opinion@dailylobo.com
After I turned 17, I got my first job as a busboy in the café of some casino up in Española. There, you have two choices: You can choose between doing the day shift or the night shift.
I mostly did the night shift because I got more tips at night, especially on weekends when almost everybody who ate in our place was drunk. But whenever I worked during the day, our supervisor made us do a weird task at the end of our shifts.
At 2:30 p.m., after wiping all the tables, we were required to carry racks and racks of glasses, and we put a pair on every table. Then, whenever a customer took a table, we were required to stow the unused glasses back in the racks in the kitchen.
I never figured out why this was necessary, especially if customers never used the glasses anyway. I tried to tell this to my supervisor.
“I don’t care. Do as I say, or thou shalt be fired,” she said, but in a less harsh way.
Religion is a lot like my former supervisor. It requires you to do unnecessary things. If you’re Muslim, you shouldn’t eat pork. If you’re Jewish, you shouldn’t drive on a Saturday. If you’re Christian, you shouldn’t f*** another man.
And if you decide to be ballsy, just as how I decided to confront my boss, and do these things anyway, you technically become a sinner. That automatically hurts your chances of meeting your virgins in heaven, wherever that is.
Plus religion doesn’t just force you to set up then take back glasses on tables you bussed. Sometimes it also makes its followers take the glasses and slam them on somebody’s head.
Believe it or not, religion can cause violence.
On Sunday, an Albuquerque man, Lawrence Capener, allegedly stabbed a choir leader during a Mass at St. Jude Thaddeus Catholic Church.
Capener told police he did this because he thought the choir leader was a Mason and that the devil was trying to influence churchgoers. He also allegedly stabbed four others during the incident. Luckily, he didn’t kill anyone. He has been charged with aggravated battery.
According to The Associated Press, Capener had been attending the church for about three months, and his mother, a Eucharistic minister at the same church, was “very active” in the parish.
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I think the stabbing is partly religion’s fault. For some reason, Christianity has always demonized underground organizations such as the Masons. Many Christians have evil thoughts about how these organizations are Satan’s minions, sent to post YouTube videos to invade the world. At first I thought people who say such things were just trolling online, but after this incident happened, my faith in humanity faded just a little more.
If I have learned one thing from the novel “Angels and Demons,” it’s that the Illuminati came into being after Masons and other men of science gathered to protest the excommunication of Galileo.
Galileo was placed under house arrest after he proposed that the sun, not Earth, was the center of the solar system. He turned out to be right, but it took the Roman Catholic Church centuries before it finally apologized to Galileo’s grave.
These underground groups were nothing more than protest groups. So if anybody has the right to slam glasses on somebody’s head, it would be the Illuminati and Masons on the head of Christianity — not vice versa.
Not to mention the Crusades. Catholics killed many just so Christian powers could take back their Holy Land, which resulted in the wider spread of Christianity around the world and in more priests putting their fingers in people’s mouths to feed them the Eucharist week after week.
And I don’t necessarily want to just focus on Christianity when talking about causing violence. Who can forget about 9/11?
Arguably, Islamic extremism caused this tragedy. And as a result, a number of people in different religions hate Muslims now, too.
Love was supposed to be the language that religion speaks. As Jesus and Confucius once said, “Do unto others what you want others to do unto you.” Instead, I remember reading last year about Palestinian soldiers shooting their guns in the air wildly. “We are killing in the name of God,” they shouted to Israelis. Israelis probably did the same.
Bulls***.
Despite all these hostile words, I am not ranting that all religious people are war-advocating, Mason-hating, 9/11-causing individuals. It’s just sad when religions repeat their words so often that they forget the real meaning of those words.
Religion should never be about just wanting to feed the Eucharist to churchgoers and killing them if they refuse to follow you.
Religion should be centered on love, on empathy, on human kindness.
And thus, extremism has no place in religion. If you think you’re better than somebody just because you have a different faith, you have a problem. If that’s the case, it’s a lot better to just reject religion, adopt your own humanistic beliefs and live your life as a good person. This way, fewer choir leaders will be stabbed in the world.
I sound like a hippy right now, don’t I?
I’m not going back to that casino. Partly because I have a problem with authority. Also, I don’t want to just put glasses on tables without any particular reason anymore. I might get too used to it if I do, and I might just end up breaking a glass on the head of that cashier in the Sonic across from the casino. That would be embarrassing.
