Interpretations

To many around the world, God is their burning flame of creation and the burning flame of the destruction, their liege and their jinn, the manifestation of their faith and the shepherd of their lives. And yet, all of this is based on blind faith, nothing more, nothing less. How much can we lean to the sacred before we forsake the secular and doom ourselves?

There are many religions around the world, each boasting their own sacred texts, prophets and Messiahs. And yet, when one looks at the world's three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, one sees a definite correlation. Judaism recognizes the Old Testament as its pinnacle of belief, despite the fact that Christianity's leading figure, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, was himself a Jew. Christianity incorporates the Old Testament and the New Testament as well, in which Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Islam recognizes both the Old and the New Testaments and adds a further book, the Qua'ran. Said to be the revelations of the Archangel Michael to Mohammed, it post-dates Christianity and Judaism. Though Jesus is not the Son of God but merely a prophet, Muslims do not contest his life, death and teachings.

To add to this jumble are two others, Buddhism and Taoism. These two are similar and different at once. Rather than being catechisms to a higher power, it is a pursuit of the calamity of the soul and the progression of good over evil. In Buddhism, the almost holy figure of Buddha, a son of a great king born into privilege and prophesied to become a great one himself if he did not see suffering. Needless to say, that he saw, and gave up his riches and status to lead an aesthetic life, helping those in need and pursuing mental perfection. He achieved it, now known as the state of Nirvana, by dying. The Buddha cult teaches of eliminating desire to free oneself from suffering. Taoism teaches a somewhat inverse way - that Time will flow, that events will happen, and one can only sit back and do nothing to oppose them.

The first true monotheism occurred over two millennia ago in ancient Egypt. The Heretic King, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, declared all other religions derelict and introduced the worship of Aten, the Sun Disk. Though still pagan in the sense that it was tied to a physical object, mainly the sun, it had no other deities. Due to Amenhotep's forceful abashing of the other cults at the time, mainly that of Amun-Ra, his religion did not outlive him by more than a year.

And what is it that defines a God? In the words of the Roman Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus (commonly known as Vespasian), "woe is me, I think I am becoming a God!" Obviously, he is not, and yet, it begins the wheels of thought rolling in the direction of what the rules of thearchy are. Most commonly hold that their God is wise, omniscient, yet having a wrathful side. And yet, if one were to invent a God, would one not invent one with these qualities? Protagoras speaks as "Man [as] the measure of all things." It is true, at least in the eyes of Man, to compare everything to ourselves. We strive for intelligence, so we value it as a quality of a perfect God. We want omniscience, and so we award it to our deity. And anger takes hold of us like the primal beasts that we are, and so it is inconceivable for us to imagine a being without it.

Today, religion has surrendered to monotheism, and the majority of religious people believe in a single God, wether the Jewish, the Christian, or the Muslim. For centuries, they have been at war with one another and have lead to massacre after massacre in the pursuit of sainthood. The obvious examples are the three Crusades, and the Holy Jihad Saladin proclaimed to battle them. Others can be found in more recent chronicles, such as the handiwork of Muslim Fundamentalists such as the Taliban, Hamas and Al-Quieda. In a blatant turn against its own people with the blessing of the papacy, Cardinal Xemenez of Spain led the Spanish Inquisition which persecuted Protestants, Atheists and everyone else who had escaped from the Roman Catholic fold. The Ku Klutz Klan, a Christian extremist group, continues its activities to this very day. Originally founded by Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War and named for the sound of the cocking rifle, this highly racist group is known far and wide for the trademark they have established, the burning cross.

Abuse of power is also not a rarity - when the da'Medici family was cast out from Florence, Gregory da'Medici rose to Pope and his brother a Cardinal. On his 'glorious return' to Florence, he held a grand party in which a young boy of ten was painted in gold paint and was told to dance as part of the decor. He later died from asphyxiation of the skin. Pope Gregory da'Medici used his papacy (the disobeyance of which was heresy) to reestablish his own family's interests in Florence.

Negativity is not the only thing that religion inspires however, as works of great artisans are seen in bulk, all displaying religious scenes. One of Michelangelo's greatest works, currently residing in Rome, the Pieta, depicts the Virgin Mary holding her dead son in her arms. This lamentation is not an uncommon subject for artists of Christianity, yet the sight and the feel of this work portrays such emotional overtones that one must hold back the pathos that surfaces. And in antiquity, one can see many examples of great pinnacles of art in religious theme. The lands of every single continent on Earth boast religious temples or remnants of artworks, from the city of Teotihuacan in South America to Akhetaten in Egypt to Anghkor Wat in Cambodia. We the modern pious are not the first to construct Mosques, Cathedrals and Synagogues.

And yet, neither corruption nor macabre acts in the name of religion has dissuaded people from believing in what they want to be true. Perhaps the Bible and the Qua'ran are not merely updated myths to be added to the annals of past religious schools of thought by some distant offspring of today's misguided man, perhaps there is some sort of truth to the seemingly radical conservative teachings of other's Gods. If Father Time has taught us anything, it is that religion is by no means wrong and in some cases can be both beneficial to life and inspirational to the artistic aspect; the danger lies in perverting it with fundamentalism or using it as a mask to hide the dark acts of a black soul.