Hey everybody, it's time for me to piss people off!

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/21/opinion/21dowd.html?oref=login

"But I never thought I'd see the day when leaps of faith would be national policy, when the fortunes of America hung on the possibility of a miracle.

What does it tell you about a president that his grounds for war are so weak that the only way he can justify it is by believing God wants it? Or that his only Iraq policy now - as our troops fight a vicious insurgency and the dream of a stable democracy falls apart - is a belief in miracles?

...............

The president has this strange notion that his belief in God means detailed and perfect knowledge of everything that God wants. He may wish to keep his head stuck in the Iraqi sand, but he may discover that the Almighty has His own purposes."

-Maureen Dowd

So there's two things that really bug me, organized religion and the Bush administration. Put the two together and i'm lighting up a molatov coctail ready to throw it at Bush's cocaine sniffin dome. But most people don't understand why I'm so opposed to organized religion. I guess I baffle them because I don't slash my wrists, I don't listen to cannibal corpse, I don't dress in all black, and I don't worship Satan. Woah wtf, what is this kid's problem with religion then? Besides the fact that religion has thrown a wrench in the progression of intellectual and scientific evolution? I guess people like Bush is my fucking problem with religion!

Religion keeps brainwashed fundies such as Bush out of touch with the secular world. It sets unscrutinized boundaries on one's intellect because after all, God's will must not be questioned. While this can be seen as ignorance, it is something far worse - it is a claim to hold a monopoly on the truth. Yes folks, time to shut off our brains, we have the truth. So the Protestants have the truth over the Catholics, the Anglicans have the truth over the Baptists, the Baptists have the truth over the Mormons and the... Oh wait, aren't these all offshoots FROM THE SAME FUCKING BIBLE? See what 2000 years does on "the truth"?... But oh wait there's more! This truth has no secular foundation, nono, it takes faith! Faith, ya know, the cognitive evolutionary offspring of hope, the difference being that, at least with hope, we acknowledge that we may be lying to ourselves. In God we trust? No, in God we hope.

As Jesus said, "one must believe like a child". That's all we need, a doctrine promoting child-like faith to parallel the child-like ignorance of half the population of the world... Thank you Jesus for admitting it. Faith is believing like a child, in other words - fuck reading the fine print, just sign your name on the dotted line and you'll be in heaven in no time. Damn God, if you're gonna send me to hell for not believing in you, at least throw me a frickin bone!

This is all we need in society, more euphamisms... Let's replace the word "hope" with "faith". Let's replace the word "supernatural" with "spiritual". Then, lets tell anybody without "spiritual faith" that they're fucking absurd. Am I missing out on something here? Since when does my lack of supernatural belief make ME the crazy one? I guess to the ignorant, the amount of believers in the world is somehow equatable to the validity of the belief itself. "Hmm, there are more Christians in the world than Muslims and Jews, I guess Christianity is the right one!!!" In that vein of logic, there are more stupid people that smart people in this world, I guess stupid is the new smart!

Lets update the times people. We're slaves to organization and structure, but lets not get so lazy as to affiliate ourselves with such intellectual convenience. We're only relinquishing what we revere most - our ability to think freely, to adhere to what others thought for us... I guess, somewhere in the quest for spirituality, humans lost sight of their innocent intentions; we became sidetracked as our quest for meaning and spiritual fullfillment gave way to unfounded claims of truth that has pitted man against man for centuries. We're not brother and sister under God, we're divided, united under a myriad of Gods. This wasn't the point of religion, but it has become the point. So I guess I'm forced to ask, what ever happened to that concept called spirituality? I guess it dissapeared when we started trying to extract truth out of religion, as opposed to fullfillment. I guess, it all shot to hell, when we started to consider faith as being a viable means to obtain that oh so precious truth.