What's with all the religious material?

Observant Not PC readers will have already noticed a new section down there on my blogroll, which I've called The Religious Material, with links to mostly atheist websites and blogs.

Why have I bothered, and why do I bother to take the piss out of religionists at least once every week, and always on Sundays? Well, it's true that the idea of an imaginary friend who created the entire universe (yet is always around to help you out of your little jams) is just a little embarrassing in the Twenty-First Century, particularly when that idea is promulgated with all the accoutrements of modern science and technology. But it's more than just embarrassing when you realise that this fatuous nonsense is used increasingly and all too frequently to justify murder, war and worse.

And I don't care here what brand of superstitious,mystic nonsense you subscribe to, they're all equally fatuous, and just as destructive:

• The idea that there is another realm which is more important than this one undercuts this world, and this life -- the only one we have.
  
• The idea that a consciousness -- a supernatural consciousness -- is what underpins reality suggests that reality somehow needs an explanation for existing. It doesn't. Reality itself is what underpins all explanation.
  
• The idea that' faith' is somehow a shortcut to knowledge is, as Ayn Rand observed, "a shortcut destroying the mind" -- it serves only to undercut the certainty derived by reason looking at this world.
  
• The idea that our rules for living are "given" to us by some authority -- and given as intrinsic, arbitrarily proscribed duties or obligations -- is death to any morality that is based on reason, and derived from and designed for life on this earth.
• The idea that martyrdom in this world brings paradise in another can only be justified by theistic nonsense, and brings with it the worldwide destruction any person awake in the last few years will already have seen.
  

The claims of religion and of mysticism are as destructive as the are false. Arbitrary claims, all asserted entirely in the absence of any evidence, and all as fatuous as they are destructive. As Blaise Pascal summarised, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction."

It's not enough any more just to laugh at religionists, since in everything from opposition to voluntary euthanasia and life-saving stem-cell research to terrorism and calls for worldwide dhimmitude, the forces of theocratic unreason are on the loose, and demanding of a response.

The clamour around the undeveloped world, and even increasingly in the US, for tearing down what Thomas Jefferson called "a wall of separation" between church and state is a sign and a foretaste of the thousand years of Dark Ages that Europe experienced before that separation was effected -- a time when Attilas and their witchdoctors ruled the world, and which the Islamic World for one wishes to reinstate.

It's not enough any more just to laugh at religionists.

As Ayn Rand observed,

Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy.

So they should. In the name of life on this earth, it's high time those ideas were taken back from both the charlatans of philosophy and and the witchdoctors of religion.

That, in essence, is the reason for the religious material here at Not PC. Thanks for asking.

RELATED: Religion, Philosophy, Objectivism, Cartoons