Mind-forged Manacles

Today the Arab countries are ablaze with protests in the streets for a slight to their Islamic god. Yesterday it was the physical assault of the Crusades against the Moors. The pattern repeats itself. Who says history can teach us anything?

Nothing better describes religions than the expression used by William Blake in his famous “London” poem -  “mind-forged manacles”.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

Surely religion is the root cause of much of man’s self-inflicted suffering. Oh if only we could shed those chains, those non-evidence-based claims. Not easy but not impossible. We put them on ourselves. Tradition and authority impose them. An uncritical uneducated population maintains them.

William Blake was aware of the self-inflicted limits placed on thought.  He advocated imagination as a means to overcome the restrictions of tradition and authority. He especially disliked science as he saw it as nature being tooth-and claw and in his London poem quoted above saw the nasty effect of the industrial revolution. But Blake himself had a mind-forged manacle based on the time he lived. For he was limited to what was known at his time. He died in 1827, 32 years before Darwin published his “Origin of Species”.  So when he published his Lamb poem asking, "Little Lamb, who made thee?/Dost thou know who made thee?", he did not realize that Darwin would, for the first time in history, provided an alternative answer to the only one at that time - a religious-based explanation.  Tyger complementing the Lamb poem has the narrator ask: "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" The answer of course is yes. Nature through evolution made both. We know today there is now no need to invoke good or evil or a God for paradoxes seen through the lens of religion. Good, evil, God are anthropomorphic terms that may one day be anachronistic. Unfortunately, as we see in the daily news, they still rule in the southern religious intolerant Taliban-like states of the US and in the eastern Islamic countries.

Why not use our imaginations and slightly rewrite the Grassroot’s song Let’s Live for Today?
I think John Lennon would approve.

"When I think of all the worries people seem to find
And how they're in a hurry to complicate their mind
By chasing after religions and dreams that can't come true
I'm glad that we are different, we've better things to do"