Somebody asked me in an email what my religion was. I thought it was an odd question, cause well, I don’t really think like that. Like my religion is religions. More accurately stories. Cool stories. Anyway, this is what I wrote back to them regarding that question.

as to religion, i dont have one. ive never found one that i liked all of what they said and wanted to apply it whole cloth to my life. i think of religions more as systems of stories and characters according to which people model their inner lives. i was raised catholic - both parents work for the church in a movement called the charismatic renewal. both parents also are really into sci-fi/fantasy, so that kind of combined with catholicism in my head to create the set of stories that i personally respond most strongly to. if i was forced at knifepoint to say what my religion was, i would either say it was syncretism (when people combine religions to make new ones - i have a couple articles about it on my site) or i would say my religion was comic books, video games, and fantasy novels. basically i like to find stories, look around inside them, and give them away to other people who need them. i think thats my “religion” as well as my ultimate purpose in life.

I also included this thing from Alan Moore that I have always loved since before I even read it. So dead on…

“Each religion is a language, and magic is linguistics. In the sense that, if you are a linguist, there’s no such thing as a ‘false language.’ It’s not like “oh yeah, French is real, but Russian is not a real language.’ If you’re a magician, you have to accept ALL of those religions as being ‘real’. They’re all true languages! So, you get a different array of concepts, a different worldview in each of the religions. To some degree, I take the quantum position that ALL of them are right in a sense. In order to see truth, you have to consider a lot of different possible positions and hold them all to be true in some mysterious way. Magic, in this sense, is moving between those different positions, studying them, seeing what information there is to be gleaned from each of them, seeing how they connect up. … And you follow these chains of ideas. You do that long enough, you start a different set of synaptic connections in your brain, different pathways. And you start to see things in a different way. You start to put things together differently.”