Posted by mach5potato on Tuesday, January 20 2004
Once upon a time on a planet named Earth, humans were primitive; ape-like even. The world was shrouded in mystery. Lightning, thunder, fire, tornados and rain were all strange and powerful forces. These primitive peoples needed a way to understand the events unfolding around them. Naturally, mystical forces were causing these events. They had no knowledge of the weather or how disasters occured so they looked to an elder in the tribe for an explaination. The elder, not wanting to seem stupid, told them that there is a God out there and he is an angry and vengeful God. It is my belief that this is where the atrocity we know as religion started.
After a few thousand years of fearing that some dark force could wipe you out at any moment, you begin to wonder how to appease these nasty deities that want so desperately to kill you. Thus, the Shaman is born. The Shaman knows all and can make the Gods leave you alone…for a fee. The Shaman can use magic. He has the power to summon God and smite you down. Naturally he is a man to be feared and revered, bringing us to the first byproduct of religion, fear. Well at this point we start to get more population on Earth. Soon these tribes are bumping into each other. Now we get to the second derivative of religion, war. Their God(s) is/are not the same as ours…let’s kill them!
As population continued to grow, there became the need to control vast areas of peoples. Thus organized religion was born. How wonderful! Tens of thousands of mindless drones, all fearing the deity of their creation. There are a few approaches to controlling the masses. You can go the Pharaoh route and say that you are a God on Earth; or you can say that you are the son of a God and that you have a direct link to the whim of God. Either way you have created a situation where defying you leads to certain damnation. How better to make the masses conform than to say, “defy me and I’ll not only kill you, but you will be tortured for eternity”?
Now here we are in modern times. We have mastered the mysteries of the weather. We know that tectonic plates, not the work of an evil spirit, cause seismic activity. Yet there is still a very primitive and useless bit of ancient knowledge that just won’t die. Yep, religion. We have split atoms, gone to the moon, and even put equipment on the surface of Mars. Yet for some reason we cannot grasp the concept that there is no happy man in the sky. What seems to be so hard to swallow? A man in the sky can snap his fingers and make an entire universe, but a person evolving from single celled organisms is just a little too farfetched? Come out from behind that stained glass curtain and use your fucking brain.
I’d like to give all Christians something to ponder. Do you worship God because you are afraid you will go to hell? Well that’s not faith, that’s fear. Do you worship God because your parents made you? That’s not faith, that’s conformity. Maybe you worship God because you need someone to blame your failures on. Have you ever questioned your faith? Of course not, right? That would be blasphemy and that’s a deadly sin. You are a slave to a God who doesn’t exist. Man, we are all so envious. Oh, and putting a fish on the back of your car won’t save your soul. Get your obsolete symbols of oppression out of my face. Now I have to go. I have special atheist things to do, the most important of which is to think. Something Christians fear more than hell.
