“Land of the free, Home of the the brave” and “where anyone can, if they obey the rules and work hard can be anything they want to be.”  How many times have we heard those cliches quoted in our homes, schools, political campaigns, and in various forms of media? I guess those are admirable goals for a utopia that will never exist and in reality cannot exist. America was, is, and may always be a grand experiment with various degrees of success and failure. The major reason for this lack of absolute success is that the experiment here and elsewhere is populated by humans who have evolved to the point of self destruction. It is only a question of how much longer it will be before they actually reach that point.

Humans are simply one species of many in the grouping of mammals of the animal kingdom which, unfortunately evolved to a higher level than they were capable of controlling their behavior. They evolved both an intellect capable of creating a world with everything humans needed for the ultimate in survival in terms of living good healthy, long lives and the ability to reason how to accomplish that end. However, this same intellect created everything they needed to destroy everything that was good about the world itself. Like other animals humans had an instinct to survive and to have fears. When combined with the fears and survival instinct humans let the intellect override reason.

There has long been something in the field of political science called the Rational Man Theory which held that man, speaking generically, was capable of thinking out situations in a rational manner before acting, thus bringing about the best outcome.  In reality, humans continuously prove just how flawed that theory is, whether it is about climate change, animal conservation, or dealing with other humans. So that leaves religion.

Religions, I believe, came about out of ignorance and superstition. In the early evolution of humans things occurred that they could not explain so they were attributed to the gods. Things that were simply natural occurrences like lightning, thunder, earthquakes, volcanoes, and even death, especially death, were all the work of some god or another. In order to lessen the fear of dying they created places where people would go when they died that were pleasant so they did not offend the gods. Then they made up the rules that supposedly came from the gods and had special people give the rules. Religion was supposed to make people feel calmer and better about life. Instead religion is leading to the destruction of humans.

I personally have no problem with what anyone else believes as long as they leave me out of it. At some point, however, some religions  ceased to be content with simply their own beliefs, they began to insist that everyone else believed as they did or the world would cease to exist. This was primarily the Christians and the Muslims. It became their mission to convert all the world’s people to their way of thinking. Untold millions of people have died during the history of humans in the name of these two religions and which of their leaders is the greatest. The sheer stupidity of these two religions which both acknowledge worshipping the same god, but fight over whether Mohammed or Jesus is the greatest, is both bizarre and appalling.

The only thing that is more appalling in this fight is the ignorance of the people who follow the alleged teaching of these two leaders in terms of what they meant in their prophecies. Both allegedly preached love and peace yet their followers are, for the most part, full of hate, greed, bigotry, and violence. Both have their similarities in the sense that they demean women, consider themselves superior to others in society, and hate others who believe differently than they do. It is almost funny to watch politicians in this country claim to be Constitutionals and Christians at the same time. Methinks that is an Oxymoron. Either that or a Moronic OX one. Bah humbug to the hypocrisy of it all!