Essay:Religion is Dumb Is Horrible

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Religionisforidiots' essay "Religion is Dumb" is so bad that I can almost enjoy it for how unrepentantly awful it is.

Holy shit, this is awful

Less of a pile of poo than the thing to the left

I don't know why we tolerate religion. Religion killed millions of people throughout history. And it's just so incredibly stupid! I mean, really, these people might as well believe in the tooth fairy. Can you believe that idiots like these are running the world?

Why is religion held to the sins of its past like nothing else ever is? No one ever rails against the state in these essays. The march of empires and the warring of nation-states has killed millions upon millions of people. You can even make similar analogies between them: the irrationalism of even the mildest of religion is a gateway to ever more dangerous irrationalism. Similarly, the simple act of giving some people (government/the state) power over others (citizens/residents) almost guarantees the eventual abuse of that power. Appropriately, they can even share the same counter argument: there is good government and there is bad government; there is good religion and there is bad religion. The evils committed by the state can be redressed and policies reformed to prevent their happening — so, too, with religion. Both hold the capability to evolve and transform from a perpetrator of abuse to a bulwark against it. And good government and good religion are populated by people who work very hard to keep them good. And don't give me the "but government is a necessity and religion isn't" argument. All governments' authority stem from their monopoly of force—however "necessary" that authority is, it's still fucking horrifying. So: why aren't you an anarchist?

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The president of the US is a Christian. Yeah, Christianity, remember that one that worships a dead guy nailed to a cross, that probably never existed to begin with?

There's something repulsive in how Religionsisforidiots (RIFI henceforth) twists a bald statement of a most trivial fact into having terrifying implications. It's makes me feel like I'm reading FreeRepublic. RIFI wouldn't cite this banal fact if he didn't believe that the President of the United States shouldn't be a Christian, and more to the point, that there should be some way of preventing it from happening. The implication is that there should be some sort of way to restrict even nominally religious people from holding office. Ah, the technocratic impulse — only "qualified" people should hold authority. Unfortunately, tests to exclude people from the political process are always a terrible idea. Should we give our damnedest to get good, smart people into office? Absolutely. But systematically excluding the majority of the population merely exchanges the tyranny of the majority for the tyranny of a minority. Additionally, how would we even enforce this test? Would we simply take someone's word for it that they don't believe in God? Or would we have a department dedicated to scrutinizing their every action? Have people follow prospective candidates around, checking for surreptitious prayer rugs, counting the number of times they use Biblical metaphors. "We're sorry, sir, but we found a cross under your bed. You're not allowed to vote any more." Well, count me in! I always wanted to live in an oppressive totalitarian state! (Naturally, my new atheist overlords must be allotted more apples than any religionist, in order to feed their much-more-rational brains.) (The counterargument is that there already is a religious test for office, albeit an unofficial one (atheists and Muslims are rarely elected to office in the U.S.). But reversing it and making it official and enforceable would make it worse. And the pool of viable candidates would be ridiculously tiny, since I imagine that the number of people out there whom perfectly align with RIFI's preferred set of beliefs drops to zero once you count RIFI.)

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Then you have the murderous rampages they went on to coerce people into becoming zombies like them.

Religious people are zombies? All of them? Last I checked, the vast majority of people in history have been religious to some degree or other. Was every one of them metaphorically lobotomized? Shit, I need to get in my time machine and tell Isacc Newton that, if only he'd been an atheist, he could've discovered general relativity, too! And the Bedouin that, once they convert to atheism, they'll have more time than ever to herd their goats! Unless RIFI says "zombies" to mean "people I don't like." If that's the case, GET AWAY FROM ME YOU ZOMBIE.

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Although, everybody they killed was either a pagan or an Islamist, so maybe there isn't too much mourning to do.

Godwin alert: Hitler was only evil for killing communists, homosexuals, and the handicapped. But the 6 million Jews? He did the planet a favor. Every one of them, after all, was a "ticking time bomb" — a follower of a religion. When the Nazis put Jews in work camps, and did everything in their power to strip them of their identity, the real crime was that he didn't re-educate them with atheism. When the Nazi's stripped them of their every possession, down to the metal in their teeth, the real crime was that they didn't redistribute it to atheists, who presumably would've used those possessions much more rationally. Villains are heroes and heroes are villains. The darkest, filthiest, most inhuman of crimes — genocide — is ennobling and admirable. Religionisforidiots goes to sleep at night dreaming of piles of human bodies, wishing they were bigger.

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And don't get me started on the Muslims (oops, too late)! They worship some scraggly pedophile that turned a bunch of primitives into a death machine that swept all across the world. These people will kill anyone for no reason at all. Are you a woman? That's grounds for murder in Islam. Don't believe in Islamism? That's grounds for murder in Islam. Don't want to get raped? Murder. Got raped? Murder. Won't grow a beard? Murder. I don't know if there are too many Muslamists with alopecia out there. And yet, we let these fanatics prowl the streets, raping anybody they can get away with. We let them slowly invade our countries, proliferating like rats feeding off the fruit of OUR civilization. Don't come crying to me if in ten years our all-Muslim parliament implements Sharia law. I told you so.

I'm going to ignore the repugnant strawman RIFI builds and instead focus on the line that most amused me. I think it's hilarious that RIFI freely blends his very anti-theist argument "everyone in Islam is murdering and raping 24/7" with the starkly insane conservative "creeping Sharia" meme. It's like seeing an atheist carry a cross to ward off vampires. (A question for RIFI: If you murder Congressperson Keith Ellison, is that an appropriate vigilante action? I mean, I can only imagine the number of people he's killed and raped at this point, just by being Muslim.)

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Religion should seriously be illegal. It's nonsense. There's no proof for any of it. It's not falsifiable. It doesn't follow methodological naturalism. Anything that disproves their stupid beliefs (and let's face it, that's everything) they ignore, because FAITH!!! And then they keep trying to mess with you for not being a part of their religion.

I agree with everything not in green. As for the green parts, sweet Jesus, mother of fucktards. I already touched on the infeasibility of just administering an anti-theist test for office, but this is simply jaw-dropping. How do you ban religion? How would you invade every single person's home, and take away their private, religious, possessions? How would you even determine what is religious and what is not? That's just for starters. I'm gobsmacked that you managed to take the moral and logistical nightmare that is barring freedom of association and make it a hundred times worse. And how would you stop future generations of religious people? There aren't nearly enough atheists to care for all, or even most, of the children of religious parents in the U.S. So, do we forcibly abort all their unborn, just to make it easier? Stuff the remaining millions in state-run homes, to be left to all the consequences — higher suicide rates, higher drug abuse rates, higher sexual abuse rates, higher violent crimes rates, and the socioeconomic sledgehammer that is not having a goddamn family — that comes from being a ward of the state? To say nothing of the parents' anguish at being stripped of their children (though RIFI probably sees this as a benefit rather than a crime). All I can really say now is that RIFI is an utter failure of a human being. He is missing so many parts — empathy, a willingness to learn, a brain not made of silicon— before he can begin to even try and be a good person.

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And I don't pretend that there are "moderates," either. Even the most "liberal" Muslim is a ticking time-bomb of radicalism. That's because once you accept the fairy tales of religion, what won't you accept? It's a gateway effect. And it's not just Christians and Muslims that are the problem. They all are. Hello, deists, have you heard of such a thing as falsifiability? Never heard of a Sikh terrorist? Google it. And Shintoism? A glorified warrior cult.

This is my favorite line in this essay. Please see the above section about the benefits of the Holocaust.

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Religion is a cancer on our society. Unfortunately. we can't get rid of it just yet. But in the meanwhile, we can keep shouting down those dolts. We can mock them at every passing. We can protest their events. Slowly, we can erode their "faith." Eventually, we will live in an idealistic society that is completely secular. Science will reign supreme, and we won't have to worry about fundies whining anymore. We will explore the stars and discover the secrets of the universe.

Science will reign supreme, and we will be free to continue raping, killing, and warring for completely secular reasons. With Religionisforidiots' robot brain as U.S. President, of course.