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Theocracy? No Thanks
Petition to the gods
Blinding Faith
Sacrifice
Fitna, Geert Wilders and the Death of European Freedom
Islam is NOT a Race
Doing it for Your Community
Jealous God
I'd Rather be a Bright than a Dhimmi
The Jewish Question
Lebanese Atheist
The Language of Indoctrination
Shameful Language
Atheist Names
Being Humanist
The World English Foundation Female Circumcision
Religion's Dirtiest Tricks
Suicide attempts in perspective
We Are All One Family
Islam is NOT a Race
Petition to the gods
Islamophobia
Is there any trick that religion will not stoop to in order to spread its tentacles over all of your life?
Religion tries to steal:-
Morality
Law
Patriotism
The family
Motherhood
Procreation
Sex
Love
Music
Beauty
Innocence
Education
Nature
Science
Euphoria
Art
Hard work
The day of rest
There isn't a single human virtue that the religious have not at times
claimed as their own. The ultimate betrayal of course came when Kiss
declared that God Gave Rock and Roll to You. The bastards. Isn't
mankind able to claim anything as its own? 
All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
all things wise and wonderful
The Lord God made them all
So what about AIDS, earthquakes, rats, the plague, cancer, overpopulation, desertification, malaria and Darwin's favourite the genus Ichneumonidae, wasps which can only propagate by laying their eggs inside the flesh of paralysed caterpillars so their grubs consume the flesh of the still living host from the inside. There is plenty in this world that any creator god would do well to disassociate himself from, and of course his apologists do just that. God is the god of the good stuff, some Christian nut-jobs even make out that all animals were herbivores before Adam and Eve screwed things up. One mistake and he holds it against the whole world for ever. What kind of a god is that? If a child acted as petulantly as that they would be sent to their room for the rest of the day. If my children disobey my instructions I can get over it because I'm big enough, grown up enough and I love them. Of course I don't like my good advice to be ignored but I can get over my own anger. What's God's excuse? Perhaps it's like the thing with the big rock, his infinite rage is powerful enough that he can create a mood so foul he can't get over it even with all the time in the world. What a wuss.
Religion wraps itself around morality like an unpopular president wraps himself around the stars and stripes, for protection and in the hope that the respect people have for the worthy one will rub off on the other. Human decency is not an exclusive province of the religious, and one of the best illustrations of this comes from the Bible, the parable (made up story) of the Good Samaritan. Whatever the motives of the Good Samaritan were you can be sure they were not Christian charity! Decency and morality are human, not divine. I have far more respect for those people who do the right thing because it is the right thing than I have for the leper-kissing arseholes who think they are buying a place in heaven by obeying instructions they show no desire to understand.
This morning I heard a report on the BBC news which featured an interview with an Iraqi working for the army. We clearly heard the man start his statement with the Arabic for praise be to God or thanks to God and yet the translation didn't mention this, no doubt because the interpreter is so used to it that he doesn't even register the fact that the words have been said. Such phrases are the equivalent of clearing the throat (insert joke about all middle Eastern languages sounding as though they are forever clearing their throats). Yesterday I helped a bloke in another shop within the same building I was working in, he was struggling to do something on his own which was made much easier by my casually helping him picking up things he dropped to save him the hassle of getting down from the chair he was stood on. After a few minutes of struggling he was finished. "Thank God's that's done" he said. I considered the possibility of telling him that he had done it all himself apart from a little help from a man who had been an atheist for three decades but I thought better of it. No doubt he wasn't aware of the theological connotation of the words he was saying. That's my point, religion has insinuated itself into everything because the religious make it their business to thrust their beliefs into everything.
One great thing you can say about Christianity is that it doesn't get involved in your toilet habits. Islam on the other hand does. You have to think about Allah when you take a dump, making sure you don't aim it at Mecca or use the wrong hand to wipe your arse. And when I say hand that's what I mean. 6th century Arabia did not have toilet paper and so the advice on toilet drill reads rather like the Boy Scout salute: left hand, two fingers, three if required.
Christianity makes up for the lack of OCD on the toilet front in other ways. The Catholic Church made hundreds of saints and feasts and celebrations, fasts and restrictions. The most infamous restriction was the banning of eating meat on a Friday. At one time there were so many times of the year and days of the week that Catholics were told not to eat meat that a trade in meat substitutes arose. This wasn't a forerunner of the Linda McCartney sausage but a list of stuff that tasted like meat but was classed by the Church as fish, such as porpoise meat and foetal rabbits. Before they are born rabbits live in fluid, so obviously Jesus regards them as fish!
It is difficult to picture just how heavily steeped in religion life was like back in the Middle Ages, unless of course you are Muslim, because for you it still is. Religion gets in the way of everything and seriously cramps your style, as no doubt an Iranian women's Olympic synchronized diving team would find out. Scientific and engineering progress in Europe took a millennium off to go and pray to Jesus and argue how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. What else was a university education for? If European civilization had continued on the trajectory it was on in pagan Rome we would be hundreds of years in advance of where we are today in material terms.
I have no doubt that we would also have advanced in terms of morality too. It was after all Rome which gave monogamy to Jews and Christians as any reading of Paul's first letter to Timothy will show. Paul (or whoever wrote the letter) needed to stress that Bishops and Deacons would have only the one wife because he didn't want the Christians looking uncivilized compared to the Romans who had long seen the advantages of monogamy and it was clearly not something which was regarded as obvious or compulsory among Christians as a whole. The advantages of monogamy are that it civilizes more men as with a ban on having multiple wives more men, and by definition that means the poorer and less privileged men, get the advantage of having a wife at all. Polygamy is almost always in practice polygyny, multiple wives for a single rich, powerful and older husband. Younger, poorer and more disadvantaged men end up without wives at all. Men without wives are a threat to any society as they are much more likely to go drinking, gambling, fighting, whoring and stirring up trouble or being stirred up to cause trouble than married men. Forbidding polygamy makes more men into stakeholders in the community, economy and society. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man not in possession of a good wife, must be in want of a fight.
Religions are always trying to make the world swallow the lie that all morality comes from faith in their gods or obedience to their laws. This is nonsense. Jesus and St Paul were quite clear about the duties that slave owners owed to their slaves, and that did not include the duty to free them, even if they were Christians. Wherever the desire to free slaves came from it was not the Bible. Similarly the words of Jesus and St Paul give no indication that women are to be afforded equal rights. There is also nothing in the words of Paul or Jesus about the virtues of a republic or democracy or a classless society. Jesus is silent about the dangers of imperialism or the intolerance of homosexuals. Jesus does not utter a single word to condemn polygamy or racism. Neither does he condemn socialism, communism, fascism, monarchism, aristocracy, the Roman occupation of Judea or even (directly and explicitly) the Roman Emperors' claims to divinity.
Both Jesus and Paul do seem to condemn a desire for riches and material gain. Paul insists that Bishops and Deacons of the church are not money-grubbers while Jesus was perfectly happy for small birds to be killed in the temple to appease his father's wrath he objected to people selling them there. Superstitious ritual sacrifice of innocent animals good, free enterprise and profit evil. Of course Jesus also clearly states that anybody who is rich stands a very small chance of ever getting into heaven, all attempts to interpret
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. — Matthew 19:24
as being anything other than a clear condemnation of a money-centred life stink. People who can look America in the camera lens and ask for money so that they can pray to make people rich in the name of Jesus are the lowest kind of vermin known to man.
The most heinous of the crimes of religion are those which appropriate the good things of life and mark them all with the stain of superstition. There is an excellent series of videos on YouTube by VictimlessCriminal called Religion is the Great Hijacker which deals with these particularly nasty tricks. Of them all the one that has made me most angry has been the hijacking of spirituality. So thorough has the message been that I have fallen for it myself, so part of the anger I feel is towards my own stupidity. Why have I been blind to this for so long? How much of life's riches have I denied myself because they have made me deny part of who I am? I don't know if there are words strong enough to express my anger, frustration and bitterness. The religious are so very keen to hang onto the best bits of life and make them their own and to claim that nobody can have them without religion because they want to make all human pleasures into toll-gates. The religious are seeking to extract a psychological tax on every human pleasure and virtue while declaring that those without their faith (or sometimes those without any acceptable faith) are machines or brutes or driven by low and evil forces.
Thinking about this reminds me strongly of the Freudian concept of the superego, ego and id. The religious are seeking to appropriate to their faith and their god all aspects of the superego, all the drives to do better, morality and decency and spirituality. Also they associate not believing in their superstitions with being evil, that is being driven entirely by the id, the nasty primitive angry hedonist. They have a world view in which everybody is driven by characters in their mythology, demons, Satan, angels, the voice of Christ, the Will of Allah or whatever. Human nature of ego, superego and id is transformed into a struggle between good and evil both on an internal and external level. We need to tell them that they are wrong and that atheists have just as much a right to have a functional superego as a man who prays to Mecca five times per day or tithes to the Westboro Baptist Church.
Being moral, decent and even spiritual is not the monopoly of the religious. The word spiritual is obviously problematic because it implies the existence of spirits but we should not let that trouble us any more than we are troubled by the notion that the words melancholic, phlegmatic, bile and even humorous imply that we subscribe to the outdated concepts of the personality being determined by the balance of humours. Our language is full of fossil words which if taken too literally would cause us to be apologizing to people all day long if we were concerned that by using them other people got the wrong impression about the way our minds work. Spirituality is just another word with a dodgy root, like creature or holiday, using the word does not imply that we share the world view of the people who first started using it. I have been denying my spiritual side, even denying that the word had any meaning, for far too long.
We need to stop being defensive about using words such as spirituality which chime in with outdated concepts that we have left behind. Christians don't turn a hair when people use the terms jovial and saturnine, they don't see that as endorsing the divinity of the Roman gods. Neither do the vast majority of Christians flinch at words such as Bacchanalian (from the Greek god Bacchus), January (from the Roman god Janus) or Thursday (from the Norse god Thor).
It is long past time that we atheists demanded the right to be spiritual and moral. The religious can no more stop us being spiritual and moral than they can say we can't join in the celebrations of Christmas or take time off from work each week, even if that is on a Sunday. Religion does not own morality, spirituality, decency, procreation, joy with nature or family values. Don't let any religious people tell you that you have to be an amoral hedonistic nihilist who never takes a day off because you don't believe in their fairy tales. You have just as much a right to be decent as any member of our species.
The religious have a clear vested interest in claiming all the good aspects of humanity and making out that they own them. There is no reason why we have to allow them to define what we are. I am an atheist, I do not believe in any gods or spirits but I can still be spiritual just as I can be humorous without me having to believe in either spirits or the personality defining characteristics of phlegm, blood and yellow and black bile.
I really could kick myself quite hard for being so stupid and allowing other people to define what I am. At least my problems on this account are relatively modest. Many atheists have taken the description, definition and stereotype of atheist from the Christian perspective and have been telling themselves that they can't get married or be faithful heterosexuals or raise children or be pleasant people to know or refrain from overindulgence because being atheists that's what they have to do. Please, if you are an atheist be aware that there are no rules in atheism at all. If you start to believe in a god or gods then you cease to be an atheist but apart from that there is total freedom within atheism and nobody can tell you that you're doing it wrong, least of all theists. That is not to say that you can be as nasty as you want to be, quite the opposite, you can be just as moral and decent and spiritual as you want to be.
How dare they tell us what to be? How dare they tell us to be what they want to condemn? It is totally outrageous that any atheist should be told that obeying the law, not breaking rules, admiring a sunset, getting married, being faithful or even being straight is somehow “unatheist”. Of course it would be so much simpler for the religious if all atheists had the morals of Captain Jack Sparrow, the sexual selectivity of Captain Jack Harkness, the charity of Jack Benny and the personal hygiene of Father Jack Hackett. They want us to be bad and sad. They want us to be unfulfilled. They want us to be empty. They want us to convert, or failing that at least be a bad example that they can point at. Don't give them that satisfaction. Listen to your own superego. Refine your own sense of morals. Make your own purpose and find satisfaction in your life, even if it is just to spite them. The sanctimonious superstitious slimeballs.