What Kind of God…?
Almost every day I see a report or hear of some sort of ridiculous rituals being performed by people purely for religious reasons. I usually blow them off as they’re typically silly, pointless mechanisms that really don’t hurt anyone other aside from maybe wasting someone’s time.
But every once and again, I become truly appalled that people – real living, breathing, thinking, loving human beings can perform such excessively malevolent acts in the name of their Deity.
This headline definitely caught my attention:
200,000 animals to be sacrificed at Nepal festival
More than 200,000 buffaloes, goats, chickens and pigeons will be killed Tuesday and Wednesday at the temple in the jungles of Bara district, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Katmandu, to honor the Hindu goddess Gadhimai…
…The slaughtered animals are taken back by devotees to their villages and eaten during a feast. The meat is considered blessed and consuming it protects them from evil.
In the words of the Late Hunter S. Thompson:
‘Ye Fucking Gods.’
I realize that as a logically thinking person, this is never going to make sense to me. I really don’t understand religion as a whole, and I have millions of reasons to postulate it’s falsehoods. But, as I have gotten older, I’ve seen how it actually helps people deal with things that are beyond their control or understanding. Some people’s lives actually seem to be enhanced by this phenomenon. And for that, I supposed one could hypothesize that it is a good thing in and of itself.
The problem I have is when people use religion to justify acts they’d normally condemn by way of simple common sense. In all seriousness, how can any rationally thinking, semi-intelligent person think that if there is a God (or Goddess), that they would want you to ritualistically slaughter hundreds of thousands of animals at once? How does one first dream up this ridiculous scenario, then justify it in their mind, then actually execute the plan?
If you believe in God, then you certainly believe that God created the buffaloes, goats, chickens and pigeons in question. Now why would you think that God went to all this trouble to create these living, breathing creatures in the first place? Did God give life to these animals just so that you people could destroy them? That seems like an awful lot of work just to have your efforts eradicated like that.
Things like this make me hope that there is a God, just so that when these insanely moronic people die and have to face him, he can look at them and say:
“What the FUCK were you thinking? Did you REALLY expect there to be 72 virgins waiting for you when you got here after what you did? And why virgins anyway? That just shows what sad pieces of shit you guys really are. What would make you think that I would actually want you to do the stupid shit you pulled while you were alive? Don’t you think that if I really wanted Israel destroyed I would have just chucked an asteroid or two at them and called it good? Why would you think that I would need your help with that? I created YOU you ignorant fuckstick. How can YOU claim to know what I would want from you? How arrogant is that? Yeah, great thinking… I put all these different people on the Earth just so you could show your worthiness to me by blowing them up along with yourself. God dammit! And to think that I gave you fuckers a brain so that this kind of shit WOULDN’T happen.”
I could go on, but there really is no point. So, I will leave you with a lighthearted bit from the comedian Jim Gaffigan:
