Writing today because we seem to be approaching the easily predicted end of a surge of bloodlust exacerbated by the chronic delusion of religion. It’s hard to give reality proper credence when one’s upbringing and one’s role models have imbued one with the need to put a mystical spin on everything. Indeed, religious thinking is the one human mental illness that is mutually reinforcing and in which the sufferer feels proud of his own rejection of reality.

We look at the painful denouements of mutually reinforced magical thinking in Salem, Mass. and throughout the centuries of senseless murder called the Crusades, in which one group of people who believed in let’s say a blue god slaughtered another group of people who believed in a green god. Clearly, each group thought not only that a god of proper hue was real but that such a god wanted them to kill its own creations.

Today, Hegseth and his Christian warriors want us to revert to the times of Richard the Lionhearted who spent many of his productive years rehearsing an action film in the Middle East. As long as we make god-fearing thugs into heroes, the massacres will continue.

The US at one time had a chance to lead us out of this self-imposed darkness where we titillate ourselves with fantasies of hot deities. Instead, we fell prey to the urge to retreat deep into Plato’s cave, where the shadows on the walls are exactly what we say they are.