Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
Facebook.
“Useful to whom?” is my usual response.
Useful to authoritarians, yes. Useful to the advancement of social justice and peaceful coexistence? Err…
It has certainly been of no use to me.
it might be useful to concentrate wealth, power and influence into the hands of the few
it might be useful to forge community identity
it might be useful to the individual for hope and (false) comfort
religion’s greatest use is to stop the poor from rising up and slaughtering the rich, on the promise of an afterlife reward, since religion so often fetishes poverty
but useful had nothing to do with true
Historically, religion has been useful for encouraging people to fight in wars … usually wars that couldn’t possibly benefit most of those who risked or lost their lives fighting in them.
As Edwin Starr sang back in 1970: “War (Religion) what is it good for? Absolutely NOTHING!” That it provides comfort to some people does not put religion on a pedestal. It’s an evil con, the biggest single con ever put over humankind. It’s attracted tax-free status in most western countries, on the pretext it does some good. The primary focus of religious charities is to harness more believers. They even admit that, at least the salvation army & st. vinnie de paul admitted in australia in 2004. It’s an evil con and must be discretely removed from society. Get it out of the schools…