There are no gods - any more than there are unicorns or satyrs or compassionate conservatives. The hundred and thirty people who died yesterday in Paris will not go to heaven. There is no heaven. They're gone. There is no afterlife. Death is the cessation of existence. No, I am not being unnecessarily cruel by removing the comfort of delusion from the equation. Realism is a necessary cruelty. The spectre of a Jihadist walking up behind you in a restaurant, putting a gun against your head and blowing your brains all over your friends' faces before murdering them as well is engendered in the smug superiority of every kindly little old granny who believes herself "saved" because she chants meaningless religious phrases before bed every night.
Every time, every single fucking time, with every religious murder, every bombing, every poor fool trampled to death in Mecca, every pogrom and every war, every Gaza strip and every Golgotha, every stem-cell research project blocked, every self-hating night of sexual repression, every child beaten because he didn't say his prayers, every taboo and auto da fe, every fifty-year-old arranging himself a marriage to a twelve-year-old girl under religious law, every Hindu self-mutilating for spiritual purity, every nun murdered in exorcism and every pedophile priest, every witch-burning and suicide cult, every stoning, every mother telling her children they'll burn in Hell if they don't respect her, every individual whose personal being is ground down by the self-effacing servility of religious ritual, every single fucking time you idiotic apes just dig yourselves deeper into the apologist's trap.
It's not just a few bad apples. This is the point of religion. Christopher Hitchens earned himself such hatred for the subtitle of one of his books (How Religion Poisons Everything) that any interviews after 2007 seem to have obligatorily subjected him to the nonsense question: "surely you can't mean everything" forcing him to steel himself and for the thousandth time pre-empt such questions and re-state that yes, everything. Everything.
Blind belief poisons everything. The glorification of gullibility poisons everything. If I walked up to you on the street and told you to go buy a gun, walk into a restaurant and start shooting people, I should hope you'd at least give it a second thought. Religion is designed to make such courses of action seem favorable or even mandatory. It is brainwashing. Blind belief in the supernatural is designed to instill absolute obedience in its victims, to remove their capacity for thought by removing their consciousness from the world around them. It is a tool of social control, whether embodied in a few pennies in the collection box or a bomb strapped to your chest. Every football player raising his hands up to the sky in prayer or thanks is only reinforcing the mass delusion.
You think I'm cruel for wanting to tear people's comforting delusions away from them, cruel for demanding that you spend lonely nights feeling the weight of the universe's emptiness on your chest? Poor you. Poor baby. So sad.
At least there's another hundred or so people who'll never have to worry about it, thanks to your insistence on equal air time for idiocy.
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