Why is everybody doing it wrong?

So. Let’s just say, for example that you wear a clown suit all day. You wear this clown suit because you have a deeply held belief that in the beginning of time the all-knowing Bongo squirted the heavens from his holy plastic flower water pistol, and humanity came into being when the all-knowing Bongo threw the sacred custard pie. You absolutely have the right to hold that belief close to your heart and wear that clown suit. I have a right that is equal to that however. I have a right to find your belief ridiculous. And I have a right to say so. I have a right to point out the existence of the all-knowing Bongo flies in the face of all known science, logic and reason. I have the right to publish my opinion on your belief where I want, be it on a blog like this one that almost nobody reads, or in a satirical magazine sold somewhere in Europe.

There is something I don’t have the right to do. I don’t have the right to make personal attacks on you because of your belief in the all-knowing Bongo. I have no right to desecrate the place where you pray by re-enacting the hallowed step ladder routine. I have no right to curtail your rights in any way or see you in any way other than a fellow human because of your religious beliefs. Your religious beliefs, however, are very different. They are nothing but fair game. There is no creator myth that I do not find inherently nonsensical, be it the all-knowing Bongo, or the stories that sit at the heart of Christianity, Islam or Scientology, or any other religion that purports to know how everything we know and are came to be. That doesn’t mean I can’t find you to be a complex and brilliant human in spite not sharing in your belief. In the words of Tyler Durden, you’re not your fucking khakis. Nor are you your religious belief. It’s not a difficult thing to recognise. And yet, our insistence on putting people into ready-made boxes will never cease.

But. And it’s a big but. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that gives you the right to murder, least of all that preposterous religious belief of yours. There are times when it is possible to see the reasons behind murder – to understand, although not excuse, the reasons. And then there are times when it is not. Whatever is it that makes a person think that a death sentence is an appropriate response to drawing a cartoon that takes the piss out of their religion? It’s like those times when a kid responds to an argument they know they’re losing by completely over-reacting; screaming, hitting, knocking shit over. That’s what they are. Children in adult’s bodies who, having never learned the life skills of empathy and debate, have heard something they don’t like and happen to have a lot of guns.

That’s the really poisonous thing about religion. When looking at it in any depth, sooner or later you have to come face to face with the fact that the whole thing comes crashing down if you don’t force yourself to believe something that is simply so illogical, so damn unlikely, with nothing in the way of observable proof, that all you can do is blindly have faith in something that is almost certainly untrue. I can’t begin to imagine how difficult it must be living with that impossible paradox forming the heart of how I define myself. Of course, I don’t imagine it would cause me to walk into a school and start shooting children like those rotting pustules of cat sick. It feels like the Spanish Inquisition might have if they all had automatic weapons.

I recognise that religion isn’t the cause of all wars, merely the excuse, that if it didn’t exist we’d find some other thing to justify all the despicable things we get up to, but I do fucking despise the way it’s used by the mindless faithful to commit these terrible crimes. And then what do we do? We use it as an excuse to persecute members of the same religion who had nothing to with these atrocities. Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day. It might seem a little extreme to suggest that the current way in which people of a certain faith are casually discriminated against by too many people in this country, given a veil of credibility by a lying, fetid press, because of some acts of violent cowardice by other shit munching fuck farts in the name of that same religion could lead to something as horrifying as a holocaust, but the more you learn about the one that took place in Germany during WWII, the more you see that casual discrimination is exactly how it started. It’s the thin end of the wedge, and it pays to remember that.

People are people, whatever else they may be, whatever box they’re put in, whatever label they’re given because of their colour, gender, age, sexuality or faith. Forgetting that puts you on a very slippery slope that ends nowhere good.