More TV.

Christiane Amanpour’s extensive piece on religion
titled “Gods Warriors”.

I watched most of it.

Fascinating and perhaps comforting on a certain level
to find practitioners of faith even more completely
insane than our own brand.

Scary because they have more conviction and less
hypocrisy.

Ironic they live in an arid region that supplies the
big blue marble with oil while the world’s breadbasket
drowns because of America’s abuse and control of the
filthy nectar sucked from their sand.

Religion is at the core of this conflict. It is the
fundament. It is why we are where we are. Neither
side of the marble will relenquish it’s imaginary
friend. Both sides insist that it’s imaginary friend
is morally superior to the other. By virtue of that, each side
is confident that it’s imaginary friend can kick the
other’s ass.

Yet, it was not the Muslims or the Christians that
poured nitro on this acient and acrimonius pile of
smouldering camel crap that has us on the threshold of
a third world war. The first where we are capable
of entirely erasing ourselves.

It was our government. Dick-in-Bush, a spineless
congress and a complicit judiciary.

Welcome to the fifth grade.

I gotta tell ya, I’m not happy to see proof that
they are just as gullible, dogmatic and stupid as we
are. Christian fundamentalists scare me every bit as
much as Muslim extremists.

It’s kinda like being in a dive bar. A small one.
And there’s two dumbasses that don’t have enough sense
to realize that the shit they are stirring will end up
with at least one of them bleeding bad on the floor.
As well as the real possibility that they’re both
packing and will kill each other and more than a few of
the rest of us.

That, my friends, is where we are. Organized religion
is comprehensively culpable.

Religion took the bait.

Religion smiled, held out its hands and
accepted the kool aid along with a formula to make
it available to the masses. They then followed
through with glee. They paid it forward.

We are in a war of religious ideology.

I’m about to piss a few of you off.

Faith* is stupid. Creationism is retarded. All you
people who buy into God, in any traditional sense, are
willfully ignorant.

Your goddamn beliefs are the root of most of the evil
ever perpetuated and precisely the reason the world
has remained in chaos since man has been able to write
about it.

The single most important reason I loathe organized
religion is it’s complete disregard of logic. Of
Science. Of what makes sense. Empirical
discipline.

There’s a sixty thousand square foot museum in
Kentucky dedicated to creationism. One diorama after
another of modern man hanging out with dinosaurs. A
sprawling complex in 21st century America, dedicated
to picking it’s nose and looking out the window at
every theory, fact, and mountain of evidentiary
information mankind has been able to compile
throughout history.

No apologies. That’s really stupid.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.

I don’t know if the Muslim religion has a parallel for
Santa Clause but I’ve always viewed Christianity as
Santa and his list of good and bad kids, for adults.

See all religion has long since been usurped by
avarice. Faith and bureaucracy do not mix. It is a
recipe for corruption and myopic pursuit of power and
control.

My point is this: If we are to prosper as a species on
this tiny blue moist spec of dust in in a universe
beyond our imagination, we absolutelty must learn
humility. We must discard these archaic and obsolete
notions of superiority based on distorted views of the
way our world was made and/or the badassness of our imaginary friends.

We are an accident. A biological coincidence lucky
enough to flourish and achieve consciousness. It
is imperative that we stop our bickering and begin to
be grateful for our barely consequential existence.

Walk it off people. Set it aside. There are things
so important you cannot begin to imagine them.

You want to worship? How about worshipping where your water comes from? How about the planet that sustains you? Your family and friends and all the people you’ve never met and won’t ever meet? Art. Kittens. Whiskey.

*What I’m talking about here is blind unchecked faith.
All I know, is if I were to observe merely faith in
the context of day to day, I would end up residing in
a cardboard box.

I am an agnostic. As such, I view your God, in
whatever form you believe it to be, as without proof
of superiority, or even existence. I don’t care. All
I want, is for you to refrain from trying to insert it
into my life, our society, our government, our world
and MY FUTURE.

Drinks for my friends.