Organised religion

Just like Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night, this article is too good to be funny! (see Family Guy episode Let's Go to the Hop)
Strictly speaking religion is the act of shoving your head up the arsehole of a guy called "god”. This strange behavior is the result of a mental affliction resulting from inflammation and partial destruction of the brain. The infection is caused by the class VI virus called faith. Organized religion, more commonly known as child abuse, is like organized crime; although it has several key differences:
*It generally involves a lot more killing.
*It generally involves a lot more crime.
*When religious people carry out the same immoral activities that gangsters do, they like to believe that what they are doing is the highest ideal.
*In most countries religion is legitimate and in many countries, developed and undeveloped, it is actively encouraged and supported.
This article will discuss the forever-changing view of who or what "god" is and the delightful effects of organized religion upon mankind. God is generally a nice guy, but he can be a bit of a grumpy guts. When god is in a grumpy mood he can do such things as flooding the entire planet in an attempt to exterminate the human race. In the 4500 years since that took place (about 1500 years after creation) the world population has risen from one family (the only survivors of the flood) to around 6.5 billion people. God's Pro-Life followers on Earth kill doctors and young women who have been raped several days prior "out of love for the children," to quote Michael Bray.
The all-knowing, all-loving god of the universe is responsible for all natural disasters, wars, horrific infectious diseases and Republicans on planet Earth. He creates homosexuals so they can be one of many flash points of hatred and ridicule for his followers on Earth, in case they get bored with starting wars and brainwashing children. Some theologians have suggested that god is confused about his own sexuality and created homosexuals to get some idea of how they act. God has often condemned this assertion claiming he is not homsexual, just "bicurious".
God has assumed many names and forms over the years, but "Yahweh" is his most popular name in the west today. People in Israel and Palestine sometimes call each other names, throws stones at each other, fire tow missiles at each other and bomb schools and hospitals because they can't seem to make their mind up about god's current name. God of course considers this a laugh riot and watching the action in Palestine and Israel is major entertainment in Olympus. There are righteous bookies in Olympus with which pious souls bet on how many people will be killed as a result of sectarian violence in the next 10 minutes. 3267 is the most popular bet.
God created the universe during his week off from burying dinosaurs a few thousand years ago to kill some time (and a few trillion of his fantastic new creations through war, famine, disease, murder, ethnic cleansing and other forms of genocide and mass murder). He told his original two creations he could see everything they did, like all parents do, but when they misbehaved in the front garden he was nowhere to be seen. 
God likes to keep himself healthy by exercising on a regular basis and sticking to a healthy diet. According to Pastor Fred Phelps, god is also a non-smoker. Phelps likes to spread this message by carrying a board which proclaims that 'God hates fags'.
==Quick Guide to God==
The only way to get to heaven, or to God is through Jesus. God has been the most loving man since Adolf Hitler's evil twin retired. God has been known to use his Earth shattering powers of supreme might in the past, in huge demonstrations of how much He loves each and every person. Some examples are documented carefully in the Bible. Examples include: Burning cities to the ground, causing plagues, famine, swarms of locusts that attack people, punishing the very first people He created in His own image and a global flood designed to exterminate mankind. The one family who remained after that event went on to repopulate the planet Earth. Inbreeding and love making at such a high rate may be frowned upon by most people, but hey, how would you do it? The fact that an infinitely diverse population of human beings, around 6.5 billion in total, could have evolved from that one family over a period of 6000 years is puzzling but this in itself is not sufficient evidence to discredit the occurrence of the flood (plus evolution is nonsense anyway, right?). 
God, like any loving parent, likes his children to behave in a polite and civilized manner. Anyone who steps outside the narrow boundaries of God's strict behavioral code are called 'sinners'. Acts of sin include communism, liberalism, studying science, thinking, Practicing Judaism, Islam or any other religion not associated with him, protected sex in college, masturbation, using contraceptives, killing fertilized eggs (embryos), drinking (God changed his views on this sin after billions of people began dying of dehydration) and smoking dope; although since god's followers on Earth are usually shareholders in tobacco companies, smoking cigarettes is not a sin.
Examples of God's will on Earth include the invasion of a WMD (Weapons of minimal destruction) armed country in order to free the land of Ronald Reagan's old buddy and secure its strategically important land and vast reserves of oil, while pissing away $22,000,000,000 of the money belonging to the people of the country that has been "freed". People have pointed out that since that country didn't use its unimaginably vast supply of WMD, maybe they weren't so bad after all. Some other hell bound individuals have said that the reason they didn't use them is because they didn't have any. While in the country God's followers "interrogate" humans who disobey them, who unfortunately laugh at their interrogators because they fool gullible Americans into thinking they've been tortured; they do this by smashing their heads against the walls they are secured to in an attempt to kill themselves and then broadcast videos showing their heads being cracked open on liberal American TV. Liberal (evil) Americans then try to say that they are being tortured.
Because God is pure love, anybody, even good people of the purest heart, who do not believe in Him are forced into eternal suffering in Hell. However, evil selfish people can believe in God and get into Heaven because God loves them. God loves everybody equally, even those He has condemned to burn forever. Those doomed to eternally burn in Hell, however, may take solace in the fact that according to the Bible Heaven is, in fact, hotter than Hell, both literally and idiomatically.
For more in-depth discussion of this subject, consult the Bible, which is the definitive authority on all things religious, as it was written by God Himself and directly given to us mere humans to treasure forever, although most actions carried out by God, such as the creation of the universe, are phrased as "God created the heavens and the Earth..." as opposed to "I created the heavens and the Earth...". 
God created Man, the Earth, the solar system, all the countless trillions of stars, galaxies, quasars, black holes, wormholes and the entire universe itself in six days. This wore God out so he rested his eyes on the seventh day. God's actions on the eighth day are not well documented. Even though modern science, logic and physical evidence have proven this is total bullshit, every last word of the Bible is the truth. As a final act of love god suggests that anyone who tells you that the Bible is not true should be "stoned to death"; or if the person in question is not attractive they should just be killed.
Due to God's unrelenting reign of horror over innocent people and blessing of sub-human psychopaths, some people on Earth consider him to be something of a twat.
Some people on Earth claim that even the most gracious and loving men in history such as Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao and Saddam Hussein are much more loving than God. Some people believe that god should bestow more love upon Earth in the form of few more hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and pandemics of deadly diseases to prove his love of man. To this end a group of American evangelicals decided to sue God in a landmark legal case.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on the other hand felt God had already proven his love of man beyond reasonable doubt and wrote a long document detailing the evidence. The evangelicals broke from their normal habit of accepting reason and logic and decided to sue anyway.
The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the evangelicals and demanded that god hand out more love in the form of a category 5 hurricane, the most destructive in US history, upon the God blessed people of the United States. Evil, godless liberals in the country, who always say that physical evidence shows that all this god stuff is nonsense tried to blame the hurricane on the evil deity ”global warming”.
==Who or what is God?==
Nobody is quite sure who or what God is. Here are some different beliefs:
According to Captain Zap "Wikipedia" Branigan:Wikipedia on God
The stand-up theologian George Carlin gave a good description of God:
One thing that Caucasians have always agreed with is that God is white. God is balding, with a big bushy beard. He usually sits in a motorized wheelchair and listens to his iGod, which contains only Death Metal. He is also a porn addict.
God wears a pair of zebra striped flip flops with Bart Simpson socks. He also wears a red and yellow spotted dress, the upper half of a lime green tuxedo with a multicolored bow tie, a Dalmatian skin balaclava with a pair of Elton John’s sunglasses and a Burberry baseball cap worn back to front.
Since humans evolved brains big enough to allow abstract though, we have always invented different types of gods. People would assign a god for everything from the sun and the moon to storms. Indeed, God's dress sense, gender and form has varied since humans invented him. 
The first time we saw god he looked a gigantic yellow and orange smiley face who moved across a room covered with sky blue wallpaper. When the Egyptians came on the scene they decided that one God wasn't good enough. They decided to make up a number of gods that could increase indefinitely over time. Gods in Egypt usually took the form of a buff cat with huge conical ears, wearing a baseball cap and smoking a pipe. These cats were generally yellowy-grey in appearance and stood as high as 200m. These gods still exist in Egypt today, but their bodies have been covered with sand and only their ears are now visible. 
The Greeks adopted a similar domestic policy which decided on who or what God was. The Greeks carried on the Egyptian policy of multiple Gods but they decided that all the Gods would look different from one another. The first God of ancient Greece was a 90 cm tall creature with a spiky blue body and who had the ability to move across the screen at ungodly speeds. The God's stomach, mouth and ears were gold colored and he wore white gloves and red and white trainers. He was hailed as the God of movement, and still remains the inspiration for the video game character Sonic, a superhero who got super-speed after getting bitten by a radioactive panther. Indeed the Greeks were pretty high on this god shit. Here is a list of the most popular Greek gods:
*Aphrodite Goddess of beauty and love.
*Apollo God of the light, music, healing, prophecy, the sun, and poetry.
*Ares God of war, primarily violent war and bloodshed.
*Artemis Goddess of the hunt and the moon.
*Athena Goddess of wisdom, strategy, and war.
*Demeter Goddess of agriculture.
*Dionysus God of hard drinking.
*Hades God of the Dead and lord of the Underworld. Brother of Poseidon and Zeus.
*Hephaestus God of fire and the forge.
*Hera Goddess of marriage, family, motherhood and childbirth. Zeus' jealous wife.
*Hermes God of travel, thieves, and commerce. Messenger of the gods.
*Hestia Goddess of the hearth and domestic life. Eventually replaced by Dionysus.
*Poseidon God of the sea. Brother of Hades and Zeus and father of Polyphemus.
*Zeus King of the gods. God of air, thunder and lightning. Brother of Poseidon and Hades. Destroyed his father who was a titan. Loves women and cheats on Hera very much in mythology.
The Romans decided to take the God principle one step further by giving him a son. They called him 'Jesus'. He was an underweight hippie who walked about half naked wearing nothing but a set of curtains and a pair of sandals that were made from an old tire. The Romans soon bored of him and forced him to be on the popular but dangerous Roman gameshow called "Crucifixion!". Unfortunately, as with all contestants on "Crucifixion!", Jesus died while playing.
There are many arguments that prove, beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt, that God does indeed exist. Here are some of the most famous arguments:
:People vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God." –Rev Richard Dawkins
:(a + bn)/n = x, therefore God exists. Reply! – Leonhard Euler
==Theocracies==
A theocracy is a country in which the government passes laws and rules the country using guidelines laid out by a holy text (today it that text almost invariably the Koran, since the evil concept of "secular democracy" has taken over countries filled with Christian people). Examples of Islamic theocracies include: Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Jordan and Sudan, which has been the host of a religiously inspired war which has cost the lives of roughly half a million people and has resulted in the displacement of 2.5 million people over the last 3 years.
It is generally agreed that the countries named above are the most civilised in the world. Secular (countries which demand a separation of religion and government) countries are generally much less civilised. Religion expert Jerry Fallwell, who was recently reunited with his pal God, makes the case that secular government "was an idea invented by the devil." These countries include: The United States of America, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Much less civilised.
==Atheistic organized religions==
Although most cool religions have at least one god, some more boring religions make do the living things on the planet earth, and don't care about heavenly fathers. 
===Buddhism===
thumb|230px|If your going to sit doing nothing for 20 years it's nice to have a bit of peace and quiet.
Buddha started as a Hindu, just like Christ started as a Jew and Joseph Smith started as a Christian. (That's how religions bring out new releases, usually: a new prophet revises the previously released version.) 
By reputation Buddhism is the most peace-loving organized religion...which may be why Hinduism drove it into the backwaters of remote Tibet, eh? Nevertheless, now and then one reads of gangs of Buddhist monks fighting each other over something like begging rights in a town.
Buddhism is kind of a cheat religion, because it has no God. That is why Buddhists are generally so peace loving. Which brings us onto our next religion:
===Jainism===
Gluttonous, evil and blood thirsty, the Jains are puzzled as to why Adolf Hitler took their holy symbol for the Nazi party. They are still questioning whether Hitler was a closet Jain and wonder why anyone gets converted to anything. They don't spend too much time discussing or wondering about god /God but are quite excitable around some nun or monk. Being severely and peculiarly veggie, they add an upturned banana to their symbol for a joke. They walk around wearing gas masks to make sure they don't inhale any insects in case they accidentally launch a chemical weapon attack on themselves. They don't mind infidels or Muslims or even Palin but thoroughly and vigorously despise onions and garlic. And potatoes. But don't mind others eating French fries with ketchup.
Some got fed up with clothes and cities and decided to skulk in some peaceful jungle. SV
==Monotheistic organized religions==
For atheists god is dead, for monotheists god is dad. God is always with monotheists, which can be a bit embarrassing on dates, but makes you feel good when your children are eaten alive by wild wolves.
===Judaism===
Judaism is essentially a first-release religion: both Christianity (aka Judaism 95 AD) and Islam (aka Judaism XP) are later releases based on the Judaic operating kernel. A new operating system, Judaism Vista was released recently, but everybody agrees it's shit. 
Computers which run Judaism DOS are more stable relative to computers running Judaism 95 and Judaism XP and are less inclined to lie to Africans about contraceptives and leave bombs outside of night clubs.
The purpose of Judaism, according to such delightful people as Martin Luther and Adolf Hitler is world domination. The people who control the world today appear to be male, white Protestants. This is just and illusion though.
In the Land of the free (and also in the Land of the Four) it is practically impossible to criticize Israel, or the Jewish faith without being called a Nazi. In fact, say something bad about Judaism, even in private, and a Jew will pop out of nowhere and call you a Nazi. Other actions which are akin to Nazism include smoking cigarettes in non-smoking areas and tapping a pen. Some people might argue that tapping a pen is not quite as bad as trying to take over the world by Blitzing major cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and destroying the abodes of several hundred thousand more, and then trying to wipe out an entire race using a sustained mass killing operation, resulting in the death of at least 6 million people, but it's pretty close.
The Jewish state of Israel was formed by kind and altruistic people from the developed world in response to the horrors of the holocaust and to finally give the Jews a place where they would be free from persecution. Hah! Just kidding! Israel was formed because the Book of Revelations says that the rapture (the death of 75% of the world’s human population) cannot come unless the Jews reside in their “homeland”. After the rapture Jesus will come back, fight the antichrist (Kofi Annan) and then kill all non-Christians (including the Jews of Israel) and then send them to hell to burn in agony forever. Jesus will then take all the Christians to heaven before finally destroying the entire planet Earth creating a new, relatively thin, asteroid belt where the Earth once was.
Since “end timer” Christian Fundamentalists have taken control of the US political and military machine, and now there is no opposing nuclear superpower to keep the US from launching it’s nukes, don’t be surprised if every single and multiple nuclear armed ballistic missile in the US is deployed tomorrow. Nice knowing y’all. War out!
====God’s chosen people====
Jews are chosen by God to be awesome. For instance, Jews only make up 0.05% of the World population but allegedly control 93.7% of it. Some completely Jewish industries include the Media, Shelf Displays, Banking, Nuclear Physics, the one Truth, and Mexican Fast Food. Around 43% of all statistics are made up. In the Bible, God said the Jews could take over the Promised Land and kill off the people who already lived there...although they were told that “all the women children that have not known a man by lying with them” were to be “[kept] alive for yourselves”. 
The Jewish God told the Major Prophet™ Moses that His commandment was "Thou shalt NOT kill" and then the next day ordered Moses to sic his soldiers on the Israelites and kill a bunch of 'em. Later God told the 11 tribes to turn on the twelfth tribe, the Benjaminites, and kill them, but they sucked at it apparently. Benjaminites are one of the few surviving tribes of Israel.
===Christianity===
Christianity was released around 2000 years ago. It was originally intended to be a cheap rip-off of Judaism which was manufactured in China instead of Jerusalem. Christianity stole the God of Judaism, Yahweh, and even their holy book, known today as the Old Testament. The Jews sued the Christians in 12AD by killing the CEO of Christianity, Jesus. Since this day the Jews have paid dearly for this (unproven) act (Think Eastern Europe in the 1930s).
Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament is summed up by the very Reverent Richard Dawkins as: 
There are two forms of Christianity: fundamentalist and nonmentalist; in other words: Christians who are mental and Christians who are normal.
====Nonmentalist Christianity====
Christianity, aka Judaism 95, is the NO 1 monotheistic religion in the world today. Only really fury cats wearing sunglasses are cooler than Christians. The president of the Christian faith is the aforementioned hippy who goes by the name of Jesus. When Jesus was alive he wasn’t very popular. People only like Jesus now he’s dead; kind of like Robert Maxwell.
Christians believe that God is loving and merciful and treasures all His children, and will send everyone who is not a Christian to be tortured in the pits of Hell for all eternity.
====Fundamentalist Christianity====
Fundamentalist Christianity is a philosophy that states that every human being deserves to be punished for the crime of being born. Put simply, 6010 years ago, some time after the domestication of the dog, a non-existent man took an apple from a tree. Since that day every human born has had to suffer for that act. The problem is that since the human who has just been born didn’t commit the “crime” of taking the apple from the tree, the punishment is actually inflicted upon people who didn’t commit it. This is the concept of Fundamentalist Christianity: people should be made to suffer and live in misery for something they didn’t do.
The default punishment for the original sin, stealing an apple, varies across the genders. Men are forced to wear white shirts and ties and travel to work each day on busses filled with people with less class than a Palestinian school after an Israeli general’s drinking binge, and women have to suffer in agony and (before Satan invented a national health service) usually die before a new sinner comes into the world. Then that new sinner would have to live a life of misery and guilt too.
Punishment, in the form of instant death, deserves to be inflicted upon humans who are too young to even realize they exist. This is in fact laid out quite clearly in the Bible. Here is a short list of some parts of the Bible which advocate punishing people for other people’s misdeeds:
*Romans 5:12 
*Gen. 3 
*Josh. 27:24-26 
*Sam. 12:11-14 and 6:19 and 24:15
*Ex. 20:5 
 
And quite a lot about killing innocent people (even your own family):
*Killing a child to punish the father (Sam. 12:14) 
*Killing all your grandchildren and nephews (Kings 10:13-14 and 11:1) 
*Killing all your servants (Kings 14:5-7) 
*Killing a man's children and replacing them with another set (Book of Job) 
*Killing everyone breathing (Num. 21:35, Joshua 8:26, Deut. 20:16, Num. 21:3, Joshua 9:11-21, Joshua 10:28-40 quite a few times!) 
*Killing man, woman, infant, suckling (Sam. 15:3, Deut. 3:6) 
*Killing your brothers (Gen. 4:8, Chron. 21:4, Ex. 32:37, Judges 9:5) 
*Killing your enemies with swords, hailstones, slingshots, arrows, and by crushing, fiery serpents and hornet stings, flaying off their skin and whipping them to death with an animal bone and an ax goad (Judges 3:31 and16:27, 30 and 15:14, Kings 20:28-30, Num. 21:6 , Ex. 9:25, Deut. 13:15 and 32:23-25 and 7:20 quite a few times again!)
*Killing 50,000 innocent persons because a few looked into a box (Sam. 6:19)
“Killing 50,000 innocent persons because a few looked into a box” is a classic example of the Fundamentalist Christian doctrine of “kill those who have done nothing wrong just because someone else did something wrong”; like putting a raped woman in jail for the rest of her life.
Ezekiel 18:4 is kind of interesting because it states that innocent children should be killed for their father’s wrongdoing. This should be the line that women who want to have an abortion should use to convince Fundamentalists Christians it’s right, “I must have an abortion because the child’s father moved a light switch on the Sabbath!”. The problem is an ugly unformed "human" who resembles a tadpole more than a man is seen to be worth more than a full grown human by Fundamentalist Christians. Yes you read that right. Ugly tadpole people are worth more than humans through the eyes of a Fundamentalist Christian.
Examples of children been made to suffer for their parent’s (non-existent) misdeeds include things like French children being flogged at the same time as watching their naked mothers screaming in agony as they were being burned alive for the “crime” of witchcraft. This is just the kind of thing a “righteous” French Christian judge would advocate. Luckily, shortly after this event, a certain nearby country attacked the frogs with a nuclear first strike.
===Islam===
Mohammed looked at the Jews, and he saw how their religion inspired 'em to kill other people in an organized, purposeful way. He looked at his own folks, the Arabs, and saw them killing each other more or less at random. "My goodness", thought Mohammed, what we Arabs need is organized religion!
Being illiterate, Mohammed dictated the Koran to some other Arabs (known as Europeans), ones who could write. He cribbed a bunch of it from the Jewish Pentateuch, known to the Christians as the Old Testament, but had the guts to give the Jews credit. (In small print the Koran calls Jews "People of the Book", meaning that they should be honored as people who used a book to justify killing folks.)
Now, just like all other organized religions Islam has two faces. One face says "All men are brothers and mercy is the greatest good;" the other face, commonly known as CAIR, says "Kill thou the unbeliever and thou shalt be blessed." 
Greatest sins in Islam include such demonic acts like wearing wigs or golden rings, petting dogs at home, thinning eyebrows, tattooing, drawing cartoons and the disgusting habit of eating with your left hand, as stated by Mohammad, the secretary of Allah the Horrible.
===Communism===
Communism is a pirated version of Judaism 95. Even though some of the first release prophets of Communism, suck as Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky ran the original Judaic operating kernel, Communism’s real prophet, the benevolent and loving Josef Stalin, man of copper, had been programmed with the more functional Judaism 95 operating system, for five years in a software seminary in Georgia. 
Stalin decided to abandon copyright laws under his new religion in case the software seminary he’d just spent 5 years in would sue him for ripping off their religion. Since all communist software was pirated, Stalin decided to erase all non-Communist software in Soviet robots and it became a capital offence to install any.
Albania took this one step further by creating the world's first officialy Linuxist state, denying the existence of Bill Gates and outlawing all Microsoft software, genuine or pirated.
The slightly-darker-than-normal Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the world's first nuclear armed lunatic asylum, has proved what Nietzsche claimed was wrong after all: you cannot kill god. God, aka "The Great Leader" of North Korea is, literaly (not metaphorically like Ronald Reagan in the 80s) DEAD. He is the dead of state of the world's first necrocracy.
==Polytheistic organized religions==
===Hinduism===
Hindus believe a whole slew of gods wander the universe. Their timescale stretches back billions of years—in fact to infinity, unlike the paltry 6000 years prescribed by the Abrahamic religions. And like the One God the multiple Hindu gods are real bloodthirsty, killing humans and each other with glorious abandon.
Why, not long ago righteous Hindu fundamentalists massacred a couple of thousand unbelievers. But there is a difference between the Hindu fundies and the Abrahamic ones: the soldiers of Moses raped the little girls and then kept them as slaves, while the Hindus raped the unbeliever women and then burned them alive. Obviously both methods of dealing with unbelievers are holy; which is more holy is a matter for the preachers of organized religion to debate.
===Shintoism===
In the remote fens of Japan Shinto persists as a genuine nature religion. Nothing more peaceful and, err, natural than an organized nature religion, you might think. 
Well, the Japanese worshipped Emperor Hirohito as a divine incarnation. And Hirohito, divine Shinto incarnation that he was, ordered the Rape of Nanking, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the death march on Bataan. Praise nature gods, them Japanese got their organized religion to justify murder just like the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, and the Hindus. Yassir!
===Scientology===
The fastest growing religion in the world, Scientology was started during the Science Fiction Anti-Renaissance of the mid-20th Century by a sheep called L.Ron Hubbard. The main appeal of Scientology is that it is far more believable than other world religion. For more information, see Tom Cruise.
===Wicca===
thumb|200px|If you want to become a Wiccan it is suggested that you read either Wicca for Dummies or Wiccapedia. These provide handy information on becoming a Wiccan.
If Christianity can be considered to be Judaism 95, then Wicca is DOS. Due to actions by loving Christians, such as the kidnap and murder of children as young as 7, Wicca has been pretty disorganized since Jesus came on the scene 2000 years ago. Christians needed to destroy the “Old Religion” so they could dominate the world. This wasn’t too hard because one of the central beliefs of Wiccans is that you should not harm anyone else.
Wiccans are typically classed as witches; or at least they were during the witch trials. . . Remember, the ones in which children were forced to watch their mothers being burned alive?
==What Does It All Mean, Daddy?==
Well, it's simple, little Virginia. 
When Zog the cave man looked around him, all befuddled by the complexity of the universe, he tried to come to an understanding of nature. Unfortunately, Zog had no access to telescopes, microscopes, or other scientific paraphernalia, so, when lightning fried the tree outside his damp little smelly cave, Zog conceived of a lightning God. Such were the origins of the Gods, which were actually primitive, poorly thought out fantasies. These can be thought of as the "assembly language" of organised religion, or possibly microcode. . . like, really really primitive, ok?
Some fantasy beliefs help tribal societies survive. Believe that a Super-Guy above the clouds tells you to kill the neighboring tribe and take their goats, and your tribe becomes braver in battle and wins many goats. Believe that you should treat your fellow believers fairly and with mercy, and your society becomes stronger. The societies that believe in a Super-Guy out compete those who don't. The leaders of these societies are aware of this, and have spent centuries tweaking the existing fantasies, and corrupting any new ones, to tighten their stranglehold on their respective societies.
Some fantasy beliefs help individuals to survive. Sing together to the Super-Guy, feast and party in His honor on His holidays, and you feel pretty good. Listen to the great stories and, when your tribe figures out how to read and write, read His Word...and your mind is engaged, entranced by the glory and the philosophy of the Super-Guy. When you stab a man in the guts with your bronze sword, you may feel horrified, disgusted...but the fantasy belief system tells you that you are righteous and lets you forget the smell of his intestines as they spilled out over your hand, and the look on his face as he died.
(Most mammals seem to have built-in empathy: even lab mice understand when a fellow mouse is suffering. It is one of the great triumphs of organized religion to systematically defeat natural human empathy and replace it with righteous satisfaction.)
Some fantasy beliefs help spread the belief system itself—like a virus spreads, like a bacterium, like gonorrhea and syphilis. Convert unbelievers to the belief system, and the Super-Guy is pleased. Conversely, the Super-Guy will punish you if you fall away from the belief system. But the fact that the fantasy beliefs help societies and individuals are also methods used by the belief system to spread. The leaders of these belief systems are aware of this, and have spent centuries tweaking the existing fantasies, and corrupting any new ones, to tighten their stranglehold on their respective belief systems.
Now, little Virginia, the proof is in the pudding: all the major belief systems have these aspects. All of them preach goodness and mercy, because that engages mens' minds and speaks to their spirits. All of them (with the possible exception of Buddhism) are elitist: they tell their believers that they are the One True People, the Ones In The Know, the Chosen, the Righteous and Correct. All of them prophesy punishments for those who abandon the One True Belief, whatever fantasy it may be. 
God, gods, or the Void did not make these fantasy belief systems, dear Virginia, oh no. They evolved from ancient superstitions like that word-game you play at birthday parties, the one where you pass a whispered phrase around a circle and see how it evolves. Organized religions evolved, Virginia, and at the foundation they do not care about good and evil, about damnation and salvation, or about truth: at the icy root they care only about spreading themselves to as many minds as possible.
Here's why: the organized religion that captures more minds crowds out lesser fantasy belief systems—and crowds out logical thought too, if it can. So the most efficient organized religion spreads; the lesser organized religions die out. It has nothing to do with truth. All that matters is how effective the organized religion is at capturing new believers.
Tell a fundamentalist Christian to prove scientifically that God exists, and he will try desperately to convert you to his belief system. Failing, he will despise you as blind, satanic, evil: the belief-virus that controls his thoughts tells him to hate and fear even plain logical thought which challenges the fantasy-belief. On the other hand, he will forgive even a murderer if he only converts to Christian faith.
Ain't humankind a buttered-cornbread wonder?
==Religion and science==
thumb|450px|Talk to a Christian about comedy and you'll be given a lecture about how evolution is wrong.
The religious community “fully embraces the scientific method”, to the quote the human-reptile hybrid and homophobe/closet homosexual Ted Haggard; Dr Joseph Goebbel's incarnate. The “scientific method” is the action of removing quotes, stories and other shit from the Bible and saying that they can be proven true. 
===The creation of the universe===
The Bible, which is of course a factual and flawless account of the history of existence (omitting the spelling errors of course), details the creation of the infinite expanse of the universe being created during God's week off. Since the Bible is the word of God its hard to understand why it has spelling errors but will leave all the strange contradictions in the Bible and let Thomas Paine worry about them instead.
There is an ever increasing group of godless, hell-bound individuals on Earth who doubt this is the case however. This group of godless deviants who are collectively referred to as 'physicists' have shown that the all points of the universe are expanding with a velocity proportional to their displacement from the original site of the creation of the universe. The theory goes that the universe came about as a result of a 'big bang' and everything began to expand until the universe as we know it today finally formed.
===The creation of life===
Another group of even more evil individuals collectively known as 'biologists' have shown that life did not come about from some guy who came out of nowhere blowing into a handful of manure, but had come into being due to a steady process of evolution driven by a process of mutation, variation among the offspring and natural selection over a period of 4,500,000,000 years. The proof of this theory is that if God couldn't go for seven days without a rest then how could he have worked non stop for 4.5 billion years?
The religious version of the story of life has many mantles and euphemisms; “intelligent design” is the most recent. The science behind this theory involves saying “I don’t understand how life could have evolved – therefore evolution is invalid”. Another trick involves manipulating scientific lingo by saying “it’s only called the theory of evolution – therefore it’s not proven true; it’s a faith position”; kind of like Isaac Newton's theory of gravity. There is no direct evidence that gravity exists, only the indirect evidence of its effects on apples. Since it can't be directly observed it's pretty clear it doesn't really exist. Apples are associated with sin after all. Gravity is probably really caused by Satan. In the Family Guy episode North by North Quahog it is revealed that Mel Gibson doesn't believe in gravity.
===The virus of faith===
Since religion is dangerous disease caused by a class VI virus called faith, it has been studied by many biologists and virologists. The molecular structure of the faith virus has been elucidated using a combination of electron micrograph studies and X-ray crystallography. There is a vaccine in the works, referred to as Common Sense. If the subject is exposed to faith at a young age, their brain begins to deterierate; it's a sad progression.
==Religion and politics==
Religion in general and God in particular has always been useful as a great cleanser of personal responsibility and restraint. If you want to justify hate, violence war or genocide then you can always say: “it wasn’t me sir, it was God. Give him detention”.
Most governments generally grant organized religions "tax-free" status, on the assumption that taxing churches will anger a vengeful God, who will then sabotage said government with incompetent, corrupt officials, fumbling, inefficient bureaucracies, and apathetic citizenry. The fact that these aspects have been prevalent in every government since the Stone Age seems to have escaped them.
Meanwhile, God continues to rake in untold wealth, in return for a pledge to "fight on the side of the heaviest artillery." However, since all past and present artillery pieces are infinitesimally small compared to God, He has consistently had problems judging which guns are the heaviest, and so contents himself with taking the occasional random pot-shot at the earth, to the constant amusement of Satan.
==References==
==See also==
*Bible Adventures
* Disorganised religion
* Making up God quotes
* The ring of power
* Fleetwood Bible Church
* Flying Spaghetti Monster
* God's Playground 
* God V. Nietzsche
* God/Unused
* Jewish History
* Mrs. God
* Allah
* Gods
* God
* JR "Bob" Dobbs
* Masochristian
* BUHHDA
Category:Religion
Category:Christianity
Category:Judaism
Category:Atheism
Category:Gods
Category:Saints
Category:Cosmology
Category:De facto rulers of the world