Wasting Time

If you devote serious time to the practice of religion, it’s safe to say you practice toilet-bowl time management, flushing much of your precious life down the drain with little or nothing to show for it.

First, you’ll waste a lot of time filling your head with useless nonsense. This includes reading some of the worst fiction ever written. Then there are various rules, laws, and practices to learn.


Seriously, if you have insomnia, try reading religious texts before bedtime. You’ll be asleep faster than you can say Methuselah. It’s the greatest sedative known to man. I have to give props to the Scientologists for at least incorporating space aliens into their stories. It’s a shame Gene Roddenberry didn’t formally invent his own religion; Stovokor sounds like a lot of fun.

Once you finally realize your head has been filled with utter nonsense (if you ever do), you must then purge such garbage from your mind if you want your brain to be functional again. That can take considerably longer, assuming you succeed at all. It’s like trying to uninstall AOL from your hard drive.

Next, you can expect to waste even more time on repetitive ritual and ceremony, such as attending church meetings, praying, Bible studies, daily Bible readings and practicing unproductive meditations.

If I add up the time I attended church and Sunday school, studied religion as if it were a serious subject, and memorized various proof texts, I count thousands of hours of my life I’d love to have back. Now if you really go overboard and throw in learning a dead language for good measure, you can kiss years and years of your life goodbye.

The more time you devote to religious practice, the more you waste your life on a pointless, dead-end pursuit… and the more you’ll want to delude yourself with a phony “He-he, I meant to do that” attitude.

4 comments:

  1. What a powerful and accurate denunciation of the vast mountains of time and energy wasted on religious contemplation and rituals -- time that could better be spent living our lives in fulfilling ways.

    Einstein said, "My appraisal of all religion is that it is superstition made incarnate." This journey is ALL we get. I have no doubts about that now. Live your life; I can think of nothing more horrible than to get to the end of it and realize all of the living that you should have done and didn't do, because it was more important to generate Alpha waves in a religious service.

    My only sister wanted a child, could not find a husband, and felt her biological clock ticking. She knew what most Christians and Christadelphians would think if she went to a sperm bank. I said to her, "To hell with what they think. If having or not having a baby is going to make or break your life, or define your life, then go get one." And she did. And it did indeed define her life, in wondrous ways. That child is now grown, and has presented her with three lovely grandchildren. And all of this would never have happened if she'd remained trapped in Christadelphianism's rank and fetid and oppressive box.

    "Living death." Those are the two words that come most to mind. And I remember when first uttering them, how I was certain in my bones that God would bring down his fury on my head. That in itself is the proof of how they fXXXed with our brains. If Hell did exist, there should be a special place in it for them to drone their tunes and their prattle.

    I grieve for the good people still trapped in their nonsense. May some succeed in freeing themselves from bondage.

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  2. Good on her, sooner or later most intelligent folk realise that the only way that you can actually "live for ever", is to have children, and make a good job of bringing them up, such that they can add a little more to the world than you have been able too.
    Mancott (I think) has previously described "The Kingdom" as some sort of never ending fraternal gathering. They are welcome to it.

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  3. Joseph, I do remember reading that, but I`m not sure if I can lay claim to writing it? However, it`s an horrendous thought. I do, in fact, remember being present on numerous occasions at fraternal gatherings, during the course of which I had the uncomfortable feeling that the speaker was going round and round in a never ending loop, and dragging me along with him. On one occasion, as the brother voicing the concluding marathon of a prayer exhausted himself, and us, and the final strains of the concluding organ voluntary groaned to a halt, a young man sitting near me, commented in a loud voice in the stillness of the assembly, "Thank God that`s over!"

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  4. Fraternal gatherings - yuk. Funerals with compulsory public lecture (presuming the CDs there have forgotten it all and any "strangers" won't be mind-numbed within minutes) - ugh. And weddings (always more horrible and depressing than than funerals) - double yuk and ugh. Blessed were several rum and cokes and strong mints to disguise the haze and even more blessed is not going to them.

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