The Oil Slicks of Faith

"That cancer at the heart of it, Jerusalem, that jewel in the desert, that celestial piss-hole in the sand, from which the spiritual black death of the middle eastern desert has oozed and spread throughout the world like a vile oil slick, coating and contaminating everything it touches with a thick slime of pious ignorance - only we don't call it ignorance, we call it faith!"

Jerusalem spawned three such oil slicks of 'faith' and you would think, after all the bloodthirsty middle eastern events proudly portrayed by their 'scriptures', that humanity would have worked out how futile they are. Yet the world's three largest 'faiths' continue to fight over Jerusalem two millennia later, having spilt rivers of blood - not just over the city and it's institutions - but also over the symbolic oil slicks it has produced.

Will there ever be a turning point? Will our civilisation ever reach a new era where people are not treated like muppets by men wearing silly hats; an era when free-thinking overcomes false hope; when indoctrination of the young and gullible becomes a criminal offence; and when the beauty of the Universe is attributed to nature, instead of the crazy things primitive men once said that it was.

After centuries of religious repression, can the oil leaks of 'faith' be capped off? Can the widespread oil slick contaminations of 'faith' be cleansed with the natural detergent of reason?

Free-thinkers are no longer scared of the religious power-brokers. On the contrary, religion is now running scared of atheists. It is being asked to justify it's astonishing faiths and it can't. It fears that the free ride which has propelled it for over two thousand years could evaporate as more people are rightly questioning the unbelievable concepts that underpin religious faiths.

What else was it Pat Condell informed us about 'faith'?

"Faith, exuding as it does it's fake aura of purity and virtue - while fronting some of the ugliest ideas this planet has ever seen. Closing people's hearts when it should be opening them. Making them proud of things they should be ashamed of - and ashamed of things they should be proud of! Faith is one of the three phony virtues, the others being piety and righteousness. Not so much a trinity as three ugly sisters!"

Over the next decade public opinion on faith will polarise. Currently there are more openly religious people than there are open atheists - but there are many, many more in between and like a political election, it will be those who the battle will be over. As the debate predictably hots up, the middle ground will be vacated for either reason or faith. Those who choose 'faith' will harden their beliefs, stridently follow their trinity of phony virtues and advocate more violent retribution.

In Australia we have a bible-carrying Prime Minister whose kerb-stop interviews every Sunday with a church back-drop are nauseating. We have a Leader of the Opposition whose catholic indoctrination spills out all over the political arena. The balance of power in the Senate is the domain of a wacko dick-head evangelical 'independent' Senator. So, Australia could go down the same path as America which has many more wacko dick-head evangelical politicians and is three quarters of the way to becoming a theocratic dictatorship - a christian mirror image of the frightening islamic theocracy in Iran. I would not have believed this ten years ago.

As people realise that atheists do not kill and maim for their non-beliefs and that their own day-to day world has been built on science, technology, democracy and ethics, they will hopefully realise that everything around them was built by the hands and the brain-power of their fellow beings and that no-one ever constructed anything, cured anything or achieved anything at all by wishful thinking or misguided faith.

The world is beginning to run out of oil.