For Those Seeking Spiritual Clarity

... uh maybe best to skip this piece by Matt Taibbi:

The one thing I wonder about is this notion that somehow religions are “more realistic” because they teach children that people are bad. First of all, I don’t think this is really what religions do. In my experience, religion taught something very different: that because two half-naked people with leaves over their genitals named Adam and Eve ate an apple in paradise a billion years ago, I, Matt Taibbi, was somehow a sinner and doomed to roast in the hot flames of hell for a billion years unless I accepted God’s authority. Which was not “realistic” at all, I don’t think, but completely retarded on about nineteen different levels. Moreover, you teach any normal kid the Bible and what he’s going to get from it is not a “realistic” view of the world but a disturbing series of questions to ponder. Like for instance, what does it mean when my own parents tell me, with a straight face, a story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son? You’re a little kid, listening at bedtime in your pee-jays to the story, expecting that Abraham is going to tell God to go fuck himself because he loves his children so much, and be rewarded for doing so. Instead it’s exactly the opposite, the father in the story is rewarded for being willing to carve his innocent son up with a knife, the moral of the story somehow being not that God is an insane murderous psychopath, but that God is just and wise and should be obeyed. When the story is over, Dad tucks you in to bed and says he’ll see you in the morning. Now that’s realism for you.

Happy Easter!