Count Your Blessings!

On my daily walk, this morning on noticed a sign in front of a house that said: “count your blessings”. What came to my mind in an instance was that I would count our years of humanity, up to half millennia ago and since we, as Homo-sapiens, started walking upright on earth and learned not only to think about ourselves but also about the public at large. According to Wikipedia “Humans (Homo sapiens) are the only extant members of the subtribe Hominina. Together with chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, they are part of the family Hominidae (the great apes, or hominids). Humans are terrestrial animals, characterized by their erect posture and bipedal locomotion; high manual dexterity and heavy tool use compared to other animals; open-ended and complex language use compared to other animal communications; larger, more complex brains than other animals; and highly advanced and organized societies.”  We learned to be selfless after we invented ways and means to conquer hunger and provide shelter for ourselves. That is when we realized that earth was our home at large, and we must protect our home for our own survival.

The only question we could never find an answer for was the mystery behind our world and the universe. What was before the big band and how such a phenomena began and evolved?

One of the largest tools we have always had for our progress is imagination. Technology, medicine, art, and everything we call progress has conceived via imagination. This imagination has not always worked for our progress, however, and there have been many setbacks during the past thousands of years of our evolution. Religion is the largest ideology that has returned us back to the stone ages, a brainchild of imagination.

One would think that it is the ideology of religions which can be accepted or ignored, depending on the education and sophistication the person. However, the history shows that religions were never limited to merely an ideology, and everything that one wishes to acquire in order to raise above others, such as wealth, reputation, position in the society, and political power, have also been the very ingredients of religions. Some societies have been able to either erase religions altogether, or limit and minimize it, and at least put a muzzle on it. Since capitalism, and especially imperialism, require uneducated and unsophisticated and ignorant public, religion has been the best instrument to promote. Examples are abundant and clear. All dictatorships have certain religious agenda. The largest western capitalist society, United States, is also the most religious western country, even though its constitution requires a secular state. The more atrocious and pro-wealthy a president, the more religious that president become. The first day, for instance, president Trump or President Bush stepped into the White House as the head of the state, they performed a religious ritual. Everything else, such as disregard for the environment, lack of care for humanity, and protecting the rich, stem from such beliefs.

On the other hand, the poorest countries are also the most religious countries. Poor African nations, unfortunate Asian countries, and even underprivileged European countries all share one thing in common, religion. A regime that attaches title of a religion to its identification, and tries to export and promote that religion by any means possible, such as the regime in Iran, not only is a dictatorship and against humanity and environment, it is the most brutal and hated regime by its population as well. Secularism is the first and the most important factor that benefits not only the environment, but also the majority of people in a state, regardless of its political or economic ideology. Exposing religious atrocities in Europe’s Middle-Ages, or in present regimes which benefit from stupefying people through religion, is the first step in fighting dictatorship, environmental degradation, and imperialism. Today’s unrest in the United States, for instance, is not just impacted by killing of a black man by a white policeman, which happens many times a year in some place in the country. It is the result of wealth disparity (by the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer) for decades since the 1980s. It is also the fact that religion is fading away in this country and people get more educated through the mass media, which is held in each hand, and the knowledge spreading with unprecedented rapidity. People learn how their government brutalizes its less fortunate people, and how it does not have any regards for wealthy corporations destroying the environment. When a government uses its military, that is supposed to protect its borders, against its own people, it simply reflects the fear of that government of its own people. Historical revolutions are the best examples to represent this fact. It is a petty that governments don’t learn from the past.