hippo, a llama, a camel at the time of creation. What for? There was only one epoch that needed or cherished the camel, and that epoch has long passed. No, the camel continues to exists because of biology. We exist thanks to our ability to farm, to work, to feed, to breed. And, of course, our lot is as fragile as a 119-year-old woman. We will soon be gone, forever.

Science, however, is what will save us, or at the very least allow humans to stick around a bit longer.

Science holds the key, not religion. Religion has sparked more wars and death than all plagues combined. Is it possible that all Mankind could vanish from one generation to the next and then be re-born just as fast? Yes. Without a doubt, and without too much of a hassle

Life as we know it is blood, bones, organs - all biological wonders passed on with every birth. Religion only gets in the way with its fairy tales, its promises, its words of suffering here so that you can live nobly in Heaven, its desire to note pain while ignoring death. We say that because we do not believe that any God worth his weight in salt would ever create such a graceless ending for human life. It is biology that cries, that laughs, that perspires, that exults, that damns, that believes, that ignores, that praises, that wants, that takes. Religion pushes you there, selling the idea that when you die you go to a better place.

I ask myself: Could there really be a better place than New York?

The altar boy used to march to the church after classes in elementary school, led there by serious-faced nuns who used every minute and second of the next hour to ingrain in me the good tenets of the benevolent Catholic religion. And I threw-on my costuume on Sunday morning and did my part in the sermon. I don't know exactly where I lost it for the Catholic religion, but I think it sort of started when one of the nuns walked me to a barber shop and told the barber to cut my moptop into something else.

I didn't get that, and, as I grew older, didn't get any of the rest. When my mother died two years ago, we held the funeral mass in the same church I had served as a young Catholic boy. I honored my mother with a lengthy eulogy that spoke of her life as a great mother, but also posed what I thought were serious questions to her God. I recall the Father standing not more than five feet to my left coughed loudly upon hearing my words to his God, and it was then that I knew his reaction wouldn't bother me in the least.

The dignified-looking Father in his pressed robes and graying hair, I told myself, was, like me, biology - a mere mortal waiting on his turn. Nothing would save him from the suffering, either, was my feeling at that soulful moment. I walked off the altar feeling my poor mother deserved a better fate and knowing that the church she had so believed in could do no more for her...

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