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.
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