The quiet rise of Babylon’s whore

The most dangerous voices don’t shout. They whisper comfort and kindness, naming it progress.

I used to look at religion like it was a trick. A weapon dressed in poetry. I saw war, shame, and control. I saw people bruised and broken and called it faith. I watched hatred get baptized and called it holy. And I told myself, with a kind of righteous pride, that religion was the problem, and that I was above it.

But life has a way of softening arrogance. Not with a slap, but with a whisper.

The stories were never about gods and monsters in some distant realm. They were about us.

When I started to listen differently, the mythical lines began to sound uncomfortably familiar. The false prophets. The tempting promises. The blind obedience. It didn’t feel ancient anymore. It felt human.

And that’s when I started to see it — maybe the demons religion spoke of were never winged creatures or horned beasts. Maybe they were our own instincts: the pride that blinds us, the greed that devours without thought, lust that corrodes love, envy that rots joy, gluttony that drains what others need, wrath that burns everything in reach, and the sloth that lets decay spread while we stand still.

We are the demons.

And the most dangerous among us aren’t the ones shouting. They’re the ones who speak softly, who promise peace while leading you to ruin, who smile while emptying your soul. They are Babylon’s whore, dressed in beauty, selling comfort, and leaving empires in ash.

The prophets weren’t trying to arm us against monsters from another realm. They were trying to keep us from destroying each other. They saw the pattern: civilizations rising and rotting, collapsing under the weight of their own arrogance, greed, and fear. They knew the enemy wasn’t out there, it was inside the human heart.

And if you look closely, you’ll see those same “demons” everywhere.
Not with horns, claws, or dripping fangs, but in polished suits and curated empathy.
Not in fire and brimstone, but in slogans, hashtags, and flawed logic.

The prophets saw it coming. Some tried to stop it. And it cost them everything. Socrates drank poison for asking dangerous questions. Galileo was silenced for pointing a telescope at the heavens. Mandela spent 27 years in a cell for refusing to submit to injustice. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot for dreaming out loud. And Jesus was crucified for speaking a truth the powerful could not bear to hear.

They weren’t saints. They were humans who saw the demons in all of us and tried to hold them back.

Religion was never meant to be worship. It was memory. A warning passed down in story and symbol: that the greatest threat to humanity will always be humanity, and the demons we fear are already inside the walls.