Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs oppress women in his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex lives in his name. Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name. The achievements of religion in past history - bloody crusades, torturing inquisitions, mass-murdering conquistadors, culture-destroying missionaries, legally enforced resistance to each new piece of scientific truth until the last possible moment - are even more impressive.
Tell it to the victims of the Crusades and the Inquisitions. Tell it to the people throughout mediaeval Europe and the old United States who were hung in irons, locked in dungeons, stretched on racks, burned at the stake, hanged, and impaled for daring to be heretics, or for having epilepsy or being social outcasts, and therefore labelled "witches." Tell it to the victims of human sacrifice. Religion has been a blot of shame on the course of human history, the velvet glove covering the iron fist of authority and coercion. To be an apologist for religion is to be a traitor to the causes of logic and liberty.
The Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch-burners and Jew-burners of history, the Irish Republican Army, the Israeli Zionists, the Muslims who are presently frothing with blood-lust regarding the author Salman Rushdie, the crazed zealots who want to ban books, movies and anything else which seems different from them -- all these are examples of what the "leap of faith" generally does to people, and it hardly seems desirable.
Meanwhile, you and I believe sanctimoniously that our collective bloodlust and sadism have been set aside. We think our shadow is no longer there. But there are still the gas chamber and the electric chair -- there is even, for that matter, the constant toll of automobile and airplane. We need look only to the millions of lives sacrificed daily to slave labor, to unjust penal institutions, to miserable, cruel communities and wretched families from which they can never escape. We need only think of how we persecute whole segments of our society so devilishly that we drive them to suicide or drug addiction. We allow the medical machine to decide who is to live and who is to die. And aren't we still prepared to send adolescent boys to war, if it comes to that? Don't we continue to poison one another with lethal pesticides and radioactivity? Don't we eagerly turn to television's murders for entertainment, night after grisly night?
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Suicide Justified
Non-Fiction---------------------Trigger Warning------------------- Originally titled 'All the Push You Need (and a little more)' this book intends to do what it says. It'll help increase your cynicism, deepen your depression, give strength to your demons, help...
