Editor's Note:  We often introduce Citric Acid as "Orange County's unlikeliest literary arts journal." In an embrace of unlikelihood, we're pleased once again to surprise and delight even ourselves (!) by sharing three more entries from UCI Religious Studies Lecturer Dr. Joseph McKenna's unpublished lexicon, An Opinionated Dictionary of Religion.

God

Polytheism says there are many gods, and you may worship and adore them all. 

Henotheism admits of many gods too, but you should only devote yourself to one. 

Kat-henotheism also acknowledges many gods, but you should devote yourself to one god at any given time, moving from god to god at different periods of your life.

Monotheism declares there is only one god to worship and adore.

Trinitarianism affirms one god, but this god is to be worshiped and adored in three persons: Father, Son Jesus, and Holy Ghost.

Dualism says there are two gods, one good and one evil, and you should adore the good one.

Dystheism says there's one god who is not altogether good; adore with caution.

Pantheism states that God is identical to the many things of the material world, and when you adore the many things of the material world you adore God.

Pan-entheism claims that God is within the many things of the material world but distinct from the many things of the material world.  You may adore this god in the material world or as something transcending it.

Deism insists there is one god who created the universe but thereafter took no interest it. You do not adore this god because this god cares about you as much as he cares for the life of an oyster.

Daoism maintains that God is not a person at all but an impersonal Force that pervades the universe and requires no adoration.

Monism proclaims there is only one item in existence, namely God: God is everything, everything is God, and everything is only one thing, namely, God.

Anatheism says the real God has never been captured by human language or human religions, and you may adore this God on your own terms.

Atheism says there are no gods at all.

Misotheism hates all gods, existent or not.

Apatheism's adherents couldn’t care less whether gods exist or not.

Agnosticism finds no credible reason to believe in God but prefers to say no one can know for certain if God exists or not. (An agnostic is no kind of believer in God.)

Ignosticism scoffs even at agnosticism's presumed knowledge of God. Ignostics advise us to give up the word "God" and rub it from the world’s lexicons and never utter it again. Why? Because we have established over many thousands of years that we do not know what the word "God" signifies, as indisputably displayed in humanity’s profound disagreements about God evinced in this very roster of eighteen. If a Martian from outer space were to land on Earth and ask the human race what God is, the Martian would hear only a cacophony of discordant voices—proof enough that humans don’t know what they’re talking about when they talk about "God." Ask an Ignostic "Do you believe in God?" and the reply comes: "I don’t know what you mean by the question." Ignosticism is a 20th-century coinage combining two words: agnostic and ignorant.

These eighteen options on God lead us inexorably to the conclusion that humanity has never ever agreed about who or what or whether God is.

And whichever your option on God (consult the list above), please be mindful that your view is a minority report, vastly outnumbered by all the other options combined.

Hair

When it comes to hair and religion, there are different strokes for different folks.

Consider a selection of holy hairstyles for men:

Some sects of Hinduism and Rastafarianism wear long unkempt dreadlocks to signify stout spirituality.

Some denominations of Buddhism keep long hair tightly wound into a topknot, suggesting spiritual control.

Other kinds of Buddhism completely shave the head to indicate spiritual commitment of the highest order.

Sikhs see shorn hair as an unnatural altering of God’s creation, and so hair is never to be cut.

For a few Christian monks, just the top of the head is shaved while a circle of bangs is left all around to imitate the crown of thorns Jesus was made to wear at his crucifixion.

Most religions’ hair customs are not authoritatively pronounced in sacred scriptures, but in a few cases hair legislation comes from the highest authority.

In the biblical book of Leviticus, God commands males not to cut their hair from the back of the ears all the way to the temples at the edge of the forehead. And so we see the long side-curls of Hassidic men and boys.

In Islam’s Hadith, which relate Muhammad’s sayings and habits, the prophet said God told him to trim his hair to the shoulders, trim his moustache above his lip, and let his beard grow as long as it may.

Women in the religions essentially face one rule for hair—modesty.

Since female hair is viewed as a sexual adornment and thereby potentially tempting to men, some religions ask women to cover their hair completely by veiling in communal spaces.

Why would religion take such interest in human hair?

Is it like parents presenting their child in a public forum and feeling good breeding is reflected in a child's pasted-down locks? 

Is it a strategy to routinize religion by attaching it to everyday activities like grooming? 

Is it meant to suffocate vanity?

Is it a way to deepen a sense of societal separation that one's religion has already effected?

Indeed, is it a way of "costly signaling"—of letting viewers know the devotee has made real sacrifices to be a follower of this religion?

Conjure in your mind's eye any holy person of any sect of any religion. You cannot picture them caped in a trendy Rodeo Drive hair salon pondering highlights, lowlights, and the silver sheen of thinning shears. But why can’t you picture it? 

If you answer that such a scenario would be unseemly for the holy, we can simply repeat the query. Why?

Imagination

Since most religions have been factually untrue, the power of imagination in the religions is absolute.

That is, most religions are wholly imagined—from commencement to conclusion, from matins to vespers, from etiology to eschatology, from the little a to the little z, from the big Alpha to the big Omega. Religions are the products of a collective fantasia.

Doesn't this speak to the power of imagination?

(Note: You may forgivably perceive your own religion as the only factually true and un-imagined religion in a history of many thousands of religions.)

Religions are imagined first by their originators, but to become religions, religions must also be co-operatively imagined by followers of the originator. Otherwise the originator is not the originator of a religion but merely the creator of a novel idea.

When ornate beliefs, overly-elaborate exercises, rituals, ceremonies, tomes and telic offerings to supra-natural beings have been accepted as actual by an entire town, or by a nation, or by a hemisphere—we have religion, and we have on display the religious imagination.

Normally, people can distinguish the imaginary from the real and do not believe what is imagined; but in the case of religion, disbelief is permanently suspended, the implausible assumes plausibility, and imagination becomes confirmed belief.

How is this possible?

(Again: Your religion was never implausible; we are speaking of other people's religions.)

Even when we arrest our disbelief during the enjoyment of fiction, whether perceived aurally or optically or only within the mind's eye, we do not extend our suspension of disbelief beyond the termination of the art form. We do not continue believing the fiction.

But a religious person may for a lifetime believe that a dew-eyed newborn religious hero walked upright on infant legs and spoke articulately about his coming life-long duties, may believe that a grown man floated three feet above the dirt and hovered there for half an hour, may believe that a bloody reeking sacrifice will pacify a God’s irritated sense of justice, may believe that God proffers advice on men's hair stylings. And so on.

Mass imagination of this kind shows that religions offer verisimilitudes: religions present information that is like the truth but not the truth per se.

By transforming the imaginary into confirmed belief, religion qualifies itself as the quintessential imaginary art form and offers notes toward a supreme fiction.

Why not revere religion that way?

Revere religion as l'art pour l'art.

Revere religion as ars gratia artis.

Dr. Joseph McKenna has been teaching religious studies as a Senior Lecturer at UC Irvine since 1999.