Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage. Concealed     
there, the fish of the sould could splash and feed. Eventually, however,       
religions became aquariums. Then, hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen   
fish stick is a short swim. 

    At best, perhaps, when the fourth veil does slip aside, Spike and Abu will 
be better prepared than most to withstand the shock of this tough truth:       
religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium 
of the masses, it is the cyanide.

    Of course, religion's omnipresent defenders are swift to point out the     
comfort it provides for the sick, the weary, and the disappointed. Yes, true   
enough. But the Deity does not dawdle in the comfort zone! If one yearns to    
see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the     
fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore 
the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of the lily pads. How limiting, how      
insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, and absentee hatchery        
manager who imprisons us in the "comfort" of artificial pools, where           
intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of        
processed nutriment.

    A longing for the divine is intrinsic in Homo sapiens. (For all we know,  
it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well.) We       
approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To      
expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence.

    Well and good. But such activity runs counter to the aspirations of        
commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, and person in    
the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to       
control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion  
a very long time ago. Kings bought off priests with land and adornments.       
Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The 
walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held       
together with fear. They called the tanks "synagogues" or "churches" or        
"mosques."
   
    After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about soul anymore.      
Instead, they talked about spirit. Soul is hot and heavy. Spirit is cool,     
abstract, detached. Soul is connected to the earth and its waters. Spirit is   
connected to the sky and it gases. Out of the gases springs fire. Firepower.   
It has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war. Once   
religion became political, the exercise of it, too could be said to lead      
sooner or later to war. "War is hell." This, religious belief propels us       
straight to hell. History unwaveringly supports this view. (Each modern         
religion has boasted that it and it alone is on speaking terms with the Deity, 
and its adherents have been quite willing to die--or kill--to support its      
presumptuous claims.)

    Not every silly bayou could be drained, of course. The soul fish that bubbled 
and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged "mystics." They were        
regarded as mavericks, exotic and inferior. If they splashed too high, they    
were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination. The fearful       
flounders in the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit    
flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical.

    Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is,         
mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt   
to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in 
which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.

    Those who witness the dropping of the fourth veil might see clearly what   
Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee dimply suspected: that not only is religion   
divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people;  
it is a suffocation of the soul.

Tom Robbins-- Skinny legs and all