"It 'tain't necessarily so!

It 'tain't necessarily so!

The things that you're liable

To read in the Bible . . .

It 'tain't necessarily so!"
(Porgy and Bess)

God doesn't exist.

He never did . . . he never will.

Wake up . . . grow up . . . and get over it!

Religion is a fairy tale for adults, a scam run by priests, ministers, rabbis, nuns, witch doctors, bishops and popes so that suckers will pay for their big houses, fine clothes and BMW's. As scary as it might sound, you alone are responsible for what happens in your life, not some imaginary spook living in a paradise in the sky . . . not some evil goblin living underground in a fiery pit . . . You!

Remember when you were six years old, and you got a chill up you spine on Christmas Eve because you KNEW a fat white man in a red suit would land on your roof that night in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer? You couldn't sleep that night because Santa was going to come down your chimney to leave toys for you under a dead tree you had helped your parents decorate (OK, so your house didn't even have a chimney . . . you were six years old and fairly stupid, you believed it anyway).

Then some kid at school told you that Santa Clause doesn't exist, and you yelled at him because you knew your parents wouldn't lie to you. But you went home and asked your parents if Santa was real anyway, and got the most valuable life lesson a child can learn . . . parents lie, teachers lie, ministers lie . . . all the authority figures you trusted to guide your life had lied to you about a fat white man who flies through the air to bring you gifts.

Think of me as a fifty eight year old kid in first grade telling you that god does not exist. You're going to die. I know it's hard for you . . . scary to even think about . . . but you're going to die . . . and be dead! You won't fly up into the sky on fairy wings to live forever in a milky white paradise . . . you're not even going to be dragged down into a fiery pit to be poked in the butt by pitchforks until the end of time . . . you're going to rot . . . and worms will feast on your eyeballs (along with the rest of you). Denial is not just a river in Egypt, you are part of the food chain on this planet.

Thousands of years ago, men and women didn't know what a microbe was, or what lightning, snow, volcanoes, mental illness, death, atoms, ocean waves, stars, mountains, comets or hurricanes were. They didn't know why babies developed in the womb, why bees sting, why rain falls, why plants and animals are so different (or so alike), so they came up with an explanation that fit their limited understanding of how the world works. There must be some invisible supernatural force (who look-a like-a man) controlling everything . . . in other words, "God did it!"

The magic theory of the universe (God did it all . . . Poof! . . . There's a tree! Poof! . . . There's a dung beetle! Poof! . . . There's a man!) is fine for 2000 B.C., when there was no real understanding of medicine, biology, astronomy, geology, astrophysics, cybernetics or psychology. But there is no excuse for people living in the twenty first century to cling fiercely to ancient fairy tales about invisible men in the sky controlling their lives, or paying scam artists thousands of dollars to make sure that they will live forever after they die in an imaginary paradise. If you insist on swallowing that, I can give you a great deal on some magic beans, and you'll like the price you're going to pay me for the Brooklyn Bridge!

Please, please, please . . . give me the power to be God for just five minutes! You wouldn't recognize the place! Poof! . . . no disease! Poof! . . . no poverty! Poof! . . . no birth defects! Poof! . . . no crime! Poof! . . . no hunger! Poof! . . . no suffering! Poof! . . . no crack, no heroin, no tobacco! Poof! . . . no evil people running everything! Poof! . . . no ignorance! Poof! . . . no war! Poof! . . . no murder! Poof! . . . no rape! Poof! . . . no racism or discrimination! Poof! . . . no exploitation!

Poof! . . . thousands of lies would disappear from history books! Poof! . . . teachers would be paid professional athlete's salaries! Poof! . . . certain people would disappear! Poof! . . . movie murders would be X-rated instead of movie sex! Poof! . . . you wouldn't need an imaginary heaven in the sky, there'd be a real one here on earth!
For your god to allow these things to exist is a clear indication that he is either evil, insane or imaginary. Since I am not superstitious (a person who believes in imaginary powers), it's clear to me that something imaginary can't be evil or insane.

God does not exist.

George Carlin On Religion

"When it comes to bullshit . . . truly, major league bullshit . . . you have to stand back in awe . . . in awe, of the all time heavyweight champion of false promises and exaggerated claims . . . religion! Organized religion! It's no contest!

Religion easily . . . easily, has the best bullshit story of all time! Think about it . . .

Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky, who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do . . . and if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place . . . of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish . . . for you to live forever . . . and suffer and burn and scream . . . until the end of time!

But he loves you! . . . he loves you! . . . and he needs money!

He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-present, all-knowing and all-wise . . . just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions and billions of dollars . . . they pay no taxes, and somehow they always need money! You're talking about a good bullshit story! . . . If I may be permitted a small pun; Holy Shit! . . . HOLY SHIT!"



©1997 George Carlin, Home Box Office



Let's talk about Christianity, the religion I'm most familiar with (the same discussion could apply to any religion . . . just change the name Jesus to Buddha, Yahweh, Shango, Confucius, Allah, Jehovah or the deity of your choice, and it won't make much difference). I was raised in the Baptist church in the fifties and sixties, where my minister proudly proclaimed I'd be a preacher myself when I grew up.

At age twelve I had read enough books on paleontology and archaeology to decide that what I heard in church was bullshit, but you didn't tell black parents in 1957 that you didn't believe in god (not if you wanted to continue breathing) so I sat in Sunday School for six more years and kept my mouth shut. But instead of pinching teenaged girls on the butt for two hours in Sunday School like other boys, I sat there and actually read the bible from cover to cover . . . something no one I knew had actually done.

I found a lot of interesting stuff in there . . . nothing that made sense like paleontology or evolution . . . but lots of fascinating stories of war, sex, politics and mythology, exactly like the Greek or Roman mythology I was studying in high school. Millions of people once fiercely believed that Zeus, Apollo, Hera, Cupid, Mars, Thor, Poseidon and Aphrodite were real, just as you believe in Jesus, God, angels, the Devil and Holy Ghosts. When I got to college I delighted in pulling out my bible and showing Christians all the freaky, stupid stuff in there. Let me share some of that with you . . .

[Please use the King James version: I know it's harder to understand, but there are two good reasons . . . (1) people were murdered for translating it from Latin into English so that you can read it, (2) later versions have been tampered with to prevent you from understanding what the original bible said].

The Garden of Eden was in Ethiopia, Africa (Genesis 2:13), no blondes come from Ethiopia; the people in the bible were black. After Cain killed Able he left Eden and married a woman from Nod (Genesis 4:14-17). If Adam, Eve and Cain were the only people on earth, where did the woman come from? The creation myth was meant to tell the story of the first Jews, not the first people on earth. After Joshua broke down the walls at Jericho, the Israelites slaughtered every man, woman and child, including their livestock, using swords, and only spared a prostitute who had helped them (Joshua 7:20-25). At the city of Ai the Israelites slaughtered twelve thousand people during their military conquest of the "Promised Land" (Joshua 8:19-26). If god had promised them the land, why slaughter thousands of people?

The Queen of Sheba wrote a love poem to Solomon, an ancestor of Jesus who had 800 wives, stating she is "black and comely" or beautiful (Song of Solomon 1:5). Sheba entreats Solomon to "lie all night between my breasts" (Song of Solomon 1:13), later she plays Monica Lewinsky, reporting that "his fruit was sweet to my taste" during oral sex (Song of Solomon 2:3). Faithful believers in the bible are told to kill witches (Exodus 22:18), make blood sacrifices (Leviticus 1:1-17 & 8:14-30), not eat pork or rabbit (Leviticus 11:6-7), cut the foreskin off each male's penis (Genesis 17:10-12), and take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound and stripe for stripe (whipping) (Exodus 21:23-25). Oh, and by the way, "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13).

God was also pretty harsh with homosexuals. When three men came to visit Lot in the town of Sodom, the house was surround by a crowd of men demanding to "know" (have sex with) them (Genesis 19:4-5). Lot offered to give the mob of rapists his two virgin daughters, but they refused and tried to break down the door to get to the men (Genesis 19:6-11). God then destroyed Sodom and the town next door (Gomorrah) with a fireball, killing hundreds of innocent men, women and children, to make sure he destroyed the men who tried to commit sodomy in Sodom (Genesis 19:24). God even turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt because she had the nerve to watch him do it (Genesis 19:25-26).

Christians like to say that Jesus came to soften all that Old Testament stuff, but he was one cold dude. Jesus ordered his disciples not to spread the gospel to anyone but Jews (Matthew 10:5-6), and specifically told them not to preach to gentiles (non-Jews). Every Christian on earth is worshiping a man who refused to speak to them, much less save them, since they are not Jews. When a non-Jewish woman begged Jesus to heal her daughter, who was "vexed with a devil" (mental illness?), Jesus refused to speak to her (Matthew 15:22-23). When she continued to beg, the disciples wanted to send her away; Jesus repeated that he had only come to the Jews (Matthew 15:24). She still wouldn't stop begging so Jesus called her a dog "It is not meet (good) to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs" (Matthew 15:26). He only healed her daughter after she said non-Jews were like dogs who could eat crumbs that fall from the master's table (Matthew 15:27).

Jesus was not the blonde, blue eyed wimp portrayed in movies and artwork. The bible describes him as having white hair like wool and feet the color of "fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace" (Revelation 1:13-15). He was a socialist; Jesus told his followers to sell everything they own, give the money to the poor and follow him (Matthew 19:21 . . . by that measure I have never met a Christian in my life). He said that a rich man could no more get into heaven than a camel go through the eye of a needle" (Matthew 19:23-24). Jesus didn't love everybody; he said "I came not to send peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34), he came to set son against father and daughter against mother (Matthew 10:35).

Jesus was a black man whose country had been invaded by whites (the Romans), and he didn't react like Martin Luther King, but rather like Malcolm X. He told his disciples that if they were broke to sell their clothes to buy swords (Luke 22:36), when the Romans came to arrest him, a disciple drew his sword and cut off an ear (Luke 22:49-50). When was the last time you saw a picture of Jesus and his posse packing swords?

The Romans tried to execute Jesus for wanting to be "King of the Jews", in other words, trying to run the Romans out of Palestine and take over as king, not for being the "son of god" (Luke 23:38). The Romans reserved crucifixion for for political prisoners (see the movie Spartacus); it was more torture than execution. People would hang suffering for three to four days until they died of exposure, nailed to an X-shaped, not T-shaped cross.The Roman Catholic Church thought the spread-legged position too lewd when Romans later began to worship the man they had tried to kill, so they changed the shape of the cross to a T-shape in religious pictures.

Jesus was taken off the cross after only nine hours (Luke 23:44-45). One theory says his friends drugged the sponge he drank from on the cross with belladonna to make him appear dead (Mark 15:36-37), but no one can prove that. Jesus recovered somewhat and was seen a few days later by hundreds of people hobbling around with holes in his ankles and hands, supposedly "risen from the dead".

Medicine was so primitive 2000 years ago and people were so superstitious that Jesus got away with claiming to have died. He could not have foreseen that his deception would cost millions of people their lives over the next twenty centuries. Europeans worshiping Jesus as the "Son of God" conquered, murdered and enslaved millions of black, yellow, brown and white non-Christians with the blessing of their god, shouting everything from "Death to the barbarians!" to "Destroy the Infidels" to "Enslave the savages" to "Manifest Destiny" to "Kill a Commie for Christ!"

Black victims of this onslaught of burning crosses now donate billions of dollars annually to con men who pray to the same black-painted-white messiah with more enthusiasm than whites do. It's time black people drop the superstitious dogma and take our destiny into our own hands.

This is the "short" version of my take on religion, but I've bored you long enough. What do you think about all this? Drop me a line at the Afrique Mail Box . . .

Married In Heaven

On the night before her wedding, a bride and her husband-to-be die in a car accident. She the couple find themselves sitting outside the Pearly Gates waiting for St. Peter to process them into Heaven. While waiting, they begin to wonder: Could they possibly get married in Heaven? When St. Peter shows up, they asked him. St. Peter says, "I don't know. This is the first time anyone has asked. Let me find out," and he leaves.

The couple sat and waited for an answer. . .

. . .for a couple of months.

While they waited, they wondered whether IF they were allowed to get married in Heaven, SHOULD they get married?

"What if it doesn't work?" they wondered, "Are we stuck together FOREVER?"

After yet another month, St. Peter finally returns, looking somewhat bedraggled. "Yes," he informs the couple, "you CAN get married in Heaven."

"Great!" said the couple, "But we were just wondering, what if things don't work out? Could we also get a divorce in Heaven?"

St. Peter, red-faced with anger, slams his clipboard onto the ground.

"What's wrong?" asked the frightened couple.

"OH, COME ON!!" St. Peter shouts, "It took me three months to find a priest up here! Do you have ANY idea how long it'll take me to find a lawyer?


© 2004 Afrique Publications -- http://www.afriqueonline.com

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Reference: As Atheists Know, You Can Be Good Without God
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