ON BEING HUMAN: OUR GOD PROBLEM

A recent exchange on Facebook recounted an ugly incident on a recent Sun-mmer night in Brooklyn's Crown Heights where a woman was mock assaulted with an automobile, with the driver pretending to try to run her down and them laughing at her distress. It was a crazy and hateful thing to do. She angrily confronted the people in the car, only to be pelted with a couple of bottles of water. Unable to get the car's license plate number before it sped away, she was left only with her justified fury at the young people in the car, and expressed her anger on Facebook.

Quite the spirited Facebook discussion was spawned. The fact that the occupants of the car were black and the woman was white and Jewish provoked all sorts of ugly racist comments, and an equal amount of anti-racist rebuttals. The word "nigger" was thrown around like it was still 1960, or 1860, and many incidents of black-on-white violence were recounted. "Subhuman" was one of the phrases used, even though there is no such thing.

When we use the term "subhuman" to describe another person, what it does is give us license to feel superior to others, either because of their skin color, national origin, economic status or their religion. It is one our least attractive human qualities, and an attitude responsible for more deaths and more human misery than any plague or famine ever.

Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, between the three of them responsible for well over 100 million deaths, were, as much as we'd like to deny it, human beings. So is Charles Manson, and so was Idi Amin. They were all raised and taught the difference between right and wrong by loving mothers, and educated by their respective societies. They grew up with the same values as their peers, none of whom became murdering scumbags like they did.

No one encouraged these people to become butchers of their fellow human beings, but that is what they became. To deny their humanity is perhaps understandable, but too easy. And dead wrong. There were choices made in their lives, and actions taken, that made them supremely evil people, but people nonetheless. To deny the destructive potential of human beings by classifying them as "subhuman" is to ignore the obvious; that we all have unlimited potential to become a whole lot of things, some of them quite heinous.

Were they madmen? Certainly. Did they convince others to be willing accomplices to their murderous and hateful agenda? Of course, that is well documented. Many millions of people were willing accomplices to genocide, and have been for as long as civilization has existed. Were they all "subhuman" too? Was one of the Gods we invented to justify our hatred and power lust just one more murdering scumbag when he ordered the Israelites to "slay them down to the last man, woman and child?" Sure sounds that way.

Any person publishing those words today would be rightfully lambasted, and anyone attempting to implement such heinous slaughter would be vilified and hunted down. God has always been an excuse to kill and conquer, all the words of love and righteousness notwithstanding. For every Mother Theresa, Ghandi or Reverend Martin Luther King (all of whom made excellent life choices with the exact same raw material as a Hitler or a Manson), there have been a hundred psychopathic butchers killing in the name of God.

The Jew who first pointed out this glaring hypocrisy in the Jewish texts was crucified by his brethren for his trouble, and rewarded with having one of the most murderous and repressive organizations ever invented being dedicated to him, organized Christianity. When one reads his simple message of love, peace, kindness and tolerance, the mind boggles at the horrible acts perpetrated in his name by the "Holy Church." Holy shit is more like it.

Then some other guy comes along claiming Abraham, Moses and Jesus as his spiritual ancestors and invents a religion called Islam, which means peace. HIs name was Mohammed. Not much peace ensued as his spiritual descendants decided that "conversion by the sword" was the way to go, conquering and slaughtering from Africa to the Pacific. That just annoyed the crap out of the Holy Church, who took a break from torturing and repressing their own faithful to to rouse a bunch of them to invade the "Holy Land" to prove that our God could out-murder and out-torture their God.

And so it goes, from all-out genocidal wars to minor racial incidents on the streets of Brooklyn. This is what humans do to one another, and most of our inhumanity towards one another can be traced to the cynical charlatans who claim to speak for God, as if such a thing were remotely possible. If there is such an entity as a God, a gnat would stand a better chance of being able to speak for us than we would have of being qualified to speak for God.

There is no religion anywhere that is not the "one true religion." Which would be just fine if not for our human need to prove this most unprovable notion by shoving it down the next guy's throat, even to the point of killing or torturing if that's what it takes.

There's also no religion anywhere that is based on anything approaching the sort of reality we experience every minute of every day. Every one of them is based on some sort of impossible fairy tale that never occurs anywhere in our human experience, and yet is believed fervently by billions of otherwise mature and intelligent people.

So we call our religions "faith" and support any number of professional clergymen who live quite well feeding on our fears and superstitions, never having to work an honest day in their lives. Priests, imams, rabbis, shamans, bishops and witch doctors (the most honest title among them) exercise an unreasonable amount of influence over human beings, people who live and work honestly and hard in the world of the real.

Unlike the God Professionals, who claim all sorts of miraculous and divine connections, it is they who perform "miracles," miracles of science, of technology, of architecture and engineering, of letters and miraculous works of art all by themselves, no matter who claims that their efforts and ingenuity are dictated by God. And they have accomplished all this in spite of organized religion's determined attempts to suppress and sabotage literacy, science, reason, logic and exploration.

Imagine how far along humanity could be without our various religions actively working against us? With no "subhumans" to hate and attack, with no ideology to demonize and prohibit, with no attempts to stifle progress, we could have been working together all along to improve our lives, learning from one another, sharing our ideas, our art and our inventions for our mutual advancement and benefit.

Without our invented "Gods" and their self-appointed human tyrant representatives, we just might have avoided Colonialism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, Jihad, the Holocaust and our countless other genocide campaigns, and the plague of starvation that still claims 13 million lives every year, mostly children under the age of 5.

That's 36,000 small children dead each and every day, most of them in Third World countries that much of the world feels do not matter since they are nations populated by lesser beings. When a person is considered subhuman, then their pain can be shrugged off as unimportant or even nonexistent, even the unbearable pain of burying one's child who has starved to death on a bountiful planet.

This happens in a world where the God Professionals put forth the absurd notion that mankind cannot form a code of ethical behavior on its own, or discern right from wrong without them. Like their guidelines have caused anything but pain, death and humiliation. The truth is, we all have within us enough goodness, wisdom, logic and reason to find our way just fine without paying the freight to support these expensive charlatans or suffering for centuries under their boot.

We also have a huge capacity for joy and spiritual fulfillment without their input or their permission. We know what is right and proper, and we know how to govern our affairs equitably without the fear of some unseen fairy tale entity or their alleged human mouthpieces.

Their skewed notions of right and wrong that much of humanity adheres to have led directly to our Hitlers or those young thugs in Brooklyn terrorizing an innocent woman for sport. When a person is considered subhuman, anything goes, from murder to oppression and slavery to mere harassment, and these ideas were propagated by the God Squad. Our pain has always been their gain, our degradation their elevation. Damn them all to the Hell they invented to go along with their imaginary cruel Gods.