let us pray

Of the many reasons why so many people in America today suffer from anxiety and depression, one comes from  the fact that, virtually from birth, people are taught to hate themselves for always failing to measure up to some infinite ideal standard - be it of wealth or beauty or sinlessness and obedience or what have you - that is simply impossible to achieve.  Christianity, for example, calls people to compare themselves to Jesus, a god who became a man perfected and sinless, which is like calling all numbers to compare themselves to infinity, or every day of the year to eternity.

The self-loathing that inevitably results from the failure of such a Sisyphean task only helps to reduce a person to putty in the hands of those social managers they have been conditioned to depend upon to guide and “save” them, be they priests and politicians, marketers and myth-makers of various sorts. Such managers then project this 'intelligently designed' self-loathing onto an "other," who they teach us to blame for it, in one way or another, so we can feel better about ourselves. 

And it is in such a system of manipulation that religion teaches us to deny that this could ever be true of ourselves, even though we suspect it is or maybe true of nearly everyone else. In fact, the vehemence with which a person is able to deny that this is true is what determines how much of a "saint" we should consider them to be. If you deny this truth unto death, for example, they call you a "martyr." 

But a martyr is simply a rat inside the cage of their own mind, who was put there by the "man behind the curtain" (i.e., priests, psychologists and psychiatrists, economists, politicians, etc.), and who is conditioned by that same "man" (or men) to ease the economic pains they are experiencing by continually tapping the lever of their different 'religious' beliefs at least once a week, in order to give them self the "spiritual" ecstasy of an endorphin high, even to the point of ignoring the most basic instinct of all life: self-preservation.  And all of this is the result of the only system that was truly created by "intelligent design," for that is exactly what money is: a man made "god" that operates as an 'intelligently designed' system of stratification and thus control.

The difference, of course, is that the priest and the politicians and all the rest, are actually in front of the curtain, that curtain being reality itself, while the drug of the "Gods" they sell - which are almost always an anthropomorphic embodiment of a tangle of self-contradictory ideals - exists behind that curtain, in what the "believer" must necessarily believe is the "true" reality.

The reality we live in, in contrast, which is the only reality anyone has ever known, is believed by the "believer" to be filled with deception and opaque with complexity, while the supra-reality - which is where our "gods" and angels live and our saints and martyrs all desire to go, and hell, a place where all those who refuse to accept this "truth" are imprisoned - is incredibly easy to understand by "believers," and just by virtue of the fact that they "believe." And they "believe" this, even though none of those "believers" have ever seen it, or can even agree among themselves about what their "God" or the supra-reality in which He is said to dwell really is. Indeed, it is because of disagreements about these very things that has driven humanity to slaughtering each other for thousands of years over which of the countless different versions we continually design for ourselves is, in fact, "true". 

Religion, in this sense, fosters the idea that suicide can be a virtue if it is done for and in defense of that religion. For with our various religions, we are conditioned to believe that our true essence, our "soul" as it were, is really our spirit, which can only be made perfect through our willingness to sacrifice our "fallen" and disobedient flesh for our faith and absolute obedience to those various religions, be they based on Gods, kingdoms, science, money, or ideologies.

 Such slavish self-sacrifice is always conflated with a sense of "freedom," of course, first through the martyrdom that releases one's own saintly spirit from their sinful and disobedient flesh, and second through the elevation to hero status all those who demonstrate complete obedience to authority, even unto allowing themselves to be crucified - "for thy will be done." And like Abraham, parents are conditioned though the example of both Abraham and Christ, to show their obedience by regularly sacrificing their own children on the altar of war, whenever God commands them to do so. And when he does, they claim to only love him all the more, even though their tears demonstrate how much they really hate His divine plan, and why everyone on the planet only ever prays for him to change it.    

 The second problem with America is that, because people are taught to worship these "false idols" or "gods" - especially that unholy trinity of "money, fame, and power" - and to blame others for their own "sins," their thoughts are easily controlled and directed like a horde of robots by those different "gods" - all of which claim to practice different political and economic religions in theory, that is "in name only," but are in fact all practiced in the very same Machiavellian way in reality. 

In this way, people can be taught a fictional version of the nature of America's problems, first by being taught a fictional narrative of this nation's true history and then by being taught to worship its "founding fathers" as political saints and intellectual gods themselves, blessed with an almost godlike biblical infallibility in everything they write, in the same way religion itself is a fictional childlike version of the nature of reality, complete with an invisible friend, one that happens to be no different than the stuffed tiger in Calvin & Hobbes, but looks like a man crucified to a tree.

And while the former plays to the imagination of a child, the other captures the hearts and minds of those same children through its depiction of a form of violence that is intended to leave its' "faithful flock" in a permanent state of PTSD, in order to empower itself by fostering among its supplicants a spiritual form of Stockholm syndrome, by teaching the faithful to hate anyone who rocks the boat of their comfort zone.   

And to think that all power can be so Machiavellian when it comes to its enemies, but would never figure out how to control the way its own populations think through ideological religions that help to divide and control in the same way the previous religions of the old gods - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - have always been used in the past, is simply a "miracle of faith." People believe this, even though slaves have always been at least as much of a threat to their owners' wealth and power, and indeed even their very lives, as the economic interests of rival plantations.

 That's why the rich and powerful, who indoctrinate people into worshiping various economic and political religions, have always justified the power they wield with theistic religion, and have always supported it as the corner stone of their authority, and always behind the illusion of the separation of church and state, which is simply a reflection of the illusion of the separation of state and economics.

The Our Father is not a prayer to the God of the Old Testament, from this perspective, but simply a prayer to the Roman emperor, who was believed to be a god, to forgive the Christians for how their Jewish  brethren had behaved with all the disobedience of Adam to God, all the animosity of Cain toward Able, and all the disrespect of Jesus toward the Sanhedrin, in the insurrection that culminated at Masada.

The Hebrews were the children of Adam's disobedience, in other words, and as insurrectionist as Barabbas, while Christians wanted the Roman emperor to understand that, as far as they were concerned, they were as peaceful and obedient as lambs. This is why St. Paul told the Romans, "Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God and those which exist are established by God." (Romans 13:1) 

  And since work is a form of prayer, and all work is done in the interests of these various gods, let us pray ...