Frivology

Picked it up on iTunes and watched it the other night.  It’s a really good film.  I may just watch it again over the weekend.  Here’s the end monologue: 

The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world actually could come to an end. Plain fact is: religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge, and having key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists.  By those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. 

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it, are our intellectual slaveholders - keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction. Religion is dangerous, because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. 

Most people would think that it is wonderful when someone says: “I am willing Lord, I will do what ever you want me to do”, except that since there are no Gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people, with their own corruptions, and limitations, and agendas. 

And anyone who tells you that they know what happens when you die, I promise you, you don’t. How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers, that I do not. 

The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big question is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble. And that is what man needs to be considering that human history is just a list of getting shit dead wrong. 

This is why rational people, anti-religionists must end their timidity, and come out of the closet, and assert themselves, and those who consider themselves only moderately religious, really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price. 

If you belong to a political party, or a social club that was tied to as much vicartry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler - a mafiawife. With the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travellers. 

If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limbs into the future decimated by the effects of a religion inspired nuclear terrorism - lets remember what the real problem was: that we learned how to precipitate mass death, before we got pass the neurologist disorder of wishing for it. 

That’s it. Grow up, or die. 

It really muddied up my already muddied views on whether or not Atheists should be “militant”, which is exactly what I’ve been thinking about all this week, no matter what I’ve been listening to or reading.