Shiprock, again

In the northwest corner of what is now New Mexico stands a remarkable monolith that the White Men call "Shiprock." It is sacred to the Dineh (Navajo) people, and is on their land.

It is an old lava plug, with what geologists variously call "dikes" or "sills" radiating outward from it, that formed about 27 million years ago when molten rock from deep underground forced its way upward through cracks in the ground, and then cooled.  Later, the surrounding rock into which the lava intruded was worn away by erosion, leaving the much harder lava standing.

In the Dineh mythology, the rock is a gigantic bird upon whose back their ancestors lived until one terrible day when a lightning storm trapped all of the women and children on top of it, while the men were away cultivating crops.  It is sacred because the ghosts of those people are still there.

So there are certain things that one does not do there (climbing on it, for instance).  But no Navajo that I've ever spoken with believes that the rock is literally a bird:  They are able to honor and  preserve their rich cultural, religious traditions about it while understanding that their myths are not literal history, but tell them something about who they are.

The White Man also has his traditions steeped in ancient religious myths, although we didn't invent them:  we adopted those of the ancient Hebrew peoples, and then extended them via a "Savior" (who is today depicted, more often than not, as a white European instead of the swarthy Jew named in the ancient stories).

It is one thing to revere and honor the ancient traditions of one's culture.  It is quite another to get so caught up in the old myths that one begins to insist that they must be taken as literal Truth with a capital "T."

Our Judeo-Christian cultural roots are deep, and rich.  But to insist that there actually was a literal Garden of Eden, in which the first two members of H. sapiens disobeyed an invisible, omnipotent Being after being convinced by a talking snake to seek knowledge -- is just insane.

Apparently my race is not as wise as the Dineh, because we have white people who insist on exactly that.  And it is their fervent desire to force everyone, in the entire world, to not only believe in the absurdity of taking important cultural myth literally, but to obey their peculiar rules of social conduct in which lying, cheating, stealing, business fraud, spousal & family abuse and more are perfectly acceptable, but feeling sexual desire will send you into a literal Lake of Fire for all of eternity.

These are sick, twisted, demented people.  And there is a major push right now to get them installed into positions of Government, where they intend to pass laws for the rest of us that conform to their shame-based ideology.  They must be prevented from gaining such power; to do so would end Capitalism as we know it and make America into another Iran.

John Galt spoke out against all this in his radio address.  Here it is, for easy reference:

"Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not. 

“It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man. 

“The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin."

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged (p. 1025). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.