THE BASIC CON

The basic con of patriarchal religions is original sin, or the sin of challenging the patriarch's divine control. The Garden of Eden, the basic human myth of Genesis, is a cautionary tale against knowledge and exploration of biological humanity in the context of a greater planetary ecology. 

At its conception, this myth and those like it were most likely a useful manipulation of primitive human population by their elites, who became elites by aggression, greed and violence.  The elites stood as the representatives of the patriarchal god(s). The conscious merging of culturally polytheistic religions by Jewish, Christian and Muslim elites in subsequent generations in the western hemisphere of the planet concentrated the myth of original sin into a form of mind-controlling indoctrination to keep the ignorant in their place.

To aspire above your birth, your lot in life, was to sin. It was to eat of the fruit of The Tree of Knowledge. However, the root fallacy of this indoctrination tool which worked well for centuries of human development has been exposed by science. The vicious suppression of science, still present today among religious fundamentalists, is a reaction against science's challenge of social hierarchies and patriarchal control. Science exposes the basic con, the basic scam, of all patriarchal religion. 

This morning on BBC's Hardtalk, I listened as an Anglican bishop from Pakistan defend patriarchy. The man is the son of a Muslim-to-Christian convert. This conversion may seem stunning on its surface, but his positions on patriarchy and social issues are entirely consistent with those of fundamentalist Muslims.