On Your Knees for Trump



While watching CFN13 our local cable news outlet in early October 2016, a segment was aired about how leading conservatives, fearing a lower voter turnout in Florida on November 8^th, are launching an evangelical campaign called “Face Down 40”. It’s intended to reawaken the religious right by praying, fasting, and then voting for Donald Trump for president. Face Down 40 takes its name from people bowing their heads in supplication for the 40 days leading up to the general election.

 

If prayer works, and social conservative and Face Down 40 organizer Pam Olsen claims it does, why has whoever they are praying to let come it to this, begging for his attention just 40 days before the vote? This seems to be a rather uncaring and capricious being on whom they are wasting their breath. What is He waiting for? Pam Olsen revealed how much she trusts prayer to work when she says "If we go back to sleep again (as she thinks Christians did in 2008 and 2012), just like we've done so many times, then we're in trouble and it's on us.” So what good is praying? If just two of you Christians pray for something, doesn’t Matthew 18: 19-20 where it says “Again, I tell you truly that if two of you on the earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by My Father in heaven. For where two or three gather together in My name, there am I with them,” guarantee it will happen? I have read numerous Christian responses to this piece of scripture, all claiming that it is taken out of context. Read the paragraphs before and after it. What caveats does Jesus impose? “Anything you ask for, it will be done for you…” There is no “but only if you do this, this, and this first”, or "it only applies to the most holy among you.” Christians use those excuses to get themselves out of a hole they’ve dug themselves into.

 

            Over a year ago, when the Republican field was crowded with 17 candidates, no less than four of them; Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz. all claimed divine inspiration to run and made it clear God favored them and wanted them to be president. What happened? The most unsavory character of them all, Donald Trump, is who Pam Olsen and her evangelical cohorts are now praying for to win. She is actually praying for a man who, in what he whimsically called locker-room banter, talks about grabbing women by the crotch, that he wanted to f*ck a woman he was not married to when he had only recently married third wife Melania, and "when you're a star, they let you do it”. As president, would Pam allow him to grope her crotch, or have sex with her while her husband was away - because he’s a star? If her answer is no, why would she support, and encourage others to support, such a person? Olsen claims Trump’s conversions on key social conservative issues is genuine and deserving of evangelical support, yet she offers not one shred of evidence that it is genuine or that he has converted. Sort of like her support for Christianity on not one shred of evidence that the bible is true.

 

        Pam simply wants to believe it, and she wants evangelicals on their knees for the next 40 days praying that this misogynistic, sexist, dishonest, shallow, and crass XY chromosome carrier attains the presidency. Why would this god they are praying to offer up a candidate who is so lacking in everything the evangelicals stand for? This man has been married three times, has claimed he didn’t need a god’s forgiveness, has called women dogs, pigs, fat slobs, bimbos, and disgusting animals, supported abortion right up until he became a Republican candidate (before then, he was a registered Democrat), claims he could shoot someone and not lose voters, and has unashamedly claimed “it doesn’t really matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” Any man of God would do the same, wouldn’t they, Pam? You would no doubt be flattered if Trump told everyone - in front of your church - that you are a “piece of ass”.

       At least his final word there accurately describes you, Pam.

Uh, um...praying and communion....that's what he means!

Religion - the original sin.

Religion is the original sin. It is the sin of willful ignorance and credulity. Just as the fairy tale of the Garden of Eden relates, religion, as practiced across most of the United States, and in many countries around the world, makes a virtue of believing the ridiculous, and a sin of enjoying life.

Belief is the path of least resistant. Disbelief requires a much more concerted effort. It is easier to believe than to question and doubt. Believing means you just accept and follow. American historian James Harvey Robinson wisely wrote ‘Few of us take the pains to study the origins of our convictions; indeed, we have a natural repugnance to so doing. We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already have.’ And as the great Carl Sagan noted ‘You cannot convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it is based on a deep-seated need to believe.'

Why do people have a need to believe something without evidence? Most beliefs were instilled when they were toddlers and were too young to question. As the Jesuits are fond of saying ‘Give me the child for seven years and I will give you the man.’ What they mean is, it is accepted that a person’s belief system evolves within a child’s infancy and that a Jesuit upbringing would make the adult a confirmed holy zealot. Not to put too fine a point on it but that is religious indoctrination. If religion were true, it would not need to indoctrinate. Its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. If something is true and correct, why would it need to be hammered into the brains of defenseless children? Many who do this claim this is what god wants.

Believing in god is not a choice; it’s an ultimatum. You must believe in him or burn in hell forever. This is totalitarianism in its purest form. It’s using fear as its recruiting tool. Reaching your goals through fear is called terrorism.

Some ask ‘what is the harm in religion?’ Simple enough. It is because your belief guides your actions, and that’s what makes religion so dangerous. Faith or belief in an after-life is the single greatest cause of suffering and stupidity inflicted upon humans, by humans, for several reasons.

First, it allows religious leaders to control people by offering hope in the next life, promising rewards, threatening punishment, even sentencing eternal damnation. When a non-believer expresses their views, they are endorsing a position that there is no evidence for belief in any gods. But when a christian or a muslim expresses their view, they are endorsing a belief dictating that people who do not believe as they do deserve to spend an eternity being tortured with fire. Yet non-belief is the position that is considered 'offensive.' Why is it a sin not to believe without evidence when the greater sin is the credulity generated by religion itself? And please don't insist that 'it's not about religion, it's about a relationship with god'...that's the same as saying it's not about sex, it's about putting a penis in a vagina.

Secondly, it negates the immediacy and value of human life right here and now. Believing in life-after-death makes the assumption that people don't really die; they just go on to a spiritual life. This subconsciously legitimizes capital punishment and the death penalty, territorial wars, religious wars, turf wars, gang wars, terrorist attacks, ethnic cleansing, murder, suicide cults, political assassination. People aren't really dying; they're just continuing on in another stage of existence.

Third, it allows people to postpone action in this life (whether humane or humanitarian) in favor of the life yet to come, allowing for political and religious boundaries, derision and division, separatism and succession. Hence, we still have global hunger, border skirmishes, illiteracy, disease, poverty and pestilence, all because the problems of this world are ultimately deemed unimportant when measured against the life yet to come.

Fourth, it offers people hope for a solution to their problems at some future date and enables them to not make a conscious effort to make the necessary changes, or do the necessary work now. It allows them to postpone taking responsibility for their own lives or education (since god will enlighten them and fix everything once they get to heaven). It permits them to sit on their hands in ignorance and inertia while life passes them by.

And fifth, it legitimizes the use of persecution and torture in the name of saving souls for the after-life. This was the justification for the Inquisition. A 1578 handbook for inquisitors spelled out the purpose of inquisitorial penalties: "for punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit." The evils they would commit...means the inquisitors projected into the future what they thought would happen and tortured accordingly. This allowed them to make up whatever they wanted. In other words, the only purpose was to scare people into submission to the church and its teachings. It still is. Believe or be damned. Or more simply 'Turn or burn'!

Religion is the belief in ideas that are, by definition, unproven and without evidence. That is why it is called faith…and faith does not give you answers, it just stops your from asking questions. Faith is the firm belief in something for which no proof exists - you simply want it to be true. It is wishful thinking. The ability to perceive the existence of God does not infer the existence of God. Belief in something is not proof that it is real, it does not equal fact. Nothing is true or false just because we wish or desire it to be so. Most people understand this when confronting other religions and cults, just not their own.

The most disturbing thing about religion is that it is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of preaching hate, bigotry, ignorance, superstition and intolerance. Just witness the outcry against homosexuality. Certain people need to stop using Jesus and god as an excuse for being narrow-minded, bigoted jerks!

Personally, I choose to live by these words: Above all things, truth…Not belief, not faith, not religion, not god nor gods, not patriotism, not ideology, not hopes, not dreams, not reward, not comfort, but truth….for better or for worse, truth.

This post is a compilation of some of the best arguments against theism and religion I have come across. I have simply assembled them into what I think is a fitting tribute to their wisdom.

                                                                        Blinded by religion