Is Our Human Condition Simply Out of Control?

I was watching Incendies (2010) the other day. I had really liked Sicario, both by director, Denis Villeneuve so I thought I'd check out his previous award winning Canadian film.

If ever you want example of the intellectual disease religion can bring to people, there's a good example of that in the film's initial murder which resulted from religious separatism. A separatism which includes the mores and tribalism that comes along with and from it.

Whether religion spawned tribalism, or the other way around matters little at this point, because it also now perpetuates it. Blended with the economics of reality for some, it is simply another cog in the wheel of humanity regressing.

Religion can be all fine and good, but it needs moderation... that is intellectual and informed practical application. That is to say, applying religion's teachings requires outright ignoring some of the more brutal and stupid tenets and statements involved within their convention (a custom or a way of acting or doing things that is widely accepted and followed) that its religious tomes supply, and demand.

If religion does not modify itself with humanity, it is a defective religion and therefore false in the face of Humanity. And reality.

The practical application of religion has gotten out of control many times, in many places, as it has now in the Middle East in obvious examples. As well as here at home in more minor cases. One has to understand that you are not so much then dealing with an enemy, but a people who are experiencing a kind of mental illness through a socially accepted system and a series of defective concepts and ideals.

They need saving from themselves.

It's not unlike a computer virus that begins to eat itself and brings its own system down. It needs to be cleaned up. It's not the enemy but a defective system that has become corrupted and needs its code and inherent governors brought back up to correct speed and action.

Yes, sometimes you have to kill people like this. As you would a rabid dog you stumble across in the wilderness. It's also just good to recognize that they have a problem, one that needs to be corrected and that they are not just inherently evil but misinformed, following their own best understanding of life through defective filters.

Normally I believe, humans want to be good. Want to be seen as good. Want to believe themselves to be doing good, to believe they are good and therefore what they do is doing good.

A little perceived good is good, but more seems better. Even more yet can be therefore be seen as even better, when typically it is simply outright destructive. And when it is destructive to others, it's easy to not see the damage, to rationalize it as "good". More therefore can be less. Just as a nightmare applied in typically human OCD fashion leads to a bipolar and excessive application.

Sadly the nightmare that this causes for some, can be felt as satiation and catharsis for its perpetrators.

And so it is left up to the rest of us to clean up this filthy disgusting belief system against non believers, or those who see reality over magical thinking. Magical thinking that has gone, as it is wont to do, horrendously awry.

The way out of this happening again and again throughout history is simply to lead ourselves into reality and proven belief systems and not simply belief systems conjured up by those in the far past, only to be interpreted by those in the present as the ridiculous and the murderous.

Still, we have new religious beliefs cropping up because we support these old beliefs and so new "prophets" believe they have an open door to come up with whatever crap they can imagine. As in Mormonism. As in Scientology. As is Conservative Republicans on the Christian right. As it stupidity.

We are not a stupid race. So why do we keep supporting belief systems that counter that? We need to get ourselves under control. And as things are going...we need to do it fast. Very fast. Before it's too late.

For far too many on a daily basis, it is already far too late.

Has this untethering of American from reality been brought to us courtesy of religions and the fantastical thinking required to believe them, for one to have faith?

We have seen this belief for many years in making excuses for people's religion and in America for having a diversity of religions and belief systems, that we should allow people their own delusions (if they be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Mormon or Scientologists, Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventist, etc.) because this is America and America means freedom. That's all great and good. However....

American politician and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said:

"You're entitled to your own opinions, you're not entitled to your own facts."

And that, outweighs either our freedom, or our religions.

It is time we pulled back, that religions went back to their proper and private places, out of our schools, out of our government in order to allow true freedom in America once again and stop infecting both ourselves and the world in such a negative way in our delusionally believing we are doing good when we most assuredly are not.

IF we do not, the corrective action that is inevitably coming, will be far more severe than anything we can now imagine.