Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? All Play and Carrie Bradshaw Makes Scott an Unholy Boy

One of Bill Maher’s funniest antireligious moments on TV was the time he put up a photo of three asinine-looking clerics at some interfaith dialogue. You had the Greek Orthodox guy in his stupid hat; next to him was a Muslim mullah with the big turban, and then there was this bishop with his big stupid hat. So here are these three old men in Halloween costumes talking about their gods and moralities and the only thing they could agree on was that sex is bad.

“Why is sex bad, anyway?” Sarah Jessica Parker said to me plaintively, in a dream I had from Sex and the City. Actually she didn’t say that; I just wrote it for effect. But I did dream about her. She’s not even my type, physically speaking (I like Asians), but I dreamed of her overnight hugs, kisses, and highly charged intimate passion because her personality in the TV show was so appealing. Well, OK—so was her body, not to mention the gorgeous hair. Obviously the Lord abandoned me that night to my evil thoughts. Within the space of three weeks I dreamed not only of Carrie Bradshaw but also my beautiful Vietnamese physician and my Chinese ex-wife’s sister. At least I got my Asians in there, but the consensus among the religious is that I will burn in hell for all eternity. Repent! I must repent my sinful subconscious!

One thing the religions all agree on is that they each have exclusive rights to the correct answers. Others may be partially correct, but only my religion has all the correct answers. You ask me if my religion offers the correct answers? What a dumb question. Of course it does, otherwise I wouldn’t belong to it, now, would I? I know it’s the correct one because my parents and my clerics and people like me have been telling me so all my life.

It’s so comfortable not to have to think, to have clerics and parents and the lowest common denominator of sheep do the thinking for me.

It is said by some that Mormons believe they will become gods in the afterlife and get their own planet if they’ve been good during their mortal lives. Others deny it, but frankly I am not interested in doing enough research to determine definitively whether Mormon families inherit their own planets. I give it as much credence as Catholics thinking, to paraphrase Bill Maher, they’re actually eating the flesh of a 2,000-year-old dead god when they suck on the wafer. It’s not even worth my time contemplating other than to make it grist for my anti-religion mill. Come on, life is short; use your brain cells for something reasonable. Joseph Smith believed in moon men, for Christ’s sake, who looked like us and lived for a thousand years.

Decades ago, when I was a child in the Netherlands, young Mormon missionaries on bicycles wearing short-sleeved white shirts and skinny ties visited us on a weekly basis to impart priceless truths. My parents were religious nuts too, so we had a weekly Battle of the Religions. I liked the final logic of the Mormons, though: “The thing is,” they said, “all the religions tell you they’re right. The difference is, we know we’re right.”

Right.

By the age of 16, I knew I was done with religion.

Theatre of the Absurd is a regular satirical column at Demockracy