The candid voice

This smooth looking git is a heretic, a traitor, an infidel and a heathen. He should not be trusted. He deliberately attacked Christian values and has offended millions around the world. He did so simply to sell books, he is not a particularly talented author – he just chose a controversial subject for attention. His profits are unholy and he shall no doubt face fair and appropriate retribution at the hands of our merciful Lord for all eternity (a good dose of teeth knashing with any luck). I for one shall be joining the picket lines around my local cinema to project an aura of good faith and godliness to the local community by intimidating them in name of the Jesus Christ, Prince of Peace and shall in no way inavertedly increase the publicity and shelf life of the very thing I want to destroy. No sir, not me.

I hate the way this man has made millions of people around the world suddenly take an interest in my faith and ask questions of it. You do not ask questions. That is part and parcel of the faith. What happens is that you become aware of the errors, lies and fabrications of the ‘good book’ and you know it was written to serve sinister human needs. Yet then – faced with a sheer lack of imagination you take a ‘leap of faith’ and ruthlessly crucify your better senses and simply ‘submit’ (Islam) to the lie. You sacrifice your independent thought in exchange for a doctrine, which through a serious of threats and fears robs of you of even the faint possibility of real virtue. The second dilemma – is that once you have taken that ‘leap’ you must engage in a bridge burning process where you deny point black your original position of rationality and deny the existence of alternatives – because your doctrine can not exist unless it is the one true word.

So how dare this man, despite the irregularities in his own work, show the world the bridges I once crossed to arrive at my current state of blissful denial. Now I’ve got to burn them again!

But, I am one of the lucky ones – for I found and crossed those bridges myself – for many of my friends who were born on ‘the other side’ and whose parents burnt their bridges for them – they have never before seen the path that led to their conceptions of reality – and they will doubtlessly react the way all humans do when confronted with what they do not know.

Down with Brown!