On Pope Francis "Excommunicating" Members of the Mafia

Yeah, like the Catholic Church has any moral authority. Any person with a shred of dignity or the merest semblance of a conscience long ago severed all ties to that despicable organization when we discovered they were sheltering an army of child rapists. The Church of Rome makes the Mafia look like the Girl Scouts.

"Excommunicated." Fuck you. "Because ours is the only true religion, you are now eternally damned unless you repent," that's what excommunicated means. What gives any man the right to say that or assume his authority is derived from the creator of the universe if there is one?

This is where that hypocrisy I was talking about comes in. Everyone is hailing Pope Francis as this wonderful person. He may have done some good things for the poor in South America, but so did dozens of charitable organizations, and they didn't have to proselytize in order to help the poor the way the church does.

I don't care how much love you have, how many charitable deeds you've done, how fatherly you look and behave, or any number of other things. If you belong to an organization that preaches the sinfulness of condom use, that kept people like Cardinal Bernard Law from facing Justice by hiding him in the Vatican, and that offers assistance with the caveat that you accept their faith; I'm sorry, you have no moral authority whatsoever. In fact, you symbolize the epitome of immorality, hypocrisy, and the propagation of hatred. If Francis had a conscience, he would have left the church decades ago and helped people any other way he could. But he didn't; he stayed, and still believes in all of the magic and fairy tales and that lying to children is okay.

The hypocrisy is this: The Catholic church says that it wants to reconcile with other faiths, while simultaneously holding as true the ideas that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on Earth, and that he has the power to send people to eternal damnation and hell fire. You can't have it both ways; you can't say, "sure, be a Muslim or a Hindu or Jew, by all means, but know that you're wrong and the only way to salvation is through Holy Mother Church."

Again, and I can't state this emphatically enough, Fuck - You.

Civilization, Enlightenment, and the Ever-Present Religious Lie

To not believe in the divine is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place. We have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It is not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It is hard work to climb down out of the trees, walk upright, and build a viable, global civilization when you start with technology that is made of rocks and sticks and fur. This is the largest project ever undertaken, and progress is difficult.

Just picture going back 50 generations within your own family. I don't care how cultured you are or how well-educated your family - you could be a Kennedy or a Vanderbilt - but if you go back far enough you will eventually come across someone who thinks that sacrificing their first-born child just might be a good way to control the weather.

These ideas, or what we call religion, have been handed down from generation to generation with no real discernible difference until the dawn of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Enlightenment principles, movable type, and the translation/demystification  of the Bible from Latin into many different languages absolutely devastated the power and influence of religion in the west.

Enlightenment thinkers, hundreds of years ago now, easily spotted the absurdity of religious claims, and vehemently attacked organized religion and a theistic worldview. That an educated person today can hold that any religion is true, let alone that an all-knowing god intervenes in human affairs, is the very definition of delusional.

But religion (enforced ignorance of the masses) did not just roll over. It has continually reinvented itself in order to make itself more palatable to our modern, secular values. Why? Largely for the same reason any tyrant wishes to rule as an absolute dictator: wealth, power, and control.

You have been lied to, brainwashed, bamboozled, and - here's the kicker - this has been done to you by people who don't even realize that it has been done to them. We never get to see or hear what gets said behind closed doors at the Vatican or any other secret gathering of religious leaders. In the rare cases that we do, it is almost always a scandal of unconscionable proportions as in the case of the systemic rape of children by Catholic clergymen.

I don't doubt that many of your Rabbis, Imams, and Ministers are all convinced of their faith and believe they are doing God's work; but a lie based on ignorance is still a lie. If you go far enough up the hierarchical ladder in any faith, you will eventually come across the person or persons who know(s) that it's all bullshit, and will keep feeding it to you for as long as you are willing not to think for yourselves.

The exception to my point about religion reinventing itself in order to keep up with modernity is, of course, Islam. Islam remains the only major religion where the vast majority of its leaders and adherents still hold every word of their book to be literally true. How is anyone surprised at the violence and the barbarism and the rampant misogyny we see throughout Muslim societies? This is exactly what you would expect when you try (and often succeed) to impose 7th century values onto our modern civilization.

Faith Leads to Immorality

The theist is far more susceptible to immoral behavior than the atheist. A person who believes in a god who forgives can act any way they please knowing that they need only ask for forgiveness, and that they will be rewarded for a lifetime of immorality.

The common notion that 'if there is no God, then why should we be kind to one another?' begins with a false premise and assumes that humans are inherently evil. This is demonstrably untrue. IF there is a god, and all you have to do is believe in him, only then does someone behave as though they can either - A) Be a bad person but ask for forgiveness at the end, or - B) Be a good person who sometimes behaves immorally because they believe they are acting in a way which is pleasing to god.

The atheist, on the other hand, has to live with his/her conscience, with no thought or hope of being forgiven or rewarded in the hereafter by declaring belief in the divine. The atheist understands that he/she alone is responsible for his/her actions; there is no vicarious redemption, nor is there a fake ID stamped 'believer' which guarantees safe passage into heaven. There is nothing to fall back on, there is no safety net.

If we don't behave in a manner which reflects our innate moral compass, if we don't have compassion and human solidarity, then we have wasted the only life we have by adding to our own misery as well as to the misery of others. This is not to say that some atheists are not assholes or psychopaths or immoral, merely that lacking belief in god is not what leads them to immorality, while the reverse is often the case among theists, as explained in the first paragraph.

In sum, theists have a free pass to behave however they wish, atheists do not. Theists believe that, by virtue of their faith in god, they are axiomatically behaving morally even when they are not. Theists believe that god arbitrarily intervenes in human affairs, and often ignore societal problems which are easily corrected by saying, 'god must have wanted that to happen.' Any worldview which allows you to shirk your obligation to your fellow man is not a moral doctrine. By saying "it's in gods hands" you are complicit in the preventable, unnecessary suffering of others.

The evidence for the truth of what I have just explained is all around us, and we cannot go on letting people claim the moral high ground simply because we have erroneously allowed the suspension of reason (faith) to be considered a virtue, when it is patently obvious that faith leads to immorality.

This misconception of non-belief

Misconception: Non-belief is a choice which can be reversed by wishing hard enough. 

This is patently false. Non-believers and atheists are simply not capable of flipping a switch and all of a sudden believing in god and heaven and miracles and all the rest of it. I can't FORCE myself to believe in something which doesn't make sense and for which there is no evidence. If I said I did believe, I would be lying to you and to myself. Don't cite examples of atheists who 'found chirst'. Please. Those people had an experience which they chose to attribute to Jesus rather than to what it was, a deeply moving experience which all humans are capable of and which had nothing to do with the god of Abraham or any other quasi-historical ancient superheroes.

What's more, you don't have information which is denied to me. By now it should be obvious that I have studied religion and faith and belief at great length, and thought about these things far more in depth than many of you have. I have read and heard every conceivable argument for faith, and none of it has caused me to think, 'that's it, that's the one, I believe!' I have studied the various religions at great length, more so than many 'believers' ever will because they don't want to read or think about anything which could shatter their faith, which I think is a cowardly way to go about living if you fall into that category.

The problem with faith is that you are brought up with these preconceived notions which fly in the face of everything we know about the nature of reality. If your starting point is the supernatural rather than the natural, it will lead and has led to copious amounts of confusion and nonsensical arguments. If you begin with myth, and hold it as true (probably because of childhood indoctrination, no matter how much or how little) you arrive at a terminal point of pseudo-intellectual chaos. If, however, your starting point is reality, using reason and logic, it will eventually become clear to you why the numinous is nothing more than wishful thinking and serves no purpose.

Why Hell Is Such An Appalling Notion

I have said before that if I were forced to choose, if I had absolutely no say in the matter and had to pick an afterlife, then I would like to spend it in a sort-of star trek kind of way, traveling from star-system to star-system and throughout this and other galaxies learning about every conceivable thing. The problem with this is the conundrum which affected the Q; at some point there is nothing new left to discover. An eternity of anything would be tedious and boring eventually.

Which brings us to hell. This is a preposterous idea to tell anyone. If I told a woman that she deserved to be raped for wearing a miniskirt, and that she deserved to get aids and pregnant from the rape, I would be seen as a monster. The rape and the aids and the unwanted pregnancy would surely destroy her life and leave her miserable and eventually dead.

But that same woman can tell me that because I don't believe in god, I therefore deserve to be TORTURED FOR AN INFINITE AMOUNT OF TIME. This is appalling on the grandest scale, and by comparison her rape and aids and pregnancy are absolutely nothing, zero. You can't conceivably compare the two. Yet people are not only allowed to say that I deserve to be tortured forever, they are not seen as monsters for wishing this upon me. Why? Because of the ridiculous and unwarranted respect we accord religious faith.

Reaching for the stars...

The idea of a deity and an afterlife came from the same people who wrote our barbaric scriptures, and they plagiarized it from the civilization that came before them. It is an after-effect of centuries of dogmatism and mass delusion. It is an old idea, and not a very good one, and it has been hanging around because people give in to cultural, parental, and religious bullying too easily. (More on this a little later).

Secularism has been around, in one form or another, as far back as the ancient Greeks. All of the great minds of discovery had no choice but to feign belief in the divine. Why? Because they valued their lives and thought they were doing important work, which they were. Speaking out against the gods or the god of Abraham was an automatic death sentence, and still is today in many parts of the world.

Still, when we speak of great discoveries, we credit the mind and not the religion, and that is as it should be. If anyone believes that Newton was a great physicist because he was a Christian (a Unitarian who denied the trinity and the divinity of Jesus), or that Alhazan was a great polymath because he was Muslim, you are sadly mistaken. Their ideas flew in the face of the rigidity and dogmatism of their faith, and it was very hard to reconcile the two. To the extent that they were scientific geniuses, it's to the extent that they were NOT religious. And in the case of Newton, perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived, he too was susceptible to mass delusion as evidenced by his lack of inquiry and skepticism in his later years. His work stopped the moment he started attributing the unknown to the divine.

Thankfully, modern scientists live in an age where openly stating disbelief in ancient ideas is not a death sentence as long as you live in a secular society. There is that word again, secular. I think we forget how important that word is. I think we forget how bad it was, and is, to live in religious societies. I think we forget that religion is a fucking stupid idea which has caused more harm and misery than anyone will ever know. And, even today, I think we forget that it's science, skepticism, and free inquiry which has allowed these secular societies to flourish.

Our current understanding of nature has changed. We have learned things since claims (god, afterlife, creation myths, etc) were made by Iron Age peasants who didn't know anything about the nature of the world. Our modern morality supersedes theirs BECAUSE OF our greater understanding. We know that other races and women are not inferior; we know that homosexuality occurs at the same rate across most mammalian species; we know that stoning people to death constitutes cruel and unusual punishment; we know that piling sins on a goat and chasing it out of the city does not relieve us of personal responsibility.

The people who gave us the ideas of gods and an afterlife are the same people who tell us, across the generations (just pick up any bible) that it was completely acceptable to massacre all the men in a village and keep the women and girls as slaves. When Genghis Khan did the same, at least he said it was because he liked fucking and he didn't want the boys to grow up and take their revenge; not because an imaginary god told his ancestors, one of whom wrote it down in a book full of other barbaric and crazy stories no child would believe if it were not for outside pressure. We simply know much more, and we don't need these ideas which were born in the infancy of our species.

Don't take anything on faith. Ask questions, demand evidence, and use the tools of logic and reason which took 4.5 Billion years to evolve. Don't throw away the only weapon you have, don't throw away your mind for a notion as ridiculous as faith. Faith means believing in something on insufficient evidence for inadequate reasons. Faith is an insult to humanity, and to the work of all the great minds who propelled us from wretched ignorance to reaching for the stars.

Religious 'Interpretation'

The reason places like Turkey and Indonesia and Bangladesh are the way they are is because they are Muslims in name only, they memorize Quran and Hadith but don't actually understand it; which is, evidently, a very good thing. Because if they understood the Arabic, Indonesia and Turkey and Bangladesh would look like Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Sudan. In some of the other Arabic-speaking societies, Islam and Sharia have been tempered by secularism and multiculturalism. It's no coincidence that Tunisians and Lebanese aren't very good Muslims; they think they're French. That's just one example.  

Now, it may be true that the violence in the middle east and the treatment of women there is a tribal or cultural thing, but it is false to say that it is only a cultural phenomenon. Islam does indeed espouse some very barbaric things. Yes, other religions do as well, but today even the fundamentalists of those religions are peaceful when compared to Islam. If, as some argue, Islam can be interpreted differently by different people, then they have no leg to stand on. Fundamentalists are, axiomatically, interpreting their religion properly. And when Islam is interpreted from a fundamentalist viewpoint, you get things like Hezbollah and Al Qaeda and Ansar Al Sharia. Almost nothing they do or say is forbidden anywhere in the Quran or Hadith, quite the opposite actually. Islam makes it easy to become a terrorist.

Muslim moderates have no right to say that fundamentalists have grossly misinterpreted the faith. And since that is apparently the case, I see no reason why anyone should expect the problem of violent extremism within Islam to stop. Islamic fundamentalism is clashing with modernity, and Muslim moderates are exacerbating the issue by defending Islam. Rather than saying, "Yes, it IS a problem and we shouldn't take the Quran literally," they argue that a happy middle ground can be found. This is simply not the case. If the Quran is the perfect word of God, then violent, external jihad against the infidel is a valid interpretation. Your personal interpretation might be something along the lines of "Jihad is an internal struggle," but if we allow you your interpretation we must allow the jihadists theirs. Are you beginning to see the problem?

If Christians and Jews were fundamentalists the way Muslims are, then they would also be subjugating women and stoning people to death; it says to in the Bible. I'll grant you that Israeli Jews have behaved monstrously in many instances toward Palestinian Arabs, but they are not forcing their women to live in cloth bags as illiterate servants in the name of Judaism. That said, it is patently obvious that the situation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is in fact a Muslim-Jewish conflict. There are people on both sides who believe that God promised them this land. If this were only a politically motivated territorial dispute, it would have been solved by now. The ongoing conflict over a patch of desert in the Levant will continue to be a problem as long as we go on pretending that it is not a religious issue. 

Arguing interpretation of verses is as ridiculous as it gets. This is the point. If you take the 'nice' verses and ignore the 'bad' ones, then you are not in fact practicing Islam; you are cherry-picking, as Christians and Jews have been doing for quite some time now. I would love to do away with religions all-together, but there is a reason the Quran is still a dangerous text in a way the Old Testament is not - because Jews and Christians don't still hold that every word of the book is true and that people are simply misinterpreting it. Go to any secular society in the west and start reading from Leviticus to well-educated people and they will look at you like you've lost your mind. Do the same with the Quran in the middle east, and everyone will listen quietly and nod their heads and say "Ameen." And that, friends, is the problem.