posted 12-12-2001 08:45 PM            

There is a line in the Red Dwarf "Waiting for God" in which Lister speaks the line that hooked me on the series in the first place: "It seems that the only reason there is a God around is so people could be rotten to each other." Through I only heard them three years ago, I can honestly say that now those words (quite insightful for a mere TV show) have become prophetic.

Throughout the last month, I've had to listen to various accounts of violence and not just overseas. No, I get treated to watching some anti-abortionists use the anthrax scare on abortion clinics. I see a bunch of madmen of various religions use bombs because they're too stupid and ignorant to realize that there is no one way of belief. So finally, when I read the story above, it was the last straw.

I've got one good way to start us all back on the long way of recovery after all this Middle Eastern bullshit is over and done with. I say we ban religion in any kind of form.

You heard me right. We ban religion.

Religion had a purpose once: to explain the unexplainable in such a way that science couldn't. But over the last hundreds of years, it has become more of a tool for people to control other people's thoughts by holding something intangible--life after death or, more correctly, a GOOD life after death--over their heads. It's not absolution as much as it is socially acceptable extortion. But it is certainly nothing worth dying over.

I don't want one single religion left in the world. Take all of the bibles and other so called holy texts and burn them. Take all of these so called religious temples and churches and other focal points and dismantle them, destroy them. Religion has gone past it's point of usefulness and has now become another way to excuse the deaths of millions to gloss over the imperfections of the few.

I'm sick of it. I'm tired of listening to madman clutch a book and somehow think they're in the right. And I don't want to stand at some point in the future scared to do anything just because somebody has to prove their most sacred beliefs are right by having people join them and they simply MUST blow up something. And I don't want to have to vote one day that the only way us rational people are going to have to live peacefully is to perform a worldwide genocide on all of those brainwashed lackwits.

I don't like living in a world where appeasal to a mythic God and killing for it is right. Not in any case.

posted 12-13-2001 12:44 AM            

Like I said before, it's nutcases like those two mentioned in the story that make me turn my back on religion.

The way I see it, the Bible is loaded with contradictions, and there appears to be no consistent message (at least, to me, there's very little consistency).

Example: One of the Ten Commandments - Thou shalt not kill. Okay, what about what happened at Jericho, Ai, and who knows how many other cities when the Israelites crossed into Canaan? If that isn't killing, I don't know WHAT is!