Eschew Obfuscation –
By Michael Douglass –
Wanna know what puts the fear of God in me?
Just how many goddamn self righteous all knowing mouth breathers in this country that still cling to the archaic notion that the earth is only two or six thousand years old.
The people who maintain with a straight face and beatific countenance that the only reason dinosaurs no longer walk among us is because they didn’t make it on to Noah’s fucking Ark.
Michael Wade Douglass
I’ve had it with organized religion. I can’t stand it.
All of life, all of the perception and preparation for life is the careful balance between instant gratification and delayed gratification and there is no other institution invented by man that manages and manipulates that balance better than organized religion. Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Baptist … whatever the goddamn hell.
Organized religion understands very well that it is far more difficult to convince an individual they have been fooled than it is to fool them to begin with. So they do the best they can to get to them early.
America wages war under the guise of religious righteousness. Either that or some perverted brand of religious nationalism. Take your pick. Pat Robertson or Ted Nugent. The serpent is of the same the same species of jingo.
You know, God, country, guns, family values, etc….
I can’t stand it.
It is an excuse for war, execution, discrimination, bigotry, misogyny, molestation of children, rape, murder, conquest, persecution and prosecution in no particular order but perhaps more than anything it provides stupid, willfully ignorant people justification to pass judgement on other people they know nothing about. It’s an alibi for just about every brand of fuckery humans engage in.
I am sick to death of it.
We pretend it’s about other things.
Ideology.
Sure.
Politics.
Yep.
Religion.
That’s the curtain.
Money, industry, oil, money, oil, you bet.
America has a vested interest in in places that don’t make sense because America is oil. The most profitable business in the history of humankind is oil (at least in recent decades).
Most of the biggest companies who trade in fossil fuels hang their hat in America on one hook or another. These companies totally run our shit. They dictate our choices. They own our media. They now write our legislation. They decide what information we have access to. They ooze into our food and water without consequence.
Welcome to exactly how religion manifests itself. Have a nice day.
I’m only in the know because I have a decoder ring.
When you run afoul of these companies your name starts to sound like Snowden or Manning. Maybe Ellsburg. Chomsky or even Einstein. The only thing these people have in common is shining a light on what it is we are doing to ourselves. Throw Greenwald, Scahill and Taibi in the mix, they’re brave bastards too.
There was a plan in place for Iraq before we went in the second time to carve it up by petroleum interest. By company. Bases and installations were named after oil companies. How fucking sick is that?
We did that.
THAT is why we did that.
We went there and we showed them just how much havoc we could visit on their heads. We weren’t there to fuck around. We killed so many of them that we don’t really know how many we killed. Clearly, we are not done. Iraq is a new front again, Afghanistan is waning so we turn to our old ally, Israel. They love us. We can wage war from their geography until the cows come home.
We give them $6 million a day.
Everyday.
Neoconservative Christians can’t wait for the rapture/apocalypse and Israel is totally on board.
Two of the most powerful factions on the planet banking on Santa Clause. What am I missing here?
Even the Zionists are getting played.
We’ve got ISIS, ISIL, IS, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Sunni, Shia … we are either Dr. Frankenstein or the monster himself in each case. Creatures of the American device.
And all of this is sold to us under the guise that we somehow have a right because our imaginary man is better than their imaginary man. Our imaginary man is righteous and can therefore usurp the land and murder the people who are friends with some other imaginary man. It’s always a man, isn’t that convenient?
And people actually buy it. They believe it. They feel positively good about it. Mindless celebrants of myth.
On both sides.
Really.
The only thing that makes me fear God is the people who believe in him and there is way too many of them.
While we sit here, while you read this, we are bombing the ever loving shit out of brown people that never did a damn thing to us. People that never used to even wish bad things for us.
People now. People starting to think about you and me. People who’ve hated us for awhile. It is our dollars and our gear that decapitate their children. They are thinking about us. About you and me. They are hating us. Can you blame them?
Do they hate us or do they hate our God?
Beware the most pious, they are always infected with the disease of the most advanced hypocrisy.
Drinks for my friends.
Republished with permission from BrainSpank.Org.
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Michael:
You seem upset. The reason I can sense it is because of all the profanity woven like gold thread into your invective. Otherwise, I might have mistaken yours for an advice column. What strikes me is that, apart from your nuanced, oblique approach to the issues you discuss, your column could have been written at any time since recorded history began; before that, actually, if we consider the cave paintings at El Castillo in Northern Spain where women were objectified despite the apparent shamanistic prohibition against depicting the human form.
The words “war, execution, discrimination, bigotry, misogyny, molestation of children, rape, murder, conquest, persecution and prosecution” all have counterparts in the earliest of the proto-Indo-European languages. Substitute “gold”, “tea”, “opium”, “tobacco”, “sugar” or “salt” for “oil” and your post could have been written at any time in human history, except that “discrimination, bigotry, misogyny, molestation of children and rape” would have been so commonplace in some of those centuries that to have included them would have run counter to PC or CW.
I abhor ISIS, with its 8th century perspective and methodologies for subduing defenseless peoples. I think you’re right, that there is indeed a religious component to the conflict, but I think it is one that cannot be isolated from other factors that make up a culture, even a civilization (if you similarly remove the concept of “civilized” from the lexicon). The West had created dozens of ISISes over the centuries since the First Crusade. In times past and for similar reasons ISIS may have gone by names like Hittite, Assyrian, Sumerian, the Third Dynasty of Ur, Amorite, Han, Shao, Wei and Moor.
George W. Bush used the term “Crusade” many times when describing the nature of the conflicts he initiated, but consider the source. Don’t get me wrong. I agree with you in most respects. But isn’t the current crISIS a natural evolution, an understandable by-product of the artificial carving up of he Ottoman Empire by a couple of bureaucrats named Sykes and Picot in the middle of The Great War and muddled further by the Balfour Declaration and other subsequent confused, ill-considered western diplomatic machinations? An unnatural dissection that failed to take into account racial, ethnic, religious and cultural sensibilities of the inhabitants of those new countries whose populations transcended the artificial lines drawn on a map by European and Russian civil servants? Saddam Hussein called Kuwait Iraq’s 19th province (historically, not religiously). About that single point, at least, I’m not sure he was wrong.
If we consider war in the region to be inevitable, have we not facilitated its becoming a cruel reality by so considering. Does it not make it easier to “cry havoc?” Does our believing it to be so not make it so? What I’m trying to express is that religion is a hollow underpinning for a conflict that has continued for thousands of years in one form or another. The religion of which you speak comes under many guises. To me, inveighing against it is like howling at the moon. We do it because it’s there. It may also be shown that it’s there because we do it.
Why not call “religion” a handy slogan, like “Don’t tread on me,” “Live free or die,” “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” “La tierra es de quien la trabaja,” or “Join or die?” To me, doing so validates every side’s phony self-righteousness and legitimizes their actual venal, rapacious rationales by converting them into “causes.” Please, don’t be part of the problem. Quit getting so goddamn fucking pissed off at the mouth-breathing shit-eating motherfuckers on all sides just because of the slogans they decide to use to inspire the temporal ends they seek? What do you think?