Down with religion! Uncage your humanity!

I was feeling trollish earlier, looking through the answers to the latest LJ Writer's Block for people who said they would free zoo animals. I fully expected for people to block me, but this one guy failed to rise. We actually had an interesting conversation. I still think he's wrong, and deluded, but it was interesting all the same. I didn't realize until today that maybe the reason I go trolling sometimes is to find someone who won't rise up in anger no matter how hard I push them, who actually has interesting points and is willing to listen in return.

Part of what I came up with in our back-and-forth was this:

Him: wish it would be like that just as you said... well what kind of anilam you want to set free?

Me: What animal I'd free? I'd set humanity free from the shackles of religion. Religion has been keeping humanity in ignorance and in denial of its basic instincts by forcing modesty, body hatred, self-hatred, sex shame, discourages free and open thought and inquiry, and other things. Religion makes slaves of us all. If God isn't dead, we should murder him.

~ ~ ~

I understand spirituality is important to some people, like Fay. I'm not saying anything against that. Religion is to spirituality as rape is to consensual sex. Spirituality and consensual sex can be beautiful things. Religion and rape, on the other hand, are horrible abuses of power. Religion is spiritual rape. It is the violence of forcing other beliefs on people, of forcing conformity. I liken religion to the kind of rape done against homosexual, bisexual, or trans folk by heterosexual cis-gendered fearful assholes. Just as those people think you can rape someone straight, or rape the queer away, so does the institution of religion think they can mind-rape people into submission and conformity.

Which goes along with my next quote:

Him: so we have to cage every animal for their survival... i don't think so... let's cage some humans too...

Me: Not every animal. Just the endangered ones, to help them breed.

And aside from humanity's metaphorical cages, thousands of humans are in cages now for no crime other than using chemicals to enhance their perceptions of reality. Then there are the people imprisoned or worse for wanting to freely express their love for someone who happens to be the same sex as them.

Humanity is the most caged animal of all.

And, of course, for expressing a gender other than the one assigned to them by society.

Oh, and then there's this, a response to my first quote above:

Him: woh what an idea! why do you think like that? are you an atheist?

Me: I'm a LaVeyan Satanist. We're like atheists, except that atheists are just as much tools of the oppressors as those who go to church. They all have basically the exact same values as church-goers. They still have body shame, sex shame, and so on. They still balk at open explorations of sexuality, and cringe at public nudity. Atheists like to think they've broken out of their cages, but in truth they're just in denial.

And it's true. They reject a very specific God and mythology, but just like Christians they filter all other religions through Christianity-colored lenses. To hear them speak, you'd think the only God was the Christian one, the only religion Christianity or Judaism. Sometimes I can't tell if I'm talking with a Christian or with an atheist.

Even the ones who don't act like the only religion is Christianity still tend to take the party line in regards to agreeing with all of society's rules, no matter how fucked up they may be. An atheist who is a free thinker is a rare gift indeed. Maybe that's what attracts so many of them to LaVeyan Satanism.