In which I nearly make the most offensive analogy of all-time

I don't have an older brother, but the closest thing I do have is my newly-married cousin. Because I am a smart-ass, it is painstaking to genuinely entertain advice from any seller under forty, so I seldom listen to him, even if my face fetches an Oscar bid for efforts in apparent approval. So it was a bit striking to digest his spiel on cultivating my - no, his - faith, at least, he said, for the sake of my unborn young'uns. Some brain neurons clicked around in there, halted in surprise (why hadn't we thought of this by now?), then resumed their arrogant dance. But it got me scratching my stubble.

Let's set the table some here: neither of my parents have ever practiced their "religion," at least not in any form I have ever distinguished. I don't recall knowing anything about a WASP father and a Jewish mother until there were at least ten candles to blow out on my cakes; to me, they were mom and dad, fin d'histoire. I have no nostalgia to lean on in terms of soporific Sunday sermons, or dysnfunctional Passover seders; none of that existed for me until my grandmother passed and God finally cameoed on the radar, rather briefly at that. I don't claim this culture for myself; it has so little bearing on my identity that I have no fear of losing it anyway. It is the loose change in my ego's pocket. And that is no one's fault - despite what my almost-sibling might think, there are no regrets to be had here on anyone's account. Far more dear to me is my double-passport culture: had the CIA offered me employment at the cost of tossing my lifetime cross-the-pond ticket into the paper shredder, I'd have walked away humming La Marseillaise, with a fresh craving for freedom-fries.

This circles back to what I deem religion's essential appeal to begin with. Flip through the good book and pick out random passages from Leviticus. It's a bit like toiling through Homer's catalog of ships, but as with the Iliad, there's more going on here than boredom. Leviticus' authors explicitly wrote out such an exhaustive set of laws and guidelines with the principal aim of distinguishing Jews from other tribes - tribes who likely held similar basic beliefs in the evils of murder, theft, etc., but were not so lawful as to detail, in writing, pages of dietary and sexual restrictions. I'll buy that this was done with noble intentions, but it can be pinpointed as the central flaw of Judaism, at least in modern application - the fervent need and desire to be exclusive, to keep the people and land pure. For fear of lightning bolts slamming down through my ceiling as I write this, I'll stop short of drawing a parallel to, ahem, Nazi ideals, but such attitudes understandbly foster outsider resentment. Some factions of Christianity and Islam probably realized this and took the mass-marketing, we'll accept-anyone-with-open-arms approach as a reactionary measure. If all that's true, it's easy to see the ramifications, but strip away all the religious facade, and it boils down to one simple observation, for me: many of us, if not all, have a natural desire to be different, and this need is inherently at odds with this same want in others. In other words, we want to be unique, but never unique in all the same ways. And we don't like others limiting our choices. Carving out a peculiar self in this way is our firmest grip on our concept of identity. And from my view of things, suddenly instilling a profound religious culture, after twenty-five years, is like sporting an ill-fitting mask to a party where no one's even wearing costumes anyway. I'm different enough as I am.