Nestor's Cola

Today I saw an article on Muslims and the Middle East, and all this Jihad crap everyone goes on and on about, and seems to have been going on about, at length, for some time now. To be honest, I can’t think back and remember a time without hearing that there was some form of shit (usually religion based) going on in the Middle East. I span several decades, mind you. Think aobut hat for a second. That’s a long grudge. It doesn’t start after nearly thirty years, this bullshit they have against each other apparently goes back hundreds, maybe even a thousand years. Everyone’s mutually fracked off about each other, and for what? God? their Church?

It’s time I stepped up on my Soapbox.

As I understand it, to be Muslim is to have a Charge, a Commission. “Go out and find those that are not Muslim. If they are not Muslim, get them to become Muslim. If they refuse, kill them.” Well, in extremist cases. But we’re talking about those extremists, right? Let’s direct our attention to this faith.

I believe, that to some extent, religion is a comfortable blanket that you wrap yourself in before going to bed in an eternal grave. It’s like breeding: a bulwark against mortality. People are afraid to die. We want to know what will happen to us after we die.

Hold the fucking phone right the fuck there.

If Religion is supposed to be a comfortable thing, something to soothe our fears, something that helps us come to terms with our short lives and even shorter ambitions, calms and comforts us against some of the frustratingly obtuse and aggrivating things this mudball of a planet has to offer us, Shouldn’t it also keep us from wanting to kill each other and stir the hive? Instead of kicking over anthills, shouldn’t religion be a personal experience? It should be something that brings you peace in the long watches of the night; Something that makes you feel more at ease standing in the line at the grocery store; or something that helps you sleep in a long trans-atlantic flight.

Those radical followers of a defunct and malignant religion, they’re not happy. They’re not at peace. They’re not comfortable. These people, for whatever reason, are fucked in the head. You want my opinion? There you have it. If you have to be a prick and be unnecessarily violent because your God(s) told you so, I say that you’re a fucking fanatic and whatever it is that you believe in, it’s not anything that’ll bring you or anyone else peace.

I think every major religious trunk out there has been responsible for a variety of atrocities, violence, and theocratic hate against those it determines to be “heathen”, and I think that again, violence spawned from religious intent defuncts and destroys any religious credibility. In other words, it’s all bullshit. (:D)

I’m not here to tell you what you should believe. I’m not going to beat you down because you’re Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or fucking Revival in the Holy Field with Mother Mary jerking off the Sacred Donkey in Tijuana. What I am going to do is I’m going to tell you that if you really believe, if you really have faith in (whatever), you’re not gonna be a prick about it. You’re not going to feel compelled to beat me down for the sake of something that is essentially a valium against death. You’re going to die. Deal with it.

My faith? My beliefs? I have faith that we will inevitably evolve beyond the need for comfort foods, comfort religions, comfort blankets and comfort zones. I believe that we all will evolve beyond archaic fear-based ideologies and will explore the human condition and achieve our next level in thought and expression. I believe that as long as there is science and art, mathematics, poetry and music, Philosophy and sculpture, discussion and passion, logic, reason and constructive emotive expression, there will be fucking progress.

Nestor: Hanging out in Tijuana watching Holy Mary and the Divine Donkey~

Okay, kids. Nestor is going to break it down for you: Religion is functionally useless nowadays except as a primer for philosophy and as a functional moral primer for existing in today’s world. Things like “Don’t kill” and “Don’t steal” are decent fundamentals. It’s good to instill a personal belief in what’s “right” and what’s “wrong”. Morals (and as an extension, laws) are the survival mechanism for any society that allows itself to propagate. morals bring a personal motivation to an impersonal law.

Let’s set aside what constitutes “right” and “wrong” for a moment. For the sake of argument we’ll use murder.
Killing your fellowman has consequences- you piss off people around you, and you destroy the equilibrium that a society creates amongst its peoples; and so therefore (unsanctioned) killing goes against the survivability of your society’s way of life. So the society concocts an explanation: “Killing is bad. We’re going to outlaw killing.”

Irregardless if there’s a theology present, it still establishes a rule, a defining characteristic. Theology just hammered home the point a little more with the promise of repercussions beyond the mortal coil: “Don’t kill, or when you die, something bad will happen to you.” Accentuated with the fear of death, the fear of the unknown, and no proven knowledge of what exists beyond the boundary of life, you have a perfect mechanism for delivering society-driven survival methodologies into your children. Here’s the kicker: It’s fundamentally no different than telling them that the boogey monster will eat them alive if they don’t go to sleep on time.

Along the way, you can throw in “guideposts to better living” for the individual because again, it serves the society’s best interests to make sure the individual is functioning properly. For the sake of argument, let’s say Vitamin X makes you healthy. Fights cancer, freshens your breath, and gives you stupendous sexual prowess. It’s then in your best interests to take Vitamin X. So let’s write that down: Your society… no wait. Your God says it’s in your best interest. Seeing as your God is the final arbiter of what happens at death, wouldn’t it make sense that he’d suggest something in life? Of course!

Breaking it down in case you missed it, religion is an excellent tool to deliver a personal connection with impersonal laws. In the past, most societies were theocratic in nature, so this was advantageous. The law, “You cannot kill, or you will recieve X punishment” is abstract. You can’t relate that to yourself without a moral obligation. Religion establishes that moral obligation. What’s amusing with this scenario is the fact that there are loopholes. “You cannot kill, or you will recieve X punishment (except)” You are free to kill those that attempt to kill you. You are free to kill those that threaten your society (encouraged, even!).”

maybe my prolem is the fact that they interject a nameless, faceless, unprovable God in the whole thing, and then at the same time that he can’t be proven, claim to speak in his name.

“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.

But here’s a few facts:

-Without religion, nobody would strap a bomb to their own child in order to murder infidels, 100% convinced that they are sending this child to heaven.

-Without religion, nobody would murder an intelligent, educated doctor just because he performs abortions.

-Without religion, there would have been no Spanish Inquisition, no Crusades, no conflict in Isreal over holy lands.

-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.

-Without religion, a woman would not be sentenced to death for the ridiculous charge of witchcraft.

-Without religion, the vast majority of suicide bombers would never go through with it, knowing that this is the only life we’ll have, that there is no God who will reward them for martyrdom.

-Without religion, Matthew Shepard would not have been robbed, pistol-whipped, tortured, and tied to a fence post and left to die because he was gay.

Go ahead. Argue. Split hairs. Piss and moan. Rationalize. Do whatever you want, but this list 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 if it already.

The fate of our species depends upon it.

-Erik Schoenek

I hate Christians, I hate Christianity, I think they’re all fucking stupid. I said before, on a forum I frequent “If we’re to abdicate Reason on an unproven absentee God, then we might as well start truthfully believing in absurdities as the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Where are their Churches and Mosques and Televangelists? You cannot accept the realities of these fictional entities, yet any faith-driven religion has you believe in something very similar! Believe in something unprovable! Be sure to drink your ovaltine!” And it’s true.

And I hate -hate- with a passion the absurd mentality that the entire faith is based off! We’re flawed and imperfect, broken and worthless and the only way we can achieve any lasting rewards is through service to your fellowman. You have to demean and debase yourself; destroy who you really are in order to achieve rewards. Here’s the kicker: You get the rewards after you die. It’s like a great cosmic joke with you as the punchline.

For all intents and purposes, we are the dominant species on this planet. We have subjugated most of the world to our whims. Our dominion is absolute. I don’t know about you, but I have fucking pride in the things we’ve accomplished.  One thousand years ago, we discovered the Scientific Method. We conquered the Atlantic and crossed from the Old World into the New World. Today we have medicines, computers, global communication, musics, unparalleled artistry and buildings that scrape the sky and trap clouds inside. On an individual level, each person grows up with a general understanding of world history, their own national history, math skills, science knowledge, and the ability to function in a society.

Christianity takes that all away. Human achievement is worthless. Material possessions are only as good as they can be so that you can give them to someone else. Your life only has meaning when you suffer, and when you suffer, it is then, only then, that God showers his love on you. What a fucking sadist, that he demands such masochistic behavior from his chosen while at the same time concealing his existence whatsoever!

I’ll close this with a couple quotes from Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff

Ayn Rand:

“They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it “another dimension,” which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it “the future,” which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out”

Leonard Peikoff:

“Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

For instance, God is infinite. Nothing can be infinite, according to the Law of Identity. Everything is what it is, and nothing else. It is limited in its qualities and in its quantity: it is this much, and no more. “Infinite” as applied to quantity does not mean “very large”: it means “larger than any specific quantity.” That means: no specific quantity—i.e., a quantity without identity. This is prohibited by the Law of Identity.

Is God the creator of the universe? There can be no creation of something out of nothing. There is no nothing.

Is God omnipotent? Can he do anything? Entities can act only in accordance with their natures; nothing can make them violate their natures …

“God” as traditionally defined is a systematic contradiction of every valid metaphysical principle. The point is wider than just the Judeo-Christian concept of God. No argument will get you from this world to a supernatural world. No reason will lead you to a world contradicting this one. No method of inference will enable you to leap from existence to a “super-existence.”"

Next week, I give you  downloadables!