It is five am and I cannot keep my eyes open. I must sleep. But I will take some notes before I do because I was inspired by the movie. I was reminded that as the Jews of Europe were innocently slaughtered by the millions in world war two, they were praying the whole time. And as the Chinese government murdered the Tibetans for their own selfish profit and gain and burned down over fifty percent of their monasteries, the Tibetans were a devoutly religious people who were praying the whole time as well. Of course we know where that got them. We only need look to the highly spiritual Native American peoples and their unfortunate demise in the face of the barbaric Europeans (supposed puritans) who conquered the Americas to see clearly the error in depending on a God or a faith for our survival. Success on earth has always come about through brute force, strength, military might, and money; not through prayer or faith or being kind or honest or generous or a good person. If anything, these practices and characteristics, regardless of how noble they are or how devoutly attached some of us are to them, have always worked against the innocent and enlightened among us. As a people we enjoy glorifying noble people once they are dead or fictionalized. But we rarely allow them to live too long.
It is a distinctly human phenomenon that I have begun to call the myth of faith – this belief that God is on our side if we do the right thing or try to be spiritual or good or religious. When we are young and still growing, it is preached to us; how important it is to believe in God, to have faith, to pray, to be good people, to be kind and honest and generous. But as we get older and study our history we are soon struck by the inconsistencies in these teachings as to they relate to what has actually transpired on the earth since we have been here. How indeed it has always been the strongest and the cruelest and the richest of us who have won the battles, and shaped the world we have lived in. It has never been the most devout, or the kindest, or the gentlest, or the most honest or the most religious.
And even if it has been at times the most religious who have won the wars and controlled the events of history, as was the case with the roman empire’s clutch on western civilization, or the Muslim domination through the latter half of the first millennia ad, or the Christian slaughter of the Americans, the most religious has never equaled the most righteous or the purest or the nicest. In other words, it is rare that a people who have dominated in the name of their religion have ever embodied much of the teachings of that religion in their practices, especially not in their business of trying to take over the world.
When we think of the winners of the great battles that have shaped the world into what it is today, whether we are thinking of Julius Caesar, or Alexander the great, or Napoleon or the catholic Church/Roman Empire, or Mohamed and his loyal band of Muslim freedom fighters who conquered half of Europe, or the Christian Crusaders who took much of it back, or the European settlers who murdered entire populations of indigenous peoples in their quest to conquer the continent of America, we can clearly see that it has never been the morals and values of our youth that have helped guide these victories. [Spain and Portugal murdered over one hundred and fifty million native peoples in south and north America. England and Holland another fifty million in north America. That’s 200 million innocent people murdered by people most of us can still call our ‘ancestors.’] It has always been the secular qualities of sheer force, brute strength, and having more money than the defeated that has enabled these victories. God and religion have never played into it, even though God and religion are almost always used as a driving force or a justification or a reason to go to battle in the first place.
