They present themselves as shepherds—yikes, what an analogy. Don’t shepherds herd SHEEP? Aren’t sheep stupid creatures with a self-destructive herd mentality, who are easily led, and often follow each other to the destruction of the herd?

Hello. Does anyone have a bone of self-preservation out there? Can we not see these wolves in shepherds clothing who are leading us down the garden path of destruction, all the while pretending that they have our best interests at heart?

Well, yes, they do have our "best interests" in mind—because they have defined our best interest as destined to be tools, fools, buffoons and sacrificial lambs for their own mad dreams and phony religious destinies. It is these kinds of tools and manipulators who led Karl Marx to say religion is the opiate of the masses.

Marx looked at the history of Europe and saw how the kings, emperors and self-serving religious leaders used religion to manipulate and anesthetize people. He saw how the "system" co-opted religion and how self-serving religious "leaders" and nobility manipulated religion and used it as a weapon not only to keep the peasants compliant, but to wage war in religion’s name and steal property, assets and land from other sects and those who had different religious beliefs.

When it comes to understanding how our self-serving politicians and corrupt ‘shepherds’ are selling us out, we are willfully blind. We are so far up the River Denial that we have already passed Cleopatra and Mark Anthony and are headed over the cliff.

In our amnesia, by ignoring the lessons of our collective history, we forget that those whom we now call saints and martyrs met an untimely end, often because they would not give up and give in to corrupt religious leaders or dictators. No problem with that today. Many of us are oh so willing to give in to corruption in and out of religion.

Somehow, not only have we failed to understand the lessons of the Biblical past, we are lost to the lessons of history as a whole, as well. We forget the lessons of church and state collusion, where religious and government leaders colluded to manipulate entire populations, where both corrupt religious leaders and corrupt kings and secular leaders conspired to fill their own pockets and bank accounts, expanding their landholdings at the expense of the people, particularly people they and the state had declared to be heretics, apostates, and ‘ungodly’.

We forget how they manipulated salvation and religion, particularly in the slave master’s version of Christianity, which taught subservience, distant salvation, and slavery as the destiny of black folk. And in the forgetting of these lessons, we put ourselves in the hands of preachers, false shepherds and "leaders", who keep us vulnerable and unprepared for major social upheavals which many scientists say are coming our way, due to energy market manipulation, economic instability and climate change.

Rather than practice the lesson of the ant and the grasshopper and prepare ourselves, many of our leaders are having us tempt God, as the Devil wanted Jesus to tempt God in the Bible: "If you are the son..."  Don't bother about trying to save yourself from calamity, you are Favored, God will save the Favored.

Hmmm...What do our various Holy Books say about willful stupidity and blind arrogance?

Our resident connivers, sellouts and quislings tell us to keep spending our way into national prosperity. Many preachers say don’t worry be happy, let God take care of you—isn’t that a bit of tempting the Creator and asking for rescue from our own arrogance and willful behavior?

These people are leading thousands of blind sheep over a cliff. Are you one of these sheep?

When we know what the consequences are, why are we not taking action to prepare ourselves? Why are we standing in front of the tidal wave with our mouths open like oxygen starved, brain dead fish? Why do we put our fate in the hands of those who mean us no good, play us for fools, set us against each other and benefit from the conflict? Why are we still getting in bed with self-serving leaders who profit from our misery and lead us down the garden path to the tiger’s den?

If we keep polluting, spending and abusing resources, we will pollute ourselves out of existence, but many of our so-called leaders in government and religion keep playing Pollyanna and act as if disaster isn’t waiting in the wings. Gasoline is climbing by the day, pricing many out of jobs, forcing people to choose between getting to work and eating. It is an abomination that a working person cannot afford to eat and get to work, more of an abomination that our leaders in and out of government continue to offer platitudes and empty promises as solutions.

Why are our leaders, religious leaders in particular, not using their bully pulpits to lead the way, creating new ministries, new collaborative efforts, new public-private partnerships which provide assistance?

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