Tales.

Before the dawn of literacy, we know that societies passed on the wisdom and the learning of their elders through oral recitation, just as the surviving preliterate tribal societies remaining today do. The elders had taken the stories from their elders, who had done the same from theirs, stretching back so far that no one had any idea where the stories began, or how much they had changed. But they quite probably understood the lessons the stories were attempting to impart, wise, practical, instructive and cautionary anecdotes about how to conduct and not conduct oneself in this life.

One of these ancient, tribal, tales was about a time, far, far removed from the present, when people in this particular tribe did not wear clothes. They carried no shame about it, as the word for the concept had not yet been invented. They worked and spoke naked, made love unhidden from the other beasts, lived carefree, naked lives in a simple, innocent, uncorrupted world.

Over time, as more and more words were invented and passed on, as the knowledge of worldly things grew, concepts such as possession and envy and jealousy, guilt and shame entered into the language, corrupting the paradise of ignorant innocence and sending people forth into the larger, harsher world of knowledge. They began to conceal themselves with clothing because they had lost the paradise of natural ignorance and learned a terrible thing called shame. They had learned that knowledge carries a high price.

This is a brilliant, wise parable, told by wise, practical people living lives of immediacy, in the presence of what they believed was their god.

Fast forward who-knows how many millennia later: deranged children in adult bodies are now teaching fairy tales and fables as literal truth to normal children, in an effort to ensure that they grow up to be deranged children in adult bodies like their teachers. They are teaching them that humanity arose from a man named Adam and a woman named Eve, who were kicked out of a material, actual, geographical garden by an angel with a sword. They have lost every bit of practical wisdom that the story contained for hairy Neolithic people wandering the desert of Israel, and turned it into a cruel, poisonous, murderous lie, a filthy pollution of the minds of innocents. It would be better that they were taught that the world is flat; at least that lie is harmless.

The whole world is mad that way. All scriptures should probably be rounded up and burned 100 years maximum after they are written, before everybody loses the point completely and starts believing in tales that the people who heard them originally weren't even supposed to believe. And the most disturbing thing of all is that the problem is getting worse, and not better. The more science advances knowledge, the more it, seems, evryone else ignores it.