Tag Archives: religion

In the life before this one Hamid had been a cockroach. He had no memories of the previous life, but he was sure of it. His life this time was not much better. He still skittered around looking for scraps. Women would at the very least gag, if not scream at his appearance. He must have been a bad cockroach, because this current life felt worse than ever the life of a bug could be.

Hamid wondered from his knot in the ground that he called home whether he had ever lived a good life, whether he had ever been rewarded.

Across the endless sand winded one lone set of tracks. Hendrick had stopped wondering if the desert had an end. Now he only thought of the sweet release of death.

“I’m pretty sure you don’t exist, God.” Hendrick could not perceive whether he spoke out loud or not, “or else you would’ve prevented all of this. But I have no one else to talk to.”

Only the howling wind responded.

“I don’t care if you don’t want to listen! You put me here. Now you have to listen.” Hendrick dreamed of lightning striking him where he stood. There were no clouds.

“You need to grow up, be respectable,” the man in the expensive Italian suit.

“What does it mean to be respectable?” I ask.

“You do what I tell you to do,” the well-dressed man says, “Put away childish things. That’s what St. Paul says, you know.”

“Who defines what is childish?”

“I do, but I pretend as if God and I are of the same opinion.”

“To what end?”

“Control! I control you by withholding acceptance until you conform to my wishes. I use God not because I believe in Him, but because it keeps you from questioning my self-made authority.”

Belief in anything other than nonbelief is heresy to Chris, and he holds to it more strictly than the most devout practitioner of any religion. His religion is nonreligion. His god is himself. The truth has been brought to the world through his own understanding. The world should be praising him for his enlightenment, but it does not.

Religion is the cause of all the world’s ills, and so it must be wiped out like a virus that plagues humanity. The only thing that can save humanity is blood sacrifice, and that sacrifice is religion.

Death to the unbelievers in unbelief.

The man in white stood atop the hill. “The day is at hand,” he bellowed, “No longer shall we tolerate the infidels. No longer shall they defile the purity of our homes and our land. To arms, my children. So says the Creator!”

Mindless sheep were turned into ravenous wolves that day. Not content with just slaughtering the infidels and their families, they killed those who would not join in, or worse, spoke ill of the man in white.

The man in white’s robes were bloodstained red by the end. He laughed as he spoke, “Purity can come only by death.”