On Religion and Divisions
The astute reader would have noticed that despite my stated job being “Guardian Angel” I’ve been careful to avoid mentioning religion. There’s a reason for that, and it’s actually fairly simple – I’m not in the amusingly assonant Religion Relations Department.
My job is moral education, plain and simple. I come across religions very occasionally and it amuses me that while they all differ in the details, they all get the main message right.
Regardless, despite all agreeing in the main, it seems a human obsession with creating new versions of all the major religions; from all the various orthodoxies and cults, to novel creations like pastafarianism, the lolcat bible, and this surreal creation epic. This doesn’t just apply to religion though; humans seem generally prone to creating new artificial distinctions in whatever it is they’re into. Just look at the fractious geeks and their coding religions, the plethora of different (yet indistinguishable) genres of music and all the pointless arguments between various sports fans.
I’ve often meant to ask someone in RRD about this, and I got the chance the other day. His response was some complicated drivel about the human animal being a pack animal and being unable to cope with empathy at the scale of the entire human race. His friend summed it up for me: “to a human, people look like ants from a long way away”.