Religion

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. - Denis Diderot

This section will be the most enjoyable for me. And to those who believe that my aversion to religion (living mythology) has lost some of its vehemence, let me assure... you that is not the case.

Basic premise regarding the history of religion and its practice... a blight on the house of humanity and greatest source of it's savagery and ignorance. Our first and most primitive attempt at philosophy and science. Our collective proto-theory of the what's, why's and how's of human existence. Now supplanted in virtually all aspects by our current understanding of the World save a few of the elements of folk wisdom. Derived principally from the fear of death, the pattern-seeking elements inherent in the brain and a juvenile inclination to wish-fulfillment.

A couple quick things to consider at the outset.

For those who entertain the notion that "Everything happens for a reason". I look forward to hearing from you on plausible "reasons" for the following:

The Cultural Revolution in China as overseen and coordinated by Mao Tse-tung and the subsequent death of approximately 70,000,000 (FrontPage)

The deliberately engineered death by mass starvation of roughly 11,000,000 individuals in Stalinist Russia in 1933 (Radio Free Europe) (The History Place)

The wholesale slaughter of approximately 6,000,000 men, women and children principally between 1941 and 1945 by the Third Reich

The systematic destruction of nearly 1,500,000 lives in the Armenian Genocide in 1915 by the Ottoman Turks (The Forgotten)

The murder of an estimated 1,500,000 Cambodians in the period 1975-1979 under the communist Khmer Rouge regime and its leader, Pol Pot (Ed Web)

The wholesale slaughter of approximately 800,000 individuals, mostly by machete attacks, in Rwanda in 1994 (United Human Rights)

To say nothing of the untold and unrecorded billions of lives cut short by disease, famine, brutality since we emerged from the savanna nearly 100,000 years ago.

And so I ask, Where is your god now?

On Islam:

Europeans - Wake up to the culture war you've been fighting for a long time now. From Londonistan to the banlieues of Paris, Islam as a political movement is undermining everything the West has fought and struggled for for centuries. Volumes have been written recently and the warning signs are not being heeded. British humorist Pat Condell had a brilliant recent post on this matter as well. Fortunately, it seems that some of Europe is finally awakening from this creeping death.

Famous Atheists:

Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), Thomas Edison (1847-1931), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), Ernest Hemingway, Linus Pauling, Karl Popper, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Burt Lancaster, Jean Paul Sartre, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Frank Zappa, Isaac Asimov, George Carlin

Famous Deists:

Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, James Madison, John Adams, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allen Poe, William Howard Taft,

Here's an interesting

Mike La Caze