I and Me, we go with Jesus in a bowl of dirt...

To see the truth of things in a way that is almost too abstract to explain linguistically is very disconcerting, when so much is so obviously flawed. Things that seem so nebulous as morality or education, or nearly anything else for that matter are ridiculously easy to fix, at least in concept. The arguments for institutionalized religion have been the same for hundreds of years, and yet it still is as much a part of public life as it has ever been. Not because we are all religious vessels, but because ignorance is so virulent that it gives lead to all of Humanity's self-destruction. It all comes from willful ignorance.

Being an American, I've only heard that said about a billion times each week, for my entire life. All of the great, pseudo-intellectual remarks that were skinned from our founding fathers and used as vacuous proverbs with no weight or real meaning... It was either a by-product of ignorance, or a catalyst for it. Either way, it is just as evil.

Men seem to think that they are always focused on something outside their own life. Most people around the world are taught as they are growing up that Man is intrinsically evil and corrupt, and that to achieve anything in life, you must put your Human self aside. You must become a cog, or a vessel, or a steward. You must empty yourself so that they may put what they like into you.

That willful surrender to stupidity and absolution of any real, rational self-criticism is the only shape that Satan could ever realistically take in our world. If the Devil is real, then He lives in the twisted side of Human nature; but not 'twisted' in the sense that it is still something that comes from us. I mean that it is deliberately morphed and given disease. Something in the Zeitgeist of Humanity lets us pay heed to others so much that we lend ourselves to be slaves to their (im)morality, and as citizens we do nothing about it.

But the Zeitgeist, or the grand Human psychological state, or whatever other abstract term it is named comes from us as Humans. Whether or not we take responsibility for it is another thing entirely.

Philosophy was more or less invented to question our stupidity as a race of animals. It lives to destroy stupidity by showing just what ignorance means. To me, philosophy is the antibiotic of Mankind, and most only take enough to give themselves a resistance to its construction. You have to bathe in it for years to be able to find any kind of real answer.

Because if you only think as much as you would like to about something, your brain shuts down and directs you to other, less painful things. This is how we cope with an evil and corrupted world. And that is the real ignorance: stupidity through ignoring.

And so, Satan would probably have to invent something like the Christian faith, and other religions. He would need those to keep people as livestock, instead of free-thinking radicals in such a finely-tuned experiment. He would look like Jesus Himself, because it would mean that any doublespeak would be so graciously asserted, and therefore vehemently followed.

Wouldn't that be hilarious, to find out one day that Lucifer was God, and our God was really dead... I'd laugh.

The evils of this planet and our species come not from otherworldly forces, but from ourselves. Everyone has, albeit very indirectly, contributed to millions of people dying or living in poverty. We contribute daily to injustice in our own country, because we believe all of the stupid, pedantic, childish lies that we are told. No one tries to investigate. And when they are enlightened with the truth, then the truth someday turns to another pedantic lie. It is not that Human nature is so corrupted and evil; it is that the majority of people are so very, very stupid, with a limited education and no real cognitive development. If you teach them all to only do what is supposed to be done, to not investigate or think critically, then you will have a country of worker drones.

But, the inquisitive nature of the mind is the only real good in the world. Everything else is either indifferent, such as Mother Nature and our own evolution, or it is evil because it was built by us to be that way.

To say that "It is just all evil" and walk away, feeling superior for pointing it out but not feeling useless for not doing anything about it, but rather feeling as though you don't owe any part of yourself to do so... that itself is evil. It makes me wonder how far our society has to fall and crumble for the people who live here to take responsibility for their own lives, instead of running from it.

We Americans are the limp-wristed, soft-spined, prissy little descendents of what were hearty men, men who shrugged off all of the injustice in the world, men who saw how inane it all was.

So then, what is the real evil in this world? Not necessarily ignorance, because it is those that prey on it that are evil. Not necessarily Human nature's deformity, because it was deformed by Humans. Not necessarily religion, because it too was built by our own hands.

Real evil is the lack of a backbone and the lack of the mental capacities required to know that you need one. There is a one, truly pure morality, and although it hasn't been discovered, I believe that most would find parts of it pretty easily by looking inside themselves.