Thou Shalt Not Kill (Unless You Do It In My Name)

Religion, religion, religion.
My god is the real god and your god is the fake god and if you make fun of my god I will kill you or someone who is the same race or ethnicity or from the same country as you. This will prove that my god is the real god and your god is the fake god and that I serve the real god and you serve the fake god and you're dead. Or someone who vaguely represents you and/or your god.

Get it?

See- this is what I think- if there were a real god at all, he or she would just slay the offender and that would be that. Well, not really. I think if there were a real god, he or she would simply ignore bullshit like someone trashing his or her reputation and try to do something about the obvious huge defects in his or her creation of human beings.

But that doesn't happen now, does it?

And it's so easy to say that these people are RELIGIOUS FANATICS! and that my church, my religion- oh, we're all about peace and the love of god and we're nothing like those crazy people who kill in the name of their CRAZY RELIGION or burn the Koran or call homosexuals faggots and tell them they're going to burn in hell or tell the government that forcing an insurance company to provide women with birth control is in all actuality an insult to their religion or believe that when you die you get your own planet and many wives or believe that you can pay money to become more enlightened through something called auditing or THAT IF A MINISTER OR PRIEST SPRINKLES YOU WITH WATER OR SUBMERGES YOU IN WATER AND RECITES CERTAIN SACRED WORDS YOU WILL BE FOREVER SAVED THROUGHOUT ETERNITY NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO IN YOUR ACTUAL LIFE or that a god did indeed create the entire universe in six days or that Noah just didn't get around to saving the dinosaurs or that a woman who is raped brings dishonor onto her family so that she must be stoned to death or that....

It never ends.
The crap that religions try to get people to believe and that people DO believe in the name of their religions- it never, ever ends.

Here's what Bill Maher said in an article a few weeks ago that keeps ringing in my ears:

"Evangelicals might like to pretend that the magical thinking that they indulge in at home doesn't affect what they do at the office, but it absolutely does. The brain that believes in angels and miracles and Jesus riding a dinosaur is trained to see the world not as it is, but as you want it to be."

He's right. He's absolutely right. 
And yes, I know that a lot of churches do really fine things. They open and run soup kitchens. They provide homeless people with shelters. They go to third world countries and help build houses. They provide counseling services for the families of prisoners. The list goes on and on and on but my belief is that the people who do these actual good deeds would do them anyway because some people are just wired to be helpful, loving people and that doing these things in the name of a god is as ridiculous as your Aunt Sadie sending a donation in your name to her favorite charity as a Christmas present for you.

Okay. I'm getting off the track. 

My point is this- we know too damn much to believe in wine-turning-to-blood or bread-turning-to-flesh and we know too damn much to believe that one man could die for the sins of all humans if they simply believe in him and we know too damn much to think that the world was created in six days and we know too damn much to believe that spilling blood in the name of a god is going to do one damn thing for humanity and we know too damn much to believe any of the religious myths and no we don't know everything but we have these BRAINS, see, so that maybe one day will be able to figure out more and more stuff and maybe eventually, they'll even be able to figure out how to control our strange blood-lust impulses. Although I sort of doubt that. They'll figure out how to get to Mars in time to get a table for dinner before they figure that one out.

So meanwhile, yes, some RELIGIOUS FANATICS are killing Americans overseas because of some stupid film that someone made which makes fun of Muhammed and we can just throw the blame at the fanaticism meanwhile ignoring the whole religious part of it while the Pope can still tell women that if they use birth control they're going to go to hell and your local legislator can make laws based on his or her own personal relationship with his or her own personal god and they are going to affect me and they are going to affect you and meanwhile, the planet is burning up, our personal freedoms which involve our own personal beliefs and bodies are being chipped away at, and that's all okay because our religious beliefs are NOT FANATICAL, just regular true beliefs. 

Religious beliefs. Which some of us (gasp! the horror!) do not happen to share. 

I don't call myself an atheist. I don't know if there's a force, an energy, a...whatever...that powers the universe which could, in fact, be defined as God. I don't know! I just know that myths are myths and I don't think I could possibly bring myself to base my entire life on them nor do I think that governments should base their laws on them either and I don't think that science should be restricted by them in any way. 

And I also think that doing evil in the name of some god is still evil whether that evil is outright slaughter or whether that evil is forcing a desperate young woman to get an illegal abortion that might lead to her death or telling a gay kid that god hates them. (Check out the statistics for suicide attempts for LGBT youth versus straight kids.) 

Okay. Enough. I could write volumes about so-called Christians who show absolutely no signs of the compassion that their savior talked about. I could go on for days about how the Bible (the one religious book I really know anything about) is misquoted, misused and has been rewritten over the ages. By men. With agendas. 
Or how so many have used their standing in a religion as a representative of their god to abuse children and then been protected by the hierarchies of those religions. 

And so forth.

But I'm just riled right now about the most recent acts being done in the name of a god and so there you go. I'm saddened and sickened and sorry that we humans keep thinking that substituting religion for grace and compassion and love and sense and enlightenment is in any way a good idea.

And if your own personal religious faith brings you great joy and comfort and is a good part of your life, I say fine. Life is difficult and the mysteries are many. 
Just keep it out of the laboratories, the law-making establishments, and my life.

Thanks. 

Yours truly...Ms. Moon