Forgive me alliteration, but your persistent
power-mad punch-ups are
pissing me off. It's mainly the extremists obviously, but not exclusively. It's a lot 
of mainstream as well let me give an
example.  Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Okey?
Muslims: listen up my bearded and veily friends! 
Calm down, okay? Stop blowing stuff up
Not everything that said about you is an attack on the prophet Mohammed and
Allah
 that needs to end in the infidel being destroyed. Have a cup of tea,
put on a Cat Stevens record, sit down and chill out.
 I mean seriously, what's wrong with a strongly-worded letter to The Times?
Christians: you and your churches don't get to be millionaires while other
people have nothing at all. They're your bloody rules; either stick to them or
abandon the faith.
And stop persecuting and killing people you judge to be immoral. 
Oh, and stop pretending you're celibate -- it's a cover-up for being a gay or a nonce. 
Right, that's two ticked off.
Jews! 
I know you're god's 'Chosen People' and the rest of us are just whatever, 
but when Israel behaves like a violent, psychopathic bully and someone mentions it
that doesn't make them
anti-semitic. And for the record, your troubled history is not a license to act with
impunity now.
So, when the letters come, I'm guessing they will,
 
I can guarantee that each one of those
faiths will be actually convinced that
i've singled them out
for special criticism. "Why did it have to
be us? Islam is a peaceful faith!"
"I don't see what's wrong with being
christian. We're peaceful loving faith"
" How dare you after all we've been through we, jews know how terrible violence can be!"
You see, all of them will be convinced that
they're the ones being picked on.
The Abrahamic fights are like scales-ists???
They're always convinced they' were tortured???
 than everyone else.
 
And why is it that all these fights
claim to be peaceful
when even the most fleeting glance of
the history of warfare will tell you
otherwise.
The relationship between religion
and warfare is very similar to the
relationship between Ant and Dec: you
could have one without the other but I'm
not sure anyone would see the point?
 
I wouldn't actually like it, but it would at least be refreshing to hear one of them
come out and say:
Выдрала из фанфика по драгонэйджу. Нечленораздельно=("Our faith violent as you like. We love a scrap, us lot, we do. Obviously our special
book says fight fight kill maim fight
smash destroy fight murder kill
and fight That's why I signed up to be honest. I'm a bit naughty, know what I mean?
 
But, yet all of them claim to be peaceful
religion. Yeah. Peaceful right up to the
point where someone take something they
think is theirs or
says the wrong thing or looks at them
funny then it's fighty smashy kicky punchy
all the way.
I know this'll upset a lot of people and
frankly I don't care
I'm getting sooo sick of religious
people screwing it up for the rest of us.
Please don't kill us! Seriously, as far as I'm
concerned this is the only chance we get.
When we die
it's all over: there's no virgins and
pearly gates waiting for us.
No big beardy man saying "Right, so how do you think that went, then?
Amm
Beat mix??? Well, uuu, killed a lot of people in
my name I see, yes, yes. Not really what I
had in mind, actually.
Amm, tell you what... Have another go as a worm.
While we're at it, I'm sick of religious people forcing their children 
forcing their children to define
themselves by their parents faith. A four
year old is no more a Christian, when he is 
member of the Postal Workers Union
"We want
a fare working wage. Decent
working conditions and time
allotted to see the new transformers film."
- said a spokesman.
another piece of consciousness-raising
you've all seen maps of the world
showing what people believe
in different places in the blue area
that Catholic in the red area the Protestant
in the orange area the Eastern orthodox
in the
green area the Sunni Muslim and so on
We all take that
perfectly for granted it seems entirely natural
that people's opinions about the cosmos
about morality
about humanity should depend upon the
accident of geography
where they happen to have been born.
Suppose scientists worked like that.
Take a difficult,
an interesting scientific issue, take for
example
the question of what made the dinosaurs
go extinct. Was it
an asteroid hitting the earth? Was it a
comet? was at the rise in the mammals?
Was it the plague viruses? All these
different theories have something going for them.
In the blue area
the scientists all believe that it was a
meteorite, in the red area they believe
it was a comet,
in the orange area a virus plague, in the
green area
the eggs of a dinosaurs were all eaten etc. I hope yet again
to have raise consciousness. We all
take for granted
that its okay for religion
to be distributed geographically in that
kind of way.
And yet we immediately see when 
I show you a map like this
how totally ridiculous that is.
Why do we all accepted as though it were
natural
and sensible and the way things should
be?
Here's another exercise in consciousness-raising again
using the example
of the scientific controversy over what
made the dinosaurs go extinct.
The Quarterly Review of Biology.
it's a journal in which biologists publish
their findings their research
I have edited an imaginary
spoof issue of The Quarterly Review of
Biology devoted,
as they sometimes are, to a particular
topic namely the topic
Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?
The first paper would be a perfectly
respectable normal scientific paper
Iridium layer at K/T boundary and potassium
argon dated crater in Yucatan
indicate this an asteroid killed the
dinosaurs
Nobody would be surprised to see a paper
like that in any
scientific journal.
the president of the
Royal Society has been vouchsafed a strong
inner conviction that an asteroid
killed the dinosaurs.
It has been
privately revealed to professor Huxdane that an asteroid
killed the dinosaurs
Professor Haldley has been brought up
to have total
and unquestioning faith that an asteroid
killed the dinosaurs.
Professor Hawkins has promulgated an official dogma,
binding on all Royal Hawkinsians
that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.
Professor Huxkins is personally
offended by all strident, shrill
and polemical denials that an asteroid
killed the dinosaurs.
Professor Hallux derives deep personal comfort
from his belief that an asteroid killed
the dinosaurs.
The president of the National Academy of
Sciences has issued a fatwa
I'm not going to switch gears and look
at a couple of criticisms that the
hardback God Delusion encountered
and I've mentioned these in the preface
to the paperback which is now
just out. Interesting is some of the
strongest criticisms
came from atheists who 
don't believe
themselves. "Believe in belief" has
the philosopher Den Dennett puts it. I'm
an atheist, but I wish to disassociate
myself from your shrill,
strident, intemperate, intolerant
ranting language. Well actually if you
look at the language of The God Delusion
is rather less shrill or intempered that
may regularly take in our stride
when listening to political commentators,
for example theater critic, so, book
critics, or
restaurant critics. Here are some
quotes from restaurant criticisms in
London
restaurants in the leading papers
recently. It is difficult if not
impossible
to imagine anyone conjuring up a
restaurant even in their sleep where
the food in it's mediocrity
come so close to inedible.
All things considered, quite the worst
restaurant in London, maybe the world
serves horrendous food, grudgingly in a
room that is a museum to Italian
waiters'
taste circum 1976. The worst meal I've
ever eaten
not by a small margin I mean the worst.
The most unrelievedly awful
what looked like a sea mine in miniature
was the most disgusting thing I put in
my mouth
since I ate earthworms at school.
Well, insulting a restaurant might seem
trivial
compared to insulting God but
restaurateurs and chefs really exist
and they have feelings to be hurt.
Whereas,  "blasphemy",
as that witty bumper-sticker puts it, "is
a victimless crime"
