Defend your Faith?!!?

I was driving in to work one morning when I saw this little ditty stuck on the back of a SUV. Worse still, it was one of those magnetic ribbons that I see, usually ordering me to support the military. Even more recently, I saw one that ordered me to pray for the troops. Heh. There also is a ribbon ordering me to save the boobies...Major General Mictlantecuhtli reporting, sir!

This message takes the cake and it is not the first time my dessert has been snatched away because, if anything, these cultists are definitely inventive in ways that set to boil my anger and disgust with a side of classic you-poor-bastard head-smacking.

There is no reason to tell people to do this. Does it make a difference? No. The sad part is that they cannot see it. If faith is publicly banished, you, the cultist, still have it. The cultists would not have a label to stick on their group for fear of reprisals but you, the cultist, have faith. That, realistically, is faith - the singular interaction of a couple of neurons in that mass of grey jello in your skull. It is not a group-think. The only thing that the group has is a label for the faith, which has the same depth as calling a mixed group of bovines "cows."

Why? Because, while they definitely are all cows, they are not the same sub-species. This one is brown, this one has eight horns...you see the pattern here. Cultists within a single cult are the same way. They have the same basic tenets but they interpret and express them in different ways. Next time you are in your cult center, look at the zombie-bozo next to you. Do they feel exactly the same way about certain aspects of the tenets of the cult as you do? Are they as vehement about the same things as you? Probably not.

They may lean that direction, but is it the same amount? Maybe they lean the other way. All of those differences make up that person's faith, just as those same opinions make up yours. That is your faith. They are not the same. Maybe the zombie-bozo next to you would like nothing more than for some tenet that you hold dear to be kicked to the curb by the cult. You are both still members of your cult with a fundamental disagreement.

Think it's bullshit? I'll make it simple: abortion. Do you think you disagree with some of your fellow cultists over abortion? Are those reasons mundane or theological, not that it really matters for the sake of the argument - of course, it would be best if the assessment was that it was theological. It is a difference and that makes one person's faith different from another.

It is up to an individual cultist to defend their own faith because they define their faith.

So by defending your faith, which, arguably, will contain tenets and ideas that are antithetical to advancement and human progress, what this imperative is really saying is: "Defend your ignorance."

That is much clearer to me.