shakers    Imagine if you would a salt shaker on your dinner table.  Now imagine another shaker on your table, only filled with bullshit.  Most of organized religion is this shaker filled with shit that people add (voluntary or not) to the various dishes and activities in their lives.  Our happy thought experiment plays on the funny human expectations surrounding how we perceive concepts like ‘purity’ and ‘contamination’; the takeaway for our purposes is that it only takes a little bit of shit to ruin your meal or experience; if you still happen to be following the larger meta-thought that I’m artlessly crafting.

We can boil our fruitful thought experiment down even further and generalize.  Take any situation, add shit religion to it, and surprisingly(?) it becomes markedly worse.  Take for instance the phenomena in American society known as “Black Friday”.   The mythological notion that come the last Friday in November businesses are finally out of the red and into the black ink in their ledgers and to celebrate their profitability they are going to sell stuff at wildly discounted prices to demonstrate their thanks to the public for purchasing their stuff.

consumptionorgy   Orgies of consumerism are nothing new in the purposefully designed consumer society, but if we take the shit-shaker of christian religion and add it to the mix we get this:

“Onward, Christian soldiers: Research shows the majority of states where shoppers are most likely to experience violence while shopping on Black Friday are located in the Bible Belt.

According to research recently released by Estately management the top ten states where people are most likely to get into fights over discounted deals on Black Friday are 1) Arkansas, 2) Tennessee, 3) Alabama, 4) Louisiana, 5) Missouri, 6) West Virginia, 7) Oklahoma, 8) Indiana, 9) Kansas, and 10) South Carolina.”

So in the home of the great Moral Majority you’re more likely to get into a fight for that last plasma screen TV at your local retailer.  Now we shouldn’t read too too much into this unscientific poll, but the results hint at the notion that endorsing religious thought (aka delusional shit) makes you a more aggressive, more selfish, let’s just say it; less Christ-like, than people who don’t partake in magical beliefs.
Apparently, the religious table shakers come pre-loaded with a generous portion of irony as well.

 

[Source:Progressive Secular Humanist]