This Is Getting Ri-Goddamned-Diculous...

"We can't see the connections here... I'm not saying God is causing earthquakes - well I'm not not saying that either!  What God does is God's business. But I'll tell you this...there's a message being sent, and that is, 'Hey you know that stuff we're doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.' I'm just saying..." - Glenn Beck

"O'REILLY: I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.
SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?
O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that."

“You have an order in the universe—tide comes in, tide goes out. Okay, the moon does it, but how’d the moon get there? Who put it there? Did it just happen?”
 “It takes more faith to not believe, and to think this was all luck—this human body, the intricacies of it—all luck, than it does to believe in a deity.” 

"They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.' True story. And so the devil said, 'Ok it's a deal.' And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something, themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another," - Pat Robertson

Ted Haggard, taking time out from smoking meth and sucking dicks to bash homosexuals.

"I can go into a playground of kids that don't know anything about Christianity, lead them to the Lord in a matter of, just no time at all, and just moments later they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God, because they're so open. They are so usable in Christianity"

"It's no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam. I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have... excuse me, but we have the truth" 

Pat Robertson says Katrina was "God's Wrath" for America's tolerance of gays and abortions.

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson discussing how the ACLU, "abortionists", pegans, feminists, gays and lesbians are responsible for 9/11.

Listen, I want to believe in God.  Honestly, I do.  I would love to believe that there is a guaranteed life after death in an eternal paradise.  I would love to believe that there is a higher power that watches over me and all of us and will reward us in the afterlife for our good deeds on Earth.  I want to believe all that stuff, but I can't because that puts me on the same team with people like this.  I know I have a lot of friends who believe in God who will tell me that they think people like Beck, O'Reilly, Robertson, the crazy Jesus Camp lady and all the rest are wackos, nutjobs and idiots who don't speak for them, but the problem is, according to the "faithful", all my friends are wrong for turning their backs on their fellow Christians.

Matthew 10:33 - "But whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven." 

 There's not a lot of grey area in the evangelical Christian faith for people who are "Cafeteria Christians" - those who pick and choose which parts of the bible and God's word they decide to follow or not, like items in a cafeteria line.  Unfortunately, (or fortunately?) the majority of people who identify themselves as Christian in America are exactly that, Cafeteria Christians.  They are strict about some things the bible teaches and lax on others.  Like the man who believes in honesty and the "Golden Rule", but likes to look at porn and have a few beers on the weekend; or the married man who is in church every Sunday and cheating on his wife every Friday night.  The country is full of Christian hypocrites, people who would say there's no way they support the outrageous comments made by "leaders" in the Christian community or the various far-right mouthpieces on TV and the radio, but according to the bible, all those people are going to hell because they're not real Christians...

So, I just can't do it.  I can't throw my lot in with people who think God controls the tides, that he makes earthquakes to punish people who are a different religion than they are, that fanaticism is a virtue, that terrorist attacks are God's vengance for tolerating homosexuality and allowing abortions.  I can't draw the imaginary, hypocritical line between their level of batshit crazy and the low-level doses that apparently run through the veins of all the part-time Christians.  There is one bible, and it's the same bible these crazy fucks are reading and it's the same bible you're reading.  You're using the same handbook, you're praying to the same God, you're living by the same commandments.  In the minds of the faithful, you're either all in or you're all out, there's no leeway in the bible, so if you're not on board with this shit, then you're going to hell, and that's pretty much all there is to it.

Now, I understand that the most vocal "Christian Leaders" are also typically the most wacked out, extremist and hateful ones as well.  I completely get that the reason most Christians don't completely agree with people like Robertson is because they don't read the same intolerance and black & white certainty in the bible that these guys do.  However, clearly the majority of active Christians in this country do, or else why would they continue to let these people speak for them?  If the majority of Christians are loving, tolerant and rational-minded, then why do they turn out in droves to vote down gay rights?  Why is proudly wearing your evangelical agenda a positive thing for a political candidate, including our last president?  The idea of the country being run by someone with a strong religious ideology should be frightening to anyone, Christian or otherwise, and yet it's the first thing a conservative candidate boasts about (second being the number of guns they own).  51% of the country identify themselves as Christian/Protestant, while 25% identify themselves as Christian/Catholic.  That leaves approximately 10% that belong to "other" religions and 15% who claim no religious beliefs or affiliations.  25% of the population either doesn't agree with the agenda of an evangelical Christian politician, or they are strongly opposed to it.  No matter how you slice it, Christians are the majority religion in this country, so when intolerant, bigotted, archaic and strongly ideological legislation is passed, it's because the majority of the Christian population are out there voting in support of it.  When the recent legalization of gay marriage in California was overturned by the passing of a special proposition - Prop. 8, 52% of voters voted against gay marriage by supporting the proposition.  Now, assuming that the entirety of the 15% of the population who is identified as non-religious ALL voted against Prop. 8, that means about 32% of the remaining 83% of the population who identify themselves as Christian or another religion voted against Prop. 8 as well.  2/3 of the Christian and religious community turned out to vote against gay marriage.  This tells me that if 7 out of 10 people tell me they don't believe all the crazy shit guys like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly or Pat Robertson say, that 3 or 4 of them are probably lying.

Sorry, I just can't get behind that.  I can't get behind an ideology that has been usurped by bigots, homophobes, hypocrites and morons.  I can't support a belief that has mutated into a political platform.  I can't support a "religion" that has been hijacked by the most corrupted group of politicians and wealthy elite in our nation's history.  The Republican "Conservative Right" has hijacked the Christian religion to the point that being a Christian basically mandates voting Republican.  I mean sure, you can call yourself a Christian and vote Democratic, but then you're supporting abortionists, pagans, homosexuals, feminists, the ACLU, pornographers and people who aren't Christians, and that pretty much condemns you to eternal damnation.  The separation of church and state was created for a reason.  That reason being, whenever a people allow their religious belief to become their political ideology, the result is inevitably a country of extremist religious oppression and severe, often violent intolerance.  The idea that there is a substantial group of people in this country who envy the indoctrination of extremist Islamic militance in young children in the Arab world and wish they could see the same thing being done to Christian children in America is insanely frightening.  The fact that two thirds of the Christian community supports homophobic legislation and legislators, that they support laws being passed to mandate Christian theology being taught in public schools, that they support laws to illegalize activities considered to be non-Christian... these are not the values that our country was founded upon.  Despite what the historical re-writers in the Tea Party and on the far right may claim, America was not founded as a Christian nation.  On the contrary, it was founded as a nation completely free and independent of a national religious identity - as a direct opposition to England and it's national church and religion.  The founding fathers had the good sense to see what a disaster a country run by religious ideologs was and they founded America as the one, truly free nation on Earth.  Religion influencing politics is the exact opposite of what our country was founded on, the separation of church and state was specifically written into our founding documents to prevent the type of theocratic ideology we're seeing more and more in our country every day.  I'm going to yield the last word to Bill Maher who put it so eloquently in his documentary Religulous...

Vaya Con Dios.