The Public Death of Faith

Religion if it comes late and not inherited from religious parents tends to happen to those involved in self destructive behaviour such as drug addiction alcohol abuse,crime etc who embrace faith on the rebound.Stand on any high st where evangelist preachers are harranguing totally indifferent passers by and the old I was saved by faith from terrible addictions is the familiar tedious and predictable meme.

It never seems to occur to such fanatics that they have merely exchanged one extreme for another and this is not something that just afflicts the lower chav criminal classes,even the likes of Peter Hitchens tells a similar trajectory with in his case mad Marxism and militant atheist thrown into the mix.

With militant Islam converts the same holds true although in many cases they manage to very conveniently combine elements of the old criminal mindset with their new found religion -a heady mix  of drugs,sex ,on the paedophillia  scale taking after Mohumud (piss be upon him) and indeed even their martyrdom is self serving - not for them the reward of being with God amidst heavenly choirs but screwing 70 virgins in a celestial harem.

Those of the criminal fraternity who convert tend to go for extremist fringes of faith or outright cults and   pride themselves on not being of the orthodox organised religion  but instead take their faith neat without any human intermediaries,laying great emphasis on this and somehow imagining that this makes them different in kind from the former,ie pure and uncorrupted when in fact they are merely literalist interpreters of a faith the non literal moderate eschew and are therfor far more dangerous and toxic.

These types can be found in said high streets ignored as I say by the passers by and it does not require humanists or atheists to take up the market place with their counter arguments because the indifference of the crowds to their white noise is more than sufficient as they have rightly concluded that religion is strictly for the birds.