Genie in a bottle

Today Smacking: Religion at large

I don't want no unlimited cash flow or unrivalled beauty. If I found a genie in a bottle today and he offered me just the one wish, it would be this: that never in the entire history of our world nor in the future to come, did organised religion or will organised religion ever exist.

I have felt this way for a long time but stumbling across news stories from a few years ago, such as this one, serve to remind me how strongly I feel about this.

I can pose my own argument against this viewpoint with any help, thanks. I know what you're going to say, and it's this: if there never was or never will be any religion, where do we draw our commandments from? Who compels us not to kill, not to covet, not to steal? Will we not live in anarchy and chaos, like Hieronymus Bosch's famous depiction of man's descent from grace?

Me, I believe in human decency, even if I do almost daily want to smack someone. With an ounce of intellect and a complete lack of dogma I think we could sort ourselves out. I like to fantasise that everything we do would be for the intuitive good, the good we all have inside of us, and not because of some ancient set of rules designed to manipulate and control a lost populace existing several thousand years ago when our brains were probably more akin to dried figs for all the use they were.

But that's just a fantasy, because religion has already served to royally fuck huge parts of the world, and it's going on all around us today. So I guess what I really want from the genie is the same thing we all say we'd wish for. World peace, thanks. And I suppose a few million big ones wouldn't go astray, either.