How to Alientate Your Entire Readership: Atheism is the New Religion.

The Poor Widow's Offering.

While all the people were listening, Jesus said to his disciples, "Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honour at banquets. They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely."

As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. "I tell you the truth," he said, "this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on."

Luke 20:45-21:4

And that was me in the corner. That was me in the spotlight, losing my religion. To coin a lyric that probably doesn’t make all that much sense in this context.

Don’t take it too literally and we’ll be fine. ..

I must’ve been about age 6, sat in my Sunday best, quietly thinking about He-Man as a lovely old vicar explained the parable of the widow to a congregation who were in turn thinking about their rickets / the football scores / dealing with the arse-itch that only appears during silent moments in crowded rooms.

So, after picturing Battle-Cat diving off a cliff to bite Skeletor on the face and He-Man jovially dancing at the prospect of no longer having to put-up with being attacked by a bony-faced squealer every time he went to the shops, a slow trickle of clarity entered my little mind. The vicar’s words seeped through the multicoloured cracks of my childish imagination.

The pew I was sat on looked bloody expensive with its intricate carving and deep, waxed lustre. Poor Jesus - hanging there in a mid-YMCA dance-off - was covered in gold leaf; this also looked bloody expensive. The stained-glass window looked infinitely pricier than the three-inch-square door panel that I once smashed for an over-exuberant ‘trick’ during a fateful Halloween excursion. And my Dad explained that replacing that was ‘bloody expensive’. As did the policeman.
In fact, the more I looked around the Church, the more I came to realise that the money we were asked to donate at the end of each service was being spent on making this place look like an incredibly opulent fairground house-of-horrors. Which would’ve been fine if a gore-covered Joseph of Arimathea leapt up from behind the alter during each communion to scare the living bejeezus out of the kneeling masses, before throwing the ‘body of Christ’ at the congregation in the form of dismembered body parts. But this didn’t happen. And I lived in a freezing terrace with a coal fire and was sustained via a diet that consisted of stew, stew and the occasional curry (stew with curry powder in it); so my disillusionment with organised religion sat down, crossed its arms and made itself entirely comfortable.

It wasn’t so much the inequality that bothered me; more the contradictions in the above parable. Firstly, this old lady was giving her money to a temple when Jesus himself was basically saying that accrued-opulence breeds wankers. Jesus then goes on to condone it. If the ‘lawmakers’ were to be distrusted, why give money to a religion that sets ‘law’? Ipso facto the Church then becomes opulent and therefore as distrustful as the wealthy folk he’s criticising. And before you start thinking that a six-year old couldn’t interpret such things, believe me when I say I was a smart kid. Only ONCE did I get a piece of Lego stuck up my arse. Well, okay, there WAS a dinky traffic-cone / nostril incident, but it was all in the name of science. And I probably didn’t discern such thinking via the smart-arsed wording used above, but I certainly had a grasp of the implications.

Maybe it’s counter to standard expectation, but it was at this point that I started to listen to the readings at church. I also spent time reading the bible. The more I read, the more I actually began to understand the concept of the good Christian, and how every single Christian I had ever met had missed the point entirely.
As much as I knew that these people were decent (they were heavily involved in charity work, used to run a meals-on-wheels service, organised bi-annual collections of clothing to ship to Africa), their ‘goodness’ was only ever displayed through their attachment to their religion. They could only work through the cultural collective - ‘in the name of Christ’ - and the rules dictated by it. Not once was humanity mentioned as a stand-alone reason for them to do anything. The religion was the primary objective – a self-imposed segregation that had a tendency to condescend anything outside of itself. Which is entirely un-Christian.

Now I could go on about the negative aspects of Christian thinking (views on homosexuality, reluctance to accept scientific discovery, etc.), but if you think about it, we’re talking about a book based on a 2000 year old philosophy. It’d be like criticising Pythagoras due to his admission that he could ‘write on the moon’. As silly as this statement is, it’s based on his naive understanding of the universe over two millennia ago. It takes nothing away from the brilliance of his theorem. Same goes for Christian philosophy. It misses the mark occasionally due to outmoded understanding, but is sound in its general focus of being nice to each other.

The problem we have is that a good idea is taken, beaten, reshaped, packaged and pitched to become something entirely different and of less use; usually due to a rather unsavoury motive.
It’s like taking a piece of Soap-bark from a tree to wash with. Then adding ammonium lauryl sulphate, glycerine, citric acid, sodium benzoate and perfume, packing it in a lime-green bottle shaped like a thigh and calling it something like ‘Elvino-Lushsalon’. And charging £5 per bottle for an allergic reaction. The original purity is lost in a swathe of added nonsense.

My analogy is closer-to-the-mark than you might think. The motivation for the organisation of religion is not much different to the motives used in corporations. The hierarchical structures are exactly the same, and almost all ‘mainstream’ religions have their workers (church goers), middle-management (priests) and CEO’s (bishops). Also, as with corporations, the original idea of ‘providing for the people’ gets lost in the haze of money & power. Organised religion is the politicisation and manipulation of philosophy for the sakes of control, power and wealth.

Now I really don’t want to sound like I’m Christian-bashing here. The same naivety can be applied to anyone who staunchly attaches themselves to any religion. If you live in fear of a supreme-being and exist to do whatever you can to placate its wraith, then I’m sorry, you’re just being a bit silly. If however, you live in fear of dying before you can truly consider yourself a good human being, then you’ve probably discovered what the majority of religious philosophies were trying to tell you in the first place. Kudos to you – email me and I’ll send you a packet of congratulatory biscuits.

So, you atheists. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Agreed with me so far? Smashing. Now, wipe that stupid grin off your face whilst I explain to you that you really piss me off.

Now, I suspect that this is going to make me very unpopular, but if (as you so vehemently state) you can only live via universal ‘truth’ and scientific thought, you really need to start educating yourself on the concepts of both. There is NOTHING more frustrating than an atheist with thinly-educated reasoning behind their position. It’s not good enough to state that all religions are bollocks, therefore when you die you simply become a rotting corpse and nothing else. Because what you’re really saying is that you have ‘faith’ that this is the case. Without proof, we have faith. And if you try to tell me that you can prove the non-existence of anything outside of the basic nuts-n-bolts of populist atheist opinion, then you aren’t at all savvy in current scientific thinking and are – again – just having blind-faith in something that has a lack of scientific proof. In other words, you’re talking out of your arse.

I agree with Darwinism. I believe in the theory of relativity. I agree with the physicists who state that our universe in its current form is around 14 billion years old. I also think that believing in a deity through blind faith is stupid.

But most importantly, I know for a FACT that I haven’t really got a clue. And neither do you. Talk to someone on the cutting-edge of particle physics and they will tell you the same thing - even science can’t understand its own theories any more. It’s all becoming extremely strange. Don’t believe me? Well, take these 'facts' on board: Everything in our universe is subjective and becoming more so the further we try to understand it – the simple process of human beings observing the universe changes it. Sub-atomic physics tries to explain things that aren’t actually explainable – we have no language to possibly illustrate how mad it all is. Current thinking states that we exist on multiple levels via infinite dimensions, and at the same time don’t exist at all. Any single particle has been discovered to be able to be in two places at the same time. Literally. Things that happen in the future have been proved to directly affect the past - causality can run backwards. The universe is thought to provide all possibilities a fraction of a second before observation dictates the outcome and therefore the physically interpreted ‘reality’.

And these scientific facts are... well... facts. And I haven’t even got into the bizarre interactions between thought & matter. So, is it so hard to believe that there could possibly be ‘something’ that could fit into the realm of us being closely connected to a universal consciousness? Alongside the above, I don’t think it’s too hard at all. Although I’d rather have an open mind and state the only thing that I can truly state as a fact:

As a human being I haven’t got the faculties to prove or disprove my existence in a greater universal sense. And until someone can, I’ll just make the most of now and be a decent human being.

Religion and atheism can both kiss my arse. I'm subscribed to common-sense.

Dee.