I just read that a Saudi teen aged girl who was gang raped was just sentenced by some Muslim Sharia court to suffer 200 lashes and 6 months in jail as part of her punishment for that crime. At first she was sentenced to 90 lashes, because she was a passenger in a car where the driver was not one of her male relatives. When she appealed the sentence, the higher court increased the sentence, because in launching an appeal she was showing disrespect for the Muslim court system. Her defense lawyer was also disbarred for participating in the appeal.
You know, I was thinking about how when it comes to religion and God, human beings suddenly become extremely stupid. They have more brains when it comes to understanding human relationships, which don't give them a problem, but a relationship with God gives them a big problem and they suddenly become stupid. Here we must assume that God does in fact exist, because when you have religion you don't have any god, a situation that exists for so many long ages of time, that eventually the very existence of any god whatsoever is thrown into doubt. The gods of religion have one thing in common, in that they were very powerful and mighty only for a very brief time, a long long long time ago, when those gods got busy long enough to write books before those gods then vanished and left us with books and not much else.
Now if one person did not speak to another person for twenty years, the first person would understand that there was a problem in that relationship. 'He hasn't spoken to me in twenty years,' they would say, and they would understand that when someone give you the silent treatment that means that they don't want to have anything to do with you because they have some kind of problem with you.
The same simple common sense is never found in any religion on this planet, in that when God gives the religious the ruthless silent treatment for long long ages of time, if you were to ask a religious person about their alleged 'relationship with a god' they will reply that everything is hunky dory, just as it always was and always will be. Religion is always perfect, the one true faith. This is what religious people have to say about that nonexistent relationship. The only conclusion that I can draw from this weird behavior is that religious people really don't give a damn about any god at all, and it must be true that religious people are so damned dogmatic that even God must become converted to their religion. This would then explain why we have so many gods, because each of these motionless do nothing gods of the world are the creation of one group or another of religious people, who, since they cannot convert God to their religion, just make up a god and carve some god out of book verses and then call that do nothing idol a god.
Yes, this god dwells in their hearts, and we can 'have a relationship with Jesus' through reading 'holy scriptures' and we can commune with this church Jesus who is present in some snack cracker called the Eucharist. Everything is perfect and just dandy, for the gods of religion have left us with the divine gift of religion to make up for the fact that we have no gods here. The gods have left the planet and gone to ghost heaven to await out deaths, an event we should look forward to with joy. Oh generous gift of the gods, the promise of dropping dead and going to ghost heaven. How lovely. How sublime. How perfect are the generous gifts of those book scribbling gods of religion. How merciful. How tender. How like a loving grandpa or how good to you, just like your mom.
Later on, when those religious people discover, for the very first time, that YAHWEH is God, and that God is very wrathful and not very nice to them at all, they can remember how it was that they were so damned mulishly stubborn that even when they were not spoken to for long ages of time, instead of using simple common sense and understanding that there was some kind of a problem with that so called relationship they claimed to be having, they made up stupid excuses and cooked up theological fictions all intended to deny the reality of their exile. Therefore since even the horrors of the long dark night of the soul and the ghoulish specter of the endless eternal darkness of godless death was not enough to purge them of their worthless religion, they will be hearing from YAHWEH God in no uncertain terms at some point in the future, and I don't think they will be able to cook up some rationalization to make that sows ear they will be getting from God into some kind of theological silk purse.
