All right you Christians, I've had it. If I hear one more of you right wingers whine about how intolerant society is of Christianity, I'm going to have an aneurysm. You claim that society is against you? Bullshit. That's right wing propaganda and nothing else. You've got Christmas and Easter crap blaring on all frequencies for three months out of the year, what the hell else do you want?
The reason you people piss me off so much is because I know exactly what you want. You want a monoculture. You want Christianity to be the only religion followed throughout the world. You want all of the prohibitions you choose to obey in the Bible to be obeyed by everyone else, too. Basically, you want all of us to return to the Middle Ages.
Well I'm not going. See, unlike many agnostics, atheists, and Christians, I've actually read the Bible. I've even studied it. At first, I just wanted to know where you all were coming from. Now, I study it to find the multitude of logical weaknesses, outright falsehoods, and disturbing anecdotes. I study it because I realized somewhere along the line that organized religions in general, and the various branches of Christianity in particular, are my enemy and are the enemy of rationalism. I know your weaknesses.
I'm a biologist, which means that you don't even want to get me going on the so-called debate about evolution. It also means that I'm heavily invested in a particular worldview we like to call secular humanism. Secular humanism's view on religion is that they're all pretty much equal, except to their practitioners, and all founded on untestable hypotheses. We know very well that you can't argue about whether Genesis is the truth or not. The argument itself makes no sense, because the story can clearly be taken as allegory. So for the past sixty odd years, we've kept pretty quiet, out of the way. We've dealt with things that can be proven, and have kept out of the field of name-calling.
No more, suckers. Next time some nice man comes knocking at my door to convert me, I'm going to convert him. I'm going to calmly and rationally explain why his religion is a load of crap. Every chance I get in life, I am going to preach the truth. Not the truth as written in some ancient ass old book, but the truth as can be verified by careful experimentation. And let me tell you Christians something. I'm devoted to the cause.
Why? I figured a few things out. It doesn't really bother me that you are my enemy; everyone worth anything has at least a few enemies. What bothers me is that you and your ilk are dangerous. Don't think so? What about 9/11? Only religious belief can cause depravity on that scale. (Don't go on about the Nazis. They were Christians, for one, and for two Nazism became its own religion with its own loopy mythology. Without that core, the nuttiness would have fallen apart long before such horrors were spawned.) Or more to the point, what about the Oklahoma City bombing? Or perhaps that nice man down in Florida who thought that it was perfectly OK to shoot an abortion doctor? What about the Second Crusade?
You're all depraved and deluded. The symbol of your religion is a primitive electric chair. Doesn't that tell you anything? You worship some invisible guy who lives in the sky (but can't prove it, of course) who supposedly did a bunch of really shitty things to people like nuking Sodom and Gomorrah, flooding the entire world (yeah, right), and demanding that one of his chosen perform human sacrifice (doesn't matter that the sacrifice wasn't made, the demand was issued).
Just ask yourself, what kind of a creator would even care if you ate pork? What sort of being sets the machinery of the cosmos in motion and causes matter to become self aware on the one hand, and then proceeds to micromanage the sexual relations of particular individuals on the other? Even stranger, the being apparently feels the need for everyone to tell him what a great guy he is all the time.
Am I the only one who thinks that this God guy is maybe just a little... well... small? I mean, how petty can you get; sending your only begotten son to some piss ant corner of the Roman Empire to supposedly save all mankind? What about the Americas or Australia? Doesn't it mystify anyone that these guys never got the word? Isn't it telling that they aren't even mentioned? Just how small is this God of yours anyhow?
Your God, the supposed architect of all creation, doesn't even know how it works. Jonah, if swallowed by either a really huge fish or a whale, would have died like any other mortal man. A seed planted in the ground does not die before germinating a new plant. The world is definitely not flat. These are only a few of the amazing errors in the Bible, and don't even hit the high note, which in my opinion is the story of Noah and the Flood.
So here's the shot across your bow. I'm lurking out here. I know your weaknesses and I know your arguments. Just try sending another nice young man to my door, and I'll turn him to secular humanism. My words may take months, even years to work their magic, but they will burrow, they will harrow, and in the end, they will remain unanswerable. The poor victim's only choice will be to reject the teachings of youth out of hand and go find out about the world for himself. In other words, he will become a secular humanist.
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