The long, dark con

After seeing the above picture posted on Reddit.com, I wrote to the good people at http://www.answersingenesis.org who erected the billboard:

It's a historical fact that more people have been murdered in the name of Christianity than any other religion in the history of mankind.

If a person needs the fear of hell to keep them from murdering, stealing or otherwise breaking the law, then that person is deficient and flawed on a most fundamental level. The rest of rational society doesn't commit murder or thievery, or other crimes, because we simply know that it's wrong to do so.

The Christian bible is filled with genocide, rape, murder, adultery, bestiality, insanity and megalomania. It's the last text I would use to guide my life.

Even Christians, today, can't manage it, what with their seamless hatred of the poor, their "holier than thou" attitude toward pornography, hatred of gays, minorities, and their ubiquitous prejudice against anyone who is not of their denomination. That, I think, is the crowning turd of Christianity -- the unending infighting among its various sects. All proclaim to love Jesus Christ and serve God, and yet resent, hate and cluck their tongues at anyone who is not of their particular sliver of faith. How Catholics glower at Protestants, and how each Protestant cult sneers at the other. All the while, carrying out heinous acts in the name of Jesus -- whether it's killing abortion doctors, picketing soldiers' funerals, or sending the country's troops into foreign countries on "crusades" in the name of oil.

Or, better yet, those execrable televangelists: a shower of pimps, making money off the crucifixion of Jesus Christ like a Times Square hustler and his hookers.

And now Christians are placing billboards around the country attacking atheists who don't believe in fictional, invisible deities who speak to people in self-contradicting books.

Atheists are to be feared?

Tell that the people of Afghanistan. Tell that to the 1.4 million-plus people dead in Iraq. Tell that to the peasants of Honduras, who've been murdered in droves by monsters schooled by the good Christians at the School for the Americas.

I'll tell you, people don't call Christianity "the long, dark con" for nothing. To paraphrase the late comedian, George Carlin: Christians believe in an invisible man in the sky who sees and hears everything, but gives no indication of his presence, who watches and judges us, and if we displease him, he'll damn us to hell to suffer for eternity . . . but he loves us.

What utter, unmitigated, unadulterated bullshit.