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This holiday, perhaps because I was in the South, I found myself taken by how deeply people are lost in their unhappy religious myths and stories about life - and how those religious beliefs greatly effect our sense of well being.

As a demythologist, I have trained myself to clearly see the mythological basis of human interactions. For example, I notice that many people view their relationships through the religious lens of bondage and ownership, treating their partners more like teenagers and possessions than adults.

In my experience, people find themselves lonely, disappointed, unhappy, depressed, and severely under-sexed when they use the lens of religion to view relationships, family, and the holidays.

As I’m watching all my depressed, angry, religious family in hypnotic-holiday-trance, speaking to me of religion, marriage, babies, and faith, I begin to feel as though I’m a stranger in a strange land of shame filled people, all trying to convert me to their brand of submissive religion so I too can be overly serious, unhappy, and ashamed of my sexuality and my life.

The way I see it, if we are going to give ourselves and each other suggestions, we may as well suggest that we have fun, feel great, and have powerful orgasms. Why not suggest ourselves into doubling or quadrupling our pleasure? Why the obsession with guilt, shame, suffering, and unhappiness - especially during the holidays?

I was laughing and chatting in an Airport bar as I traveled on Christmas eve. A guy came up to me and said “son, you don’t understand yet, do you?”. He handed me a black and white cartoon illustrated pamphlet that basically said Jesus is coming back soon and if I don’t believe, I’m going to burn in hell.

Personally I thought the illustrations were pretty shitty and I told him so. “If you’re going to try to scare people - I find that color photos work best. I was in advertising for a while,” I told him, “and crappy artists can really hurt your conversion rate.”

I guess “don’t get it” because I’m too relaxed. I feel good because, after 35 years of being lost in an unhappy sea of religious and spiritual bullshit, I have managed to free my mind and my body of a majority of my guilt and shame. I feel good simply because I see life clearly.

Everybody celebrates the holiday of Christmas as the birth of Jesus. That’s because our little brains can’t distinguish between metaphor and reality.

Christmas is an agricultural metaphor - a story that tells us exactly what the sun is doing and what’s going to happen next.

The start of winter begins with the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, when the Sun is at its most southern point in the sky. In 2010, winter solstice was December 21st at 6:38pm EST.

Follow me here. The sun (not the SON) appears to be dead as it seems to set at its southern most point on the horizon for three days. 21 + 3 days dead equals 24. Suddenly and miraculously on the 24th day of December, the sun (not The Son) is “born”.

December 24th is in fact a day of birth, not of Jesus the Son of God, but of the SUN moving back towards the North towards more light. I guess I don’t “get it,” because I don’t understand how intelligent people can continue to be bamboozled by childish myths and fairy stories, confusing the word sun with the word son.

The real “reason for the season” is agriculture.

When our ancestors watched the sun “die” on the horizon for 3 days, it scared the pants off of them. They saw life as a daily struggle of light over darkness, good over evil. When the sun stopped moving, it meant death and evil were taking over. On the plains of Africa sunlight meant survival, darkness, death.

The shaman taught that, though things look dark, cold, scary on the longest nights of the year, the reality is that spring, rebirth, life, and light are on their way back into power. The sun is coming to rescue us from the evil of darkness. Sound familiar? 41% of Americans believe that Jesus, the Son of God, will return in their lifetime to save them from evil. Guess what; he already does every year - right before our very eyes.

The story of rebirth is a myth that has played out since our ancestors began telling stories. From darkness, light, from death, life.

Our beliefs in agricultural myths have gotten out of hand. Currently, religious belief is leading us down the path of something that I feel is destructive and terrible. 53% of Americans still believe the world is only 6000 years old. I understand the mistake - what the bible calls “the world” is really a reference to agriculture and the earliest thriving civilizations on record.

However, because of endless mistaken interpretations of basic words, nearly half of all Americans eagerly await the end of times, making life decisions accordingly. They expect to ascend into the sky, raptured by Jesus, so they can watch the rest of the world’s dumb-ass population writhe in pain as they are hurled into a oceans of fire.

The 2012 prophecies fall neatly into this “end of the world” thinking, which is why it’s received so much press and acclaim, but all of it is mythological, magical thinking.

I am happy to boldly make the prediction with absolute certainty that 01-01-2012 will come and go without Armageddon. This prediction will also be true of any other Armageddon revisionist dates and biblical, astrological, or Mayan calendar re-interpretations that are sure to follow when 2012 doesn’t happen.

Unfortunately, what research tells us is that when predictions don’t happen, they make people’s belief and faith in the books and leaders who made the predictions stronger!

The reality is that Armageddon is an old time battlefield, a plain in Palestine. The biblical story of the epic battle of light over dark, good over evil, was written for a different people living in a different time. Our little brains are left trying to make sense of the senseless. We are masters of theories, masters of endless misinterpretations.

Religion is built upon agricultural myths - stories that were essential to life when we didn’t have technology, books, YouTube or Google. In order to keep the information alive, we told one another stories about the sun of god and the eternal struggle over evil night.

My wish this “New Year” is that if we want to achieve sexual liberation in our lifetime, then I suggest that we begin waking up to the fact that everything we believe about sex, relationships, marriage, fidelity, and infidelity is incorrect. Our current cultural ideas are based on old stories of power hungry men who wanted to consolidate their own status, power, and pussy. That’s called the bible.

The great world religions say the same things not because they are true - but rather because they share common ancestry - dating back to the African plains some 200,000 years ago. God has evolved as we have evolved. Unfortunately, as various tribes split off and moved out of Africa, they gave the same god slightly different stories and different names, and this is what most of the world’s fighting is about.

We continue to treat religious thinking with undue respect and kid gloves. As a result, world religions have been sheltered from reality and critical thinking. Unfortunately this allows masses of intelligent people to believe delusional things. We respect religious insanity because we believe in our god fanatically, and we don’t want anybody challenging us the way we continue to challenge other religious beliefs as we attempt to save them.

Going into 2011, it’s time we realize that religious belief is not innocuous. Christianity and Islam will continue their head-on train wreck collision course, because they both have the explicit directive to go forth and spread the word of their god, converting and saving people around the world. With two angry, power hungry, submission demanding, blood thirsty competing gods, who are each convinced there can be only one god, fighting, war, destruction is inevitable.

Unfortunately, both religions are bent on severely restricting sexual, psychological, and spiritual freedom in the name of “old time” morals, values and beliefs.

Frankly, I’m never going to change a true believer. I don’t even want to. The person I’m speaking to is the one in a million who has been trying to find a way out of the quagmire of myth, religion, and superstition, because the bullshit just isn’t working for them anymore.

The more I learn, see, understand and experience, the more I free myself from the treachery of faith.

I trust in boundless life. I trust in sex.