God and War

God and War

Woman of Wisdom

A writing that has gathered cobwebs that is sadly still relevant today.  This writing was originally in presentation form because I was invited to give a presentation at St. John Fisher College that connected our coven to peace.  When the host saw my presentation, he withdrew his invitation because the truth about religion was part of my presentation.

My presentation started out:  “I am here today to tell you about covens of Goddess women that are materializing all over our nation and why they are necessary for peace.  I have a lot of dots to connect, so I hope you will bear with me as I connect them for you. There is a Goddess saying “To change the world you must first change yourself.”  And regarding peace, the field of psychiatry tells us that for a person to keep making the same mistake over and over again = insanity.  So for people who desire peace to support a religious system that has been the necessary partner of organized war for the last 4,000 that = societal insanity and we cannot afford that kind of insanity any longer because time has almost run out regarding our planet’s resources and livability plus more nations every year are acquiring nuclear weapons.  As covens and circles of women; we are done with vengeful war gods who are full of power, wrath, aggression, and looting.  War gods are very new to the human scene, but they have rapidly brought us to the brink of extinction as a species.

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to return to college after my children were grown  so that I have a recent education.  Although my major was art history, my passion became anthropology because I came to realize that if we do not understand why people do the things they do, we can never hope to return our world to a place of sanity and peace.

The two most important things I learned in anthropology classes were; number one, organized war did not always exist as part of the human condition; and two, everything that groups of people do, the laws they enact and enforce or refuse to enforce come from the base of their society, their religious system.   The base “has” to change before anything above it can change.

I want to make a very important point and that is that women were for the first 500,000 peaceful years of human existence the leaders of their religion and their societies.   There is an image in The Language of the Goddess  by Professor Marija Gimburtas,  page 237, of a flint knapped figure of a mother goddess that is “possibly as early as 500,000 B. P.” 2

 Humans envisioned the creator of all that is as female.  As in the natural world, man comes from woman, woman does not come from man contrary to the really crazy story the bible writers concocted to support their new system of organized war.

And for those of you who do not already know the difference between matriarchal and patriarchal societies, the best book I can direct you to is Saharasia:  The 4,000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World by James DeMeo, Ph. D2

And for the purpose of this wring I will not focus on the Koran, the Confucian Marriage Manual or the Hindu Code of Manu all brutal to women and all coming from god religions.  That does not mean that I am not aware of the various god religions of our world, and that they are equally repressive to the mothers of our world.  I have found a few quotes from the bible that express some of the horrors of patriarchal, warring god societies:

Most of the Old Testament is about the god of the Hebrew tribes demanding that all the people in the 31 nations of the promised land be put to death by the sword and that their property be put into the treasure of the Lord.   This is from Joshua 6:19, “All the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron are sacred to the Lord and must go into his treasury.”  Almost complete Genocide of 31 nations of people was recorded in the bible in detail, but what was sacred  to the Lord was the objects of value that were taken from the dead.  I think that is a very telling fact about war and warring gods, and nothing has changed to the present time.  Organized war is still seen as legal, state-sanctioned murder of innocent civilians to take what is of value from them including, of course, their land.  In some instances the young, virgin women were kept to be concubines/sex slaves to the men of the Hebrew tribes.

And regarding collateral damage; even the infants were fair game such as in Psalm 137:8, “Oh daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us - he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”  And in Nahum 3:10, “Yet she was taken captive and went into exile.  Her infants were dashed to pieces at the head of every street.   And in Isaiah  13:1, An oracle concerning Babylon that Isaiah son of Amoz saw, verse 3, “I have commanded my holy ones; I have summoned my warriors to carry out my wrath.”  And the end of verse 4, “The Lord Almighty is mustering an army for war.”   And verse 15, “Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword.  Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives ravished.”  End of quote.  Our modern army of the U.S. a under god; instead of dashing infants and children to pieces, simply drops bombs on their cities and villages which effects the same results.  And to make it sound neater, the dead and mutilated civilians are called “collateral damage.”  Whether men of god are looting gold, silver and bronze or oil, the acts and results are the same.  Whoever gets in the way of their looting is collateral damage.  So the question is why have so many people followed warring gods into our 21st century and even given these institutions tax exempt status?  The answer is because there is no other institution deemed necessary in enabling patriarchy and war to give it a tax-exempt status.  God religions and patriarchal governments have always been either one and the same or in partnership with each other.  The front that god religions try to cover themselves with is that they do a miniscule amount of charity work.  That is of course a very thin veil as the money they give out isn’t even a drop in the bucket to offset their tax-exempt status which allows them to take in huge sums of tax-free monies and property.  And in a matrifocal, humane society, tax money collected from citizens would go for human needs so there would not be homeless people, hungry people, or people with no health care who have to beg to the god institutions for insufficient handouts.

It is also imperative to patriarchy to make young men believe that they must unquestionably  obey father figures.  The point of the Jesus myth is that Jesus‘ father, God, demanded he be crucified, and Jesus meekly complied while his helpless mother looked on.  That is what patriarchy is about and it is necessary for war.  And of course, poor mothers must feel that they have no choice in the matter of sacrificing their children to the wars of the wealthy.  They simply mirror what their husbands are saying that war in noble and poor people need not try to figure out what is really going on ~ that is something so complicated and secretive that they must trust their leaders to do that for them.  For those first 500,000 years of Goddess, not god, organized war did not exist.  The Goddess communities and cities such as Crete had no fortifications, weapons, or armies.  

   

There are women scholars who have put into words much better than I can the origins of war and I would like to bring your attention to The Great Cosmic Mother by Barbara Mor. 3

  In her chapter, “Denial of the Mother; Denial of the People,” starting on page 315 Mor connects god religions with nuclear annihilation and more of us had better learn that lesson and fast.  Mother Earth will go on, but she may be too irradiated for any life but maybe the simplest of life forms to exist.

There are many such women as myself who are serious about going from patrism back to matrism a time when women had their natural place in society and all of its functions especially that of the mother religion.  Since women have fought to return to places of higher learning, we now have women anthropologists, etymologists, theologians, archeologists, as well as many women researchers.   I would especially recommend the recent  scholarly work by Dr. Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess 4

 because it is on the national bestseller’s list and is in print.  

And I did write that women had to fight to return to places of higher learning.  Before monotheistic god religions, women were scholars who taught men.  Perhaps the very first author in recorded history was the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna daughter of Akkadian King Sargon who was fluent in both the Sumerian and Akkadian languages.5

  And it was the Greek priestess Diotma who was Socrates’ mentor.  Another example of a woman who taught men was Hypatia who was a renowned mathematician and the head of the Neoplatonist School of Philosophy in the city of Alexandria.  There she taught both genders of students until Alexandria’s Christian patriarch ordered her violent death by the hands of Nitrian monks.  Christian clergy murdered priestesses and razed their temples to the ground.  And eventually the Christian reign of terror started by Dominican friars and maintained throughout the 500 years of the Inquisition that spread throughout Europe and even reached the shores of North America at Salem, MA in 1692, traumatized and silenced woman for centuries to the present.  You simply cannot have organized war if women have equal rights and freedom.  And that is why our government leaders have fought against even allowing an equal rights amendment to come up for a vote.  It would mean the beginning of the end of the Pentagon as a government-funded business.  And I want to make a note here that women who follow gods are masculist in their thinking (have become masculized in their thinking) and that is why the opposite of masculist, feminist” has become a derogatory phrase among men who also support the god systems of our world.  

Barbara Mor states on page 316, “Under god there is a literal belief that all of life is created for men to use.  And what patriarchal men see as usable is also seen as contemptible.  We suggest that the atomic blast is man’s final identification with the Sun God, the final annihilation of matter/mother and that this is the implicit goal of all patriarchal religions....”  And, “Because the Christian church relentlessly uses words like ‘pious’ and ‘meek’ to describe the character of Christ, such words have masked the actual historical aggressiveness of the church against human bodies and minds....but throughout the Christian Empire, concepts of humility and meekness  have been systematically used for centuries to condition submissiveness in the masses, while the ruling elites quite arrogantly and aggressively grabbed the earth’s treasures for themselves.”

And the Goddess religions did not just fade away; from page 260 of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: “As the New Testament grew in stature, women’s rights were curtailed and imagery was eliminated.  In 308, the temple of Isis at Philoe was closed.  In 391, the temple Artemis at Ephesus was sacked.  In 390, a mob under the direction of the patriarch Theophilus attacked and burned the library at Alexandria because it contained Pagan/Goddess classics.   And on  page 529: “Justinian ordered the Academy of Athens disbanded.”  Christianity plunged our civilized world into the dark ages.

The good news is that we are out of the dark ages and covens of women are returning to our Goddess of a thousand names.  She is 500,000 years old and She reigned supreme in the times of peace; the times before Aryan thunder gods attacked the peaceful Goddess settlements of Europe, Asia and North Africa.  All these facts are documented in the list of books that we have prepared.

It is time for all gods to leave now and for the looting to stop whether it is in the form of war profiteering or having our military act as mercenaries, paid for by our taxes, to work for multinational corporation's so-called “interests” in the resources that belong to people in foreign countries.  Looting has always been a dangerous enterprise and armies are needed to “get the job done.”   I would propose that it was Bush’s and Cheney’s goal to establish a military base in Iraq for just that purpose.  And that is why they have already built a fortified embassy that is 42 acres large; while at the same time, the Iraqi people have almost no necessities of life such as water and electricity.  But the Bush gang of looters have their mega embassy and they want permanent military basses to protect the privatizing of the Iraqi oil to American oil companies.  That is blatant looting.  And President Bush is sure that god was on his side in this latest war enterprise, and he often invoked god’s name in his speeches and comments.   And he is correct, his god was on his side.  In any war, both sides have a god who cheers the soldiers on.  

What our coven has chosen to do is to celebrate our various goddesses at the times of our eight sabbats of the year.  Some of the sabbats are very easy to remember because all the images of our holidays come from Goddess times such as our upcoming Eostore which is on the first full moon following the vernal equinox because it is a full moon celebration of the Teutonic lunar Goddess Eostre.  That is where the word Easter comes from and also our word for estrogen.6

  And that is why there is no set date for Easter.  It always follows the first Sunday after the first full moon after vernal equinox.  The Easter rabbit is Eostre’s moon hare.  And also our Easter eggs were originally the great cosmic egg of creation also part of Eostre’s celebration.  All the symbols of all our holidays come from Goddess times.  

Besides celebrating the eight sabbats, on May 5th of every year we remember the women victims of the Inquisition because as that was a crime so huge, so vile, so unspeakable, and so horrific that  no monument has ever been created to remember the, perhaps, 9 million women and children who died the most horrible, untimely deaths by fire at the hands of god’s servants.  And it was not only women, but the women’s children and even their pets who were burned alive with them.  We know from much documentation of those times that girls as young as 13 and women as old as 82 years were burned alive by the men of the Christian god in order to terrorize all women into silence and  wipe out any remaining traces of matriarchy.  And in the  beginning of the Inquisition it was decreed that pregnant women could not be tortured until after having given birth.  But that order was later rescinded.7

 Today’s circles of women are about  remembering.  We are done with being forced to forget our murdered sisters.  We are remembering them.

And on August 23rd of every year when the Nemesea takes place, we look at bible scripture to see what it is really saying.  This tradition was started in 1971 by another group of women.  And because this forum is focused on peace (my original presentation was part of a program that supposedly was concerned with world peace).  I would like to direct you to just one bible quote from Nahum 1:2, “The Lord is a jealous and avenging god; the Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath.”  This is not what Goddess is about.  She is about love and nurturing, about respecting all life, and about the natural cycles of life and death.  There are no crazy stories about virgin births or holy ghosts.  And there is no vampire who rises from the dead and after appearing to humans on earth, rises up to a place that has only been created in some human minds.  Instead there is the original trinity of maiden, mother, and crone.  It is a beautiful, peaceful religion that honors women and tells the story of their divinity and their connection with all that is natural on our mother earth.  We are reborn very day in our offspring and our worn out bodies are simply recycled by the crone aspect of the Goddess or mother earth.    

The women in our coven are from this area and also from places as far away as Cape Cod and the state of Washington.  I invited my like-minded women friends to be part of a oven.  I chose the name, but everything else is egalitarian, not hierarchal; we are equal sisters each having our own special talents that we share with each other.  We have a voluntary newsletter for each sabbat, we do not require a tax-free or tax-exempt status because no money changes hands.   

And I just want to mention briefly that I had a Guest Essayist spot in a local newspaper on domestic violence as that is always a big part of any patriarchy society.

War should be the most hated and despised word in our language, but it is glorified.  If the base of our society, god religion, hated war; it could not exist.  But it doesn’t.  In fact most of our males feel an adrenalin rush at the sound of the word.  Until Goddess replaces god, war will always be glorified.  We are continually told that we must mindlessly support our troops who must mindlessly obey their superiors.  No matter which world leader pushes the nuclear button first, his god will be squarely behind him or her.  

Before the first antiwar protests in the spring of ’03, I took it upon myself to write to the heads of  thirty of the largest area churches of different denominations in our area including the city of Rochester, NY.  I asked that the ministers and priests not forget to have their congregations come to the anti-war protests.  And I wrote that I would be wearing an American flag bow; and so, to come up and say “hi” to me.  I only got one reply from a minister who wrote me to never again send him correspondence.  That tells you how really heartless men of god are and how their number one priority is an alliance to the government which grants them their tax-exempt status.  And no one came up to me at the protests except for my peace friends who were not religious people.  The protests should have been huge, they were not in this nation under god.  When the American citizens had a chance to speak out against the slaughter of thousands of innocent women and children in Iraq, the majority chose not to be interested.  It is time for a change and our Goddess covens and circles are about the beginning of real change.    

  

Thank you,

         

Connecting Dots to Peace

Title: Connecting the dots to peace.

Composed by: Woman of Wisdom

Some of us have been smart enough or just lucky enough to have gained information that freed our minds from religious enslavement. Yes, I know, our parents thought they were protecting us by keeping us within the boundaries of our own ethnic groups through religious indoctrination. But we are not tribal anymore, and we don’t need that kind of protection. And of course we go to a church building because we need to feel we have friends there. However; change to a different denomination, and your church friends will believe that the devil (a figment of fanatic, enslaved minds) has led you away from their denomination and that you are on your way to hell (another invention of deranged minds). It is a shame that religion attracts so many insecure people by using the carrot of pretend friendship.

And yes, bishops, ministers, rabbi, and imams try to imagine comforting messages in their manuals. You know, don’t actually read your manual, let a religious leader “interpret” it for you. If you read the various god manuals skeptically you would be horrified. In our present world, the men who carried out the violence as documented in their manuals would be serving life sentences for crimes against humanity. Those manuals of fantastic stories of violence to other groups of humans and misogyny towards women were written millennia ago. In those times, disease was believed to be caused by demons, the sun went down in the west every night; and people were afraid that if the proper rituals were not preformed, that it would not return. And the same for winter solstice when the sun seemed to be going away. But now we know better, and we know that the earth isn’t flat and that it was not created in six days. So why are too many humans still enslaving their minds with the other bizarre stories that are in the god manuals? And why is the Pope still traveling around the world trying to convince people that homosexuals are less than heterosexuals because ancient men said so and then wrote their nasty thoughts in a book called the bible? Too bad those same ancient men did not think to write that sexually molesting children was an offense to their pretend god also. But quite to the contrary, the
Holy See has acted to hide their pedophile priests and bishops while paying off the thousands of victims to keep them quiet. Sometimes a few of the victims slip through the Vatican cracks and we are aware of their true stories. And I personally knew a man whose life was ruined by childhood molestation by a Catholic priest. He has never been able to recover and lead a normal and happy life. How many lost souls are there just like the man I knew who literally lost their lives in order to temporarily satisfy the sexual perversions of pedophile priests and bishops.

And in all god religions women are suppose to believe that they are powerless to protect their children from things like sexual molestation and war. By that I mean the mothers who submit their children to Catholic priests and also believe that they must allow their sons and daughters to fight the wars of the wealthy. Mothers you have the power to say “no.” In fact, it is your only duty and responsibility to protect your children from any kind of harm. And your husband has no authority or right to take that power from you. Your power comes from nature and no amount of writing by Jewish scribes and priesthoods can take that away.

I want to tell those who have been indoctrinated into god religions that is it ok to believe in reality. You don’t need to believe in a deity who you hope will bless you while he has forgotten the millions of your brothers and sisters around the world. My antipathy came when I traveled to Mexico and saw all the sick and dying children there. I was very angry at myself for having been so naive all my life. Some people are smart enough even when they are children to realize that the god stories are lies. But not myself. I had heard the stories told by ministers how god cared for all his children. But if one actually reads that horrible manual the facts are that god demanded the murder of all the nations of people who the Hebrew tribes wanted to take their land, gold, silver, and sometimes their virgin girls. How convenient. And how very sadistic to order the murder of infants in front of their parents. I know that if anyone read the accounts of the sadistic murder of women, children, infants, and pregnant women that god demanded, they would be repulsed. That is why the religious leaders warn people away from actually reading those manuals. Life is what is holy, the bible is the opposite of holy. I will point you to just a few places in the bible where those crimes against humanity demanded by a pretend god are described in horrid detail: Numbers 31, Deuteronomy 7, Joshua 6:21 “They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it - men, women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys,” Joshua 10-12, Psalm 137:9, Nahum 3, and Zephaniah. Much of the Old Testament is a record of how the Hebrew tribes tried to justify to themselves the genocides they carried out in order to plunder what belonged to other nations of people.

And for any bible apologists who would like to pretend that things got a little less cruel in the
New Testament, let me remind you that the New Testament is only 17 % of the bible; and in that 17%, there is the crucifixion of a son while a helpless mother looks on and also the continued degradation of women in general. Paul who is the major player in the New Testament had the traditional Jewish hatred of women which would later be even further embellished by the Holy See.

And why do I care? Because god religions have caused centuries too much of strife, bloodshed, and murder between humans. There is nothing good, noble, or kind about god religions. And yes, I know there are the food cupboards and the token handouts given to people in other countries more often than not to entice them to also become part of one’s religious tribe. And let me remind you that the religious leaders all live extremely well, and the political leaders who support them live like kings. They do not go without like their sages and prophets were said to. We have governments now and it is their job to insure that no one goes without the necessities of life. And we should demand that our governments do their job. God religions do not have the power or the will to care for the needy. That is obvious as 30,000 children a day die from starvation and disease. And that is not only in third world countries, there is plenty of hunger and homelessness here in America. And it is always the children who suffer the most from the gods’ neglect and the gods’ wars. God religions are so harmful that we should have evolved beyond them centuries ago. But the majority of us have been indoctrinated into tribal thought.
I would like to scream to “Grow up and evolve because we are all the same human family and must cooperate with each other if we are to continue to live in this very fragile ecosystem.” And because we have nuclear waste and nuclear bombs we cannot cling to a god/tribal mentality.
I have heard the illegal settlers on Palestinian land say that god said that was their land. Again, how convenient. What a silly pretense in hopes of making an excuse for their land theft.

And another god myth is that things were always this way. This this is how men behave.
But that is also a lie. They never teach in public schools about pre-god religions. And do you know why? Because the pre-god deity was female. Of course She was a nurturing mother who loved all Her children. She had many different names because She had existed for millennia the world over, and no one questioned that creation was mother, was female. There was an estimated 600,000 years of a kinder, saner way to live. But with the creation of surplus came greed. It was easy for the nomadic tribes to pillage what defenseless, agricultural, goddess tribes had; and so, the violent thunder and war gods were created by men who are believed to have originated in the Russian steeps. Women would have and did cling to their peaceful mother deity. For just one example, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus in present day Turkey was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. A few of the structures of that massive temple still exist to this day. So that women were eventually enslaved by the men of their own tribes. And to completely erase the memory of anything Goddess and female from the human psyche was the job of the inquisitors. The Inquisition lasted 500 years. That is also something that will never be taught in public or religious schools. One must be fortunate enough to reach college to get information such as that. And you must also be inquisitive enough to enroll in fields of study such as anthropology. And that is why wealthy Republicans always cut grants for college educations. First, they don’t care about people less fortunate then they are; and secondly, they need the majority of our people to remain in the dark and do the menial work they require for almost no pay. Every day in America, more Americans lose a living wage job. Plus the wealthy need their armies of the poor to fight their wars.

And of course the sky god men are still clinging to power. That is why god religions are the only businesses that are tax exempt. National leaders need their preachers of god religions to keep the masses of people malleable. The majority of minds cannot be free, cannot be able to reason and think if the wealthy are to maintain their immense wealth and power. The majority of minds must be crammed full of gobble de gook god talk. And while it may make many feel good and protected and loved to meet in a large building with other people who have agreed to share the same delusion; know that, that is a tribal need. You are giving in to the lest desirable traits of your species, not the best. When you realize that the truth is the one thing you should desire in your life, then the world will start to go back to being peaceful and sane. You can fill up a need in your life to be with other humans by celebrating the seasonal holidays like your ancient Goddess ancestors did and which we still do. For example, Easter was really the celebration of spring and the Goddess Estore. Same for all of our other holidays which have quite amusingly been Christianized. It doesn’t work. You can’t take woman and her Goddess out of humanity and still have a story that makes sense. And when I write the word “Goddess” I do not see Her outside of myself. We speak for the Goddess as men speak for their god, but we do not pretend that She exists outside of ourselves. She is the best of women, the best of what we use to be before being terrorized by the men of gods. The figure of nine million women and children has been given by scholars as being the number of victims of the torture and murder by the inquisitors from their 500 year's reign of terror by both the Catholic and Protestant clergy across Europe.

And by the way, there are so many great books that tell the truth about everything Goddess and woman. You can find them in libraries and bookstores under mythology, or women’s studies because the god men will not allow them to be listed under religion. Gods are a very sad substitute for Goddess so that they cannot afford to have that competition. Most of the ranting of the Old Testament was about destroying the Goddess, her priestesses referred to as temple prostitutes and harlots, and the thousand of Goddess statutes referred to as graven or pagan images. For just one example Jezebel of the Old Testament was not a heretic, she was worshiping the Goddess of her people. And all the ancient history that was recorded and housed at the great library at Alexandria, Egypt, was of course burned by Christian monks. They contained the writing of women sages and scholars. And they were proof that it was women who laid all the foundations for culture to evolve. It was women who were exalted not their male offspring. See The Women’s History of the World by Rosalind Miles.

I was told in a grocery store by a stranger, a very elderly woman in the cat food isle, that I was going to hell because I did not believe what was in her book, the bible. So I said in the nicest way possible that many more books have been written since that large manual was put together by ancient men thousands of years ago. For just one, I recommended Barbara G. Walker’s books. The very elderly woman asked me to repeat Walker’s name for her. I felt a tiny spark of inquisitiveness when she asked me to repeat the name of that most excellent researcher. I believe that all humans are good and that there are many just like I was who only know what they have been indoctrinated into. And that is why I am posting this blog. I am aware of the inherent goodness of humans that is only destroyed by intentional lies perpetrated by conniving men with agendas. For example, humans have an inherent taboo against killing their own species. That natural instinct not to murder their own kind must be taught out of them by “military training.” And it starts with our little boys being desensitized to violence by things like hunting and all the stories of heroes who do violent things. The conniving men with agendas knowingly use other human beings to gain both wealth and power. And without god religions, there would be no gods to support the wars of the wealthy. God religions, war, and patriotism always go hand and hand. It is all one horrible package deal. And the not wealthy suffer from those three evils while the wealthy profit from them. This is not the kind of society I wanted to live in. And I have a right to demand a safe earth for myself and for all women and children. I know that earth can be beautiful again when the gods have been chased away.

I was surprised when our anthropology teacher drew a pyramid of how culture is created. At the very bottom of the pyramid was religion. She said that everything else rested on that. So that if you have the violent god religions that we are stuck with now, then your culture will be one of violence. If a female deity was at the bottom of the pyramid, violence could not exist. And if we could evolve beyond a need for any archetypes, then humans could recognize that our deities are archetypes and that we must look to ourselves to make our world what we want it to be. We would put resources into curing diseases, ending starvation, making birth control available to all women who want it, save the only environment that we have, and not fund wars of acquisition. Sanity would take the place of the insanity that we now live under pretending that it isn’t here. When adults pretend to believe in absurd stories that is willful ignorance for lazy minds. And a man once told me that he needed religion because the world was so crazy. Then get rid of gods, and the world will not be crazy. That is the very first step we must take toward peace. And it amuses me when the god men of the various god religions gather to agree that they can get along because they know that they are all in the same business of selling god lies and justifying wars for corrupt national leaders. They are all a bunch of hoodlums who for centuries have preyed on uneducated people. How many times has it been said that the poor are the cannon fodder for the wars of the wealthy? But somehow that never registers with the destitute who see the military as the only job that is available to them. They believe that the military will give them the housing, food, and small pay they need in return for their risking their lives and becoming killers. And too often the parents of these unfortunate children feel that the risk their children are taking is worth it. It was Cindy Sheehan who tried so hard to warn other mothers not to become the grieving mother that she is.

This blog will be updated on the earth religion holidays, which is what our secular holidays are about because I write a little something to my women friends on those holidays. Also, I would appreciate it if you avail yourself of some knowledge from books written in this century by authors such as Barbara G. Walker, Merlin Stone, Kurt Vonnegut, and Rosalind Miles. There
are hundreds of wonderful researchers that you can find in women’s studies or mythology. I do not want to hear from people like the elderly woman in the grocery store who only has one book. I do not recognize any of the god manuals as any different from other books written by humans. I could just as well claim divine revelation for writing this essay as did the men who wrote their manuals which established them at the top of all creation. Again, how convenient for them. If we say that divinity is female, a mother image, would priests, rabbis, and imams acquiesce to worship Her? We know the answer to that because what they are interested in is dominance. And a female created each one of those men from her body because nature gave only females the power to create. Their mothers are the living Goddess in their lives. Crazy stories can’t change that. To me, those men are arrogant, puffed-up buffoons. They are the king with no clothes.

But of course there are some terrible mothers for sons and daughters to hate. In a war state, it is very hard not to be a terrible mother. If you don’t let your priest, husband, and the war state system rule over your mind, there are consequences to pay. But for many mothers, having our children alive is worth any consequences. Just recently here in Rochester, NY, another young Marine 23 years old came home in a coffin. The commentator stressed that the Marine would have a full military funeral in Arlington cemetery. And I thought to myself “Well, isn’t that f------ wonderful.” You could hear the young man’s mother sobbing in the background. If only she had not been indoctrinated into the thought that his death had something to do with religion, patriotism, and someone’s freedom that young man would be alive fulfilling the dreams of his life. Kurt Vonnegut wrote about religion and war, and I think his books should be required reading in all high schools. But of course that is never going to happen. Vonnegut was one of the most talented and clever science fiction writers of our time or any time. And if he had not written about the truths of our world; spoken out about religion in a thinly veiled humorous way, he would have been required reading in high schools.

We must stop selling the future of our species for the privilege of grouping with other humans in a nice warm building that has pretty windows, music, and pot luck suppers. For example, I have my own group of like-minded friends for support and camaraderie and would be glad to tell you how you could have that also. I am aware of the needs of humans such as the need to feel part of a group, but there are much better ways to satisfy that need other than making religious leaders wealthy and dooming life on earth for our species not to mention the majority of other species that our stupidity/greed is rushing to extinction. A friend of mine makes stickers that I put on all my mail that read: “Women you can stop war by not supporting god religions.” There are many small ways we can speak out against the senseless slaughter of millions for things like oil wealth and other commodities.

Of course I had to cut many corners in writing this plea for reason because what I have written about spans millions of years. I would suggest for the inquisitive mind that you read for yourself the facts in books such as When God was a Woman, by Merlin Stone, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain, The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas, The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo and Barbara More, and all books by Barbara G. Walker. There are so many books available to people who want to know how society works and how we have arrived at where we find ourselves today. And if you can find it in print,
Sex and Religion in Oppression by Bernard Braxton is a real mind opener.

Any thoughtful comments by open minded individuals who have read some of the above suggested books will be responded to. Also, my blog will be updated from time to time coinciding with the pagan, secular holidays.

P.S. When a country has the mantra of “We must send our youths off to foreign lands to murder strangers to protect our freedoms,” that is not freedom, that is a war state. The TV pundits following that mantra call the poor, young soldiers “our young men and women in uniform.” How many times around the holidays have we heard that we must salute our young men and women in uniform? That is the wealthy trying to make their crimes against our poor families sound softer, less brutal. I have heard that only one member of our Senate and Congress have a son or daughter in the military. The poor youths of our country are protecting the privilege of the few wealthy among us to plunder, they are not protecting your freedom or mine. Freedom comes from a skeptical, logical mind not trapped in mysticism ruled over by a priesthood. Priesthoods equal war state control over the masses. Wealthy rulers and wealthy priesthoods are, of course, a partnership and have been so since their inception. Even in a book about general world history one can see the necessary partnerships that developed between god religions and wealthy national leaders. These are the dots we must connect if our human family has a chance of surviving much longer on this fragile island of life we call Earth.