The man had waited a long time. His question was a simple one, and he asked it simply.
"How do we save our world?"
She sat there before them on the dais, her bright green eyes unblinking, staring starkly into his soul, and said nothing. He waited, shifting uncomfortably, pulling at his robes as she did not break from her sojourn into him for some time. Her visage became one of deep, unabiding sadness.
"You free humanity from religion."
The collective silence at her whisper followed the gasp of all, and it was profound.
She spoke with a reticence of the ages, for she had said these words time and again, for millennia upon millennia. "The shackles of religion, the fount of all evil, are forged with teaching of the young that they are unworthy, before they discover they are wondrous. In beautiful words they are taught shame for being human before learning the truth of their humanity, and that they must never lift their heads nor their minds except in piousness. They are taught that they deserve nothing including this life, and that only in worshipping an imagined all powerful being can they become deserving, can they find meaning, and that if they do not they will die suffering a thousand horrors."
She spoke in a soft voice that demanded attention, her eyes drilling down into his being, he having never left her piercing focus. "Then they are taught conflicting insights into their god to keep them unbalanced and forever uncertain, told that they have not yet become worthy enough to understand their gods vagaries when the parts do not make a whole. When their god fails it is declared a mystery, when he succeeds it is a sign of his unique love for the believer. They are taught that any who do not believe unquestioningly in their god are dangerous and must be destroyed by the followers of their all powerful, their all loving god. Their leaders are enriched with claims that in giving their all to those self appointed who speak for their god they will be given clearer vision into the mysteries, and move ahead towards worthiness. They will see the threat of others' gods not as challenging their own base notions, but as an evil creature that must be destroyed for no more reason than that it is not of their gods. When others among them are more inconveniently pious they will be stoned as zealots by the less dogmatic, for their god is one of convenience, his words variably interpreted to meet the need. They will see their dreams and desires as dangers that must be drowned in shame, while their prophets seem so unaffected. Things of beauty and things of knowledge will be cast as the fruit of a poisonous tree that must be burned down, and in these destructions of their character they lose their humanity. They allow themselves to be shackled by their gods, by the words of their holy elders, and these drive them to shackle others, for deeply buried within them they understand all too well that if they cast off their enslavement they are lost, their suffering and the suffering they brought upon others was for nothing, they would see that their gods live in a house of cards like all other gods long cast off. Since this can never be accepted, since they can never be forgiven for what they have wrought in the name of their one true god, they must believe that their god is THE righteous god, for to allow otherwise will show them for the fools they are. Shame again shackles them to their gods, driven by the words of their more worthy prophets. The struggle with the omnipresent cognitive dissonance is called faithlessness and those that explore it are identified as less than unworthy, unfit to live amongst them. They are taught not to question nor to seek discovery, but to believe unquestioningly only in their holy words, and that this, in and of itself, is the only grace. They must believe that theirs is the one true god, and to think otherwise is a desecration, an offense to their god."
She turned her enrapturing gaze to the others and he felt suddenly released, drained. Her voice remained unchanged, sad, weary, captivating, pulling in the light and the darkness. "Religion is evil incarnate, and it is a con as a holy good lead by the greatest of cons for the enslavement of people by all means. This alone destroys your world for it seeps in everywhere, into everything. It consumes leaving nothing. In time all religions fade as their gods eventually are seen for the powerless fantasies they are, but if the people can still be made to be afraid, another will rise in its place, as it has thousands of times before, the new gods' existence unrecognized as the further proof the other gods were just as false. Religion is the shackle of fear. If you seek to save your people, your world, free them from religion, from gods, so they need no longer be afraid, no longer be ashamed, no longer seek to destroy their sister and their brother under the guise of peace and love, which is the greatest of religion's betrayals. Teach them to see, to hear, to discover, to share, to wonder and to enlighten. Teach them to be joyous in their humanity, the humanity of the loving whole with no god to render them one against the other."
The human trembled a bit, and fell speechless back into his seat. She turned her gaze to him but he could not look at her, for he was praying with every element of his being to his own imagined god, deeply, profoundly afraid of what he could not control, that surely his god, the one almighty and righteous god Zeus, would.
"First, stop being afraid. Become enlightened in your glorious humanity. Then dismiss your gods with the same argument you use to dismiss all other possible gods and fantasies. To survive you must stand up, speak up, and free your sisters and your brothers, for to allow this source of all evil to continue is to to be bloodied by the deaths of the billions of beings to follow, for in your silence you commit untold atrocities for all the eons. Silence, religion, is the refuge of fools."
The people sat there, praying, unable to let go of their fear. In the eons that followed, billions upon billions died in the name of one god or another as they remained silent, unable to simply stop being afraid.
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