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Were you raised a believer? Were you taught since infancy that some all-knowing, all-powerful God made you in His image, and that he now watches over you and guides the actions of your life? But that you still somehow have free will, and that the choices you make and the actions you take in your brief few years in this world will somehow determine your fate for all eternity?

This God made you as you are– a creature with the power of rationality and reason– and yet demands that you reject reason and logic and instead place your full belief in the words of a book. A book written by man, but claimed to be of divine origin. Stories about impossible feats and actions, yet presented as irrefutable truth.

For many, questioning the stories was simply not allowed. For others, it was met with dismissive answers of God’s unknowable nature, or working in mysterious ways. For yet others, it became their life’s work to study these stories and attempt to contrive some sense of logic or consistency from them, to explain away the contradictions and vagueries, to attempt to reconcile a collection of myths and fables with a very real world that disproves its stories at every turn.

But this God loves you, as He loves all beings. All the pain and suffering in this world is due to our own sins, our lack of faith, our lack of worship of His grace and kindness. If only we were more devoted, there would be no starving children, no senseless violence, no cancer to slowly kill our loved ones or ourselves.

We were made in God’s image. Which is to say that God was made in our image, because that is all our imaginations allow us to conceive. We can imagine an afterlife of heavens or virigins or lakes of fire, because these are fantasies that allow us to imagine ourselves– in our current human forms– as continuing to exist after we die. It is comforting to believe that we continue on with our same consciousness, our same memories and personalities and being exactly who we are now, even though our mortal bodies– our brains and minds– cease to function.

For just a moment, try to imagine eternity. Eternity. Try to picture what it would be like if “we” were to experience endless time, whether heaven or hell. Would we remember what happened a thousand years ago? A million years ago? Would we stay perfectly static as we were when we died? What if we were sick or infirmed? Do we stay in our most “ideal” form? Do we grow? Do we learn? Do we evolve? Or is linear time a construct of our mortal form, and if there is any possible afterlife, it would be something that we can’t even possibly imagine because we have no frame of reference? Would that infinite form have any relation to our individual selves from these brief few years on this earth?

How does any of this make sense? How can you examine any aspect of religion– from its origin stories to its modern rules to its promises of eternal futures– and not immediately see a thousand glaring inconsistencies?

How can you live this one brief life in constant fear of something for which there is no proof? How can you worship and praise an all-powerful being that inflicts so much pain on suffering on innocent people, only to be told that His reasons are unknowable?

This is a critique of religion in its purest form. This is not a critique of the consequences of religion in the wrong hands, such as those who use religion to justify violence and hatred, or those who use religion to exploit the faithful and enrich themselves. But is this pure belief that enables these consequences. If we shed this primitive dulling of our minds– if we elevate our species to think critically– this manipulation is far more difficult.

To read any religious text with a literal interpretation is absurd. At best, we can treat these texts as allegories meant to help us develop of our sense of morality. Jesus as a symbol of universal love and selflessness is inspiring; Jesus as the literal son of God is insanity.

All religion breeds subservience. Faith is, by definition, a slave mentality. It conditions us to submit ourselves to higher authorities, whether that authority is a divine voice in our heads, or a pastor who preaches hate (or perhaps even more sickening, a “prosperity gospel”), or an autocratic politcal leader, or a power-tripping law enforcement officer, or an domineering or abusive spouse, or any huckster claiming to have the answers to your problems, or any of a hundred other artificial authorities.

To reject god is to love humanity. Any god that is worth worshipping would be disgusted by worship.

Slay your god. Free your self.

Across the political spectrum, there seems to remain only a single shared belief: the government is the enemy.

Center-right ideology claims to want the smallest possible government, maximizing individual liberty at the expense of social safety. Center-left ideology claims to want a robust government that protects and provides for people, but rejects every aspect of the existing system and has failed to reform even a fraction of it to match their vision (In the United States, at least. Many other countries seem to have made decent progress). Centrists are statists only because they have a naive and incomplete understanding of the world.

Of course, far-right ideology is also statist in its authoritarianism, and far-left ideology is ultimately anarchist and seeks to eliminate the state completely. Real political ideology is not a line or a horseshoe or even a compass, but generalizations about left-wing or right-wing dominate the debate. Such is the messy reality of a system that has been reduced to a two-party us-versus-them duopoly by politicians and mainstream media.

The point is that virtually everyone agrees that the system is broken, although the solution to the problem differs drastically. The only people that are satisfied with the current system are those that are served by the state: the wealthy, and those that wield the power of the state itself.

By most historians’ accounts, the state was established to protect property rights. Those that accumulated great resources or wealth– usually through exploitation or violence– established a system that gave a veneer of legitimacy to their conquest and subjugation of the less fortunate. Whether the state took the form of kings, emperors, democracies, or republics, it has always been a tool of the powerful to preserve their power and wealth.

With the rise of modern “liberal democracy,” the elite learned that it could give people the illusion of agency and equality, so that they would believe that the state serves them instead of serving the powerful.

But there has never been a government where this has been true. Every state is corrupt, manipulated by the wealthy elites that are the enemy of true democracy, because they know that in any real democracy, the masses would destroy them without hesitation.

The state exists to preserve itself, because it is a tool of the rich and powerful to maintain order and obedience among the population. The left knows this; the right knows this.

The state does not serve you. All systems of government exist to maintain roughly the status quo, which is that a handful of people remain at the top and control 98% of the wealth, and hundreds of millions of us spend our lives toiling away for their scraps, and fighting one another when one person’s crumb is larger than the other’s.

The truth is that there can be no civilization without a state. Even the staunchest libertarian or the most radical anarchist will take great pains to describe their vision of a stateless society, one in which humans enter into personal contracts or they cooperate by consensus. But as they are pressed for details on the specifics of how these systems will work, they will begin to describe systems that sound increasingly like some version of a centralized governing body.

But this is not a justification for tolerating the modern state as it exists today. Under this system, we are all slaves. Many of us do not realize we are slaves; many others lack the imagination to envision an alternative. The rest of us participate in the charade because we feel powerless to change it. And only a select few reject the system completely and fight for either a far-left or far-right vision of liberation. They are often called the “lunatic fringe.”

But if we were to set aside our political identities and our prescribed ideologies, we would see that virtually all of us across the horseshoe or the compass want the same thing. And if we all stopped fighting each other to shift the state an inch to the right or to the left to pretend that we’ve “won,” we could work together to eliminate this corrupt and oppressive system and build something new that works for all of us.

Stop fighting for crumbs. Start fighting the real enemy.

We are bound by many shackles. For each of us, some shackles are stronger than others: the threat of eternal damnation keeps many of us devoted to fairy tales; for others, it is the threat of poverty and ruin in this life that keep us beholden to the capitalist ghouls that exploit us and hoard resources.

The shackle that binds all of us is the state. Some of us are bound more tightly based on the color of our skin, but all of us are subjugated by the threat of force that is delegated to the state in the mistaken belief that the state is meant to serve and protect us, rather than to oppress us to enrich itself.

These oppressive masters are interconnected, of course.

Religion conditions us to reject our humanity, to submit ourselves to the dictates of some grand deity without questioning the reasons or the consequences. Religion is almost always the first oppressor, with rites and rituals that indoctrinate us from the moment we are born and strike fear into our tiny little hearts of the suffering that awaits us if we disobey our authority figures.

The state often comes next, with nearly two decades of curated propaganda that glorifies the state and, increasingly, leaves us without the critical thinking skills that are necessary for deciphering the world around us. The state maintains a monopoly on physical coercion, with no habitable place left on this planet where we can be free from its subjugation.

In short order, we begin to feel the downward pressure of the rich, hording land and resources and demanding nearly the full wealth from our labor for the simple right to not starve. Their system demands a hierarchy, and they will work in lockstep with the state to ensure that they remain at the top of the chain. Millions starve or lay homeless in the streets, while tens of millions others sacrifice their health, their lives, and any shred of happiness to simply scrape by. This is the situation in the United States, one of the most developed nations in the world; the situation is far more bleak for large swaths of exploited nations across the globe.

This is what we call civilization. It is a system where a handful of sociopaths have devised intricate methods of control and coercion and, through centuries of force and slaughter, have convinced the rest of us that the system is good and right, or at the very least that it is the best possible system.

Any attempt to pursue an alternative model is sabotaged and destroyed by the existing powers, who then point to the failure as “proof” of its inferiority. Any attempt to even contemplate a better world is met with derision, and we are told that we must remain savages because it is in our nature. Forgetting, of course, that many such happy, peaceful civilizations thrived before they were annihilated by the sociopathic, cancerous ideologies of the conquerors.

But the state can be tamed and eventually dismantled. The wealthy can be summarily stripped of their power and banished to asylums, where we can study the mental deficiencies that fuel their unbridled greed. But none of this will happen as long as our population remains committed to illogic and irrationality.

To be free, we must unshackle ourselves from superstition and subjugation. We must abandon religion as a quaint relic of the past, a time when our ancestors required such fairy tales to help them interpret the world around them. But no longer are these fantasies needed, and our continued fealty to them does so much more harm than good. Accepting the tragic state of the world as the will of god is an affront to our species. There is no comfort in a higher power that awaits your every error in order to punish you with hardship, and to eventually cast you into an eternal lake of fire if you do not adequately worship it.

To have any chance at freedom, we must first break the shackles of our religions.

Look at the world around you. What is good in it, and what is poison? Which are the things that humans are responsible for?

The world that we have built is a marvel. We have conquered every inch of this planet and are pushing beyond it. But while this may be some stunning accomplishment for humankind, it has been a disaster for humanity. We have all been dragged along this march of progress, convinced by the prevailing powers that this is the path back to Eden, that coal power plants and air conditioning and freeways and faraway slave labor mining will salve the pain of this existence.

Why, throughout history, have we waged wars? Because we want more. Why have we built miserable factories that pollute our skies and streams? Because we want more. Why do we enslave ourselves to lifetimes of debt and most of our lives spent in jobs we hate? Because we want more. Why do we spend countless hours bingeing television or mindlessly scrolling empty content?

More. More. More. That is the answer to our unhappiness. More is the driving force of our economy. More is the justification for genocides in distant lands. More is the salve for our anger, our fear, our discontent.

As we consume more of the outer world, we lose more of our inner world. We may become more materially rich, but we are all more spiritually empty. We ignore the suffering of our fellow man, across the planet and even across the street. We deny the destruction of our planet in the face of hard evidence. We are less connected than ever to our communities and our kin, a war of all against all to simply survive and possibly feel a moment of security.

Those in power will tell you that this is some recent development, that all the world was joyous and happy until the “others” came and ruined it. They will tell you that we can go back to this great era if you believe them, if you submit your will to their command, if you hate the “other” and destroy them.

This is a lie.

For the vast majority of human civilization, the system has only ever served a tiny fraction of humanity, a fortunate few who either took power through violence and force, or who preyed on our natural decency to convince us to give it to them. At its best, this system maintained a sense of comfort for a lucky few million inhabitants, while the rest of our species has been exploited, slaughtered, and made to live in squalor.

A few million people congregated around the centers of power, where they are told that it is “liberty” and “democracy” and “free trade ” and “hard work” that have afforded them such comfortable lives. In reality, we are shielded from the true cost of our consumer comfort, and if we ever catch a glimpse of it we are so appalled that most of us try to forget it anyway.

Even in this comfort, how happy are you, really?

Do you spend the majority of your hours sitting in traffic, and dealing with bills, and shopping for unnecessary distractions? Do you spend the majority of your days working at a job that offers no meaningful value to society– and in fact probably does some degree of harm? Do you spend the majority of your years waiting for the privilege of a few days’ vacation, or a chance to reunite with your family for the holidays, or the chance to retire when you are nearing your final chapter and then you’ll get to enjoy this life?

Who told you that this is the only way to live, or the best one?

Why did you believe them?

There is no generosity in power. The structures that create power and the people that seek power both exist outside of moral behavior. Any morality they portray is only a means of accumulating more power.

Do not be deceived. The celebrity does not care about deforestation. The billionaire does not care about freedom of speech. The politician does not care about you.

The pursuit of power and wealth is a disease. It is not moral behavior. It is an aberration of the human spirit. Human beings just want to live their lives. We want peace and security and a little bit of comfort for ourselves and the ones we love. We do not seek conflict. We are willing to suffer greatly to avoid it.

And this is the weakness that the sociopaths exploit. Those that crave power, those that amass obscene wealth, they exploit us and manipulate us and enslave us because they know that we will do anything to avoid challening their power. As long as they leave us just enough to continue existing, we will suffer their tyranny. We will wait for some other great power to come save us.

We are a submissive species. But this is not a flaw; in fact, it is the source of all the love in this world. It is the love preached by Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha, although it has been corrupted by the charlatans that have hijacked their teachings to create religions of hate and conquest. To be passive, to reject our savage instincts and cooperate instead of fight, to love instead of hate, these are the true hallmarks of what makes human beings exceptional.

The only flaw is our tolerance for those that harm us. The compassion is too great. They indoctrinate us to believe that they deserve their power, that this is the natural order.

They are liars.

Do not trust the billionaire who tells you how to get rich. He needs you poor so that he can be rich.

Do not idolize the celebrity that flies their private jet to multi-million dollar galas for protecting the ocean.

Do not believe the righteous who claim to protect children from predators. They only seek to divert attention from their own fangs.

Do not listen to the propagandist who tells you that the other side is evil and seeks to harm you, and that only his side can protect you. This is a false dichotomy and is meant to manipulate you.

Do not believe the strongman who tells you that only he can fix everything, if you put your faith in him and support him without question. He will use your obedience to enrich himself and laugh at your gullibility.

Do not believe anyone in power.

When did you choose to become a slave? When were you given the choice to sacrifice your self-determination in the service of a god, of a ruler, of tradition?

Do you not remember when? That is because the choice was never given. You were taught from childhood that this is how it is. We must worship our Lord and abide by his Word. We must obey our fathers and our mothers. We must bend a knee to those that claim power over us.