Warning: This is highly offensive, sacrilegious and hilarious. If you of a religious persuasion I advise you not to read this!
Bhagavad gita
The Gita is a seven hundred verse poem that is of a discussion between Krishna, Pandava and Arjuna about various philosophical and religious matters. It is part of the Hindu holy books. Set on a battlefield that represents the conflicts in life.
It is a brilliant poem – shame about the religious elements it is attached to.
Bible
The bible is two books. The first is cobbled together out of primitive pre-jewish mythology and writings. It has many authors and features a particularly nasty fictitious fairy who loves sacrifices, war, vengeance and has quite a few little temper tantrums. Not a nice guy. It sets out a code of practice that is misogynistic, homophobic, barbaric, sectarian and violent with threats and cruelty thrown in for good measure. There is one chosen race and it just so happens to be this one (don’t they all believe that?).
The second book was allied to the first to give it more importance – the first book having got very popular due to people’s general liking of blood and guts, gratuitous violence and general nastiness – is the general wanderings and procrastinations of a guy called Jesus. You might have heard of him. It features a nicer god who promotes love and peace. That can’t be bad. He has a grouchy side though and if you don’t believe in him, or go about calling him a fictitious fairy, he is likely to have you roasted forever. The guy’s no hippy. Though I suppose you could put him in the same category as the hippy sect leader, and gruesome murderer, Charlie Manson.
Fortunately I am safe from everlasting grilling as he is as fictitious as everything else connected to religion. Phew!!
The new testament (now two thousand years old so not so new!) was pasted together out of lots of bits written by loads of unknown dudes after having been passed down orally for a few generations. Note: none of the Gospels were actually written by the guys themselves: James, John, Tom and the other disciples were illiterate.
Fortunately, according to the faithful, not a word was misplaced. They got it spot on. There were no ‘Chinese Whispers’ here.
To make it doubly sure they all got together after a couple of hundred years, had a big symposium of all the top guys, supervised by Constantine, and decided what was in and what was out. The stuff that didn’t fit was called heretical and burnt.
Shame really – it was probably all the juicy stuff.
What was gathered together was then termed the absolute word of the great goblin in the sky. We’ve been lumbered with it and all its inconsistencies ever since – though it does do a great line in poetry and most eloquent verse that has made it eminently quotable and a great source of inspiration for writers and playwrights. But the downside are the wars, crusades, burnings and drownings, persecution and torture, brainwashing and victimisation, all carried out in the name of gentle Jesus.
Big Bang
Contrary to the idiotic view of US evangelistic christians the universe began with the Big Bang 13.798 billion years ago.
Because we only have tiny brains we have a great deal of trouble getting our heads round this. The Big Bang created all the matter and energy in the universe. It created time and the laws of Physics. The laws that pertained at the moment of the Big Bang can only be wondered at. Maybe one day our intelligence, imagination, experimentation, technology and computer power will enable us to understand it.
This was no religious experience. It was a physical event. There was no god involved.
We have great trouble understanding anything that does not have an ultimate purpose or reason. That is a product of the way our brains, and hence consciousness, have evolved. Because we cannot conceive that he universe, or ourselves, have no purpose, that our life will end and there will be nothing afterwards, we make things up. These things are stories called religion. We are more comfortable with the silly stories of religion than we are with the cold facts of the Big Bang and evolution.
The idea of creating something out of nothing goes against all the understanding our feeble minds are capable of, but then we are but bacteria in a toilet bowl trying to make sense of a descending arse.
In order to make it more logical we created a superpixie who could create something out of nothing and who could breathe life into mud. For some perverse reason people find that easier to accept.
None the less the evidence stacks up to show that the Big Bang occurred and there is no god lurking up there in the sky. Perhaps we need to invent a better telescope? Or he’s hiding somewhere? Perhaps the pixie died? Or perhaps the Big Bang occurred and there is no superpixie?
All the science stacks up. Perhaps it is time we faced up to it.
Big numbers
Big numbers are beyond our brains ability to compute. They are meaningless to us. When we consider facts such as the fact that the Big Bang took place 13.798 billion years ago we have no real concept of the vast amount of time this really means.
The fact that the Earth originated, from a coalescence of gas and dust circling the sun, somewhere around 4.5 billion years ago is equally meaningless to us. We cannot imagine that much time.
Likewise the fact that life started as simple unicellular organisms 3.8 billion years ago is beyond our ability to take in. This is why so many people have trouble comprehending the theory of evolution by natural selection. It does not seem possible to them because they cannot understand the reality of the time scales involved. That is not a surprise. Our brains did not evolve to deal with numbers that are this large. None of us can really grasp it. Even scientists who deal with astronomical distances and time cannot really grasp the meaning of these numbers. They are too big. It is not our fault.
Religions use the bewilderment of big numbers to get us to believe in myths. They make more sense to us.
Bigotry
I put bigotry in because it’s one of the main things that religious fanatics do well. They are brilliant at treating anyone with differing views to their own with derision, intolerance, contempt and unadulterated hatred. This is the cause of so much persecution and sectarian violence.
How many millions of innocent people have died because of religious bigotry?
Fortunately I do not hate the lot of them and do not want them all shot. I am not a bigot. I am just disgusted by them and what they stand for.
Billy Graham
Billy Graham is a very rich man.
Like Jimmy Swaggart, Guru Maharaji they made their fortunes out of peddling religious garbage to the masses. Their smart suits, penthouse suites and fleets of Rolls Royce’s are testament to the rewards the great pixie bestows upon them. Or is it just fraud? Even more worrying is the thought that these evangelists might actually believe the religious vomit they are spouting.
The TV evangelists are the snake-oil salesmen of the modern world. They have harnessed the medium to get to the gullible in order to make themselves extremely rich. Even when caught in brothels snorting coke they wriggle out of it.
Bishop
A bishop is a chess piece so named because of its power.
A bishop is a person who seeks power by pretending to pass on the words of a fictitious being. They are high up so have a lot of power and do quite well for themselves.
Tossing the bishop is a universal hobby.
They move diagonally so you never get a straight answer from a bishop!
Black Rock in the Kaaba
The black rock was supposedly thrown to earth from heaven to mark the spot where the temple should be built. It was incorporated into the Kaaba as a corner stone. It is an ancient rock that is quite remarkable. It was probably a meteorite. It is a large dark rock and because of its unusual nature has been the focus of intense interest for thousands of years. It’s not like Blackpool rock. There are no names running through it and it’s not minty.
In pagan times there were three of these types of stones all worshipped by pagans and said to have fallen out of the heavens from god. One was white, one was red and this one was black. They were signs from heaven and incorporated into the wall of the Kaaba. Touching it is supposed to provide wondrous cures and mystical properties.
The pagans used to use unusual rocks, rock formations or trees as focuses of their worship.
I’ll stick with the Blackpool variety, thanks.
Blasphemy
Blasphemy is the truth spoken out loud.
There is no evidence of any god.
All religions are man-made fabrications.
The prophets were all either mentally deranged or conniving power-seeking bastards or deluded do-gooders.
Millions of people have been crucified, burnt, pressed, tortured and slaughtered for saying a lot less than this. That shows how absurd it all is and how evil religion really is.
Blasphemy – see this book!
In this day and age I stand Full Square behind the right of every person to say what they believe without fear of attack from the religious intolerant.
To be able to say I do not believe is as much my right as it is for you to say you do! If your faith is strong enough then nothing I say or believe should make the slightest difference.
The fact of me saying god does not exist does not make him not exist just as you saying that he does can’t conjure him up out of nothing. I cannot insult something that doesn’t exist and I reserve the right to offend. Preventing people speaking out against brainwashing and religious intolerance and fanaticism should be a crime.
Bodhisattva
A Bodhisattva is an enlightened person who, out of compassion, helps all other sentient beings.
I love the idea.
I am a Bodhisattva who spends his life helping others come to the truth. I just do not possess magical powers. My weapons are my words. You’d better believe it!
Boggie man
The boggie man is a fictitious monster thought up by adults to scare the shit out of their kids and get them to behave. Mummy and Daddy want to fuck so you stay quiet and stay in your bed or the boggie man will get you!
It’s the same general principle that most religions have applied when dealing with adults: You do as we fucking say or the big boggie man in the sky will send you to the pits of hell for ever.
So it’s our own fault then.
Back in the days before we had electricity and the world was covered in forests in which many large dangerous creatures lived it must have been terrifying to think of a boggie man. We put the boggie man of religion in the sky and he’s still terrifying us.
Bollocks
A generic term used to describe all religious and superstitious practice as well as anything related to or pertaining to religion.
Bones of the Saints
Bones of Saints were another popular relic and great little earner. The church cashed in on these and flogged them to the rich or displayed them in churches and charged admission. Supposedly these remains had special powers. You can get near to them and be healed of just about everything apart from an addiction to belief. A bit like black rocks.
Most saints have probably got enough bones to make three or four hundred whole bodies just as there were enough fragments of the original cross to make at least a hundred of them. Someone was doing a roaring trade!
Brahman
Brahman is the Hindu concept of the unknowable, infinite essence that creates reality in and around our world including the reality of self.
That’s religion for you; create a new mystery to explain the previous mystery. That’ll confuse the simple. You don’t want anything too logical; they’ll see through it.
Burka – Burqa
A sack used to cover women so that their shape cannot be seen and they cannot be lusted after. Thus men can be saved from themselves.
This pre-islamic garb originated in a misogynistic society in which women were chattels to be bought, locked away and used. It was designed to further subjugate women.
Seemingly some women like it. They like the anonymity. However that, in a modern world, should be a matter of choice.
In many countries women are whipped if they do not wear the sack. That is not civilised. That is barbaric.
I am all in favour of freedom. Everybody should be free to believe what they want, wear what they want and say what they want.
I believe burqas are misogynistic and a relic of a time I am glad to see long gone. The burqa, with its anonymity and hiding of the features that enable non-verbal communication is belittling to women and a barrier to understanding each other. I cannot talk deeply to someone hiding behind a barrier. I do not think it is appropriate to wear such a thing in a civilised country especially in places, such as shops, workplaces, schools, ports and courts where it is important to see expressive human features.
Burning Bushes
Seemingly the pixie spoke to Moses out of a burning bush up a mountain with nobody else around. Sounds par for the course. The bush burnt but was not devoured. I wonder if I was to pop in to my doctor and tell him I’ve just had a conversation with a supernatural being via a burning bush and no, there was no one else about to witness it, what would he say? I’m sure it would be fine. He’d put it down to stress and give me a couple of pills. He wouldn’t have me committed