The Gospel of Margaret Cho

If you truly believed in Jesus, you would try to be like him and love us, fags and dykes and feminists all. God bless you, even you. You fucking fuckers.

Margaret Cho says God gets her, but I think she really gets God. I’m an atheist, which basically means that I don’t “get” most “religious” people, who are really mean and, frankly, stupid, since they don’t pay any attention to reality, or worse, actively reject it.

There are a lot of good religious people (like Cho), of course, but in my experience they are outnumbered to a rediculous degree. For this reason I feel bad for them. They might be going the right way on a one-way street, but the heavy traffic going the wrong way has basically made the sign moot.

I don’t think whether we are religious or not should matter to anyone — because it simply reveals nothing useful to other people. I knew Margaret Cho was good a long time ago, and only now do I learn she is a devout Christian. I’m happy for her if it makes her happy, but it has no bearing on my judgement of her, except I super-double love people who call out mean people over their hypocritically pious meanness.

George Bush is religious; I consider this inarguably true. He says he is, and I have no reason to doubt him. However, he is also evil, which I and a lot of other people find inconvenient in a politician.

But whether we are good should matter a hell of a lot more than it does. That should be the scale we weigh our friends on — and our candidates.

Update: I rest my case:

A new poll finds that nearly six in 10 white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified […]

The findings of this poll, which did not define torture, compared to a Pew Research Center poll from February that found that 48% of the general public think torture can be justified.