Religion

What can I really say about religion? I could just have said “it’s all bollocks” and then posted it, but that would be unfair. Instead I’m going to briefly talk about why it’s bollocks and hopefully that will be enough. Also note that I refuse to use capital letters for ‘god’ or the words ‘he’ and ‘him’ when talking about the made-up deity.

There are estimated to be roughly 4,200 different religions in the world. This means that even if there is a god of some sort (which there isn’t) that 4,199 of them are wrong.

Each religion has its own book - a storybook, if you will - and believers live their lives according to the “rules” within it. Why would any sane person do that? Imagine if you were a huge fan of the works of Dr Seuss and decided to follow his instruction. Your weekly shop would consist of about 50 eggs, 7 packets of ham and a bottle of green food dye and you would be obsessed with feline headwear. People would think you were a mental, and they’d probably be right.

There are special buildings where these people can go to worship their imaginary man in the sky, but only at set times. It’s good of them to inform the rest of us that this is going on with a twenty minute stint of tuneless bell-ringing before and after they’ve sung for the aforementioned fictional chap.

Inside these buildings, a man wearing a dress will read from the storybook. Perhaps he will talk about how the imaginary bearded man created everything. By himself. How is that even possible? He’d need plans, permits, scaffolding, a team of labourers, and where did all the money come from? There would have been no funding available. It just doesn’t add up and of course any evidence that pre-dates this story was all put there by him as a joke. The world is 2014 years old, apparently.

If that’s not enough, there’s the potential to hear about a man walking up a mountain and coming down with some big rocks with stuff written on them. “You just made these yourself, didn’t you?” asked nobody. “Hey, let’s live our lives by what’s written on them,” chirped someone else. Sounds legit.

Science is religion’s enemy and trips into space proved that there is no god sitting in the clouds watching over us. This just meant that the goalposts had to be moved. “Heaven isn’t where we thought it was,” someone very important said. Not even a suggestion that it doesn’t actually exist or a suggestion of where it was now believed to be.

Remember when there was to be a new pope? People gathered outside and the world’s news channels gave it seemingly endless coverage. “Everyone” was so excited, they said. Not me and not millions of others. There wasn’t this kind of coverage when my local Starbucks was recruiting a new manager and that was perhaps more significant. There is still an assumption that the majority are religious and I don’t think it’s true.

I’m pretty sure no religious book demands fighting non-believers in a physical sense, so different religious groups facing off against each other, shouting things like “my storybook is better than your storybook” and “your god isn’t real” and then bombing each other for centuries doesn’t really make sense either. It’s not like someone said something worthy of starting a war, such as “Short Circuit 2 is an often overlooked cinematic masterpiece”.

Everyone is entitled to believe what they want, such is the supposed nature of the free world, but religion makes no sense at all. It is full of speculation, contradiction and downright lies. Allegations of abuse and the long refusal to allow women to be involved at a high level drew much criticism, but yet people still hang on to their faith.

If there are enough gullible people, maybe I can start my own religion. Is there any money in it?