Religion 101

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+ his past winter I traveled through Europe, Israel and the United States with a camera crew, search­ing for an answer to a question that had bothered me for a long time: Why are people religious? I wanted to see the locations that mean so much to the true believers. Everywhere I went gave me further reason to agree with John Adams: "This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it."

CERNE ABBAS, England

In the little village called Cerne Abbas in southern Eng­land you can see something highly unusual: the image of a giant, carved into a hillside and known as the Rude Man. From across the meadow what you see is a chalk outline in the hill. It was made when someone—or some­thing—carved a shallow, two-foot-wide ditch through the grass and topsoil and filled it with white chalk. It forms the shape of a huge naked man with a sizable erect penis. Well, sizable for England.

In his right hand the giant holds a 120-foot club. Yes, he might have been a giant with a big penis, but he was still insecure. Some people think an actual giant is buried under that hill; others think it has to do with crop circles or ancient space visitors or druids.

But no one really knows, and that's what I found fasci­nating about Cerne Abbas: It doesn't mean anything. The locals have maintained it for centuries, and they have no idea why they do it. They do it because they've always done it. And that's religion for you: Sometimes you kneel, sometimes you fast, and sometimes you go up the hill and cut the grass around the giant space penis.

It should also serve to remind us that we've had so many gods over the centuries, what makes us so certain we've got the right ones now? How can we trust our heart? When we were dating Wotan, it just felt so right. What if

we're wrong again and Jesus breaks our heart too? Before him it was Jehovah, and before him was Zeus, and before him we had a thing with the moon.

Someone carved a pantless giant into a hill because it meant something to them. And what if they were right? What if you get to heaven and they say, "Sorry, you led a nice life, but you didn't worship the naked dude with the club and the big cock. Bye. Enjoy hell."

I'm just saying, better safe than sorry.

THE VATICAN, Vatican City

When you approach the Vatican, with its enormous C-shaped columns out front, it's hard not to ask yourself, Does this look like anything Jesus Christ had in mind? Talk about a hostile takeover! It looks like what it is—a giant bureau­cratic building.

I wonder how many of the cell-phone photographers—excuse me, pilgrims—I saw milling around in the square were aware of how much in Catholicism comes not from the founder but from the bureaucrats who came after him.

For instance, there are the scribes who penciled Resurrection scenes into the Gospel of Mark more than 100 years after it was written. Yes, it's true—there is no resurrected Jesus in the original Gospel.

Why not? I'm quite sure Jesus once said, "After I go, appoint a spokesperson for me and make sure he lives in a giant palace—the better to remind people of my thing about the meek inheriting the earth. And make sure there are more and more buffers that get between the people and their God. Like me—they have to go through me to get to the big guy, even though the big guy is really me. I know, that's confusing, but I like it confusing! In fact, make up some sort of Holy Ghost no one can understand so the Church can have another vote by claiming it alone knows what the Ghost would think, since it completely made him up. And priests—let's make sure people have to go through them, too—oh, and my mom, let's not forget her."

I was raised Catholic, and I swear it was like going to the DMV. I kept wondering, How many lines do I have to stand in?

JUDAH DESERT, Israel

In the late 1940s, right around the time the nation of Israel was being born, Jews in the stark, unforgiving Judah Desert made a startling discovery: The Arabs were already mad at them.

But there was something else. Deep in the caves of Qumran they found what the world has come to know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Written by an ancient Jew­ish sect believed to be the Essenes, the scrolls contain fragments of almost every book in the Old Testament, plus prophe-

cies by Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Daniel that are not in the Bible, as well as psalms attributed to King David and Joshua that are also not in the Bible.

It seems we keep finding Bible out-takes like we find "new" Elvis and Tupac records.

Now, I know religious Christians and Jews alike get their hair shirts in a bunch when you call the Bible a fairy tale, and they have a point—the Bible is actually an anthology of fairy tales, a kind of Reader's Digest collection of books written in different languages over thousands of years and then assembled and translated into Ameri­can, just as God planned.

The question is, who decided what got into the Bible and what got edited out and was included only with the director's cut and the DVD extras?

I'll tell you who: man—and when I say "man," I specifically mean people with penises, because no religion I ever heard of would let women make an important decision like that.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a living reminder that religious books are often about as sacred and holy as Saran Wrap. They were written by men and edited by men and, judging by some of the nonsense that made it in, edited pretty badly.

No wonder even though the Dead Sea Scrolls were found more than 60 years ago, most of them still haven't been pub­lished. Which is too bad because Yahweh has totally burned through his advance.

SALT LAKE TEMPLE, Salt Lake City

It really doesn't compare to the great cathedrals of Europe, but the Mormon Salt Lake Temple is still impressive. It has lots of soaring spires that make you feel as if you're halfway to heaven already!

To be a Mormon is to believe some really crazy stuff—crazy even by the stan­dards of the big religions. But that's the plight of the newer ones like Mormonism and Scientology. When you're the new kid on the block, all the good crazy myths have been used, so you have to up the ante: I'll see your burning bush and talk­ing snake, and I'll raise you magic under­wear and extraterrestrial infestation.

Which may help explain why both Mormonism and Scientology derive their creation myths from novels. Yes. actual novels. The Book of Mormon—with its ideas about the American Indian being a lost tribe of Israel and the Gospel being preached here in the New World—seems completely lifted from a book called View of the Hebrews, kind of the way The Da Vinci Code ripped off Holy Blood, Holy Grail. L. Ron Hubbard, of course, the founder of Scientology, was himself a science-fiction novelist.

Now, there's nothing wrong with mak­ing up stories about galactic warriors invading Earth, except that Scientol­ogy isn't found in the fiction section of your bookstore. It sounds to me like a science-fiction novelist said to him­self, Hey, people take this shit seri­ously. What am I doing wasting my time over here in the fiction section? Actu­ally, what Mr. Hubbard is reported to have said is "I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is."

ANNE FRANK HOUSE, Amsterdam

When you stand in front of it—a non­descript house on a busy street—you really feel how true the phrase "banal­ity of evil" is. One of the most common arguments in defense of religion is that Hitler wasn't religious and neither were Stalin and Mao, and they were bad, so religion must be good. But like religion itself, this argument relies on one's not thinking too deeply.

For one thing, Hitler didn't personally exterminate all his victims, and many of his foot soldiers who pushed people into ovens were good Christians. Religion doesn't ever seem up to the task of put­ting the brakes on violence; if anything, it constantly justifies acts of madness.

And although 20th century fascism and communism weren't religions as we commonly think of them, they really were religions: state religions. Hitler was seen as infallible and godlike, while Hirohito was a god on earth. We should not get hung up on the word religion.

What matters is this: Whenever peo­ple organize their life around something whose chief property is groundlessness, bad things follow. Even if the central story is harmless—like "There's a God who loves you so much he whacked his own son so you could keep sinning"—it doesn't matter, because once reality has left the building, anything can be extrapolated or tacked on by priest­hoods and preachers and other delu-sionals and power-hungry pricks. It's a small step from "Your god loves you very much, and he's the only real god" to "So you really need to get out there and kill for him."

When people believe something utterly groundless because they were told it by a charismatic preacher—and Hitler was nothing if not that—all bets are off. Nazism was a religion based on the insane fiction that Jews were subhuman vermin unfit to live. That's crazy, but people—and not a primitive society of people—believed it because (a) they liked the preacher, (b) all the sheep around them were buying it even though it was crap, and (c) it was tied to their glorious Valhalla future.

A-B-C: That's religion.

RELIGIOUS BOOKS ARE ABOUT AS SACRED AND HOLY AS S AR AN WRAP.