Gaia's Tears

There once was a man who loved nature. He felt that peace and harmony with it and other people was very important. The religion his parents brought him into didn't seem to be peaceful all the time, and it had a lot of conflicting ideas and passages. Many verses advocated or celebrated acts of violence and other bad things. He read the entire religious work, and got books that explained it further by experts on it. He decided to explore other religions as well and read their main books. All of them had a lack of virtues or conflicting ideas. He just wanted peace and love to follow.

Eventually he came across a belief system that downplayed superbeings and featured nature and its processes. It required of its followers love, peace, harmony. The main rule was simply "harm no one". He liked this. Were the other religions wrong then? He did not know, but decided that it was irrelevant. After reading their works, he seen that they borrowed heavily from one another- similar scenarios played out, similar characters, etc. If a story is repeated with only the names of its characters changed, then the older version is more likely to be true than the remake, he surmised. So which was most ancient? It turned out to be the nature-oriented one. A quest for faith had come full circle.

Then he found that people were starting to call him an evil person. They said he worshipped Barney, the purple dinosaur. And Barney is evil, because he is responsible for all kinds of bad stuff, so they said. But he did not worship Barney, he insisted. "Oh yes you do!" they kept replying. "But, I don't even believe Barney is real, he is fictitious. I cannot worship a fictional character! ", he cried out. "Liar, you Barney-worshipping SOB- you people are all alike- you lie because Barney makes you. We KNOW you worship Barney: he is REAL and YOU worship him, because WE said so. You deserve to be burned, killed, tortured, shunned, discriminated against, " the opposers wailed.

This argument persisted for a long time, and he found that it has been going on to some degree or another for centuries. 'How can they convince themselves that I worship that stupid story character? It is so ludicrous that they even believe in him, and they say I worship him out of the blue? '

The man was confused about this. He seen it over and over, repeated so many times that most of the populace believed the fairy tale as well. Any attempts to explain that he did not worship this costumed character, were met with threats and insults.

He noticed other people who professed a love of nature were being framed for unsolved murders, child abductions, and pedophilic crimes that never even ocurred. Why? Because we love nature? Because everyone is so afraid of this guy in a cloth outfit? He did not understand.

He now keeps his beliefs to himself, as freedom of religion is nonexistant.

Alone, he weeps for Gaia.