Quit reading right now if someone who questions religiosity offends you. I’m atheist or agnostic. I think religiosity is a cowardly way of dismissing the growth of knowledge. It says, when we don’t understand something we should quit trying to understand and attribute it to God or some mystical fairy in charge of difficult ideas. I believe you have the privilege to quit questioning and sink into the comfort of believing that some god will take care of you, but don’t then lay it on the rest of us. I’m primarily talking to Christians because they are the majority in charge of the nation right now, but Jews, Muslims and Mormons, anyone who believes that superstition should guide our socio/political world, is whom I’m talking to. Faith, in the religious and financial senses of the word, is the problem.
We are now mature enough as a society to realize we the citizens make the decisions, not some god or politician or economist or preacher or corporation or whatever. We, all of us, have to take responsibility for the world we live in. We can no longer give our power to a higher authority, especially when that power is the Judeo/Xtian/Muslim male aggressor god who admitted that he was a jealous god and we should worship no other god but him. If he were human we would call him a genocidal psychopath just as our corporations have become in his image.
Faith, for corporations, is in the infallible and invisible hand of the markets, which will lead to freedom or at least a semblance of progress, regardless of the impoverishment of 46 million Americans and the further impoverishment of new ideas for the betterment of democracy. Faith in gods and capitalism has stalled the true progress of humanity.
We need to move to the next phase of history, to a world where women will be respected as full members of society, where every citizen will be treated as equal and deserving of love as every other citizen. Faith, whether in a psychopathic god or a psychopathic economic system, is keeping us from our destiny as a good and wholesome democratic enterprise. It’s time to grow up.
By growing up I mean we need to get rid of the childhood conveniences of relying on “superiors,” whether parents or superstition or priests or especially corporate managers. We can use these people in their expertise, but we as citizens are responsible for the final decision and we have to have the confidence that we are capable to make those decisions.
To have the appropriate facts that we need at hand we have to demand openness and accountability, real accountability from government and the corporations that are so powerful.
Progress needs to be measured in how all of society is fairing, not just GDP or other gross measures. Humanity should be the first priority, not the last. Faith, religious or economic, has no place in proceeding to a more sustainable, just and humane place to live.
Lehman lives in Warren.
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