How Fear, Dogma, and Political Manipulation Shaped Centuries of Conflict and Collective Insanity
God, that shimmering placeholder for everything humanity could not decipher, was conjured like a celestial bandage slapped over the fractures of our ignorance. Whenever the cosmos muttered a riddle too cryptic for our trembling minds, we sculpted a deity—usually in our own temperamental image—and declared the mystery solved. The pattern was brutally simple: where understanding stumbled, invention strutted in wearing a halo.
And behind this invention marched a catalogue of savageries. The most grotesque atrocities embroidered into human history were given the velvet cloak of holiness so that cruelty might strut about as virtue. Religion, that old sentimental crutch, was grasped not by the courageous but by those unready to stare into the abyss without a parental hand holding theirs. Yet this crutch multiplied like dandruff—persistent, itchy, and absurdly expensive to maintain—while its users fidgeted with rituals as if the fidgeting itself were proof of meaning.
Christian theology, at its most politically potent, never had to create malice—it merely anointed it. It burnished violent impulses with a sanctimonious sheen, embalming inherited barbarisms in divine lacquer. And when religious disputes ignited, they smoldered longer and burned hotter than quarrels about land, wealth, or pride. Sacred outrage is the most inflammable substance known to the human psyche.
Crack open the so-called holy literature—its obscene narratives, carnivorous punishments, vengeful tirades—, and one finds a chronicle more befitting a demon’s diary than a benevolent deity’s proclamation. It is a literary ossuary of human cruelty, echoing down centuries with the tidy justification that “God commanded it.” Such texts did not elevate humankind; they disciplined it into submissive brutality.
Religion, of course, makes stupendous political fertilizer. It keeps the masses docile, hushed, bowed in orderly rows while the ambitious reap power. For a politician, religion is profitable; for a citizen, it is burdensome. One does not even need a god to form a religion; priests and their political puppetry are sufficient. Fear is the mother of faith, and for millennia it may have functioned as a necessary evil—but why did it metastasize into something more malignant than necessary?
The insanity of killing in the name of a deity needs no further definition. Without religion, good people would still do good and the wicked would still do harm. But when good people commit wickedness, it is almost always because doctrine deputized them. Religion erects an impersonal, authoritarian code that eclipses any individual’s right to wonder, explore, err, or grow. It invites slavery of the soul, not liberation. Its method is fear dressed up as devotion; its reward is obedience varnished as righteousness.
Under strict religious rule, sanity frays. A society with two competing religions becomes a battlefield; give it thirty, and paradoxically, peace becomes possible because no faction holds the monopoly on absolute truth. Religious mania thrives by explaining everything—once a divine puppeteer is accepted as the cause of every worldly twitch, logic can be discarded like confetti.
The notion of the sacred is a conservative straightjacket. It criminalizes uncertainty, suspicion, inquiry—those delicate tools through which progress chisels its way forward. Vatican City is not merely spiritual real estate but a geopolitical statement in miniature, just as communism enshrines its own sacerdotal rituals. Whether a group calls itself religious or political scarcely matters; the machinery of control is nearly identical.
Age clarifies what youth refuses to see: the Bible is an interpretive carnival. It can vindicate or vilify any thought, any vice, any virtue. As knowledge, technology, and AI peel back old illusions, the human origin of Scripture becomes glaring. And if one truly believes in a deity who sanctions slavery, commands massacres, endorses polygamy, persecutes dissent, and condemns souls to eternal torture, then the moral outcome is predictable—it has always been bleak. These were the beliefs that built inquisitorial dungeons and drenched Europe in sectarian blood.
Even today, processions—religious or political—invite the same humiliation: the surrender of one’s mind to the choreography of the crowd. Walk before a bishop or a demagogue, and you are reduced to a docile sheep. Talk to yourself long enough and you may mistake your own echo for God’s voice—yet psychiatry, not theology, will diagnose the condition honestly.
Those who claim expertise in God’s intentions are often loudest in error. The Inquisition turned murder into sacrament; its architects were not merely tyrants, but bureaucrats of sanctified violence. If one can worship a trinity and still proclaim monotheism, one can believe absolutely anything—logic becomes a negotiable hallucination.
Humans flock to groups: believers and atheists alike guard their ideological chemistry like sacred equations. Politics and religion are mirror images, both anchored in the tribal instinct to divide, defend, and dominate. Gods never protected humanity; rather, humanity protected its gods with crusades and jihads, with centuries of bloodshed packaged as piety.
Meanwhile, the universe whispered more profound mysteries—hydrogen dreaming itself into helium, carbon, amino acids, and life—yet we built no temples for those miracles. Instead, we squandered two millennia fumbling with stone idols and sacred wine, talking to the skies while ignoring each other’s suffering.
Our religion denies life; our politics defends the denial. Prayer became a performance, theology a labyrinth, and spirituality a marketplace. Humans chased profit—whether from church pews, congressional halls, or corporate stocks—while ignoring the luminous machinery of their own inner chemistry.
But a thinking person, one who listens inward rather than upward, can kindle a different light: a clarity unlicensed by priests or politicians, rooted not in fear but in the fierce wonder of being alive.
Tanmoy Bhattacharyya
December 6th 2025
