En ingles 'pa que me entiendas...

So I got into talking with you a bit of a smidgen about religion. More than we had i guess. I learned something new about you that i had no clue about (you're an endless amount of surprises and i love that) and I did feel insecure for a minute but i shut down that insecurity enough because why should i be jealous of someone I had no clue even existed...but back to religion. I want to share with you some of the spiritual journey i have undertaken in my life. I started having issues with religion when i went into the SDA mission school. All my life i had been blessed by the catholic education system that was always great to me. Never minding that they took my star wars gun in kindergarten, made me not have to deal with girls until 4th grade when hormones are barely making their way, made my mother take me to a psychologist and get an mri because i was not right and never would be. They made me take catechism where we had to memorize the ten commandments and i really wanted to know what adultery was..it was right there! but no one listened until the lady giving us catechism asked me to be quiet. Like i wanted to have adultery with her or something. Yes, it was a shock to me when in my second day of school i asked Flint if he had had his first communion.. i think he was puzzled by that and must have asked his mom during lunch because when i got home i learned that Flint was a protestant...That not everyone who believed in Jebus was a catholic. My mother kindly taught me about this that same day and i was shocked...How can the one true church have people leaving! That makes no fucking sense! Then my mother told me they don't believe in icons like the cross...Those poor fuckers! if vampires attack they are so screwed! Seriously, i always kept my cross to my chest, No way i was getting bitten! That was a shocker that led me to question so much. I don't remember anything else shocking in elementary religion wise, just that the SDA kids were real a-holes. They had some sort of issues, and forget about talking to them about saturday morning cartoons, those stuck up jerks thought they were too good for them. They did go exploring nature a lot, something i always wanted to do but without the praying. My father never took a hike in his life, he was a blue collar guy and was too tired and wanted to watch the boxing fight/game while my mother having worked in emergencies way too long had a million things to say about the dangers of the outdoors. How they found that poor girl dehydrated because she wandered into Laguna Salada and had no water and she was mummified in three days... Thanks mom. I had barely overcome Vampires and now mummies were a thing. AS a teenager i started reading... a lot. I read a lot of Michael Ende because he was real big in Mexico because we get our books mostly through Spanish publishers and he was real big in Europe. The Neverending story was amazing and i started reading a collection of his short stories and there was one about Islam that made me very curious. about how Iblis the devil would trick voyagers in the desert. I loved reading about the rise of Islam. I had seen The Prophet about the rise of islam and loved that the christians had originally protected the muslims. Then i read about how the crusades happened and saw that islam was the same bag. There is a way out of our primordial chaos and it's the invisible man! I respected my boss at the liquor store, he took his time to pray, didn't drink and was good guy. Tough but fair. His son was a fucking mess, first day at work i find his glass pipe. I tell him i'm cool with it but he denies it, it didn't take long for him to start having me cover his ass while bj's were being given in the back (why yes, i did refuse the invitation for the sloppy seconds), weed was smoked in the coolers with his buddies where all sorts of implements were found such as gravity bongs, apples with holes, rolling papers and stuff from the stone age before electronic shit came into the market (where i worked long hours so probably second hand inhaled more crap than anyone in that store). My lesson was islam was a good religion...on paper. In real life, macho bullshit politics fucked things up, the stuff you learn in history class about how islam gave women more rights was true about 700 years ago but then men started messing things up. The reason i mention islam is that so much islamic and arabic culture is immersed into our own Mexican culture through the spanish that they are influence. The cultural thing was also a major factor that affected my religious views, I am Mexican...and the Mexican government went to war with the catholic church for a good three years because we wanted to teach sexual education and other stuff at our public schools. It got so bad that teachers were getting executed and since the church didn’t condemn it and actually spoke out in favor of this, then out they went. Good riddance! No more baptisms and no more services. The progressive government wanted the church gone for good but people didn’t and so a war came out. The Cristero war saw things get real bad on both sides. The Cristeros were being actual terrorists, killing school teachers and soldiers. To this day you see altars to holy young men who fought in the side of the church saying “Viva Cristo Rey!”.. And of course, this has always affected me view on religion, How can we support a church who sent out terrorists to kill teachers? The catholic church replaced all our gods and traditions and melded them into itself. Right now my father is planning celebrations on December 12 for earth mother Tonantzin who was renamed the virgen de guadalupe and is the biggest object of adoration for the whole of mexico.

Cristero boy mannequin in the cathedral in Mexicali. My experiences with eastern religions was first seen when i asked my uncle about the gods he would put in his store. My uncle is chinese mexican, he married my aunt whose very catholic but he followed along with the catholic dogma. I think of how many Mexicans keep chinese idols for good luck that it never seemed odd to me. You give your idol some spare change, fresh oranges and incense to keep good luck coming. I used to read about the veda’s in my government textbook from Mexico , because my aunts in Mexico city were teachers and damned if they allowed the catholic education system to keep me from reading what all the children in mexico were reading. The story of Nachiketas was way too impacting for me. Nachiketas is taught by Yama, the god of death, to forsake all the illusions of life to achieve Moksha and become a true enlightened being. I, like an idiot, tried to do so. I refused to drink based on this and the mesoamerican belief that alcohol was to sacred for casual use and was reserved as medicine. I refused to take any drugs, for it might cloud my mind from the true reality. And i refused to seek out sex, because it was a distraction just like the demons daughters tried distracting Buddha in his meditations. Bertolucci’s Little Buddha was a wonderful movie when i was teenager. I loved it. I loved the message of Buddhism, because i interpreted it as one should question everything. Not to believe anything because then you stop thinking and you must think to achieve the true enlightenment. So my belief in buddhism was to not believe in it Having contrasting points in my head wasn’t hard, i had already had a lot of practice from all weird thought experiments i had subjected myself to. To wrap it up i remember kindly of the SDA’s teachers who taught me. I engaged them in questions and they were always gracious. Mr Clendenon got me into Star Trek and Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy and Elder Breingan was always the kindest man to me. Mrs. Johnston was like a mom to me. It was horrible to me thought to have chapel every thursday because that meant we were getting a crazy talk, from the pastor telling us virginity was a wedding gift from god (i should have kept the receipt) to the crazy guy showing us a model of the city of future earth with walls made of different stones (he does know that the stones aren't to be a literal thing, right? They are metaphors for different tribes of israel) to all sorts of weird things they did such as the gymnastics teams that come from lord know where to show us how Jesus made their taut supple bodies, especially on the girls with their glutes of steel, bend that way. Yes it was tough to respect the religion of people you cared for when they tell you dinosaurs were in noah's ark. But they had a comfort in religion and i would never look to them as intellectually stunted as some atheists would. Religion is too personal for us to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t believe, and as humanity progresses we move on. At one point there was blood atonement and sacrifices to the god of Israel and we have moved on. Today, I saw an episode of the Orville that dealt exactly with that. That we should trust logic and progress to make sure that the crap religion has given us will go away. We catholics finally got a pope that believes we shouldn’t judge homosexuals and that evolution was the truth. It took the catholic church a good 500 years but it's getting there. It will probably step back or forward before it fixes all its problems, I might be too negative to believe we all will get there without having a horrible theocracy resurge to try to make last stand before people shun it so badly that religion gets put away along with the other bullshit humanity had like human sacrifice, slavery, horrible childhood mortality and lawn darts but I hope humanity will get there.. Shit..i was just going to write something quick.