it has me worried...

I wish I could say that books were my religion without sounding defensive and barbaric. I wish that, somehow, people who were religious could consider their religiosity a system of viewing the world, and not as the world itself. Because only by accepting the premise that religion is a system (and not an entity higher than other disciplines) can I compare it to other systems - to the system of literature. I'm hounded alternately by both the thought that the highest calling is to religion, and by the thought that my mind is only made to struggle with lesser subjects, not the divine. The world of human sciences and the human mind, at least, offers encouragement, solution, reason to be analyzed. But perhaps I substitute it for religion because my mediocre mind is not structured for higher yearnings...and that bothers me to no end.

But if religion and literature are both systems, then I could say without shame that literature offers to me what God may offer to someone else. I do not dare to compare individual authors with God, but the overall expanse of literature offers a vision of humanity that is comparable to the vision given to believers. Both religion and literature demand loyalty and sacrifice to a life does not exist but in thought, that you live your own life but judge it from without simultaneously, that you be devoted to the past and representations of the past. Both are designed to make you aware of your own insignificance without rejecting you, rather promoting that you join the ranks of those who have come before. And both systems are cloaked in a philosophy of self-examination and self-consciousness that lies beyond the ego, that requires us to recognize ourselves.

People pray without feeling sometimes, and people read without connecting the words to outside meanings. Each system is threatened by hedonism and misinterpretation. Both systems can be blamed for death, for wars and the tracts calling for those wars.

It remains that these two systems (and there are more) offer visions of the world that are comforting. Not comforting because they are forms of escape, delusion, or insecurity, but comforting because they provide a framework into which all additional knowledge can be organized. Literature is my framework, but I don't doubt that for another it is music, or another form of art. But as the world presents me with an array of places and information and emotion, so varied and chaotic, literature can allow me to match old ideas with new ones, fear with another's fear, and life in the context of other lives. And because each system of art is dynamic, it can expand to incorporate and explain the most shocking contemporary knowledge with the slight comfort of familiarity.

Here an advocate for the supremacy of religion would say, no, religion is not intended to offer only comfort, but also negate the comfort that it offers, by having each person suffer individually and struggle with their faith in the system of coherence, in the vision of the world. But literature is not so stable a friend in itself, for a book's pages are limited, and the familiarity that it offers within those pages ends at the back cover. So a reader, too, is left abandoned, awake to that chaotic world of impressions that have yet to be sorted. Neither system takes the fear from life. I only make the comparison between the systems because I would like to know, for myself, whether I create a vision of my world in ways that others create visions of their worlds. Or, do my ways, because of the limitations of my system, lack depth.

Making religion an art is scandalous, as was the vision of history as art. To declare something 'subjective' is to make it relative, susceptible to individual whims, to make it serve and not be served. But what it loses in omnipotence it gains in feeling-- history and religion have never been so appealing in all their forms as when I could apply my own thoughts to them. Still, religion cannot be an art to those who prop it above the entire world. But if there is a God, I can't imagine that He would object to our serving the world, but substituting Him with a vision of humanity that is as complicated and honorable as He himself.