the timboucher experience

Every once in a while, I like to come back down to earth and see how the rest of humanity thinks about and portrays religion. I’m fully aware that my own views come off as rather “outlandish” or at least unusual to the average person. So, with that in mind, I’ll sometimes fool around on sites like Beliefnet. But it always is really weird to me whenever I see stuff like this. On the one hand, this site’s kinda cool that it gives like regular people information (sort of) and a forum to think about religion. But then, on the other hand, they have just ridiculous pointless crap on there too, like this “Belief-O-Matic” quiz. This kind of shit really summarizes pretty effectively I think what this whole site is about.

Basically, you just answer 20 questions and its supposed to tell you what religion your views are most aligned with. Yes, I recognize that it’s basically just supposed to be a learning toy, and that’s fine. But I just don’t see it as a very useful one. Their questions fall into the following categories (paraphrased slightly):

1. Belief in Deity & nature of its incarnations
2. Origin of Universe and Life
3. What happens after death?
4. Why does evil and suffering exist?
5. Role of and path to “Salvation”
6. Contemporary social issues

When I see these categories, I really realize just how far away I’ve come from the popularly accepted definition of what religion is all about. It’s just weird, because I don’t really think about religion in terms of the whole equation of: God + Cosmology + Afterlife + Evil/Suffering + Salvation = Religion. In one way, I almost feel like that has nothing to do even with religion at its core. “What?” You’re saying indignantly, “Nothing to do with religion? You’re off your rocker, Boucher!” Maybe I am, who knows. But the way I see religion is basically as the stories we tell ourselves and that we tell each other to help us get through this thing called Life. It’s pretty simple actually. It’s much simpler than all that God + This + That stuff, although those kinds of stories fit very comfortably into this definition.

It’s also completely retarded the “matches” this quiz game me, in terms of what religions I’m most suited to. Baha’i, Christian Science, & fucking Mormonism make up three of the top four. I got a 100% match with the Bahai Faith. Ridiculous! I mean, they’re pulling this stuff outta their damned ass. I think the problem is probably that I just abstained from answering a lot of the questions, because I thought they were just completely erroneous to what I think of as religion, or like as my own “spirituality” or whatever. So probably the few ones I did answer is what landed me with those weird-ass religions.

One thing I don’t understand, is like according to this, I have a 53% match with Taoism, and I checked out their little rant on it, and it’s like one of the only ones I really do agree with more or less in total. And it says stuff like “Taoism does not refer to any specific incarnation of God,” or “Death has no particular meaning to Taoists.” Like I didn’t answer any of the questions that dealt with that stuff either, so how in the hell do you land a 100% match according to their weird system of rating?

Anyway, the whole thing is very annoying, but also oddly educational, like I said - in terms of bringing me back down to how regular people are thinking about this kind of shit, and what I’m gonna have to change about what I’m saying (or how I’m saying it) before I’m going to be able to communicate with people who are using these kind of mental tool sets to think about religion.

• Delusional Beliefs
• The Filter of Belief
• Scientists & God
• Is Belief in God Simplistic?
• Ritual without belief