It’s the Education, Stupid
by Michelle Furr

How do the billion daily crumbs of piety gathered in daily acts and thoughts of worship weigh against the mountain of skeletons from the "holy" wars of overt and covert organized religion?

How, and on what scale do they weigh? I don’t know.

This I do know:

The world is mystery beyond words and any verbal revelation, and those who kill, kill knowledge of mystery. Those who state, "Believe thus and thus and thus," kill mystery.

Running scared in a world that itself is ineluctable, inscrutable, inexplicable, we scramble for top-of-the-heap, king-of-the-hill position.

"Me, me, me!" shout those clambering toward the summit of this mountain of skeletons.

A teacher once said, "’Man is the measure of all things.’ When you come to understand that statement fully, you can consider yourself educated." Years passed before I saw the hidden pride behind that and other such explications of the inexplicable.

Cocks-of-the-walk, we preen in the reflected light from the chalk-white mountain of skeletons on which we stand.

Rotund tones pour from balconies, pulpits, minarets, and lecterns hectoring: do thus, be thus, speak thus, think thus. Any god worthy of worship would surely blush and wonder, "What have I wrought?"

Splendidly robed speakers ceaselessly berate, bemoan, and belittle those who disagree with their small-room, windowless views of this spacious universe.

Piety without humility is pure hypocrisy whose most fertile soil is hunger, poverty, and ignorance.

Feed, clothe, and house? Yes. That we must.

Then educate, educate, educate. That too we must.