I keep reading the same things again and again, in different forms, in different books.. They all talk about the horror that religion has brought upon us, about the villainy associated with it, about the atrocities committed in its name. And with a morbid fascination I keep on reading, abhorring religion at every page turn and still perusing through its ever-growing list of carnage and barbaric deeds. What a bloody past it has given us, the idea that is supposed to bring us peace, and love and joy! What a human cost it has extracted from us to appease a god of its own creation, to strengthen its hold upon us! Subjugated men to their deaths and used those deaths to subjugate many more. What a fantastically cruel, inhuman idea. To write about religion's many infamies would take forever and better writers than I have chronicled them, but what a gory sight indeed to see a man die for his religion and to vault him over us as a martyr, beloved of god and a life worth emulating. To conjure up a god who demands sacrifice, who punishes, threatens, massacres his chosen people, can change his mind at a whim; a concept that's twisted around to fit every new discovery, every new idea, thought, social mores, till he becomes so convoluted that even his best supporters cannot try to explain him satisfactorily.

I have come to the somewhat saddening conclusion that there is probably no god, much as I would like to think he exists; but faced with the wrathful, vengeful, capricious, greedy, fickle, exacting, pitiless god that paraded about by religion I'd rather not have a god and live a life devoid of belief in a holy order of things than pander to such a human deity.