Godless And Free

by Pat Condell

  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.

  Well, 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, because 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. Because, 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 for the bloodthirsty monsters 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 parentsre 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. Hell, 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. It feeds exclusively on scripture, and its 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 it 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, cos the brain ain’t listening.

  Peace, especially to all the secret atheists and homosexuals. Better days are coming.

  45.

  Ta

  ke Your God and Shove Him

  August 21, 2008

  OK, you don’t need to be religious to be a public nuisance any more than you need a medical degree to be an alcoholic, but statistically it does help, apparently, and who could be surprised?

  This is going to be a fairly rude video, because I thought I had made my position on scripture fairly clear the last time, but apparently not. There are some people who have decided to evangelise to me, because in their opinion I haven’t quite grasped the truth, and they want to set me straight about that, using guess what, scripture. And because I don’t want to hear any of this, I’m closed-minded, apparently, which is a novelty. Being called closed-minded by religious people is a bit like being called yellow by a bunch of bananas.

  But in this case I have to admit there’s some truth in the accusation. The fact is I’m so closed-minded that I’m only prepared to engage with reality.

  I know it sounds unreasonable, but if something isn’t real then I find I’ve got an inbuilt automatic prejudice – that’s right, a prejudice – against pretending that it is real.

  In fact I’m so closed-minded when it comes to believing absurdities that, you won’t believe this, but I actually require proof. That’s right, copper-bottomed proof that would stand up in a court of law. A real court, not a human rights commission. And we both know that you and your scripture are not going to furnish that prof you talk from now until the end of time. So let’s not bother and say we did, because you’d be far better employed reflecting on the fact that your deeply held beliefs are really nothing more than an accident of birth. The parents that you happened to be born to and the stuff they happened to believe in is now doubtless what you believe in. Had you been born elsewhere you’d believe other stuff, and this stuff you would consider heretical and false.

  Yet in both cases yours would be the only true religion. How are you not embarrassed?

  So no, thank you, I don’t want to hear about your beliefs, and I don’t give a damn what your scriptures have to say about anything. Sorry to be so closed-minded, but I’m going to spell it out for you now as clearly as I can, just to avoid any future misunderstandings. I don’t care if you’ve got a written formula for converting lead into gold. Keep it to yourself.

  Evangelising to people who don’t want to hear it is such a tasteless thing to do. It’s like exposing yourself in public. Whatever happened to good manners? It’s not as if we don’t even know the pitch. God knows we’ve heard it thousands and thousands of times, and it doesn’t get any more convincing in the telling, but that doesn’t seem to register with you, does it?

  If somebody tried to sell me a car and I decided it wasn’t for me, I wouldn’t expect that person to return the following day and try to sell it to me again, especially if it was an invisible car. If they did, they would be dismissed in very short order, and they would not be given any respect.

  Because, you see, I’m not in the market for a car. Any car. I’ve decided to walk. That’s going to take me where I’m going, because I’m going where it takes me. And I’ll be happy to get there. In fact, I already am.

  So I don’t need to hear about anybody’s god or saviour or prophet or scripture or any sort of supernatural deity hocus pocus whatsoever, or even any fancy variation on that theme, half man half god kind of ar
rangements. I’m not interested. I’ve heard it all before and I think it’s all lies. Insulting degrading nonsense that contaminates everything it touches. In fact, whenever I’m exposed to religion I feel dirty. I feel contaminated by the vileness of the mealy-mouthed platitudes that pass for wisdom, the naked money-grubbing, the controlling rhetoric devoid of any humanity or compassion – are you kidding me? The supercilious hectoring tone, the constant intrusive demands for privilege, and the absolutely unforgivable violation of the minds of young children, and I think those people who make a profession of religion are the scum of the earth. And I think that if Jesus turned up tomorrow he would agree with me, so let’s hope he does. Peace.

  46.

  Islam

  s War on Freedom

  August 31, 2008

  Free speech is not a bargaining chip. It’s not something for lawyers to dissect to their advantage or for politicians to trade away for cheap votes. It’s sacred. And that’s a concept that some religious people seem to have trouble understanding.

  Just when we thought the United Nations couldn’t get any more useless, something called the Organisfontlamic Conference, which is a fancy way of saying a Saudi-funded cartel of Islamic dictatorships, has been allowed to hijack the United Nations Human Rights Council, thus rendering it instantly and permanently worthless.

  Nevertheless, with all the plodding predictability of a Hollywood car chase, their first order of business was to pass a resolution banning criticism of Islam and sharia, and, by extension, of their own barbaric regimes, with all the stonings and beheadings, amputations and female genital mutilation that so disgusts everyone in the civilised world.

  In other words they’ve tried to make it illegal to criticise evil. A bit like abolishing penicillin because the bacteria are offended.

  I thought the United Nations existed to help drag countries like this out of the Stone Age, not for them to drag everybody else back there. But apparently not, because next April in Geneva the United Nations is hosting a conference on racism at which this manipulative nonsense is likely to be enshrined, giving Islam special status in international law. And given the kind of unprincipled leaders we have in the West right now, especially here in Europe, there’s every chance that this could have a real effect on our freedom of expression in the civilised world.

  Islam has a notoriously one-sided view of free speech, just it has a one-sided view of everything else. If you criticise Islam publicly you will be abused and threatened almost beyond belief, as an army of hysterical brainwashed illiteramuses line up to shit the contents of their minds into your mailbox. Check out the feedback page on my website for an idea of what you can expect.

  And maybe some of you leftie liberal multicultural pricks who are always telling me that Islam is peace, maybe you’d like to take a look as well, that’s if you can bear to pull your heads out of your America-hating arses for five minutes.

  “Islam is peace” is a message that has been spread to the four corners of the mosque, and that’s where it stops, because nobody else is buying it in a million years. Islam is as Islam does, and as long as the Saudis hold the reins and continue to finance extremists and to teach children violence and hate, then Islam is Islam, and peace has nothing to do with it. And every concession we make to it is an invitation to the past to reach out a bony hand and grab us by the nuts.

  And we’re already on a slippery slope, which is being liberally greased by our own leaders who don’t like freedom any more than Islam does. And that’s why Islamists are free to say whatever they want to in our society; to criticise us, to insult us for the way we dress, for the way we behave, our culture, our values, even calling for homosexuals to be killed without being arrested for incitement to murder, because that might inflame community relations. But anyone who so much as raises an eyebrow in protest at any of this is immediately accused of hate speech.

  Well, personally, I don’t do hate speech, because I think hate is a self-destructive emotion, and therefore rather a stupid one, but I do a pretty good line in disdain and contempt speech, and anyone who thinks their faith should trump my freedom is going to get that by the bucketload. Sorry to be so disrespectful and everything. It’s just that I believe the time to start defending your freedom is while you’ve still got it, not after it’s gone. And that’s why I think that this conference in Geneva should be boycotted by all civilised countries. The Canadians, to their credit, have already opted out. Let’s just hope some pin-headed human rights commissioner doesn’t force them to change their minds.

  We’ve been exposed to Islam up close in the West for a couple of decades, I suppose, ever since the Rushdie affair brought it to everyone’s attention like a shovel to the back of the head. And we’ve had a chance to take a good long look at it from our perspective, and to measure it against our cultural values. Remember them?

  And many of us don’t like what we see, I’m afraid. In fact, we’re appalled and disgusted by much of what we see, and we’re going to say so loud and clear (well some of us are anyway), and anyone who doesn’t want to hear it had better shut their ears along with their minds, because free speech is our birthright in the civilised world. It’s what made us the civilised world. And we know it’s our lifeline to the future, and if we let anyone pick it apart then our society has no future, which is exactly what the Islamists intend.

  Make no mistake, what the people behind this resolution want is to turn this planet into a prison camp, into a worldwide religious police state like Saudi Arabia is today. And that’s not a fantasy; it’s a reality where women are treated as property, minorities abused and victimised, where execution or mutilation await anyone who steps out of line, where there’s no other religion allowed, and where there’s no beer! – and just on its own that would be enough for me, quite frankly.

  And if we carry on as we have been in the West, staying silent about this, either through fear or through misplaced cultural sensitivity, if we keep letting ourselves be bullied and pushed around by radical Islam and its fellow-travelling multiculturalist pimps, then little by little, resolution by phoney bullshit resolution, our freedom will be eaten away until it’s no longer recognisable as freedom at all. At which point you may wake up and look around wondering: “What the hell happened there?” as some bearded ignoramus hands you a one-way ticket back to the seventh century. Enjoy.

  Peace, and happy days.

  47.

  Welcome to Sa

  udi Britain

  September 30, 2008

  Hi everyone. You may remember that a couple of weeks ago it was revealed that sharia courts are now operating here in Britain with the full backing of the law, even though they discriminate against women as a matter of course. And what this means is that those women who are intimidated into using these courts (as some of them will be, and everyone knows it), they will now find that they have the full weight of the British legal system lined up against them alongside the patriarchal bigotry in their own communities.

  Those women who are cheated out of their just entitlement in these places, as some already have been, will find that they have no recourse to the real law to put things right.

  In other words, we are now accommodating Saudi Arabian legal principles here in Britain, just as we accommodate their corrupt business practices and their threats against our national security when we try to investigate them.

  If live in Britain and if you think these courts are a bad idea, please sign the petition to which I’ve linked, asking that they be abolished and that this poison be removed from our society, and that we revert to the rule of civilised law with equal rights for all, if that’s not too much trouble.

  Over the last eleven years of this Labour government we’ve had in Britain, the British people have seen their society subjected to social engineering on a massive scale by a misguided and arrogant liberal elite who, in their eagerness to fragment the fabric of our society, have actually succeeded in giving civilised values a bad name.

  To
lerance and diversity are good things on paper. I’m sure we’d all vote for tolerance and diversity. But in practice they’ve become a nightmare of doublethink and lies, where the most unreasonable people in society are encouraged at every turn to be even more unreasonable.

  A case in point, just this week some idiot from Saudi Arabia is being allowed to sue a supermarket because he was required to handle alcohol as part of his job, despite being told this when he took the job. And despite the fact that thousands of Muslims in Britain handle alcohol every day when they sell it in their corner shops to people like me.

  I do find it quite ironic that Islam forbids intoxication when you consider how many Muslims are seemingly so intoxicated by their religion, especially in Saudi Arabia. So it was no surprise to me to hear that this idiot was from Saudi Arabia, because I think we all know that entire country is mentally ill.

  The Saudis would have us believe that theirs is the purest form of Islam. Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly the nuttiest form. It’s barking mad, if you’ll pardon the canine metaphor. And it’s pig-ignorant, even if you won’t.

  It’s got to be just about the nastiest belief system on this faith-obsessed planet. And it’s a cowardly one as well, enforced by cowardly men who are afraid of women, and whose only language is ultimately violence. They’re absolutely pathetic, and history is already laughing at them.

  If the term “human rights” means anything in this world, then one day the Saudis will pay out as much in compensation for their abuse of women as the Catholic Church has for its abuse of children. And I’ll certainly drink to that.

  I was out earlier today, coincidentally, buying some beer. Not because I enjoy beer particularly, but because I know it offends Islam. Although it didn’t seem to bother the Muslim shopkeeper I bought it from. Maybe he was just being polite.