The titular question showed up from an anonymous source in my private blog, shortly after I wrote a very in offensive post about how religion perforated our language; and I’ll preface this all by saying, wow, this is the broadest of questions to me, and since I hardly knew where to start, and wound up […]
So, here I was watching four straight season of classic 90’s sci-fi titan The X-Files on Netflix, because why not, when I came across an episode in which Scully proclaimed herself to be a faithful catholic, and even ended the episode attending church. Now, that annoyed me quite a lot, and this post is about to get super boring while I explain why.
The following is a genuine recounting of a part of the Norse Mythology. There exists a poem called Lokasenna in which Loki (you know, the super sexy Tom Hiddleston from the Marvel franchise one) is hanging out and having a few drinks with some of the Æsir (gods), but is kicked out after inexplicably murdering a waiter that they were all being really nice to. After a little time away, presumably stewing in anger, Loki returned to throw down the gauntlet and show the gods some serious smack talk. All I can say is god damn, this would have livened up The Avengers movie.
What follows is a genuine account of the resulting quarrel.
Religion has been a primary catalyst of war, genocide, murder, rape, destruction, oppression, segregation, and a million other overlapping offences during its reign over the human race; however, all of these I can forgive of religion, for one simple reason: It’s human nature, we’d do it anyway. The four horsemen of the apocalypse aren’t fictitious, they’re simply the personification of four common atrocities that have ravaged humanity since its inception two hundred thousands years ago. No, I can forgive religion of all these monstrous offences, because it’s just the convenient excuse. If we didn’t have religion, we’d inevitably think of some other scapegoat in our efforts to maim and kill and conquer one another.
However, there is one thing that I can never and will never forgive religion for (and note that I’m talking about the entirety of fundamentalist religion as a whole here; I’m not criticising any particular pious individual), and that is the promotion of an under-appreciation of the world around us; because to try and deny, forbid and oppress an understanding of the process of natural selection and evolution is throwing a tarp over the greatest masterpiece ever conceived. Continue reading
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She questioned how I was so unable to see the ‘evidence of god’ all around me. She kept using the word ‘blind’. I hadn’t started the conversation. I was polite and respectful, even though she wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against religious people in general, agree to disagree; but this girl was […]
“Aliens are real. There really was an alien crash landing in 1947 near the Roswell Army Air Field, and the United States Government really did cover it up.”
These are the claims that were recently being made by a former CIA operative named Chase Brandon; claims which are of course, entirely fictional. He asserted that he came across secret documents and photographs in a oddly placed cardboard box during a visit to a public CIA library. The infamous Roswell Incident that he is speaking off has long ago been debunked as the recovery of a Mogul balloon, and putting aside the menagerie of pop-culture traditions; sci-fi movies, conspiracy theories, and other such nonsense, the case is relatively closed.
So what on Earth (and I assure you, it is on Earth), made him come forward with these outlandish claims?
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Unlike where I grew up, which had a decent(ish) mixture of races and cultures, the place I currently live is quite segregated; and as such, a lot of the people here have quite a myopic view on the subject of middle-eastern immigration.
“They should go back where they came from.”
There’s a famous, but often mis-quoted, phrase, that states that being born an Englishman is like winning the greatest lottery in the world. We have freedoms here, and in all of the western world, that so many could scarcely imagine. In this instance, I’m not talking about the right to eat food and drink clean water that people in so many starving third world countries don’t have. I speak of the many areas of the middle-east, where families have to worry about their children being blown apart on the way to school, where they have to worry about their livelihood, be it a shop or a farm or a restaurant or whatever, being destroyed or looted by thugs and armed terrorists. The ideal that a country exists where they can go, and not have to worry about their loved ones being forcibly drafted into extremist militia, being blown apart by stray bombings or terrorist attacks, must be as near a vision of heaven on earth as they may find, and a lucky few may earn enough or fight hard enough to earn safe passage to England or America or anywhere else where such liberties are granted. Telling them to go ‘home‘ is effectively sentencing them to a life or hardship and danger, simply because they weren’t fortunate enough to be born where you were.
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Herein lies a post where I once again dissect, analyse, and let’s face it, mock the shit out of The Bible. If this doesn’t sound like your kind of post, then perhaps you should pop off to church instead… and don’t forget the blindfold and the earplugs!
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Being the pedantic arse that I am, I’m going to ask a few (presumably unanswerable) questions about the Islamic heaven, historically referred to as ‘Jannah‘. We all know a few of the key elements of this paradise, 72 virgins, giant palaces for everyone, rivers of milk and honey, and so on, and as I read into the writings on the subject, there were a few things I found somewhat unusual. So, here we go…
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So here’s something that caught my eye. For my American followers, this is the story of a young football (soccer) player named Fabrice Muamba, who had a heart attack on the pitch a few days ago, but is now recovering well. A friend of mine, Charlie, pointed something out to me after seeing this story, and it struck me as decidedly odd. So, Muamba claims that god helped him to get better after his heart attack… But surely this was after god gave a healthy, young, fit athlete a heart attack in the first place.
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