Certifiable Madness

"I’m not insane; my mother had me tested.” So says fictional physicist Sheldon Cooper. Whatever your opinion of The Big Bang Theory, it’s still both funny and evocative of an intuitive prickle most of us must have felt at some time. Are we mad? And how would we tell? Madness takes many forms and can lead us in many directions. We use it as an excuse for both genius and for great wrongdoing. And we frequently accuse our leaders of it for decisions that we, sane, grounded people would never take.

The celebration of religion is a form of mass insanity shared by countless millions of those who consider themselves enlightened by it, but seen by the rest of us as burdened by the weight of maintaining the biggest conspiracy theory of all time. God must move in mysterious ways indeed for there to never have been a single scrap of evidence for ‘his’ existence, for him to hold so many, weirdly antipathetic forms and yet to be advocated by multiple powerful and costly global bureaucracies. As Voltaire may have said, if god did not exist it would be necessary to set up a government department to collect his taxes.

Religion is the original protection racket; pay now and seek your reward in the hereafter. And worse than that, it divides us and foments violence; it always has. So you would think that a sane administration, a government of the people for the people, would want to promote unity, not division. Maybe this is the warped thinking behind paying the islamic protection racket tax, jizya, traditionally levied on non-muslims living in muslim territories? Halal certification is nothing more than the imposition of taxes on the host nation to assist in its assimilation into the wold of islam.

Now, you may have guessed by now that I am an unrepentant atheist; no mealy-mouthed bet-hedging agnostic, me. In my book, if you truly believe in the existence of a higher power you are certifiably unfit for any office and you certainly should have no role in shaping the minds of the young. But my upbringing, at least in broadly cultural terms, is christian; a religion which – like all others - is merely a temporary appropriation of all that preceded it. And right now, the thing the christian world celebrates is the festival of fecundity we call Easter.

Like ramadan, it is a moveable feast and similarly it is the high spot of the christian calendar, being the time at which the miracle of supposed re-birth is remembered. So why are christians required to pay islam the halal tax to purchase chocolate eggs (themselves already a travesty, anyway, being a celebration of consumerism instead of resurrection) which most manufacturers are scared of even calling ‘Easter Eggs’? And it’s not just confectionery; halal is everywhere, it is virtually unavoidable. Why is this pervasive insult to all non-muslims not resisted with all our energies?

The parable of when Jesus paid his jizya...

Do they think we are mad? Do they think we don’t see? A country which fails to defend its borders, its customs and its people is not worthy of the name. But time after time we see this failing by those who rule over us - and those who aid and abet them - to roll over and let islam set the agenda. They seem to think that by kow-towing to the ‘needs’ of the ‘religion of peace’ will bring harmony, when all the evidence of this pestilential cult tells us the opposite. Based on the Einsteinian definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over in the hope of a different outcome this time – they must be fucking mad.