I think it might have been the second time I was tripping on Psilocybin mushrooms. I was about fifteen, been an atheist all my life, sitting in my Protestant best friend’s room. We had never spoken about religion before, and I barely understood it. I just knew some people believed in God, and there was some Jesus fella who died on a cross and now everyone was all fanatic about it.
I stayed away from the shit. It seemed crazy to me.
Nothing like a fistful of magic mushrooms to suddenly pique your curiosity, though. There was a Bible on her bed. I picked it up, began to read from the beginning and within just a little while, I was experiencing the most terrifying trip of my life. The Bible is not the best reading material for those on psychedelic drugs, let me tell you. Eight hours later, I finally came back to the safe world I lived in, in Western Canada, where no one was really religious except on Sundays and when the Census came
around.
Obviously, I’ve read the Bible high. I’ve also read the Bible sober. I’ve had the Bible read to me, and I read it with the very nice Jehovah’s Witness who comes to my door every week. I’ve read the Bible in a boat. I’ve read the Bible with a goat. Each new time I pick up that horrific book of lies, I think it’s even worse than the time before. In fact, if I was to attribute my increasingly intolerant views towards religion, after extremism, reading holy texts would likely be the cause. They are filthy, putrid rags full of immoral deities, lies and stories that are enough to put you off your lunch. Reading the Bible, and I think most of you atheists out there can confirm this, is the best way to turn someone away from God.
So, when theists come at me constantly with comments like this one from my Instagram:
I just have to laugh. I mean, dammit, I wish I could go back to those blissfully ignorant times when I’d never cracked that awful book. I definitely wish I’d never had that horrific trip on mushrooms. I mean, I can’t even talk about the details of the experience without ending up in a fetal position crying, “No, Jesus! No!”. I wish I’d never read the damned thing at all.
But I have. And if you have, too, you’re likely an atheist as well. And that’s how I know the people who post these comments on my Instagram and Twitter, have likely not read the Bible cover to cover themselves.
I think the biggest thing that strikes me, though, when these people ask me, “Have you ever even read the Bible?”, is the absolute and utter arrogance they’re showing about the superiority of their religion. I mean, I can only assume that people who ask me this do not actively believe in every deity that has ever been dreamt up by man. There are likely thousands of deities they dismiss and hold no belief in. They’ve also likely never read the holy texts that accompany many of these deities, and they still dismiss them. It’s perfectly okay for a Christian to dismiss the existence of Vishnu without reading the Upanishads, but it’s simply not okay for me to dismiss the Christian God without reading the Bible.
Yeah. I call bullshit.
It’s okay for you to dismiss the existence of any god without reading the texts that support them. As the great Hitch once said,
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. – Christopher Hitchens
None of us needs to read the Bible if we don’t want to, and we can just as easily dismiss Yahweh as we can the almighty Shango. There is no evidence for any god, with or without their magic books.
What do you say when religious people tell you that you need to read the Bible or the Quran or other holy texts? Let me know in the comments!
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