I also refrained from mentioning that many it is now common knowledge that religious experiences such as a sudden overwhelming feeling of onesness with God, are merely the result of chemical reactions in the brain involving serotonin and other chemicals that the body generates and have nothing whatsoever to do with a religious experience. Although such experiences may occur within a church and within a religious ceremony, they may also occur to anyone, religious or not, anywhere at any time.

If an individual regularly has such experiences, it may be an indication of chemical imbalances within the brain. In such cases, the individuals concerned would be well advised to seek medical help.

...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.