What set me off on this is The Militant Atheist's display of her formidable ire against judicial sanction for State Sponsored Religion. At the time of going to press, the hapless Mr. Anthony Kennedy and others hadn't stumbled upon her page yet, so we can only conjecture how the tirade will affect their nervous systems.
IMOVHO, ninety nine percent of The Ten Commandments (nos 1, 2 and 10, to be precise) are pure balderdash. Particularly, my grouse is with "Thou shalt not covet your neighbour's house". Now, my neighbour happens to be a Friendly Neighbourhood Software Company, with central AC and heating, an extremely comfortable Yellow Couch in the lobby, a 4 mbps dedicated internet line, several dozens of PYTs all over the place, and, most importantly, a young chief who drives there everyday in her hip Camry (I must reiterate my staunch allegiance to Commandment 7 here, but I don't think she looks the married type). How, I ask you, can one, in such an unsupportive environment as this, not covet one's neighbour's house?
Likewise, "Thou shalt have no other Gods besides Me". I wonder what makes whoever it is that write commandments, write a set of fine, fine commandments and then spoil all the good work with one or two (and, rarely, like in this case, as many as three) utterly foolish ones. This is simply not done. You can't just, in one stroke, mercilessly delist all those millions of Gods, Goddesses, Godlets and Godettes, whose names we learnt at the knees of our doting mothers, and who we have grown to know, admire and love so much. And, what about the Gods and Goddesses of the neo-Greek variety? It is a most cruel experience to be told, every time you swoon over a Keira or a Preity, that you have acted in direct contravention of Commandment-2, and have hence earned yourself 200 princely lashes. No siree, not done at all.
For the sake of completeness, though, I must concede that I also sort of like, if that's the word I want, one or two of them Commandments. Like "Thou shalt not murder", which I think is a very, very noble motto to live by. And I mostly try to abide by it. For example, when I went to the friendly neighbourhood grocer yesterday and asked for a tube of Close-Up, and he tried to sell me a tube of Fevi-Kwick, I did not murder him. Also, importantly, one mustn't ignore the fact that the concept of God itself hasn't been entirely without some few fringe benefits. Like a few holidays round the year. In fact, in one of my better moods, I might even stoop to arguing that this one benefit far outweighs any of the aforementioned drawbacks. A few days' less work means the world to me.
So, essentially, it all simmers down to this: in every atheist in the world, including me, beneath all that superficial anti-God rhetoric, if you care to look deep enough, you will find a real, and even more utterly hopeless atheist. But, like many other luminaries of our time, I am also a very practical man; I like my holidays. And many of them are, as stated, thanks to the Lord, our God. May His clan increase. (To hell with Commandment 2!)
Fine print: When I am not ignoring God, I am usually hunting for thirty-ton, thirteen-legged, fire-spitting, man-eating dragons in my cupboard. But because I'm bored of hunting for thirty-ton, thirteen-legged, fire-spitting, man-eating dragons in my cupboard, I don't do it anymore. So I have no choice in the matter, really. If you, however, generally do not like ignoring the dragons, you are welcome to ignore this post instead.
