Exploiting Faith

This is a big one.  Where to start, where to start… I suppose I should explain that this article will probably upset a lot of people, if said people were to actually read this.  I try to approach all aspects of life with morality, common sense and logic.  Religion is no exception.  I believe that faith and religion are very separate ideas.  You can have faith without religion.  My aim here isn’t to convince any one person that their faith is wrong, nor their religion.  I am also not trying to target any one religion; however, I am more familiar with the Christian based religions so it may seem that way.  Where everyone is entitled to their own faith and practice, that entitlement does not grant them authority of persuasion.  This is one of the underlying problems with religion, I believe, that has tainted faith for centuries.

I was initially raised in a Catholic setting, as my Dad was Catholic, and so we went to a Catholic church.  My mom, I believe was protestant, because her parents were protestant, or something along those lines.  Apparently Catholics and Protestants don’t get along too well, which is surprising to me because they come from a Christian background.  Anyway, I don’t remember much of the teachings, as I was pretty young, and more or less went by force – not the kind of force, like I was shackled and dragged to church.  The kind of force where, I was a child, and it was either go to church peacefully, or I wouldn’t get to play with my Legos afterward.  Later on in my childhood, after my parents divorced, I would sometimes attend my Grandparents church as well.  I could not discern the difference of either sect.  It was just another boring hour on Sunday to me.  At the same time, my stepfather was practicing his parents’ religion – Mormon.  Oh god, that was the most painful of the three because it was THREE HOURS LONG on Sunday.  Sure we got to go out to Boston Market afterwards, but I would have gladly made that trade if it meant sleeping in longer and playing in the woods.  I’m not sure if it was the lack of pressure to pay attention to the teachings, the lack of consistency of a distinct sect or religion, or some inherent trait that led me to be rebellious to religion, but I never once used faith based teachings in my daily life; at least none that I remember.

I find that the center of all religion is fear.  Fear of the creator.  It’s a bit socialist to me – that fear is instilled in the believers in order to keep them conformed to the faith.  I also find it a bit frightening, and borrowing a line from a Death Cab for Cutie song – “fear is the heart of love” as dictated by a nun, is particularly harrowing.  Love should have no fear.  You should not love out of fear, rather you should love out of compassion and loyalty.  You love someone because you choose to, not because you fear the alternative.

Now faith – faith to me is completely separate from religion, although every religion has faith of some sort.  Save the atheist, everyone has faith.  Even scientists have faith.  What you cannot prove but believe to exist is the nature of faith.  Theories are the scientist’s faith.  I identify more with a scientists proof than a religious proof as there are evident mathematical equations, physics, chemistry… all things science that have created many mechanical and electrical wonders that we can see, and that work.  So they have to be doing something right.  The reason we still have a conflict of religion and science is because of the ultimate question in the reliability in both faiths – You can’t prove God exists, but you can’t prove that he doesn’t, either.  Lack of proof doesn’t necessarily promote faith, but it also does not negate it.

I believe religion is a faith based government.  It is a governing power over a group of people that teaches them, and holds them to a set of rules in order to maintain an organized and growing society.  Religion happens to use faith as the basis of their governance.  Take Christianity for example.  The word of God was passed down to the people.  These people must follow the word of God throughout their life.  The reward is entrance into His kingdom.  However, if you do not follow the word of God, you will spend eternity in Hell, which apparently is not a very nice place this time of year, or any other time for that matter.  None of this is proven, it is a matter of hearsay and mass acceptance.  I believe that many basic religious followers use religion to promote a set of morals that all men should follow.  This idea is actually very good.  Imagine a world where everyone was held to the same moral values and principles.  The only problem is that these are written by God, or more specifically translated and taught by the highest followers of God.  Some of these morals and principles are logically flawed.

First of all, most religious texts are known to have been written by man, as an interpretation of God’s word.  The religion is based on this book.  However, man is fallible, therefore religion is fallible.  Most religions hold its followers to a code of deliverance.  It is their duty to convince the non believers that the word of God is the true word, and that the non believer’s faith is immoral and wrong.  This may be the one flaw that creates the most problems.  Thousands of lives have been lost to this ideology.  In my opinion, if religion were taught to live and let live, the world would be a much better place.  I don’t believe that religion should be abolished.  Faith in an organized sense is important to those that need it to believe there is a higher purpose to their existence.

My biggest peeve with religion is that it is used as governance for all of society, whether individuals in said society believe or not.  Many will quote religion as if it is an ultimately accepted standard for all people.  For instance, some will quote our very government, and country as a Christian based country, that our Country was made on the basic principles of Christianity, and therefore the citizens must be accountable as such.  I doubt many of them know that our founding fathers had a variety of different religious backgrounds, and that none of those beliefs laid the groundwork for our constitution.  The pledge of allegiance was actually written by a socialist named Francis Bellamy in 1892.  Congress later adopted this in 1942 and added the phrase “Under God” in 1954.  Many people forget that practicing their religion in this country is a right, but not an absolute.  This should be a globally accepted norm, rather than just an idea by those who seek peace – You may practice your religion, you may have your faith, but you have no right to impose your beliefs by force, physically nor legally, upon any one person.  The bottom line is – Religion should never be used as a basis of governance over any society.  Religion has no value in government, and it is ignorant to believe so.

There are two topics I rarely bring up in public discussion unless it is with close friends.  These are politics and religion.  The two systems are so complex that there is no logical one any one person can be completely versed on the subject or their point of view.  This does not stop people from justifying their beliefs regardless how logically flawed they are.  The main problem with religious argument is that their word must be taken literal in order for it to be valid.  Everything must be followed as it is written without argument.  This is the basis for the argument against same sex marriage – the only reason there is opposition to same sex marriage is because marriage is deemed as a religious act, and in the Bible it is written that it is to be between a man and a woman.  This poses a problem for those that are homosexual but wish to be married as acknowledged by the society and government they are a part of.  Whatever you believe, there are benefits to having the government recognize you as man and wife.  Some use religion to deny these people of this right, and this is fundamentally wrong.  My biggest argument is that one who is religious, and clings to the word of God as absolute and unchangeable, chooses to ignore those teachings that are archaic, barbaric and immoral.  This, I believe, is the definition of hypocrisy and if you do not allow yourself to reason then you should not be allowed to impose law over those with many different faiths.  I will not go into specifics, but I will say that my thoughts on this matter come from the fact that there are religions that promote stealing as wrong, but rape as an act that is not necessarily unethical.  Not to single out Christianity, but many cling to the bible as the basis for their morality and judgment of others, without actually knowing what is in it.  I have a sneaky suspicion that this is true for many other religions.

I will admit that this article is extremely compressed, and I could write a book resembling a work by Ayn Rand that explains my thoughts on the matter.  The bottom line is that I believe there is a very unstable pressure by many religious individuals to the masses.  Simply forcing one to believe in faith will not ensure acceptance and obedience.  One must choose to believe, and the religious should only preach, not force, their faith to others.  They must put faith in their teachings that they will inspire someone to follow them.  I think this was the intention of religion that was eventually degraded and tainted by greed.

I have never attached myself to any one religion.  I would place my ideology of morality close to that of Buddhism, as they preach acceptance more than any other religion know of – including the absence of faith (I am not Buddhist, I just like their style).  I am not atheist – I cannot discount the existence of a creator simply because we cannot prove it.  I am neither faithful to religion in a sense that I must believe there was a certain way or reason we are here.  I am also not an antitheist, which is an opposition to organized religion.  I may disagree with it, but I also must accept it, even if I do not accept their involvement with government and large scale society.  If anything, I would say I am Deist.  This is the belief that God may exist, and that many religions may coexist.  Some may view it as a weak faith.  I believe that you should not put absolute faith in anything that you do not fully understand.  When you really look at it, I don’t believe we should even be all that worried to hurry up and figure out exactly why we are here and where we go when we die.  The only thing we should be doing is living with each other, without imposition, but with morality and compassion.

Representation by Taxation is Dead

I find most people in the first world are incredibly intelligent.  So smart, in fact, that whenever there is a national or global issue the majority seems to have an educated, expert opinion on the matter.  The internet has been a great place where people can show up and present their knowledge on everything.  There is no retribution, because on the internet you are faceless.  That egotistical extreme racist asshole that makes disparaging remarks on an internet forum on how this race or that race is the reason for all the problems of the earth could just be your mild mannered neighbor.  He’s not going to say those things in public because he enjoys borrowing your power tools, and having you watch his cat while on holiday.

The most recent event that has everybody spewing out their empty knowledge on the matter is of course the economy.  More specifically, who is responsible for the disparagement of wealth, who to blame for ruining the American Dream, and what to do to fix everything in the shortest amount of time possible.  The new face of the movement for economical reform is the Occupy Wall Street protesters, which quickly sprouted into a nationwide protest at several different locations.  I even saw a small demonstration of people at the capitol building in Columbus, Ohio, where I currently reside.  It would appear that anybody with enough money to enjoy the American Dream look down at the protesters as smelly hippies that don’t have jobs and don’t want to work hard for their wealth.  The protesters look down at the reasonably and extremely wealthy as the silver spoon, trust fund people who never had to face the challenges of the lower 99% of Americans.  The problem is, both sides have their own opinion on the issue, but as usual are extremely ill informed and don’t really know what they are fighting for, or against.

The protesters know that they are sick of the growing number of poor and lower middle class.  The ultra rich are sick of these liberal hippies (their words, not mine) smelling up their territory.  What is interesting to me is the media coverage of this whole thing.  The protests had been going on for more than a week before I started to see the media placing the news on their websites and newspapers.  Now there are several articles printed a day on any given news outlet about protests in whatever state, about which companies don’t pay their fair share, and how big business screws up the economy.  The thing is, this has been going on for decades but nobody does anything about it until an unruly mod appears.

I’ll admit, I am on the protesters side, and I am fed up with big business, which includes corporations as well as investment banks (such as the ones we paid first to screw us over, and then again to bail them out when screwing us over stopped making them money).  So why haven’t I lifted a finger to help the cause?  As it stands, these protests are just a show of force, but aren’t attacking anything specific.  They just hope to make a presence and expect someone to step up and make a change.  It’s a start of a movement that needs to transform into something much smarter.  The people they expect to resolve their problems are the same people that allowed this to happen in the first place.  These protests aren’t going to convince the wealthiest of Americans to stop taking advantage of our economic system out of good faith.  We are talking about the greediest, souless…est people on this Earth, that are more concerned about having power than wealth – it just so happens you must have wealth in order to have power.

I don’t want to sound hypocritical, but I believe what needs to be done is to start outlining the factors that contribute to disparagement of wealth.  This is how I see how wealth is gathered – an individual or group of individuals forms a company that produces goods or services.  This is the basis of an economy, and is needed for society.  These individuals receive money for the goods or services from the consumer.  Some of this money is paid to the workers for the company, some is paid to maintain the company (utilities and infrastructure), some is paid to people that invested in the company as dividends, some is paid to the government in taxes, and the rest is (should) be invested back into the company for growth (profits).  Seems simple enough – the entire global economy runs off this principle.

So it’s simple – A company loses revenue due to operating costs, dividends and taxes.  The leftover stuff is profit to re-invest in the company or other ventures.  With big business, these revenues and profits can be enormous and the payrolls for the top executives get higher and higher (re: Disparity of Wealth in America).  Somewhere, more cash is either pumped into the company or cash is freed up somewhere else to allow this extreme shift of money.  Whatever happens, the result is this – the top earners exponentially or geometrically grow their wealth, while the bottom earners have to fight for a raise, or even to keep their job.  This starts the uneven spread of wealth across our society, and it has been happening for decades… centuries, millennia even.  I’m sure if you look at any society that has ever existed, the scenario is all the same – the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

So, now we have a movement on our hands.  The 99% is fed up with the rich getting richer at their expense.  Unfortunately this doesn’t solve anything.  Bringing the fight to the front door doesn’t stop the rich from sneaking out the back.  We, as a democratic society, need to put pressure on the government and our political parties to fix the funneling of mass quantities of money to the uber rich.  Capital investments are important to society, but only when they benefit everyone involved.  Many people who look down on these protesters because they think these people aren’t willing to work hard for their wealth are not looking hard enough into the underlying problem.  It’s not that they aren’t working hard enough to achieve the American Dream; they aren’t given a fair chance.  Thousands of people unemployed from the high school graduate to the doctorate.  Companies are throwing even more people on the street while giving the executives million dollar bonuses.  The 1%, or rather the 0.5% of top earners in this country know that in order to keep power in this society they must control the wealth of everyone else, or they will have more competition.

How do they do it?  How do these ultra rich, faceless enemies of the general public manage to make so much money while everyone else suffers?  The government and our politicians allow them to do so.  Big business lobbies for a complex tax system and loopholes to reduce their taxable income, so they have bigger profits to stuff the pocket books of the ultra rich.  They create offshore entities to amass an extreme amount of wealth and then tell the government that the only way the country will see this income is to allow them to move it into their US entities at a tax rate barely comparable to the 35% it should be, thus reducing the expecting income of the government that relies on this money to take care of its citizens.  Big business holds the government hostage, telling them the only way they will manufacture on American soil is if they get huge tax breaks, then somehow funnel income to other countries so they aren’t taxed for it.  They do all of this and when we complain they insist they are only conforming to our governments laws… only it’s not really the governments laws, rather the big business that puts out big cash influence into the political system.

It is sickening to think that most big businesses get their start in the US – from the American Dream, and then work so hard to destroy it for others.  The U.S. gave them an opportunity and they exploit it at every chance they can to make more money, to have more power.  It’s not just an act of unfairness or injustice.  It’s an act of treason.

Of course, saying all of this doesn’t make a lick of difference – no more than the Occupy protests do.  All I can say, is we need to hold our government, our politicians accountable for the decisions they make that regulate our economy.  We don’t need to tax the big business or the rich more; we need to tax them, period.  They need to be taxed fairly, just as the ordinary American.  Progressive tax, flat tax… whatever tax – as long as EVERYBODY is taxed.  Remove tax loopholes that allow the funneling and blanket movements of cash in and out of the country at reduced rates.  Increase excise taxes so it is no longer economical for companies to manufacture in other countries only to import the product straight to America (eliminating jobs AND reducing our export/import ratio, which directly effects GDP).  Remove high barriers to start a company so that when these greedy companies exit our economy all together because they don’t get their way, there is someone else waiting to pick up where they left off, in a much fairer manner.  Let these people know that we are not going to be bullied any longer.  Let our officials know we will only put them in office if they promise to stop letting big business get away with being greedy.  Let them know that everyone should have a shot at the American Dream.

TL;DR:  Dear government, stop letting the ultra rich big business and capital enterprises take advantage of the other 99.5% of Americans, and take care of the society you have sworn to protect.  We are still a Democracy, and we should still have a voice.