Fast Track For A Sacred Cow

Agnes is part of a larger problem, though a prominent fang in the snake.

We were all treated this week, among the detritus of political campaign and megaphonic hairpieces, to the news that Pope Francis had officially recognized a second intercessory miracle attributed to the ghoulish figure of Mother Theresa. It startled me, as I had forced my knowledge of this dreary procession into the fog only to have it snapped back forefront by the fawning and wholly supportive litany of our news outlets.

Mother Theresa, whom I shall now be properly referring to as Agnes, is known to us as a benign and beatific figure. She has “Mother” in her self-granted title, affecting an elevated and benevolent position, and her relentless PR machine has done nothing for the last fifty years but embellish that persona while trying to keep her cruelty and hypocrisy a secret from us.

She has also been on the fast track to sainthood essentially since the moment of her death. The organization which bears her name, the Missionaries of Charity, continues to take in obscene amounts of cash from around the world while operating little more than death hotels. Claiming over four thousand nuns and nineteen of these horror show hospices in Calcutta alone, the last benevolent thing the sisters have done was to shut down adoption centers in India due to overwhelming religious intolerance. The intolerance, of course, originating with the sisters and directed at India's adoption laws, which do not exclude un- or formerly-married individuals.

Between then and now, the doddering form of Pope John Paul II claimed as authentic the story related by a woman healed of her cancer by intercession from Agnes's picture. The woman's doctors and husband told a very different story, but what need have we of doctors when glowing snapshots are among us? It comes as no surprise to read that the benevolent Missionaries of Charity are accused of illegally retaining the woman's medical records which document her year-long course of professional treatment, as well as pressuring the hospital staff to endorse this nonsense about miracles. The miracle that has just been recognized by the current Pope dates to 2008, and involved the same kind of nonsense around a Brazilian man's brain tumors. I unfortunately haven't been able to find any substantive article regarding actual details, but the Vatican Insider described it as “scientifically impossible.” The same Vatican, I remind you, that has never accepted or understood anything scientific until it was force fed to them. These things are on record, you can read as much about them as you can stomach. I describe them only to sketch out for you exactly what it is this dead woman is being credited with, and that these insulting and obviously delusional lies are what puts Agnes at the right hand of the creator she didn't believe in.

Agnes's personal documents reflected that she had no faith in the existence of God. The man responsible for examining those documents as part of the first step in canonization, Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, argues she was only having a half-decade “dark night of the soul” and that the cynical analysis of people like myself fails to properly understand her intent. But what other explanation could come from a representative of the nation-state responsible for both promoting and profiting from the never-ending victory lap Agnes seemed to be on? Incidentally, it's remarkable to me that the Vatican would not only allow her non-belief to become public, but that the clear contradiction between being a non-believer and a candidate for canonization seems to mean nothing.

Before the fourth century, the only saints were martyrs. If you wanted a seat in the VIP box, you had to die for your faith, preferably in a very public and painful way. Regional religious heroes, now including holy men who were conspicuously dead of natural causes, began to become venerated with approval of local bishops. This went on until 1170, when Pope Alexander the Stylish claimed any and all rights to canonization, because why the hell not. Three years later, it became actively illegal to venerate outside the Church's authority, with real-world laws to punish people for liking a dead guy just a little too much. Nothing particularly interesting to this conversation happens for quite a long time, until 1983 when JP II starts hacking bits off Alexander's game plan to streamline the process. One of the best bits to go was the dedicated position of opposition, someone responsible for the argument that the candidate for sainthood didn't deserve it. Arguments against can still be suggested, but to the best of my knowledge the Vatican no longer finds it necessary to challenge itself from within in almost any fashion.

The process begins with the potential saint's death, and before the first bureaucratic papers are shuffled a period of five years is supposed to elapse. This is to allow for fervor to die down, ostensibly to ensure that mob rule combined with the observable uptick in popular people's esteem after they die does not overwhelm what passes for reason at the Vatican. Agnes was not held to this tradition, as the examination of her writings – the first official step toward sainthood – began well before and was concluded by the time of her death. Following the examination and approval of the candidate's personal papers, their corpse is to be exhumed and examined. This is to ensure that no wacko cults have been messing around with the remains or using the tomb as a site for bizarre rituals, as well as the ritual lopping off of choice bits of the corpse to save as relics. You can almost swim in the irony, as well as feel a little sadness we never got to see the Pope chasing Agnes through the Vatican waving a pair of golden garden shears.

Once the Vatican ensures the candidate's corpse will stay where it is told and the choice cuts are securely pickled, the Pope publicly declares you a hero. It's really only an honorary thing at this point, as the candidate still doesn't get any feasts or churches named after them. It's worth noting that, at this point, the church will not acknowledge that the candidate is, in fact, in heaven at all. It seems counterintuitive, I know, to think that a person could be in line for sainthood without being in heaven, but nothing is so ironclad as a rule open to interpretation. There's some good news, though. The candidate can have their image graven across all kind of prayer-themed merchandise – probably nothing wrong with worshipping a graven image, after all – and use that merchandise to build a fanbase, thereby increasing the probability that some delusional person will credit their hallucinatory fantasy to the candidate's intercession. One could be forgiven at this point for thinking that this is less a somber and spiritual separation of the wheat from the chaff, more a brutally arrogant and solipsistic swimsuit contest judged on hysterical fervency and theocratic cheerleading.

We now reach the point Agnes had attained by the time of her death, attribution of miracles. Agnes shouldn't have even been considered for another half-decade, I remind you, but instead the Pope could not have thrown the miracle flag faster. It is at this third step in the canonization process that the church will finally publicly claim that the candidate's eternal being is ensconced firmly in the heavenly hereafter. Everything they preached from childhood indoctrination or adult conversion about how to get to heaven and avoid death was only the first part of the story. They withheld that not everyone would actually be getting MVP status, class warfare evidently being a problem in the afterlife as well, and that the path would involve years in whatever waiting room the Vatican prefers now – having renounced the horrific idea of limbo years ago – while guys in bathrobes read diaries and fiddle with corpses. Sounds fun to me, I don't know why they would bury the lead like that, but there you have it.

Beatification is attributed one of two ways, both on equally shaky rhetorical ground, I would say. Firstly, the candidate can be a martyr, meaning they died for their faith or as an act of heroic charity, presumably the bearing of another's mortal wound. Alternatively, they can be a confessor, the default position for saints these days. To be a confessor, it must be proven – for whatever that word is worth coming from the lips of a Pope – that the creator of the universe interceded directly to benefit a person who offered a prayer through the saint-elect, kind of like clicking through to Amazon from a website you like. These fraudulent miracle cures are well know to you, and they only proliferate due to the Catholic construct's unwillingness to repair the damage they have done in destitute countries without proper health care.

The final step before being fitted for a heavenly letterman's jacket is an encore miracle, which is why the ghoulish Agnes is currently in our public consciousness again. As part of JP II's streamlining process I mentioned earlier, part of the 800-year-old process left on the cutting room floor was the requirement of three intercessions. Currently only one additional conspiracy is required – the unfortunate man from Brazil – and the news is filled with fawning and completely complicit endorsement of the current Pope's thumbs up. No news outlet appears willing to state what is painfully obvious to honest thought: none of this is true, and it matters even less.

Despite the chorus to the contrary, the current Pope has done little to nothing regarding advancing the church into the 21^st century or guiding it to better mesh with modern society. Before Francis, Pope Benedict the Nazi-Faced threw open the pearly back door by validating locally venerated cult leaders at an unheard of pace; fanatics long dead, supported by the church, and with a large booster club who weren't waiting on the Vatican's approval or a cleared-up runny nose. Making a saint out of a monstrous woman who should be properly known for inflicting horrific dying conditions and absolutely no medical care whatsoever, in addition to being a well-known seller of indulgences to the most foul people you can imagine, will hopefully prove to be an unremovable nail in the Vatican's long-overdue coffin.

These Three Things

Religion, among the thousands of very large and very unprovable claims it makes, never even dares to attempt addressing the three most important steps in our species' development.

I Have Made Fire

The oldest definitive evidence of human-controlled fire dates back roughly one million years and was found two years ago in Wonderwerk Cave in Northern Cape, South Africa. In this cave, quite by accident, archaeologists found carbonized plant material and burned animal bones, with the sharp edges of the bone and undisturbed patterns of ash removing any possibility that the material was blown by wind into its position. This discovery brings us slightly closer to confirming that fire was the key in transitioning between Homo habilis and Homo erectus, referred to as the “cooking hypothesis.” This suggests that the benefits of controlled fire allowed for our caloric energy to be spent on general brainy goodness instead of raw physicality, but to prove it we need as-yet-absent evidence from the 1.8 million-year-old habilis/erectus split.

Without the harnessing of fire for defense, warmth, cooking, and social well-being, civilization never happens. Without fire, food requires nearly as much energy to eat and digest as it provides. Without fire, the predators of the night are free to come and take us at their pleasure, and we stay so cold in our bones that the urge to tell stories and recreate the hunt for the entertainment of others never surfaces. Fire brings with it softer food, the ability to sleep on the ground, a sphere of insect-free bliss, and innumerable other benefits.

If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

In Genesis 4:4, Abel burns an animal sacrifice and thereby gains favor with God over his brother Cain, because God's just not that interested in the ritual wasting of hard-won food unless it's through immolation. Later on, in 8:20, the flood recedes and Noah celebrates his successful endeavor by killing and burning “of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl.” Based on Jewish law, this passage can be easily and accurately rephrased as “Noah killed and burned every living thing he didn't plan on eating in the immediate future.” Since there was no provision for feeding animals on the trip, the predators would have long since erased the prey. This means that, despite surviving impossible odds and making it out of the boat to barren dry land, another swath of animals was shepherded into extinction by God's loving hand. In the interest of not inflating the word count of this essay too insufferably, we shall omit discussion of the utter nonsense involved in surviving with no plants and salted water, the inability of the ground to grow crop, as well as speculation on how we have doves at all if the one Noah used as a dry land gauge never came back.

The aforementioned are the first two biblical accounts of humans controlling fire, and both are instances of divinely-warranted needless sacrifice. It seems obvious that these people are familiar with fire and find it neither alarming or abnormal, which clashes with the role of fire as the one and only effective way to curry favor with God. Flame makes many appearances, acting as everything from a font of knowledge to a source of retribution and punishment, but nowhere does the call for sacrifice through immolation or the delivery of fire from God to man appear. The Genesis flood myth, blatantly plagiarized as it is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, can be placed at roughly 2700 B.C.E, around 2000 years after idiots think the Garden of Eden was a place. It's obvious, once examined, that fire was a pre-existing, human-harnessed secular substance. Equally obvious is that the odious people making all this bullshit up were too stupid to even think of taking credit for it.

Couple veiny dicks over here, pulsing demon anuses over here...annnnnd, done!

x^2 + y^2 = r^2

The wheel brings us monumental advances, but in a circuitous and cryptic way. Pottery wheels appear to have arrived on the scene first, but shortly thereafter the wheel found its vertical orientation. Stone wheels are heavy, and assembling a throwing wheel would likely require rolling the top over to the stand before hefting it. At some point, someone just a little bit brighter than the rest thought to connect two wheels with a wooden shaft, and much rejoicing was heard. They appear on transportation in our archaeological record around 3500 B.C.E., located in the landmass spanning from Mesopotamia to Central Europe, making any further attribution difficult. Packs and supplies could now be borne on the shoulders of an axle, instead of a horse or grandmother. Without a person even needing to understand it, the wheel allows us to further exploit the laws of physics concerning horizontal movement, while demonstrating Newtonian principles effortlessly when ascending and descending every hill.

Wheels are mentioned everywhere in scripture, usually describing the opposing army's chariots when not in flowery use to describe Ezekiel's hallucinations. However, as you can no doubt guess, the moment of conception of this invaluable shape is nowhere in the account. One can infer it, of course, since Noah was said to be near his 600^th year of life for the flood and couldn't have moved the materials needed without mechanical advantage. But, once again, no mention of the divine hand delivering such a treasure. Like everything worthwhile created by mankind, religion first takes it for granted and then takes the credit.

The Ghoul of Calcutta, seen here taking credit for inventing medical malpractice.

Shoes Too Small To Kickbox God

When confronting the presently unanswerable questions of our surroundings' beginning and end, again we find God carelessly omitted the latter while thoroughly and completely missing the mark on the former. The closest either Genesis creation story can come to accuracy is when over-friendly, conciliatory reasoning is applied to the creation of light as an attempt to make it work with how we know photons operate. “Let there be light,” sez God, and light happens, but not right away. A verse later God sees the light, declares it good, and separates it from the darkness, thereby unjustly ruining the reputation of darkness to this day. This might seem to fit with the delay one would expect to see between the creation of a star and the photons it emits striking another object. It falls under scrutiny because it also fits with the disproven, shameful, and arrogant geocentric nonsense preached from all pulpits.

When turning to the end of existence on Earth, our sheer inability to imagine such a thing coupled with our extreme shortsightedness makes forming an impression of it nearly impossible. People are really only able to imagine things through their singular frame of reference, so we unavoidably cut-and-paste a stand-in for ourselves into the picture when we cast our thoughts to the unimaginable. We also tend to have a much easier time with the hypothetical death of others than we do our own, regardless of one's personal feelings. This can create a distinctly skewed and temporally-crippled way of examining things, which we then naturally find in spades in every single religious scripture.

As an example of how narrow our focus can be on the subject of events on the astronomical scale, I offer some solid data followed by speculative conjecture. The age of the universe (which is to say the time elapsed since the Big Bang) is calculated to be 13.8 billion years, with the Milky Way galaxy only slightly younger at 13.2 billion. In a remote and unfashionable end of one spiral arm of that galaxy sits our humble little planet, which clocks in at a barely-old-enough-to-drink 4.5 billion years old. Looking to the other end of eventuality, our Sun's luminosity is steadily increasing to the point that it will evaporate all the water on Earth in approximately 3.75 billion years, and shortly after that swallow our scorched rock whole. Around a quarter billion years after that, the Andromeda galaxy will come along and finish the job by colliding with and erasing our galaxy from the sky.

"I'm very, very slowly coming for your punk ass."

Now, on our paltry little scale, we showed up as a separate genus from the Australopithecine right around two million years ago. Generously speaking, it can be said that on the way to anatomically-modern humans a separate and now-extinct subset of human emerged every four hundred thousand years, until H. sapiens reached dominance roughly two hundred thousand years ago.

For wild speculation, if our species were to follow the oversimplified track record I have outlined above, without molestation and a minimum of self-destruction, we have only two hundred thousand years in our present anatomical – and probably intellectual – state before a divergence appears that our side will undoubtably lose. Our tinier frames and goofy-looking heads must have seemed ridiculous to our predecessors, but our cunning way of bashing their fucking skulls in when they weren't looking meant we got to run the show. Similarly, gradual mutations will occur that at some point will give those who come after a distinct advantage over us. And since there's over three and a half million years to go before our heat death, the incredibly imprecise four hundred thousand year cycle I mentioned earlier can revolve almost nine more times before the game is up. Though it's impossibly hard to imagine, the last human to rattle out an arid dying breath will be eight iterations removed from you and I, and wholly unrecognizable to us.

The horror. The horror.

But no reference to this is made in any religious description of the end times. In fact, they all sound like they could easily happen next week or next month, described as they are in tiny little ideas well-suited to illiterate and unimaginative fools. The mere fact that bumper stickers warning of unmanned vehicles in case of Rapture exist should be more than enough to demonstrate how eager and hurried the religious are to just have done with it all. They really want life – all life – to be over so that they might be happy, which seems reasonable to them because their scripture and leaders told them that's how it would be. It is one of the most disgusting things a person can think, and these groups go one further by claiming such an idea is gracious, humble, and kind. Lies piled upon lies, and all a consequence of claiming to know the mind of God.

Render Unto Caesar

The road from “congress shall make no law” to tax-free churches, congressional chaplains, and currency sanctioned by Christianity is marked by complacency and conciliation on the part of the non-believers.

The argument, which you have no doubt heard plenty of times, that America was founded by people who worshipped the washboard-stomached Jesus seen in Pat Robertson's dusty sexual fantasies and who desired to build a new nation devoted to the glorification of that filthy hippie and his bizarre and thoughtless teachings is still pressed into service today, trotted out like a moth-eaten shawl to be draped over any number of the debates we face.

Despite the obvious unconstitutionality of the entire premise, to this very day the United States military pays official chaplains to serve in every branch out of taxpayer-funded government coffers, and has had authorization to do so since 1791. There is no interpretation of the establishment or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment that allows for a government-sanctioned chaplain of any denomination to minister to the armed forces, which is self-evident without the authority of Madison or Jefferson and their arguments to back it up. Despite being challenged in the United States Court of Appeals, no willingness has been shown to risk displeasing America's religious theocrats by forcing the position to be filled by a non-combat volunteer. The irony of a paid military chaplain swearing to uphold the Constitution should be obvious without me having to elaborate on it. Fortunately, those of us who would have no idea how to approach addressing the problem are shored up by the efforts of organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Military Association of Atheists, both of whom work not only to defend the rights of the non-religious in both private and military life, but to re-establish the secular values our country was, evidentially speaking, established on.

We were pretty into Egyptian and Grecian style, though. Kind of our "Joy Division" phase.

Deism was, to be profoundly generous, still defensible at the time of America's establishment. Collectively, we were unfamiliar with microbiology and the Beagle's monumental voyage was still half a century away. It could be forgiven, knowing what the best scientific information was, for a thinking person to come to the conclusion that the intrinsic order in the universe – “the way of things” – was so impossibly clockwork and perfect as to necessitate, at the very least, an unimaginable force to establish the observable laws things operated by. This is the “unmoved mover” you may have heard of, a current favorite of the creationist cults to explain away their utter mindless arrogance in the face of an utter paucity of any evidence. It may not only have been defensible or forgivable, it may have been the only logical and rational conclusion one could come to based on the evidence at hand. Theism, with its nonsense based on an intervening wrathful creator who performs miracles and picks favorites, was already in decline among the population possessed of the luxury of free time to participate in Enlightenment thinking. People understood that a prime mover argument can and does only lead you to an infinitely regressing repetition of the same question: “Who made the maker?” These volleys of logic were met by the church, then as now, with vehement retaliation and dismissals based on arguments from ignorance. Unfortunately for us but incredibly beneficial for the religious, the tools with which the notion of a creator could be abolished entirely were still generations off.

The Presidents

George Washington appears to have been that most rare (and personally valuable to myself) of all religious people: the private one. While it is public record that he purchased pews in several churches and attended services regularly while in Philadelphia, Washington chose to spend his time at Mount Vernon more wisely. He attended services sparsely there, according to biographer Paul Ford, and later anecdotes seeking to discredit him publicly did so by reporting that cards and drinking were engaged in by Washington and visitors to his home most vigorously on Sundays. Washington almost never mentioned God by name in public speeches, referring instead to the ideas of Providence and a Grand Architect. His farewell address, which is most commonly referenced as concrete proof of Washington's Christian faith, was not written by him but by Alexander Hamilton, and Washington in fact deliberately removed passages connecting morality with divinity and avoided entirely addressing any particulars of his belief. As for his behavior in solitude, both Hamilton and Washington's staff write of interrupting his morning prayer, which was evidently a regular and solitary-by-preference practice. It is still contended that Washington introduced the oath of fealty to God in the presidential inauguration, despite refutations from the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon. People far more educated on Washington's life than myself continue to argue from both sides of the aisle exactly where on the spectrum from deism to Christianity he actually lied, but insofar as this subject is concerned his exact disposition is irrelevant. What matters is that if he was a devout and practicing Christian, he kept it to himself.

And we revere him to this day...

Thomas Jefferson, as a retirement hobby to kill the time not spent founding the University of Virginia as a bastion of higher learning unsullied by religious influence, engaged himself by taking a scalpel to the New Testament, removing any and all passages which he thought to be unfounded, magical, or otherwise insulting to the intelligence of a reasoned person. The resulting extant text, which is available to all, is an impossibly-thin tome which tells a rather uninteresting story of a young man who says things that irritate some while endearing him to others. The final page of this story, which I find the most edifying, is three paragraphs long and consists of Jesus dying, being buried, and everyone leaving. No resurrection, no fanciful rays of sunshine to be recreated in hideous oil paintings for the next two millenia, but the relating of a man's death. Furthermore, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (one of the three things included on his obelisk as worth remembering him for, his time as President notably absent) Jefferson writes clearly on the errancy of religious faction having any influence in civil discourse whatsoever. In dissolving any affiliation between the colonies and the Church of England, Jefferson sought to prevent the cudgel of a state church from being wielded against the citizens of the new republic. The worst accusation that could be leveled at him would be the aforementioned label of deist, as he describes a creator of the mind and “departure from the plan” enforced on the populace by religious leaders who sought – then as now – to prevent the free exchange of ideas while lining their own pockets. However, nowhere does he mention any thought that the universe was created for him or anyone else, or that an intervening creator answered prayers, affected the outcome of events, or had a preferred sexual style. The personification of this deistic creator by Jefferson in the Statute, sometimes feebly pointed to as support for accusations of theism, can also be accurately dismissed as a poetic device, seeing as he later gives the concept of truth the same embodiment, albeit feminine.

Again, super respectful reverence is all we know how to do.

The Treaty of Tripoli & The First Barbary War

Securing our independence brought the need to ensure our own security. The treaties enacted by England to protect trade routes and crew obviously no longer applied to our nation, and in 1797 John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli into law. This treaty was to establish our business and cautiously peaceful relationship with the Muslim empire in the Barbary States, who consistently had great success in seizing both our ships and their crew for their own use. The second article of the Treaty, which I argue is second only to the First Amendment in clarity and intent of purpose, states as follows:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

It's a rather beautiful passage, I think, especially when compared to the soul-crushingly indigestible language of our current legislation. But beyond beauty, the most important thing about this passage is that it clearly shows the intention of our nation to hold no brook with religion. Adams may have been far too naive and trusting when concerned with the Muslim theocracy and the ability of its adherents to be trusted, and he was completely mistaken in implying that our non-starter status meant we would never declare war against a religious state, but it couldn't be more obvious that our founding and principles are established as those of a secular nation founded on the rule of law, not a terrifying theocratic nightmare based on deluded religious texts.

It really is everything Hitchens warned us about.

Proving Adams' trust was wildly misplaced, the forces of Tripoli continued to hijack and make slaves of American ships. Seeking explanation, Adams and Jefferson traveled to Tripoli, where their only response was passages in the Qur’an commanding “all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.” Jefferson fought with Congress, arguing that any money paid would only encourage repeated offense. Upon Jefferson's election, Tripoli vastly increased the amount of their demands, which Jefferson finally had the power to refuse. The Navy, recently reconstructed, was at Jefferson's disposal with the caveat to do no more than necessary to defend. Without consulting Congress Jefferson sent the Navy to attack Tripoli, beginning the four year conflict that would end with General Eaton's marines and mercenaries brought the city of Derna to the ground in 1805. This is, by the way, the first time the American flag was flown over a military victory in a foreign land, and the reason Tripoli is in the second line of the Marine Corps Hymn.

The Money

When the time came, as it must in any successful fledgling rebellion, to design a national seal representative of the ideals of the new republic, Samuel Adams appointed an artist in Philadelphia called William Barton. The now-familiar thirteen-layer pyramid crowned with the Eye of Providence was what Barton delivered, with the wholly unfamiliar-to-us latin phrases Deo Favente (“With God's Favor”) and Perennis (“Everlasting”). There was no attempt on Barton's behalf to obfuscate his intentions and belief that the Providential Eye belonged to an intervening Christian god, which was clearly not good enough for Adams.

It rocks your very world, doesn't it?

Charles Thompson, the Secretary of the Congress and a teacher of latin, was tasked with refining the design to bring it more in line with what Adams wanted. Thompson removed the religious references entirely, substituting the phrases Annuit Coeptis (“To/He Approve/s Our Undertaking”) and Novus Ordo Seclorum (“New Order of the Ages”) while retaining the thirteen-layer pyramid, Eye of Providence, and E Pluribus Unum (“One Out Of Many”). This adjustment fulfilled the requirements, changing the intended message from “God gave us this and it's ours forever” to “Can you guys fucking believe how lucky we were to pull this off?”

"I gotcha Deo Favente right here, pal."

The ridiculous motto of the United States since 1956 has been “In God We Trust,” a noxious phrase opposed by anyone who can recognize the meaninglessness of the words even without recognizing the direct contradiction to our nation's principles. This indelicate usurper is a holdover from the Civil War, where the phrase was used by both sides to claim divine support. Since at least 1873, this mindless affirmation has been on our coinage by order of the Congress, not appearing on the paper money until 1957. The same level of blind fervor for empty religious-themed patriotism wouldn't be seen again until the World Trade Center attack, when once again our Union claimed the backing of – for all anyone can tell – the same god who compelled our enemies.

The Congress

In examining religion's perfidious influence on democracy, specifically in our representative bodies, it is helpful to compare the original intent with the current reality. Given that, ideally, both the House and Senate would be filled with individuals selected by their communities as best suited to represent their interests and ideals, one would expect the resulting bodies to reflect the broad spectrum of ideas and attitudes seen nationwide. To examine that a little closer, we can apply that most tenuous of metrics: the public opinion poll. Opinion polls always make me wince the slightest bit, as there are so many clumsily simple ways their data becomes skewed. From convenience bias to acquiescence, these kinds of surveys have many obstacles to assembling data into information, but in many cases they are the best possible way to gauge what people say they think.

Which, unfortunately, assumes *they* know what they think.

Pew Research reported in 2012 that 16.1% of Americans who responded to their poll self-identified as having no religious affiliation. As mentioned, there is no reliable way to determine what percentage of people who respond in the affirmative are lying to the pollster to fulfill an imagined expectation, or claiming affiliation out of habit or guilt. As you can infer for yourself, it is improbable that there exist enough physical structures to house all the worshippers who claim to be such fervent practitioners.

There are 535 voting members of Congress, which would suggest that roughly 86 members of that august body should be atheist. If we further narrow the field by disregarding the 5.8% of Pew respondents who felt “religious unaffiliated” described their views (as opposed to the rather confusing group labeled “secular unaffiliated”) we are left with around 55 Congresspeople that should reliably be found doing something useful on Sunday morning. This is, self-evidently, at odds with the precisely zero (sometimes one, as of late, but not for long) representatives of the nation's public who profess to be unburdened by childish superstition, and flies in the face of the decidedly Christian-flavored political grandstanding we must constantly slog through.

It can only feed, never produce...

It may actually be fair and accurate to say that America is a Christian nation, not by design but through lazy arrogance or weakness on the part of those of us who knew better. To call it de facto is to give it too much credence, but the fact remains. To admit this is not to agree with the historically ignorant who claim a Christian founding for our nation, nor is it further concession or conciliation to theocracy with an enthusiastic allowance for it to reign. The fervor with which the cry of rationality and forced retreat for religion seems to keep growing can only suggest to us that the tide turns in our favor. We can perhaps now be said to be in recovery, a nation with a serious problem that we have just recently become mature enough to accept and fix.

Detrimentally Open-Minded

While it is foolish to dismiss any hypothesis out-of-hand, it is equally foolish to continue believing a thing to be true after it has been shown to be demonstrably false.

The greatest advancements in human understanding of our objective world are perhaps always prefaced by the dismissal and ostracization of the few people to catch on first. Consider the skeptical treatment of Pasteur or Jenner, and try to imagine for yourself how outlandish and impossible it must have sounded, however fascinated your intellect may have been. Consider the public shaming, charges of heresy, and punishments inflicted upon Galileo by the church for writing a book on what he observed through his telescope. It was detrimental in the extreme for a scientist of that era to publicly proclaim things that we teach without a second thought to our very young children today, and it should not be forgotten that the church did not publicly admit Galileo to be correct until 1992. This attitude varies from one pope to another, it would seem, as the most sinister pope in recent memory didn't accept this concession from the church and instead sided with church leaders of Galileo's time. Pope Quitter Nazi Benedict invoked the position that the church was just in punishing Galileo because of the church's adherence to reason, ethics, and social consequences, and revision of the verdict could only be politically motivated, a statement made while he was still a Cardinal responsible for the concealment of unconscionable rape and torture of 200 deaf children to protect the reputation of the church.

It's entirely possible PR was never his strong suit.

I am not above acknowledging how ridiculous someone claiming knowledge of a round Earth would have sounded to the general public pre-Pythagoras or, if you prefer, before the time of Augustus of Hippo. The only physical evidence in favor that could be provided was the mysterious way a ship's mast appeared on the horizon before its hull did, and the spherical shadow which fell on the moon during an eclipse. It would have been the ravings of a madman, an ill-founded conclusion absolutely contrary to what were the best explanations for the natural world that were available to us. Except those ravings actually were the better explanation, they simply sounded so contrary to traditional common knowledge and were inflammatory to church doctrine (admittedly not difficult to accomplish), making them something of a social poison.

Not pictured: logic or reason.

The upshot of all this is that there are many hypotheses advanced by our peers that sound laughably simple-minded and deserving of our scorn. While the history of scientific advancement is nothing if not littered with pipe dreams and crazy ideas or explanations for things, the fact remains that a handful of those insane propositions happened to be true. We take combustion reactions completely for granted, but what did the first layperson think when Joseph Priestley explained and demonstrated that oxygen made things burn, not phlogiston? There is undoubtably some idea being knocked around right now that couldn't sound more disconnected or feverish which may prove to have a kernel of understanding beyond what we now collectively possess. The benefit of our current method of scientific discipline allows for these outliers to become separated from and raised above their undeserving contemporaries in order to become well-understood accepted knowledge, rather than killing or making outcasts of their proponents, provided they fulfill the dirt simple requirements of the scientific method.

Not everyone makes it through the process.

Unfortunately, an unpleasant counterpart to our powerful drive to discover more about the world around us is the stubborn insistence on holding on to antiquated ideas after they have been proven false because of a personal affinity for them based on comfort or, even worse, routine. Every specific point illustrated in holy texts and claimed as factual has been dismantled in short order by honest investigation, in many instances by scientists and historians who claim a religious faith. Artifacts, events, and locations have, time and again, completely escaped discovery or been demonstrated to be non-existent by highly-trained investigative professionals who were specifically looking for evidence. This fact has not escaped the religious community entirely, but it has done nothing to convince them that their ideas are incorrect and better off discarded. Mystical shrouds, forty years spent wandering the desert, settlements and figures, all debunked in no uncertain terms.

It was a beach towel the whole time.

This is fine for the false biblical declarations of physical things which would leave evidence we could locate, but a more difficult argument takes place concerning the phenomenally silly tale told by believers concerning what awaits us upon our death. Specifically, some people with belief structures ranging from devoutly religious to limp-wristed spiritualism claim that they have died and witnessed another aspect of consciousness disconnected from the experiences common to the rest of us. Their claims vary, from tunnels to dreamlike hallucinations to visions of the biblical ideas of the afterlife, but they are all exactly alike in the sense that there is no proof whatsoever. There is a general consistency of experience from person to person, but there is no sufficient sample group of people accurately reporting any information they could not have gleaned normally, and there is concrete evidence that these experiences are due to stresses on the brain. This is proven by the documented ability to induce an identical response when subjecting a pilot to high gravitational forces in a centrifuge, such as the one formerly operated by the aerospace physiology department of the now-private Brooks Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas. The only difference found is the spiritual significance some people choose to attach because they underwent the experience during a medical emergency instead of inside a training facility. These reports are thematically familiar to all of us, and I argue they are just another extension of the innate fear we have of no longer existing. I completely understand why this trepidation results in reassuring and comforting imagery regarding our disposition, but that imagery offers no benefit over the understanding that our terror is a direct result of being the only species capable of contemplating its own death when not under immediate threat.

Not like this adorable little fucker. Look at him. Contemplate your demise, you bastard!

People should look on reports of near-death experiences as only what they are, the cacophonous chemical experiences of a panicked and terrified brain related through a filter of the storyteller's mythos and paper-thin understanding. The disgusting practice of inculcating religious ideology with an entirely threat-based reward and punishment system in children and then, if something unthinkable should happen to one of them and they regurgitate this nonsense to their parents and doctors upon reviving, trotting them out on a national stage as some kind of ghoulish poster child for the harp-and-halo afterlife story is perhaps the most shameful thing a person can do to a child without being ordained. The phenomenon is predictable and consistently reproducible, but that fact along with the dearth of scientific and biological information provided by the resulting studies have done nothing to even slightly quiet the shrill ignorance of the believers. One more thing bears mentioning, as the arrogance of claiming scientific proof while not even beginning to understand high school biology infuriates me to no end: if your brain is dead, the hippocampus and associated sections of the brain which are associated with the formation and retention of memories have no function. No function, as I don't have to explain to you, means no memory formation and no ability to report back to us what color the angel's hair was or what kind of pony your dead relative was riding through a cloud.

Or whomever they should happen to see.

Open-mindedness is a term used to describe a willingness to listen to and try to understand ideas one had not been previously exposed to, but the meaning of this term has been skewed through misuse in two ways I wish to mention. Firstly, it is entirely common now to hear people who argue from the secular or skeptical side of the aisle labeled as not being open-minded, by which the accuser means the individual is convinced against the proposition and will not accept the points made in favor. This is a misuse because the appropriate word is the one I have chosen: convinced. The skeptic had an open mind to the idea, originally, but the subsequent investigation and critical thinking caused them to become convinced it was false. For example, it is possible that a video recording showing an erratically-moving light in the sky could be documentation of an alien spacecraft, but evidence presented in the form of weather reports, flight histories, and technical understanding of the field of view captured by the lens is convincing proof that the video documented a perfectly normal passenger aircraft. Similarly, lack of religious faith (or even soft spirituality) earns one the accusation. In this instance, it is not the evidence against that convinces the non-believer, it is the deafening vacuum of evidence in favor.

The second misuse is when open-mindedness is used as some kind of defense by people who cling to baseless methods of thinking. The proof has been presented, the debate has been won. However, no matter how much argument is leveled against them, they contort through amazing mental acrobatics to explain why they still believe. “At least I'm open-minded,” they say, despite the fact that they have methodically refused to accept new information precisely because it threatens their favored view. This is not intellectual honesty, nor is it admirable persistence. It's wasted energy and, when allowed to influence society, an incredible waste of resources. When school districts, for example, allow the waste of money, time, and human talent and potential by allowing children to be lied to during class time in the name of open-minded fairness the component of examining new ideas concerning critical thinking is intentionally abandoned. When people with legitimate illness – or, more commonly, those surrounding them – turn to faith healers and quack remedies, the shield of open-mindedness is thrown up to deflect the accusations of negligent care. No amount of belief or faith will enable a crystal to cure cancer. This kind of behavior is more accurately described as being mindlessly stubborn, or if one is less inclined to generosity as willful ignorance.

Divine Jurisprudence

The divine has never known what it was talking about, and even the most devoutly religious never really cared.

Religious people never follow the rules. Rules are, to someone with respect for civilization and their fellows humans, ubiquitous in almost all circumstances.  These are in place, for the most part, to try and ensure the general well-being of the majority of the community. They were approved, enacted, and exercised by humans as a self-regulating group, a cornerstone of the most basic concept of society. Failure to abide by rules carries punishment, ranging in severity based on your age and the nature of your transgression. Children can expect loss of privileges or the equivalent of house arrest, whereas adults get a range stretching from financial sanction to incarceration, penalties which enact a consequence on the transgressor and potentially act as a deterrent for others. Regardless of fluctuating police and prosecutorial success and the current popularity of state-sanctioned execution in different regions of the country, a certain group of people have always and will always decide that they are personally exempt from the law and act accordingly. The motivations for defying societal laws can be mental illness or garden-variety antisocial behavior from assholes, but in all cases humans defying other humans can be rationally understood. What cannot be understood is the willingness of humans who consider themselves pious and faithful in all other respects to openly defy the direct commands of the creator of the universe on punishment of eternal torture and suffering. The bizarre methods and inconsistencies in heavenly mandate cry out for an examination of the sweetest low-hanging fruit our current triumvirate can offer, as it is both impossible to find a single worthwhile edict that secular society hadn't already provided or any proof that the religious take their celestial obligation at all seriously.

"Never actually opened it, why do you ask?"

The Pentateuch contains the first five books of the Old Testament and therein both the 613 Talmudic laws and both recitations of Moses's Top Ten which I intend to address, as well as two disparate accounts of creation within the very first chapter. The only thing different interpreters can agree on regarding the origins of these five books is their heavenly creation by the hand of God in the time before time began, but there is wide disagreement on the physical state of said books and the effect of God's Bookshelf on the principle of creatio ex nihilo. How the Pentateuch changed hands from God to Moses is another matter of debate. In one account Moses ascended to heaven to take them from the safeguard of angels, casting a negative light both on God's omnipotence and the quality of angel-based home security systems. An alternate recitation of the story is that God was shopping his books around the various cultures living at the time and got no takers, save for the Israelites. Once this selection of the "chosen" was completed, so the story goes, the revelations were sent forth into all lands and translated into all languages, which is a bit like God getting engaged but still telling everyone he's single should the opportunity to trade up come along. Of late, the far more reasonable "documentary hypothesis" suggests that the first four books were compiled from four geographically and culturally separate sources and modified over time, before being falsely attributed to the wholly manufactured figure of Moses.

Sexy like He-Man, and exactly as real.

The 613 Talmudic laws, or mitzvot, were extracted from the Pentateuch and compiled by the Rambam Moses Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah shortly after the first millennium to act as a complete statement of codified Jewish religious law. Despite opposition from contemporaries, Maimonides' text became and remains a companion to the Talmud and an unassailable arbiter of judgement. The vast majority of the laws, as one would expect, are common societal injunctions against theft, perjury, murder, grudge-keeping, and mistreatment of the young or elderly (all of which will be quickly disregarded in Deuteronomy when the seven Canaanite nations need slaughtering). Less pleasant is the ghastly injunction to circumcise (found twice), or the need to take a special bath (Lev. 15:16) if a Jewish male should be unfortunate enough to be sullied by the touch of anything icky (Lev. 11:29-30), a dead animal (Lev. 11:39), a dead human (Num. 19:11-16), a leper (Lev. 13:2-46), or -- worst of all -- a menstruating woman (Lev. 15:19-24). What is not explained is what the celestial creator's abnormal fascination with male children's genitals or his attitude towards women, which is parallel with the "girls are gross" hardline my friends and I took on the playground, has to contribute to the betterment of society. Or abiding by the stupidly vicious command to whole-heartedly take on the burden of holding an unremitting grudge against the Amalekites found in Deuteronomy, or the same chapter's allowance for the use of a woman (including for sex) until she no longer pleases her captor, provided she is not made a slave, or the stunningly removed and nonsensical decree from Exodus "to break the neck of the firstling of an ass if it be not redeemed." I cannot even imagine what would be involved in the redemption of livestock, but I am certain it is not the subject of conversation at any bar mitzvah. Knowledge of how to understand instructions removed by two millennia notwithstanding, a whole swath of exhortations involving Temples, sacrifices, and criminal procedures literally cannot be followed because they are predicated on a completely theocratic state of Israel.

You know the sound that's playing.

The inappropriately-named decalogue is related at least twice, but for purposes of this tirade I will focus on the very familiar appearances in Exodus and again in Deuteronomy. In part one, God speaks to Moses and the assembled company in an audible voice in one language and dictates ten edicts, at which point everyone except Moses left, allowing more rules to be inscribed with no witness to their divine origin. Then comes the return from the mount, fantastic party, golden calf, Moses gets miffed and deliberately destroys the only physical representation of his savior in existence, because piety sometimes takes the form of a pretentious child. Smash cut to slightly later, Deuteronomy's Moses can't get these goddamn kids to stay off his lawn and so hauls the whole rigamarole out again, trudging his imaginary self up and down the hill to re-carve the direct and unchallengeable edicts from almighty God from memory like a shopping list that fell out of his pocket on the way into the store. History and convenience may have reduced the muddled nonsense this imaginary tribal leader rambled off to a comfortable and familiar ten, but in both Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 there are fourteen cruel commandments that could only have been written by the fiercely tribal minds of the time. In any case, again we see how even the most esteemed of religious leaders doesn't take divine instruction seriously, as a quick reading of the two different installments will show that the latter group has been re-written and modified to further highlight God's supremacy over other gods (which would seem to completely contradict any argument for his "one true" status) and to persuade children to treat their parents kindly in exchange for longevity. Modern treatment further spits in the eye of the celestial spoken word by adapting the commandment's sensibilities to fit in more easily with people's need to live their lives and perpetual fondness for shiny things. The commandment forbidding people from aspiring for a better life casually groups and equates servants, cattle, and women as property only gets quoted in abbreviation, either to shift the focus to inanimate property or to come to a full stop after mentioning thy neighbor's wife, nicely truncating the problematic and less-flattering slaves and work animals. The jewelry seen most often on Sunday morning and the majority of stock in every Abbey gift shop I've ever seen would be a direct shot in God's chops if not for the Catholic liturgy's amendment and casual repudiation of the commandment regarding graven images.

A souvenir of the torture device that killed your savior, graven in any material you like.

The Qur'an follows shortly thereafter, and leads with some throat-clearing by way of a pre-emptive explanation regarding its clumsy plagiarization of the holy texts which preceded it. All three works were crafted by the same divine hand, goes the diminutive reasoning, and therefore it is to be expected that the same story is told. Islam, figuring the third time will be the charm, takes this unprovable pretension a step further by claiming the Qur'an to be the final and unchallengeable revelation. This is very much like Jim Henson filming the La Choy Dragon commercials and then, when the topic of pre-existing European and Asian dragon mythology inevitably arises, saying: "Obviously they're similar because we all got the idea from the same place. It's just that mine is the only one that's correct and no one else is allowed to make dragons from now on." The Qur'an was verbally relayed from God to Mohammed via the archangel Gabriel over the course of twenty-three years. After getting the first few chapters out Mohammed relocated to a settlement he called "Medina" and began the construction of an entirely Muslim community, whereupon Gabriel stepped up production and began delivering laws and behavioral restrictions unto his new community every day. With the benefit of hindsight you can anticipate the problems Mohammed the prophet would have had, since the benevolent archangel Gabriel had not seen fit to reveal every contingency to Mohammed before sending him to forcibly establish a totalitarian bedroom community in an already-occupied settlement with people who were wondering out loud why their town wasn't called "Yathrib" anymore. Upon his death, Mohammed's cohorts gathered his writings together, made their own little additions and alterations, and stamped it as the final revelation. 

"Nailed it!"

Accompanying this are the collective hadith, supplements to and clarifications of the Qur'an used as teaching religious texts, which are not the "direct" writings of Mohammed but the secondhand accounts of his opinions, declarations, and actions. Individual hadith have their value to Islam debated based on the relative merits of the chain of narrators through whom it was supplied, and currently no proscription is more publicly contentious than the required punishment for apostasy. There are several instances of Mohammed's mandate and requirement for the death of non-believers, the exact wording of which changes depending on whose translation you're reading, and several passages can be found which seem to call for compassion instead of the sword (albeit the kind of compassion one reserves for watching a freshly crushed snake wriggle its last on the highway). In practice, the only real point of contention among Islamic schools of jurisprudence is whether or not to give the accused the called-for three days of confinement to consider recanting, because the only way to make your religion more tissue-paper flimsy than bellowing that anyone who doesn't play along will die is threatening death and handing out do-over cards. The death penalty is called for by not only Mohammed, but more contemporary hadith as well as Sunni and Shia imams whose names you would recognize, for a failure to adhere to any one of the five pillars of Islam. Nowhere in sight is the sweetly quaint sliding scale of Catholic penance, or the guilt-riddled Hebraic Ten Days of Repentance. The public execution of apostates is intended to make the Islamic model of civilization the global victor by virtue of all the opposition being dead or too stricken with fear to protest, an idea that directly negates one of the most fundamental cornerstones of actual, grown-up civilization. Modern Islam not only makes no pretense of shame or any effort to obfuscate the final hard line it draws, instead making their violence against peaceful communities and individuals an embraced point of pride. 

Clearly, despite divine inspiration, ostensible authorship by disciples closest to the given prophet, and being the direct command of the non-thing being these people claim to know as the creator of the seen and unseen, challenging and redefining the holy edicts based on your personal interpretation and geographical coincidences is remarkably commonplace. It's almost as if the direct orders and -- one assumes -- benevolent heartfelt wishes of God are more like easily ignored guidelines, seeing as Christianity alone has had more than a dozen schisms since the Council of Ephesus in 431 C.E., which will henceforth be referred to as the First Annual Jesus-Con. The Assyrian Church sent Ephesus all a-flutter by kicking heresy square in the balls and moving straight on to the schismatic behavior of referring to Mary as the "Birth Giver of Christ" instead of the approved "Birth Giver of God," because divine omniscience had really meant to clarify that but had gotten sidetracked during the regretful little bit with the floods. What separated a juicy schism from a more tame heresy had to be defined and clarified 106 years previously at another clash of the intellectual giants called the First Council of Nicaea because, again, divine dictation is nothing if not loaded with wiggle room.

All this. All the time.

Since the first millennium, the Catholic Church has happily accepted money paid over and above the tithe by its parishioners as protection against a loving and just God. The justification for and lascivious intensity of which fluctuated over time but has always been a well-regarded standing order from the Pope, who used his smarm and position as the one infallible physical manifestation of God to skirt the unfortunate detail that the aforementioned perfect and divine overlord had once again forgotten to clarify the point, sadly neglecting to include anything in his unchallengeable and unquestionably perfect revelations about the sale of indulgences to haul people's dead relatives out of the less-nice waiting rooms in purgatory, and into something with a pleasant tile floor and maybe some magazines. This was the wholesale practice of sticking up the helpless, with the added pleasure of knowing your congregation was powerless against the idea of Grandma suffering in the afterlife because no one would here would cough up some shekels. Those indulgences paid entirely for the reconstruction of Saint Peter's Basilica after it had fallen into slight disrepair due to casual neglect around the end of the fifteenth century, because Rome was absolutely filthy with Late Renaissance-style churches at that point and no one could really be bothered to sweep and dust every couple days. Trading money for salvation was big business, and since there was no commandment not to (which could then be gleefully ignored or re-written) it proceeded until a huffy faction who were equally full of themselves posted a Dear Pope letter and a giant middle finger in the center of town. Luther and Calvin kicked Mother Church square in her desiccated ovaries, then barely took a moment to celebrate this whole Protestant Reformation thing they had stumbled onto before turning to infighting over the finer points of predestination vis a vis free will and salvation.

Rumble in the Jungle it was not.

Saint Augustine of Hippo kept the New Testament "divinely inspired" fan-fiction train running, pushing the idea of limbo for unbaptized infants as an academic solution to the hilarious and unforeseen problem of original sin sending newborns to the same eternal reward as people who rape and kill newborns. The claim of divine inspiration might as well have been one of typical arrogance, coming as it was from one primate telling another that he stands between all the primates and the unseen authority. God was evidently fine all along with the fate of infants, as he felt no need to include a revelation speaking to the baptismal conundrum despite his aforementioned omniscience. Augustine only advanced his provincial and backward form of cruel nonsense because a fellow -- and much finer -- thinker called Pelagius was telling people horrifically subversive and irresponsible things like "Adam died of old age," or "It's possible for people to do good things without celestial reward or punishment," and the most heretical cry of revolution: "There is no need to attempt to drown your newborn child."

"Is this about the Legos?"

The Torah was verbally dictated, except when it was directly written by Moses, and has evolved from a brutish and cruel origin to a much fuzzier and friendly-looking exterior today. Sometimes the directives are attributed to God, sometimes to Moses, but until any archaeological evidence can be produced that indicates either being is real it is safe to assume Old Testament death mandates are entirely a product of the wills of early tribal leaders. This penalty applies to false prophecy (which should reasonably include all religious groups which are not Hebrew), mastery over ghosts (which may or may not include exorcism), gaining information from the deceased (ostensibly aimed at mediums, although I argue we could include reading a book or, in fact, praying for guidance), the rape of a married woman (no problem if she's single), incest, any form of physical love that isn't completely boring and devoid of any passion, or rebellion of any kind against one's parents. Oddly enough, bar mitzvahs are not celebrated for their rarity, perhaps because killing a child for rebelling against their parents is a remarkably stupid and self-defeating way to build a society.

The Qur'an claims to be the perfect and final revelation of God, but incorrectly re-tells Hebraic legends, has entire post-revelatory redactions in the form of the Satanic Verses, displays in its morally regressive logic a stunning kind of ignorant single-mindedness that would offend in any epoch, fosters a tribalist attitude to the unbelieving infidel, the all-too-familiar proprietary treatment of women, and the ghastly promise to its young men that they will get more sexual slaves (or maybe grapes, God wasn't too clear on that point) if you will only kill as many differently-minded people as you possibly can in the course of your own suicide. All of this points to shitty stories stolen from the distant past and attributed to someone who was, by any account, an illiterate and malnourished desert dweller who was suffering from impossible-to-diagnose seizures that were perhaps responsible for him thinking God was talking to him.

I propose none of this is necessary, and even my too-small brain can trace a line past these archaic and detrimental beliefs. If your holy texts are the word of God, fine. With that comes some baggage. If you belong to the more Western flavor if Islam, but don't ascribe to the killing of apostates as commanded by Mohammed, in what sense are you a Muslim? There is no religion without an eschatology calling for active participation in the utter destruction of the human race in order to bring about the end times and whichever Second Coming-ish apocalyptic fist fight you prefer, but zealots who appear to be fervently pursuing these goals are not hailed as religious heroes by the greater community. There is no revelation allowing for the challenge of these dictates, all of which carry equal weight in terms of importance. Since all the dictates are equivalent in regard to celestial obedience and eternal reward, on what authority can anyone not strictly follow every law to the letter while still retaining their place in the (presumably correctly selected) congregation? If any one law may be disregarded at will, what need has the group for a supervisory entity? Since no participant in any religion makes any honest effort to follow the laws as written, why claim both the dictates and the imaginary consequences that come with them? God is unchallengeable, yet his faithful and obedient animals challenge revelation all the time. God is infallible, but tells different stories to different people and always leaves out more important things than are included, leading to endless confused and nefarious revision until we're left with centuries-removed oppressive fairy stories taken more seriously than the world we all share. Human beings are perfectly capable of living good and proper lives without hurting each other solely on the basis of innate morality, therefore it would do us all a great deal of good to move past the adoption of imaginary rules that carry very real consequences.