Godless And Free

by Pat Condell

  Anyway, as I was leaving the shop with my beer, two women happened to walk past wearing burkas. Nothing too unusual about that, not any more, not in London anyway, and nobody really paid it much attention, apart from one small child who I overheard describing them to her mother as letterbox ladies, which I thought was actually quite inventive and rather charming.

  But of course it was also deeply offensive, so we had the child put to death.

  No, not really. But it was lucky that neither of the women actually heard the offensive and insulting remark, because obviously each of them had her head encased in a cloth sack, so that was good, because it meant that the police didn’t have to be called, no human rights people needed to get involved, and nobody required any financial compensation for hurt feelings, which I thought made a very pleasant change indeed.

  And, of course, as a result, we didn’t have to listen to any propaganda soundbites from some Islamist Saudi shill at the Muslim Council of Britain.

  So all in all it worked out for the best. And it just goes to show that these things don’t always have to end in tears.

  Peace, especially to everyone who remembers to sign the petition.

  48.

  Stop Sharia Law i

  n Britain

  October 6, 2008

  Well, first of all I want to thank everyone who helped get my last video reinstated on YouTube. I’m very grateful to everyone for their support on that. I want to thank YouTube as well, obviously, for reinstating it, but most of all I want to thank all those people who flagged the video in the first place, for giving us all a bit of fun, and for taking a dump in their own oatmeal, because it’s thanks to those people that that video is now all over the internet and all over YouTube like a rash, which just goes to show what can be achieved when we all work together. Thanks guys.

  I was told that it was removed because it violated YouTube’s guidelines on hate speech, in particular where I referred to the entire country of Saudi Arabia as mentally ill. So let me just clarify that point now to avoid any future confusion.

  It’s my belief that the laws which govern the country of Saudi Arabia are insane and wicked laws, and that the people who enforce them are seriously mentally ill.

  Of course there are people in Saudi Arabia who disagree with those laws and who would rather things were different in that country, and I wouldn’t mind betting that the majority of those people are female.

  However, they still have to live in a society which is governed with an iron rod by superstitious barbarians and policed by violent fanatics. In other words, a society which is, in fact, mentally ill.

  And, as if to illustrate the black hole of sexual repression that is Saudi Arabia, just this week a senior Saudi cleric, an Islamic “scholar”, if you’ll pardon the expression, has said that women who wear the burka should show only one eye, not two, because showing two eyes could make a woman seductive, and tempt some unfortunate man into raping her through no fault of his own.

  And it’s this kind of attitude that governs Saudi Arabia, and convinces me that Saudi Arabia’s influence on this planet is a thoroughly cancerous one, and the worst advertisement for any religion that it would be possible to imagine.

  Even Scientology looks good next to the Wahhabi doctrine, a twisted malignant mutation of Islam, which is as vile and as inhuman an ideology as Nazism.

  And that’s really all I was trying to say.

  I also believe that the sharia courts which have beestablished here in Britain, and which reflect the mentally ill laws of Saudi Arabia, are the thin end of an ever thickening wedge of Islamic medievalism that’s being hammered up our fundament by the Saudis with the connivance of our own government.

  Our prime minister wants London to be the sharia banking capital of Europe. I’m not sure why. Maybe he’s got a side bet with the Dutch and the Swedish governments to see who can completely Islamicise their societies first. Either way, they say money talks, and right now in Britain it’s talking Arabic.

  But I guess that’s what happens, isn’t it, when the most backward society on the planet happens to be one of the wealthiest. They can simply bribe their values into places where they don’t belong, and where they wouldn’t be tolerated for a second if not for their money.

  Saudi money is responsible, not just for forcing the British government to cravenly break its own laws, not just for the various pressure groups of Islamist fanatics who claim to speak for all Muslims in Britain, but also for the hundreds of mosques that have been established here in recent years, including the one in London that was exposed recently on television for allowing hate speech to be preached in its purest form – specifically that Muslims should hate anyone who isn’t a Muslim, and that apostates and homosexuals should be killed. They couldn’t quite make up their minds whether these people should be thrown from the top of a mountain or stoned to death, or both, leaving another tricky theological poser for the “scholars”.

  But allowing these courts into Britain is not just pandering to Saudi money, is it? It’s also a cynical, and I think quite typical vote-whoring tactic by the Labour Party, of which I’m ashamed to admit I used to be a card-carrying member. Now I wouldn’t vote Labour again at gunpoint, because like many people, over the last eleven years I’ve realised that a vote for Labour is a vote for Islam.

  And although I like and admire certain individual Muslims as people, I’ve seen enough of Islam to know that I don’t want it anywhere near me. And I don’t want any of its values enshrined in the laws of the country I live in. I want to see Islam relegated to its rightful place in society as a non-influential non-intrusive spiritual belief system. And that’s really what this petition was all about. It did quite well in the short time we managed to publicise it, but now it’s closed. However, there is a new petition which runs until the end of the year, which should give everyone the chance to spread it around far and wide.*

  If people know about this they will sign it, because you know that all your friends are just as sick as you are of having Islam rammed down their throats and being called racists if they complain about it. So maybe this time we can get enough signatures to make this genuinely newsworthy and give this disgraceful government the kick in the crotch it’s been asking for.

  Oh, and if the people who flagged the last video could do me a huge favour and flag this one as well, I’d be most grateful. Thanks again for all your help. Peace.

  * A petition can still be signed at onelawforall.org.uk

  49.

  Godless and Free

  October 31, 2008

  Somebody pointed out to me recently that by focussing on what I don’t want, namely religion, I’m attracting more of it into my life, which I agree would be a very unfortunate irony, if not for the fact that I’m focussing on what I do want, and that’s freedom, and lots of it.

  You see, I make these videos, not because I despise religion as humanity’s way of poking itself in the eye with a sharp stick for no reason, although obviously I do, but because I want to live in a free world full of free people who can say whatever they want to say, and who can be whoever they want to be, one thousand percent of the time, and where nobody is allowed to shut them up because their crackpot religious beliefs have been offended.

  I don’t care at all about theology, unless it threatens that freedom, and then I care about it the way I care about rabies or typhoid. So you could say that I’m not so much anti-religion as pro-freedom. Indeed, if religion was pro-freedom I wouldn’t have such a problem with it, but then if religion was pro-freedom it wouldn’t exist, because religion feeds on a broken spirit. That’s why it tries to break your spirit the moment you come into contact with it.

  Submit, obey, do not question. Those words should be chiselled above the entrance of every church and every mosque, because that’s the only message religion has when it comes right down to it: Praise the Lord, or else.

  The Pope spelled it out for American Catholics when he told them: “Obedience to the doctri
ne of the Church is the foundation of your faith.” That’s what he said. There was no mention of enlightenment or spirituality or any of these things, because he’s not in that business. He’s in the obedience business, the only business where the customer is always wrong.

  Clergy are the only salesmen who don’t have to justify or prove any of the outrageous claims they make for the product they’re hustling, and this leaves them free to engage in the kind of open fraud which in any other walk of life would be a criminal offence.

  For the level of investment they demand from us, I believe we’re entitled to expect actual enlightenment and wisdom in return. Instead what do we get? We get dogma, crude coercion and endless empty pieties about the love of a god who clearly loves us the way a violent husband loves the woman sitting next to him with two black eyes. If we step out of line we pay in the most brutal way.

  And it’s this crass violence at the heart of religion which I believe makes it truly evil, and also furnishes proof, as if proof were needed, that this is an entirely manmade phenomenon with nothing divine about it, otherwise it wouldn’t be so damned ugly.

  The god of the desert is transparently a false god. He’s a puppet who speaks with the voice of ignorant men who are afraid of knowledge and afraid of freedom, and who therefore need desperately to control the thoughts of others for their own miserable survival.

  They need us to believe that we’re less than we are, and to diminish ourselves in our own minds; to feel small, helpless, in need of salvation. So what do they tell us? They tell us that strength and virtue lie in submission. Yes, of course they do. With our faces in the dust we are invincible, isn’t that right? And of course we will live forever, either in eternal bliss or in eternal torment, but that’s entirely up to us.

  Eternal bliss requires that you wear a straitjacket of blind faith, not permanently, just from now until you die. Whereas living a joyful humane compassionate but godless life will get you horribly tortured for all eternity.

  Fear is religion’s currency of choice. It’s the lowest of human emotions, because it’s the most crippling emotion, and that’s why it’s religion’s currency of choice. It’s pretty obvious when you think about it, but hey, don’t strain yourselves.

  But actually it’s religion that has everything to fear, because it depends on maintaining the illusion, maintaining the spell, and hoping that nobody manages to burst its artificial bubble of faith. And this is exactly why it wages such determined war on our basic freedoms of thought and speech. But it’s losing this war, because every day more and more of us are waking up to the damage that this nonsense is doing to our world. We can see our societies being twisted out of shape, being injected with false values that pander to bigotry and superstition, and we’ve realised that this god of the desert has outstayed his welcome and become a liability, and quite frankly he needs us a lot more than we need him, because we’ve moved on from the desert, and we’ve discovered a few things about the world and the universe and our place in it, and we’re no longer afraid of the thunder and lightning. Our world is no longer populated by demons and hobgoblins, and we no longer need to be led around by the nose for the benefit of clergy.

  And they know this, just as they know that their god’s very existence depends entirely on our belief – belief without evidence and belief that defies reason.

  And when that belief disappears, as one day it certainly will, this ridiculous god will disappear with it, instantly and forever.

  He won’t be able to vent his wrath or visit retribution on anyone, because he won’t exist. He’ll evaporate quicker than common sense in a creation museum, and his vast army of controlling parasitical clergy will find themselves briefly cartoon-like in mid air, before dropping like fleas into a bucket.

  That’s what I’m looking forward to, and that’s what I’m focussed on, and it’s why I make these videos, because I think we’re better than this, and I know we’ve got the power to withdraw our belief and our consent and put a stop to this nonsense – all we need is the courage.

  Peace, and freedom. Let’s not forget the freedom.

  50.

  The Water of Life

  December 23, 2008

  Hi everyone. As some of you may know I’ve been away for a while on a drugs binge.* Not only that, it was an atheist drugs binge, which makes it a thousand times worse. At least I hope it does. But now that I’m back in some kind of reasonable shape, I just thought I’d make this video, firstly to wish everybody a merry Christmas whether they like it or not, and also to answer a couple of points that people have made to me recently.

  Somebody said: “You know, you’re not going to win the battle of ideas by insulting people you disagree with.” Which is a fair point. Or it would be if we were engaged in a battle of ideas, but unfortunately religion doesn’t have ideas. It has dogma. And the purpose of dogma is to get in the way of ideas; to stamp them out and kill them off before they succeed in changing anything. Because, as everyone knows, change to religion is pretty much what kryptonite is to Superman. It’s about as welcome as garlic to a vampire, because it threatens the position of those who control religion for their own narrow ignorant selfish ends.

  And secondly, I don’t insult people because I disagree with them: people who believe in, say, things like spiritualism or astrology, even though I don’t believe in those things myself (although I have to say I think the planets do influence our lives, mainly by not crashing into us, which I think is quite considerate of them, really). But if astrologers were demanding special privileges all the time, and insisting that their beliefs be allowed to dictate the behaviour of others, then I’d probably adopt rather a different tone.

  If astrologers enjoyed a tax exempt status which they routinely abused to meddle in politics and force their values into other people’s lives, or if they reacted with fury, threatening to kill people at the slightest criticism of their beliefs, or if astrologers were allowed to indoctrinate young children before their minds were fully formed, and if they then molested many of these children and protected each other from justice, while insisting that women and homosexuals not be allowed to practice astrology because they’re women and homosexuals, well then one or two insults might slip out. That’s how it works.

  And I don’t apologise for that. Why should I, when religion has the barefaced cheek to claim moral authority over us when anyone can see it doesn’t even have any moral awareness? How can it have, when it’s so insulated from self-examination by its blind obedience to scripture?

  It seems like hardly a week goes by these days that we don’t have to listen to some mealy-mouthed clergyman complaining that secularism is going to lead to moral anarchy and the breakdown of society, as if people really are stupid enough to swallow this shallow-minded self-serving bullshit.

  Obviously nobody wants to live in a moral vacuum. Well, nobody outside politics and banking. But far from filling this vacuum, as it always claims, religion has actually caused it by using scripture as a vacuous substitute for genuine morality, by denying people the chance to formulate their own more substantial moral bearings in the only place that you find anything of real value, and that’s within.

  If it hasn’t come from within it isn’t worth a damn, and you know that in your heart. You know it’s been put on like a cheap Sunday suit, and it’s as phoney as a clip-on bowtie.

  If you get your morals uncritically from scripture you’re really no better than a dog who’s afraid to steal the meat because he knows he’ll be whipped. He’d love that meat more than anything, but, like you, his finely tuned moral compass keeps him on the straight and narrow. What a good dog he is.

  Of course a dog doesn’t have a soul (apparently) so he doesn’t have the problem of having to live forever, but you do, and you know you’ll be whipped forever if you even think about touching that meat, you bad d, you miserable sinner.

  Now maybe this doesn’t apply to you, because you are, in fact, a happy worshipper. Maybe you embrace the Lord eve
ry day with a joyful heart, and that’s great, but surely you realise that the moment you change your mind about the Lord and stop embracing him you’re setting yourself up for some terrible eternal torture. Don’t you ever feel as if somebody is shooting at your feet to make you dance? Because that’s how it looks to a neutral observer.

  Now maybe that’s just my ignorance talking, because that’s something else I get accused of quite a lot. Somebody said recently: “Clearly you just don’t understand what a person’s faith actually means to them. For me,” she said, “it’s like the water of life.”

  And I thought: “What a great phrase. The water of life, without which, of course, there can be no life.”

  But even the water of life needs to be contained and properly managed, or it can run out of control, get into places where it doesn’t belong and cause real damage.

  For example, if the water of your life gets together with the water of other people’s lives and they form a deluge, a rushing torrent of righteous certainty that sweeps all before it, including reason, then it’s not so much the water of life any more, is it? It’s rapidly turning the water of death, as everything in its path is crushed – original thought, rational enquiry, free speech – and their tattered remnants are strewn upon the rocks of scripture and blind dogma.

  What’s needed here, obviously, is a dam to contain this water of death, convert it back into the water of life, and give us all a chance to switch on a lightbulb in our minds. And that’s where secularism comes in. It’s everybody’s friend, believer and non-believer alike, which I think makes it the real water of life, at least almost as much as this stuff, beer. Cheers. (Takes a sip from a glass of exceptionally tasty dark ale.)

  Now that’s what I call the water of life.

  A merry Christmas to everyone, especially to all you Islamist crackpots who think that celebrating Christmas is a sin. Of course it is. That’s why it’s fun. Peace.