Respect me! Don't mock my faith just because you can't understand it! Don't offend me by laughing! etc. etc.






(* Donald Trump is one. And Ann Coulter. And Tony Blair.)

*People Are Fucking Stupid

People Have Always Been Fucking Stupid

and it takes some effort to overcome the brainwashing and get a real education

Since time began I'm sure a % of humanity has been dirt dumb, gallingly gullible, and susceptible to this kind of psychic garbage.

And, no surprise, there is an ever-ready population of charlatans and hucksters eager to take advantage of that gullibility.

Provides socially acceptable cover for hucksters, pedophiles, rapists and con artists. I have a couple of childhood friends that became ministers, they are totally BOGUS! Just in it for the easy, tax-free, MONEY!!!

I am related to some who seek to serve through ministry, so I feel compelled to mention the not-hucksters here.

Even so, I take your point that it is a field easily exploited by the least ethical among us.

Fraud, because they justify everything they do with lies.
Extortion because they take money on threat of eternal damnation.
Child abuse because they brainwash young children with their lies while they children are too young to understand that they are being victimized.

Sometimes they combine all those into one package. When I was a little kid the nuns at the Catholic school used to encourage us to spend our allowances buy something they called "indulgences". For cold hard cash, you could buy your way out of purgatory and into heaven. And since purgatory was just about as bad as hell, we little kids (too young to know better) were told we would suffer horribly unless we gave our allowance money to the church to buy those indulgences (extortion). They even had a chart of how much money it took to buy your way out of X number of days of purgatory. Crass, money-grubbing bullshit aimed at snatching quarters from little kids. And if you consult any Catholic authority today they will tell you that cash for indulgences was eliminated in the 1500's. But as a child, I saw them being sold with my own eyes, so that brings us back to lies, as the foundation of religion, and covers all the bases.

And there's the fact that Pope Paul VI said in 1967 money given for indulgences was only in the form of a free-will gift, and was used to encourage charity. So why did they have to clarify money-for-forgiveness in 1967 if it was banished in the 1500's? More lies upon lies.

literally.

when piling on the made-up methods for achieving nirvana the catholics (full disclosure: I started with these kooks) really have cornered the market in how to get their god to help them make a few bucks...

My personal favorites? Annulments...especially after someone has kids with a spouse...pay a few bucks, have the marriage annulled in the eyes of the church and you are free to marry the person you committed adultery with on your original spouse...

When there's a profit to made in sin and forgiving that sin, count on the catholics to have a method to capture and increase revenue...

It really angers me to see these old folks scrambling to get their payouts in order so they can make it to heaven after they're gone...the church capitalizes on those fears of hell or purgatory and uses that as a cudgel to separate seniors from their money.

The parents who hand over their children to guys like this should get double whatever sentence the rapist gets.


"secular dumbasses like Daniel Dennett lack the brainpower to understand...the subtle shadings and nuances of religious thought."

I think you mean people who anger the faithful and the faitheists by pointing out the problems with treating the bigoted hate speech in the bible as divine directive.

They ask only that those who tell the truth be silenced.

It's against the law to torture, imprison and/or burn them at the stake.

Which are, of course, made up, evidence free.


Unlike the extremely subtle shadings that are REAL that science and logic dumbasses like Dennett do understand, but the nuances of religious thought ignore.

I have a BFA in Costume Design.

those subtle nuances of shading are church hierarchy code for contradictions they can't explain and have no basis even in their own bible. Those subtle nuances are called lies and fantasy in the real world. But the world of make-believe is exactly that, no actual physical laws or even any coherent explanations.

Just subtle nuanced shades of fantasy to extort the believers.