TO Anti-War & CLIMATE-CHANGE ACTIVISTS

A friend of mine named Duff said she’s having trouble flagging you down on something big.

Right now most of the world has been bamboozled into following religions that are going to wipe us off the face of the planet – you included. Maybe you personally don’t think you need religion, and that's fine. But anthropologists know that the majority of the world does, always has, and probably always will.

And if you don’t help the world see their religions are lethal – and help throw them some healthy religions as substitutes -- then nothing else you do will ever matter. Nothing you can do will ever cap religion. Darlings, you might as well spit in the wind.

Actually, we all have “religion.” There’s no choice in that. The only choice is which religion you’ll follow: Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah or Vishnu, the way over half the world does now? One of the Eastern religions? All the mainstream Eastern religions I know also pump up war, violence, and a one-sided male-over-female mentality – even Buddhism. Or is your religion money? Or science?

We all have answers to the big questions -- Where did I come from; What’s the purpose of life; Where do I go after I die. How you answer is your religion. Maybe without knowing it, Science is your god. The purpose of life, says the God Science, is to study it. And since it stands in the way of accurately studying things, the Big Sin is emotion. The supernatural, says The God Science, is for fools. The God Science says humans came from 32c worth of chemicals, period. End of sentence.

Can you see how such a god, if left free to romp around the sandbox, might lead to the invention of WMD? If the point of life is to scrutinize the universe, and fear and love are abominations, then study has total free reign -- no matter where it leads.

Of all the hundreds of world cultures anthropologists have studied, every single one has had religion – and religion based on the supra-natural. When anthropologists find such “universals” they know they’re on to something big, something fundamental to human functioning (other universals include the incest taboo, gender roles, myth, language, art, cooking, games, moral standards, and a few more.).

A solution to the war gods is a Guiding Mother Goddess. We are what we worship. If people worship a mother goddess, they’ll treat others the way a healthy mother treats her children: with unconditional love and regard. Instead of punishing, they’ll teach. Instead of bumping everyone into piles called good, better and best, they’ll see everyone as equally valuable.

If you have a negative reaction to the idea of a Mother Goddess, consider this: the Abrahamaic religions have spent 2000 years making damn sure you do. They knew the greatest threat to their existence were the Mother Goddesses, and they used every trick in the book – most hitting below the belt – to con humanity into having just the reaction you’re having now.

But even the Inquisitors couldn’t scrub out the notion of Mother Earth, Gaia, the ancient Goddess Gaia. Not only has the world shrunk to a village, it’s shrunk to a village speaking a hundred different languages – almost all of them sick war-god languages. To survive now, we need one mutually intelligible language. I propose it be a language of love -- the language of our common Mother, the Great Mother Goddess, Gaia.