Religion

 Just after I learned how to read I was somehow able to acquire a book. This book had big pictures, big print, small words, and ran thru the Greek myths from creation to the height of Ancient Greek Society. They were told in their late, fully formed, context without what, I now know as fascinating, starts and growths to what they became.

I devoured that book about 10 billion times. Ok, exaggeration. Over several months I read that book again and again. I was thinking about what I read after reading and went back while thinking to see again what I was thinking about.

After several months of this I began to look at other mythologies. I wanted to see what other people believed.

And when I say mythologies I also include Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Mythologies. I did not yet connect them with the world around me and the place my Mum took me to on Sundays that I daydreamed, or slept, thru and missed everything said.

And I began too see the many similarities in these mythologies. From chaos came order thru the actions of a creator being. These creator beings begat children, lesser gods than itself, and were rebelled against and/or overthrown by these children. And these children went on and ruled and begat and all of these gods definitely were created in our own image.

They were created by us to try and make sense of a world we did not understand and scared the heck outta us.

Those are the broad details of all of these myths. And these myths, while details might be different, all were pretty similar. And the myths that grew out of a common center of civilization, those being the Yellow River Valley in China, the Indus River Valley in India, the Zana Valley and the Sechin Bajo near the Sechin River in Northern Peru, the Nile River Valley in Egypt, and the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley in what is now Iraq, were very similar to each other. Coming from a common root after all.

Each one of these developed their own mythologies that had some differences, and some very remarkable similarities.

And again, it all comes down to people who had no understanding of how the world worked and their place in it. So they tried to explain it by making stories.

And, over time, these stories became truth.

And, over time, these stories became Religion.

And one of the things that religion does is give a group of people an identity connected to something greater than they are. A collective with a plug to something bigger.

In the beginning this was fairly benign. Most societies had some form of the Earth Mother myth going and society was much more Matriarchal. And the medicine people, as the priests were known, were for the most part more Doctors and Psychiatrists than anything else.

And then, the Sky Father showed up. And that is when Religion took on it's Capital Letter self. Because the Daddy Figure took over. And all of a sudden it was a much more Masculine thing.

Almost overnight things went from a benign, mostly, Mother Worship, to a Violent and Authoritarian Father Worship.

And Religion became much more about Us versus Them. And we began to see Government. Instead of Tribal Councils where all people had a voice we began to see Single Man rule with henchmen to keep Power.

And ever since people have been identified by which gods they thought of as their own. And societies grew up where they could co-opt others gods, Rome is a big example of this. The common people were often kept in check thru religion. The Identity of Us and not Them.

Most religions did also at least try to put some sort of Moral Guidance at their center. The Golden Rule, for example, is integral to most religions, in one form or another. They wanted some way to guide the lower orders, never the priests themselves, in belief and Law.

And then we began to see the Monotheistic Religions.

The first Monotheistic Religion was the cult of Zoroaster. That began in ancient Mesopotamia, IE the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley, in the 6th Century BC. A while later the Babylonians conquered the Israelites and took the Upper Classes to Babylon. And thus Judaism went from the cult of Yahweh, god of the Jews amongst all other gods, to God, Singular, who was a Monotheistic god. And from there we get Christianity and Islam.

Interestingly enough a few decades, maybe even a century later, the Romans began the worship of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter Best and Greatest. Over time, and the time frame is uncertain, this evolved into a belief, among some of the Patrician Upper Classes in Rome, that Jupiter Optimus Maximus was really the only god and all other gods were merely reflections of him that others could understand. What is certain is that by the time of Caesar this belief was well established in the upper classes and had begun to trickle down into the Plebian, Lower, class.

Now we have a bunch of competing Monotheistic Religions. And all of these religions have one thing more than any other in common, they all believe that their god is the only god and that any other god is fraudulent, and any other interpretation of their god is wrong.

And woe betide those who did not believe at all.

What could possibly go wrong?

And in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East we got the beginnings of Religious Wars. And this was because Governments were associating themselves with specific religions. Zoroastrianism became associated with Persia. Christianity with Rome and the Empire. When Islam showed up it began with Arabs and spread out into the Middle East, Africa, and what is now Spain.

For the next 1700 years wars of religion tore the world of the Middle East, Africa somewhat, and Europe, all to pieces. Eastern and Western Christianity fought each other and Islam. Then the Protestant Reformation happened and the wars between Catholics and Protestants began.

And the persecution of Jews by christians began and kept up to this day.

So wars of religion have been a driving force in warfare for a long time.

And with all of this developed all of the various ways that religion controls people. The promise of heaven. The threat of hell. Believe as we do or you will be damned. Even the followers of the so called prince of peace believed this.

And now we get to the present.

We have a serious religious backlash using various right wing political parties and movements against the Liberalism of the past few centuries. It has been building for a while. And it has exploded over the last 50 years.

It is exemplified by what is happening with the evangelical christianity movement in the United States. They have formed an alliance with one of the two major political parties, and have pretty much co-opted that party entirely. They are pushing to make christian law the law of the land. All the while bemoaning the sharia law of the islamic countries and trying to convince Americans that the people of islam want to impose sharia law on the United States.

That, folks, is called Gaslighting. Because, while some of islam would, I am sure, love to impose sharia law here and everywhere else, it is the christians who are actively working towards it. And are getting frighteningly close to achieving it.

People are leaving religion in all countries. Belief in the sky god is waning. And the true believers are afraid. And, unfortunately, some people with money and power, who may or may not be believers, are trying to use this to get and keep power.

Because Religion, especially Religion of the Sky God, has always been about power and Control.

And in alliance, which will never be comfortable, with the rich and powerful capitalists, they are having a powerful, and increasingly violent, backlash.

You can see it everywhere. Religious language for depriving Woman of control of their own bodies. Religious language used to try to take over education to ensure future believers. And, the most ironic, religious language to promote power by the wealthy.

It is up to those of us who are rational, those of us who know the Earth is round and revolves around the Sun, those of us who know that we are Stronger as a Community that excepts all manners of Human and Belief without discretion, those of us who know that vaccines work and chemtrails are not real, those of us who know that the time when belief in the sky god is long past being a rational act, it is up to us to make sure that this religious backlash gains no more ground. 

It is up to us to make sure that these irrational people, who are terrified of a world where their sky god is not paramount, get lovingly and gently pushed to the sidelines.

It is up to us to reclaim this world for Science, for Rational Thinking, for Reality.

And I am afraid that we shall fail because most of us do not believe that it is really that bad.

Well, it is.