It is Past Time to Recognize Religion as Myth Worship

Society, especially so-called polite society, rules the day in allowing theists to pretend their reality is real. Isn't it finally time to call religion mythology and its worship of it characters myth worship?

That being said, regarding mass shootings of religious groups... that is not how you evolve beyond something. You cannot do it from outside. You do not have hate for others in order to evoke social evolution. That, is a sign you are on the wrong track.

We have a leadership in America right now in Donald Trump, that is nationalist and ignorant, greedy for power and wealth and evoking more ignorance. Denying science and reality and telling lies daily from our highest office which is inflaming the foolish and the mentally and emotionally and even socially, damaged in our society. Stop it. Americans should not kill Americans. The American government, should not kill Americans. Really, we should not be killing anyone, unless it is to stop them from killing or harming others.

You Need To Consider The Possibility Your Religion Is Mythology

Still, there is a groundswell rising against religions in the world.

And we're seeing dysfunctional reactions within them against one another. Mostly based in the three desert religions of the Middle East. It's not really being noticed for what it is and is building in the so-called "First World" countries. And why is that?

Also, those Theists who support religion and do notice this are totally misunderstanding what is happening.

I don't believe anyone (certainly not me or anyone I know) are really against people exploring their spiritual beliefs, their religion, per se, or even wanting to end it tomorrow. This is still America, still a free country, regardless of the illiberal actions of some in power at this time.

Hopefully, with our attention and efforts, we will be putting an end to that very soon in 2020 and ending the conservative and Trump delusional form of governing.

However, there are still and always some obvious downsides to religion. Such as extremism. And religion's biggest travesty, "cherry picking" among their beliefs in order to fit them more closely into reality, sanity and logic.

Those who ignorantly profess their "faith" incorrectly and inaccurately enable their religions to continue and evolve when they should have died off centuries ago. It also enables those abusing others for their own misguided religions fundamentalism.

Those who are attacking such groups as transgenders, calling them child molesters, or ridiculously and ignorantly equating trans or gays with bestiality, when the reality is quite different and they are really quite normal, just different than the "norm".

If there's such a thing. When really it's about majorities and minorities. And where so often we see those types who call out others as degenerates, being charged with many of those same offenses themselves and so being outed as the hypocrites they were, to begin with. Typically all for reasons of position, power and wealth.

Kids More Likely To Be Molested At Church Than In Transgender Bathrooms

What this growing irritation is leading eventually to is a reaction against all those who are so-called believers. If they can simply follow their religion and keep their mouths shut, I don't think anyone would care to bother with actions against them in any way.

But when one considers all the bad actions and ill will that has been built around theism in recent times, what else could one expect? Pushing their beliefs into others faces, into our government, is illiberal and incorrect and even criminal. Certainly unconstitutional.

Those who say their religion requires them to do certain things, to get involved, to sway non-believer's beliefs in aggressive fashions, is just asking for a reaction against themselves, and others like them.

And then you have people like Donald Trump as POTUS who use religion in a morally reprehensible fashion for purely political purposes and lying, claiming he is a religious individual, which his only religion us capitalism and even beyond that to kleptocratic and oligarchical actions.

If you take this kind of behavior to its obvious conclusions, it's death for the future of religious institutions overall. To be sure it will take time. To be sure they may never really completely die off in a kind of half-life form of degeneration. Where they will halve in power and membership seemingly forever, but never quite go completely away.

Because religion is a symptom of the human mind, the human brain, and human evolution. It is a form of thought that should fade away as humankind evolves to the next stage and the ones after that. There are some beliefs that are more functional that some of the major religions today. Better than the ridiculous ones we hear of so often in the likes of Mormonism, Christian sects, Muslim sects, and even Jewish sects. As well as corporate thought style beliefs like Scientology.

Buddhism for one, the Buddha Dharma is far more functional that most if not all other "religions". While not a religion itself, but more of what we need in a mental discipline. I am not selling it as an answer. To be sure it too has fallen to the damages of the human reconstruction in ignoring its original teaches and adding nonsense to them down through the millennia so it too is viewed as more of another ridiculous religion.

The one saving grace is what Gautama (Siddhartha) Buddha Himself said, and you typically don't see in any religion, is to trust your instincts and if you're being taught something stupid, simply don't believe it. I dropped religion when I was younger, for sanity and reason themselves:

"In the time of the Gautama Buddha, many holy teachers and priests also wandered from village to village offering their teachings and principles to anyone who would listen. How can we differentiate an authentic teacher from a charlatan? According to tradition, Siddhartha Gautama offered the answer on one of his many journeys:
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
– Gautama Buddha

In what other "religion" would you come across koans or one such as:

“If you meet the Buddha, kill him.”– Linji

Humankind seems to wish for Magic, rather than Reality. It needs buffers to the daily grind and abuse of living. I learned of ancient Asian philosophies in grade school Isshinryu Karate classes in that Okinawan martial arts and philosophical system.

Through my life, I found one similarity after another to that. I found some similarities in the Catholicism I was raised with and abandoned by 9th grade. I became well read in philosophy from the Greeks to the ancients in India and China and Japan. I found people who grew up in Buddhist countries seemed the most oriented toward Buddhism as a religion. Which to me was reversed to what it was intended to be.

I found that the Catholic teachings appeared to have a basis in Buddhism. At university for my degree in psychology, I found many of the beliefs in that discipline to be very Buddhist in nature. At least the most functional forms. I learned about humankind's relationship to ritual and repetition. And I studied phenomenology and began to see how religion had gone awry.

How through anthropology and philosophy, sociology and psychology, it became clear where we began and how we evolved.

Religion is not the end, but the beginning, sadly. As when one learns how to walk, one changes and drops that methodology when one learns how to run, ride a bike and fly a jet or a spacecraft. And yet we hang onto the old ways out of fear. Out of conservatism. Out of ignorance. An ignorance we no longer need to cloak ourselves in.

We just need to be brave, learn the better ways and move into the future along with our overall inevitable development.

Still some, especially the conservative mind, holds onto it as if life depends on it. And it thoroughly does not. We may never evolve fully into our potential if we cannot finally let it go.

On the one hand, while they want to expand their ranks while religion is in this current phase of dying off. They aren't considering the reasons for religion's warnings because it's been discussed as a part of their theologies and epistemologies simply because they've been persecuted in the past.

Humankind and society have tried again and again to purge themselves of religious, but have failed repeatedly because they needed a replacement. A modern and functional form of mind management. It will happen, but it is like fighting an addict's cravings for what they are so used to, what they are indoctrinated into from childhood, to need.

While the individual may need something in daily life, society at large obviously does not. And we're seeing the dysfunctionality of it all over the world today.

One wonders perhaps why anyone would want to persecute someone else because of their beliefs until you have had to deal with someone being really and truly religiously annoying on continual and daily basis. Those who flaunt their mythology in the face of reality and against reality.

While religion will surely not end once and for all anytime soon, and while we do need to allow people their freedom in their choices, the rest of us should not have to suffer through living within their delusions around our society. It is a kind of reversed abuse. To be sure, enjoy your religion, just allow us the benefit of enjoying not enjoying it.

We can and should at least all agree that others are worshipping their chosen myths from the past, and then go on our way. Undisturbed and unperturbed by those theists who still wish to continue with this internal mental standing bicycle of a mentality spinning its wheels and going nowhere. Certainly not progressing into the future of the continued evolution of humankind.

Mental Condition(ing) of Our Society

It occurred to me it would be interesting to consider America today as a person and its relation to actual psychological conditions. The same can be applied to other dysfunctional countries. North Korea. Countries in Africa. Russia.

There is precedent for something like this in America. Corporations are "people" here, one of our more ludicrous decisions which has led to the demise of the middle class and an ever growing oligarch, draining money into the coffers of corporations and the wealthy, and has bastardized our election process.

Money, is a vote now. Offensive, and ridiculous. America has always been somewhat that way. In the beginning, only landowners could vote, and a few others specifically indicated. Not women. Not blacks, not many. America was founded to allow anyone to make a profit, to eliminate castes and a protected elite strata so the playing field is open to all.

That is America today. But it has been purposefully hampered. The way out of the pain of being an average American is multiple jobs, and to become wealthy enough that you are above the masses drowning in debt and a lack of funds to give them a decent living, healthcare, mental health care, and a secure future and retirement, and for their children to have a better life than they did.

Much of that has been retarded in this country. On purpose. Then they profess the way to fix that disparity is to do more of the same, assuring more of the same, against all logic. And the masses for the most part, certainly on the right, with the Republican party, have been delusionally convinced of it.

Art by Marvin Hayes

It is madness and it is making us mad. Someone posted this weekend, "boys are broken."

America, is broken. Functional, but in the wrong ways much of the time.

From that platform, we see America as having been a more or less (as much as a country can be) cohesive nation. Some of that from our ignorance of our own reality. Our ignorance of ourselves (the white nation ignorant of the human experience of the black nation, native Americans, Mexicans, immigrants in general, and so on).

As media and education, science and in our facing down and beginning to face down religion in a more enlightened and advanced environment, the complexity of responsibility has become more intricate and burdensome. Some (many?) cannot handle this. They want their old reality back. A dysfunctional reality but a familiar one to them. We have not been educated to understand we have to always change, and change is good, it should be good, we have to make it be good. And we're not too much of the time.

Instant media has magnified everything. For profit news has exaggerated the unimportant over that of the important, due in part to people's attention spans, lack of interest in reality, too frequent traumatic events and so much through overwork and underpay, we have a need for escape.

As we come to terms with things we have long been ignorant of, or simply ignored (and through that and the structures of society), we have even enabled some of the wrong things, as we try to find our lost selves, and wonder at our personality as a nation, in observing it splitting all around us. We continue to polarize, we continue to fracture. We choose opposing viewpoints and rationalize our goodness, sometimes leading us along the right path, sometimes down the darkness of the wrong path.

Art by Marvin Hayes

We are becoming schizophrenic, or at least schizophreniform in nature in going temporarily from insanity to insanity. We have a short memory, selective memory. Memory affected by media and politicians who don't want us to remember to make their life easier, to make them more money. We are frustrated, fearful, but traditionally we are Americans and leaders. So we demand we lead, even if and when we are simply too fragile to do so.

That leads at times to bravado, to over self assurance, even to delusions. All so well exemplified in the Republican party and its leader now, the foolishness of a President Donald Trump. It means we act on things we try to fix, but inappropriately, IF we even do act. Mass shootings, we do nothing? NOTHING is the answer? How can that be?

Turning Americans into poor, allowing the killing our children - Art by Marvin Hayes

We find we are failing at things (war on drugs, for instance) and we keep pushing those failed agendas, because they are familiar and we lack the knowledge or refused to find it, in order to move forward correctly albeit painfully. We avoid pain, which increasing our pain. Even though repeating actions while seeking new, varied and unachievable reactions, continues to fail over and over again.

And we keep moving forward(?) with our eyes wide shut, until we are lost. We choose the wrong leaders. Our leaders choose the wrong goals. Our chosen priorities are skewed, even diametrically opposed at times.

How can we stop this, fix this, become rational, sane, functional and productive again?

To paraphrase what my university psychology professor and primary adviser once said:

"Order your mind and you will order your environment. It works the other way, too. Start small. Act. Evoke change. Change is good. Try things and when they fail, try other things. Doing nothing is not the solution. Build on your building and finally you will realize one day, that you are there."

First, we all have to want to be whole again. Sanity will follow. We need to come together again and glue our fractures with the adherence of our recognition that we are all Americans and more importantly, we are all human beings.

And that's the rub, isn't it? How to get there. But we can, and if we wish it to be so, we will.

We are simply not there now. Not yet.

#America #GOP #realDonaldTrump is making us crazier along with his #Republican confused Congress and their at times ridiculous paradigms of how to govern.