The Doomsday clock has ticked another minute closer to midnight on the back of global uncertainty on how to deal with the threats of nuclear weapons and climate change.
“It is now five minutes to midnight,” said Allison Macfarlane, chair of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS), which created the clock in 1947 as a barometer of how close the world is to an apocalyptic end. (ABC NEWS: Jan 11, 2012)
We live in the time between the vaporizing of Hiroshima and the Islamists getting their hands on a nuke.
In this time, perhaps a bit of quiet reflection ‘between-the-blasts’ on how it may have come to pass.
Religion enslaves the lives of almost every human being on the planet who is alive now or who has ever lived.
Human societies are held together with the thin strands of an inherited dogma dangling into a dark and sordid past.
We belong to a poisoned collective of desperate tribes with their bordered settlements defended by the spears of mythology and superstition.
The falsehoods and arrogance of all religions have defined the consciousness levels of all the individuals who have ever been born into them and continued to believe in them.
Religion has shackled the potential of billions upon billions of lives. Some individuals have remained ignorant by choice choosing to have a wager. For the most, they don’t have any choice whatsoever.
For them religion is a matter of life and death. Believe or die, or live outside the circle of defense.
Religion is a self-perpetuating process based on submission for promised reward.
The process is the history of humanity itself.
A systematic denial strategy based on faith and faith alone.
Because of religion men to a great degree don’t make their own history, they don’t make it just as they please; they don’t make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. Most of humanity believes in a jealous revengeful sky god and all the superstitious ignorance that goes with it. Are we destined to be expelled from our ‘Garden of Eden’ – our host planet, by our own hand. Either by atomic or ecological means? A kind of feed-back system of divine self-fulfilling prophesy?
As children we are ‘raised’ to believe in lies – to varying degrees. From the benign Easter Bunny to the all avenging God of the heavy-metal hard-core Heaven and Hell variety. Our human culture is based on stories passed down through the generations. It was only a matter of time before we settled on a ripping-good-yarn to explain all the mysteries of existence.
The Roman Emperor Constantine saw the potential for Christianity to control the masses and the rest, as they say, is history. Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire has been around since at least the 4th century, it has played the prominent role in the shaping of Western civilization.
These monotheistic religions which occupy so much time and space in the lives of people are responsible for – global warming, eco-collapse, overpopulation, wars, famine, genocide, extinction, slavery, inequality, poverty and most of the persecution.
The dominant abrahamic religious beliefs (Judaism Islam, Christianity) are all essentially anthropocentric, placing man superior to nature, contemptuous of it and willing to exploit it for the slightest whim.
Anyone who believes in the old books of the Bible the Quran or Bhagavad Gita, etc – is either mentally ill, a deranged criminal, or in denial of reality.
These so called doctrines of revealed truth are no more than the deluded paranoid rantings of ignorant superstitious old misogynists.
The followers of these ‘Holy Books’ are responsible for most of the wars throughout history and the systematic persecution of the infidel and ‘non-believers’ inflicting pain and suffering on billions of innocent individuals down through time.
Despite the pox of religion eating at the very heart of the human race, we are very lucky to have got this far down the ‘civilised’ road.
If the believers in the interpretations of ancient desert warlords and wandering soothsayers did exactly what their repugnant old books said, the world would be an even more horrible place.
The current rise in religious faith is a scary concept indeed – the believers are back more vengeful than ever.
Its hard to decide who is scarier – Mitt Romney or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The devout believers will always re-group, re-brand or re-arm, willing and waiting for their time to strike.
When Fascists next come to town they will be carrying a cross and a flag or a Quran and a nuke.
Despite Copernicus humans still want to believe they are the centre of the universe.
Despite Darwin we turn our backs on the facts that we are just players in a massive natural process.
Despite Einstein we are willing to use nuclear forces to annihilate each other.
Are we beyond the point of no return? – The path to global catastrophe seems imminent.
The believers of the world can all thank their respective gods in their prayers for the absolute dominion he gave the tribes of Abraham over the earth, and for the virgins he promised to the avengers of Allah in paradise.
The religious attitude is that the earth is just a staging ground for testing your faith. You have to die and go to heaven to collect your just rewards.
Religion is why the clock has moved a little closer to midnight.
