religion is phony

I’ve been pretty down about my PC lately. It’s hard to read the screen most of the time, and it crashes often, failing to reboot about 90% of the time. But I just had to try and write this.

I just picked up Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable, inspiring, and engrossing work. So I’ve been thinking lately, you could easily guess, about religion and god and death/afterdeath and all that.

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

If there was only one true god; one true religion; one infallible, incontrovertible, irrefutable truth… why is it that most of the world’s population – at least two-thirds of all people! – either don’t know much about it or have never even heard of it at all? (Think about this: inarguably the world’s biggest religions, Christianity and Islam, make up only about a third and a fifth of the world’s population, respectively.)

If there was only one true god; one true religion; one infallible, incontrovertible, irrefutable truth… then why bother going around telling people about it at all? After all, wouldn’t everyone already know, were it truly the most irrefutable fact there ever was? Wouldn’t it be more evident than, say, gravity? Wouldn’t we all have either been more or less born with such knowledge? Or at least have worked it out on our own, before ever figuring anything else out? Wouldn’t it at least be merely common sense?

And yet, I’d be willing to bet that almost every child on Earth has had a run-in with gravity before religion, with the result that gravity was the first, and most, irrefutable fact that we all put down on our ever-growing list of articles of common sense.

If there was only one true god; one true religion; one infallible, incontrovertible, irrefutable truth… then why doesn’t this “god” simply whisper the same thing in all of our ears? Why is it all just a little bit different for every few thousand people, until at the end of the line, just like in the children’s game “Telephone Operator,” the One True Thing is so different from the version at the other end as to be almost wholly alien to each other?

Or does that just mean that there are many gods, with many fanciful stories, and many paths to redemption/salvation/paradise/enlightenment/immortality? And that, by definition, all monotheistic religions are instantly false?

Of course, religion is something that I’ll simply never get. I’ll admit that, even as a formerly zealous Christian. It may well be that what first drove me from religion was the fact that there seemed to be no qualified answer to one of my biggest questions: how could there be more than one group of people saying that theirs was the Only True Thing, yet all claiming that the other guy was a phony?

Come on. As soon as we all learn to answer that question honestly, to each other and (most importantly) to ourselves, we’ll all have this whole “getting along together” thing worked out. It will be for the best when we put down our brickbats and admit that we’re all just hurtling along on this great big rock without one whit of evidence that we know anything whatsoever about god(s) or afterdeath or whatever came before the Big Bang.

I cannot pretend that I have respect for other people’s religions, because other people’s religions do not respect logic or common sense. Also, I simply can not and do not respect religion, or people who believe in some idiotic set of fictions about how the universe works and came to be. Religion is now as stupid and childish as it was when we worshipped fire and told each other that a Great Snake farted all of existence out of its ass. As then, it is today just as ridiculous and superstitious to believe in some giant, possibly invisible, old, bearded white guy who lives in the clouds and hangs out in a bathrobe all day as the creator of the universe. That’s not an intelligent designer, it’s a pandemonium-wreaking slob.

Such worthless and idiotic fantasies are best left for fiction, or left alone. I will never subscribe to such primitive, superstitious ideology, because it’s just plain stupid as hell to do so.

Also, there are no photographs.