Life's Illusions 2011

Anyone reading my blog through the years will not be surprised by this list. This is where I stand and it lies behind everything I have written. As we start 2011, therefore, I'd like to thank you all for reading my work. It's been a personal adventure for me and I hope a source of interest and amusement for you. Here's hoping that the new year is kind to us all.


• Religion and Politics are not ends in themselves—they are symptoms of the people who support them. If people did not need to feel secure and superior, neither would exist.

• Organized religion is a corporation providing a service: giving pre-digested answers to life’s great questions, licensing human behavior, and providing employment.

• Religions exist for community. They become political when they legislate human behavior and then attempt to enforce it.

• Spirituality does not require an organized place of worship or prescribed ways of recognizing blessings.

o The founders of a religion are the idealists. Followers take and pervert the original ideas as people sign on. It is much easier to gain followers by promising benefits than asking for sacrifice.

o People can create better myths and beliefs for themselves if they go out to a hillside in complete darkness and try counting stars.

o It is entirely possible to be ethical and not part of organized religion.

o Any religion looks ridiculous if its basic beliefs are examined closely. Contrary to religious belief, science is not a religion. It is subject to hypothesis and correction through evidence. Belief and truth are not the same. Try telling the creationists to prove or disprove their beliefs.

o Parents who raise their children in an organized religion without thinking shut down young minds and then act as enforcers for religion if the children start to think for themselves.

o Politics is not the art of the possible: it is the art of the expedient, particularly in lining the pockets of those who know how to play the game. Too often, any good done for society as the result of political action is incidental and accidental. The wisest question to ask a politician is “Who is benefitting from this?” or, more bravely, “How are you benefitting from this?”

o Religion assumes prominence when people are starving and stressed. At other times it is one more form of oppression, purporting to add spiritual authority to human unkindness.

o Religious and political “values” are merely slogans to sway large numbers of people by referring to ideologies and ideas that people know only by name and have not taken the time to examine. Anyone who really studies politics and religion should be scared witless by them.

o Wars are a form of profit seeking and taking. Lunatics start them, people die for them, religion justifies them, and armament manufacturers encourage it all. Money is not the root of all evil. People believing they deserve it is.