It seemed one day I awoke and this wasn't the America I knew and loved. Things changed but they didn't change overnight.
First thing that changed was my perspective. My happily semi-apathetic EMPLOYED existence was changed into a worried,anxious and pathetic UNEMPLOYED existence. How that happened will be a tale for another day. What's prominent about the fact that I became unemployed was the fact that once I was out of the rat race I had time to look around. I began to smell the flowers, look at the world around me in focus instead of a hurried blur and taste the food instead of just swallowing it. I began tasting everything before swallowing it.
That's when I realized that America had become one of the most frightening places on Earth with regard to it's potential for catastrophe.
Let’s start with religion….one of my all time favorite, super mobile and all around most durable and flexible collective human self destruct buttons.
America was founded initially by people fleeing religious persecution and seeking a place to mine new opportunities for a happy life. At least that’s how the popular legend goes as I’ve heard it. But what has really happened to those initial desires and intentions?
Well we have become what we ran away from. That line between church and state has been steadily blurring since the 1980’s and the Reagan Era. Evangelists and private agenda religious groups have far too much money and sway on politics. Many American policies have clauses or dependency policies based on fundamentalist thought. That’s part of why stem cell research was practically halted by the Bush administration. Our Foreign aid packages have religious specifications built into them. America has been pushing a silent crusade and using it’s wealth and influence to do it. What… did you think several other countries hate us for no reason whatsoever. Some of that anger is , unfortunately, justified. Hell, even Bush once said that his faith in God drives his foreign policy..(that’s not a quote so leave me alone about it). I’m sure Al Quaida and Iran’s government could say the same.
In our own way we are just as fanatical as they are. Did you know that millions of dollars were spent on a creationist museum in Kentucky. That has got to be the definition of wasted funds. Do you know how much good those millions could have done!! But no they go into “Theologically and Scientifically accurate” animatronics of humans living side by side with Dinosaurs. These people are trying to scientifically dispute Evolution and carbon dating as well as several other scientific theories, facts and evidence through literal interpretation of the Bible. Well there’s got to be the first sign of the end times right there. Maybe we should go back to bleeding with leeches to treat illnes as well while we’re at it.
I just watched the special edition of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. There are plenty of scenes where the fanatical Templar Order are shouting for blood ..screaming “God Wills It!!”..When I fall asleep watching that flick and I hear those lines I swear I wake up thinking someone went on a shooting spree in Utah.
That leads me to another point about America….there’s two of them. Probably has been for quite some time but my dull witted perception is only really coming to grips with this now. Middle America and southern America are COMPLETLEY Different places in many ways from the coasts. Racism justified by religion is still quite abundant round those parts. God fearing, gun toting murderers happily line up for Church every Sunday and dream of ways to asassinate Obama. Oh that’s not to say entire states are backwards but they have significant portions of their populations that are. It shocks the hell out of me to see people still scared to death of homosexuality..violently scared. I mean COME ON..GET OVER IT PEOPLE!!! I’m so sick of Bible waving morons that quote Bible passages that supposedly justify everything from excommunication of gay’s to outright culling. Did we learn nothing from Nazi Germany and the countless regimes of genocide that have followed.The Kmer Rouge(prolly spelled that wrong..well hey it’s a frickin blog not a history book) The insane ethnic cleansing in Romania, Serbia and Croatia, The current situation in Darfur..the list goes on. In our time the LIST STILL GOES ON!! It’s disgusting to say the least and you can’t tell me Religion isn’t used as a tool to justify such madness.
Which brings me back to religion…..did we go off topic?..anyway…. Any belief system based on Baseless and Groundless “Facts” leads to disaster. I think the true problem with organized religion is the fact that it makes people think they are right. If you define the “right” for someone you are also defining the “wrong”. This translates into good and evil. So religion gets people thinking that their denomination, belief set, Dogma..call it what you want is good and those who don’t follow their secular guidelines then become evil. This is usually based on books written by men..(yea men..make no mistake about that..Religion is an Artifact..MAN MADE..no Gods , higher powers or phenomenon are responsible for this crap..its all on us) thousands of years ago. Now these documents are not written like the constitution where they are meant to be adapted to our changing world and the needs of our people. They are scribed in stone and are immutable. Now if one of these immutable “how to live life for dummies” texts happens to say that homosexuality is evil..then that is meant to mean that…homosexuality is evil. So now we know, for a fact that homosexuals are evil because this ancient text said so. Now we do the worst thing you possibly can in this situation. We apply logic. Yep logic mixed with the illogical..matter and Anti matter out on a date…..words like military and intelligence getting married and forming unions which end lives. So if this ancient text says homosexuality is evil and that is taken to mean gays are evil then what do you do about evil…..What do you mean live and let live!!???…practice tolerance!!!??...why, you can’t turn your head to evil like that..it’s illogical..you have to stop the evil…smoke it out ,hunt it down and TERMINATE IT!!...yea kill the evil….!!. And if your common sense tells you that killing is wrong, if you get a little sqeamish about cutting these two 16 year old’s dicks off, stuffin em’ down their throats and setting their lynched bodies on fire to the tune of Cumbaya..why then just look to the good book you placed your faith in that brought about this madness in the first place..it’ll get ya through.
Now an argument can be made that religion is like any other “tool" and can be wielded both nobly and nefariously. Mother Theresa and Ghandi never lynched two gay 16 year olds did they. My aunt Josie was a devout catholic and never hurt a hair on anyone’s head. For every example of murder and oppression done in the name of some God there are examples to the opposite effect. So what does that mean? That religion like every other tool man uses for good or ill is MAN MADE. If it was truly divine and not made up and forged into a socio-political control structure by the ruling classes then none of this would happen would it.
We need to explain the unexplained and one of the key questions we can’t answer is why are we here and what are we supposed to do. That’s the basis of religion and faith. All those myths explaining the unexplainable..like creation. Giving the unknown a graspable context people could wrap their heads around..grounding them in a world of unknowns. People eventually realized the power of these stories and of human faith..now control steps in. Parables and metaphors step into these tales to teach moral lessons on behavior and what is acceptable within each culture. They began to form laws complete with punishment for their breaching. They became a means to power and control. Some were used for good and some for ill and still are. Know why muslims don’t eat pork? To sum up very briefly, in their part of the world no one knew how to properly prepare pork to keep trichinosis from killing everyone so they put a religious ban on it because it was dangerous. Now science has discovered these parasites and how to eliminate them so ya think they would say..”Yay..bacon!”..nope. it’s in an ancient holy text..it’s immutable…..science be damned.
Let’s face it and grow up people. We don’t have a word of some God to live by. We have our wits, our common sense and our meager intelligence and that’s about it. We need to finally come of age as a species and say ”Hey..we don’t know all the answers and we are finally mature enough to deal with that so let’s move the holy texts to the mythology section , admit everyone is equal and get on with life and rule out a veritable cornucopia of justifications to murder each other”. We better start using our brains for something other than figuring out Apple’s latest gadgets and learn to co exist and do it quick. The stakes are higher now as the world has grown much smaller.
If The English Church had access to Nuclear weapons during the Holy Crusades what do you think would have happened. You got it. “GOD WILLS IT”…….game over.
E
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