Religion is too big a category to do it justice in one web page. Suffice it to say that billions of intelligent people have sweated over this one for tens of thousands of years already. Anything I can say here will only sound facetious, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm pretty much guaranteed that no matter what I say I'm going to offend somebody, so I may as well close my eyes and pitch in with both hands, or as P. G. Wodehouse's immortal Bertie Wooster would have it, "What ho!" If you are easily offended, please try not to be. Or at least don't read the rest of this web page.

There's a lot of lively debate about what exactly constitutes a religion. In my mind, a religion has three parts to it:

How to behave while you are alive.
What will happen to you after you die.
How Part 2 is affected by Part 1.

Any belief system that has only Part 1, I'm going to call a philosophy. I think it has to have Parts 2 and 3 too in order to be a religion.

My reason for bringing up the subject of religion is as follows. Each of us is going to spend a whole lot more time being dead than being alive. Archimedes is supposed to have lived for 75 years, for example. That was supposedly more than 2000 years ago, so the poor chap has spent more than 96% of the time since he was born being dead. Some scientists think that the Universe is on the order of 10,000,000,000 years old, give or take a few years. Archimedes was dead for 99.99999925% of it. Think of everything he missed. It makes sense that we should all spend a few moments pondering the Eternal Verities: Life, Death, and the Hereafter. Here we find ourselves solidly on the turf of religion.

There are a lot of popular religions to choose from. You can, for example, be Animist, Baha'i, Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Druid, Hindu, Jewish, Moslem, Pagan, Rastafarian, Rosicrucian, Satanist, Scientologist, Shamanist, Shinto, Sikh, Taoist, Vedic, Voodoo, Wiccan, or Zoroastrian. There are probably a lot of other choices that I've forgotten to mention. You've got your Greek Pantheon, your Roman Pantheon, and your Norse Pantheon too. Unitarians profess to believe in all of the above. Atheists believe in none of the above. Agnostics believe basically the same thing as atheists but they lack the courage of their convictions. On a lighter note, in Britain recently, a statistically significant number of people filled in "Jedi Knight" as their religion on a government survey form.

There's a lot of variants within that list too. If you are Christian, you can for example be Adventist, Anglican, Baptist, Calvinist, Catholic, Christian Scientist, Coptic, Episcopal, Jehovah's Witness, Lutheran, Mennonite, Orthodox, Methodist, Mormon, Presbyterian, or Quaker. Not that these are even good solid robust definitions, for example, picking one at random there are at least four variants of Episcopal in addition to the official original plain vanilla Episcopal, including Charismatic, Evangelical, Reformed, and Southern. I'm not even going to get into the difference between religions, cults, and sects.

Given that there are so many religions, denominations, and sects, it's not surprising that the field occasionally attracts a few thieves and con artists who try to slip between the cracks. Don't be taken in by them.

Rule #1: Be particularly suspicious of religions that espouse poverty while offering to take all that evil money from you.

Many religions are evangelical, meaning that going out and converting people to your religion is laudatory and sometimes even mandatory. If you have MS, you are going to become especially attractive to members of evangelical religions. If the person trying to evangelicize you is obviously a thief, con-artist, charlatan, or fool, then having a good therapeutic shout at them will probably do wonders for your attitude. Beating them to death with your walker or running them down with your electric wheelchair will bring you only momentary pleasure and should be approached with caution since it is lamentably illegal in most civilized parts of the world.

Rule #2: The correct way to react to being evangelicized is to interrupt early with a polite comment along the lines of "Thank you very much for telling me this, and I will give it great thought."

You should practice saying this into a mirror until you get the right amount of earnest sarcasm. You want to sail right under their sarcasm radar (which for most Americans is blessedly high) while providing yourself modest entertainment. I have found that a delivery similar to John Cleese gives me the most pleasure. Special care should be taken with evangelizers who have MS. Conversely, your religion may have cured your MS and you will of course be tempted to spread the good word in that case. If so, ponder the next rule before you do:

Rule #3: Your religion may have cured your MS, but it may not cure mine.

Many religions have a tradition of miraculous cures, which some MS sufferers will find extremely seductive for obvious reasons. What appears to be a miraculous cure may however turn out to be merely a spontaneous remission, which could be followed in a matter of hours, days, months, or years by a spontaneous relapse (MS is like that). The role of religion is more properly to give you solace, support, and/or an explanation of this process, but emphatically not to give you blame or guilt.

Rule #4: Avoid any religion that holds you in high regard only if you are miraculously and permanently cured.

Some religions entail a certain amount of chanting, dancing, leaping about in ecstasy, and in the case of some of the more outré, sexual activity.

Rule #5: Religions that require a lot of physical activity are probably not a good idea unless it can be done from a wheelchair or somebody else can assist you or do it for you or to you while you watch with great interest.

Membership of some religions requires a certain amount of knowledge of holy books, writings, or oral traditions. If MS has affected your memory, you may not fit in.

Rule #6: Religions that require memorization are probably not a good idea.

Some religions are extremely complicated and entail a lot of reading and study for you to get your mind around them. It usually happens like this. Religions start with the word of a deity or deities usually dictated by divine inspiration or revelation to a human intermediary. This holy single-source knowledge is passed on by word of mouth and/or written down. Over time people notice that the holy words are no longer as clear as they thought, and people start to talk and write about what they think about that. Other people notice that these secondary sources have gotten it wrong or forgotten something or perhaps were not quite as clear as they should be either, and they start with grim determination to set the record straight once and for all. Add to this mix cultural drift, language drift, physical deterioration of documents and memories, flagrant opportunism, political manipulation, a bunch of people on one side shouting that everything written must be taken literally and an equally vocal group on the other side shouting that it's an allegory and interpreting it literally is the last thing you should do, and you find yourself with a hell of a lot of stuff to read. Most of it is contradictory and some of the people involved are heavily armed.

Ordinarily I would say that this might provide you with something to do on a rainy day, but a chronic illness does have a tendency to give you a sense of urgency and a reason to want to focus, while simultaneously robbing you of the capacity to do just that.

Rule #7: Simple religions are probably best.

Be careful of foreign religions, because they might lose a lot in the translation. For example, Buddhism always eluded me as a teenager. The three characteristic of life according to Buddha are:

Suffering.
Impermanence.
Absence of ego-self.

People who have MS are already familiar with the "Suffering" part. The rest of it sounds grandiose and elusive, but that's partly the result of a bad translation. A native speaker of English would probably say instead:

Suffering.
Change.
No soul.

The "Change" part is particularly apt for MS patients, our disease rarely stays the same. Buddhists apply this to everything - and it is certainly true if you look around you that everything is in a constant state of change. I was certainly amused a few weeks ago when I heard an Egyptian scholar say on a TV about the pyramids that "Only the rocks are permanent." This is probably not true. The Sphinx seems to be melting away due to the effect of wind and rain erosion, and anyway, I expect all of the rocks we see today will eventually be subducted (a ten-dollar word for "sucked into") into the Earth's mantle during the process of continental drift over the next few billion years. Even rocks are impermanent.

The subject of the "soul" is a good one. Opinions vary, like country clubs, from over-exclusive to over-inclusive:

There is no such thing.
Special people have one (usually "true believers").
All people have one.
People and animals have one.
Every living thing, plant or animal, has one.
Everything has one. Including humans, hamsters, herbaceous borders, helicopters, and houses. Even bricks (they presumably have very small ones).

What happens to you after you die is usually, but not necessarily, a matter of what happens to your soul. There are many choices, the most important of which are probably:

Good people go to a good place (also known as heaven) and bad people go to a bad place (also known as hell).
Everybody gets reincarnated, either in a never ending cycle or until they get it right.
One life per customer, no refunds, no returns.

Interestingly, the Cathars are of the opinion that what we so charmingly think of as "life" is actually hell. Some days I think I'm a Cathar.

I've heard it said that heaven would be boring because all of the interesting people would be in hell. But then that's exactly what the devil (or whatever personification of evil you choose) would say. It sounds sophomoric, something that a rebellious but ignorant teenager would say to get attention. Yet the basic concept is curiously attractive. Who can tell, who can tell? Rather than attempt to argue myself out of this apparent logical conundrum, I will content myself with giving:

Rule #8: It's a waste of time trying to apply logic to religion. Religion is about faith.

There are lots of other things that logic shouldn't be applied to - religion isn't unique in this regard. Politics is one. Bureaucracy is another. Movies are another. I want to know why didn't MJ recognize Spiderman's mouthwash when she kissed Peter Parker? And since I have heard claims to the contrary, I want to go on record as saying:

Rule #9: Science is not a religion.

What's more, it neither confirms nor contradicts any religion. There. I've said it. Go back and look at the section on Science if you're confused.