Whenever I’m discussing religion, it is not my intention to ridicule the beliefs of people who consider God to be a supreme being of unchallenged power; who see the Bible as the true representation of this being on this earth — an earth which was created by the same supreme being mentioned before, according to Abrahamic theists; who just know by faith that Noah didn’t lie about a world-dominating flood; who find the story of this supreme being torturing the poor and helpless gullible Job normal and even inspirational; who also know by the same vague faith that Jesus of Nazareth was really the Son of God; and who revere this supreme being to such heights that even the slightest mentioning of unbelief is punishable by death.

Where was I? Oh, right — it’s not my intention to do so. Normally it just flows from the examples themselves, even the good ones are too giggle-inducing to be taken seriously by rational people. I have already mentioned the following in an earlier article¹: “We love Him because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:9-10) I then cynically noted that I thought it was sweet and inspirational, but when you truly read what is said there and when you truly analyse it, it just doesn’t make any sense.

How do we know “He” first loved us? Why should we always love somebody who loved us first? By using “because” this quote is trying to settle an argument (otherwise it would have said, “He loved us and we love him.”), so why should something like this even be stated when it’s that obvious that we should love God because he already loved us? I could go on, but I think I made my (somewhat grainy) point. Inspirational sayings work because they don’t bring up additional questions. This is not inspirational at all.

Even when you put down the Bible, there is enough that brings laughter as a side effect to the table. Christians burning books, because they can truly burn every single copy of the book (that was sarcasm, people); Protestants and Roman Catholics killing each other in the Reformation, because the line between “children of God” and “demons of Satan” is determined by tradition, the position of the Pope and whether you should read the Bible in Latin or a translated version in church on Sunday (yeah, right); Muslims hating Jews and vice versa, even though history has clearly shown us that Judaism is both the godfather of Christianity and Islam; and American Christians who proclaim that the United States was founded on Christian principles (it was not), that it’s “one nation under God” (it’s not), that the Founding Fathers would have turned over in their graves if they had known about such nonbelief (even though some of them were atheists, and the rest most likely not every-day Christians).

No, whenever discussing religion it is not my primary goal to ridicule or make fun of someone’s religion, but in the end, does it matter? Any ridicule that follows from discussions has at least some truth in it, and as long as Christians pick-and-choose what to believe about their religion and what-not, based upon random, totally naive and irrational arguments, I don’t have to worry about side effects. Especially when religion itself has some very strange and eerie side effects itself.

Because I don’t think my point needs anymore evidence, I’ll just finish with one of the most shocking things I have read so far this year. I read it in Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (which I would greatly recommend, not just because of the religious questioning, but also because the numerous bits about natural selection and the theory of evolution are wonderful and eye-opening), in which he discussed the Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne (a colleague of Dawkins), a man who does nothing else than give Christians an even worser name.

“[..] I was on a television panel with Swinburne, and also with our Oxford colleague Professor Peter Atkins. Swinburne at one point attempted to justify the Holocaust on the grounds that it gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous and noble. Peter Atkins splendidly growled, ‘May you rot in hell.’ ”²

This is not someone who is considered to be a lunatic, but a renowned theologian and a “noble Christian.” I don’t have to put any effort in ridiculing religion when religion itself (together with its believers) does all the work for me.