On Religion~
Some time ago, me and my idiot son tore apart some “wiccans” and made them cry. While involved in a very similar discussion with Christians, someone popped up with paganism being a more comforting religion. The original deconstruction of “Wicca” went like this.
the fuckbake said,
If you havn’t figured it out already, I am Wiccan. Legaly. Isis is one of our gods. A few others are Astarte, Cali, Hecetae, Demeter, and Inana. The Wicca I practice is very new though, dating back only to the early 60s, and is comprised of different interpretations of multiple religions.
to which I replied,
Do you just… I dunno, throw darts at a dartboard or something when picking out your gods? Or is there some specific ritual you have to perform? Seriously, not only are you crossing theologies, but also pantheons. I’d take Wicca a little more seriously if it wasn’t a mishmash of “let’s borrow this deity” and “what sort of things can I think of while bombed off my gourd?”. Just a little.
My son, ever-verbose and ultimately fundamentally fucking awesome, then brought the smackdown on the fuckbake:
Dude, you’re a fucking twit. People who say shit about Wicca being an old faith, or that their branch is old, or new, or whatever–that’s bullshit. This is why:
1. Wicca was spread in the mid-1950s by a man named Gerald Gardner as a nature-based “revival” of supposed suppressed European pagan beliefs centering around so-called “witchcraft.” Really what this appears to mean is the kind of shit you find in a New Age self-help leaflet.
2. There is absolutely no evidence that Wicca goes further back than the 1920s. That’s right, you’re grandparents and great grandparents were probably alive when Gardner was just putting this shit together in his head.
3. Wicca is supposedly matriarchal in nature. Gardner claims that he pretty much reconstructed the religion from the rites of the “New Forest Coven.” However, their rites were incredibly fragmented and he substantially rewrote most, if not all of them. What does that mean? It means that the fucking Untouchable in their little system rewrote what documents remained of the framework for their view on a dualistic spiritual reality. That does no lend credence to any sort of fate. Imagine if Hinduism was rewritten so that the lowest members of the cast were up top and the Brahmins were in the shit.
4. In the mid-1970s Dianic Wicca arise in the US, splintering off from Gardnerian Wicca. By this time the religion had been about twenty years old. It couldn’t even legally fucking drink yet. Dianic Wicca was a feminist form of the nascent “religion,” still just a growing cult by the standards of anyone with half a fucking frontal lobe left. Back in the UK shit was going down and Alexandrian Wicca arise, which pretty much came from a schism over power struggles when Gardner wouldn’t initiate certain members. From that a bunch of his old disciples split and said they found a new, more traditional source to fucking draw their faith from. This was still an intiatory, mystery religion, but fuck it–new assholes had power. At the same time in the US, certain Wiccans hearing about this started opening their own fucking franchises, this time calling it British Traditional Wicca. Check out Adherents.Com for numbers and shit.
5. The deities you worship now are not the deities worshipped by Wicca, that is, by Gardnerian Wicca. It’s as if I said “I’m a Roman Catholic who worships Pele, the Volcano Goddess.” Gardnerian Wicca worshipped a Supreme Goddess and a Horned God. Tell me–where the fuck is your Horned God? Where is your female fucking pseudo-monotheist Goddess? Please, enlighten me as to how you claim to be Wiccan, even though you fail the litmus test of worshipping those deities or concepts that define your religion. Anyways, back to the original point, which I had admittedly wondered off from: Wicca as a whole is a new religion. There is no “very new.” There are people still alive, many of them, who remember when Wicca first started popping up. That means it’s new.
The point being is that we’ve come ’round again and we now discuss Christianity.
I said,
Personally, I believe that we as a race should be old enough and mature enough to set aside beliefs in fairy tales. 
I also believe that organized religion has been more responsible (both indirectly and directly) for hate crimes, prejudice, ethnic cleansings, ignorance and intolerance than any other reason (i.e. economics, agriculture, territory, etc). I believe (and have stated before) that paganism is a literal joke that can’t be taken seriously, I believe that the people that practice paganism are a literal joke and can’t be taken seriously..
I got a reply, then, that sort of… kickstarted the engine, I guess.
You will see much more intolerance and hatred spewed against religion than from it.
to which I replied,
Well, look at the source: thousands of years of witch hunts, Inquisitions, the branding of any non-christian (in this example, Catholicism) religion as pagan and heretical, the Crusades. heck, without religion, Hypatia of Alexandria would not have been pulled out of her chariot one day, stripped nude, dragged to the foot of the church and burned alive by a mob of Christians. Surely, in the face of this track record you can understand a handful of angry words.
My closing words I think are appropriate:
Oh, don’t get me wrong; religion (from a sociological standpoint) has had its uses. One could say that religion functions as sort of a moral compass for a given society and aside from all the different flavors of religion, we’ve discovered a few universal truths: Killing each other is wrong. Stealing from each other is wrong. lying to each other is wrong. So on and so forth. Going forward, a majority of our laws are derived from the basic moral codes we’ve established through theology.
The point is that we’ve moved beyond the time when we had rabbit brains and associated the inexplicable with the Divine. We’ve outgrown it. no longer do we have to be beholden to superstitions, hallucinations and antiquated black and white ideologies.
tl;dr: You outgrew the Easter Bunny, it’s high time you outgrew “god”.
There’s more I want to argue; there’s more that I want to call the ‘perfect’ christians to account for. The problem with debating Christianity is that you can’t and shouldn’t bring old injustices up for accountability. How can you properly call a cotton-belt bible thumping Baptist to account for the ethnic cleansings ordered by the Catholic Church? You can’t, there’s no basis for context. Oh, sure, they’re both branches of christianity, but the fact remains that while all christians should be held accountable for acts perpetrated in their god’s name, you can’t bring something up that is hundreds of years old. it makes for bad debate. You can use it to set up a context, but not as actual ammunition, fuel for the fire. Use proper, modern events.
A buddy of mine said this about religion in general:
“Without religion, you would have good people doing good things and bad people doing bad things. But only with religion, do you have good people doing bad things.
There’s always that rationalization from religious apologists, those who seek to cleanse the good name of religious beliefs by picking all the bad seeds out of the pot. Somebody commits murder in the name of God? Not a true christian. Terrorist? Not a true muslim. It wasn’t for religious reasons, it was for political reasons, sociological reasons, it was mere psychosis… etc., etc., etc. [...]
Go ahead. Argue. Split hairs. Piss and moan. Rationalize. Do whatever you want, but this can go on and on and on for hours and hours, pages and pages of horrors and cruelties for which the blame can be squarely placed on ignorant dogma and the breeding ground for it that is religion. Charity exists without religion. Peace and love exists without religion. School shootings and gang warfare would exist without religion. But absolutely none of these hideous crimes and cruelties listed would occur if it weren’t for the contemptible and repulsive belief in myth and superstition that is religion.
It’s time to stop defending something that holds back intellectual advancement, that perpetuates hate and violence. Its influence gives us the origin for most of the bigotry in the world, and serves mainly to control the masses and keep them complacent and dulled to a world of killers and tyrants. That moderates exist is absolutely no justification for the crimes of the extremists. The moderates only provide safe haven for the extremists to get closer and closer to pushing forward their glorious vision of armageddon. It’s time to put a stop to it.
It doesn’t require violence or bloodshed to get rid of religious dogma. No coup is required to save the world from this monstrosity. All that is required is for you to stop believing fairy tales are real. To embrace the wonderful, logical intellect you have hidden away in your skull and see the universe as it really is rather than how you want it to be. That you refrain from teaching your children myths, mysticism, and dogma as irrefutable truth. You can still have spirituality. You can still have great wonder for the mysteries of the universe. But let go of the rulebooks. Let go of the nonsense and the answers that are not to be questioned. Let go of it already.
Soapboxing is done, go back to blowing your cat.