Some people want to believe in the delusion of beauty; some want to believe in the delusion of equality. Some things need not be 100% objectively true to be worth believing in.

- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

Of course, that assumes two things:

1) that all people who have faith in irrational concepts are beholden to a religion or ideology external to themselves,

2) that leaders of said religions are cynics and opium-peddlers in the Marxist sense.

Assumption #1 is false because there are many irrational beliefs, such as my own, which have very little to nothing to do with organized religion. Assumption #2 is false because, for good or for ill, the leaders of such things really do often believe what they say to be The Truth. Osama bin Laden, for example, probably fervently believes that he is the Fist Of God. As alien as that concept is to products of Western Liberalism and the Enlightenment, it’s not so hard if you step back and think of secular idealists driven by the same sort of insanity: Che Guevara is a good example, or Adolph Hitler, or Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, militia survivalists, so on and so forth.

I’m not Christian, so your arguments of brainwashing have little to no effect on me. If people want to pretend, like me, about universe fairies, so be it. In terms of scientific, objective, naturalistic reality it is hogwash. That’s identical to saying, however, to saying that pork isn’t kosher. It’s hogwash and non-kosher by the definition of the analysis scheme being used. This also doesn’t prevent universe fairies and pork from serving beneficial pragmatic uses when applied appropriately.

Probably the other reason you and people such as Tony are in
shock at my bold statements is that for most of the history of
christianity and just about any other religion, anyone who dared
to disagree ended up in serious trouble or outright dead.

And don’t worry, I know it isn’t just the christians doing this -
draw a picture of Mohammed and get instant death threats and
an airliner full of passengers into your skyscraper. All in the name
of a loving God, of course.

Already I can feel the hatred, pity, fear, anger and whatever else
from every religious person who reads my words, despite their
claims to be about peace and love. You’ve had 2,000 years of
domination in the world, of course it is shocking that someone
dares to stand up to your mythology and dictatorship - not only
because someone is going against the grain, but also because
you have been brainwashed for so long that saying the Emperor
Has No Clothes is a real culture shock.

So say what you will about me, but I am no troll. I am just speaking
for so many who can’t or won’t say what they are really thinking -
that religion is an outmoded concept based on ancient misinterpretations
of the world and psychology that has been hijacked and cleverly
utilized by those in power over the masses, so many of whom
just blindly accept what they told.

The Matrix is more right than ever about how the world works.

This is a gross mis-characterization of history. A sociologist would say that this statement is bad science.

While it is true that a number of “so-called Christians” have leveraged the dogma of their particular religious denominations to increase their own political or economic power, this is also true of every other religion… and (more to the point), every other sociological construct that involves enough people to abstract and distill power from a group of individuals and embody it in a leader or cabal of leaders. This includes guilds, democracies, theocracies, clans, business organizational units, political action committees, *any* grouping of people that allows trust to be transitive or distributive and power to flow outside individual responsibility.

Now, a libertarian would argue that this means that essentially just about every social construct is bad because it can be misused, but this completely ignores all of the advantages of people working in groups.

Abstracting power from a collection of individuals and putting it at the control of one (or a few) leaders allows an economy of scale and efficiency that does not exist among a collection of complete equals. This is why people band together in social constructs in the first place. And while there are plenty of horrible examples of misuse of power by social constructs, there are also plenty of examples of brilliant use of power by social constructs. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I’m going to feed the troll, but what the hey. Let’s say I like the color blue, and you like the color green. Now, the fact that I like the color blue, and may think your opinion of the color green incorrect in my case, I can grant that people is people and indeed for you the color green may be better. I have my opinion, you have yours, and the price of rice in Peoria remains unchanged.

The moderate religionist like Tony will go “well, I’m a Seventh-Day-Bah’ai-Tantric-Catholic, and you’re an Agnostic-Atheist-Freethinker-Skeptic-Cynic-Solipsist, and the price of rice in Peoria remains unchanged.” Despite the fact that he has a religion, he can see it as a personal choice that, should people disagree with him cordially, it doesn’t much matter.

Then along comes someone with a bucket of tar and a broad brush who declares that all religionists are fundamentalists and, when a moderate religionist politely disagrees, complain that the religionist isn’t fundamentalist enough.

I’m a deist, and I don’t consider you a fool for being an atheist any more than I consider Dr. Plait a fool for being an atheist or I consider Tony a fool for being a Catholic. I consider people fools not based on their ideology, but on their actions. You can believe in the Great Turtle A’tuin or even the Warhammer Chaos gods if you really want to but as long as you’re civil and you don’t try to teach science as religion or religion as science, I don’t much care. When you go about stereotypically painting others as a stereotype due to the Great [Un]Holy Culture War when there’s evidence not more than a few scrollwheel turns away to disprove said sweeping hyperbole, on the other hand, I can’t be quite so forgiving.

Meanwhile a select number of so-called Christians have made a
fortune and wielded serious power over the ages all because of
this one claim.

Man, how can I get in on this scam?