As I looked at him, he began to tell me his views upon religion.
He was guilty of deriding religion and placing it in the waste bin of superstition and mumbo jumbo, a big step for him who was brought up roman catholic.
His childhood was filled with catholic hell and catholic purgatory and bucket loads of christian guilt all poured into his susceptible, impressionable mind.
You’d think things like these would be enough to turn anyone of religion, he said, but they hook you with the promise of an afterlife, in a place called heaven, that is much better than the life we live now, he said incredulously.
He had been one of the fortunate few to escape from its suffocating clutches and to this day found priests and churches both repulsive and dangerous.
Dangerous? How so? I asked.
Religion is dangerous because it distracts the mind from its reasoning faculty, he said, by using fear, guilt and condemnation as its weapons for the mind and soul of humanity.
One thing I have learnt in this life is that if anyone tries to sell you something using fear as their main influence, you can be damn sure its not worth having.
Despite his repulsion towards religion, he could understand why people clung to it with such fervor.
In a world of uncertainty, where a persons death can happen quite suddenly it was reassuring to hear that there is someplace after death even if it sounds a lot like an eternal holiday camp, where we are rewarded for our deeds in this life.
If you were to say to someone who is religious, “Show me proof that heaven exists?”
They would say, “Show me that it doesn’t”.
In other words they expect you to prove something that doesn’t exist.
It’s understandable why people get hooked, dangling around in a world of guilt and purgatory, trying to escape the inescapable - death.
Religious teachers like to make you believe that they know what there is after death, because an old book written at a time when superstition was taken as fact and truth tells them so.
The real truth is that no one knows what happens after we die.
In the bible they talk lots about hell and purgatory, with awful descriptions of such places but there is surprisingly few details about heaven.
Why?
Why wouldn’t they talk more about heaven and its place as a reward in the whole scheme of things?
It would attract a lot more people to their belief.
It obviously wasn’t given much thought when the whole thing was being made up?
Perhaps whoever first came up with the concept of heaven didn’t have much of an imagination?
Or could it be that it doesn’t really exist except in the minds and hearts and hopes of frightened people?
Religion is the ultimate scam, he said.
It fills people with fear for their souls and once they are submissive, it offers them a reward in the after life, the old carrot and stick routine.
But you have to wait until you’re dead for your reward.
So when you find out it was all a scam, you can’t go back and get a refund because you’re dead.
How fucking convenient!
How fucking deceptive!
Every day around the world, poor saps are giving their hard earned money to misguided ridiculous men in stupid hats and robes who go against the very principles they teach, in order to buy themselves a place in heaven..
Don’t they say that it is easier for a poor man to enter heaven than a rich man to fit through the eye of a needle? (I think there’s a camel involved in there somewhere)
But don’t the toffs at the vatican live in absolute luxury and splendor?
They spend their time performing old, useless rituals in a language few people today understand, while millions who believe in their bullshit suffer from poverty or disease brought on by malnutrition, things that the church could remedy quite easily by liquidating its wealth and sharing it amongst all their suffering believers.
Wouldn’t doing this be an act of selflessness, love and compassion?
Doesn’t the church tells everyone to do these things (especially towards the church in the form of donations) but it doesn’t do itself, except in token gestures?
Throughout history it is proven that celibacy is unnatural in a human being, it goes against our genetic programing and causes perversions in people who seem to end up preying upon vulnerable children and young adults.
Yet still the church insists upon celibacy as a pre requisite for priests.
Even when the perversions and brutality became public, the best the church could do was threaten those affected with intimidation and eternal damnation, while they quietly moved the offending priests to another parish that wasn’t privy to what had happened.
These priests received little help for their mental afflictions, so they kept on perpetrating their crimes against those who trusted them and who they were meant to protect.
They probably told themselves it was the devil that made them do it.
The poor fucking devil has been the scapegoat throughout religious history.
Anyone else who committed sexual rape and molestation against children would be severely prosecuted and ostricised, but for some reason the law lets the church off from these crimes and its responsibility to ensure such things never happen again.
Decades later, the church finally says sorry because there is too much evidence for it deny and hide what has happened.
As though, its all over now folks, nothing to see here, time to go home and put the blinkers back on.
Don’t question the fact that the church admitted its guilt because it had to, was forced to, instead of doing it because it wanted to, because it was the right thing to do.
Sometimes I feel like screaming at the stupidity of people who still believe that the church can do no wrong, he said shaking his head in disbelief.
They still believe the pope is the conduit between God and humanity and God speaks his will only through the pope but I see the pope is a useless waste of space.
Here he is, in a position where he could do a hell of a lot of good for humanity but instead he travels around the world, talking out his arse telling people not to use condoms.
A look of pure disgust crossed his face.
But hang on, doesn’t the church have shares in condom companies? I ask.
Yes, he replied, a secret not well known.
The dope tells people to abstain from sex, to go against what is a natural, biological act that has seen our species survive and grow throughout the ages.
I would describe myself as a lot of christians describe themselves - I have been saved, reborn again, he said.
I have been saved from a life believing in the fantasies and lies the church wraps around its followers, suffocating them and blinding them from the light of reason and common sense.
I have been born again as someone who is free of these constrictions and who can see that this life we live now is the most important thing of all, because it is now and it’s the only thing we can be sure of.
Teach your children well he said, teach them that it’s better to use their reasoning minds and think for themselves when it comes to matters of religion and spirituality.
Don’t follow the herd of bleating sheep up the hill and over the cliff.
Perhaps people will always make the mistake of seeking comfort and solace in the fantasy of religion, falling into the traps religion sets up to ensnare the fearful, the unsuspecting and the vulnerable.
Perhaps they’ll wake up and see religion for what it is - the ultimate swindle of the soul.
After a short break while I made myself a drink, he continued.
God is something you have to have faith in because there is no physical or spiritual proof that any God exists in the first place.
It is like saying that an ice block is an intelligent, sentient being because you have faith that it is.
Just because a person believes in something, it doesn’t make it true.
God is a nice thought but nothing more.
God is a substitute for our parents when we grow up into adults.
We personify God so much, we have come to call it a he or for some, a she.
Why would God be one sex or another?
Why do we think we can understand the mind of a God with our tiny little minds?
Someone once said that to say you know the mind of God, is incredibly arrogant.
I mean if an omnipotent, all knowing, infinite, eternal God really did exist, wouldn’t any knowledge from this fantastic being blow our minds apart?
I would love for the concept of God to be real.
It would be comforting and reassuring to know that we will be looked after in some life in the here after but when you look at it from a larger perspective, any intelligent, thinking person would have to see it as pure fiction and fantasy.
Um..... well perhaps not I said, there have been many intelligent, thinking people who have subscribed to the belief in a God.
He agreed as he continued.
We are people who are frightened of the unknown and believing in a God reassures and comforts us, so I can understand why people believe in such a thing.
It gives people a sense of purpose and meaning, as if the chaos and random acts of the universe have some predestined meaning to their actions.
Ultimately, the only meaning and purpose we humans have is that which we give ourselves.
To think that God only has time for us humans and not every other living being out there in wild expanding universe, is incredibly stupid and arrogant!
I could see he was feeling very angry about it all and needed to calm down, so I went to find something else to do for awhile.
Strange the things you say to yourself when you’re looking in the mirror, I thought.