Ted Haggard Has Put the Last Nail in the Coffin

Less than a third of Americans attend church weekly. One by one, Catholic churches are folding up under economic stress exasperated by settlement after settlement with abused children. Southern Baptism has alienated any rational, thinking human beings who once fell for the mythology of Christ with its irrational crusade for the non-science of Intelligent Design, amid other shoot-downs from federal judges over such flagrant violations of the Establishment Clause such as prayer in school and government subsidies for parochial schools.

And now, Ted Haggard, incredibly able fundraiser and political activist, has quit over allegations that he has been paying another man for gay sex for months. One of the chief tenets of his ministry was the abomination of homosexuality.

Yes, that's right, a wildly popular, firebrand southern Evangelist Christian who preached that homosexuality is an abomination has engaged both in sodomy and prostitution, which his Bible makes explicity clear one should be put to death for. Liberal Christians who somehow imagine that Jesus removes the edicts of the Old Testament have never read the New Testament- Matthew 5:17-18 makes it extremely clear that the Old Testament still stands. Anyone who disagrees with this is a wishy-washy moderate who is saying that Jesus was a liar.

Anyways, I digress.

Religion in the United States is dying. Catholicism is already dead in Western Europe, with church attendance approaching single digits weekly even in its former nest-hives like France and Italy. Southern Baptism is an absolute joke: churches keep people on the attendance rolls decades after they've left the church or even died, and many of their leaders are just out-and-out criminals: the IRS demands that all non-profits make the salaries of their top five earners available to the public, Billy and Franklin Graham, to name a few have not done this. I believe they should all be in prison.

With the success of recent authors like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins, I think I can proudly and happily say that this is the end of the theist majority in America; this is the last generaiton where the majority will believe in insipid fairy tales like God, Jesus, or creationism. Religious leadership has lied to and betrayed its flock, their churches are filled with liars, adulterers, and criminals (there are about 500 times as many theists in America's prisons as atheists; this far outweighs the percentage in the general population) who almost never show up any more, an the judges no longer tolerate their abuse of populist misunderstanding of the Constitution.

The churches have infested your country with liars, theives, criminals, and rapists. They have poisoned your minds and the minds of your children to embrace fairy tales like hell and science-for-idiots like Intelligent Design (whose last legal refutation, in Pennsylvania, came from a far-right lifelong Christian Republican appointed by Rick Santorum; this is NOT an activist judge!!). They have taken your money and spent it on prostitutes and real estate in the Mediterannean. Do not put up with this crap any more.

You are not a sinner. You are not a bad person. You do NOT need salvation and there is no such thing as original sin! You are a human being. You are a beautiful, wonderful organism. You (YOU PERSONALLY) are the product of billions of years of evolutionary struggle; you are nature's finest creation. You were not made from dust and you were not made to serve the whimsy of a murderous, sexist, homophobic, racist, genocidal God who makes and breaks so caprciciously. You are nature's greatest, by far. You are good at heart. Whenever you elevate people into papacy, priesthood, or any other authority, you create another thief, another liar, another sexual deviant.

Mohammed had girls as young as 8 in his harem. Jesus may never have existed at all. Do not allow yourself to be fooled any longer. Do not intoctrinate your children into these idiotic fairy tales; they will just be another wallet for people like Ted Haggard to rob from.

Organized religion at all levels is on the way out: it is dying, and rightfully so. Ted Haggard, whose platform has spanned every evil from a pro-war stance to homophobia and sexism, is just the latest, not the first and certainly not the last, example of why your impotent and foolish God does not exist. Jesus is never coming back; Mohammed will not reign over the Earth in the "End Times." The universe is better than that and so are you.

Let Ted Haggard be your example. Let you be accused of your intellectual crimes: have you ever believed in an absurd proposition? Do you REALLY believe that some day, Jesus is going to fly out of the clouds, snatch up all the Christians, fight with a great big dragon, and then the universe ends? Do you REALLY believe that some day, the stars will literally fall to Earth, as Revelations say they WILL before the Second Coming? Do you REALLY believe that Mohammed flew up to heaven on a magical horse, or that Noah fit exactly two of every animal, including all 650,000 different species of beetle? Do you REALLY believe that there is an eternal, omnipotent, immutable Sovereign of the Universe who CARES about the state of the skin wrapped around the shaft of your genitalia?

if so, confess like Ted Haggard. And quit, like Ted Haggard: your days are numbered. You can abandon your hopeless myths and become a real, normal human being again.