Debut Podcast

An excerpt from Unchecked and Unbalanced the book

The title of this chapter is that of a good question I’m often asked. While no religion is absolutely harmless, there are those out there that carry relatively positive messages, and one should be curious as to why I still loop those in with the larger and more destructive forces. There are also those out there that don’t actually even know about the negative side of what they believe, and just believe in private. There are also those who don’t even practice an organized faith, and merely practice whatever spiritual path they choose in the privacy of their own home, without affecting anyone around them. I’ll start with a religion that I tend to give a lot of grief to, and keep in mind that nothing positive I am about to say was influenced in any way, although that may change if Viacom gets their hands on my work. Then it’ll have more black ink than a military document from 1941.

The truth, in my own heart, about Scientology, is that I truthfully have very little against them. After all, when you stack them up against the other major religions of our time, they don’t have a history of physical violence against dissenters (only courtroom drama). They don’t teach their members to harm others, nor do they officially say that their faith is the only right one and that something bad will happen to you if you don’t believe them. In fact, they are how many other religions should be. They’re quiet and secretive and tend to stay out of other people’s business unless it directly involves them.

Scientology teaches its followers to be healthy, refrain from psychotropic drugs as well as narcotics and excessive alcohol, and even uses physical exercise as part of some of its prayer programs. Truth be told, aside from their mythology and their willingness to sue people on a whim, I can’t think of anything bad to say about them.
The same goes for many of the Pagan religions as well. These religions, although some followers seem to become quite militant about their faith, have a great collection of ideas. Such as the Wiccans who believe in more of a bipolar deity that is both man and woman, who is not vengeful against people of other faiths. The religion teaches peace, love and harmony, which is why it was adopted so heavily among hippies and other peace movements in the sixties and seventies.

Even the practice of LaVeyan Satanism seems to have many positive messages. The message in the Satanic Bible—the beginning anyway—seems to be that there is no devil or god, or heaven or hell. Here and now is your time of torment and here and now is your time of bliss. Live your life while you’re on this Earth and live everyday as if it were your last, instead of spending your life building up to an afterlife that doesn’t exist. Although, the malfunction of the Satanic belief structure seems to crumble in the second half of the book, when Anton LaVey reveals the great secret of the Enochian Keys, which are the spoken invocations of the lord of the underworld. How is it that you can raise the lord of darkness, when as previously stated in the book, he does not exist?

Anton LaVey, as a person, was a great man. He was a man that I feel should be idolized for many reasons. He was laid back and spent most of his days unbathed, in dark rooms in black robes, playing with snakes and having sex with the chubbiest women he could find. He did whatever he wanted in life, and never went out of his way to hurt others, in fact, for the most part, did the opposite. This is far more than I can say about other religious “profits”, especially those in the 1960s, when LaVey came to power with the book, The Satanic Bible. He was charitable, and encouraged others to be as well. And for an old man—as is evident in his latter day teachings such as, the Satanic Verses, and Satan Speaks—he had an astounding sense of humor. In fact, he wrote extensively in his later years about the decline of physical comedy in the world, and how he felt it was contributing to the darkness that currently reigned over the world—he had a fetish for the whoopee cushion.

This was the Anton LaVey that I liked. However, the other Anton was a calculating opportunist who achieved his fame through nothing but shock value. This is the other half of the man, for which I have very little respect. And although he started an institution with the good ideas of peace against children and animals, and an understanding of the ambiguous nature of morality as a whole; he also wrote many musical pieces reciting hymns that resembled Christianity far too much. These were hymns about killing Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians because, he said, “We don’t need them anymore.” I guess as an example of how the seemingly harmless becomes harmful, this stands alone.

The Nordic teachings are another great example of the religious double standard. Whereas the stories of Odin and other deities teach peace and respect, with an overwhelming sense of family and unity, the Nordic beliefs also teach a great war-philosophy, where only those who die during war can truly enter the heavenly kingdom of Valhalla. This could pretty easily explain the war-like values of the Vikings and history’s other practitioners of the Nordic faiths.

Even the more primitive Middle Eastern religions practiced philosophies that were peaceable as well as realistic. They realized that violence could be necessary although, as a last ditch effort. Beliefs like the Sumerian structure were actually—scientifically—close to our current philosophy. Although written a bit more cryptically and abstractly, the Sumerians even believed in something very close to the big bang theory, as well as human evolution. The problem with the Sumerian belief is that eventually, the anti-war stance of the faith became a distant memory, as the people who practiced it started participating in slavery and honed the “conquer and convert” philosophy of the later Muslim beliefs.

The problem lies in the fact that these are mythologies, and practice forms of theology. The problems with theology are many. The major problems are that when you explain the mysteries of time and space, you absolve those to whom you preach it from the urge to try to answer them for themselves. Another issue is the God aspect. The truth in the matter is that there is no superior high being in the world hovering over us like we’re its children. Therefore, when you talk to it, or more dangerously, when it talks to you, it’s only telling you whatever you inwardly desire it to. Such as in cases where people think that God is talking to them, what they’re actually hearing are their inner desires and needs, therefore what they think is a higher power, because of their being brain washed, is actually parts of their own mind. This can be very dangerous, and in matters of the dangers of this kind of phenomenon, one must mention how this is caused by the lack of reasoning, logic and query that can be caused by religious teachings.


The Theo-Glitch

Another great issue is schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is so incredibly common among those from families who greatly influence religion. If you combine teachings of religion with an extraordinarily high Intelligence Quotient, you have two possible out-comes. One, the better of the two, the person rejects religion and follows his own path into the world of science or elsewhere. Two, the more dangerous of the two, you’ve got a person thinking that God is talking to him through his neighbor’s dog and telling him to hurt or even kill others. And if you take the stories of the bible literally, believing that God would tell you to do such things isn’t irrational to you, in fact, it’s pretty normal considering all of the people in the bible to which things like this happened.

The greatest danger is what I refer to as the Theo-glitch. Sigmund Freud talked extensively about this in one of his later books. He theorized that religion is actually a glitch in the brain, and it can be worsened with the more faith that is pounded down a person’s throat as they grow. You see, your brain isn’t truly fully developed until you are around your mid to late teens, therefore anything can be very impressionable onto a youth. Stories of things like Santa and the Easter Bunny can advance this glitch, however, nothing causes the glitch to accrue like religion. Santa and the Rabbit are only tales and parents take them lightly. They don’t preach them day in and day out, and they—most of the time—inform their children at a pretty young age that they don’t exist. This is not the way it is with religion. Although the stories are similar, and in many cases, stories of Rudolph and his shiny nose are more believable than certain stories of religious lore, parents never tell their children that God doesn’t exist.

As an example, I’ll use the Son of Sam. Although there were no religious claims of the Son of Sam, he did actually come from a heavily religious upbringing. You see, most people—people who all carry a light form of schizophrenia—would have a little switch in their brain that would say, “Wait a minute, dogs can’t talk. So, how can a dog tell me to kill people?”

The issue lies in the faith of religion. If you take literally the stories in the bible, then receiving orders to kill from a dog is not that far off from reality. After all, with stories of burning bushes talking to people, God telling people to kill their children, God smiting people to win a bet with Satan, and telling entire tribes of people to kill all men up to the first born and take the virgins for delight after all have been slaughtered; the belief in these stories are no more ridiculous than believing that a dog could tell you to kill people.

Therefore, the Summer of Sam began, and a summer where many lived in fear. And it’s not far off the truth to believe that this could have been easily avoided if it were not for his religious upbringing.

You must wonder what children must feel when their told stories of grown men walking on water, and tales of a great and devout heaven waiting for them when they die. One would have to wonder what the youth suicide rate is among heavily religious homes. Well, actually the statistic is quite astonishing. Seven in every twenty-five heavily Christian homes experienced a youth death that was self inflicted during 2008. While, one out of every seventeen experienced a non-self inflicted youth mortality. One would have to wonder how much the belief in an afterlife had to do with these lives being lost even before they had the chance to flourish and hear orders to kill from their neighbor’s dog.

The Theo-glitch is a great part of why impressionable people tend to join cults, whether peaceful but still scary like the Raelians, or violent ones like the Davidians. Many argue that it’s just a persons need to belong that carries them to the extent of buying into the religious rhetoric of these cult leaders. The truth of the matter is this: their minds are conditioned to believe in vast radical stories of gods and prophets, therefore have no logical reason to reject such people who may claim to be one or the other.

If you were conditioned from youth to believe that God spoke to all of these people just a couple millennia ago, and that a person was born into the world from a virgin to be the son of god, who would be martyred but later rise from the dead; what would your reasoning be to believe that this sort of thing couldn’t happen in our own time? What would your reasoning be to disbelieve in what you’re being told? You would have absolutely no reason to reject the radical claims of cult leaders solely on principle. Combine that with the common attribute of cult leaders, this being great charisma, and suddenly your brain has been reduced to that of a four year-old hearing biblical stories from your grandfather.

It takes great conditioning to wean yourself off of the destructive thought patterns that are laid into your mind by religious faith. It’s taken my whole life to let go of the same teachings. As a child, my grandfather taught me a lot of biblical stories and these stories scared the hell out of me when I was young. He was a devout Lutheran, and took the bible word for word. Even at my age, I tend to have irrational fears from time to time, at which point, I need to step back and repeat to myself that everything is alright, and that I have nothing to be afraid of. I need to retell myself that there is nothing rational to explain what I just saw out of the corner of my eye in the dark, and that it was just my mind trying to interpret what I was seeing with something familiar to me. That’s what happens when your eyes can’t interpret what you’re seeing, your brain starts making it up itself. It’s a life long process of weaning and convincing to get yourself into a rational thought process, when your childhood was filled with stories that made the Legend of Tarzan and Lord of the Rings seem like more viably fact related stories. It is stories like these that I attribute to my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as well. I have no reason to ascertain that if I don’t do everything in multiples of five that my life will suddenly begin wielding negative results. I have no reason to believe that my girlfriend won’t make it back from Florida next month if I don’t follow preordained and irrational patterns. But it is just that: irrational. And much like a phobia, it is hard to talk down with rational thought. It, in synopsis, is my brain acting irrationally and independent of logic.

This brings us to what else makes religion so dangerous. Religion teaches the dangerous pattern of blind faith. Now, it’s not like the bible is the only book in history to teach that things are blind. After all, according to history, Helen Keller was blind. According to Robert Frost, love is blind, and according to E. E. Cummings, so is lust. But these can all be positive things, except for the Helen Keller thing. It is not healthy to believe in blind faith and it is extremely destructive to teach it.

With the teaching of blind faith, you are teaching others not to question things in this world. There is nothing positive that can come from not questioning the values, principles, beliefs and/or actions of our world or nation. If nobody were to question anything, our federal government would be able to just do whatever they wanted without having to first pretend that we care. The time it takes to pretend often gives a head start to whatever democratically elected leader we’re trying to snuff out, or whatever third-world country we’re planning on blowing up next. I’m being a little facetious, but you get the point. The belief that we shouldn’t question anything is dangerous and can lead to a wasted life, a wasted land, nationalism, or even perestroika. I don’t think anybody wants these things, no matter how morally bankrupted because of religion. After all, these things lead to the end of free thought, free speech, and probably the end of the world as we know it. How could a person who questions authority actually believe in dragons, invisible men impregnating cosmic telekinetic Jewish zombies and lions with multiple heads rising from the sea? They wouldn’t.

When a person is taught blind faith, what’s to stop them from believing anything else that’s told to them? This is another effect of the Theo-glitch. What’s the incentive for people of blind faith to question the authority around them, when they’re taught at young ages to just believe and not question? If you’ll notice, we have a pretty shallow medical industry in this country. It is a medical industry where those in charge of the pharmaceutical companies are also in charge of approving drugs and creating new illnesses. An industry as well, that makes no money if people are healthy. Combine that with leaders and spokespersons who tell us that we have the best medical industry in the world, a clear lie when you look at health statistics, and you have a recipe for a complete lack of health. Why would a person who believes that it’s best to just believe because people tell you to, want to question this industry laden with conflicts of interests. It’s just one example of how religion has duped us into the control of those in power by teaching this principle, but there are many more. I know that this is starting to sound a bit Marxist, but in the matters of faith, I truly think that he—like the thousands who came before him with the very same observation—was onto something. It is truly the opiate of the mind.

The Theo-glitch affects of blind faith is what led the Soviet Union to fall. When people again and again believe blindly in their government that they’re going to get paid, even though they haven’t been paid in months and their government is going more and more bankrupt, they’re leading themselves into destruction. This is what happens when people don’t question authority, and the same happens when people are taught not to question anything else. This is precisely how religion and imperialism are one in the same in matters of virtue.

I’ve mentioned before just how defensive people can get whenever you bring up a point that might question their personal faith. This is probably because they’ve never questioned their own faith, therefore they have no answers. Because again, how could a person who questions anything believe in people living in the stomach of a whale, blazing talking bushes, and/or two of every species of animal living on a yacht, and that includes dinosaurs?

If you’ve ever wondered why the Christian right is indeed that, look at today’s right wing party. As they’ve completely strayed from the original ideals of the Republican Party, and even conservatives have abandoned the original beliefs of the party. After all, there was a time when they believed that government would stay out of the lives of its citizens, and that to legislate morality was wrong. Now they believe to the contrary, and the Christian right is aligned with them because of their current beliefs of overall control. One would have to be a complete nationalist who does not know their arm from their bay window when it comes to politics, to align himself with today’s right. Just like one would have to be oblivious to the differences between a history book and Alice in Wonderland to buy into religion. These two entities are perfect for one another and make perfect allies because of their similarities in the philosophy against any kind of questioning of leadership. In both beliefs, it is wrong to question authority. Just like conservative talk show hosts like to say that it’s wrong to question the commander in chief, the bible says that it is better to be tied to stones and drowned in the seas, than to question the divinity or existence on God. These similarities are basically just accouterments to their other shared beliefs in homophobia, censorship and moral slavery.

The seemingly harmless becomes harmful in a personal scenario. I spoke earlier of the Theo-glitch and its harm to a person’s psyche, in the way that the overt school of religious thinking may make it hard for people to distinguish between reality and fiction. This is evident in a personal friend of mine who is later interviewed in this book. He’s a devout Catholic. He was raised that way, attends church every Sunday, and goes pretty far into the train of thought seniored by Christian Science. This is evident in him as no matter how far out there the things he reads are, he seemingly believes anything that is either put in a book or shown on YouTube. This, to me is dangerous and I’ll illustrate how. He has, as of recent, fallen under the David Icke school of thought. He’s been telling me for years about these secret prisons that the US is building for when it decides to institute the one world government and one world currency, because he listens to a late night talk show that meddles in these particular schools of thought (or lack of thought). I’m not going to say that all of this stuff is lies, but come on, most of it is so ridiculous that a normal and logical person would have no choice but to either change the station or just listen for the entertainment value. However, he believes everything he hears on this show, no matter how outrageous the claim. Just a year or so ago, David Icke was featured on this show, talking about his line of thought regarding the lizard men that are controlling the world and have been throughout history by interbreeding with man and creating a lineage to maintain power over earth. These lizard men consist of George W. Bush, The Pope, Adolf Hitler, Oscar Schindler, and many other prominent people in the world’s history. They either live in the cavernous and hollow Earth, or they live in the stars, but either way, they are from the fourth dimension, and can shape shift because of a special type of gold they develop that they inhale into their body for powers.

A logical person would read this and say, “What?” But to a religious mind, considering all of the stories in the bible that would make the same logical person give the same logical answer, he is unable to distinguish between reality and fiction. This has created a rampant paranoia in him that wouldn’t take a seasoned shrink to deem unhealthy. Because of this, he believes in these tales and even preaches about them quite heavily, especially after having a few. He is not a stupid person, in fact, his knowledge of human nutrition as well as human biology is pretty advanced. He commonly emits signs of very high IQ, but because of his religious upbringing, cannot seem to think to himself that Mr. Icke just might be either lying or just insane. Why would he be able to? Again, some of the biblical tales are just as outrageous as the stories Icke claims to be reality.

Now, this may seem like innocent belief and one might ask how it could harm anyone. Well, in truth, it is just an innocent belief. But let’s say he’s at the voting booth in three years, and there is one candidate that is very intelligent, ideological and qualified for the position he’s seeking, and another who is a bumbling fool such as the leader of our former administration. Let’s just say that he knows he should vote for the person who is more qualified, but in David Icke’s new book, that’s probably just another update of an old one, Icke claims to have seen said politician’s eyes glow bright and skin turn scaly, thus revealing him as a lizard man from the constellation Draco. Where do you think this highly paranoid and highly religious conspiracy theorist is going to lean? He’ll vote for the fool before he’ll vote for a lizard man who wants to hold the reigns of control over our world and everyone in it.

This is where it’s dangerous. I’ll mention later in the book how many people voted for Bush in 2004 just because of his religious beliefs, even though they had no idea where he stood on anything. And if you look at the rest of that statistic, everyone who was voting with the number one issue being economy, healthcare, terrorism, or Iraq, all voted for John Kerry. A person voting for someone just because he believes that an invisible man impregnated a virgin to give birth to his cosmic Jewish zombie of a son is no different than not voting for a person just because somebody wrote a book claiming he’s come kind of reptile man, sent here from the fourth dimension.

And other than voting, what’s to stop this friend of mine from going off the deep end one of these days? He already believes that our own government is plotting against us to kill us—a point that I won’t overtly argue—so what’s to stop him from going on a killing spree of government officials like some of the other nuts out there like the Michigan Militia? What’s to stop him from possibly walking into an office building in Oklahoma and pulling the switch? What’s to stop him from hijacking a plane and toppling a large skyscraper or three? Well, as the past has shown us when it relates to the last two questions, nothing is to stop him. Because wasn’t it religious nutcases from the Michigan Militia as well as zealots from the Middle-East, who were hoping for their forty virgins in Heaven who were responsible for the last two.

You see, something as seemingly harmless as faith would never make a normal person think twice about teaching it to their children. Most of them don’t even realize half of the stories in that book, it’s just become inherent. It seems like people think that religion is genetic. Just because your parents practiced something doesn’t mean you must as well. But they don’t think twice. These cases are usually not the ones that lead to the harm. Again, it’s the cases of overt teaching during the developmental stages of the mind. The overall lack of reason that is necessary to believe the stories in most bibles are true, can only be that of a child. And after these stories are taught, there is nothing to reaffirm a case of reality in the child as he/she becomes an adult. Overt religious teaching strips an innocent child of a very necessary survival component of the human brain: reason.

Reason and logic are pretty essential in a society like the one we have today. When one in thirty people are claiming to have spoken to god, what’s to stop a percentage of those people from whipping up a batch of Kool-Aid for a mass suicide? After all, I doubt God told them to do anything good. You need to have logic and reason on your side when you’re confronted in the airport by one of their cult-members who are trying to recruit you. Without logic, why would you not blindly follow? A person who’s right brain is dominant might actually listen to the people, but right brained people still retain a sense of logic from their left. However, in overtly religious people, there is usually a central (Temporal) lobe dominance, where it should be recessive to the frontal lobe. This is the common ground between conspiracy theorists and religionists also discussed later in the book. Feelings of helplessness, fear and paranoia are great triggers of such a disorder.


Final Summation

Religion becomes harmful on many grounds: whether it be violence to others, the coercion of children, sexual repression, sexism, bigotry, war, or even just the clear hostility displayed at acts of question or inquiry. But there are so many more ways that religion harms that aren’t often thought about. The Theo-glitch is one of those, in the way that it’s disguised so well with the veil of faith. After all, if one person thinks that a voice from another world is directing his actions, no matter what they are, and has mapped out a future that is unchangeable, it would surely be called dementia. However, if a few million people believe in the same concept, and even accept it as reality, it is then called religion. I guess what separates religion from madness is a mandate from the masses.

Either way, religion harms the psyche by allowing madness to exist independently of mental illness. There are even many states and countries that don’t separate “Jerusalem Syndrome” from basic dementia or schizophrenia. Why is that? It is separate, both in its effects, as well as in its foundation and cause. Ponder this: without the concept of God, would you have a bunch of nut-jobs walking around thinking that God is talking to them? Of course you wouldn’t, but don’t try to introduce that theory to a religionist. If you do, then you’re talking the words of Satan, who is supposed to be sent to earth around this time to talk people out of religion. Satan, you know that guy, the talking snake who tempted the rib-woman to eat from the magical tree that ended paradise, with whom she later had a child, who killed his brother, therefore is coursed to be a vampire. It’s funny what you can get people to buy, just by putting it into the right language, or making people believe it’s from an ancient text. However, when it’s worded like that, it suddenly sounds a little ridiculous doesn’t it? Well then, what of splashing magical water onto a baby’s head to protect him from a special baby hell for those who never received magical water treatment? Well, the Catholics believe in it.

When delusions exist independently of mental illness, they become much harder to incriminate. And when it comes from an introduced concept as opposed to a natural one, one would think that the natural answer would be to stop introducing the concept to children. After all, what you tell a child during the period of mental and emotional development is going to affect them for the rest of their lives. Therefore, can we be a little more careful about it? Can we maybe leave the fairytales separate from what we teach them as reality? It makes about as much sense to teach a child that the stories in the bible are real, as it would to introduce philosophy or linguistics into the biology or home economics classroom. We just need to start thinking logically about what we’re inflicting on children and how it’s going to affect them in the future. However, if parents can’t stop this kind of abuse themselves, then there is another option, which we’ll talk about in part three.

Unchecked and Unbalanced: Evolution Continues

According to Freud, there are three stages of human understanding. This is wholly demonstrative with all cultures in history. The three stages are superstition, religion and science. One might say that superstition is the same as religion, but it’s clearly not. The belief in God alone is merely superstition. To believe that one must dance in a circle under the sun or the rains won’t come is superstition. So is believing that one must paint a red line down the center of one’s face or else the gods will not look well upon you is only superstition. Superstition becomes religion when certain fables, rituals, morals and values are attached with the original God myth. This combination is what we see today as religion. The third and final stage of human understanding begins when rational thought enters the spectrum, causing either new people to question the faiths of the past, or followers of said faith to question their own beliefs through rational thought.

But what is happening today is that more and more people are being ruled by what could be deemed the new stage of evolution. Over the past four thousand years, people have continued to physically evolve. People have gotten taller, produced less body hair, lost more of their tailbone, less people are born with wisdom teeth, and people are living upwards of three times the life expectancy when compared to even two thousand years ago. But now we’re seeing a great neurological evolution happening. More and more people every year are replacing faith with reason, belief with logic, prayer with scientific medicine, bigotry with tolerance and acceptance, and, most of all, religion with science. America stands dead last in the westernized world in this new stage of evolution, but it still holds a strong and growing 16% percent of people claiming no religious affiliation. In many other westernized countries, the numbers are as large as 67%.

But there is a danger. This danger threatens to halt this new stage of evolution and human understanding. You see, as secular culture begins to take the lead, what its doing is involuntarily radicalizing what is gradually becoming the world’s religious minority. More and more are seeing radical religion as a means of holding on to what they’ve been tricked into believing is their “traditional” values. This happens not because the change they see around them is necessarily negative, but because it’s different and this frightens them. Therefore, they plot harder and harder by the day to attempt to discredit scientific achievements. They make up lies about scientific leaders like Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin. They create elaborate conspiracy theories about inoculations causing Down Syndrome or condoms causing AIDS. They waste tax payer money (to which they do not even contribute) to sue schools and other secular, educational foundations, to try to force them to stop teaching evolution and other scientific discoveries, only to replace them with myths. They help fund children to be sent to unregulated schools where they’re taught myths in place of science. They publicly demonize those who don’t act accordingly to their predisposed agendas. They picket clinics, screaming at innocent people, pushing them, spitting on them, to convince them that they will burn in some magical fire land if they do something responsible in the face of society. They post websites to pass the private information, including addresses and phone numbers, of abortion providers. They shoot people outside clinics, in parks and even in churches. They bomb institutions which are contrary to their fables. They kill, slaughter and maim those who would refute their beliefs or predisposed morality. They even fly planes into sky-scrapers, killing thousands of people. And what’s worse is that their actions become more extreme the more the world moves into this new stage of human understanding.

All of these actions remind me of past atrocities and even past regimes. “Believe in this. I have no proof of this, but believe in it anyway, or else someone, somewhere, at some point will hurt you.” This is basically the root of imperialism. This is the technique that was employed by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Pol-Pot, the first popes, the Romans, the Churches of England and Spain… Wait a minute, what were those last three? This brings me to my point. The basis for imperialism is the same basis for religion: believe in this, or you will be sorry.

This was best put by a man named Dr. James Luther Adams, when he said, “The Nazis were not going to return home with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors in America had found a mask for fascism in patriotism and the passages of the bible.” He was really on to something there, and as a holocaust survivor and Harvard Ethics professor, he truly knows what he’s talking about.

How do nationalistic imperialism and religion tie together on a mental scale? They do in the same way the conspiracy theories do, which is why both movements have so often employed conspiracy theories for the purpose of recruitment and manipulation with such great success. It all lies in the dominant area of the brain. Or, rather, the dominant hemisphere and lobe. You see, humans until now have generally been controlled by the central lobe of the brain. This lobe is responsible (namely in its right hemisphere) for many things in the body but primarily, emotion and faith, thus, this is the area of the brain that allows for the proverbial leap of faith. A leap of faith, by definition, is the act of either buying into a system, or believing in something without rational evidence (without influence of the left hemisphere or the frontal lobe). Dominance of this part of the brain makes people more susceptible and gullible, and less scrutinous, reasonable or rational.

When I say “leaps of faith,” I’m referring to a number of beliefs. One belief could be that (A) the world is run by a global elite who are all descendent from an alien civilization of lizards who started the central bank in 1913 to fund the poisoning of water supplies with LSD. Another belief would be that (B) the Jews are plotting a grand scheme to take over the country and even the world by campaigning central banks and financial institutions, and must be stopped. Another would be that (C) despite archaeological evidence, the world was created in six days, six thousand years ago; the first man was made from sand and the first woman was made from his rib; they lived in a magical garden full of dinosaurs and talking snakes, the same snake who told the rib-woman to eat from a magical tree, which thusly ended paradise.

These are all connected in the sense that they would’ve made for great novels, but also in the sense that people rarely believe in one without the other. If we look at those in order of A, B and C, as I laid out, we can illustrate a great connection. This is that it’s not all that uncommon for people to believe in C without believing in either A or B. However, it is extremely uncommon for people to believe in either A or B without believing in C (C being a general belief in any of the world’s major religions, not only the anecdote I stated before).

Why would they believe in one without the other? All three are radical beliefs with absolutely no evidentiary foundation. They’re, again, not only identical in essence, but also identical in origin: the central (temporal) lobe and right hemisphere of the brain. When a person believes in any one of these, it is a clear indication of temporal lobe and right brained dominance (as is illustrated time and again through studies of brain wave activity and its reactive similarities). This solves the puzzle as to why these beliefs tend to go hand in hand. There are more moderate religionists who may believe in a god, but also challenge many of the tenants of organized religion with rational thought. In my search, I found exactly what I thought I would: These people were merely moderately susceptible to outlandish conspiracy theories, but only those which have a clear, factual and structural foundation, while the outlandish theory was merely the icing on the cake (Alex Jones was a hit for these people). The third group in the human understanding progression (seculars and atheists), tested a clear negative in every research experiment of this type, to the conspiracy theory books and documentaries; showing a consistent skepticism toward the sources of the makers and writers, even often questioning their motivations. This is a clear indicator of frontal lobe, left brained dominance (the more skeptical and logical lobe and hemisphere of the brain).

Another startling find was when I noticed that the part of the brain that is dominant in these religionists, as well as most reactive to conspiracy theories, is also the same part of the brain responsible for schizophrenia, delusion, paranoia and even epilepsy. Looking back, we’ve seen that many exorcisms in history have been performed on epileptics, but apparently, it can be demonstrated, that we can easily say that there was a time when we called epileptics prophets. Post Mortem, we’ve diagnosed many different figures of religious ideation with epilepsy. We can do this because it seems that many of them, the spells they experienced anyway, seem to resemble epilepsy. Joseph Smith was said to have long standing blackouts, sometimes up to three days at a time. Other reports of possession (shaking, foaming at the mouth) as well as constant head aches were attributed to other religious leaders like Muhammad and Joan of Arc. Other symptoms like speech arrest and visual and auditory hallucinations, and lapses of consciousness have also been mentioned in religious texts.

What does this tell us? It tells us that there is a clear and demonstrative difference between religionists and atheists. Could this also be an evolutionary difference?

It is well known that during our stages of evolution, we’ve become more and more prone to logic. We came from animals who scavenged, to using crude tools to pick ants out of trees. This age of invention continued as we started using tools to hunt and eventually build. Along the lines, we harnessed the concept of agriculture, growing fruits, vegetables and grains for survival, which led to the breeding and domestication of animals as a food source. As time continued, our inventions have become more and more complex. The spear became the axe, and eventually became the sword, then the musket, the cannon, the rifle, and eventually, the nuclear missile. Likewise, the wheel became the buggy, then the bike, then the train, then the car and eventually the airplane. This has happened because the more we use the logic centers of our brains, the more developed they become, and the easier it is to grasp more complex concepts. After all, I highly doubt that the man who invented the first wheel could even come close to developing the technology in something as relatively simple as a printing press, let alone, an Apple computer. This is precisely why there has been such a leap since the agricultural revolution. The more complex the technology of the parent generation, the more exponentially developed will be the ability to grasp complexity in the offspring. A point: a child today is more technologically savvy than the man who invented the first super computer only a generation ago.

It is obviously evident that extreme neurological development has happened over the past few thousand years, and it is more evident that this evolution continues today. The more we evolve neurologically, the more logical and rational we become. This is physically evident in each generation’s brain activity, moving ever so gradually and delicately into the left hemisphere and the frontal lobe of the brain. Could this mean that skepticisms like atheism and political independence are simply the next stage of evolution? Well, according to the research: yes.

But as I mentioned before, the more skeptical, agnostic, atheist and secular the world’s culture becomes, the more our world culture pushes religionists and moderates into radicalism. When looking at the three stages, moderates could either be defined as those who never evolved past the first stage of understanding (superstition), as they’re less likely to apply strange rituals or myths to their god or deity in which they believe. However, this makes no sense as they are truly willing to compromise religion in the name of science, realizing that science isn’t some grand conspirator against religion. They still hold their deistic beliefs, but won’t attack science if more contemporary revelations contradict their previously held beliefs. Instead, the evidence points to the conclusion that religious moderates are more of a transitional phase of evolution. They’re sort of the Lucy, connecting the furry beasts with Einstein (also an admitted atheist).

This is demonstrative in matters of conversion. What I said before may have been misleading, it’s not the radicals who are being pushed to radicalism, it is those who already hold a fundamental and literal belief in religion, far beyond moderation. In fact, as a case in point, I’ve never heard of a single moderate who has been converted into a radical system by secular culture. However, I’ve heard of literally dozens of moderates who have converted into secularism since September 11^th. They have been pushed into agnosticism and even atheism by the religious radical right, demonstrating a previous presence of left and frontal brained activity which just needed a final push to weed off the effects of nurture. There are plentiful amounts of tales telling of those who completely skipped the middle step and were pushed from religion into atheism, as is the case with one of the country’s leading atheists. There seems to be not only a trend, but a clear pattern here. It seems very consistent that progress is leading in one direction. Using A, B and C again, I’ll illustrate what I mean (A: Religious, B: Moderate, C: Atheist). We have heard of plenty of cases of person A becoming person B. We have heard plenty of cases of person B becoming person C. We have heard of plenty of cases of person A even going as far to become person C, but never has there been a case of person C becoming person A., except for a schizophrenic who later became infamous in California as the famous Night Stalker. It is an all too rare case as well for person B to become person A. I know of none, personally. Therefore, this clearly establishes a line of progress, and quite possibly another olive branch on the tree of life (evolution).

It is, however, quite possible that we’re seeing two branches forming. As I said, the religious group may be leaving their churches and putting on the rainbow pins and lab coats in refreshing numbers, but what of those who are not? Is it not fair to say that following the lines of the progress of complexity that I just outlined, that the least frontal lobed and left brained parents will produce a like offspring? Especially as it will more than likely be educated outside of the secular school system, and also, the radicalism of the parents will be passed on to the offspring by both nurture as well as nature. Again, we’re talking about the evolution of brain function. One might think that the bloodlines that do not evolve would just cease to exist, but that is not the case. In the past, in more of a “fend for yourself” type of society, the case would have certainly been that those capable of greater brain function would thrive over the incapable. Adaptability, not strength, is the essence of evolution, after all. Those with a higher or more evolved brain functionality would be more likely to survive because of their ability to see patterns and trends, and to build and invent. Trust me, if evolution were about physical strength or even speed, the dinosaurs would still be ruling this planet, and humans would be nothing more than a walking, running and shrieking food source. We likely would have never evolved past Australopithecus. Even something as intellectually simple as basic addition and subtraction is what led to our survival into an agricultural species.

That problem is that we don’t live in the world of survival of the fittest (most adaptive) anymore. In previous epochs, in inventive and agricultural neighbor would not have openly and freely shared his tools, grains or kills with those of other tribes, let alone other species. But in today’s world, person A has full access to all of the benefits of person C’s inventions, all the while declaring war against persons B and C. We must remember that scientific and medical research, autonomy, democracy; these are all inventions of the secular movement and the result of intellectual evolution. We started trying to cure diseases by dancing in circles, then we tried human sacrifice, then we tried praying, then we tried herbs, which led to today’s medical industry. However, those of the first and second parent intellectual species, who still insist that God can cure illness, see a specialist, they take medication and try experimental research; all of these, the advantageous benefits of the evolution of neurological comprehension, and frontal lobed and left brained dominance. Therefore, the parent species has not died off. Rather, they’ve survived because of the benefits of the offspring species. In any other type of evolution or society, the parent species would be relegated to relying on priests or shamans to heal illnesses and afflictions. Unfortunately, seculars, like myself, are not as cold-hearted as we probably should be.

Because of all of this, the parent species has survived. Therefore, we’re actually seeing a split in the evolutionary tree between the frontal lobe dominated and the central lobe dominated.

The human tree is awfully clear when we look at it like this. It starts with the central lobed superstitious, onto their central lobed, but slightly more left-brained and analytical religious offspring. The superstitious eventually either die off from war or poverty, or go into seclusion from the rest of society. Suddenly the branch splits again, forming the new, slightly more skeptical moderate who eventually becomes either deist or theist. Eventually, the moderate and secular split, as the secular (the most analytical and frontal and left brained of the species) is born. This clearly happened sometime in the 1700s in Europe, and eventually spread from there through ideals. All the while, the sectarian religionist continues farther and farther to the right (symbolically), as the moderates continued developing into new branches of atheists. As evolution dictates, somehow and someway, one species will thrive over the other, but in today’s society, this is unlikely to happen.

Or is it? We concluded earlier the similarities between religionists, imperialists, and conspiracy theorists. We saw how both sectarians and imperialists utilize conspiracy theories because the followers of both lines of thought are more susceptible to them because of their right brained and central lobed dominance. They are capable of leaps of faith, which the left-brained and frontal-lobed secular is not. And to be more apt to attempt a leap of faith is to be more likely to believe a foundationless lie. Again, which are the roots of nationalism, imperialism, religion, and for that matter, about 97% of history’s slain human life. It’s been my experience that those who are least likely to believe that there is a beautiful paradise beneath a blazing fire, are least likely to jump into it. But on the other hand, those who want you to believe it, with legions of central-lobed people around, will find it pretty easy to form an army to throw the non-believers into the fire. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. But what we cannot allow is for the parent species of evolution to halt the progression and evolution of the species. The offspring species MUST find a way to thrive over the parent.

Unchecked and Unbalanced: A New Face on an Old System.

The following blog is from the Fourth of July weekend, 2009.

I mentioned in the previous edition that things have certainly not changed since the inaugeration of President Barack Obama, when it comes to the endless fight against the takeover of the Evangelical Right (Wrong). Therefore, I decided to dedicate today's Unchecked and Unbalanced: A Moral Minority Report to the president and his pandering toward a group that is still coming in from the fringe at an alarming rate. I feel the need to raise the mirror once again to the country which surrounds me. Well, I guess the mirror would be pointed at our leaders as I scour the society around me asking the question, "Hey, where does this look familiar?"

Now watch this drive!!!

If you don't find it disturbing that only one week after Barack Obama delivered a press conference regarding his inaction with such promised motives as Don't Ask Don't Tell, and DOMA, he's out golfing with before the Independence Day BBQ. Yeah, it's the fourth of July, I get that, but this has been every weekend. And there's something about the president addressing the media while practicing his drive that just sends me back a few years into a sheer state of panic.

What I'm asking today on Unchecked and Unbalanced is, "Where's the outrage?" or better, "What change?" I ask this question with the best intentions. Look, I know that I’m about to alienate a wide, vast portion of my demographic, but we were promised change, and personally, the only changes that I’ve seen have been most antithetic to what I would refer to as, “in the best interest of our country.”

Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20th of this year. The world watched and the world waited to hear what this extremely well orator was going to say next. We all wanted to know what his plan was to make the United States a new paradise on Earth. Well, some of us did. Personally, after working on his campaign indirectly and single-handedly raising almost 30 million dollars for him, I was a little sick of hearing him talk. I was ready for action. But what I saw disturbed me greatly. I saw Rick Warren give the opening “incantation” at the ceremony. Personally, I’m hard pressed to name any person who shouldn’t be disturbed by this.

Pastor Rick Warren has been a long time opponent of civil liberties as well as choice. Warren was the founder of the southern evangelical Mega-church called the Saddleback Church. Since founding the sixth largest church in the United States, Warren has also written many best sellers, such as his most popular A Purpose Driven Church. While a person could greatly commend Warren for his encouragement of churches around the country to increase charity work and philanthropy, Warren has also been much the controversial figure in certain lights, namely choice and liberty.

Warren is famous for comparing gay marriage to incest, and has recently called abortion, “The Nazi holocaust for children.” Warren showed his disdain for choice in shelling out millions of dollars to get the California bill, Prop 8, passed, a bill that he called necessary. His exact quote is, “I’m opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I’m opposed to having an older guy be with a child and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.” Warren compared gay marriage to incest, pedophelia and poligymy, and this was only years after comparing abortion to one of the biggest atrocities in years.

There are have been other rumors regarding Warren, but these are all just rumors and therefore
cannot be confirmed, but from what I know, I don’t doubt them a bit.

Barack Obama made the decision, even after the criticism from his own party for having Warren, and I didn’t think that boded well for him after the revelations of his long-time reverend, Jeremiah Write, who was a greatly outspoken conspiracy theorist as well as a zealot of the highest regards. However, I, like many, kept the faith, but in June of 2009, yet another factor came about telling us that we’re not out of the woods of religious zealotry in public office, in fact, the woods are closing in on us.

On the morning of June 4th, 2009, Barack Obama made the decision to appoint Alexia Kelley as the Director of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services. I’m not going to ramble on about just how many ways the Faith-Based initiative is unconstitutional and irresponsible, but I will mention the fact that the person who fills that seat has a lot of power in regards to access to birth control as well as abortion. What’s scary about that, you ask? It’s because Alexia Kelley has been a long time opponent of birth control, abortion, and even gay rights.

Kelley was the co-founder and former executive director for an anti-choice organization called Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG). Jon O’Brian, the head of Catholics for Choice said on the morning of the appointment, “Ms. Kelley’s appointment would be a defeat for reason and logic and calls into question whether President Obama’s administration is serious about reducing the need for abortion. And, while it may not gain many headlines, the impact and significance of this appointment should not go unnoticed.” He later said in his speech, “If Ms. Kelley had been appointed to another position in the administration, there might be less reason for concern. However, the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for providing and expanding access to key sexual and reproductive health services.” He continued, “As such, we need those working in HHS to rely on evidence based methods to reduce the need for abortion. We need them to believe in men’s and woman’s capacity to make moral decisions about their own lives. Unfortunately, as see from her work at CACG, Ms. Kelley does not fit that bill.”

Kelley and her organization has supported consistently, every abortion and birth control access

The positive results of a "Christian Nation."

restriction since its founding, and Kelley herself is a proud anti-choice public figure, as is shown by the smile on her face whenever she gains a new opportunity to oppose either choice or human rights. She, much like Pastor Warren, compares abortion to “torture and murder.”

While Obama continues to appoint people to his cabinet who have strong fundamentalist affiliations as well as radical intent, one must start to wonder about Obama’s real character. After all, what did he learn during his twenty some years of bowing to a radical in Chicago? After hearing about only three of his affiliations of religious radicals, is it any wonder that the Faith Based Initiative, DOMA and haven't been even addressed since Obama took office, and he claims to be "biting his time," with DADT? In this person's humble opinion, no.

Note: Since writing this blog, in fact, only days afterward, Dr. Francis Collins was appointed as the director of the NIH (National Institute of Health). Francis Collins is the scientist who is commonly misgiven the credit for mapping the human genome, when in fact, he directed the team of about 2,000 scientists who collectively mapped a small part of it. Collins, while a great director, is hardly a person who ought to be running a scientific cabinet of government in what is supposed to be a new and more science-friendly administration. Collins, contrary to other scientists, firmly believes that morality is a not a fortunate byproduct of evolution, but was actually given to us by God in later stages of evolution. Francis publicly stated on Real Time with Bill Maher that he literally believes in talking snakes, zombies, strange rib women, men made of nothing but sand and magical trees that have the power to end "paradise." He also refers to atheism as "dogma," thus outing his as a man who would serve better on the board of an intelligent disign institution as opposed to a legitimate, federal scientific foundation. Truly, this should scare the vast majority of logical and mentally healthy people in the world.

Unchecked and Unbalanced: The Inaugeration.

Welcome to the inaugural Moral Minority Report. This is the first in the series of First Amendment violations in the United States, and what we can do to stop them. Before we get started, let's clear up what the First Amendment is.

"Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech; or the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

No matter how much Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity would like you to believe that this amendment has little to nothing to do with religion, they're lying. Along with people like Falwell, Robertson and Bush, they've created a lie for you, in which they claim that the first amendment has nothing to do with the separation of church and state, and that this falsehood is merely a remnant of Soviet Russia's constitution. This is what I like to call "The New Lie."

America was not founded to be a Christian or even religious nation. That is everything that thousands died in the Revolutionary War to prevent.

As one of our more prominent founding fathers, James Madison, wrote, "That religion or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, being under the direction and conviction only, not of violence or compulsion, all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it according to the dictates of Conscience; and therefore that no man or class of men ought, on account of religion to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges; nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities under..."

What this basically means is, although Madison was fervently against the foundation of religion in the first place, "In a free country, we can't dictate that you do or you do not practice religion, but religion is to be separate from state as well as separate from any establishment of state." Madison also wrote in later years, "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

Madison was not alone in his detest against religion, as John Adams wrote, "This would be the best of all worlds if it not for religion." This notion was well carried in the times of the early Americas when our fathers saw a nation being formed with as much religious persecution as the lands from which we sought freedom in the first place. Thomas Jefferson was a very outspoken opponent of organized religion, as one of his more tame remarks on the topic reads, "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government." He wrote this initially to James Madison who quickly and eagerly responded, "There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermiddle with religion. Its least interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation."

Withstanding the words of Hamilton, Paine, and Washington, do these statements sound as though our founding fathers intended a Christian Nation, in which people's rights and even medical research would be halted on the basis of religious faith? Absolutely not. America was founded on secular principles and should be as such today, in the spirit of our founding fathers. The first few editions of this blog is going to be chapters from my book "crUSAder," and I will start with a section on one of the more basic of religious rule, The Pledge of Allegiance and Child Indoctrination. Before you read this part, try to remember that the pledge did not have the words "under god" in it until 1954, 100 years after it was initially written.

Children in schools are mandated to recite the pledge of allegiance, which in and of itself is un-American because of the nationalistic properties therein; but within the pledge, children are forced to recite the following:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the republic, for which it stands, one nation under GOD—indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

As we can see here, America has become yet another theocracy, much like those countries in the middle-east, that the same conservative talk show hosts should revel in. In a country where our highest freedoms are dissent against our national legislation without imprisonment—most of the time—as well as our freedom of religion, this pledge that our children forcibly say on a daily basis, is the highest of abominations against those previously stated freedoms. When one forces a child not only to pledge their allegiance to their country as well as another’s religion, we are violating those very rights that separate America from middle eastern countries. And those separations that distinguish us from openly theocratic countries are those which many of us—outwardly, anyway—would die to protect. So then, why is it that they are tolerated? I’m afraid that I just don’t have an answer. Maybe it’s because there just isn’t justice for all.

Justice is a word that is thrown around as much in politics today, as the word extreme would be in the vernacular of a professional skateboarding competition. And truthfully, it’s become just as meaningless. After all, where is the justice in the fact that there are stone statues of the ten commandments in front of court houses all over in the south? Is it not bad enough that when testifying in a court of law, you are mandated to place your hand on a book of religious faith? A religious faith that only belongs to about 12% of this country is a mandatory and intrical part of American court proceedings. “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—so help me, God,” is what is stated in the beginning of a court testimony, while the testifier has his hand placed in the CHRISTIAN bible. What about this says “religious freedom and diversity”? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. And don’t try bringing this up to any sort of right-winger, because if they don’t just flat out tell you to deal with it, they’ll tell you that this is just the way it’s always been, since the right-wing religious pilgrims founded America.

This is what I like to call The New Lie. I call it this because it’s not only new, but it’s completely false. The word The is only there as a preposition. This new lie is what claims that it’s always been like this. That those of us who chose a different route from Christianity have always had to have it shoved in our face, only because this has always been a Christian nation. The lie claims that our churches have always used their tax free money to buy up real state as well as stock and presidents. The lie claims that all other faiths are to be called “new age” because they always have been. The lie claims that courtrooms have always made people swear on the bible and use the word God before testifying. It claims the same for school children, in regards to prayer.

The truth is, as I’ve clearly demonstrated so far, is that this country was not founded on religion, nor was it founded by religious people. And only when it started adopting these overt religious practices, did the violence, turmoil and moral decay of this country begin. Now we’ve become a neo-fascist religious empire, based on the same type of theocracy as Great Britain so many years ago, as well as many middle eastern countries today. If you want to prove this, then why don’t you try something? Why don’t you call your local congressman or congresswoman, and tell him or her that you want to propose removing the term “In God We Trust” from dollar bills and replacing it with “In Allah We Trust”. What would be more fitting, since I’m sure I don’t have to bring up the statistic again, tell your leaders that you want to replace the religious phrase on the dollar with “There Is No God”. I’m sure that will get you laughed right off of the phone. That may actually get you kicked out of the capital building. If you want to have a larger laugh, why don’t you tell your school that you practice the faith of the Flying Spaghetti monster, therefore you must go to school dressed as a pirate every Thursday. Why don’t you ask for a bible other than a Christian one in a Juvenile corrections facility? Why don’t you ask a hotel if they have a free bible of a religion that is child friendly, and has no murder, rape or bloodshed. Why don’t you propose changing the word God to Buddha in the pledge of allegiance. Well, the fact of the matter is that we’re supposed to have freedom of religion as well as a separation of church and state. Therefore, why is it that anything other than a Christian based proposal is so readily laughed off the table. If you look at the actual numbers, the number of Muslims in America is actually higher than Presbyterians, Roman Catholics and Protestants combined. Therefore, this being a democracy, why would it be so ridiculous to propose changing the word God to Allah in those heavily Muslim areas? Do that and you’ll see the Christian Right pull the separation of church and state amendment out of their hands faster than the bible. The same amendment that they would usually claim doesn’t exist.

Proof of this is what I like to call the happening of 2004. A Jr. high school in Ohio experienced great controversy around Christmas time when the teachers of the school decided it would be a good idea to spend a week teaching children about the faiths around the world, and what they practice on Christmas. After all, December twenty-fifth was the birthday of about nine prophets and quite a few gods as well, even a hundred years before the birth of Jesus. And by the way, that date wasn’t even decided upon until about six-hundred years after the bible was written.

The teachers taught the children about the eastern religions and their lore around this time of the year. They taught the children about Islam, Judaism as well as many of the Nordic and Pagan beliefs, and their lore behind their holidays at this time of the year. Over all, it was a good idea and if done properly, could have been an eye opening experience and would have led the children to be more tolerant of other cultures and religions.

The problem started when the kids all drew pictures. They were all given the choice of one of the religions that were discussed during the week long education, and given an assignment to draw a picture with an accompanying story that averaged about one-hundred words a piece. Again, not that bad of an idea. That is, until the parent teacher conferences when a woman by the name of Valerie Sheldon entered the halls of the school and saw something that her eyes just could not believe. She saw not only a picture drawn by a child of a Star of David, but she also saw a picture of a snowy night with a pentacle in the sky, that represented the pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice.

She immediately started to scream and search around for a teacher. When she found the teacher responsible for the course, she interrupted her conference with another child’s parent and immediately started calling the teacher foul names in front of children and threatened to sue her for teaching the children this kind of “blasphemy”. What struck me was when I found out that she headed up a parent organization that had only two years prior, fought to keep a Christian Christmas play in the schools holiday-time proceedings.

The story is that parents of the children who attend this school, were parents of a very progressive part of Ohio. Yeah, there is one. A few of the parents decided that keeping a holiday play in school was just a little too much when the play involved the birth of Jesus and other solely Christian references. They fought to get it out of the school, however Valerie and her heavily religious parent group fought against them, citing that the play was only a holiday play and not only for people of a certain denomination of Christianity. The other group fought back informing her that the problem didn’t lie with the fact that it only appealed to one Christian denomination, but the problem was that it was Christian in the first place and surrounded around Christian mythology, and not historical timeline. Therefore, this play shouldn’t be allowed in school because many of the parents in the school either didn’t want their children exposed to false history and religion, and others practiced other faiths such as Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and even a few Wiccan families.

Valerie fired back in outrage claiming that Christianity is hand and hand with history and Jesus is a part of history too, which may or may not be true, more heavily in the maybe not category. Valerie just couldn’t understand that others don’t believe in the same things she does, and attested that they should and that this play would be a good way to educate. The end result came when Valerie threatened to sue the school, and the other parent group did not, and made clear their intention not to bring this into the courtroom. The school sided with the side that threatened to sue, because they knew she would. They left the play in the school, where it remained for a few years, before the music/drama teacher retired and a new one was hired that refused to do a Christian based play.

Now, this same woman who thought it would be wrong to pull Christianity out of school, is throwing a fit because other religions are being discussed in school as well. Now, I’m all for getting religion completely out of school, but this is a woman who fought to keep religion in school in more than one other case. Therefore, purely out of poetic justice, I’m glad that Valerie suddenly knew how it felt. However, the story doesn’t have that happy of an ending. In fact, the three teachers who were involved in the study were fired because the school wanted to avoid another lawsuit, as Valerie had again threatened to sue. Valerie is still a leading fighter of keeping Christianity in school but all other religions out, and even today is involved in a lawsuit against a school in Nevada for teaching the new and radical theory of gravity.

Okay, that last part was a joke, but I could see it being true. After all, I would think she’d be all about going back in time and getting in on some of that sweet Scope’s Trial action. But in truth, this tale illustrates the very core of what the religious right is all about. They’re all for separation of church and state so long as it involves any other religion but Christianity. They just don’t want their children learning about other religions, because then they might have to answer some actual questions about their faith. And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned in the writing of this book, it’s that people don’t like to have their faith questioned, and they will go pretty far out of their way, even to the length of violence, to keep questions away from their faith. I guess that’s because if other people ask them questions about it, they just might have to question it themselves to answer those queries. After all, nothing brings defensiveness to the front lines in a person than to ask them a question to which they don’t know the answer.

As I write this chapter, I’m reading a book called Religious Literacy, by Stephen Prothero, who calls into question the misunderstanding of religion, and blames it on the fact that public schools don’t teach enough about it. I guess what he’s arguing is that public schools should have comparative religion courses, with which I whole heartedly agree. We need remember though, that a comparative religion course is mainly a course on philosophy with small strains of history attached. This should never be taught along side biology or science, as even a Vatican scientist will tell you, “The Bible is not a book of science, it’s a book of faith.” It would make as much sense to teach Mother Goose tales along side anthropology.

However, if the fact that Christianity, as he argues, is only carried out in the manner in which it is because of the lack of education among those who practice it, why is it that parents irrationally flip out whenever the school proposes a comparative religion course? I know that these people are mostly pretty egocentric, but I would think this would solve the problem. Although, they wouldn’t want their children learning that there are many other faiths out there from which to choose, now would they? This might breed a new generation of people who aren’t devout and fanatically obsessed as they are. It brings the defenses up, and nothing can do that like religious discussion.

If you have a problem believing in the defensiveness of religious people whenever a questioning of their beliefs comes to mind, consider the Vatican (outside of their science department, by the way, which has changed much since the time of Galileo). Have you ever tried to interview a person in the Vatican? Or have you ever tried to interview a Catholic, for that matter, about some of the more bizarre beliefs in the religious structure? If you were to ask a Christian why they believe that the world is 6,000 years old, if you were to find a person who even knew what you were talking about, you would not get an answer, you would get, “This interview is over.” This is because none of them really have any kind of scientific data to back this up, they just believe it because they’re told to believe it. And that is the entirety of religion itself. People who are just told to believe something, and after a few years, just believe it because they were told to. And the worse part about this, is that this is how people now perceive politics, because religion has merged into politics. People are told to believe that abortion is bad and that abstinence only education is good, therefore they eventually believe it, instead of looking at the facts and the numbers and deciding for themselves. It seems today that every issue of politics is also an issue of religion. This is the rise of American theocracy.

Note: This post was from earlier on this year, and this is the first time it has appeared on this website. Since writing this blog, I've been exposed to some horrible truths that do nothing but prove that the evangelical uprising was not only a problem of the Bush administration, but Barack Obama has since carried the torch. His election of Alexia Kelley to a high ranking position in the Department of Health and Human Services, his inauguration prayer being given by known radical, Rick Warren, and even the appointment of Mr. Francis (the scientist who is commonly and falsly credited with mapping the human genome, and a man who actually believes that God implanted morality into us during later stages of evolution) as a leading government scientist; proves the point that the fight is far from over, but has just begun. Our future depends on secular culture winning this war of ideals, else our future be as riddled with war and schism as it is now.

Thanks for reading,
C. Allen Thompson