Hallelujah

Organized religion is, by its very nature, divisive. Us/them. Sure you can join, but until you do you're THEM. 

Humans look at THEM suspiciously. It doesn't take much for that to morph into fear, and perceived threat, with the inevitable attempt to vilify and dehumanize. 

It used to be that the fearful intolerance by organized religion to THEM resulted in large scale holy war, genocide, torture, and/or imprisonment, of millions.

Today's religious intolerance results in terrorism, attempts to control women's bodies, book burning, bigotry, and support for Donald Trump. 

I'm not sure that's progress.

Pro-Misogyny

Much of the pro-life movement is about the subjugation of women. Force her, as she so deserves, to submit to thy will. 

Sure, pro-livers feel repulsion at the idea of terminating a pregnancy - find me someone who enjoys it. But their focus is on subjugating women to their beliefs - forcibly - and no exceptions.

How unsatisfying to try to prevent unwanted pregnancies by informing young women and providing them birth control.  How un-thrilling to simply provide assistance to women who cannot afford to have a child -  healthcare, living expense, opportunity - as strategy to encourage them to keep their pregnancies. Uh, that's not happening! Are you crazy?

No, pro-life is about putting women in their place. 'Pro-lifers' don't love fetuses, or even other people's babies. Pro-lifers hate women.

Next Time Thorg, Just Say Goodnight

Thorg lived along the southern coast of what is now France some 40,000 years ago. He lived there with his clan of some 22 individuals most of whom were related by blood, their world held together by intimacy, fear, necessity, and love. 

Thorg was a good storyteller. Many a night's campfire was filled with his wild-eyed tales of bravery and heroism of the previous day's hunts or of mystical tales and Thorg's interpretations of the stunning beauty, power, and magic of their natural world. 

Then one night Thorg ate a new kind of mushroom. The bullshit that came out of his mouth that night stunned, terrified, and entertained like no other night that had ever come before. Thorg saw the power of his bullshit and it was good. 

But unknown to Thorg and his clan, that night he had planted a seed. A seed that grew and grew over thousands of years. His words and others like his eventually lost their innocence, morphing into a grotesque and perverse power-hungry culture of rigid dogma, intolerance, and psychopathy - the religions of today. Along the way millions were murdered in crusades and holy wars, while millions more suffered from the misogynistic sadism, perverse cruelty, scientific intolerance, and creepy hate filled glee of its predominantly male leaders - all in god's name. 

Thorg's words eventually led to the construction of massive temples of reverence and power to those that occupied them. Extravagant cathedrals, temples, mosques, built at a time when average people lived in dirt floor huts, starving a great deal of the time. Ahh but these monuments to greed and power were not enough and so eventually entire 'holy' cities were built as the universe's grand central stations of utter bullshit - the Vatican our prime example. 

I'd like to think Thorg would have been repulsed and deeply saddened had he known known the extent of the harm to come to millions in god's name that all started with his utter bullshit - beautiful and as powerful and entertaining as it was.

Certainty

Certainty, in the face of ignorance, is mental illness.

In medicine, it is also quite lethal.

Bloodless Murder

Cancelling a person is a violent, extremely harsh act, in many ways akin to murder. Lives are destroyed, long productive careers ended without mercy. People isolated, much of how they have come to define themselves over decades, publicly ripped from them without mercy.

Human history is riff with campaigns of destruction, war, and murder as our collective psychopathy has marched forward through the ages. 

The cancel culture then is really just another take on intolerance, hate, and murder. 

Nothing new - just less actual blood. 

Hell on Earth

If we werent already in hell nature would not have selected for sociopathic psychopaths over human history.

Innocent tales of mystery, repeated for millennium by the night's campfire, would not have morphed into cruel, intolerant, and violent religion.

Murder, war by another name, would not have become societal tool. 

Nation would have never trumped love and extended family clans.

And money would not be.

Welcome To Your World

40,000 years ago, on the steppes of Asia, in the coastal caves and forests of Europe, on the savannas of Africa, tight nit clans of humans roamed according to the seasons, following food and resource, as they had done for generations. 

These were small groups organized by intimate knowledge of one another, by bloodline, by necessity, and by love.

At night they gathered at their fires eating, talking, laughing, loving. It is here their gods were created, the mystical nature of their worlds interpreted, described, and experienced in dance, music, and long repeated tales. And it is here sociopathy began to flourish. 

For nature selects for sociopaths.