If you worship under the flag of Catholicism, you worship an institution that continues to lie to its laiety about articles of its history and about the very foundations of its faith. It has become the quintessential model of organized mind control and bureaucratic indifference on a scale that boggles the imagination.
How anyone can obtain continued spiritual sustenance from such a wretch is beyond me, but you do need to know that it is possible. A "freedom-loving" Creator allows for such things. I come from such stock.
If you worship under the flag of rebellion against Catholicism, you believe in the possibility that an unchanged heart is capable of creating unlike itself. Such is not the case, I assure you, so at best you are six inches closer on a journey of one thousand miles, and, at worst, you are miles behind where you intended to go in the first place. Even so, a person of the courage and integrity of Professor Steven Jones hails from such stock, revealing the possibility, again, of a loving Creator capable of reaching inside our most innocent, or fetid, religious organizations and wringing out important matters of truth and understanding.
If you worship under a flag from the East, you worship unlike the other two spiritual traditions in form only. Regardless of how self-indulgent or self-expanding your meditations become the basic problem of obtaining contact with a power greater than one's self and then being unable to effectively and accurately communicate that relationship with one's fellows remains. Ten pounds of the best fertilizer known to man trapped inside of a five pound bag.
If you worship beneath the flag which denies all flags you will become obsessed with the existence of flags so that you can then deny they exist. Perfect self contradiction and a precise reflection of the form of all other flags, combined. Atheism, as it turns out, is a religion, too, and capable of the same hypocrisies, hubris and internecine behaviors evident in any organized religion. As Bob Dylan once wrote, "you gotta serve somebody."
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