What power can so delude people that they can torture others and feel no empathy, no guilt? The only delusion strong enough is religion, secure in the knowledge that he is doing his god’s bidding, people are capable of unthinkable atrocity.The Inquisitors vanquished heretics, real or imagined, to burn at the stake in the name of god. Inca’s offered human sacrifices to their gods without a qualm, Roman’s fed those they conquered at first and then Christians to the lions, The Nazi’s gassed the Jews. The list we know of goes back to the beginnings of history but the trick of using a god to bless the slaughter of one group [the non-believers] by another probably goes back to when we climbed outta the trees.
All of the tyrants have common characteristics, each have their ‘God Bless America’. Here’s the trick: Almost everybody fears the unknown and there's no bigger unknown than life after death. Once a person convinces themself of a paradigm that sashays it’s way around death, he’s hooked. Unlike science, where the point is to continually challenge a hypothesis by looking for new-contradictory information to disprove it, religions require unquestioning faith and absolute belief. Once a person ‘believes’ no information contradicting the pronouncements of the authorities of that belief system can be entertained.
So when the pope sent out his inquisitors or anointed kings they carried the infallibility derived from the pope’s direct mainline communication with the one, the only, the big kahuna. Using the same mystical mainline the Inca priests claimed they heard their god telling them to cut out the hearts of a few more virgins. In Amerika it’s the born again types who have assumed the mantel of direct spokesmen for and interpreters of divine will.
Round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows, cause the Muslim fundamentalists hear the voice of god echoing around in their empty skulls too, so do the Jewish Zionists, so do the Hindus. i think they’re all full of shit, but if it turns out there is a heaven i'm hoping for a ticket to the doggy version.
