I’m going to go ahead and make an inflammatory statement here: religion and patriotism are forms of mental disease.
Now, there are many different definitions of mental illness. Continually doing the same thing but expecting different results, being a danger to yourself or others, actually having physical or neurological damage to the brain, not knowing the difference between right and wrong or between reality and fantasy are a few of the more common ones.
I’m not suggesting that god fearing, flag waving folks have something physically wrong inside the cranium, but they do fit every other one of those definitions.
Nations have risen and fallen for the last 6,000 years, at least. Populations have been transferred from one to the other. They have expanded and they have fought wars. Ultimately, whether from the inside or the outside, they have all collapsed.
Religions, too, have come and gone. They have offered meaning, solace in time of sorrow, and hope for an afterlife. They have also been the cause of oppression, war and deliberate ignorance. Yet people still have such a deep hunger for spiritual enlightenment that new religions are being invented all the time.
In religion and politics, people keep trying the same things and hoping for better results. Insane.
Nationalism is clearly a danger to ourselves and others, because it can lead to war. Very few people, probably less than 1%, would actually be capable of deliberately killing another person. You may be angry at your boss, but you’re not going to put a bomb in his car. You may shout at your neighbor and say “I’ll fucking kill you!,” but you won’t, really. But large numbers of people will vote for leaders who will drop bombs on other people, killing them. They won’t think twice and they won’t feel guilty.
Religion is also a danger to ourselves and others because nationalist leaders use it to rally people around their nationalist wars.
Not knowing the difference between right and wrong is actually a point of pride among extreme nationalists. “My country right or wrong,” they say.
Religion’s no better. People assume that whatever their priest says is right. Not only do religious people not know the difference between right and wrong, thay have stopped trying to figure it out.
The big thing for me though is that last one: not knowing the difference between reality and fantasy. Nations are not real things. There is no physical barrier at the Rio Grande. Birds fly across it with impunity. They are entirely human inventions, i.e. artificial, and people would be better off without them. Yet they continue to exist. Insanity.
Religion as well. If everybody on earth stopped going to church, synagogue, mosque or temple the plants would continue to grow, the rain would continue to fall, and babies would continue to be born. There are scientific explanations for all of these things, and all religion does is to provide us with a fantasy.
I’m not against fantasy. But when you start believing in it, you have a problem, and that problem is called insanity.
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