Hello Regan,

Can’t remember who wrote it but the lines which stayed with me were…’that religion is superstition got lucky.’

Much of what frightens most thinking non-superstitious people, let’s call some of them educated or even scientists, is the sway that religion holds over much of society but in particular over women’s reproductive life.

If what generates superstition is fear then fear still has its grip on much of American culture.

It’s almost as if the old paradigm of ‘if we rid the sinner from our midst then God’s Providence will bless us all.’

And pun intentional, God help us if that Deity is a vengeful, jealous, condemning, homicidal and racist one as portrayed in the Old Testament, The Koran and The Torah.

And that’s not even getting into the blaming transmutation of Pandora to Eve or from Asherah and Yahweh to just Yahweh.

So, from the pulpits of your Bible Belt, we’ve got one here in my Province and they always align themselves with Right-Wing political parties, allowing women, even poor ones or POC, the rights to control their bodies will bring about calamity.

“And let’s do God’s work and shoot up a few of them pharmacies or Planned Parenthood offices or them baby-killing clinics and if a bullet finds a doctor or a nurse…well Amen to that.”

And that’s not even getting into the concept of forcing women to have a child who will be born into poverty and malnourishment and other countries perhaps be even born to starve to death.

And the medical costs of having a child in the US would financially cripple many people in my country.

Not many people get that religion is a major stumbling block when many Americans are trying to change the medical system of the richest country in the world …but I think it comes back to your central tenet about religion and even Calvin’s concept of predestination.

Surrendering control of the medical system will not just bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth, heaven forbid — because even heaven is hierarchal — but it would mean access for all to universal health care….and birth control and besides, that’s Socialism and that’s too damn close to COMMUNISM!

And that will bring down God’s wrath, so if you’re poor or black or both, God wants it that way and that’s predestination, a concept remarkably similar to the Hindu teachings regarding reincarnation and karma: used of course to justify the brutal human-limiting Caste system.

I mean ‘In God we Trust’ on currency?

What, if you’re not getting much from the feast table/bank of life, trust that God wants it that way?

So how to combat the willful obfuscation, prevarication and mind-numbing superstitious nonsense which is in reality a class ridden economic process masquerading as religion?

I think it was Sigmund Freud who said that ‘Religion is misplaced parent envy.”

“There’s a really big mummy and daddy waiting to take care of me after I die…well, even before, they’re watching over me.”

And yet…what really good parent engages in blaming and shaming, have we really not learned anything from Nathanial Hawthorne’s 1850 “The Scarlet Letter”?

Most know that won’t work, it can break the child’s spirit, forever banishing her to the hinterlands of her possibility, to search for the scraps under the feast table while those, like the pre-tribulationists and other Pyramid-Schemed Evangelicals who ascribe to The Rapture, sit at the right hand of Jesus and look down at those being tortured, I mean, afflicted with God’s punishment.

So my point, albeit long winded, is that blaming and shaming all men won’t work either.

You are going to need Men and Women to combat the sham, pull back the curtain and expose, as tirelessly and tedious as it may seem, those people… women too, they too vote Republican, they sit on Judge’s benches and not just pews, they hold offices in the School Board, they sit on the PTA, they are the majority of Elementary School teachers…they have power.

Level your excoriation at them too.

Trump is not part of God’s plan. How dare any Evangelical leaders anthropomorphize ‘the creator of all’ and pretend to speak for him/her/they!

Or are those women too under the sway of the dreaded Patriarchy?

That’s a panacea and an easy out. There are misguided and avaricious plotting women in positions of power too. They are human after all.

Lastly and perhaps for another conversation:

There is an enormous father wound in western culture…it started in the Industrial Revolution with taking fathers from their sons, and reached its most destructive phase during the 20th Century with 10 million men killed and 25 million wounded in the First World War, and in the Second World War with 15 million dead and 25 million wounded. And that’s not even getting into civilian losses and rape.

Those are staggering numbers which created insane levels of trans-generational grief. It brought about the collapse of Kings and their religious minions (not enough lamentably) and created an enormous rift between men and women because for the most part women waved their men off to war, women pinned white flowers on men out of uniform: they were branded cowards.

They were supposed to make a sacrifice for not just their country but also to protect their women and children.

I know this because it happened to my father, whose naval uniform was being cleaned and he was out on the streets of Montreal in his ‘civvies’.

Two women called him over and when he bent down to hear what they had to say, they pinned a white flower to his lapel.

You see, the first things that early unions in the 19th Century, created by men, they were called chartists, was to take women and children out of the mines and later the factories.

The second thing they did was to teach their children how to read.

Many many men sacrificed themselves for their wives and their children.

Many many men are still doing that today Regan, they’re not all out there impregnating women and walking away…but tell men they are the problem or are not needed and are only worthy of condemnations for the sins of others, then they will.