"It's the way it is."
Most kids get to hear such a statement in one of hundreds of languages since the advent of language in human culture.
With that, the kid should understand. Do it how it is done here or be put to death, excommunicated or imprisoned and tortured.
This, of course, does not prove that it need be done how it is being done. Only that it is being done how it is. And those in charge of how it is done are the Authority. They decide who get's taken out of camp and stoned to death.
I was receiving a very mild form of corrective instruction after being sold to a friendly officer of the law.
My lawyer advised me to attend church until the sentenced was passed down. Demonstrate how absurd it would be to put me away.
So I did.
I wasn't forced to believe. No one is.
My crime was known, they may have thought I was the lost sheep retuning to the flock. I saw it as it was. Odd. Waiting time.
One weekend we had a youth retreat. Christian only ski resort.
That weekend the resort had good snow cover, good weather and Christian youths from two large churches. We were discouraged from mixing with the other Christians because they believed something different then we believed.
Our youth director, pastor, was like Moses. An evil dictator. My friend and I used to enjoy tormenting him with insubordination.
By then, the snow weekend, I mostly just ignored his existence.
I was busy working on a reality check.
Trying to be impervious. Biding my time.
One afternoon it came. The eating room was full of soon to be eating Christians. Us on one side of the room. Them, the not quite right Christians on the other side.
When I looked over at the other Christians I noticed something strange. A youth had been taken from his table and sat alone in the wide isle on a chair. Young women were getting up from their chairs.
"What."
"It's his birthday."
"I have a birthday."
Not that day. But it didn't matter. I didn't care what any of the young women from the other Christians believed. What anyone believed.
I wanted kisses.
My body moved before I could think. I walked across the room, partly aware that all eyes were on me, and stood beside the birthday boy. Feeling too tall, I went to my knees beside him until someone brought me a chair.
I could have been embarrassed had I had sense. At the time, there was no time. It was all about to start, this kissing of the birthday boy and now, the crazy guy that crossed the room over that strange border to enter the other domain. When I finally came to focus on my situation, the goddess of them all, the young woman with all the grace and poise and admiration of all her tribe, caught my eyes. And she smiled at me, braking from her boyfriends embrace to get up from her seat and join the line of kissing angels.
Thirty years later I can still see her. Smiling. The goddess in woman.
More reward than one could ask for a small act of insubordination.
And all the kisses to go with it.
The weekend had become an enlightening experiences.
I knew the Priests, under their various names, were wrong.
Something other than what they had said mattered.
God hadn't given them authority over us, they had taken it. Taken our freedom to chose. Built us a box of rules and demanded our subordination and first born from wife and animals. And 10%.
The box, the tabernacle, was real in that the goat skins were from goats, the gold crafted by real craftsmen, the fabric, the best. The pillar of smoke that burned day and night,
the sacrifices the people brought to the priests were real. People really were slaughtered for using the Lord's name in vain.
But it was, as it still is, an elaborate lie.
A lie modeled by Moses and propigated through the ages so the priests could steel heaven from under our feet.
So they could live in material luxury in the religious structures made from the riches, sweat, blood, lives and freedom of the hopeless believer.
The Church, the Moshe, the Synagogue. Tax free. Super powers. Working with or for, sometimes inadvertently, for the War Lords. Sometime both in one.
They call themselves holy.
Holy has no meaning when in association with the big lie.
Fools will follow.
Tyrants will deceive.
Make them pay their taxes. The last 6,000 years of them.
The lie has been exposed.
The Priests are the first Mafia.
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