Religious People

Why Religious People Make Me Nervous (Warning, Graphic Content)

I think there's always going to be a fundamental gulf between people like myself, who relate to the world in a (mostly) Rational, Humanist fashion, and religious people. We start off from different places about our ultimate understanding of the world. While we might be able to come to terms on basic things like law, government, and the structure of society, at the drop of a hat the whole world can change for them, and everything we had agreed upon before is now null and void.

There's no stability in your worldview when it stems from the belief in supernatural forces beyond human ken. Today God says to love your fellow man; tomorrow he says to murder the unbelievers and put their heads on pikes. Who are you to disagree?

Case in point:

MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) -- One of Liberia's most notorious rebel commanders, known as Gen. Butt Naked, has returned to the nation his troops terrorized to confess, saying he is responsible for 20,000 deaths.

Joshua Milton Blahyi, who now lives in Ghana, returned this week to face his homeland's truth and reconciliation commission, this time wearing a suit and tie. His nom de guerre is derived from his platoon's practice of charging naked into battle, a technique meant to terrify the enemy.

...

The civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people in this nation of 3 million, was characterized by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls. Drugged fighters waltzed into battle wearing women's wigs, flowing gowns and carrying dainty purses stolen from civilians.

Before he led his fighters into battle, wearing only a pair of lace-up boots, Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice to the devil.

The sacrifice was typically "the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat," he told The Associated Press on Saturday. He appeared before the commission Jan. 15.

...

In 1996, while charging naked into a battle, Blahyi said God appeared and told him he was a slave to Satan, not the hero he considered himself to be, according to an earlier interview with The Associated Press.

He became a born-again Christian and for a while, traversed the war-wracked streets of Monrovia selling cassettes of his sermons.

Satan tells him to kill, and he does. God tells him to stop, and he does.

What happens when God or Satan tell him to start killing again?

This is why I get the shivers when I go past a church, or see the Jesus fish on a car, or hear a pro-lifer talking about life beginning at conception (life meaning 'the soul we can baptize' for them).

They might be all smiles today, but tomorrow they could be waving machetes, brandishing rifles, setting fire to my home.

The worst part? They could still be all smiles.

Source: CNN.com