The tyranny of scripture

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The tyranny of scripture

Duration: 6 minutes and 47 seconds

Country: United Kingdom

Language: English

License: CC - Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives

Genre: Video Blog

Producer: www.patcondell.net

Director: Pat Condell

Views: 3,264 (139 embedded)

Posted by: patcondell on Aug 7, 2008

Humanity in chains.
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I sometimes think that if Satan existed
he couldn't devise a better way of keeping humanity in chains
than by encouraging the blind uncritical veneration of scripture
and the fossilisation of human thought.
So, without wishing to be too rude about it, I want to say something to the handful of people
who insist on sending me sometimes quite lengthy passages of scripture.
You probably know who you are. Well, maybe you don't. Maybe that's part of the problem here,
but I don't understand why you do this. You must realise, surely, that I never read a single word of it.
I recognise it immediately as scripture, and therefore as worthless.
So effectively you are wasting your time.
The time it takes you to copy and paste that fantasy fiction and send it to me
is time that you could be spending far more profitably, doing something you enjoy
like, I don't know, flagellating yourself, perhaps; rending your garments, gnashing your teeth,
prostrating yourself before a crucifix and crying your eyes out for hours on end -
whatever it is you normally do to relax and unwind.
On the other hand, if it's a genuine neurotic problem that you've got,
some kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, well obviously that's different.
Then I do sympathise. Please carry on sending as much scripture as you like,
but consulting a trained mental health professional might also be quite a good idea
because scripture is not reality. I'm sorry to be the one to break the bad news.
It's just scripture, I'm afraid. What's been divinely revealed
hasn't been revealed at all. It's been imagined.
And if it's all you've got to support your particular version of reality
and the god who supposedly created it, then I would suggest that your god is in fact
a false god, and every time you proclaim him you merely proclaim yourself deceived,
like the village idiot who walks around blowing a whistle at people because he thinks it makes him important,
when all it does it single him out as the village idiot.
Apologies, by the way, to any genuine idiots who are offended at being associated with religion. That wasn't my intention.
I also get quite a lot of e-mails from secret atheists; people who live in the American Bible Belt,
and who tell me that they would literally lose their livelihood if the ignoramuses around them
knew that they didn't believe in the tribal god of the ancient Judean desert.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there were as many secret atheists in the Bible Belt
as there are secret homosexuals in Saudi Arabia.
It's just that with all the available women in that country safely under lock and key where they belong
all those poor studs can turn to is porn or each other. Let's be realistic.
But both of these unfortunate groups - the secret atheists and the secret homosexuals
are victims of other people's rigid interpretation of scripture.
Scripture gives us licence, if we are that way inclined,
to show the very worst of ourselves, and to behave in ways
we might otherwise be ashamed of, if we had any decency about us.
There's nothing you can't read into it, or take from it,
so whatever nasty shitty little attitude you harbour towards your fellow man
will find justification in scripture.
Like the sands of the desert, fixed and immutable, yet ever shifting,
the words of God are infinitely versatile.
Open that book and watch them dance across the page like ninjas,
each one a soldier for you and your petty prejudices.
But don't make the mistake of thinking that you can blame scripture for your noxious opinions.
You can seek refuge in it, as many hypocrites do, but you can't hide behind it.
Because scripture depends on interpretation, because it is so ambiguous,
the way that you choose to interpret it reveals who you are in your heart.
So in that sense it's not a shield at all.
It's a spotlight that shows up an evil heart like an x-ray,
as with those hardline Saudi clerics, for example,
who take sadistic pleasure interpreting the Koran as cruelly as possible
they merely reveal themselves as the bloodthirsty monsters that they are
and advertise to the world the darkness in their petty little souls
and their pitiful inadequacy as men.
Right now the Anglican church is tearing itself apart because some people
again have taken refuge in scripture as an excuse
for prejudice against women and homosexuals.
In any other walk of life in the civilised world this would be prosecuted as a crime,
but scripture legitimises it, implying that it's the result of profound reflection,
when in fact it's just a grubby front for chauvinism and ignorance.
Which brings me back to the Bible Belt, widely recognised, of course,
as an area of outstanding natural stupidity, and with very good reason,
especially when you consider the millions of dollars that have been spent
in building creation museums. Just think of the psychotherapy that money could have paid for.
Creation museums are the latest symptom of Christi-insanity to hit the United States,
and they are, of course, inspired one hundred percent by scripture.
At the moment they seem to be popping up like mushrooms, in a spontaneous eruption of life, ironically enough,
all over the land of the free, and beyond now.
These are places of education where Christian children can go to learn the truth,
that their parents are morons and quite possibly insane.
They'll learn that Adam and Eve not only existed in all their Disney-like fig-leafed apple-chomping glory,
but they rode around the place on dinosaurs.
They probably even had rodeos. Well, why not? They were Christians, weren't they?
The dinosaurs died out eventually
and who could be surprised? Look at the company they had to keep.
Although one dinosaur is still with us, unfortunately,
and that is creationism's very own Ignoramus Rex,
a small brained creature with a hard outer shell impervious to reason,
feeds exclusively on scripture, and it's copious droppings
have not only been used to build these museums,
but can serve as a useful metaphor for everything in them.
If you've got a head full of scripture, then what you've got is
a head full of ideas that have stopped growing.
That'll be a head full of dead ideas, then.
And you have no right to have those ideas respected or taken seriously.
You're simply not entitled to it.
And you've certainly got no business using them to tell other people how they should live their lives
because you don't know anything.
If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,
scripture is the first refuge of the ignoramus.
You can study is for years without learning anything,
but you will end up with a lot to say for yourself,
and it will all amount to the same thing -
talk to the scripture, because the brain ain't listening.
Peace, especially to all the secret atheists and homosexuals.
Better days are coming.

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