Today I am going to blog about how religion can define our creativity but also how a lack of religion can define our creativity also. I personally locked away my own creativity deep inside of me for fear of people not liking it. It wasn’t until I unlocked it again through my own counselling that I realised my creativity should be for no one else but me, because of the healing it can give to me.
I want to make it clear from the word go that I am not challenging any body’s belief system we are free to believe what we want to and for some it is their own creative choice to believe what we choose to believe. The purpose of this blog is to create an alternative way of thinking about who we credit for our greatest achievements.
Recently I watched a clip by Ricky Gervais called the Unbelievers Documentary see video above. Now I feel like I must admit I do genuinely like some of Ricky Gervais’s work so I am warning of Bias. There are some interesting points made in his documentary and the stand out one for me is about not talking to our children about religion until they are old enough to make informed decisions for themselves.
Our parents influence on us is massive, whether that be the positives on us or the not so positive. So if our parents tell us from a young age that there is a god and we should believe in him too it is highly likely we will do just that. Our parents have been the very thing we have depended on and the reason for our existence so of course we are going to take on board what they say. In the same way we believe that if we are not careful climbing on the wall we might fall off.
Ultimately though I am curious to know what sort of an impact, introducing religion at such a young age has on us. I went to a C of E school where we had services about one particular religion twice a week. We even had a local priest take the service approximately once a week. The headmaster went on to become a vicar. School is a place where your work is judged in line with what other kids your age can do. It is not individualised to the child so I left my fate up to a god for long periods of my life. It didn’t serve me to think there was a god to bail me out, I spent large parts of my teenage years waiting to get discovered by somebody who was going to set me in the right career direction along to fortune and fame.
It wasn’t until I went back to myself and my inner voice about the things I enjoy and am good at that I even got close to what was best for me and my life path.
When I got back into education as an adult I took an interest in Karl Marx and read a lot about him. There were a few things he said I found admirable but one of the things that really stood out was when he said;
“A belief in god and religion takes away our own human creativity.”
If you think about it, this could be true, now I want to take you to (sorry for the stereotype but something that most consider masculine) When Tyson Fury beat Wladimir Klitschko. Klitschko had proved himself to be an absolute professional and warrior, holding on to the heavyweight championship of the world for around 11 years I think, but when Tyson Fury beat him against the odds, he gave Jesus Christ the credit.
The dedication and effort Fury must have put into training in order to win that fight, must have been detrimental to him and his life quality. However when he won he repeated the same thing over and over. “I just want to thank Jesus Christ.”
Another example of handing over the credit for creativity is when reading an announcements section of a music CD inlay. The amount of times I have read the music artist hand over all the hard work over to god “I just want to thank god for making this all possible.”
Often you see sports people thanking god for their achievements, for example you see runners kissing their cross before the ‘go’ shot is fired. Then when they have won the race they point to the sky in some sort of hand over of credit. Surely runners should claim their own credit for it is them that has spent the time in training.
I think it is important we take credit for our own hard work and master pieces, for if we don’t our self-esteem may not grow to its full potential. Could it be that the people who credit their own greatness to god have self-esteem issues in the first place? To the extreme they would hand over the credit for something that took hours of life to do, over to a god for fear of having the spot light on them?
At the opposite end of this there are those that get lost within the field of creativity and place all of their individual worth and value on creating things and hoping to get praise and worth from them. A couple of occasions when I was younger my art was not given any worth therefore I stopped drawing. I held that creativity inside me which created its own conflicts. It wasn’t until later after many sessions in counselling that I picked up a pencil again and recognised that I could still draw for enjoyment regardless of what people thought of my art. I felt at peace with this activity and the comfort I got from this was un measurable. (I was devastated by how many likes I got when I posted it to social media however ;-p)
I have worked with great talent that is so dependent on comments of worth that when the comments of praise do not come the whole project is rubbished and ridiculed. Which takes me back to why would somebody give all the credit or all the value of our work on one person or god?
I really want to reiterate I am not challenging anybody’s belief in god, I am too unsure of my own god to challenge anybody else’s. The purpose of this blog is to question if somebody achieves something good, or creates something talented or clever. Then who should take the credit for it. Should we encourage people to take credit for their own works of art and achievement opposed to handing them over to some higher force?
Here is one last thought, imagine a land running round with creative people, we would have amazing landscaped gardens, brightly coloured hair, multi-coloured clothes, cars that can go in excess of 200 mph, art to attract the masses, music that touches the soul, poetry that makes the heart flutter, stories that stretch the imagination to the deepest realms of existence………
Life would be amazing wouldn’t it? We could all take something from this and be creative…………..actually na wait, god would just take all the credit, so I just might not bother!

If you have questions about your own creativity or want to learn more about yourself through creativity and you think counselling my help, contact through brighter-pathways.co.uk website. by clicking here ——–> Counselling