Godless And Free (5 page)

12.
Am I a Racist?

May 20, 2007

Well, it seems that my little video about Islam has caused a storm in a teacup in Berkeley, California, where somebody on the grandly named Peace and Justice Commission circulated it in an e-mail, and everybody was shocked and disgusted. Well, they said they were shocked and disgusted, which is not really the same thing.

One person even called it hate speech, as if I’m some kind of neo-Nazi. Give me a break, I’m not even a Catholic any more.

Of course I don’t want to offend Muslims. What do you think I am, insane? But I don’t think that any intelligent Muslim would be offended by anything I’ve said. Indeed, I’ve had e-mails from Muslims who agree with me.

On the other hand, I don’t really mind the idea of offending a group of politically correct jackasses, which is what seems to have happened in Berkeley.

If any of you dishonest wretches are watching this video, I want to say to you that having an opinion about Muslim women covering their faces is not racist, and by calling it that you simply devalue that word even more than it’s already been devalued by people like you.

I don’t care what your race is, if you’re walking around in public with your face covered up, dressed like a pepper pot, then I think you’ve got something wrong with you.

And it has nothing to do with religion or with God or anything like that. This is a social issue. This is a controlling device which has been imposed by men; ignorant cowardly men who are too insecure in themselves to allow women to be themselves.

It’s a statement of segregation and of separation, and it’s a wilful refusal to assimilate, and too often it’s used cynically as a political weapon, to cause division in society.

They insist on working as teachers dressed in this costume, knowing it’s going to cause problems because the kids can’t hear what they’re saying, and so it all ends up in court, because that’s what they really wanted all along, and then it’s all over the news again, because some Muslims have gone out of their way to be offended yet again.

I think that for any woman in a free country like Britain or America to deliberately wear this symbol of oppression, which is what it is, is an insult to all the brave women in Muslim countries who have already died horrible deaths trying to shake off this ridiculous medieval nonsense. I think they ought to be ashamed of themselves. And if you think that’s racist, then I think you’re the one who has the problem, not me.

I live in Britain, and we’re a very tolerant society. Some people say we’re too tolerant for our own good, but I’m proud of how tolerant we are. And that’s why we tolerate people calling us racists, while simultaneously calling us kuffars and devils. We tolerate people teaching their children to hate Jews. We tolerate people using free speech to protest against free speech.e even tolerate people who despise the values that make this country the kind of place they’d want to come to, from whatever repressive hell hole they couldn’t wait to get out of.

We couldn’t be less racist if we tried, and we try all the time. Because we know that being tolerant means you have to tolerate intolerance, and you have to put up with people who don’t want to put up with you. And that’s what we do in Britain.

We bend over backwards for Muslims, all Muslims, almost as far as we bend over forwards for the American government, and that’s all the way.

Peace.* And you can take that any way you like in Berkeley.

* I reverse the peace sign to make a V-sign, the British equivalent of giving the finger.

13.
Miracles and Morals

May 29, 2007

Hi everyone. I’ve been asked by various people where I get my morality without religion. Well, isn’t it obvious? I get it by mail order. That’s right, it comes in a plain brown wrapper because I don’t want the neighbours to know what I’m up to.

No, seriously, I simply ask myself, what would a Christian do in this situation? And then I do the opposite.

I’m kidding, of course. No, I just trust my feelings to tell me that good things are right and bad things are wrong, and it just seems to fall into place. I dunno, maybe it’s a miracle.

Well, what’s the alternative? A Christian morality that embraces all the barbarism of Leviticus while ignoring the simple wisdom in the golden rule? Thanks, but no thanks.

Even if you believe the Bible, you know that Adam and Eve gave us the knowledge of good and evil, which presumably means right and wrong. So why do we still need guidance? (If you can call it guidance, being bullied and threatened with violence by some celestial thug.)

I’m actually amazed that anyone even trusts God to tell us how to behave. If you used him as a role model you’d probably end up in prison, because that son of a bitch is about as qualified to preach morality as Charles Manson.

On every second page of the Old Testament somebody is being butchered for the glory of, or directly by, God. This is not a loving entity I see in these pages. This is a deeply disturbed individual. This is the kind of personality the police always tell you not to approach. This character would give Hitler a run for his money. And any morality that’s there is really just a list of rules, some of them quite barbaric, which must be obeyed on pain of eternal torture (what else?).

But this is not really surprising, is it, because scripture is not actually about morality. It’s really about believing in the impossible, and the more impossible a thing appears to be, the more likely we are to believe it, it seems to me.

And the morality is really just a garnish, a dressing, which is usually ignored for the meat and potatoes of the magic and the mumbo-jumbo.

For example, if you take the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, which is probably his greatest ever gig, and strip away all the Christianity, well then you’d have something worthwhile. But all the miracle stuff – the virgin birth, the resurrection, redemption, hellfire, damnation, and all the Cecil B. deMille stuff – that has all been put there deliberately to obscure this simple fact.

The last thing any clergyman wants is people living according to the words of Jesus, because if they did, there’d be no need for organised religion, and a lot of people would find themselves out of a job. They need the miracles to keep the cash rolling in, even though they tell us it’s not actually about the miracles, it’s about the message. Oh yeah? And what message would that be, then? “Believe in me, for behold, I can do miracles.” That’s the message, because if you take away the miracles what are you left with? A pretty decent guy talking common sense, which means that nobody on this planet is going to take him seriously if he lives to be a million. The miracles are everything. And all the stuff that Jesus said about blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the peacemakers; you’re the salt of the earth, the light of the world, turn the other cheek, don’t give alms in public, don’t pray in public, you can’t serve God and mammon, consider the lilies of the field, judge not lest ye be judged, don’t be a hypocrite, whatever you ask for you’ll get, do unto others as you want to be done by, beware of false prophets…

People have said that stuff for thousands of years, and nobody has ever listened.

So let’s drop this idea that it’s not about the miracles. It’s all about the miracles. It’s all about the magic and the mumbo-jumbo, which is a shame, because I think that’s probably the last thing Jesus would have wanted. Of course, I can’t be absolutely sure about that because, after all, I’m no theologian.

But given all this, I’d now like to ask you, where do you get your morality from? I’d be very interested to know. In the meantime, peace to everyone, especially Christians with guns who support the death penalty.

14.
Catholic Morality

June 4, 2007

Well, not content with trying to force religion into the European constitution, now the Catholic Church is interfering in British politics. This week a cardinal and an archbishop have both threatened to withhold communion from Catholics MPs who don’t vote against abortion.

Personally, I’ve always thought it’s a shame the virgin Mary never had the right to choose, because then we might have been spared two thousand years of misery and bloodshed.

But it wasn’t to be, and so, for Catholics, abortion has always been a tricky one, especially if you’re using a knitting needle in a back alley, which is the Catholic Church’s preferred method, because, when it comes to Catholic dogma, human life is only sacred if you obey the rules. Hence no condoms for Africa. We don’t want those people doing anything immoral, so we’re going to let them die.

This is from ananisation supposedly founded on the teachings of Jesus. I’m not sure what teachings exactly. It must be the bit where Jesus talks about living in palaces full of art treasures, protecting paedophiles, and collaborating with the Nazis. I haven’t actually managed to find that passage myself, but I’m sure it must be in the Gospels somewhere.

And this is why I wasn’t too surprised when I first heard that the current Pope is in fact an ex-Nazi,* because to me the Catholic Church and Nazism go together as naturally as Bibles and lynch mobs. If you think of one, it’s difficult not to think of the other.

Indeed, I’ve often thought it was just bad luck for the Catholic Church that Nazism never became respectable, because they put all their chips on the number of the beast, but it just didn’t happen for them.

Although the Pope who collaborated with Hitler by ignoring the Holocaust is now being made a saint for his trouble. That’s right, Pius XII is being made a saint, which has got to be the cheekiest thing I’ve heard since Henry Kissinger had the nerve to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

I’m not sure why it is that the Catholic Church exudes this aura of, not so much evil as… well, actually yes, evil.

I think this whole celibacy thing has a lot to answer for, because there’s got to be so much repressed energy there with nowhere to go. I mean that’s bound to cause a few short circuits.

I can understand somebody being celibate if that’s how they’re comfortable. But if you’re doing it as a penance, denying your most powerful basic urges because you think that God is going to be pleased with you, then I think you should see a doctor, because those “inner demons” you’re struggling with so manfully are really nothing that a twenty dollar whore couldn’t put right in a couple of minutes. But of course you couldn’t do that, because that would be sinful. Much better to insert your penis into a choirboy, and then carry on lecturing dying Africans on sexual abstinence.

If any cardinals or bishops are watching this video, let me ask you a question. On a theological level, is it more of a sin for a priest to rape a child while wearing a condom, or not wearing one? How much more evil is it to wear the condom? And would it be OK, i.e. would you keep quiet about it, if he went to confession afterwards and truly repented, until the next time?

The Catholic Church has lost so much money on this scandal, they must be down to their last few billion by now. If you were Pope wouldn’t it make sense to try and add up all the sex abuse that’s been committed so far, and then add up all the money that’s been paid out in compensation, and then you might be able to work out exactly how much the Church is paying for, say, one blowjob, and whether it might be more economical to buy the same product from a professional sex worker. That way you’d be helping to employ somebody in a legitimate occupation. Certainly one that’s more legitimate than yours is, your holiness, your eminence, your grace.

A little word of advice – clean your own stained glass windows before you start cleaning everybody else’s, and then people might take you a little more seriously. Peace.

* OK, I know he was conscripted into it as a youth, so I admit that was a cheap shot, but I think this guy deserves a few cheap shots, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

15.
Origin of the Species

June 13, 2007

Where do we come from? This is the ultimate question for us, I suppose, and at the moment we’ve got two opposing theories. We’ve got the evolution or the science theory, and the creation or the magic theory. Both equally valid. Both equally plausible. Apparently.

And to emphasise this they’ve now built a creation museum where all the myths of the Bible can finally come to life a lot more fully than they ever did in the past, for twenty dollars a head.

The creation theory of course comes from the book of Genesis, which tells us God created man from a handful of dust and he created woman from man’s rib. And these two together were so stupid that they weren’t on the planet five minutes when they’d managed to get a curse put on all future generations. Nice work.

But in a way this is one positive thing about Genesis, that it does give us a kind of status. It confers on us a tragic nobility where we’re communing directly with God, wrestling with major themes, and not just grubbing around in the dirt for insects, as we otherwise would have been. So just for our own self-respect, if Genesis didn’t exist, we’d have to write it, if somebody hadn’t already beaten us to it a few thousand years ago.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection, on the other hand, tells us that we have evolved over millions of years from lower life forms such as lizards, apes, and born again Republicans.

And many Christians would like to see both of these theories taught in schools so that kids can get both sides of the argument. But what I don’t understand is why there are only two sides to this argument. Why only two theories? Because this is a very important question, so surely we need all the theories we can get, especially as the two we’ve got are so mutually exclusive. If you embrace one you have to reject the other. What kind of absolutist madness is this? There has to be some middle ground.

(Sound of a police siren in the street.)

My cab must be early.

OK, here’s a question: If you crossed a pig with a monkey, what would you get? I’ll give you a clue. Look in the mirror. Now I’m not trying to be insulting, but it’s true, isn’t it?

We know that genetically we are very close to monkeys, but we’re also very close to pigs, which is great news if you’re looking for an organ transplant. In fact, in some cannibal societies human meat is known as long pig.

So maybe here’s what happened. A few million years ago a monkey had sex with a pig (I know it’s wrong, but they were at a loose end on a Saturday night, these things happen) and they produced the first human, a remarkable creature that could not only peel bananas with its feet but was mustard at sniffing out truffles. And from this we evolved into the articulate dextrous pig-monkeys we are today.

Still not convinced? OK, let’s call the monkey Adam, and the pig, oh I dunno, you think of something.

Well, why not? It makes more sense than either of the other theories, as it explains why there’s no missing link while eliminating the supernatural, so I’d like to see it taught in schools. Let’s give the kids all the available theories, and let them decide.

We are the pig-monkeys of planet earth, this is my theory. And since I don’t have a shred of evidence to support it, naturally I believe it all the more passionately. Peace.