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| And your religion, and your religion ... |
A group of folks who subscribe to the Islam religion and are from the Middle Eastern region murdered 129 people while injuring a whopping 352 others, 99 of those critically, last week in Paris. This is an atrocious act and there is no reasonable defense for it.
That is, unless you are a religious person. If you are religious, after all, you must try to live in the way that your deity of choice supposedly tells you to live, and this deity, of course, can be construed by different people to tell them just about anything.
In reaction to this event last week in Paris, the fine people of America and others all over the world pointed to the religion of Islam. Whether you term it "radical Islam" or plain old "Islam" is of little consequence at this point — some form of Islam is to blame here, apparently.
And how could you argue with that stance? After all, the Koran says that Muslims should "fight those who do not believe in Allah ... nor follow the religion of truth ... until they pay the tax in acknowledgement of superiority and they are in a state of subjection."
So, when your asshole cousin posts on Facebook that Muslims have been literally instructed to fight non-believers, he's not wrong.
It's when he implores you to pray for the people of Paris in his very next post that he becomes a fool.
Because, you know, the bible isn't so different from the Koran when it says: "But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me."
You see, your asshole cousin believes he has the moral authority because he believes his religion doesn't teach the same things that Islam does. That Islam is OBVIOUSLY wrong while his religion is MORAL and JUST. Once you subscribe to a religion and living your life according to its central text, you are subscribing to a belief system that you delude yourself into believing is the correct way to live. And most religions have the same central tenet that their belief system is *the* truth or *the* way, and the explicit (or, at the very least, implicit) duty to subdue or at least convert the "other" religions in some fashion.
The recommended means for this action are immaterial if you subscribe to any sort of omniscient being. My slaughter is your state of subjection; if you believe in a deity that tells you things, then you have to allow for the fact that another deity could tell someone else something completely different, and in your worldview that needs to be OK because, again, you're the type of person who believes in an invisible, impossible-to-prove thing.
And the pickle here is that there are no facts to support any of these competing belief systems. At the end of the day, people who subscribe to a religion are believing in something for the sake of having something to believe in. Whether it's because they can't believe in themselves or they need a "light at the end of the tunnel" to live a good life, if you want to give Christians a pass for condemning homosexuality and systemic oppression, then you also need to give Muslims a pass for believing that it's their duty to kill non-believers.
Let's say that I wake up tomorrow and claim that, overnight, I was spoken to by the one true deity and that my life's work was now to convert people to follow me in worshiping this deity. And let's say that this deity told me that my life's work was to procreate with as many women as possible by whatever means necessary, because by doing so, my offspring would also receive my "gift" to speak to this deity, and the world would be a better place.
Well, by the word of my deity himself, that pretty much gives me the green light to break into my neighbor's house and fuck the lady, and to go to a bar downtown and rape women when they come into the third stall on the left, right? You would call that bat shit insane, right? BUT THIS IS GOD'S WORK. HE WILLED IT. It is no more insane than any other religious belief out there.
You can't have it both ways. If you decide that because there are no facts involved with religion, you have to tolerate all forms of it, then I can concatenate any link of absurd beliefs into a new religion, and you have to respect it.
At least that's how it should work. Instead, everyone has "faith" in their particular belief system as they drone on chanting in their church or temple or mosque, and they dismiss each other's beliefs as somehow backward or silly or outright worse than their own.
And that's why, if it were up to me, there would be no religious tolerance of any sort. More people have died in the name of "god" than in any other name throughout history, and while I won't bother to give you a detailed historical explanation of the use of religion to control peoples, there's a reason for that: Religion is extremely dangerous. They are *all* dangerous. Islam is no more dangerous than Judaism is no more dangerous than Catholicism is no more dangerous than Buddhism. They are all methods of mind control that infect populations and bring down otherwise functional societies.
Why do we tolerate this shit? At some point, you have to call a spade a spade.
At the Democratic debate the other night, Bernie Sanders mentioned that we have thousands of nuclear warheads that we continue to maintain and are incredibly expensive to keep up. My solution to this problem that we've faced for thousands upon thousands of years also incorporates a solution to that problem:
1) Declare the United States of America a religion-free zone. You may not practice religion or pass down religious beliefs. You will be put to death if you refuse to deny the existence of a god.
2) Nuke the rest of the world. We have enough problems cleaning out the religious population here; we can't do this piecemeal the world over. Let's give the human civilization a fresh start by wiping out everything else.
3) Repopulate the world with Little Ethan Averys because my deity said so. Wait, what?
OK, so that's all a bit of a farce and never going to happen, and frankly, I don't entirely give two fucks if you want to believe in a god and subscribe to some asinine religion. But my point is, let's not kid ourselves here: The religion of Islam isn't the problem.
It's religion in general. It's your religion. It's your neighbor's religion. It's all a problem, and it all needs to stop.
Fuck religion.
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