What about this FAITH thing, anyway?

"But though, speaking for myself, I thus admit the possibility of revelation. I totally disbelieve that the almighty ever did communicate any thing to man by any mode of speech in any language . . . .

"The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing call revelation or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonorable belief against the character of the divinity, the most destructive to morality and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist.”

- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part II.

Previously we defined Faith as an unfounded belief in something that cannot be proved. Throughout America there are many examples of how the most indignant, self-righteous, closed-minded, christians take their gospel as, well, gospel. Some of them even go so far as to think that they must live their lives precisely as outlined in their handy dandy instruction manual. In order to do this, they must set aside a lifetime of experiences, knowledge and facts. They have to replace all those human experiences and ideas with “Faith”.

Christians who claim to have been “reborn” are even more afflicted with “Faith,” so much so that they seem to be even more compelled to force everyone else to follow their example.

Today’s christian “Faith” is best described in context with several other christian practices. First, there is thing called “prayer”, an exercise that seems to take up a lot of their free time. A lot of the time, praying seem to consist of people begging god to give them stuff.

Praying for relief is also a common tactic when faced with tough choices. Rather than use logic, rational analysis or bothering to research similar events in an effort to find a solution, the proper christian behavior is to get on your knees and place a person-to-person call to god. (Do not call collect!)

If you pray hard enough, their argument goes, god will drop everything else on his agenda, including all of those billions of galaxies, with their billions of stars, and untold numbers of inhabited planets, and he will consider your individual, selfish, and egotistical demands to the exclusion of everything else, including the billions of other earthbound hominids. Why not try it out yourself during the next lottery drawing and see how well this system works? Be sure to get on your knees and REALLY pray hard.

Obedient christian cultists brainwash their offspring to rely on prayer, rather than logic, shortly after birth. As a result, there are some truly painful examples.

Recently, one set of particularly abusive Christian parents house-broke and puppy-trained their defenseless, three year-old daughter to publicly confess to committing mortal sins and to pray for forgiveness. When questioned on TV, these yahoos proudly proclaimed that their daughter was “reborn” after surviving their brainwashing ordeal.

MORTAL SINS? A THREE YEAR OLD GIRL? Who ever allowed those nut-jobs to become parents? And parading her around like a trained pet on live TV?

Given their cult’s proud faces and visible “moral” support from other cult members, it is likely that many other kids are undergoing the same kind of dangerous mental, even physical abuse.

If that story reminds you of canine obedience training classes, you are on the right track. How can any three year old have the capacity for self-awareness, much less understand the nature and extent of her “capital crime” or “mortal sin”? Just what sort of chance does that poor girl have in a modern society? That amount of strict mind control at such an early age is bound to create permanent damage. If more examples of this kind of child abuse start appearing in our press, it may be time for the state child services to get involved.

As a result of this kind of brain-washing almost from birth, christians pray for the most vitally important things, like finding a parking spot close to the store’s entrance, finding your misplaced car keys, high school football victories, finding out who impregnated their 14 yr old daughter, getting their drunken son bailed out of jail, getting a winning lottery ticket, finding extra money their wallets and for sunny golfing weather.

In a slightly more serious vein, it is noteworthy to find that the Macropedia index in the Encyclopaedia Britannica lists the dangerous christian cult Opus Dei under the heading of “brainwashing” right above the Hare Krishna. Opus Dei is but one example, in a long list of christian cults that use brainwashing in order to control members, families and all. With the popularity of The DaVinci Code, Opus Dei members are trying hard to spin public opinion back under control.

The reality of such constant and common prayer activities leads to the obvious question of what happens when two people, from the same cult, pray for opposite results with the identical amount of fervor and belief. In the case of a tie, who wins? What if a Pentecostal husband prays for great fishing weather, while his dutiful, totally obedient wife prays for thunderstorms water her garden?

How is a busy god supposed to decide? Does god flip some celestial coin? Even Einstein scolded god about gambling.

As you might probably guess, much more often than not, this prayer-based nonsense results in complete and utter failure. Does the futility of their actions ever dissuade the faithful from praying? Apparently not. To the contrary, recent studies have shown that prayer seems to be growing in popularity. Cult membership continues to rise, especially in the brainwashed cults.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Try telling that to hordes of praying christians who rely solely on Faith in their god. Dare we suggest that repeated reliance on christian prayer is a clear manifestation of insanity?

You would think after repeated failures, rational beings would start to question the effectiveness of prayer and look for other answers to such puzzling questions, such as, why is weather like it is, what are planets made of and why don’t they stay in one spot in the sky, what is this quantum gravity or chromo-dynamics stuff supposed to mean, what is genetic farming all about, or even all about what hominid conception through sexual activity entails.

You would also be wrong. Instead of actually trying to figure out and solve problems, using their brains, experience and free thought, they created yet another counterpart to both Faith and Prayer, something conveniently called “god’s will.”

Rather than blame their own blatant, willful ignorance, human error, or downright ineffable stupidity for the failure of their prayers to work as requested, christians created this handy device that is to be applied generously should one of their Prayers fail. It works something like this.

Let’s say that some known danger looms ahead. Rather than act rationally, study the danger and apply humanity’s great body of knowledge in an effort to find a solution, the christian approach calls for them to get on their knees and pray. If their prayer fails, (as often it does, almost every single time) it is excused away by applying a concept called “god’s will.”

Should you decide to try “thinking” this concept through, you will find that the christians actually created a pretty nifty system. Not only does it absolve the believer from even a hint of personal responsibility, it actually interferes with their future learning, education and maturity.

It offers the christian cult leaders with a huge amount of control over their flock, without ever having to say, “I’m sorry.” Instead, all they have to say, “It was god’s will.”

Some of you might begin to wonder, though, just how long can the christians keep beating their heads against this brick wall before they realize that their entire system is fatally flawed? In response, just think about Jericho.

As you can imagine, christian Faith leads its people into some pretty strange and hypocritical situations. Even though these situations cause the more rational thinkers to question the so-called “inerrancy” of their instruction manual, more often than not, it leads the true believers back to “god’s will” and, of course, even more Faith. It sounds almost like a scientific equation: When faced with all contrary evidence, first have Faith, then pray, and then blame god’s will.

The concept of god’s will is nothing more than an excuse to explain away their failure.

The bible is filled with many examples of behavior that otherwise normal and ethical hominids like us would find both illegal and morally objectionable, yet it seems to be blessed by their god, simply because they had enough Faith.

The bible contains a long, entertaining fable about a fascinating character named Lot. Lot is a great example of how having christian Faith can be both advantageous and fun.

When Lot was given the choice between giving up the idea of imaginary angels dancing around in his head, or, letting a gang of sex-starved men rape his virgin daughters, guess which choice he opts for. (Just a hint, his daughters “came” second.) For this impressive display of wholesome family values, Lot is called "just" and "righteous." Pet. 2:7-8, 19:8.

Another neat trick is how Lot’s wife turns into a large animal salt-lick simply because she was caught facing in the wrong direction. That episode warns ye of little Faith just how badly their god reacts when faced with a lack of faith and an excess of curiosity.

We aren’t quite done with Lot. Without access to his wife’s sexual services, he became a lonely, troubled, horny male hominid. Luckily for Lot, his daughters acquired a rather active imagination, probably as a result of their previous rape-filled experiences. They joined Lot in a cave, where they got him drunk, and then, they took turns raping him. Because of Lot’s family values, all of his daughters got pregnant with their own daddy’s sperm.

According to their god’s word, this isn’t incest. Solely because of the strength of Lot’s Faith, it’s considered a blessing. Genesis 19:30-38. As you see, having enough Faith manages to cover a whole range of crimes and sins. Talk about christian family values.

A serious believer in these cults and their inerrant bible is forced to swallow some other big ones whole, even larger than that unlucky cetacean who ends up with Jonah-flavored indigestion.

Unfortunately, even if you total up all these contradictions and other really weird stuff, you will often find that arguing with a bible beater becomes an insurmountable task. If you try to point out the hundreds of conflicts and inconsistencies in the book, their eyes glaze over and they claim that it is - wait for it – a matter of Faith.

Today you frequently run into some bible beaters who claim that having gay sex is a crime against god. Don’t waste your time pointing out Ruth’s “claving” Naomi’s private parts; Ruth 1:16-17 and 2:10-11; the Jewish King David kissing and fondling his lover Jonathan; Samuel 18:2; or Daniel getting physical with Ashpenaz, Daniel 1:9.

Their Faith will blind them to any rational discussion of those examples. Their Faith tells them that they are right, and your interpretation is unacceptable, if not blasphemy. Some more creative christians argue that it simply is matter of interpretation, and that the inerrant bible would never condone same-sex relationships.

As for divorce, Deuteronomy contains a great idea for how to get rid of a boring, inconvenient, or troublesome wife. Even though the god-approved rapes far outnumber divorces in their instruction manual, it is clear that males always had the right to trade in their tired, aging sex partner and former child incubator, for a much younger, new and improved model. Just send the laundry out and claim that she wasn’t a virgin when you got married.

What about a husband having multiple partners, not counting those lucky concubines? Well, that depends. If you can stand listening to the strictest christian conservative charlatans for any length of time, say a Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, at some point they will start pontificating about what they believe constitutes proper family values and relationships.

They claim that their bible supports only one proposition: “Marriage is between one man and a woman.” Based solely on their interpretation, they want to change the entire US constitution and define marriage solely in biblical terms as they perceive them.

One man and a woman? This definition of marriage is expressed in some biblical terms, is it? Christians repeat this claim so often that you would almost think that they had some liturgical support for this.

The next time someone tells you that the bible is “inerrant” when discussing marital relationships, ask them about Abraham. He starts out with one wife, Sarah, and his sex toy, Hagar. Without ever splitting up with or divorcing Sarah, he marries Keturah. At the same time, it turns out that Horny Abe was playing the field with a whole bunch of other concubines, all of who seem to have gotten god’s blessing to screw Abe without sin. While he may have never played in the NBA, he sure had a lot of extra-marital experience. Genesis 25:1, 25:6.

Sex outside of marriage apparently gave only men the grounds for divorce, not their wives. Contrary to the bible beaters’ preaching, there is plenty of evidence in support of getting a divorce. Matthew 5:31,32; 19:1-9; Mar 10:2-12; Luke 16:18.

Still, some of today’s Christians want to outlaw divorces as another crime against god. It is hard to rationally reconcile their position that divorce is sinful, when their own god apparently blessed them again and again.

It should come to no surprise that the more conservative and religious a region of America is, the higher the divorce rate. Talk about saying one thing and doing another.

As suggested earlier, most of the biblical male heroes (there aren’t many females who are described as heroes, much less even mentioned in a positive light) mentioned in the bible seem to own a lot of concubines, all of them outside of their marriage. Marriages seemed to be more concerned with politics and power, not procreation or, god forbid, recreation.

Absolom, or Avshalom, King David’s third son, made his way through almost all of his dad’s impressive harem during his rebellion. With the help of the people of Israel and Judah, Absolom came very close to overthrowing David from his throne. Daddy needed the help of outsiders to survive the rebellion.

Another of David’s sons, Solomon, eventually created an even larger harem for himself, consisting of over 1,000 compliant, sex-starved slave-babes all dedicated to providing him with physical pleasure. That is more than three a day per year. He probably just wanted to outdo dad’s own record numbers.

As biblical parents go, David seems to have been one of the unluckiest in history. When your sons rebel and try to kill you, there has to be a reason.

There are many examples to choose from, but Judah takes the cake. Judah, guilty of two counts of rape, pimping and incest, not to mention a murderous breach of contract, is considered a righteous biblical hero simply because he had the right amount of Faith. You can be sure that he never let any of his sperm hit the dirt.

This shows just how important Faith is to christians. Faith allows you to set aside all these pesky legal troubles and logical questions, and it allows you to ignore contrary evidence contained in the gospel itself. Faith is more important than anything, especially your own rational thoughts.

Even if you are willing to ignore all the sciences and replace them with this Faith-based approach to life, just which words are you supposed to follow? Which ideas are correct and which are to be Faithed away? There are so many choices, many of them contradictory. Here are a few examples to avoid.

Faith Healing

Faith healing is a great example of a religion gone wrong. According to their instruction manual, JC healed some forty sick people, with the help of his apostles. Their book is a little unclear on what diseases he actually cured. Apparently, carpenter training was quite different 2000 orbits ago.

As you can guess, the strictest christians jumped on this bandwagon. From the earliest days, christians approved of healing the sick and injured by anointing them with holy water and placing a preacher’s hands on the ailing.

Even though the vast majority of the christian Faith Healers fail miserably and routinely, with usually fatal results, they can always go back to that tried and true equation, Faith + Prayer = god’s will.

If the patient died, it was never because Faith healing is one of the most unfortunate, deadly scams ever to be inflicted on the sick and ailing in all of history. It is because the family did not pray hard enough. During the past 2000 orbits, the idea of Faith Healing continues to raise its ugly head. Its reappearance is never a good omen.

The human body is quite a robust mechanism. It is actually not very easy to kill a body off. Absent serious, infected wounds, or a healthy christian-based stoning, hanging, beheading or crushing, the body can tolerate quite a bit of abuse.

Disease is another matter. Bacteria, viruses, fungal infections and protein-based prions are the source of illness and often, death. Still, the body has methods of dealing with those kind go attacks. It has attacking white cells, cleansing T cells, cells that can grow into new skin, and many other methods of healing itself. Even the body’s temperature seems to rise when attacked by certain bacteria and viruses, making the bugs easier to kill off.

Unfortunately, there are rare cases where a normally fatal disease fails to kill off its victim. I use the word unfortunately because of the harm that follows. If the sick person falls into the hands of a christian Faith Healer and somehow survives a usually fatal illness, the Faith Healer takes all the credit.

Physical traits, severity of the infection, or even misdiagnoses count for nothing. If a sick person survives despite the presence of Faith healers, they are free to apply Faith Healing in the future, to the death and suffering of other cult members.

Over the past 200 years, many American christian preachers made huge fortunes by pretending to heal people solely with Faith and prayer. Leslie Weatherhead, Oral Roberts, and Edgar Cayce are just a few of the famous examples of evil charlatanism.

The modern (Red) State of Florida is overrun with christian cultists who make their living on phony “miracles”, Faith Healing and other creative scams. Bleeding paintings, oil slicks that look like JC, and healed paraplegics and epileptics are routine in Central Florida. It is amazing how many cases of relapsed paraplegia, blindness and lameness occur just before a new audience arrives.

The recent creative scam involves the eBay auctioning of a decade old grilled-cheese sandwich. It supposedly portrayed the V. Mary’s image, if you squinted, took off your glasses and had a really bright light shining in your face when you looked. Where else can you use the power of suggestion, a decent refrigerator-freezer, combined with incredible christian gullibility to earn $28,000 for a stale grilled cheese sandwich? Is this a great country, or what?

Unfortunately for all you future christian entrepreneurs, the successful scammer never disclosed whether her famous Virgin sandwich used Kraft ™ single wrapped cheese or Velveeta.™

Even if you could learn which cheese was used, since Wonder Bread went bankrupt, the chances of recreating this “miracle” are pretty slim. Of course, you may want to try it with a casserole or a pizza. Be creative. The most gullible will still believe. Donuts, rusted pans, glass windows, oil change garage floors, even Chicago underpasses have suffered from the same notoriety.

As for those innocent children who had the bad luck to be born within a christian cult, chances are that if they are sick or seriously injured, they will look up and see themselves surrounded by brain-washed Faithful, mumbling their nonsense. Surgery, modern medicines, CT or MRI scans and the rest of the best that humanity’s science and medicine has to offer, will never be available to them. When you think of those kids, picture a gravestone with the following words: “Killed by Faith Healers.”

The body count is rising among kids who had the misfortune to be hatched into a conservative christian family. Just in the last few months, a treatable (and prayed over) case of spinal meningitis resulted in the innocent’s death. In another case, a child with leukemia (of a type easily treated) died because mums and daddums thought it was god swill . . . . or was that god’s will? to pray over the the ailing yute. There are other examples. Even worse, in some communities, ones who shun modern life and modern medicine, we may never learn how many innocents die because their sick parents refuse to seek proper care.

While some folks object to vaccines because of that gawd-awful ass from England who concocted the whole autism-vaccine issue (for personal gain, no less), a significant percentage of parents who refuse vaccines do so because of religious reasons. Not only do they cause their own kids to suffer, even die unnecessarily, they risk the health of the general population.

The concept of “herd immunity” has been around for decades. Simply put, it is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when a sufficiently large percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, typically by the use of vaccines. The greater the proportion of individuals have been vaccinated, the smaller the probability that a particular disease will spread, even if a particular individual was not vaccinated. (the chances of contact with an ill person and the resulting transmission falls as the proportion of those vaccinated increases.)

Religious freedom is all well and good, but these jerks increase the risk to you and me, simply because they hate science, medicine, and rational thinking. Prayer, you see, cures all.

Stem cell research

Stem cells are primal, undifferentiated cells that have the potential to produce any kind of human cell, and possibly replace any organ in the human body, from skin to the pancreas and liver, without the need for harmful anti-rejection chemicals. Most modern researchers believe that stem cells have the potential to eradicate most human diseases. The potential for Alzheimer's, paralysis and previously fatal conditions is amazing. Because the body’s own cells would serve as the platform for the new organ or cells, there would be no chance of organ rejection.

Today’s transplants are hamstrung by two major problems, availability of donor organs and matching blood and cell types. Despite aiming for the closest possible matches, all organ donor recipients must take extremely powerful drugs which suppress the body’s efforts to reject and expel the foreign organ.

In the U.S., many Fundies and the loudest christian groups have rejected the entire science of embryonic stem cell research. They view it as a form of abortion. Luckily, other religious thinkers aren’t so hypocritical. Many Jewish, Humanists, Unitarian Universalists, and Muslim clerics strongly favor stem cell research. Of course, agnostics and atheists have never been blinded by any religion’s dogma and anti-science propaganda. Unfortunately, that has not been enough.

Former President George W. Bush publicly claimed to have met with numerous "scientists, scholars, bio-ethicists, religious leaders, doctors, researchers, members of Congress, his Cabinet, and his friends." These meetings led him to prohibit the use of federal funding to work with embryonic cell lines created after that date.

In response, several highly educated members of the Council on Bio-Ethics complained about decision. He has since replaced those ethical, rational scientists with three christian bigots who will do everything in their power to stop this science from moving forward.

Luckily, President Obama reversed some of the most outrageous decisions. However, between TeaBuggers, an ill-informed, and a nay-saying senate, some severe limitations continue to exist. That also explains why other nations are head and shoulders above the US when it comes to stem cell research and the development of cancer curing drugs, alzheimer’s treatments, and other stem cell based discoveries.

Here’s a point to ponder: If the bible infallibly contains all of god’s wisdom and instructions, and if god knows everything, why is the bible silent on topics like stem cell research and cloning? Could it be that god forgot about these discoveries? Or can’t this all powerful, all-knowing god see that far into the future?

Blood transfusions

These days, blood, plasma and serum transfusion are commonplace and mostly safe. Tests for viruses, retro-viruses, bacteria, and contaminants have become routine, despite early protests from the American Red Cross (ARC). More than a decade ago, those greedy christians on the board of ARC held a series of private meetings in which they said that AIDS:

a) did not exist,
b) if it did exist, it was a gays’ only disease,
c) it could not transmitted through blood, and
d) even if it could be transmitted, it would cost too much to test all blood products.

No one has bothered to estimate how many innocent transfusion recipients died because of greedy ARC policies. The US population of hemophiliacs has dropped over the years, however. God’s will, no doubt.

Several millennia ago, the idea of Rh factors and A, B, AB and O blood types were still unknown. Some medicine men knew that a person who had bled too much would die. Their conditions could be cured by replacing their missing fluids with other people’s blood. Often, the patient improved. Less often, this sometimes led to the painful death of the recipient.

Rather than figure out why many transfusions saved lives, while others did not, most christian cults barred the practice entirely. It was far easier to claim that their Faith prevented the transfusions from taking place. After all, if you can’t understand it, it must be one of those mysteries that can only be explained by Faith or god’s will. Besides, research is expensive.

You can see where the American Red Cross learned its Christian behavior when they initially refused to approve testing of blood for the AIDS virus. Luckily, new technologies are causing the ARC to reconsider its ban on blood donations from HIV sufferers.

Today, several Evangelical and Baptist cults, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses and others still bar transfusions, even though the science has more than answered the critical medical issues. Faith, yet again, conquers health and welfare issues. Their reading of the bible leads not to salvation, but to early deaths.

These are but a few problems CREATED by religious folks, when the simple and straightforward application of science and medicine would prevent those problems from ever occurring. Given the risks posed by the Zika virus, one wonders how the religious reich will respond. So far, things have been quiet on their end. But, one must only look to our inane, insane, and frankly ridiculous response to the recent Ebola outbreak.

Past behavior, especially by Republicans who are conservative christians, is a good predictor of future events. Bless their tiny hearts.