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How to Make the World a Better Place - Your Considered Opinions Please

I think the world would be a much better place if the majority of its citizens would realise that religion is a dirty, filthy, evil, immoral and dangerous habit. In order to encourage people who engage in it to give it up (and to discourage others), they ought to be made to feel guilty and ashamed and should be forced to do it in private/secret so that good moral and praisworthy people would not have to witness such degrading behaviour. Their filthy and violent religious literature should be controlled (perhaps burned) and the depiction of religious practices, and perhaps even discussion thereof in the electronic media, should be strictly censored to protect children. Parents who subject their children to religion should be charged and convicted of child abuse. Perhaps this abominable and dangerous behavior could even be criminalised so that its sordid practitioners are driven deep underground where they and their evil heros such as Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Osamar Bin Laden belong. Absolute vermin! We could isolate them on islands or construct special camps for them where they could be held until a final...

Ok ... yes, I'm kidding/[ph]antasizing. But these thoughts can give a sort of perverse pleasure - especially to those of us who have sufferred at the hands of the religious and been traumatised by their bigotry. I imagine the pleasure I speak of is a bit like christian and muslim fundies enjoyng the spectacle of unbelievers burning in hell. Very naughty!

I'd like to read your naughty fantasies about how we could make the world a better place. Let's have some fun in here! Perhaps give the fundies, who sometime come in here on hit and run forays, pause for thought by talking in language they understand; by holding a mirror up to them.

Or is that forbidden fruit?

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Permalink Reply by La Gaya Sienza on August 27, 2010 at 4:26am

I agree with your ideas Rigbyt. I've long believed that this whole so called "war on drugs" is the biggest load of bullshit after religion itself. Everybody knows what happened during prohibition in the United States. What on Earth made people think prohibiting other drugs would be any different. The best way to start a crime wave is to make certain substances that people want illegal. Where there is a demand suppliers will step in to fill it, illegal or not. Instead of it being a public health problem it becomes a huge criminal and social problem with health problems that cannot be addressed because addicts have to hide or be imprisoned. That's just the sort of captive market the crime bosses and the churches love.

And I like your idea of charging people who make false promises with criminal conduct, and force them to prove their claims. All those crazy church goers in the bible belt who sing and chant and holler and speak in tougues and fall down in spasms... Are they just paying for entertainment? Or do they fill the collection plate in church and send money to televangelists because they are being promised happiness on Earth and/or an eternal afterlife in heaven if they do as their religious bosses tell them to do in this life. Insofar as the preachers are selling eternal life they ought to be able to prove that at least one of their followers has actually got his/her money's worth. If they cannot they ought to be made to pay it all back and if they don't we could move to "hard labour" as you suggest.

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Permalink Reply by Jennifer Nicole on August 27, 2010 at 2:45am

Teach people to understand and respect boundaries of other people...then convince them to think as much of others as they do of themselves. Because if they understand the other person's viewpoint, they'd be less likely to act in a way as to harm that other person. >.X

As that world will never happen, I'll pull on an extremist idea instead: Put top scientists in charge of creating a chemical to place in public water systems that prevents people from being fertile. When people want to have children, they have to take classes and apply for a license to attain a counteragent.

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Permalink Reply by La Gaya Sienza on August 27, 2010 at 3:13am

Yes, that might work, Jennifer. The bleeding hearts might find it difficult to swallow though.
What do you think about the following:

Self-imposed isolation by those who want to live in a society like Iran or the Taliban's Afganistan. They should just completely isolate their societies from us and we should help them do so.

Of course life in such countries would not be pretty. And you can imagine what would happen eventually after being left to themselves under a theocracy - stonings, the chopping off of limbs, no education for females, the abandonmment of science, art and music, the destruction of cultural heritage. In the end there would be no one left but the ruling theocrats and their harems. But if isolation is what they want we should let them have it so that reasonable people in civilised societies can continue to progress and pursue happiness unharmed. We should develop alternate sources of renewable energy so that we don’t need their damned oil. Then they can live in splendid, poverty stricken isolation. Of course, we as humanists would open our doors to those who want to abandon such a horrible existence, those who want to abandon religion (at least that type of religion) and live in freedom. The theocratic rumps that would remain would be powerless on the world stage and soon snuff themselves out or abandon their old ways.

Let it be so!

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Permalink Reply by damian on August 28, 2010 at 7:09am

I can't think of anything better than your idea at the moment. I'm sure the kids would go nuts in such a place.

I almost want to suggest atheist neighborhoods, but then this would just make people hate us more, and we aren't as closed minded as the religious.

I wanted to suggest businesses who don't service xtians, but this would just reinforce xtians feelings towards us.

Maybe an atheist version of the door to door mormons, but for the most part we don't push our beliefs on others.

So, i guess this brings me around to your idea. Isolate them, and see how they like it. You see, they need us. If they were isolated, the majority of people wouldn't look for them. I don't see teens running to the amish community.

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Permalink Reply by Lisa on September 1, 2010 at 5:39pm

But they should not be allowed to have children because that would be just cruel.

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Permalink Reply by Goz on September 2, 2010 at 6:31am

Give religious people Hawaii..Move them all there....Once there,they get a little surprise,they can never leave..

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Permalink Reply by Zero_6ix on September 3, 2010 at 9:35am

Hawaii? There are so many better places that don't involve an "Edenic" setting. Places like the aptly-named Exclusion Zone. Think on it; they could clean the radiation through the power of prayer. And if they start succumbing to thyroid cancer, that just means THEY AREN'T PRAYING HARD ENOUGH.

Or, if the picturesque settings of Eastern Europe isn't enough, there's always the DMZ. Nothing but beautiful wildlife, communist and capitalist propaganda, and landmines as far as the eye can see. MIRACLE BONUS: Removal of said landmines, regeneration of destroyed limbs.

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Permalink Reply by La Gaya Sienza on September 3, 2010 at 2:14pm

Absolutely! I mean, if their god is all powerful, then the regeneration of the odd limb or two ought to be child's play, right?. We'll keep an eye out for it and report on progress.