soul food

I was raised Catholic. When I was growing up, my mother encouraged me to learn the beliefs that she learned as a child. Like many Americans, as a young adult my mother also encouraged my independent search of faith, philosophy and religion. She gave me the ultimate authority to make these kinds of decisions for myself. Where I come from, individuality is the cultural religion.
When I was young, there was God. A great big man-thing that had control over everything. Wow. I had absolute faith in something I never saw, heard, touched, tasted or smelled. That was fine until I started to get a little older and started to learn about the things that other people didn’t see, hear, touch, taste or smell. As I learned more about world faith and religion I learned more about their bizarre contrasts. The believers were as devout as I, but to a different idea completely. As I could no longer jump into one camp or another without feeling the arrogant exclusivity of billions of God’s children, I became a true heathen. What was spoon-fed to me as a child increasingly defied sense, logic or reason and began to defeat its own purpose.
Eventually my faith in anything fell out completely. It’s not any easier to believe in nothing, especially when you’re hungry.

In all my travels, the only thing that seems to be universal is people. There are lots of people, and more on the way! My faith has shifted towards the survival of my species. Primitive yet powerful, this idea is far from the fast food of philosophies. True, all I have to do is maintain an active sense of responsibility towards my fellow humans and I can sleep well at night, but considering the complexity of our synthetic world, this responsibility sounds simpler than it is.
Whether I go to my happy hunting ground after I die remains to be seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled. No worries though. I don’t hunt for my food.