Organized Religion: What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing! Say it Again!

Organized Religion: What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing! Say it Again!

By RARothTallTales

Created Jun 24 2007 - 3:01pm

I must preface my two Euro cents (which is about 3 US cents) into the

discourse with the following disclaimer: I am an atheist.

Notice I did not say DEVOUT atheist. Atheism is NOT a belief system. It is

the absence of belief.

So saying I was "devout" would be like saying my grandparents are all devout

corpses. Death is a negative state, a state of "un", it just IS.

Like atheism.

With that aside, religion of the organized sort, to me, is more than just

wrong. It's superfluous in the extreme.

Want to believe in God? Fine. Do that RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE. Go nowhere. Do

not congregate in a special "sanctified" location once per week to natter in

sync and bow your head in the presence of other devotees. God should be a

private experience, not for sharing, not for display, and most definitely it

should NEVER be set to music.

Music in and of itself is a "gift from God". It needs no augmentation, with

the name Jesus or Jehovah or Yahweh flitting hither and thither. Leave God

out of the musical equation. If He/She exists, they can hear you just fine,

awake, asleep, whenever, wherever, God is ALWAYS watching YOU!

That is the chief reason I cannot buy the "God hypothesis". It's just too

damn creepy.

Google earth and that other Google street program are more than I can bear!

Is someone watching me RIGHT NOW? Perhaps, but it is not God or Jesus or

Zeus or Odin. It's some insomniac in Tacoma.

Be that as it may or may not, what I find most off putting about organized

religion is that, by its very nature, it MUST gang up on others, on

nonbelievers. It lends itself to a mob mentality. Put another way, a single

person has zero inclination to tell strangers how to behave or have sex.

But get a group of BELIEVERS together, and before you can say Hosanna they

are proselytizing nonbelievers.

Missionary position, anyone? EVERYONE?!!!

And if that fails, they set to burning or skewering or bombing nonbelievers.

Organized religions most egregious failure: to follow its OWN tenets.

Live and let live is practiced with far more frequency and fervor by

atheists than any person ensnared in the velvet-gloved stranglehold of

organized religion.

Show me an atheist, and I'll show you someone not fucking with other people.

This is all the Commandments we need:

DO NOT FUCK WITH OTHER PEOPLE

Which means do not kill them, rape them, steal from them, beat them,

humiliate them, cheat on them, belittle them and so on.

My one Commandment covers a LOT more useful territory than the ten spooky

ones Moses dragged down from the side of a mountain thousands of years ago,

or so the story goes-and I do mean story.

Without any help from organized religion, I have developed a healthy and

socially acceptable ethos. Am I some sort of freak of nature? Do atheists

commit crimes with a frequency disproportionate to the approximate number of

atheists in the USA?

No, we don't.

In fact, while a whopping 0.4% of us in 2001 admitted to being atheists

(0.5% say "agnostic" and 13.2% own up to be "nonreligious"), only 0.2% of

the prison population identifies with the label "atheist".

Meanwhile, about 80% of the prison population happily, gleefully accepts the

label "Christian". The US population, as of 2001, was 76.5% Christian.

So it is safe to say atheists do NOT have a less effective moral compass

than Christians.

Atheists may have a better one, if anything. Not being inculcated with the

benefits of believing in fairytales leaves one's mind attuned to reality,

with all its beautiful brutal truths.

Morals come from actualizing the world, and how anyone can be expected to

perform THAT little miracle, with reams of ersatz miracles clogging up the

works, is beyond me.

Religion is programming. There is no "God gene" as some eclectic fools have

hypothesized. Religion dwells in the Shrinking Frontier of human ignorance.

Every time humans come up with a feasible answer to this or that, God

recedes a little further into the darkness.

What is left for God to "lord" over? Two things:

1. How did all this baloney get here?

2. What happens when you die?

Soon, once there is an acceptable model for the "Creation", the list will

dwindle to just one element, death, the Undiscovered Country.

And it is my hope that one day people will come to grips with death, as is,

without the fancy window dressing of Heaven or Paradise or Elysium or 72

virgins.

Remember: they never say what those 72 virgins LOOK like. Wouldn't it be

ironic if they all looked like Petunia Pig, Porky's thing on the side,

something to pass the time till he and Bugs Bunny once again cross-dress and

sashay up and down Hollywood and Vine?

But I digress.

Isn't life interesting and wondrous enough without injecting, into our

day-to-day routine, the continuous presence of a supernatural watchdog who,

far as I can tell, doesn't give a flying fuck at the mooooooooooonnnnnnnn!

what happens here on Earth?

Yes, I think so.

Amen, Halleluiah, and pass the Tylenol.

PS I haven't posted here of late because SmirkingChimp.com would not let me

access their site for a MONTH. Why, I have no idea. At times, computers can

get snitty.

_______

RA Roth, author of Tall Tales [1]

About author R.A. Roth is the author of two works of published fiction,

Tales of the Black Earth and Tall Tales. Please click the signature if you

are interested in acquiring the latter.

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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson