As long as I live one thing will always puzzle and perplex me – the gullibility of my fellow human beings. We blindly follow doctrinal notions like mindless sheep, never daring to question one specific notion still deeply ingrained from a time long past (any form of religion), or more so these days, the latest to be promoted heavily by the pseudo-scientific community.
It has oft been quoted that religion is the opiate of the masses. How true has that statement become over the thousands of years since we first gazed up at the sky, convinced that all powerful gods controlled us and our world?
Personally, I saw through the sheer hypocrisy of the high church Anglicanism I was born into by the time I turned seven. The private school I attended in 1950’s England had compulsory religious studies as the predominant subject of its curriculum. To get top marks in it back then was far more important than how you did in all of the other badly taught subjects. Saying our daily prayers was compulsory along with corporal punishment for those like me who committed the slightest misdemeanor, such as just sitting there in silence as I often did, while the rest loudly recited their prayers.
Almost two thousand years ago when the first Roman Empire finally crashed and burned, those who deemed themselves to be the leaders of roman society at the time, desperately needed to remain in control of their former empire, its masses and its wealth. And so those same patrician former senators became the ruling elite of the new second Roman Empire, which still exists to this day, in its guise as the Roman Catholic Church. They took on the various responsibilities of pope (emperor) and cardinal (senator) after Constantine adopted the new eastern religion shortly before his death to clear his conscience for all the barbaric acts he was responsible for in the eastern empire.
What better way to continue to control the masses and carry on accumulating wealth than to place fear in the minds of the masses, this time with the notion of heaven and hell while also tithing them; heaven for those who behaved themselves, towing the line, paying the tithe and working themselves into an early grave for their masters, and hell for those who did not. Surely this was a far better solution than the former practice of putting them to the sword if they objected to the decrees of their masters. Oh no, wait a minute, silly me. They still carried on with that bloody practice, except this time they crossed themselves and sought absolution for their sins from their new style priests!
To make use of the death of a falsely accused Palestinian Jewish carpenter, who died horribly when he was crucified for wanting freedom for his people from roman oppression to further their nefarious politico/religious ends, apart from being two-faced, was pure genius. What better way to continue to divide and conquer than by promoting their new religion. Bow down and pray to a dead man as if he was somehow a new form of roman deity, thereby continuing their age old former pagan belief system – brilliant!
Down the millennia our ancestors have blindly followed without question everything religion in its many forms has proclaimed. Sadly this is the norm for the masses of the world that still cling desperately to the concept of any form of religion today, unable to stand on their own two legs and accept what life brings.
Before you proclaim me the spawn of Satan, just ask yourself this question; how many wars have been fought purely for religious reasons over the centuries, and who died in them? People like you and me that’s who. Our so-called leaders, secular or religious, hardly ever did or do even to this day. It is always the nation’s youth who get sent to the battlefront. In their fiendish minds it is far better for thousands of ordinary people like us to perish, be we Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu – feel free to insert your own religion here.
For a while in the twentieth century, a new political religion appeared when the Russian Bolsheviks adopted and twisted the philosophical writings of Carl Marx and Friedrich Engels to suit their own ends, into yet another way of controlling the masses. Fortunately it didn’t last long thank goodness.
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These days the western world, with one or two major exceptions, has a new religion. It is called environmentalism.
The twenty-first century environmental version of religious zealots are currently engaged in playing on our naiveté yet again by telling us that the latest global warming phenomena is all our fault, based on extremely dubious scientific evidence. They conveniently ignore the fact that our planet naturally cycles itself constantly between periods of warmth and cold, dependent on its varied perturbations around our star – the sun. The acolytes of this new religion are using their weak arguments to make us feel guilty and cough up money (Carbon Offsetting) – yet another brilliant con.
Its funny how those same environmentalists have completely ignored or forgotten what happened to New Zealand when a large hole appeared in the Ozone layer at the bottom of the world. Thanks to the hole, thousands of Kiwis like myself are suffering from various skin cancers, but do the environmentalists care? Do the politicians? No, because skin cancer is non taxable unlike Carbon emissions.
Unless or until we humans blindly stop following doctrines, be they religious, political or pseudo-scientific, we will continue along the same mindless path we have always trodden like sheep since Adam purportedly appeared in the Garden of Eden. Come to think of it has anyone definitively located the mythical garden and its tree of knowledge yet? We humans could sure use some right now along with a large helping of plain unvarnished common sense.
Have We Had Help? 
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