I confess this religion thing has me baffled.

It's not so much that people have a religion, but more in the way that they allow that religion to dictate their lives in the weirdest ways.

Presumably if there is a creator sitting up there in the clouds he is looking benignly down on his creation and smirking at the mess we are making of it.  To amuse himself, he'll chuck in the odd earthquake or plague just to see how we get on with it.  We know he would have a sense of humour as you only have to look at the Duckbilled Platypus, Elephants or James Reilly to see that. 

What really confuses me is the thoughts that go through this creator's mind.

I presume he is happy enough if we all go about our business leading moral lives but why doesn't it end there?  Is he really going to be upset if an Hasidic Jew doesn't wear a black hat or shaves off a beard?  Did he used to lose a night's sleep when Catholics ate meat on a Friday [he must have been relieved what that one was abolished]?  Does he have a hissy fit if an Amish listens to the radio?  What the fuck is all that about?  What the blind fuck has clothing or facial hair got to do with religion?

And then of course we have the real hardball fruitcakes.  Those who go on a murdering rampage because they believe their prophet might have been offended by a cartoon.  It's not a god we are talking about here but a prophet who is considerably lower on the pecking order.  If someone who is dead for the last fifteen hundred years worries about a cartoon then we are all in trouble.

I hear these murdering scum want to die as they will be martyrs [in their addled minds].  They want to head off to their seventy or whatever virgins, who by now must all have had a right good shagging what with all those suicide bombers who got there first.

I say let them be martyrs if that's what they want.  In fact I say let all radical muslims and would be jihads die a martyr's death.

Stick 'em all on a ship and sink it in shark infested waters.

Then everyone will be happy.

Even the sharks.

But maybe not the virgins?