Selling a Fear of Hell for the Love of Salvation

My brother is a Catholic priest. This means he has devoted his life to teaching children they are going to hell if they don’t obey his Catholic Church, while he washes his hands of any damage such a lie does to any of the children he teaches to believe his lie. Why does he do this? Because he was convinced that if he doesn’t spend his entire life selling this lie, which he has been sold since he was circumcised, he’d end up in hell. So, to save his own ass from the fires of hell, he sells his brand of lies and pretends his circumcision turned him into a eunuch.

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How Capitalism Is About Killing the Poor

Capitalism is a religion. That's all it is. It is thought of as simply a way of organizing and running your economy, but it can only ever end up killing the "unchosen."And the "chosen" are the ones who were given great wealth, by God, or course. And they, like Abraham, are only too happy to sacrifice a world of Isaacs, if that is what their God of money commands. Look at the EpiPen ad AIDS medication controversy, when Mylan raised the price over 500% and Martin Shkreli jacked up the prices of AIDS meds, just because they could, not because they needed to make bigger profits. And look at the 70 fold price increase on a drug treatment for Muscular Dystrophy, charging $89,000.00 per year. For Spinal Muscular atrophy, they charge $750,000 for first year and $300K thereafter. In this way, capitalism sells long life the way the Catholic Church once sold salvation through indulgences. Both are highly respected and adored by the other, despite Jesus overturning the ...

Why Are Republicans Pro Life?

Most people don't realize that the Supreme Court has been in the hands of the Republican party since at least 1970! In fact, even in the landmark case of Roe v Wade that legalized abortion, SCOTUS was inhabited by 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats, and the vote was 7 to 2. One of the reasons is that the Republican Party has absolutely ZERO desire to win on the abortion issue. And that's because abortion gives the GOP a clear focal point with potentially unlimited organizing power. And it's an even simpler message to sell than religion, since we are "pro-life." (if that was true, however, they wouldn't be actively trying to repeal healthcare for up to 30 million Americans, nor would they be so pro-gun, pro-war, pro-death penalty, pro welfare cuts, pro- social security cuts, pro- drone strikes, etc). The Republican party officially became "pro-life" in 1976, thanks to Jesse Helms (R-NC). The only reason no serious challenge was brought within the pa...

The Clash of Religious Beliefs with Reality: Over Simplicity in a Hyper Complex World

God is the anthropomorphism of our hope that life has a "happily ever after" ending, where there is no such thing as death and suffering, which we anthropomorphize in the form of the devil. In a sense, we are taking ideas and turning them into phantom figures of our selves, with angels and demons being projections of our own souls and our penchant for good and evil. We see this when we anthropomorphize the act of gift giving into Santa Clause and think in terms of "old man winter" and "father time." We even reverse this process by describing ourselves as living in the springtime of our youth or the autumn of our years. Religion takes this habit to another level, however, and teaches people to "believe" that the personifications we rely on to describe our hopes and fears are actual "beings;" beings from whom all of the characteristics we tend to associate with ideas of life and death, good and evil, necessarily emanate. Thi...

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