Monday 18 February 2013

The Desparate Delusion, pt. I

I recently found myself reading the blog of a very serious and heavily indoctrinated Christian man no more than 25 years old.

I felt so sorry for him for having reached practically the point of no return in his absolute delusion, living in a fantasy world, entirely of his own construction, where his god and the Christian Bible - which he takes literally, although he does not say which version - are all that matters.

It pains me knowing there are still (and always will be) people so weak of spirit and mind, people whose lives are so meaningless and whose existence is so frail that they invest all their energy in what they call "having faith."

Reason, logic, and critical thinking, however - a potent triad often confusedly absent in "people of faith," especially when their "faith" is challenged -  would sooner refer to this devotion to faith as, essentially, a dissociative defense mechanism. The problem is that the activation of this defense is a gross over-reaction to what is often nothing more than the observation or knowledge of some thought or action that is so different from the person's own that it is shocking and therefore must be "bad."

A perfect example would be trans* individuals and their acceptance in modern culture. In the officially secular USA, discrimination and outright (usually church-sanctioned) hatred abounds. In India, also officially secular, the majority religion is Hinduism (80% or more of the population,) and because Hinduism has deities of ambiguous gender or sex (or species!), trans* individuals don't innately go against Hindu beliefs by simply existing!

Interestingly, the Christian Bible says nothing about sex-changes or transgender individuals at all, although at some point I believe it does prohibit male genital mutilation.

Pretty sure Islam encourages devout practitioners to cut out the clitorides of their wife/wives.

In any case, I've grappled my whole life with trying to understand why people give themselves over to ANY doctrine or philosophy. I was always terrified of it. Terrified of not being in control of my life, of letting some invisible being manipulate me and the world around me according to some ancient texts...

People turn to religion when their lives are so shitty that they have given up trying to regain control.

Thus, religion is effectively a means of dealing with depression in varying degrees of severity for people without the resources, education, or mere willpower to find another way of facing their problems and dealing with their life.

Religion is for cowards. Religious devotion, literal interpretation of texts, "having faith" - they are all simply a means of escape from the problems of the real world, a means of escaping what HUMANS do in the HUMAN world, of which the person in question is undoubtedly a part.

Religion, therefore, when taken to such extremes, is practically indistinguishable from a serious mental illness.

Think about it.

Think about all the things religion asks of you, and think of all the extremes to which people will interpret those requests. Then, think of all the instances in which people DO reach those extremes. Realize it happens every single day.

The Middle East is the way it is now for two reasons: The British Empire and Islam. It's mostly because of Islam (and subsequently Judaism,) but also because the Brits took a map of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and divided it with a ruler and pencil and pissed off the already angry Arabs in the area, since they were forced to be in the proximity of people with a different interpretation of their scriptures.

Oh no, these people think differently...better kill them for the next hundred years!

Religion is a mental illness.

Religion drives people to murder. To murder many at once. To commit genocide.

In America, we've seen some pretty awful shit lately. The mass shootings the media loves to pin on anything from "lax" gun control laws to violent video games and death metal are in fact committed by people with one thing in common: they are mentally disturbed or ill.

Religion is indistinguishable from mental illness.

Religion is a disease.

It is the most potent and deadly in world history.

Unless we as a race wake up very soon, religion will continue to destroy the world using as a weapon the very beings who created it - humans.