In our time, the world was full of Crusaders, Jihadists, Warriors and Satanic/Messianic Cults.  Serial killers and mass murderers walked virtually every city's streets they were so common.  Some had killed in the name of psychopathy.  Others in the name of war, patriotism and arrogance.  Still others in the name of their gods.  Each had its own ideals for reality and none could tolerate any other vision.  They were to differing degrees all continuously jockeying for advantage and superiority over any other world concepts.  This became a phase of Man's culture called "The Age of Intolerance".  It began when he left the primeval ooze and continues to the day of this writing.  Even religionists who professed and practiced pacifism and tolerance contributed to the mortar that held together the strong separating walls of discrimination, ignorance and fear high between different peoples, different races, different cultures, different countries, different ethnicities and different religions.  Religiousity was the battlecry and the entire earth was the battleground.  What most failed to realize was that each and every one of those world views was based upon false premises.

 

In fact, religion could be redefined as a state of ultimate denial in accepting the evidence of your own senses combined with a total desire for ignorance, awe and alternatives to reality.  Scientists have created three terms for such a response:  they are "PSYCHOSIS", "MYSTICISM" and  "SUPERSTITIOUS BEHAVIOR".  All can be combined into the single term "FANTASY".

 

Religionists proudly profess they have "belief".  They revel in the idea that they need nothing other than their vacuous and fuzzy-minded ideas to base their world and self concepts upon.  They pronounce the scribblings of earlier mystics who recorded their primitive world concepts in a rather fictional tome called the Bible, to be a record of real and living events in the past.  Lack of understanding of the underlying laws that govern natural phenomena led those ancients to come up with simple-minded explanations and attempts to avoid disasters that often befell them.  A volcano erupts and the volcano god must be angry, so sacrifice a virgin or captured enemy to it.  Flood waters inundate the low-lying areas of a flood plain and an all-knowing god must be trying to tell them something.  Sacrifice a scapegoat to appease it.  After a while, the lowest humans on the social "totem pole" were kept around to use for that purpose when they ran out of goats.  When the volcano didn't erupt again, or the storm-driven flood waters had finally receded and stayed that way, they received psychological reinforcement that their angry god concepts must have been correct.  Thus the world began to be explained with concepts no more real than the "soul" of an amoeba. 

 

When naturalists and philosophers first began pondering the world around them, they launched an intellectual assault on the world concepts of the religionists as well as create an alternative way for Man to view his world.  It was an unacceptable mortal threat to the churches and organized religious institutions around the world.  Man was capable of viewing, measuring, sensing and interacting with his environment using just his own five physical senses.  He did not need someone such as a priest to act as an intermediary between him and his world concepts.  Creating such a blasphemous alternative to the guidance and control exerted by all religious institutions would compete for followers and their valuables, would marginalize all church doctrine, and ultimately undo all that the founders and dictators of the various religions had created.  They would lose the one thing that they all had in common:  the iron-clad control over their followers and their fortunes.  Promise them a good afterlife and voila, pass the plate for money! 

 

Of course, no one had to really do anything for the money and power other than spin fantasies and yarns, promises and pablum in times of woe.  It was the worst sort of motivation and it worked. 

 

They preyed upon the weakest parts of human psychology.  They reinforced those weakenesses.  Keep their eyes on an out-fo-reach Heaven filled with angels, soft clouds, virgins for men and infants, procreation and protective father figures for women, all the people and things anyone would long for.  All the while carefully slip your hand into their pockets and extract the coins from them.  Keep them in fear by promising pain, suffering, and eternal torture in Hell if they lost their faith and the combination was successful for at least 3000 years!  Don't just use a carrot.  Don't just use a stick.  Use BOTH a carrot AND a stick!  The strongest kind of Skinnerian psychology applied for at least 3 millenia.  It is amazing that the emergence of reason and the scientific method led to a grand level of progress and accomplishment in a mere 400 years during which the strongest churches in the history of Mankind tried their best to thwart this "counterculture" with torture, burning at the stake, drowning on dunking stools, or other equally horrendous treatment of "witches, heretics and other godless creatures". 

 

Yet as of this writing in the early part of our 21st century, overall church membership has waned, most civilized populations are literate and familiar with other literature besides their religious texts, and science, medicine and technology continue to be the central most important aspect of the world economies.  You might conclude that Science had won the war, but that is not apparently true.  It may have won some skirmishes and battles, but the war has continued to be fought all around the globe. 

 

Ignorance and fundamentalistic religion still remained deeply entrenched in all closed religion-based societies, cultures and dictatorships.  Throughout the recorded history of ancient and modern Man, the one most common thread found is that of the clash between "good" and "evil".  Most individuals living as of this time would define those two terms using their original meanings.  They are kept blind to the drift and role-reversal that the world's institutions have smoke-screened.   Ask a religionist what they consider "good" and it will be "God".  Ask them what they consider "evil" and they would respond anything that threatens their religious world concept.  It is their zeal that has been stirred to a rapid boil by their "handlers", the religious leaders of their various organized religions.

 

Ask a scientist what is "good" and they may define anything that is of benefit to the comfort and survival of Homo sapiens.  Ask that same person what they consider "evil" and they would be hard-pressed to answer, since their world concepts do not include such a value judgement nor a fear-based system of controlling their opinions and behavior.

 

The human psyche is the most fragile part of the emotional life of a typical Homo sapiens.  Psychiatrists have divided it into many sub-components, with some being the most basic and foundational upon which everything else is supported.  The "ego" is just such a hollow eggshell.  It can be easily led to react in the most antisocial of ways by envy, flattery, false praise, lies, fear, lack of self-esteem, lack of a set of standard values upon which society has agreed to live within, as well as many other externalized and internalized influences.  The ego is the key to the success in controlling an individual's overall allegiances and responses.  Long before a famous psychiatrist, Dr. Sigmund Freud, created the terminology here, witch doctors, shamans, high priests, pharoahs and monarchs of various types realized and tapped into this part of their followers' mass psychology.  It worked then and still works to this day!