Religion is a fairy tale for adults, a scam run by priests,
ministers, rabbis, nuns, witch doctors, bishops and popes so that
suckers will pay for their big houses, fine clothes and BMW's.
As scary as it might sound, you alone are responsible for what
happens in your life, not some imaginary spook living in a paradise
in the sky . . . not some evil goblin living underground in a
fiery pit . . . You!
Remember when you were six years old, and you got a chill
up you spine on Christmas Eve because you KNEW a fat white man
in a red suit would land on your roof that night in a sleigh pulled
by flying reindeer? You couldn't sleep that night because Santa
was going to come down your chimney to leave toys for you under
a dead tree you had helped your parents decorate (OK, so your
house didn't even have a chimney . . . you were six years old
and fairly stupid, you believed it anyway).
Then some kid at school told you that Santa Clause doesn't
exist, and you yelled at him because you knew your parents wouldn't
lie to you. But you went home and asked your parents if Santa
was real anyway, and got the most valuable life lesson a child
can learn . . . parents lie, teachers lie, ministers lie . . .
all the authority figures you trusted to guide your life had lied
to you about a fat white man who flies through the air to bring
you gifts.
Think of me as a fifty eight year old kid in first grade telling
you that god does not exist. You're going to die. I know it's
hard for you . . . scary to even think about . . . but you're
going to die . . . and be dead! You won't fly up into the sky
on fairy wings to live forever in a milky white paradise . . .
you're not even going to be dragged down into a fiery pit to be
poked in the butt by pitchforks until the end of time . . . you're
going to rot . . . and worms will feast on your eyeballs (along
with the rest of you). Denial is not just a river in Egypt, you
are part of the food chain on this planet.
Thousands of years ago, men and women didn't know what a microbe
was, or what lightning, snow, volcanoes, mental illness, death,
atoms, ocean waves, stars, mountains, comets or hurricanes were.
They didn't know why babies developed in the womb, why bees sting,
why rain falls, why plants and animals are so different (or so
alike), so they came up with an explanation that fit their limited
understanding of how the world works. There must be some invisible
supernatural force (who look-a like-a man) controlling everything
. . . in other words, "God did it!"
The magic theory of the universe (God did it all . . . Poof!
. . . There's a tree! Poof! . . . There's a dung beetle! Poof!
. . . There's a man!) is fine for 2000 B.C., when there was no
real understanding of medicine, biology, astronomy, geology, astrophysics,
cybernetics or psychology. But there is no excuse for people living
in the twenty first century to cling fiercely to ancient fairy
tales about invisible men in the sky controlling their lives,
or paying scam artists thousands of dollars to make sure that
they will live forever after they die in an imaginary paradise.
If you insist on swallowing that, I can give you a great deal
on some magic beans, and you'll like the price you're going to
pay me for the Brooklyn Bridge!
Please, please, please . . . give me the power to be God for
just five minutes! You wouldn't recognize the place! Poof! . .
. no disease! Poof! . . . no poverty! Poof! . . . no birth defects!
Poof! . . . no crime! Poof! . . . no hunger! Poof! . . . no suffering!
Poof! . . . no crack, no heroin, no tobacco! Poof! . . . no evil
people running everything! Poof! . . . no ignorance! Poof! . .
. no war! Poof! . . . no murder! Poof! . . . no rape! Poof! .
. . no racism or discrimination! Poof! . . . no exploitation!
Poof! . . . thousands of lies would disappear from history
books! Poof! . . . teachers would be paid professional athlete's
salaries! Poof! . . . certain people would disappear! Poof! .
. . movie murders would be X-rated instead of movie sex! Poof!
. . . you wouldn't need an imaginary heaven in the sky, there'd
be a real one here on earth!
For your god to allow these things to exist is a clear indication
that he is either evil, insane or imaginary. Since I am not superstitious
(a person who believes in imaginary powers), it's clear to me
that something imaginary can't be evil or insane.
God does not exist.
George Carlin On Religion
"When it comes to bullshit . .
. truly, major league bullshit . . . you have to stand back in
awe . . . in awe, of the all time heavyweight champion of false
promises and exaggerated claims . . . religion! Organized religion!
It's no contest!
Religion easily . . . easily, has the
best bullshit story of all time! Think about it . . .
Religion has convinced people that
there's an invisible man living in the sky, who watches everything
you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has
a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do . . .
and if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special
place . . . of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish
. . . for you to live forever . . . and suffer and burn and scream
. . . until the end of time!
But he loves you! . . . he loves you!
. . . and he needs money!
He always needs money! He's all-powerful,
all-present, all-knowing and all-wise . . . just can't handle
money! Religion takes in billions and billions of dollars . .
. they pay no taxes, and somehow they always need money! You're
talking about a good bullshit story! . . . If I may be permitted
a small pun; Holy Shit! . . . HOLY SHIT!"
Let's talk about Christianity, the religion I'm most familiar
with (the same discussion could apply to any religion . . . just
change the name Jesus to Buddha, Yahweh, Shango, Confucius, Allah,
Jehovah or the deity of your choice, and it won't make much difference).
I was raised in the Baptist church in the fifties and sixties,
where my minister proudly proclaimed I'd be a preacher myself
when I grew up.
At age twelve I had read enough books on paleontology and
archaeology to decide that what I heard in church was bullshit,
but you didn't tell black parents in 1957 that you didn't believe
in god (not if you wanted to continue breathing) so I sat in Sunday
School for six more years and kept my mouth shut. But instead
of pinching teenaged girls on the butt for two hours in Sunday
School like other boys, I sat there and actually read the bible
from cover to cover . . . something no one I knew had actually
done.
I found a lot of interesting stuff in there . . . nothing
that made sense like paleontology or evolution . . . but lots
of fascinating stories of war, sex, politics and mythology, exactly
like the Greek or Roman mythology I was studying in high school.
Millions of people once fiercely believed that Zeus, Apollo, Hera,
Cupid, Mars, Thor, Poseidon and Aphrodite were real, just as you
believe in Jesus, God, angels, the Devil and Holy Ghosts. When
I got to college I delighted in pulling out my bible and showing
Christians all the freaky, stupid stuff in there. Let me share
some of that with you . . .
[Please use the King James version: I know it's harder to
understand, but there are two good reasons . . . (1) people were
murdered for translating it from Latin into English so that you
can read it, (2) later versions have been tampered with to prevent
you from understanding what the original bible said].
The Garden of Eden was in Ethiopia, Africa (Genesis 2:13),
no blondes come from Ethiopia; the people in the bible were black.
After Cain killed Able he left Eden and married a woman from
Nod (Genesis 4:14-17). If Adam, Eve and Cain were the only
people on earth, where did the woman come from? The creation myth
was meant to tell the story of the first Jews, not the first people
on earth. After Joshua broke down the walls at Jericho, the Israelites
slaughtered every man, woman and child, including their livestock,
using swords, and only spared a prostitute who had helped them
(Joshua 7:20-25). At the city of Ai the Israelites slaughtered
twelve thousand people during their military conquest of the "Promised
Land" (Joshua 8:19-26). If god had promised them the land,
why slaughter thousands of people?
The Queen of Sheba wrote a love poem to Solomon, an ancestor
of Jesus who had 800 wives, stating she is "black and comely"
or beautiful (Song of Solomon 1:5). Sheba entreats Solomon to
"lie all night between my breasts" (Song of Solomon
1:13), later she plays Monica Lewinsky, reporting that "his
fruit was sweet to my taste" during oral sex (Song of Solomon
2:3). Faithful believers in the bible are told to kill witches
(Exodus 22:18), make blood sacrifices (Leviticus 1:1-17 &
8:14-30), not eat pork or rabbit (Leviticus 11:6-7), cut the foreskin
off each male's penis (Genesis 17:10-12), and take life for life,
eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning
for burning, wound for wound and stripe for stripe (whipping)
(Exodus 21:23-25). Oh, and by the way, "Thou shalt not kill"
(Exodus 20:13).
God was also pretty harsh with homosexuals. When three men
came to visit Lot in the town of Sodom, the house was surround
by a crowd of men demanding to "know" (have sex with)
them (Genesis 19:4-5). Lot offered to give the mob of rapists
his two virgin daughters, but they refused and tried to break
down the door to get to the men (Genesis 19:6-11). God then destroyed
Sodom and the town next door (Gomorrah) with a fireball, killing
hundreds of innocent men, women and children, to make sure he
destroyed the men who tried to commit sodomy in Sodom (Genesis
19:24). God even turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt because
she had the nerve to watch him do it (Genesis 19:25-26).
Christians like to say that Jesus came to soften all that
Old Testament stuff, but he was one cold dude. Jesus ordered his
disciples not to spread the gospel to anyone but Jews (Matthew
10:5-6), and specifically told them not to preach to gentiles
(non-Jews). Every Christian on earth is worshiping a man who refused
to speak to them, much less save them, since they are not Jews.
When a non-Jewish woman begged Jesus to heal her daughter, who
was "vexed with a devil" (mental illness?), Jesus refused
to speak to her (Matthew 15:22-23). When she continued to beg,
the disciples wanted to send her away; Jesus repeated that he
had only come to the Jews (Matthew 15:24). She still wouldn't
stop begging so Jesus called her a dog "It is not meet (good)
to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs" (Matthew
15:26). He only healed her daughter after she said non-Jews were
like dogs who could eat crumbs that fall from the master's table
(Matthew 15:27).
Jesus was not the blonde, blue eyed wimp portrayed in movies
and artwork. The bible describes him as having white hair like
wool and feet the color of "fine brass, as if they burned
in a furnace" (Revelation 1:13-15). He was a socialist; Jesus
told his followers to sell everything they own, give the
money to the poor and follow him (Matthew 19:21 . . . by that
measure I have never met a Christian in my life). He said that
a rich man could no more get into heaven than a camel go through
the eye of a needle" (Matthew 19:23-24). Jesus didn't love
everybody; he said "I came not to send peace, but a sword
(Matthew 10:34), he came to set son against father and daughter
against mother (Matthew 10:35).
Jesus was a black man whose country had been invaded by whites
(the Romans), and he didn't react like Martin Luther King, but
rather like Malcolm X. He told his disciples that if they were
broke to sell their clothes to buy swords (Luke 22:36), when the
Romans came to arrest him, a disciple drew his sword and cut off
an ear (Luke 22:49-50). When was the last time you saw a picture
of Jesus and his posse packing swords?
The Romans tried to execute Jesus for wanting to be "King
of the Jews", in other words, trying to run the Romans out
of Palestine and take over as king, not for being the "son
of god" (Luke 23:38). The Romans reserved crucifixion for
for political prisoners (see the movie Spartacus); it was more
torture than execution. People would hang suffering for three
to four days until they died of exposure, nailed to an X-shaped,
not T-shaped cross.The Roman Catholic Church thought the spread-legged
position too lewd when Romans later began to worship the man they
had tried to kill, so they changed the shape of the cross to a
T-shape in religious pictures.
Jesus was taken off the cross after only nine hours (Luke
23:44-45). One theory says his friends drugged the sponge he drank
from on the cross with belladonna to make him appear dead (Mark
15:36-37), but no one can prove that. Jesus recovered somewhat
and was seen a few days later by hundreds of people hobbling around
with holes in his ankles and hands, supposedly "risen from
the dead".
Medicine was so primitive 2000 years ago and people were so
superstitious that Jesus got away with claiming to have died.
He could not have foreseen that his deception would cost millions
of people their lives over the next twenty centuries. Europeans
worshiping Jesus as the "Son of God" conquered, murdered
and enslaved millions of black, yellow, brown and white non-Christians
with the blessing of their god, shouting everything from "Death
to the barbarians!" to "Destroy the Infidels" to
"Enslave the savages" to "Manifest Destiny"
to "Kill a Commie for Christ!"
Black victims of this onslaught of burning crosses now donate
billions of dollars annually to con men who pray to the same black-painted-white
messiah with more enthusiasm than whites do. It's time black people
drop the superstitious dogma and take our destiny into our own
hands.
This is the "short" version of my take on religion,
but I've bored you long enough. What do you think about all this?
Drop me a line at the Afrique Mail Box . . .
Married In Heaven
On the night before her wedding, a bride and her husband-to-be
die in a car accident. She the couple find themselves sitting
outside the Pearly Gates waiting for St. Peter to process them
into Heaven. While waiting, they begin to wonder: Could they
possibly get married in Heaven? When St. Peter shows up, they
asked him. St. Peter says, "I don't know. This is the first
time anyone has asked. Let me find out," and he leaves.
The couple sat and waited for an answer. . .
. . .for a couple of months.
While they waited, they wondered whether IF they were allowed
to get married in Heaven, SHOULD they get married?
"What if it doesn't work?" they wondered, "Are
we stuck together FOREVER?"
After yet another month, St. Peter finally returns, looking somewhat
bedraggled. "Yes," he informs the couple, "you
CAN get married in Heaven."
"Great!" said the couple, "But we were just wondering,
what if things don't work out? Could we also get a divorce in
Heaven?"
St. Peter, red-faced with anger, slams his clipboard onto the
ground.
"What's wrong?" asked the frightened couple.
"OH, COME ON!!" St. Peter shouts, "It took me
three months to find a priest up here! Do you have ANY idea how
long it'll take me to find a lawyer?
Give us your thoughts on religion . . . stop by the Afrique Mail Box and drop us a line!
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