Another Religious Horror Show

My favorite fiction book of all time has to be Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. One part of it that resonates with me is an argument that an uber patriotic America soldier named Nately gets into an fierce argument with an old Italian man (This happens during WWII).

The Italian man tells Nately that it is stupid to die for your country . This incites Nately, but the old man counters with:

“What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.”

Nately tries to fend the old man off, but the old man gets the better of him in a verbal jousting session that goes like this:

“Anything worth living for,” said Nately, “is worth dying for.”

“And anything worth dying for,” answered the sacrilegious old man, “is certainly worth living for.”

Dying for a country may seem like a bad idea, but at least you can fucking POINT to a country. You can find it on a map. You can visit it. It has currency, languages, culture, heritage, history etc.

Religion has NONE of that, yet people massacre, rape, torture, incinerate, bomb, maim, extort, kidnap, exploit etc others in its name all the time.

WHY can’t people see that it is made up? Many of the greatest evils in world history have been perpetrated in the name of a God nobody has ever seen, touched, physically felt, heard, or met.

Furthermore, many who do these things would actually have you believe their religion is one of PEACE! They will tell you their belief system is PEACEFUL .

You know what is peaceful? PEACE.

Religion is the opposite