The Promised Roads

Not ever having suffered from the illusion – or delusion – of religion I never expected some act of magic that would turn me away from this twisting lane I stumble down onto some golden road that leads straight to some distant city of the soul, where all that ails my existence would be cured and set right. The more I thought about it, though, the greater a lie it seemed to me; a false promise to those easily led by those that want the ease of leading the gullible.

I found the act of believing to be too great a leap over some great pit of probability for it to be anything I could even force myself to do. It always seemed to be the denial of too much of what is real, rather than the meek acceptance of some greater force. A turning away from the world, rather than a turning towards anything that lay out there beyond that one reaching finger on the ceiling.

So, when those people, standing at the occasional crossroad I come to, promise the path they show me will lead to that golden road and on to that invisible city, I simply turn away, without saying anything, and carry on down this twisting lane. For I know that anything they say to me will be as meaningless as the sound of the wind through the leaves, and that anything I could say to them will be dismissed for lying too far beyond anything they could ever reach for. This is because it seems that a belief, a religion, is like the bars of a prison that closes, shuts down, the lives of those inside them. All except for those lucky few who manage to escape and run free into this marvellous world that lies outside those cold high prison walls, for what they want to show me is not some great invisible city but a prison of the mind.