The One Day When Christians And Atheists Sing From The Same Hymn Sheet | Giles Fraser | Comment | The Guardian / quote 2 of 2
Religion is a set of bronze-age myths designed to keep the priestly caste in power and carefully engineered to feed off the insecurities of the weak and the ignorant.
...now I need to own up and come clean: I don't believe in God. And no, this is not some modern theologian's semantic dodge. The whole thing is rubbish; a set of bronze-age myths designed to keep the priestly caste in power and carefully engineered to feed off the insecurities of the weak and the ignorant.
And to think, I gave religion my best years – which is why I wont ever be a neutral sort of atheist. I know it from the inside: all the deceitful intellectual twists and turns, all the cons and the bullshit, all the hypocrisy. The way it treats women and gays. The way it pretends it has some sort of monopoly on virtue while abusing children and making people feel guilty about sex. The way it uses that weasel category of "faith" as a cover for a lack of proper intellectual justification.
All that manipulative stuff about "going to heaven" because it says so in a very old book (a book that constantly contradicts itself). To tell you the truth, most of them don't mean it anyway. And the ones that do are mad.