Religion

I trying to understand why I go back and forth on religion. I went from being an atheist as part of the general backlash against the roman catholic church in Québec, to agnostic after much discussion with a philosophy prof in cégep, who was Catholic (his name was Christian hehe), to wondering about where the hell I am going. A comment by AIDS on #zines about me being on the fence about really stung, somehow, although AIDS is quite an abusive if humourous person and should mostly be ignored.

After discussing white people wearing dreadlocks on missruckus's journal, I went to do some research on dreadlocks and thus came across lots of information on Rastafarianism. On one hand I thought it's all laughable because they worshiped this guy that wasn't Rastafarian and didn't seem to care very much, the mythology was pretty much scraped together rapidly, etc. On the other hand I get caught up by stuff like "I and I". Reading about Rastafarianism from an outside perspective is much different than reading a Rastafarian talk about it. I think that there is something about devotion that just totally knocks me off my feet sometimes. I think that the certainity of belief (read that again) is very comforting; I envy this kind of Knowing, of security.

After seeing his movie Wheel of Time at the Hot Docs festival, director Werner Herzog was answering questions. He told one person that the Dalaï Lama says that people should look into their own culture's religions for spirituality, that he doesn't support religious tourism. People look up to Buddhism as this holier than holy religion for some reason, but someone I know who had spent time with the Free Tibet movement was talking about how people were talking about some monks raping women and other Bad Stuff. Buddhists are humans too, after all. After growing up in Québec, it's quite easy to look up to other religions as "better" than Catholicism. I personally have rejected the Catholic Church. I don't want anything to do with it. We celebrated my father's funeral there and I know that this is what he wanted, but I was kind of infuriated, I was not feeling at home, I wanted really hard to get out of there. I know I am being carried by history but I don't want to separate myself from this history. This is who I am. So I'm out of this Church yet am yearning for cultural and posibly religious identity, maybe more broadly, spirituality. What the hell do I do now?

Last night I read this article about cultural appropriation by white people, and the bond between religion and culture.

I'll have to write more about this later, but for now I have to really work.