I’ve got a really nasty one right now.  Usually this type of pain is accompanied by a bad spike in my blood pressure which isn’t the case this time.  There is the sensation of having a fever, however, which is always a sign of a really bad headache.

Nothing I can take has any effect on one of these.  I just have to suffer through.

Just one of many unpleasantries I have to suffer periodically.

I was just reading some comments on another blog that brought up the old without god you can’t be moral theme.  I’ve actually been noticing that quite a bit lately.  Basically the christian declares that without god the only option is to become morally depraved and unrestrained.

I have to wonder where this idea comes from?

Indeed, as a christian, I was fascinated by end-time prophecies.  I thought it was the coolest thing ever to fantasize about how Revelations was going to play out.  I actually found joy in imagining the utter destruction of billions of people.  There was no doubt in my mind that only a relative few would survive god’s ultimate judgment.  Of course, I was going to be among those few.

How, exactly, is this a moral way of thinking?

Billions of people’s lives mean absolutely nothing to god or his children.  They were created so he could pour out his wrath on them to show how righteous his judgments are.  If you believe in predestination, it gets even worse because you have no option about what is going to happen to you.

How is that moral?  Is your head hurting yet?

I’ve mentioned before about being in church services where the preacher in a frenzy of religious blindness actually led the congregation in asking god to put cancer, AIDS, heart attacks, etc., on their friends and loved ones so that they would be brought low enough that they would call out to god for salvation.  It didn’t matter that those people would have to suffer horribly and probably die, at least they would be saved.  Their souls wouldn’t go to hell.  Who cares if their lives were ruined otherwise?  Is this moral?

I had a real bad headache or two after sitting through this particularly horrid type of worship service.  The thing that was the most shocking was how many people gleefully took up the challenge of praying for their loved ones in this manner.  Imagine a few hundred people pleading with god to give Uncle Bob a nasty form of throat cancer because he spends so much time smoking at bars and nightclubs.

Suppose you worked in some kind of biological laboratory and had access to a Petri dish full of the most virulent life destroying little buggers ever conceived.   If you were to smuggle them out of the lab and release them into the water supply of a large city what would you expect the reaction of the rest of the world would be?  If they caught you, you would be universally condemned as the worst terrorist who ever lived.  You and I know this.  There is no question.  This would be an immoral act of the highest degree by any civilized standard.

But this is exactly what those good moral christians in that good moral church were asking their good moral god to do for them.  God, after all, has the power to give life and take it away.

How can we mere mortals have higher moral standards than god?  Why is it most societies condemn slavery but the bible doesn’t?  Why is it everyone knew murder is immoral long before the bible was written?

That question used to bother me a lot as a christian.  How could I have higher moral standards than my god when he was supposed to be the only source of said morals?  It used to give me headaches.

Being free of religion for the last eleven years has led me to realize that my moral standards never came from god or the bible in the first place, I had them before and I still have them after being a christian.  Like many other facts of life religion usurps what is right and true and then claims that you never knew or had it before religion revealed it to you.  They keep beating you over the head with it long enough you eventually begin to believe it and then you can’t fathom how anyone else could possibly know such things without your god, too.

I hope in some small way that I have made you think hard enough to get a headache.  Because, well, misery loves company.

And I am, after all, an immoral douchebag.