It’s been a long time since I have posted to my blog, because things have been so busy at work and at home, but I feel I have to comment on this.

In case you haven’t been following the news, Dr. George Tiller, who was known for providing late term abortions, was killed this Sunday. He was shot to death while sitting in church.

Now, you may know my position on abortion, which is that it’s a necessary evil (there’s a clever little epigram that says conservatives need to recognize abortion is a necessary evil, liberals that it’s a necessary evil), so we should take steps to reduce the need for them. But I’m also committed to the stance that–for most cases outside of severe deformity of the fetus, or imminent danger to the mother’s life–the later the operation is performed, the more unconscionable it becomes. Still, he didn’t deserve to be killed.

Bill O’Reilly (whose word you should always take with a grain of salt, if not a whole salt lick) would have us believe that Tiller was killing babies right before their heads breached the birth canal, and was calling it “late term.”

I guarantee you he wasn’t. And for a guy who bills himself as ‘No-Spin,’ O’Reilly sure got people spun up over ‘Tiller the Baby Killer.’

Granted, O’Reilly wasn’t directly responsible for inciting the man to murder Tiller, but the baby-killing meme that he gives platform to is dangerous, and his singling out of Tiller is despicable.

I have been thinking a lot lately about where I came from, and I realized there is a huge problem with Christianity. Where do people come from? I mean, our ’souls’? The obvious reason for the lack of explanation is that religion is entirely a construction of man, and men are far more preoccupied with where they are going when they die than where they were before they were born, but let’s just humor the idea for a moment.

It’s possible, I’m sure, to come up with some half-baked explanation that fits with the bible, but the fact remains that it just doesn’t say. That’s right, the book of infinite wisdom, and everything you would ever need to know, provides no answer. I think that we should let that sink in.

We could imagine, as I am sure Christians do, that souls are created at the moment of conception, but then where do all the spontaneously aborted fetuses go? Heaven, or hell? They surely haven’t had the chance to sin yet, so they must go to heaven, right? If so, abortion should be OK, right? Christian women should be happy to abort their babies if it guarantees that they will go to heaven. One sin, for which they can be forgiven, can be their child’s ticket to everlasting bliss. Seems like a worthy sacrifice to me.

The alternative to this is of course that the soul is created the body some time later in the pregnancy, but then their whole ‘moment of conception’ pro-life stand is bullshit.

The other explanation is that we exist before, and that god assigns us a body. If that is so, then our souls have to be somewhere, heaven or hell, before conception. Nothing leaves hell, and unless you are a Catholic, heaven is the only alternative, so we have all experienced heaven before. Following that line of logic, since god is omniscient, he knows before we are born if, at conception, he is sentencing a sinless being to hell. Which makes him a pretty cruel motherfucker to go through with it. If we all stop having kids, however, then they can’t go to hell, and when we die, every family member we would ever have would meet us graciously at the gates of heaven. We could forgo the apocalypse, and all join god’s army, and single-handedly destroy sin. You may argue that that would be tampering with the will of god, but if anything ever happens at all, it must be the will of god. God allowed Hitler. In fact, me saying this right now is the will of god.

Shit! How easy it is to slip into this nonsense.

The point is, where we come from says a lot more about metaphysics than where we are going, and we are left to imagine. The bible explains nothing — not like we didn’t already know that — , but the only explanations we have are sheer fantasy, concocted on the spot to fill in the gaps that the religion has left, and if you are religious, you know damn good and well that, as you were reading this, you were trying desperately to fill in the gaps.

I have the answer for you though: religion is fake. There is no reason to believe in any of it, other than being indoctrinated at a young age, and having a mind so weak that you cannot cope with death, so that you have to make believe you are going to live forever. Where do we come from? Nowhere. And we are soon to be going back. If you can’t wrap your head around the impermanence and inconsequentiality of your life, then you are arrogant indeed.

Merry Christmas.