Go to sleep, my little brother

 

Go to sleep, my little brother

(The truth is a public good, therefore a public service.)

Religion is not a simple spiritual current. Nor is it a folkloric accident of human history. It is a system. A functional, integrated, ancient, and remarkably efficient system. Its primary function is not to reveal, but to soothe. Not to understand, but to make one accept. Religion does not seek lucidity; it offers sleep. And this sleep is presented as inner peace, wisdom, elevation, when in fact it is an organized narcosis.

Like any lullaby, it reassures. It speaks softly to the child anxious about the world: do not worry, everything has meaning, someone is watching, everything is written. And the child calms down. He stops questioning. He yields. Religion has thus become the maternal voice of the system: gentle, enveloping, comforting — but profoundly inhibiting.

We find here the same mechanism as in the refusal of heliocentrism. Religions could not accept that the Earth was not the center of the universe, not because it changed anything concrete in daily life, but because it displaced prestige. It was not truth that was threatened, but the symbolic position of the human. In the same way, religion claims that the human is at the center of the divine gaze, that he is loved, judged, chosen. It places him under a fictitious cosmic spotlight. It offers him a metaphysical importance to keep him quiet.

Yet it is entirely demonstrable, scientifically speaking, that gods do not exist — in reality, that no god exists. Certainly, one cannot demonstrate the nonexistence of a being absolutely invisible, intangible, and devoid of any interaction. But as soon as a god is attributed potentialities, these become analyzable. And then reason reasserts its rights.

The fundamental attributes assigned to gods — omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, infinity — are not simply unverifiable: they are incompatible with any coherent structure of the real. Omnipotence is impossible by nature, for a being unable to demonstrate it cannot claim it; and a truly omnipotent being could instantly deny all logical laws, including the one defining its own omnipotence. Omniscience is equally impossible: to know absolutely everything would require perfect knowledge of the future, thus a totally frozen universe, annihilating all dynamics, all evolution, all supposed freedom.

As for infinity and eternity, not only can no god prove them, but nothing in the order of the real shows the slightest operational possibility of them. They are nothing but gratuitous assertions, superlatives without verifiable content. Words magnified to mask the void.

And above all, a god could only be a god if he had not been compelled to exist. Yet existence is always compelled. Nothing self-engenders, nothing arises from pure will. To exist is to obey a cosmic, biological, material mechanism. If a god exists, he is necessarily subjected to this initial constraint — and if he escapes it, then he does not exist in any real sense. The paradox is total.

What we call “God” is therefore nothing but a hypertrophied mental projection: an absolute father imagined to fill anxiety, a fabulous figure destined to neutralize the fear of dying and the vertigo of existing. Religion confuses psychological need with ontological reality. It transforms distress into certainty.

But an isolated belief does not make a system. To become religion, it must structure itself. And this structuring follows a precise mechanics: codification of rules, establishment of a hierarchy, sacralization of texts, creation of rituals, institutionalization of sin. Morality becomes surveillance, faith becomes obligation, and transcendence becomes social control.

What was originally a human attempt to create meaning has been transformed into a normative apparatus. Good and evil are no longer discussed: they are decreed. Disobedience is no longer disagreement: it becomes fault. And fault becomes debt. Religion establishes a moral economy in which the individual is structurally guilty. Guilty of thinking, guilty of desiring, guilty of existing.

And yet religion does not respect its own morality. It preaches love while justifying violence. It glorifies humility while accumulating fortunes. It condemns hatred while cultivating fear. Its texts overflow with massacres, punishments, misogyny, exclusions, sacralized submission. What it calls virtue is often only docility. What it calls sin is often only freedom.

If a god truly spoke, would he speak with a thousand voices? Why so many religions, so many contradictory versions, so many exclusive truths all claiming the absolute? The plurality of dogmas reveals what it tries to conceal: religion is not a revelation, but a cultural fabrication, locally produced, historically situated, psychologically determined. A genuine revelation would be univocal. Religion is disparate.

And even when societies proclaim themselves secular, religion continues to permeate mental mechanisms. Modern justice remains deeply moralizing. It punishes, it judges, it seeks fault more than understanding, the culprit more than the causes. It reproduces a religious pattern emptied of its god: punishment, redemption, guilt, merit, expiation. It is not rational justice but a secularized dogmatic morality.

Religion thus serves a central purpose of the triumvirate: maintaining order. It transforms suffering into value, patience into virtue, submission into wisdom. It diverts social anger inward, channels it, guilt-trips it. It promises compensation after death to neutralize revolt before death. It makes the unbearable bearable.

And the metaphor then becomes clear: the people are an anxious child, and religion is a hand that rocks them.

Go to sleep, my little brother, God watches over you.

Do not think too much. Do not question. Heaven takes care of everything.

But this sleep is not peace. It is anesthesia. A suspension of lucidity. A renunciation of understanding the real in order to better accept it. The price of this lullaby is high: it prevents collective awakening, slows rational emancipation, delays the awareness of sharing, of the constraint of existing, of the fundamental innocence of all.

Suffering reigns uselessly; we cannot prevent it, we can only try to treat it, but it only grows.

Waking up does not mean replacing God with the void. It means replacing superstition with understanding, blind faith with lucidity, submission with collective responsibility. It means accepting that meaning is not given to us from above, but must be built here, among beings compelled to exist, without a sky to watch us, increase our fears, and justify them.

Religion does not disappear through combat. It disappears through understanding. The day humans no longer need a celestial father to calm their vertigo, the lullaby will become useless.

And on that day, the little brother will finally open his eyes.

And to put an end to this diabolical social triumvirate… Do as you wish with the following statement:

Personal enrichment and personal power are incompatible with

the current democracy, which is nothing but disguised feudalism.

End – E. Berlherm

(The obligation to exist implies the innocence of existing permanently, which is true for the wolf-parasites as for the sheep.)