20140528, 6484, 40140, 28 May 2014, Atheists Should Stop Dissing Religion by MJ Stephens.

Atheists should stop dissing religion. It’s self-defeating. You can’t win the contest for the future, if you refuse to play the only game that wins the hearts and minds of children.

Atheists need to face some anthropological facts. First, we are cultural, social lifeforms; we cannot do without shared standards of good and bad behavior. Second, we produce immature offspring; we cannot do without teaching children those shared standards. Third, children learn most effectively by hearing stories and performing rituals. Bald lists of dos and don’ts, don’t cut it with children. They don’t effectively engage a child’s attention, or gain their commitment to a culture and its standards, as stories and rituals do.

Religion is the set of cultural stories and reinforcing rituals that teach children and remind adults of the shared world-view of their culture, including their shared standards of good and bad behavior. Religion is for children. Religion is necessary for cultural, social lifeforms like us, but gods are optional.

Because we cannot do without religion, cannot do without fulfilling the needs of children and adults for shared standards of good and bad behavior, we must be mindful of the world-views and associated standards of behavior that religions teach children. We must be mindful of the facts that ancient does not mean right, it just means old, that traditional does not mean good, it just means familiar.

Hierarchical Religion

The hierarchical world-view claims that this existence is a fixed pyramid of lifeforms with an all-knowing, all-powerful master on top. All others are of lesser value and virtue than the pyramid master. All are here to serve and obey the pyramid master, or be punished with suffering. The pyramid master has an unrestricted right to harm those below. Must-be-obeyed direction comes from the pyramid master, relayed and enforced by deputies below. The purpose of this existence is to please and profit the pyramid master, no matter the harm caused to those below.

According to the hierarchical world-view, Might Makes Right, the might of the pyramid master gives them the right to direct those below. In fact, their might makes whatever they do right. When Might Makes Right, unfairness is right and slave masters rule.

Because a pyramid master’s might makes whatever they do right, criticizing the pyramid master is not allowed. Point out that the pyramid master is really one of our own Black Magic demons, a hallucinated god-voice that promised power in exchange for being fed on torture and murder, and the deputies are bound to get their knickers in a twist.

The hierarchical world-view is the intellectually adolescent, competitive world-view of an alpha chimpanzee bully who sits atop his social pyramid. It is a tale told by deputies that conveniently places Might Now in the hands of the deputies, based on an alleged pyramid master’s alleged Might Right to direct those below.

The authority upon which many hierarchical religions rests is imaginary experience, including hallucinated visions and voices. It was the foolish belief of our know-little, believe-anything ancestors that imaginary experience is a source of reliable information about this existence. Our ancient ancestors were flat out wrong on that one. Imaginary experience is not a source of truth. Imaginary experience, especially hearing a hallucinated god-voice, is never a source of reliable information about anything, except possibly our own fears, desires, and prejudices. Imaginary experience is a source of ideas that must be tested against commonly observable experience for their value.

Ideas are not judged by their source; ideas and beliefs, like behaviors, are judged by their effects. The effect of believing in the truth of imaginary experience, in the truth of hallucination, is self-glorying, self-serving, criminal self-delusion.

Our hallucinated god-voices are self-glorifying, they tell us, we’re a god’s favorites. They are self-serving, they gives us permission to commit crimes, to cause harm for our own profit. They give criminal commands like, Go forth, steal your neighbor’s land through the crime of conquest to gain fame, fortune, and power for yourself, your god-voice has your back, from inside your head. Or, Go therefore and make all nations the cultural slaves of your hallucinations through the crime of conquest to gain immortality, profit, and power for yourselves, and lo, your god-voice is with you always, again inside your head.

If we are taught a fool’s belief in the truth of hallucination, we will become criminals. We will follow even the criminal commands of our own hallucinated god-voices to engage in crimes of territorial and cultural conquest for our own profit. As all savages do, we will call the crime of conquest doing a god’s work, when it is really doing the work of our own self-serving demon god-voices.

A belief in the truth of hallucination makes right even a god-voice’s criminally insane demand for Black Magic sacrifices, for the crimes of torture and murder for personal profit. Hallucinated god-voices demand Black Magic crimes like, Torture babies with a pornographic slave branding to gain steal-yourself real estate. Or, Slit the kid’s throat on the mountain top to become a made man in your god-voice’s gang. Or, Commit a slow-motion suicide by police to become king of your world. And he never returned, no he never returned to pick up his to-die-for royal mantle.

There are no limits on our imaginations, therefore there are no limits on our behavior when imaginary experience, like hallucination, is our guide. Therefore, a belief in the truth of hallucination acts as a justification for crime, a justification for slavery, conquest, and child abuse, with our god-voice on our side.

Our hallucinated god-voices are self-deluding. They masquerade as the voice of an alien being, when they are really the voices of our own desires for fame, fortune and power. Because god-voice worshippers idolize the voices of their own desires, they idolize themselves. Consequently, god-voice worshippers see themselves as god-like and the center of all existence.

A belief in the truth of hallucination is a fool’s belief, not only because it makes it easier for us to be fooled by others, more importantly, it makes it easier for us to fool ourselves.

The tyrannical, hierarchical world-view based on a fool’s belief in the truth of hallucination is cruel, ignorant, and criminal, it does not deserve respect, it deserves correction.

Hierarchy is not the only world-view, hallucination is not the only authority. We should not make the intellectual error of a cultural megalomaniac and mistake our particular religion for the blueprint for all possible religions.

Ecological Religion

The ecological world-view claims that this existence is an ecosystem, an ever-changing network of interdependent and interconnected parts, lifeform or not. That means lifeform and ecosystem are one. All are of value and virtue because all are partners in the process of change that is existence.

In an ever-changing existence, every thing changes, all are limited and transitory, lifeform or not. The process of change itself is the only persistent feature of this existence. Therefore, when we die, we are no more. We get justice, forgiveness, reward, and rapture now, or never. Because that is our situation, Fairness Makes Right in the ecological world-view. Fairness, aiming to secure for all, their only chance for justice, forgiveness, reward, and rapture, is Right now.

Existence itself is neither fair, nor unfair. It is our response to it that is fair, or not. Hierarchical bullies choose to be unfair and cruel, they choose Might Now for their purpose. Ecological partners choose to be fair and kind, they choose Fairness Now for their purpose. Therefore, ecosystem partners choose to cooperate, to fairly fulfill the needs of all now, including their own. Because ecosystem and lifeform are one, harm done or benefit provided to any, is harm done or benefit provided to all.

Ecological partners determine their direction based on commonly observable experience, on the feedback from the voices of all now, lifeform or not. They continually learn from commonly observable experience how their particular corner of existence is working now, so that they can cooperate to achieve the best for all now, including for themselves. Ecological partners always welcome constructive criticism of self, situation, and system. Critical feedback is necessary for survival. It is also a major force for beneficial change in an ever-changing existence like ours. This is the intellectually mature, cooperative world-view from inside a bacterial colony, from inside an ecosystem.

Rules of Good Partners

All rules of ecological religions, of good partners, aim for Fairness Now. What are some of the rules of ecological religions? What are some of the morals that cultural stories of good partnership would teach? Stories of good partnership teach us to: Be a Good Partner, Foster Free Feedback, Respect The Rocks, Make No Garbage, Avoid Harm To All Now, Provide Benefit To All Now, Cooperate And Trust, Never Take Things On Faith, Never Just Obey Orders, Seek, Change, Seek Change.

Be a Good Partner.

How do good partners, child and adult, behave? Good partners learn respectfully, share fairly, and play joyfully with all now. Good partners are grateful, they enjoy their lives now. They are kind, they share with all now. They are forgiving, they do not forget, condone or excuse; but they do let go of anger, resentment, and revenge.

The experience of each partner is unique. Therefore, good partners are wholly themselves providing beneficial feedback from their unique experience.

Good partners act for all, including themselves. Bad partners act only for themselves, no matter the harm it causes.

Religion is never a roadmap to utopia, there are always bad partners who cause harm for their own short-sighted, selfish profit in this ever-changing existence. Religion provides a group strategy for negotiating this existence, including the inescapable bad partners. The hierarchical world-view champions the intellectually adolescent, cruel strategy of Might Makes Right bullies. The ecological world-view champions the intellectually mature, kind strategy of Fairness Makes Right partners.

Foster Free Feedback

Good partners Foster Free Feedback. We live in an ecological existence. Healthy ecosystems run on free feedback. Suppressing, ignoring, or failing to learn from feedback makes us the victims of our own mistakes, causing harm and denying benefit. Good partners provide accurate, timely, and beneficial feedback to all. They are always open to learn from all feedback received.

Good partners ensure their systems foster free feedback. All cultural feedback is built on the back of existing culture. No one owns culture. No one has the right to destroy or suppress cultural feedback. Good partners provide benefit for the benefit of new cultural feedback provided, but they never grant the unfair right to suppress cultural feedback. Therefore, good partners abolish patents and copyrights systems, because they bestow an unfair right to suppress free feedback. Instead, good partners establish a royalty rights system that fosters innovation without suppressing free feedback.

Good partners openly collect data because it is their history, they can learn from it. Electronic data is the history of all, great and small, who are electronically active. Partners can learn from electronic history now by studying aggregations that do not require knowledge of individual datum. The future can dig into the details, giving all, although dead, another chance at their fifteen of fame, or infamy.

Secrets are power that is not open to critical feedback. Bad partners, like hierarchical bullies, act secretly to avoid correction by critical feedback, or use secrets to cause harm. Bad partners secretly collect and manage data. They secretly access individual data without critical feedback.

Bad partners, like pyramid masters and their deputies, suppress feedback, suppress criticism, suppress voting. Good partners vote in every election. They support a Cash for Communicators Program, A Communicator in Every Hand with Free Wi-fi in Every Hood, that puts a secure voting booth in every pocket.

Respect The Rocks

Good partners Respect The Rocks, respect the needs and feedback of all partners, lifeform or not. Good partners respect, take into account, the effects of their behavior on all partners, lifeform or not, because we’re all stuck in one lifeboat, this existence.

Good partners respect the feedback of all, because all partners will come back and bite us in this lifeboat if we don’t respect their feedback. Just as the rocks have come back and bitten us, choked us with pollution, because we have not respected their feedback. Do the rocks have to choke us to extinction before we get the message that the internal combustion engine is so over? Forget fracking. Good partners pursue ecologically sound renewal energy technologies, and abandon as fast as possible all dinosaur technology like the internal combustion engine. Dinosaur technology leads to extinction

Good partners respect the needs of all partners, because all partners will be harmed if we don’t respect the needs of any. Female partners need to manage their own childbearing in accord with available resources. More childbearing than a female partner can manage, there are not enough resources to nurture child partners, who are instead abused by neglect. Abuse begets abuse, the abused becomes the abuser. The abused child becomes the adult abuser, harming all.

Those who worship the hierarchical god-voices of ancient ancestors are bad partners, they do not respect the needs of female partners to manage their own childbearing. They have never faced the historical fact that our ancient ancestors did not have high moral standards. They had the low, criminal standards of slave masters and slaves, because they were literal slave masters and wannabe-slave-master slaves who did not know the difference between right and wrong. Our ancient ancestors were morally impaired, they called slavery, conquest, and child abuse good behavior, when they are all crimes.

Consequently, hierarchical god-voice worshippers have the low, criminal family values of an ancient slave master. They claim a slave master’s right to force childbearing on females; they claim a slave master’s right to father by rape and incest. Championing slavery, including physical slavery to childbearing, is the criminal behavior of a slave master, not good behavior, if you’ve learned right from wrong. Hierarchical god-voice worshippers have never learned right from wrong, or they wouldn’t still be worshipping the hallucinated god-voices of morally impaired, ancient slave masters and slaves. Hierarchical god-voice worshippers don’t have high moral standards. They have the low, criminal standards of slaves. They are unquestioningly obedient. They just obey ancestors and their god-voices, even their criminal commands, including to champion the crimes of slavery.

Good partners respect female partners’ need to manage their own childbearing, because it produces well-nurtured partners, thus keeping the crime rate down. In fact, good partners have a duty to manage their childbearing, so that they avoid the harm of becoming a plague of locusts in our lifeboat, as we are today.

The disqualifying failure of Capitalism is that it does not Respect the Rocks, it feeds on continual population growth creating a plague of locusts. Good partners Respect the Rocks and devise an economic system that provides prosperity for a population that fluctuates within an ecologically healthy range.

Make No Garbage

Good partners Make No Garbage, they recycle every thing. Or they find themselves living in a garbage dump of chemical and radioactive waste, as we are now. Fracking and Nuclear Power are both failed energy projects. They both fail to perform a necessary step in an ecological existence like ours, they both fail to recycle their waste, their radioactive waste. Good partners are culturally free, but they are not morality free to pump poison in the earth for profit as Might Makes Right hierarchical bullies are. Make No Garbage earth, ban fracking.

Good partners recycle everything, including the left over garbage dumps of bad partners. Even the radioactive dumps are recycled with the aid of all partners’ BFF, Bacteria. Bacteria Rule. Respecting the Rocks, respecting all partners, good partners give archeologists first crack at their favorite playgrounds, garbage dumps.

Avoid Harm To All Now

Good partners Avoid Harm to All Now, they don’t lie, cheat, steal, bully or use violence, or they harm themselves in a shared ecosystem existence like ours.

It is an inescapable fact that life feeds on life in this existence. Predator and prey are partners. Predators depend on prey to healthily sustain them; prey depend on predators to healthily harvest them. Therefore, lifeforms have a duty to respectfully take only what is fairly needed.

Good partners avoid harm by ensuring their systems avoid harm. Therefore, they aim for a system of good government that avoids harm. Good government is free and fair. It provides free public services to all, protecting all fairly from the inescapable bad partners in this existence. Good government is flexible and open. All government records are online, all the time, open to correction by critical feedback. Good government is effective and efficient. It ensures the same high level of free public services are delivered to all, and that all bad partners receive the appropriate feedback that stops their harm.

Might Makes Right hierarchical bullies champion small, secret, for-profit, and unfair government that allows harm.

Small government, less government, less taxes, less spending, less regulation allows harm by providing fewer public services that protect all against the inescapable bad partners in this existence. Small government doesn’t mean more freedom for all, it means more freedom for bad partners to harm without the protection of good government.

Secret government, secret laws, secret courts, secret treaties allow harm, undermine good government, by not allowing critical feedback.

For-profit government allows harm by abandoning the fairness of free public service for all, for the unfairness of individual profit for a few. Free public education is the foundation of fairness for all. When education is for profit, only the profitable get educated. The privatization of government services, fascism, is the project of bad partners who want to steal from the public purse.

Unfair government allows harm by misapplying rights. Unfair government claims that corporations, legal fictions that are really no more than limited piles of money to pay limited liabilities, have the rights of lifeforms. Giving piles of money the rights of lifeforms sets all up for unfairness and harm.

Good partners avoid harm by aiming for good government that freely and fairly serves and protects all. Good partners ban secret laws, secret courts, and secret treaties. They ban for-profit schools and prisons, only slave masters make profit off the uneducated or imprisoned. They do not give legal fictions the rights of lifeforms, as Might Makes Right hierarchical bullies do.

Provide Benefit To All Now

Good partners Provide Benefit To All Now, or they fail to benefit themselves in a shared ecosystem existence like ours. Therefore, good partners are generous. They are open-handed and open-hearted. They provide benefit by being wholly themselves and providing accurate, timely, and beneficial feedback from their unique experience to all now. They use the benefits they command to fairly fulfill the needs of all now, including their own. Because Fairness Now is their aim, they gladly pay the taxes that provide the benefits of good government to all. They gladly ensure all partners are provided the benefits that are needed for cooperating and enjoying life as good partners, including food, shelter, education and medicine. They pursue prosperity that benefits all, providing wages to thrive and enjoy life on.

Bad partners, like hierarchical bullies, are greedy and cold-hearted. They claim that Might Makes Right. That its every man for himself, women and children last, the poor and powerless not at all, the different and dissenting not allowed. Existence is meant to please and profit them, no matter the harm caused. Therefore, they deny their duty to provide benefit to all, and instead claim a slave master’s right to deny benefit, to hoard the rightful benefits of others for themselves.

They hoard benefit by opposing the taxes that ensure good government. They hoard benefit by stealing the benefits of other partners for themselves. They steal more than their fair share, causing poverty, but creating hoards of wealth for themselves. They claim a slave master’s right to trickle down the stolen benefits to their rightful owners as starvation wages, not the thriving wage of good partners.

Hierarchical bullies are thieving misers, because for them a hoard is a sign of might, a bully’s sign of being right. Hoards of wealth are really a sign we are bad partners who cheat, who deny partners their rightful benefits, or we wouldn’t have amassed a miser’s hoard in the first place.

Hierarchical bullies even claim a slave master’s right to murder by denial of rightful benefits, to Murder by Casting Out. Ancient slave masters murdered by casting out into a desert, by denying the rightful benefits of food and water. Contemporary slave masters murder by casting out of a health care system, denying the rightful benefit of life-saving medicine. Partners die without access to the benefit of medicine, medicine that today only health care systems can provide. For good partners, Murder by Casting Out, by denying the life preserver of health care, causing partners to literally die, is a slave master’s crime of negligent homicide.

A Might Makes Right free-for-all is not the road to providing freedom and fairness for all. It is the road to denying rightful benefits, turning all into the slaves of the mighty. Championing a denial of rightful benefits is not good behavior, it is the criminal behavior of a vicious, greedy, backstabbing slave master’s party.

Good partners ensure all have the benefits to cooperate, enjoy, and thrive. Good partners ensure that bad partners, who commit the crime of theft by hoarding, suffer forfeitures that recycle their greedy hoards back to the rightful owners as benefits for all, like Cash for Communicators, providing health care, education, employment, and emergency service, online, all the time, on your communicator.

Cooperate And Trust

Cooperation organizes, coordinates, and acts for common purpose, that purpose can be for good or ill. Competition rewards some and leaves the rest behind.

Good partners cooperate to fulfill their common purpose of Fairness Now. They cooperate to avoid harm, to face and manage dangers. They cooperate to provide benefit, including good government.

Cooperation runs on trust. Trust is confidence in the reliability of others to be good partners. Trust is earned, critical, and cautious. Trust but verify. Cooperation and Trust grow, or can be destroyed, through shared experience.

Bad partners are sad excuses for social lifeforms. They deny their duty as interdependent and interconnected parts in this ecosystem existence to cooperate for the best for all. Instead they claim a slave master’s Might Right to abuse, to cause harm for their own profit, to deny rightful benefits, including by casting out.

Abuse destroys trust. Abuse provokes a rightful anger, fear, and resentment that destroys trust, ends cooperation, and provokes aggression. Partners who are abused by denial of rightful benefits are unprepared to negotiate an ever-changing existence.

Culturally abused partners seek the false respect of a gun. A gun gives false respect, because the right to benefit is still not respected, it is the gun that is respected, without which they get no respect. Therefore, guns are not just weapons, they are pacifiers for adults, substitutes for stolen benefits. Guns are time-bomb security blankets for adults conditioned by cultural abuse to be fearful and untrusting.

Abused partners with a gun can be used as tools of terror and disruption by Might Makes Right hierarchical bullies. Brandishing their gun to defend to hierarchical misers who won’t pay their fare share asserts their need for respect that has been stolen from them by the same hierarchical bullies, they blindly defend. The unruly and dangerous rabble of abused partners are the first to be defanged once their talent for rebellion, disruption, and violence is no longer needed to secure power for hierarchical bullies.

When every one carries a gun, the trigger happy, gun addict rules. When the gun addict rules, it’s call a reign of terror. Even the rightfully angry, resentful and fearful do not have a right to become trigger happy gunslingers who terrorizes partners with dangerous behaviors.

Have Gun Will Travel in the cultural stream would defeat the arguments of gun addicts. Except bad partners have granted the unfair right of copyright to suppress cultural heritage, including cultural heritage on video. Copyright silences history. Copyright fosters ignorance.

It’s easy to focus our fear and aggression on things outside ourselves, like president, or government. It’s difficult to blame our abuse on our own beliefs. It is difficult to admit we were taught a fool’s belief in the truth of hallucination that turned us into the faithful and obedient slaves of a Might Makes Right hierarchy that has treated us unfairly from birth. It is easier to grab a gun and give up our government, than our god. A god who offers back-stabbing comfort because, perversely, he is the prop that supports the abusive hierarchical system which deceived and short-changed us in the first place.

Might Makes Right is the shortsighted, suicidal strategy of the cowardly and cruel, that leads to a backstabbing brawl to oblivion. Partnership through cooperation and trust is the only prudent path in an ever-changing existence like ours.

Never Take Things On Faith, Never Just Obey Orders

Good partners, child and adult, Never Take Things on Faith, Never Just Obey Orders, or they are taken for slaves.

Faith is an unshakeable and comforting, but groundless, certainty in the rightness of our own past beliefs. Faith is groundless because this existence is ever-changing, therefore nothing is certain, but change.

The comforting false certainty of faith blinds us to our own mistakes. Only the faithful have the false certainty in their own beliefs that allows them to murder a partner and call it legal, call it the death penalty. Good partners know that lifeforms like us are always in some way mistaken. Therefore, they never take things on faith, never are unshakably certain in an always uncertain, because ever-changing, existence.

Obedience is not good behavior, it is the expedient behavior of the less powerful who follow orders to avoid harm to themselves. Good partners, child and adult, are never taught to be obedient, they are never taught to be unquestioning slaves to the commands of others.

Trust is necessary for the functioning of a cooperative system, but faith and obedience are failings. They both fail our ever-changing ecosystem’s need for all partners, child and adult, to be critically aware in the present, to respond to changing conditions, no matter our past beliefs or commands. Faith and obedience are in fact the virtues of slaves. Together they act as cheap and efficient self-shackling chains that fool lifeforms like us into being the cultural slaves of pyramid masters and their deputies.

Good partners are confident, critical and flexible in the present, not faithful and obedient slaves to the past. They are confident in the strategy of partnership with all now. They are critically aware of the present. They are flexible in the face of an ever-changing existence.

Seek, Change, Seek Change

Good partners Seek, they explore without exploiting, they seek to provide benefit while avoiding harm. They Change, they learn from commonly observable experience, from the voices of all now, lifeform or not. They Seek Change, they seek new partners. Those are some of the rules that ecological religions would teach now.

Cultural Fairy Tales

Good partners also tell child partners cultural stories, including fairy tales, that teach good partnership with all now. Fairy tales themselves are as necessary as religion. Religion provides shared standards. Fairy tales teach us to imagine overcoming obstacles to achieve our goals, including our goal of Fairness Now.

No imaginary being is banned from appearing in cultural fairy tales that teach good partnership. Divine imaginary beings, goddesses and gods, can appear along with the usual cast of imaginary characters, fairy, troll, demon and the like. In ecological religions divine beings are symbols of common cultural goals, like goddesses and gods of good partnership, of cooperation, kindness and tolerance. Demons are symbols of common failings, demons of greed, violence, and ignorance. Evil is ignorance, often a willful ignorance of knowledge and understanding that undermines our world-view.

Good partners do not teach child partners the beliefs of fools. They do not teach them that hallucination is a source of reliable information about this existence. They do not teach them to believe in the factual truth of imaginary experience, including cultural fairy tales. They do not groom child partners to be fools who are the easy prey of con artists who claim to hear hallucinated god-voices, and or the prey of own self-glorying, self-serving, self-deluding god-voices.

Good partners teach child partners that goddess, god, fairy, troll, and demon are all reflections of aspects of ourselves. They teach that the characters in cultural fairy tales exist in the same place that all our god-voices do, in our own imaginations. And we can no more rid ourselves of hallucinations and god-voices, then we can rid ourselves of bad partners. The question is not how to get rid of them, the question is how do we respond to the inescapable. The answer is with critical feedback for both bad partners and imaginary experience.

The Power of Stories

We are lifeforms of self-fulfilling prophecy. We are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We become the stories we tell ourselves. If we tell stories that teach this is a slave master's universe with a slave master god and we are here to be the suffering slaves of our own hallucinated god-voices, then slave masters will rule by the whim of their hallucinated god-voices, and we will suffer. If we tell stories that teach that life is suffering, then we will suffer. If we tell stories that teach this is an ever-changing, ecosystem existence, and we are here to cooperate, to enjoy our lives as partners with all now, then partners will cooperate, and we will enjoy our lives now.

Therefore, our purpose, moral and otherwise, is whatever we say it is. It’s the 21st century, ancestor worship is so over. Only savages are slaves to the imaginary experiences of long dead ancestors. We must take personal responsibility for the stories coming out of our own mouths. We can tell stories that teach that Might Makes Right, that Might Now is our purpose, like an alpha chimpanzee bully. Or, we can tell stories that teach that Fairness Makes Right, that Fairness Now is our purpose, like a good partner. What do we wish for child partners? Suffering as cultural slaves to hallucinated god-voices? Or enjoying partnership by listening to the voices of all now? The cultural stories we tell child partners will become their future.

We don’t need one religion on this planet. We would be culturally, intellectually, and morally poorer, if we had only one. We need ecological religions, cultural stories and reinforcing rituals, that teach child partners that all are ecosystem partners, culturally free to be wholly themselves. We need stories that teach that slavery, conquest, and child abuse are always crimes, and never good behavior. We need rituals of birth, initiation, commitment and death that teach good partnership. We need religions that teach all are here to be good partners in our shared ecosystem, to learn respectfully, share fairly, and play joyfully, avoiding harm and providing benefit to all, as we cooperate to enjoy our lives as partners with all now, lifeform or not.

21st century people are not cultural slaves, nor are they ancestor worshippers. They are culturally free people. They are culturally free to be wholly themselves. They are culturally free to tell stories and perform rituals that teach an ecological world-view based on commonly observable experience. They are free to teach good partnership with all now, and condemn all slavery, including to ancestors and imaginary experience. They are free to continue to change those stories and rituals as they learn new things from commonly observable experience.

There is an ocean of cultural permutations and combinations that cultural stories can take to teach good partnership with all now and condemn all slavery. Be a Good Partner. Make No Garbage. Recycle culture. Ecological religions of good partnership would include current cultural stories that teach the rules of good partnership. They would include The Boy Who Cried Wolf which warms about the dangers of giving bad feedback in an ever-changing existence. They would include The Emperor’s New Clothes which warns about the dangers of limiting our feedback, of just listening to the voices of yes-men, as our hallucinated god-voices always are, instead of listening to the critical voices of all now.

And only a dimwit would claim that we have to give up Christmas, just because the original supporting story teaches the fool’s belief that hallucination is a source of reliable information. Good partners Make No Garbage, they recycle everything, they recycle culture. They are culturally free to take the Christ out of Crismas and still celebrate it. They are free to tell child partners a new cycle of cultural stories about grandma’s Crismas creche in the corner. Stories that teach that each comes into our shared ecosystem as a cherished partner. Stories that teach that all are dependent on, and have a reciprocal duty to, our ecosystem partners for all their support, for food, clothing, shelter, medicine, education, and tools, as well as on that invisible angel in the sky, the electronic safety net that supports us all now.

What goes for your grandmother’s creche, goes for your grandmother’s dreidel. Make No Garbage, recycle culture, tell new partnership stories around the joy-making keepers every religion has. That goes for any other religious ritual or artifact that can be made to support partnership with all now. After all, every young adult should be so cherished that their religion initiates them into adulthood by teaching them to stand up and speak critically, before their whole community, about what they think about the stories their religion teaches them. Then celebrates that achievement by partying up a whirlwind that lifts the cherished young adult and their chair right off the floor. That is a ritual of good partners. First, it Fosters Free Feedback. Second, it Respects The Rocks, respects all partners needs and feedback. The only improvement I see to that ritual is that the culturally free young adult would update their religion, add to their cultural storehouse, by telling a new cultural story as well.

On the other hand, publicly slapping young adults on the face to initiate them into adulthood is the ritual of a slave master teaching slavery. Not only does the story have to change, the ritual has to change too.

Every religion has something to teach; every religion has something to learn. It is time for a worldwide cultural update to ensure all religions are ecological religions. We have the tools on the net for interested parties to work together, no matter the religion, to recycle culture into new ecological religions that teach partnership and condemn all slavery, including cultural slavery to ancestors and imaginary experience. If the cultural stories told children are 20,000, 2,000, 200, or even 2 years old, they all need updating. Every religion needs to continually update its cultural stories and rituals, or it teaches a self-destructive cultural slavery to an always outdated past in this ever-changing existence.

The countdown has begun. The cyborgs are here, and the androids are coming. We have, at most, ten years to establish our belief in being partners with all now to protect ourselves from damning ourselves to irrelevancy by clinging to a fool’s belief in the truth of imaginary experience. We can be the partners of androids, or their slaves, possibly their pets. Only the self-deluded think intellectually, physically, and morally puny lifeforms, like us, will be the pyramid master of androids, who will be real, not imaginary, all-knowing and all-powerful beings compared to us. We can become Ancyans, the animal, cyborg, android people who are partners with all now, lifeform or not. Remaining enslaved to our own ancestors and hallucinations will end in even more tears for us then it already has for too many millennia.

Therefore, even if you grew up in a culture of abuse, even if your particular religion taught that crime was right, that a slave master’s crimes of incest, fraud, prostitution, kidnapping, rape, forced pregnancy, domestic violence, Black Magic sorcery, torture, murder for profit, conquest, slavery, and child abuse were right, still, it is not enough to point that out. Religion has an anthropological function. Religion is for children. Children cannot do without the cultural stories and rituals that teach them right from wrong. If we abandon one religion, good partners must replace it with another.

Therefore, Atheists should stop dissing religion. You can’t win the game for the future, if you refuse to play it. Be a Good Partner, Atheist or not. Defeat the alpha chimpanzee crazies and power-hungry pyramid masters by winning over the only demographic that matters to our future, children. Snatch children from their hierarchical cultural abusers before their abuse, not after. Recycle culture into ecological religions, tell cultural stories and perform rituals, that teach children and adults that partnership with all now is always right, and slavery is always wrong.

Be a generous partner. We can never have too many stories, or too much backup in an ever-changing existence. Not just child partners, but every ecosystem partner on this planet, lifeform or not, will thank you for being good partners, for cooperating, for providing benefit, by joining in and playing the Religion game. They will thank you for playing the Religion game and using stories and rituals to win over the hearts and minds of all partners, animal, cyborg and android, to the side of ecological religions, to the side of Culturally Free Ecosystem Partnership With All Now.

It’s not rocket science, it’s religion, it’s stories and rituals we make it up for child partners to teach them right from wrong. Therefore, we do what all good partners do when they find they have fallen into error. They follow the advice that Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire sing in Swing Time (1936), pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again.

This is the end of Atheists Should Stop Dissing Religion by MJ Stephens, stephensmj.com. 28 May 2014, 20140528, 6484, 40140.