An open letter to religious people: You are idiots and i hate you.
Before you go and get the wrong idea, this is NOT about why religion is bad, or why it is wrong. Of course religion is bad, and of course religion is wrong. But this is so blindingly obvious that it no longer needs to be said.
Instead, this is a direct attack on you, the religious person. The argument? That your failure to reject religion indicates that you are colossally irredeemably stupid.
Religion is fundamentally flawed in a staggering variety of ways, to the point that a curious child can bring down the entire framework of baloney with an innocent question.
Such questions include
*Why is there evil?
*Who made god?
*Why should I trust you after that santa claus thing?
But you didn’t ask those questions, did you? Or if you did, you accepted the pathetic rationalizations that where offered without further contemplation.
perhaps you where even afraid to ask, or even to think about it.
Your comforting little worldview matter more to you then the truth.
But can this critical failure really be blamed on fear of the consequences of religion being wrong? Is a godless world that terrible to contemplate?
The idea that santa claus isn’t real is also unpleasant, and this proves a deterrent to disbelief. But not a significant one.
God doesn’t even bring people presents. In fact, in most religions he is actually a real jerk. Plagues and laws and smiting and eternal torture. Is this really a so attractive an idea that people can’t let it go?
Perhaps disinterest is the only real problem. After all, if a man can’t read greek, that doesn’t make him stupid. It simply means he doesn’t care to learn greek.
But can really a disinterest in the fundamental nature of reality really be justified in such a way? maybe so. After all, it makes little difference in day to day living if god is really up there or not.
And yet, should not the fact that god’s existence has no major consequence itself raise a red flag?
The idea that a being with immense powers exist, but never tampers with the world in a noticeable way is an absurdly childish hypothetical scenario. it’s “I’m not touching you” on a cosmic scale.
Granted, we used to see a lot more evidence of god’s tampering then we do today. Lightning, disease, floods, butterflies and the sun.
But even then, a bunch of inexplicable things hardly adds up to a magical being who you can’t see.
And of course all this “evidence” wilted and died with sufficient rational inquiry. The sun and stars turned out to be big nuclear furnaces, diseases and butterflies are now well understood, and lightning is just an electrical discharge.
Indeed, from a leopards spots to pregnancy to the shape of the earth, religions has been proved wrong, wrong, wrong.
It would take an IDIOT not to see a pattern in this. And that’s exactly what you are.
The icing on this pathetic cake is that you realize that all OTHER religions are wrong, you just have a blind spot towards your own.
Perhaps you have a vague awareness that religion is retarded, but you never really give it up because your thoughts are to disorganized to deal with it.
If this is the case, and your mind is a dusty closet full of odds and ends, motivational phrases and vacation photos, I have nothing but contempt for you.
I refuse to respect religious beliefs, and I refuse to respect the people who hold them. Your willful ignorance is inexcusable and it disgust me.
Read MoreEvil fucking scientists!!!
Jesus loves the little zygotes
all the zygotes of the world.
Jesus loves them until they’re born
then abandons them forlorn.
Jesus loves the little zygotes ’til they’re born.
Jesus loves the little children
all the children of the world.
Jesus gives them heart defects
measles, mumps, and ringwormed necks.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
Jesus lets their parents beat them,
bruise their bodies black and blue.
Jesus gives them birth defects,
scurvy, ticks, and palette clefts.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
Jesus gives the children cancer.
Earaches, lice, and scabies too.
Bowel obstructions, altered lips,
blighted brains and twisted hips.
Extra chromosomes to help them when they pray.
Hallelujah.
Jesus gives the children acne.
AIDS and leprosy galore.
Germs and worms of every kind.
Things to make the children blind.
But he cannot give them smallpox anymore.
Scientists and unbelievers
wiped the pox right off the earth.
Jesus still gives gifts to kids,
broken nose and burnt eyelids.
But he cannot give them smallpox anymore.
Dear kid: you almost didnt have a dad.
today a lady put a gun to my head… she also fired three shots at me…
it sucked.
but the most amazing thing about this whole ordeal is:
i never once asked God for help… it didnt even cross my mind.
i dont know if there are atheists in foxholes…
but i can tell you there are atheists in crosshairs.
throughout your life i want you to remember this one thing…
there is no god.
try not to worry. enjoy your life.
Read MoreGod delusions cloud a world of wonders
MOST weeks I read The Sunday Age’s Faith column, out of professional duty. Most weeks I am left perplexed, unable to reconcile what I am reading with anything I see around me.
What I see is a world slowly tearing itself apart for the sake of one faith or another. A world where an extreme faction of Islam wishes to put me and mine to the sword for my unbelief, and to shackle half the world for the crime of being born female. A world where an extreme faction of Christianity wants to throw away science for the sake of millenniums-old superstitions, and is prepared to kill in the name of life. A world where an extreme faction of Hinduism wishes to religiously purify India. A world where people are unashamedly trying to fulfil the biblical conditions for Armageddon.
Moderates say that these factions are perversions of faith, but that too jars with what I know of the past: that it took until the 20th century for humans to devise a secular philosophy, in the form of communism, to rival faith’s destructive power. From the Egyptians enslaving the Israelites to Nero lighting the streets with burning Christians, from the slaughter of the Crusades to the bloodbath of India’s Partition, violence and religion have always gone hand in hand. And the record of societies governed by religious law, from the Aztecs to the Taliban, tells us that theocracy is a synonym for barbarity.
It’s a puzzling thing about religion that its words, which generally urge us to bolster our better natures and remedy our faults, so rarely match its actions. It seems to me that while an individual’s faith can be a profound personal journey that might even make them a better person, a society’s faith is akin to mass psychosis. History suggests that the killers were always the truest believers, and that notions of tolerance, peace and enlightenment come from those who question the orthodoxy.
I also see a world where human beings have unlocked many, although by no means all, the secrets of reality. Secrets that allow the meanest of Westerners to enjoy a lifestyle beyond the imaginings of kings, that cure diseases that were once routinely fatal, that let us cross vast distances in comfort and safety.
That’s the world that has produced the computer and the skyscraper, along with Michelangelo’s David, the plays of Shakespeare, the first three Star Wars movies and the Rolling Stones. None of these things was made or discovered by a man on his knees gazing at the stars, but by men and women standing at a workbench looking down at the world. Many were undoubtedly men and women of faith, but it didn’t cloud their essential genius, the ability to engage with what is. The great discoveries were not made by those agog at the wonders of the divine, but by those intrigued by the wonders of the mundane.
Because make no mistake, we live in a world of wonders. The sound of a wave breaking on a beach, the green of a forest, that we can see and hear and appreciate these things … these are all true marvels, and no less so for the fact we can now understand how it happens. As someone wise once said, the garden is quite good enough without having to invent fairies at the bottom of it.
The question I can’t escape is why so many people clearly prefer the realm of faith, the realm of the Inquisition and of violent jihad, to the realm of thought. What does faith provide them with that reality does not? If it is the comfort of a benevolent power guiding and protecting them, how do they square that with the horror and squalor that still infest the world? Or if it’s a desire for mystery, isn’t the contemplation of the natural forces that conspired to put us here enough?
More and more, I suspect that I will never have a proper answer to these questions. If all that we now know and all the demonstrable benefits of secular thought are not enough to dissuade the faithful, then it’s hard to see what shattering revelation or cogent argument ever will. Perhaps it’s simply that the human brain is hardwired for belief, a theory bolstered by the number of people who spurn the churches only to take up one of faith’s less organised offspring (see wicca, tarot, positive thinking, etc). It is a disturbing prospect.
And then, too, I wonder if I’m any better. It’s become quite clear that I’m as guilty as anyone of clinging to an irrational belief in the face of all available evidence. It’s just that my faith is that people will one day see the light, and realise it comes from earth, not from heaven.
Read MoreAbout Me
Having grown up in the sweltering Florida heat, George enjoys staying indoors, and air conditioning. A Level 7 Elvish Photoshop Mage with +10 Dropshadow Power, George specializes in visual design & interaction design — two fancy terms he uses to make himself sound important and to explain that he cares about both how things look and how things work.