Blasphemy is Our Duty and Your Cure

The stories of people outraged over blasphemy in the USA are laughable, and more frightening than those of the Middle East. Freedom to worship what you want does not give you the freedom to place ideas ahead of lives, especially human lives.

But this is what we see more often than not in the USA still, and the law prosecutes those who blaspheme or mock religion as if they bombed an abortion clinic, but bombing an abortion clinic is treated like it's okay because it was his beliefs. The double standard is dangerous and will cause our country to fall behind even the Middle East in morals and ethics.

Many will attempt to call this a slippery slope fallacy, but we have seen it happen many times already. When ideas are given more value than human lives countries fall into chaos and war, innocent people are put to death without even breaking the insane blasphemy laws, and the land is taken over by religious gangs spreading their myths with violence and fear.

Here's the deal, all of you deluded enough to believe the myths told in books written thousands of years ago, if what you claim is truth truly had any value, it would be the inevitable outcome of any human logic. This means you would not have to teach it, especially indoctrinate children, nor spread it by force.

The very fact you have to protect your weak god with the use of force is undeniable proof your religion is nothing more than mythology and bad poetry. If your god were not weak, then you'd have nothing to fear when we deny the claim you make of him existing.

The irony of you creating laws to enforce arbitrary rules in the name of your god is evidence that either you don't know a god, or one does not even exist. The difference between an atheist and a theist is this: an atheist must justify our morals, religious people are never called to do that but they are the ones who would put a child to death just for insulting their doctrine or god.

The meat of this issue is that religious people prove their gods don't exist by their own actions, how they vote or why they attack others. They have no justification for their arbitrary rules, and when pressed they always point to the very books they never actually read, which is also a set of arbitrary claims.

So the irreligious atheists must ask for empirical evidence, and to date not one bit of evidence has been provided for any of the religious books. I challenge you to find some and present it for scrutiny.

Taking things on faith is admitting you don't know but just want to accept the claims to belong to a majority. The greatest thing about having a brain is that we can scrutinize everything to determine what is real, and what is just a shadow playing tricks on our mind.

Now people from the 80s and earlier are still naive and ignorant enough to forget that each generation knows more than the previous ones, we ride the shoulders of our elders to rise above their mistakes. So they complain about youth in the USA today being irreverent and unbehaved.

Let me remind you of what we did for entertainment in the 80s:

● My friends once got bored during Christmas and went through the neighborhood moving all the lawn decorations onto the roofs of every house, without the owner's knowledge. Nativity, cross, and Santa were all hanging out on the roofs of those who dared to make the neighborhood tacky with their manufactured crap.

● My brother, a few friends, and I snuck out in the middle of the night. After a rousing game of "hide/run from the cops" we decided to rip up all the temporary lines on the road, they were repaving and used reflective tape until they could paint it. We then made a huge peace sign in the middle of the neighborhood with them. It was even in the news, though no one knew it was us.

● Walking home from work was always risky, when I was 17. The gangs of the area made moving through the streets a life or death situation, and work was on the other side of several territories. I was accosted many times before I moved, simply for walking on their street.

● Downtown Seattle was worse when I was young. Many times you'd be mugged in broad daylight and no one helped because they feared becoming a victim themselves. In contrast to seeing even disabled and poor people today standing with the victim.

● Tucson was always overrun with weed smokers, I know, I was one of them. The cops could never catch us with evidence because we smoked it all up before they figured out we were high as kites. My friends there would regale me with tales of how the Wild West was still unlawful until the 90s. Even after the 90s we were certainly criminals, we just duked it out in video games instead of gunfire on the streets.

● Almost no one under 30 knew that an atom was made of smaller particles when I was growing up, and we also did not understand how chemicals reacted to DNA to produce the effect we call life. Today children in grade school are writing scientific papers, developing new technologies, and advancing our species beyond my generation's dreams.

So no, your religion does not deserve respect at all, and your delusions should be reason for treatment instead of a qualification for government office. But there is an easy and rather enjoyable cure for the delusion called god, learn the scientific method and apply it to everything in your life, you will see that learning this one tool will change your outlook for the better.

Mocking Religion Is Important

The answer to why we must mock religion is one I have touched on but never really answered directly. The answer is very simple, any ideology elevated above mockery becomes a tyranny.

Though ideology must never be above mockery, nothing is ever truly above mockery. Ridicule is the exception, ideology which is demonstrably harmful should be ridiculed, but other aspects of life should be off limits. Rule of thumb here, if it cannot be chosen then it's off limits unless it is demonstrably harmful.

The reason harmful ideologies must be ridiculed is to make them no longer acceptable, thus making them no longer harmful. Religion, as a whole, has been demonstrably harmful and is chosen. Prayer being an excellent example of the harm it causes to society.

Prayer has nothing to do with helping and everything to do with ego. People who pray are saying they are happy not actually doing anything but want everyone to think they are, so they announce that they are praying for someone who is suffering to draw attention to themselves, distracting from the person who is truly suffering.

We see this effect in medical doctors as well, the ideology has been acceptable for so long even the atheist doctors are willing to say platitudes in place of actually helping the patient, Virginia Mason and Harborview in Seattle do this quite a lot. Often prayer is used in place of real help resulting in the death of an innocent person, while the ones praying are allowed to continue to draw attention to themselves instead of being punished for their crimes.

Another event this problem often arises is when it takes very little to help, like say retweeting something on Twitter. Instead of tapping the retweet like they should, they just have to say "my prayers are with them." This makes it all about them and distracts from the actual problem. Some tweeps have actually gotten angry when I would point out how selfish they are being for saying such things.

To protect society from this selfishness and complacency, we mock prayer and religion, and ridicule the stupidity religion forces it's followers to embrace. Once it is no longer acceptable to harm others, or allow injustices to happen, because of religion, we will stop ridiculing and move on.

Now, before you get angry with any atheist who ridicules your religious nonsense, know this, we were once as stupid as you, and when we stopped being willfully ignorant we were ridiculed for wanting to learn, often abused for not accepting your myths, and distrusted for being more honest than any religious person has ever been. If you think silly pictures of your myths with phrases that show the idiotic ideas you believe are hurtful, at least we don't usually mock individuals until they display their stupidity.

We aren't attacking you, we are just telling the truth now.