God... or God?

A Story by Ali A. Rizvi

I am in several minds about the religion I should adopt for myself - to see if there is anything that's better than what I was born into. I have decided to do a quick rundown of the gods available in different religions and see which one is right for me.

Weirdness in religion is only weird if the religion is not yours. For a while, I thought I was Muslim because it is the most rational, logical, reasonable, updated religion in the world. The reality is - 99% of the reason I'm Muslim is because I was born into it. If I was born into a family of Jehovah's witnesses, I guarantee you I'd think it was the bomb - at least until I was in a near-fatal accident and required a blood transfusion. So it's all an accident of birth. I have watched Hindu wedding ceremonies, and thought they were a bit weird, specially all the chanting. But I was born a Shi'a Muslim, and to be fair, I can imagine those Hindu wedding guests' faces as they're walking into an Imam Bara on the 10th of Muharram, watching us beat ourselves and crying over an event that occurred 1400 years ago.

It seems that all religions have that little balance of genius and kookiness, and we follow them, sometimes blindly, due to a belief conflictingly induced by fear and respect. I am in several minds about the religion I should adopt for myself - to see if there is anything that's better than what I was born into. I have decided to do a quick rundown of the gods available in different religions and see which one is right for me.

CHRISTIANITY: I like the concept of a God that loves you and will forgive. But He is a single parent, and the Trinity thing's a bit strange - for the Holy Spirit to go into Mary and conceive Jesus. But I like the emphasis on love and forgiveness. I love the idea that Jesus died for our sins, though I don't get why he couldn't heal all blindness instead of just a few blind people, or cure all leprosy instead of an isolated colony of the poor fuckers. The half-assed miracles don't do it for me. David Blaine can levitate too. And Edward Jenner eradicated all smallpox, not just a bunch of pus-oozing African kids. But there are positives: Brides at Christian weddings look hot as hell. Christmas rocks, and crosses make awesome pendants. Problem is, I like to poke fun at things (can you tell?), including religion, and Christianity, like Islam, will kill me for that s**t. I know they're slamming Muslims for the Rushdie fatwa, but here's Leviticus 24:16 for you:

"And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death." (King James version)

ISLAM: Not a bad choice. But honestly, the Muslim God scares the s**t out of me. Way too much fear - I'm not feeling the divine hippie-love that Christianity offers. If you start using too much fear to instill morality into people, you'll end up corrupting the morality itself and fetter the experience-based primary learning process, natural decision making, and common sense (which is not very common, by the way). I would love to stick to the idea of doing good for others out of empathy and goodwill rather than doing good just because I'm scared shitless of going to hell for eternity. Moreover, I think He makes the test way too hard. Commanding Abraham to circumcise himself with two rocks? Ouch. And showing up in his dream to tell him to sacrifice his son on top of that? Poor Isaac. Can you imagine the awkward father-son distance after that? "Isaac, wanna go fishing?"... "Sure, Dad... um... you didn't have another dream, did you?" God told Abraham he was testing him. Sounds like an insecure girlfriend - or boyfriend, depending on his sexual orientation - Who can literally send you to hell if you piss her/him off. Islam is awesome for men though -- four wives, the slave girls, and the temporary marriage (if you're Shi'a).

And it's the only religion where you can have sex with a married woman, as long as she's a slave or a prisoner of war:

"004.024 And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess." (Pickthall's translation)

Don't kill me for that. That's straight from the Quran - God talking, not me. But yeah, lots of plus points to being a male Muslim - it's okay to not have any control over your God-given horniness, because it's up to the women to take the responsibility of keeping it under control, by covering everything except their faces and hands. Highlights and straightening irons are for s***s. Unless they're for your husband - who can have three other wives, in addition to slave girls - single OR married - out of wedlock.

Sorry, what does 's**t' mean again?

What if you're a pedophile? Then it's your choice. If you like little boys, Christianity may be right for you, specially if you want to be a Catholic priest. It's what they have in common with acne - they'll both come on your face before you're thirteen. If you like little girls, then Islam might be a better option. Just wait till she's nine years old before you consummate the marriage. If that makes you mad - and your name is Ayesha - a shrink might help you more than just reciting Baqarah at Fajr. Anyway, on to Judaism!

JUDAISM: This is what first alerted us to the entire Abrahamic thing. A definite pro here is the lack of existence of hell, apparently. Is that true? Ahem. I think the Jewish God is female. It was Moses who brought down the Ten Commandments, and one of them was "Thou shalt not commit adultery." What the hell kind of a man would come up with that?? That set the stone in motion for Christianity, which followed, and screwed things up for all men with all that monogamy bullshit, not to mention abstinence for Catholic priests (yeah right, ask little Jeremy about that).

Islam, thank you for the reformation! Although - you probably should have gotten rid of the circumcision thing these Moses freaks came up with. To be fair, the good thing about circumcision is that you don't have to do it on yourself, but on a child who can't exactly say no or think for himself yet. True Abrahamic tradition. Sigh. With time, they've just toned down the intensity to focus the chop chop action on a different head. What's with the anti-foreskin, pro-hymen sentiment? Oh, and their God is also a little like the Muslim God - both have a secret alliance with pigs, who said to the Lord: "God, tell them to eat whatever they want, the goats on Eid, the turkeys on Thanksgiving, just have them stay the f**k away from us! We're the closest thing to the humans - so much that when they need new heart valves, we're the best animal to get them from! Eating us would be like cannibalism!"

HINDUISM: Apparently, there is only one God here which has many different aspects. These guys have a God with several arms and an elephant trunk. But the Jews, Christians, and Muslims have a 900 year old albino prophet who saved all the animals from a worldwide flood by putting them on a wooden boat. (God told him to do that, testing him like Abraham; it's a 'test' because, um, God also caused the flood.) Anyway, back to the Hindus. We've got the four wives/slave girls thing and they've got the Kama Sutra. The name of Abraham, the ancestor of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, is derived from Brahman, the concept of the supreme spirit, or the absolute and ultimate reality, in Hinduism (as well as the highest caste in their caste system). Brahman, in turn, is derived from brh, a Sanskrit word. F**k. This is a tough call. Oh oh oh! And another thing - Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka, like Jesus was born of the virgin Mary! How about that? I love what these religions ascribe to virgins - 'immaculate', 'pure', 'innocent', 'chaste', the glory of being 'untouched' - wow! Who would want to be unchaste, impure, un-innocent, and um... maculate? (Is that the opposite of immaculate? Whatever, man.) The thousands of female victims of this patriarchal 'save-your-virginity-and-you-won't-be-impure' mentality, of course! No girl wants to be impure and non-virginal, but virginity is a significant impediment to reproduction, so we have to compromise, but holy s**t, don't you think that if Britney Spears could have a kid without making her vagina a TWO-way street instead of one-way like all of these Gods' and prophets' moms, she'd have held on to that 'I'm a virgin' bullshit a little longer? Virginity is glorified in Islam too - the houris in heaven - the beautiful, wide-eyed girls that the good people get - are all virgins too, apparently with their hymens intact even after they've had a few 9/11 hijackers reap their rewards in paradise. They are wide-eyed, by the way - straight from the Quran - 44:54 - so if you have a heavy Asian fetish, get all you can here on earth, dude - heaven's going to suck for you.

SCIENTOLOGY: I can't be the same religion as Tom Cruise. He's hot, so I'd definitely f**k him, but then Lot (Or 'Lut' to the Muslims), the prophet who helped decimate all those f**s, could totally screw me over. Or, he could just offer me his daughters like he did back then! Again - from the Quran this time:

"011.078 And his people came unto him, running towards him - and before then they used to commit abominations - He said: O my people! Here are my daughters! They are purer for you. Beware of Allah, and degrade me not in (the person of) my guests."

Nice! Maybe I'll just pretend to be queer. Send your daughters my way! Or I'll just keep on threatening heterosexual marriage.

MOTHER GOOSE / AESOP / O. HENRY: When I was a kid, I couldn't tell religious stories from things like 'The Fox and the Grapes' by Aesop. And that story about Solomon stopping for a bunch of ants crossing the road - that's a classic - I still can't remember whether that's religious or not. Stories like O. Henry's 'The Ugly Duckling', and fables like 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf', all with a moral at the end of the story. If you told me today that these are from the Torah, Bible, or Quran - and I didn't know - I'd believe you. There's a whole religion that can be made out of this stuff. I'm excited. Really. Feel my n*****s.

GLORIA ESTEFAN: I'm not a big fan of her music. But I once spent some time directing half my prayers to God and the other half to Gloria Estefan. About 50% of my prayers to each entity were answered, and 50% weren't. Maybe I chose the wrong singer. I assume if I'd prayed to William Hung instead, God would have been nicer to me. Gloria probably isn't a virgin, so she's not pure and immaculate and chaste. (I'm betting - seriously - that William Hung is. Even Tom Cruise wouldn't f**k him.) There are confounding factors in this study, of course. God may have been upset with me for doing the experiment in the first place, and decided not to answer my prayers. But I don't understand why God would let His (or Her, if you're Jewish) ego get involved and get all competitive with a horrible Latina singer who believed Elian Gonzales should stay in the United States. The insecure girlfriend (or boyfriend) surfaces again.

BUDDHISM: I like the fact that Buddha comes in all shapes and sizes. I've seen skinny Buddhas, fat Buddhas, Buddhas with beer bellies, malnutritioned Buddhas, tiny Buddhas that you wear around your neck, and giant Buddhas, like the ones they blew up in Afghanistan. Jazakallah Khair, Mullah Omar! This is why God let you ride off into the sunset on a motorcycle with a blind eye and hid you from those foreskinned, hymenless infidels! Anyway, back to Buddha and his different shapes and sizes - this is good for the generation of today that thinks emaciation is the way to go, specially teenage girls. It's nice to know that your spiritual leader (Buddha's not considered a god) is physically multi-faceted, occasionally good looking, and very very smart. Buddha came up with some pretty impressive s**t, though he also fucked over women in his teachings, but hey, it's only 50% of the population - can't get everyone all of the time. Besides, women menstruate, which, according to the Muslim God, is an 'illness' (Quran, 2:222).

SANTA CLAUS: This is a man who flies through the air and lives at the North Pole, on top of the world. He makes a list and checks it twice. He rewards you if you're good, and doesn't reward you if you're bad. He has elves like God has angels. But if I tell people I believe in Santa Claus, they think I'm crazy. When I tell them I believe in God, that's perfectly fine - even though it's the same concept.

So there it is. It's a tough call. Choose one, choose none, or choose all, like the Mughal King Akbar. I'm still deciding. Right now, I'm f*****g going for William Hung.