Religion ? No Thanks !
State Religion ?
NO WAY!

Religion becomes offensive when a quarter million plus religious followers register intent to congest & disrupt Munich all in one weekend.

Sept 2006, a quarter million plus of Pope Ratzinger's (*) followers will swamp Munich over the weekend, & cause massive congestion.

• Tip for visitors: Practise crossing your legs ! - Imagine the queues to the toilets ;-) There's a Lot more trees & bushes at Riem to hide behind, than there are in the town central square, where it'll be horribly crowded. Public transport are predicting Massive delays, Sun 10th Sept 2006 & reccomending followers to start travelling to the field (ex airport) as early as 3 AM !)
• Like the Munich Security conference, that also disrupts Munich each year, the pope will disrupt the city too.
• Marienplatz (city square) will have its manholes (drains) sealed (welded ?) I hear, trains will run through without stopping at Marienplatz I've read, (stairs will be too crowded), 100,000 of pope's followers expected on Saturday. Marienplatz takes just 8000 normally & there's more scaffold than normal mass demos, near toy museum, probably. to take TV camera photos. Side streets will be horribly jammed. Car, bikes, dustbins & plant containers will be removed. Police security level one. I've heard residents on pope's routes are asked to keep windows closed ! Bloody cheek, fresh air is a god(s) given right, not to be denied just because some reactionary old man in a white dress has come to disrupt the city. Friday morning, a day before his arrival, helicopters were already casing the joint.
• The Haupt Bahn Hof (main station) & S-Bahn Stamm- Strecke (network central spine) will doubtless be totally over run with visitors. Organising normal city groups, eg eg country walks meeting to start at Haupt Bahn Hof before travelling) would be a nightmare. With Heathrow closed 'cos of bombers ~2 weeks back, maybe the police will be jumpy ? Even planning to travel to a Friday beer garden (or wet weather fallback) will be tricky this week, & a bad idea in the centre or East. Munich will be horrible - swamped by religious followers.

For some reason, it's considered "Politically Correct" to go out of one's way not to offend local or sundry global religious sensitivities, But religionists rarely care about not offending & protecting those of other religions & equally of No religion. ? Why tolerate proselatysing & missionary zeal, unless equally the religionists tolerate urgings to dump their religion ?

• The Violent Some religions consider atheists even worse than members of other religions, & extremists prioritise atheists as first to be persecuted or even killed. Inhuman, but nothing new, consider: the christian/muslim crusades, the inter muslim killings in Iraq, the perpetual jewish/arab problems, the catholic extermination of the cathars in France, the catholic/protestant christian wars in continental Europe etc, the Spanish inquisition, the aztec sacrifices -all sick violence motivated by religion.
• The Asymmetric Consider those modern faiths in nations that demand our citizens & travellers in their countries abide by their rules, yet they demand we exercise tolerance in our countries, & change our laws to allow their expatriates freedoms even locals aren't allowed Examples:
  • (Sikh turban law for motor bikes in UK as one trivial example, no one being bright enough to develop a large crash helmet & a flatter thiner turban).
  • Women who must cover arms or not even enter some mid/far east places of worship, yet right demanded for those worshippers girls to be taught veiled in French schools.
• The Noisy
• Want to live near an electric amplifier powered Minaret ? ;-) Do you need loud European church bells ? ;-) English bells are loud & bad enough sometimes, but at least they plays tunes, the ones in Bavaria just cluelessly & monotonously repeatedly clang.
• Predators & Loons etc In Germany the no-blood-transfusions-for-their-kids lot (Jehovah's Witnesses) don't bother one in the U-Bahn, they just stand silent holding a note you can read if you want to talk them. Both countries unfortunately have door to door religious pushers though
  Germany outlaws some American sects eg Scientologist & similar : Too many worries about brain washing the impressionable, signing away assets & being held incommunicado, hard to tell if kidnapped. They're here though, under other names. (Look for pavements signs: "Free Personality Test", trabslate it as "Are you gulible & lonely enough ? ")

• Bavarians inflict crosses in many school class rooms It perpetuates brain washing & then adults fail to notice & reject crosses elsewhere. Some find it objectionable.
• At least one major Munich state hospital rooms, has unpleasantly large christian crosses - where patients are supposed to be recovering. For those of other religions & No religion, crosses can be oppressive & make one feel Worse. Remove provocative religious symbols !
• Ugly great crosses pollute the natural landscape at the top of Alpine mountains. ( not all are merely old/ traditional: another was stuck up recently. ) Walk up a whole mountain, increasingly at peace with nature, get to the top, breath in the clean air ... enjoy the immense view ... & be oppressed by some sickies who want to shove your nose in the fact they weirdly believe some bloke was tortured by some other blokes, & in their madness claim the bloke nailed up endured it for you ! How sick & primitive !
• Why not celebrate Real heroes instead ? Instead of all these tedious roadside crosses in catholic countries, complete with cross, nails, & red painted blood, dedicated to a mythic 2000 year old person in mid east; Why not statues of real heroes ? eg the Trudering, Munich, 1990s U-Bahn, worker, who when tunnel was collapsing, ran up then out to warn road users, & got killed by a bus.
• Crosses lower in many bedrooms in Tyrol Austria when skiing. Try to fall asleep to an image of some poor chap nailed up, red painted blood on hands & feet 'n all ! This after walking up stairs & halls, `decorated with lots of smelly old animal heads mounted on the wall, & then they mark death rather birth days of famous people ... Does this verge on a death cult or what ? Sick ignorant believers screw such disgusting imagery into customer bedroom walls ! Take them down & & leave them in the cupboard if you can.
• Some religious people do some good, but others do considerable harm. Some atheists do a lot of good, & others not. Many do good, who we'll fortunately never know what if any religion they have, 'cos its none of our business, & they do Not preach & do the missionary bit that so annoys many people & states.
• Don't waste your money on church donations. Contract out of state collected religious taxes (built into income tax etc). Give the money straight to something directly beneficial like drilling for fresh water in Africa.
• Why does Germany collects income tax for the churches ? (Unless registered citizens contract out). Apparently Hitler did a deal with the churches & it never got rescinded. (Correct me if wrong, but I've heard it many times).
• Ever noticed how much money is spent in Bavarian churches & outside in church yards ? So much expensive polished black marble, gold lettering & other ornamentation ? Bavarian church yards have far more money wasted on them, than to British church yards. Plenty of money for churches, with 2/3rds of the population having a state registered religion, & them all paying 10% on top of normal income tax to the churches (unless one contracts out).
• Why do some German `Lander' inc. Bavaria require a certificate to be bought before one can contract out ? Who gets the certificate fee ? The church I think. Free certificate from some Lander, but not from "Frei Staat Bayern".
• Why do we still have "C of E" (Church of England) in most/ many primary school names in England ? (so common we don't even notice!) Why not control & pay for it from local secular authority ?!
• Why for 6 years did a catholic school continuously cheat, forcing boys into catholic mass (always starting in the name of "School Assembly", until there were regular mini revolutions about 3 times a year, when protestant kids & other non catholics got removed by parents from what was Not morning assembly, but religion, sometimes complete mass with wafer in the mouth, in the chapel, cross dead ahead).
• Why are the catholic hierarchy still so keen on chastity, when it puts extra mental strain on staff. Why let un-naturally stressed people run schools for children, & even worse, boarding schools, where abuse is harder to avoid or report. At one school they owned & ran (fortunately with some lay (ie non religious) staff too), the boys knew some religious brothers were round the twist, most just `normally', but a few nastily, eg the boys only ever trusted themselves 3 or 4 at a time to collect dormitory sheets from one of the religious brothers.
• Why did that catholic boarding school need steel shutters outside on some of the ground floor windows on the 100 year old building ? To keep out stones from the protestant village mob nearby apparently !
• Why do most christians baptise so early, long before they can think & choose for themselves legally at eg 18, legal age of majority in UK ?
• Why do the Jews & some Americans sexually mutilate males, cutting the foreskin of boys. It started as religious, might possibly have made some sense in a hot mid east with no water to wash about 2 centuries back, like avoiding pork, (that goes off fast in the heat,) but makes no sense now.
• Why do some Africans sexually mutilate females ? Religion ? or `tribal custom', or both ? - no difference to a girl at the sharp end.
• Popes cause starvation & pollution: ~Go forth ... with no condoms ... catch Aids ... multiply like crazy ... & Starve ... or pollute an over populated world!~ That's what the message amounts to. The church gets some more believers. The world gets more babies that will grow up to want more fresh water, food, sewage, motor bikes, fridges, cars, & the planet overloads & warms ever faster. Preaching no contraception is Evil.

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What Would Aliens From Space Think ?

• Step outside religious human preconceptions for a minute, pretend you'r an alien with green skin, tentacles, & a brain: How to consider these biped humans ? Perhaps: "Primitive, superstitious natives of no worth! maybe good to eat, same way humans exploit animals ?".
• Consider natives seen in ritual textiles & hats decorated with with feathers or animal hair etc, chanting in mass, singing in procession, revelling sometimes in blood. No not just some old tribe in Africa, but on the road, village to village in Bavaria, or en route again, some frenzied, beating themselves to bleeding over the back with chains (Iraq etc). Consider the violence of some of the sperm carriers (known as `men'), beating healthy egg carriers (known as `women') for the crime of showing a healthy ankle or a slipped veil - Taliban!
• Are these bipeds specimens even weirder than the first limited ones seen remote from space, after the first first electro magnetic radiations leaked from Earth when Radio & TV started. ?
• Consider weird religious antics, eg ultra orthodox jews, some of whom apparently consider turning on a light switch as Work, so they can't do it, (but OK if they employ a non believer to ?). Consider catholics in bavaria strolling about flicking audiences with water from big floppy toilet brushes ( that's what it looks like to a Brit ;-)
• How amusing that these primitive bipeds with their ridiculous religious pursuits consider they've had civilisation for thousands of years, when its obvious from a galactic viewpoint, that Earth civilisation only started about 50 years ago, when human bipeds stopped merely exploding steam engines & finally started transmitting electro magnetic radiations (Radio, TV) that could leak into space & be a first declaration of some limited intelligence.
• Should an alien observer feel anthropological respect for religious primitives ? or contempt ? or amusement at absurd foolish rituals ? Should we strive to be equally objective, & shed our brain washed religious reverence, drummed into us by forebears & society back to when we sat in caves ?

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Seperate Church & State

• Separation of church & state is supposed to be enshrined in the USA constitution. In practice, it doesn't seem so: Watch them swear the oath of office on TV. Watch the president pander to his belief in his god & their religious constituencies.
• Watch the old replays of the British Queen Elizabeth 2nd's coronation, Was there .. or not .. reference to some god ? "I swear by almighty" ? Rather like the default oath swearing in a British court, (though there's some atheist/ agnostic alternative now) Whose god ? Yours ? Mine ? Why should mine be yours ? The neighbours' god ? The immigrants expats's home country god(s) ? A christian, jewish, muslim mono-theist god, or old Nordic, Roman pantheon, ancient Greek teams of gods ?
• Don't expect the state to be keen, the priesthood has always been hand maiden to the monarch in exploiting his subjects (when they're not running the king as puppet too that is ;-)
• "Religion is the opiate of the masses" (Karl Max). It's cheaper than opium too, so a great way to keep the populace busy & satisfied, (though football on television is another pretty handy technique ;-)

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Irreverence

• Maybe god or gods might get tired of humans foolishly arguing about gods in their ignorance. Wise humans would better just try & do more good than harm in this world, & quietly wait, & hope for the best & see if anything comes after. (Or Before, per concept of Pre- (rather than Re- incarnation (c/o Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times) etc ;-)
• (*) No need to switch names from a fairly unique identifier such as Ratzinger to a bland Benedikt the Nth, just 'cos some male got voted into "dead man's shoes" when a catholic sex discriminated job vacancy arose. Clergy changing names, reinventing themselves, doesn't necessarily increase trust. Certain other types of humans change their name too, often for dubious reasons (other than getting married).
• The papal predecessor's assertion of `Papal Infallibility' doesn't cut ice ... Got to be right ? ... What if he was Wrong there too ... Just another stubborn old man who won't be told his wrong ? ... Recursive self justification requires no logic, merely ... faith ? There are lots of words for people who believe in absence of proof, ... gullible, foolish, naive are perhaps some of the less offensive.
• Wouldn't it be nice to see a black/ Asian female Pope with a couple of kids ? Someone who actually understood the world ?
• Wouldn't it be nice if the popes got a tenure of X years, & didn't become ever older, more reactionary, & senile, always dieing on the job.
• The T shirt of a friend says: GOD
  Protect Me
  From your followers!

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Jokes

• Comedian Dave Allen, did a nice sketch: Some believers start praying to god, god turns round & listens, some believer of another religion interrupts, god turns round to listen, another starts, & another etc, all praying to their one god of their one only true religion ... & god (just the one (*)) goes crazy, & covers his ears, deafened by the noise.)
  It was on a half hour transmission from British TV, I think he was perhaps on both ITV & BBC at different times.
• Question:What's the difference between a quarter million lemmings off a cliff, and a quarter million worshippers on one field ?
  Answer: Not much, if they can't keep their legs crossed ;-)

Links

• International Humanist & Ethical Union
• British Humanist Association
• A link to a famous Bavarian anti-papist comedian is due here.
• Please do not email me ! I'm too busy, I just took some time out, as the pope disrupted plans in our city. if you want to chat over a beer some Friday beer garden feel free.