Godless And Free (17 page)

49.
Godless and Free

October 31, 2008

Somebody pointed out to me recently that by focussing on what I don’t want, namely religion, I’m attracting more of it into my life, which I agree would be a very unfortunate irony, if not for the fact that I’m focussing on what I do want, and that’s freedom, and lots of it.

You see, I make these videos, not because I despise religion as humanity’s way of poking itself in the eye with a sharp stick for no reason, although obviously I do, but because I want to live in a free world full of free people who can say whatever they want to say, and who can be whoever they want to be, one thousand percent of the time, and where nobody is allowed to shut them up because their crackpot religious beliefs have been offended.

I don’t care at all about theology, unless it threatens that freedom, and then I care about it the way I care about rabies or typhoid. So you could say that I’m not so much anti-religion as pro-freedom. Indeed, if religion was pro-freedom I wouldn’t have such a problem with it, but then if religion was pro-freedom it wouldn’t exist, because religion feeds on a broken spirit. That’s why it tries to break your spirit the moment you come into contact with it.

Submit, obey, do not question. Those words should be chiselled above the entrance of every church and every mosque, because that’s the only message religion has when it comes right down to it: Praise the Lord, or else.

The Pope spelled it out for American Catholics when he told them: “Obedience to the doctrine of the Church is the foundation of your faith.” That’s what he said. There was no mention of enlightenment or spirituality or any of these things, because he’s not in that business. He’s in the obedience business, the only business where the customer is always wrong.

Clergy are the only salesmen who don’t have to justify or prove any of the outrageous claims they make for the product they’re hustling, and this leaves them free to engage in the kind of open fraud which in any other walk of life would be a criminal offence.

For the level of investment they demand from us, I believe we’re entitled to expect actual enlightenment and wisdom in return. Instead what do we get? We get dogma, crude coercion and endless empty pieties about the love of a god who clearly loves us the way a violent husband loves the woman sitting next to him with two black eyes. If we step out of line we pay in the most brutal way.

And it’s this crass violence at the heart of religion which I believe makes it truly evil, and also furnishes proof, as if proof were needed, that this is an entirely manmade phenomenon with nothing divine about it, otherwise it wouldn’t be so damned ugly.

The god of the desert is transparently a false god. He’s a puppet who speaks with the voice of ignorant men who are afraid of knowledge and afraid of freedom, and who therefore need desperately to control the thoughts of others for their own miserable survival.

They need us to believe that we’re less than we are, and to diminish ourselves in our own minds; to feel small, helpless, in need of salvation. So what do they tell us? They tell us that strength and virtue lie in submission. Yes, of course they do. With our faces in the dust we are invincible, isn’t that right? And of course we will live forever, either in eternal bliss or in eternal torment, but that’s entirely up to us.

Eternal bliss requires that you wear a straitjacket of blind faith, not permanently, just from now until you die. Whereas living a joyful humane compassionate but godless life will get you horribly tortured for all eternity.

Fear is religion’s currency of choice. It’s the lowest of human emotions, because it’s the most crippling emotion, and that’s why it’s religion’s currency of choice. It’s pretty obvious when you think about it, but hey, don’t strain yourselves.

But actually it’s religion that has everything to fear, because it depends on maintaining the illusion, maintaining the spell, and hoping that nobody manages to burst its artificial bubble of faith. And this is exactly why it wages such determined war on our basic freedoms of thought and speech. But it’s losing this war, because every day more and more of us are waking up to the damage that this nonsense is doing to our world. We can see our societies being twisted out of shape, being injected with false values that pander to bigotry and superstition, and we’ve realised that this god of the desert has outstayed his welcome and become a liability, and quite frankly he needs us a lot more than we need him, because we’ve moved on from the desert, and we’ve discovered a few things about the world and the universe and our place in it, and we’re no longer afraid of the thunder and lightning. Our world is no longer populated by demons and hobgoblins, and we no longer need to be led around by the nose for the benefit of clergy.

And they know this, just as they know that their god’s very existence depends entirely on our belief – belief without evidence and belief that defies reason.

And when that belief disappears, as one day it certainly will, this ridiculous god will disappear with it, instantly and forever.

He won’t be able to vent his wrath or visit retribution on anyone, because he won’t exist. He’ll evaporate quicker than common sense in a creation museum, and his vast army of controlling parasitical clergy will find themselves briefly cartoon-like in mid air, before dropping like fleas into a bucket.

That’s what I’m looking forward to, and that’s what I’m focussed on, and it’s why I make these videos, because I think we’re better than this, and I know we’ve got the power to withdraw our belief and our consent and put a stop to this nonsense – all we need is the courage.

Peace, and freedom. Let’s not forget the freedom.

50.
The Water of Life

December 23, 2008

Hi everyone. As some of you may know I’ve been away for a while on a drugs binge.* Not only that, it was an atheist drugs binge, which makes it a thousand times worse. At least I hope it does. But now that I’m back in some kind of reasonable shape, I just thought I’d make this video, firstly to wish everybody a merry Christmas whether they like it or not, and also to answer a couple of points that people have made to me recently.

Somebody said: “You know, you’re not going to win the battle of ideas by insulting people you disagree with.” Which is a fair point. Or it would be if we were engaged in a battle of ideas, but unfortunately religion doesn’t have ideas. It has dogma. And the purpose of dogma is to get in the way of ideas; to stamp them out and kill them off before they succeed in changing anything. Because, as everyone knows, change to religion is pretty much what kryptonite is to Superman. It’s about as welcome as garlic to a vampire, because it threatens the position of those who control religion for their own narrow ignorant selfish ends.

And secondly, I don’t insult people because I disagree with them: people who believe in, say, things like spiritualism or astrology, even though I don’t believe in those things myself (although I have to say I think the planets do influence our lives, mainly by not crashing into us, which I think is quite considerate of them, really). But if astrologers were demanding special privileges all the time, and insisting that their beliefs be allowed to dictate the behaviour of others, then I’d probably adopt rather a different tone.

If astrologers enjoyed a tax exempt status which they routinely abused to meddle in politics and force their values into other people’s lives, or if they reacted with fury, threatening to kill people at the slightest criticism of their beliefs, or if astrologers were allowed to indoctrinate young children before their minds were fully formed, and if they then molested many of these children and protected each other from justice, while insisting that women and homosexuals not be allowed to practice astrology because they’re women and homosexuals, well then one or two insults might slip out. That’s how it works.

And I don’t apologise for that. Why should I, when religion has the barefaced cheek to claim moral authority over us when anyone can see it doesn’t even have any moral awareness? How can it have, when it’s so insulated from self-examination by its blind obedience to scripture?

It seems like hardly a week goes by these days that we don’t have to listen to some mealy-mouthed clergyman complaining that secularism is going to lead to moral anarchy and the breakdown of society, as if people really are stupid enough to swallow this shallow-minded self-serving bullshit.

Obviously nobody wants to live in a moral vacuum. Well, nobody outside politics and banking. But far from filling this vacuum, as it always claims, religion has actually caused it by using scripture as a vacuous substitute for genuine morality, by denying people the chance to formulate their own more substantial moral bearings in the only place that you find anything of real value, and that’s within.

If it hasn’t come from within it isn’t worth a damn, and you know that in your heart. You know it’s been put on like a cheap Sunday suit, and it’s as phoney as a clip-on bowtie.

If you get your morals uncritically from scripture you’re really no better than a dog who’s afraid to steal the meat because he knows he’ll be whipped. He’d love that meat more than anything, but, like you, his finely tuned moral compass keeps him on the straight and narrow. What a good dog he is.

Of course a dog doesn’t have a soul (apparently) so he doesn’t have the problem of having to live forever, but you do, and you know you’ll be whipped forever if you even think about touching that meat, you bad d, you miserable sinner.

Now maybe this doesn’t apply to you, because you are, in fact, a happy worshipper. Maybe you embrace the Lord every day with a joyful heart, and that’s great, but surely you realise that the moment you change your mind about the Lord and stop embracing him you’re setting yourself up for some terrible eternal torture. Don’t you ever feel as if somebody is shooting at your feet to make you dance? Because that’s how it looks to a neutral observer.

Now maybe that’s just my ignorance talking, because that’s something else I get accused of quite a lot. Somebody said recently: “Clearly you just don’t understand what a person’s faith actually means to them. For me,” she said, “it’s like the water of life.”

And I thought: “What a great phrase. The water of life, without which, of course, there can be no life.”

But even the water of life needs to be contained and properly managed, or it can run out of control, get into places where it doesn’t belong and cause real damage.

For example, if the water of your life gets together with the water of other people’s lives and they form a deluge, a rushing torrent of righteous certainty that sweeps all before it, including reason, then it’s not so much the water of life any more, is it? It’s rapidly turning the water of death, as everything in its path is crushed – original thought, rational enquiry, free speech – and their tattered remnants are strewn upon the rocks of scripture and blind dogma.

What’s needed here, obviously, is a dam to contain this water of death, convert it back into the water of life, and give us all a chance to switch on a lightbulb in our minds. And that’s where secularism comes in. It’s everybody’s friend, believer and non-believer alike, which I think makes it the real water of life, at least almost as much as this stuff, beer. Cheers.
(Takes a sip from a glass of exceptionally tasty dark ale.)

Now that’s what I call the water of life.

A merry Christmas to everyone, especially to all you Islamist crackpots who think that celebrating Christmas is a sin. Of course it is. That’s why it’s fun. Peace.

* This is a reference to pain killers I had been prescribed for a temporary back problem. I mentioned it because several people had kindly asked how I was doing.

51.
Shame on the Netherlands

January 25, 2009

Well, I suppose it had to happen eventually. The Dutch government is clearly just so determined to prostrate its country towards Mecca that insulting Islam is now officially a criminal offence. That’s right. You’re not allowed to insult anyone’s beliefs in the Netherlands, even if those beliefs insult you and everything you stand for.

As part of the ongoing Islamisation process, the Amsterdam appeals court has sanctioned the prosecution of an elected politician* for making a film critical of Islam and for comparing the Koran with
Mein Kampf
.

Now I have to say I’ve never actually read Hitler’s book, but I have read the Koran, and as an unbeliever (which I am, by the way – I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that before) if I talked about Muslims the way their holy book talks about me, I’d be arrested for hate speech and I’d probably end up in prison.

Fortunately I don’t feel inclined to behave in that way because I don’t feel the same level of hatred towards Muslims that their holy book evidently feels towards me.

In justifying this prosecution, the court said that it went according to the standards of the European Court of Human Rights, which, I have to say, rang one or two alarm bells, because I think we all know by now that whenever we hear the words “human rights” in connection with Islam we’re about to be confronted with another piece of ugly opportunism that spits in the face of genuine human rights and insults everyone’s intelligence.

And so it was a few months ago when the Islamic dictatorships hijacked the United Nations Human Rights Council and immediately demanded that western governments make it a crime to criticise Islam.

At the time I didn’t know whether the Dutch or the Swedish government would be the first to snap to attention and offer them everything they want on a silver plate, but in the event the Dutch establishment just happened to have a convenient fall guy who they didn’t want embarrassing them any more, because let’s be fair, they’re more than capable of embarrassing themselves.

And what a wonderful job they’re doing of that at the moment; embarrassing not only themselves, but their people, their country. In fact the entire continent of Europe is blushing for Holland today, especially for the dhimmi judges of Amsterdam to whom the politics of appeasement are clearly more important even than justice. Shame on you.

And what kind of justice system is it where the truth is inadmissable as evidence? What kind of a place are the Dutch people allowing their country to turn into? From a beacon of enlightened liberal values to the leading edge of the new totalitarianism in just a few short years, thanks entirely to the influence of Islam.

You’re being chewed up and spat out, is what’s happening to you people. Look at what you’re doing. You’re prosecuting a man who lives under twenty-four hour protection from attack by violent Muslims, yet he’s the criminal for expressing an opinion? Lewis Carroll couldn’t have written this one any better.

Nobody should be compelled to respect an ideology that doesn’t respect them, and Islam respects nobody. It claims dominion. Respect doesn’t come into it. You submit. That’s the deal.

The Dutch people are finally waking up to this fact. Sixty percent of them now consider Islam to be a threat to their national identity. Unfortunately none of those people are in power.

The ones who are in power have pretty much backed themselves into a corner – either continue with this toxic multicultural lie indefinitely or admit to a catastrophic mistake in opening the floodgates to Islam in the first place. But they could never do that, because that would be racist. That’s quite a predicament, isn’t it?

It would funny if it wasn’t so tragic. In fact, it’s still quite funny, because stupidity in action is always pretty funny. But this is a dark hour for the Netherlands, there’s no doubt about that. And it’s also kind of a watershed moment for the rest of Europe. We’ll all be watching now to see how this turns out. If these charges succeed we’ll know the dyke has been breached and it’s the beginning of the end of justice as we know it in Europe, and the beginning of creeping sharia, or injustice, as we know it. Looking forward to that? No, me neither.

The truth is sometimes offensive, there’s no doubt about that, but it doesn’t make it any less true. And the truth is that there are millions of people all over the western world who are absolutely sick and tired of Islam. They’re sick of hearing about it, and they’re sick of having to make allowances for it that aren’t deserved. And they feel enough is enough. And their voices will be heard.

The multicultural mafia can pretend it ain’t so, and they can pass all the laws they want to and continue to harass people and shut down internet connections and generally behave like the Gestapo, but it isn’t going to work. You can’t change people’s hearts by force. We are not going to respect Islam until Islam starts to respect us.

But then if that ever happened it wouldn’t be Islam any more, and that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

Peace, and good luck Netherlands. You’re going to need it.

*Geert Wilders.