Our Collective Delusion

Is the Earth dying of terminal religion?

by W. Christopher Epler

Once upon a time, before the Christian Right, before Christian fundamentalists, before George W. Bush, Christianity had at least something to do with compassion, kindness, and spirituality.

Now, however, the religion of Jesus Christ (at least in America) has been reduced to the infinite hypocrisies of sub humans like Tom Delay, "Dr" Frist, and glassy-eyed, gay-hating, Muslim-hating television Christian Evangelists.

The question is are these psychopaths the precursors of a religious insanity which will necessarily destroy civilization along with much of the biosphere of the Earth?

In short, has religion turned into our worst nightmare?

In the Middle East we get to choose between Muslim "holy warriors" (that infinite contradiction in terms) and the, hypocritical real estate ambitions of a (self) chosen people.

Everywhere we look we see religious fanatics trumpeting murder in the name of God . . . always, always in the name of God.

The problem is that such human beings are simply out of reach. They are so caught up in their terror of life that things like rationality, justice, and science are meaningless to them. They might just as well have time warped from the hordes of Genghis Kahn or Hitler's torch light parades.

Said differently, they are virtually another human species. Homo religioso: the cancer that is rapidly killing us all.

The question before us is this religious evolution into hatred, violence, and greed inevitable, i.e., is the religious free ride over, and are we now seeing the latent Heart of Darkness of ALL religions?

After all, we should take note that religion has always been mankind's designer Disney Land of choice when life gets too confusing and frightening and for literally billions of human beings the 3rd millennia is just too over the top.

So what to do? Well, there's always the pamphlet solution. You can always self lobotomize and join a cult and maybe indirectly (if not directly) righteously kill lots of "alien" people in the process.

When you talk with a religious zealot, you never really have a conversation. What happens is that you get "preached at” by people who would kill your children in a heartbeat if they thought that would garner them some cult points.

The bottom line (and this isn't complicated!) is that religious fanatics and zealots are certifiably insane. Or said more generally, religion has become an institutionalized army of psychotics.

Perhaps over the centuries the good will and sanity of some religious practioners concealed the fact that religion IN ITS ESSENCE is insanity incarnate.

This turns out to be a very plausible thesis. After all, isn't the core of sanity to "be in touch with reality", and isn't a religious "cult" (by definition!) a gaggle to cowards and wimps who are in pell mell flight from reality?

However, it's increasingly obvious that reality cowards are a luxury our planet can now longer afford. In the 3rd millennia (and for evermore), losing touch with reality is equivalent to turning into a planetary cancer cell.

So our neighbors and relatives who choose dingbat doctrines over science, rationality, and truth aren't just harmless people who happen to have "different views"; they are literal psychopaths disguised to look like adult Homo sapiens. Reality for them is horror and their infantile one liners are symptoms of a reality cowardice they are willing to kill for -- over and over and over again.

Perhaps the toilet of insanity and carnage called the "religious" Middle East is proof positive of what happens to civilization when the essence of institutionalized religion (i.e., terror of truth) is allowed to run amok.

Original article posted here.