No Choose We Lose

NEW RULE (Yes I love Bill Maher and you should to): Religious people have to stop campaigning for protection from "religious hatred". It's not enough that the rule only applies to brown people anyway, but there's a reason why no rational person should give a shit if they upset someones religious sensibilities: They chose them.

Unlike the laws that protect against racial hatred, sexual or minority discrimination (otherwise known as the George Bush happy hour), religious people deserve absolutely nothing of the same sort. The simple reason is that they chose to believe in whatever supernatural spook is their cultures flavour du jour, and therefore have to deal with it when someone pokes fun at them, says they're idiots, bigots, intolerant, extremists, fascists and general nutjobs.

You see there's a common misconception that Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and the rest are some kind of race of people, like someone might be oriental, black, middle eastern, white or aborigine. Or that they're some kind of nation people Chinese or Kenyan or French or Brazilian. Or that they're some kind of minority people like the handicapped, the transsexual or those that don't blindly support causes they don't understand just because the papers tell them to. There are no religious children. If you were born in Tehran, chances are you would be raised as a Muslim. If you were born in North America you'd be raised as a Christian. Why? Not because you were born that way, but because your parents chose to raise you that way. Irrespective of belief, you would still be brown if you were born in the mid-east, and Caucasian if you were born in North America. You can't change that.

But you can change your beliefs. And the reason that belief deserves absolutely zero protection in the eyes of the law is because people CHOOSE to follow whatever religion it is they're into. Do lawyers get legal protection defending them from lawyer jokes? No, because they chose to be a lawyer, no one forced them. Should dustmen get protection from having to work with waste? No, because they chose to be dustmen (though they seem to be trying their damndest to change this). So Muslims or Christians shouldn't get any protection from someone calling them on their intolerant bullshit because THEY CHOSE TO FOLLOW THAT RELIGION. You can't argue otherwise, because if you had any proof for your belief, it would be fact and not belief.

So stop whining when someone shows an image of your prophet, or when someone slaughters one of your TB infected sacred cows, or when someone puts Jerry Springer The Opera on television and a judge laughs you out of court when you try to sue the producer on the grounds of blasphemy. You chose to follow that particular fiction that talks about talking bushes, men floating into the sky, six thousand year old earths and babies surviving attempts on their lives which end up shaping their destiny (the last one was actually from Harry Potter, but it's a similar load of absolute fantasy), so stop complaining when rational people disagree. Also, stop complaining when your employer tells you (or should if they had any spine) to shut the fuck up when you whine about having to handle alcohol, not wear your cross (and what is the point of wearing that by the way? If Jesus does come back the last thing he's going to want to see is a cross) when on company time or when logical people, the establishment or the mass media tell you to stop discriminating against women, gays, liberals, the poor, or other religions. Using the old "God says..." trick is a cheap way to disguise your hatred. You chose to believe in first century belief system in the twenty first century, so stop whining when the rest of the species decides to try and get along with one another for who we all are, and ignores you crying out that your crumbling papyrus pile of bullshit tells you that women should subservient to men. Or that gays should be executed. Or that rape victims are to blame for tempting their attackers.

You chose to live in a framework of myth, superstition and fear of change and the unknown. You'd learn that the modern world is a far more interesting place when you choose not to.