Sunday, November 26, 2023
The Christmas season is already here. And over the years it has become one of the biggest financial boons to businesses and religious institutions. A little baby born in a manger surrounded by animals has spawned an industry worth trillions! This celebration isn’t about baby Jesus anymore; it’s about money and competition, and money and religion, and money the mythology of righteousness, and more money still. How many of you who celebrate Christmas pause at midnight to celebrate the birth, instead of trying to figure out what gifts were yours under the Christmas tree? How many of the little ones even know anything about Christmas, except that they get to stay up late and wait for Santa and their gifts?
I often wonder what would’ve happened if Muhammad had been privy to the same kind of PR that Jesus had. The Romans, once they found a new god, sold him quickly and expertly to the world as the Almighty, the Trinity, notwithstanding the fact that they had put him to death 300 years or so earlier! Jesus, who was in fact a prophet, and one of the many who were crucified for claiming to be the messiah, struck a chord and soared into infinity and divinity! A few centuries later, Muhammad the prophet also soared, but to a different class or race of people!
The commercialization of Christmas and Easter are so embarrassingly obvious to everyone that, as modernity and technology advance, religion is losing its power and influence in today’s society! Young people especially, don’t see the need for religious institutions, especially when they preach hate and division and are against most of the things the younger generations hold dear! They believe, like I do, that religion was invented to control us, to make us afraid, to make us supple to the stories of hell and damnation and make us pay for those fears, psychologically and financially! It’s a very profitable business, tax-free of course; after all, they’re doing God’s bidding.
In the meantime, the church’s coffers have become bloated enough to make them turn their attentions to bending the wills of governments to suit their purposes, not the people’s, but for their selfish motives! In Belize, they have tried and succeeded in blocking us from teaching Our history, and most recently also stood against the marijuana legislation, and even our objections regarding the slaughter of innocents! They failed on the latest one.
I’m not presumptuous enough to deny God’s presence; I don’t know if it exists! Still, it and I have this conversation every night where we, or rather I, discuss my doubts and my fears and my demands! I believe that religion is a part of our id, not identity, but our id, from so many centuries of indoctrination. Anyway, my conversations are therapeutic and comforting to me. I believe that if there is a god or gods, they cannot be of a certain gender and definitely not human; we are not so special that it would assume our identity when there’s so much in this undiscovered universe that we aren’t aware of; and if it created everything as we were taught, then no, it wouldn’t have human form, in my opinion.
In our civilization, for the last 2000 years at least, the white and rich have been the most powerful; they have ruled the world, with the help of religion! Minorities and the poor and women have been subjugated, turned into slaves and sub-humans and sufferers! Religions, all of them, are male-dominated, with the understanding that the female should be submissive and know their place!
What god would allow that, along with all the suffering going on in this world? Religion makes promises it can’t deliver. It’s like a pyramid scheme with the less fortunate always at the bottom! So yeah, God is white, rich and living in America!
Glen