The Religionists

As the God fearers look at we who fear not and label us atheists with the implied putdown that the label engenders, I say, let us look back at these righteous, yet sometimes gentle folks and label them Religionists.

I think I have four religious friends. Two are Catholic. One sways with the Christian breeze. An old friend from high school is a pretty die-hard Lutheran.

I really do like my religious friends and I could care less that they are religious. And furthermore, they could care less that I am not only without religion but also willing to die into the abyss with no comforting notion of anything other than becoming a pile of waste. (I say, turn my whole mess into hydrogen and use it for a fuel. On me.)

So, this is not a swipe at religious people. They do what they do for good reasons. The world is an ambiguous place that is fraught with all sorts of hells. Poverty. Ignorance. Abuse. Disappointment. Loneliness. Disease. Bad Breath. Shoddy sexual partners. Reality Television. All of it bookended with the forceful propulsion out of a vagina and the eventual nasty transition into the dead state. The need for some big defining rule book, something that makes up for all this at the end, helps to mollify the conflicts and dreads that torture their terrified minds and contort their stressed out bodies.

So let them have it. It’s either that or morphine and the Afghanis are busy enough. But from now on, I think I will refer to these people who need all this religion, the Buddhists, the Christians, the Muslims, the Jews, the Hindus, the Sikhs, the Shinto, the Zoroastrianists, the Unitarian-Universalists, the Scientologists and anyone else who needs to project basic life/death impulses outside their somatic material ephemeral reality into a soothing stratosphere of symbolism, abstraction and dogmatic fairy tales as the Religionists. All of them. This makes reference to them more efficient in the world of taxonomy and levels the labeling field, which brings the Non-Religionists up to the task of facing these hoards on equal footing.

Though the Religionists are many and fight and scratch for their existence under the names of various sects, they are all fundamentally operating by a process of denying the wretched yet riveting reality of living into codified rules that actually pertain to human relations (sex) and the afterlife (death), both of which hardly need any real explanation. Being that all this explanation is a waste of energy, the laws of nature should see to it that these modes of operation will cease to exist.

The Religionists are a dwindling breed. See the link below.

According to this chart, though the Christian religion is in wopping first place by a good margin and Islam holds forth in second, guess what is in third place? No Religion at all. Following that are all sorts of wacky, fun religions that include ancient Chinese secrets and White Witches.

The Religionists. They’re a large group, but they’re a divided bunch. The Non-Religionists are a much more cohesive breed. Let’s respect the Religionists as human beings. But let’s not let them treat us Non-Religionists as anything less than the future for all mankind. And certainly, there is no need to argue with a Religionist about the future. Just watch them fall out of their minority fold into the majority mindset of Non-Religion. You’ll be too dead to ever see the complete conversion of the billions, but so what?


Religionists, Non-Religionists Pie Chart


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