Today I’d like to say a few words about faith which I think has the potential to enslave us all by stealth. Because I think faith is a very dangerous and misleading word; it contains two completely separate entities which have got nothing at all to do with each others. One is good and one is evil. One is called spirituality and the other is called religion. One is a private experience, the other is a public nuisance. One needs to self knowledge, the other to self indulgence at everyone else’s expense. In one there is no compulsion whereas the other depends on compulsion for its survival. One is grounded in innocence the other in guilt. One embraces life, the other worship death.

It’s hard to imagine how these two things could be anymore different, yet for some reason they’re always sold to us together in a single package under the banner of faith; If you take one you’ve got to take the other, a bit like a pet shop giving away a free rattlesnake with every bunny rabbit.

Now I’m not saying that there isn’t more to this life than meets the eye, because there obviously is. Science has already shown us that in the subatomic world it turns out that nothing is actually solid, if you can understand that, and some particles are so unpredictable we’re not even sure if they exist or not. They seem to be there and not be there at the same time, a bit like western democracy, or is that just me?

But anyway, it’s clear that we are part of a reality that we don’t fully understand. If there’s a life force in this universe, and let’s face it there must be, otherwise there wouldn’t be any life, it’s natural that we would want to make some connection with it because everybody wants to feel more alive, right? But there’s no evidence that it requires worshiping or any form of subservient behavior, or that we are in anyway central to its agenda or even relevant to it anymore than any other organism on the planet, or in the universe, this universe or any other universe. So in that sense I think we really need to get over ourselves BIG TIME. Also we need to stop pretending that all the man-made trappings of faith, the ornamental accessories, if you like, aren’t really anything more than just that, I’m talking about scripture, dogma, ritual, prophecy, religious laws, all these things that have been put there to give religion some kind of structure, and to be fair that’s why they’re there isn’t it? It’s a bit like dressing the invisible man, once he’s got some clothes on, you can see him, but of course you don’t see him, you see the clothes. And that’s the problem, everyone’s become so obsessed with the god damn clothes we’ve forgotten if there was ever anyone there in the first place.

If you’re a spiritual person, you don’t need religion, and you know it. And you’re certainly not interested in forcing your beliefs onto anybody else. If you’re not a spiritual person, then what the bloody hell are you doing on your knees praying like an idiot, like some dog that’s been taught how to do something without understanding why. Get up and stop making a fool of yourself, because your faith is not a virtue, it’s a vice. It’s a slave to dogma, to scriptural certainties which are nevertheless open to self-interested interpretation by men. Now I’m sure even you can see the obvious flaw in that little arrangement. Also faith in its Alice In Wonderland way defines and measures itself according to lack of evidence; the less evidence there is, the more faith is required and the more worthy it is of respect and deference for some reason, not to mention large amounts of public money, generous tax-breaks and the freedom to fill the minds of innocent young children with violent superstitions and baseless fears. And this to me really is the curse of faith. And it’s something that shames us all from generation to generation, it’s the cowardly way that we allow religion to be forced onto children in a clear violation of their human rights, hypnotizing them almost at birth, hijacking their life and turning them into little Christians, little Muslims, little Jews before they have a chance to understand the first thing that’s involved.

Oh, we live in such a civilized times in the 21st century, don’t we? Human rights there, everything to us. We fall over ourselves to give compensation to every cheap-chancer, every low-life criminal scumbag whose precious feelings have been hurt but we don’t give a damn about the right of children having their minds molded and stunted by others before they’ve had a chance to fully form like dead heading flowers before they bloom. It’s a crime against humanity, it’s what it is, and one day it will be against the law.