OH MY GOD, MY GRANDMA AND GRANDPA AND ALL MY DEAD PETS JUST CAME BACK TO LIFE! THANK YOU GEORGIA FOR KILLING TROY DAVIS!!!

Tragedies are undone, wars play out in reverse, the Twin Towers spontaneously rebuild… all because we killed Troy Davis! Thanks, Georgia!

And the best part is, nobody will ever murder anyone ever again! This is awesome!

Talk about Pro-Life! Nobody will ever die ever again! THIS SOLVES EVERYTHING!!!

Gawker: How Michele Bachmann Is Tied to the Ugandan Movement to Execute Gay People

Yet another thing conservatives are going to have to use cognitive dissonance to avoid reconciling: hating terrorists, but also desperately wanting to vote for a moronic, fascist piece of shit.

Wait a second, never mind! I forgot, only brown people can be terrorists.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

Religious folk like to claim that lack of God begets a lack of morals, and to a certain extent they’re right. Only, it’s not secularism that causes the problems but rather instilling people with notions of magical punishments for their actions, hammering into them the import of doing good not for the sake of being a good person, of not doing harm to others because they understand harm, but for the sake of saving themselves from some fantastic damnation. And once that veil is pulled away, what’s the point? Once religion, once God is exposed as a fraud, then suddenly the impetus to do good out of fear is eliminated as well. And when you confuse morality with a system of religion, this can be really dangerous.

It’s similar to the way we approach other things, too: Like how we build up these mythical tales of marijuana use killing you on your first use, and destroying your life, and being so addictive and horrible that you’ll be ruined within months if you ever even think about smoking a joint. And then people actually end up smoking pot at some point in their lives and realizing it’s not even close to as bad as depicted, and in fact quite pleasant with seemingly few side effects with responsible use. And then it dawns on them that other drugs were depicted this way, too, so maybe it’s safe to give, say, heroin a go. Or crack. Hell, why not some crystal meth?

And that’s what the gateway is: Not some intrinsic property of the drugs themselves, but rather the way we condition ourselves as a species to think about things. We aren’t honest with ourselves because we don’t seem to be able to trust ourselves to be adults. (And it’s cyclical, of course: Treat someone like a child and they’ll become one.) We end up inventing all these little tricks to try to convince ourselves that intensely exaggerated and often outright invented repercussions will result from actions we’re afraid (sometimes with good reason — see: heroin) or uncomfortable to take. And in doing so, in lying to ourselves, we never fully grasp what the actual situations are, what the actual dangers are. All we do is prop up a bunch of facades of boogeymen and train ourselves to believe that if we do something “wrong”, they’re going to come alive at night and eat us.

And some people can only be tricked for so long.

When you find out that Santa Claus isn’t real, for how long do you continue kissing ass with your parents? The whole thing was just a device to get you to behave for an entire year for a single annual reward. There was always the threat of no presents at Christmas, because Santa doesn’t bring gifts to bad girls and boys. Only lumps of coal. And then you’re told it’s bullshit, and not only is the incentive to be artificially pleasant and complacent under almost any circumstance[1] throughout the year removed, but you’re also disillusioned with the system as a whole.

So what happens when you suspect that God isn’t real? The same God you’ve been kept in a state of perpetual childhood to believe in, to suspend your disbelief, to exhibit cognitive dissonance to such an extent as no rational adult in an enlightened, mature society would be capable? The same God who’ll burn you for an eternity — a fucking eternity — for something so much as lying to your parents? God doesn’t give heaven to bad girls and boys. Only lumps of coal. Lit. Up your asshole. Forever. What happens when you begin to suspect that maybe this whole system might not be real?

Some people can only stay children for so long.

[1] And this is what makes the whole Catholic kid-rape scandal particularly insidious is that these children are led to be complacent to appease God — who they’re told is represented by these men — and so they’re afraid to do anything out of fear that they’ll make God angry. Fucking disgusting.

It’s good to see that the Pope is undeterred by all these “petty rumors” about how he facilitated the systematic sexual abuse of thousands of children. Because that’s what all of this is, right? Petty rumors. It doesn’t matter what documented, incontrovertible evidence says. That kind of shit is for suckers.

So, if raping and covering up the rape of children, in some cases repeatedly, is just a “petty rumor”, then what else can we get away with? I mean, if that’s a petty rumor, then surely shoplifting is nothing more than childish hearsay. Armed robbery? Maybe vindictive gossip. At best. And punching an old former-Hitler-Youth assbag in the balls until he can’t even fantasize about ever sitting down comfortably again without feeling like he’s going to vomit so hard from the lasting pain that his scrotum inverts would be, what, juvenile chatter?

Meanwhile, Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League and regrettably not just a long-since-washed stain in his mother’s panties, claims it would have been “heartless” for the Catholic church to do anything about the pedophilia among its priests. Surely, by logical extension, more heartless than raping children and then exacerbating the emotional and psychological scarring by making them completely helpless to do anything about what happened to them.

My dad — who doesn’t quite yet know I’m an atheist, for reasons I won’t get into here, though I think he suspects — recently told me (before the recent spate of evidence against the Pope and the church in general came forth) “you know, a little church never hurt anyone.” I don’t quite understand cognitive dissonance. I mean, the Inquisition alone — think of how many people were tortured to death by representatives of the Catholic church.

Yet somehow millions still think of this man, this organization, of representations of some kind of loving and benevolent God. Cognitive dissonance is an amazing thing. I can’t imagine knowing all of this and still failing to draw the connection that either this religion does not represent an actually loving God, or that the God of this religion really, really loves child rape.

This was originally written in response to a Facebook post made by someone with whom I went to high school:

“God will never tempt you, Satan does. Will you choose to sin when you are tempted? Or will you turn away? God always offers a way out.”

And her subsequent response to my initial reply (which I’ll refrain from posting for the sake of brevity and because the rest of my response renders it redundant):

“I believe that there are demons (Satan) working against believers in Christ everyday. Satan knows when and where we are weak and will take every opportunity to attack. God has set eternity in hearts of man, and I believe that there IS more than this life. Revelations is VERY differnt than that of the rest of the bible..however it does reveal some about what is yet to come. Eternity of punishment=death=sin. Eternity in Heave=life=obediance…..

“Which is Which? Thats a battle believers in Christ struggle with everyday…Is this God speaking to me? or is it my flesh? (Sata) the deeper the relationship with Christ, the clearer it becomes..”

I liked my own argument so much that I wanted to share it with all of you. (Also, she appears to have deleted the entire thread instead of replying. Thanks, Sally. Guess that means I win the argument.)

I’ve modified it slightly for flow/conciseness/etc. Anyway:

The problem lies with authentication: How do you identify the tricks when you see them? If God is giving you some kind of signal, how can you be sure it’s not a forgery? That is, if Satan is truly cunning, it should be possible for him to fake God’s signature sometimes.

Everything gets so oversimplified that God and Satan are reduced from omnipotent or nigh-omnipotent super-beings to these caricatures that can barely pull off cunningness at the level of which humans are capable. It’s all cartoonish and blatant, like the depictions of Satan as a rascally pitchfork-wielding red guy, always causing childish and puerile mischief. But if he’s really such a threat as to necessitate this big, long battle over human souls — something some would argue is one of the most important things we could concern ourselves with — he HAS to be capable of tricking us into doing or believing just about ANYthing.

For instance, maybe Satan wrote the Bible, and every time someone worships the God depicted therein — a God who would commit genocide against humanity when it disgusted him, or who created two people with no sense of right and wrong and expected them to understand the significance of obeying rules and then punished not only them but every one of their descendants forever when they didn’t use the facilities that they didn’t actually even POSSESS until AFTER they’d eaten the apple — every time you align yourself with this petty, irrational, arbitrarily cruel entity, you’re worshiping the REAL Satan — the one who was so devious, so deceitful that he masterfully wove together this elaborate and effective framework of religion and faith, manufacturing and demonizing bogeyman opposition, so that people would eagerly throw themselves with the best of intentions and hopes right into his trap.

And sure, you can say “well I know the difference, I have the clarity that God has given me to recognize the truth”, but that’s exactly my point: How can you be sure? How can you know that that feeling you have, that understanding you feel you possess, is the genuine article and not just a forgery intended to keep you obedient to the REAL Satan?

Maybe the real trick is to get you to think that something is a trick when it’s not. Or that something else isn’t a trick when it is. And whatever clarity you might think you’ve attained is also just deception.