Religion is fiction is the best bumper sticker I have seen in ages. But it comes with a price. And, the price is revulsion and retaliation by on-lookers. But it is a good price to pay because the more people respond to this message, the more accurate the message of the bumper sticker is.

Let me tell you what I feel when I received this email from Atheist Republic.

The initial impulse, was "hey, Atheists got it right this time, we hit 'em religion and all people who claim religion as their purpose in life".

But on second thoughts, I said, "hey, hang on, let's see why they are so mad at the bumper sticker, and  let's see whether we can stick to them better, or maybe, just maybe, we got it wrong".

How then should we approach ourselves and tell the world our feelings and our experience with regard to religion and religious experience?

I am no Guru but I know through direct experience and pain that religion is a fake. I believe so strongly that religion is made up. Therefore, religion is fiction. Very true. (This argument is true because it is logical. My own testimony).

Am I biased, prejudiced, bigoted or one-sided in my argument and accusation that religion is definitely an invention? Let me tell you my story.

I was a person who was religious almost the entire period of my life, and especially during my adult life. But the people I have come across more vain, deceptive and cruel, are religious people. They don't have to be fanatics. They just need to be themselves, and, even in kindness they are deceiving themselves and then they try to deceive you.

Why am I saying this? Because all my entire life, I have modelled my actions, judgments. moral values and codes on religion. And, religion has failed me. It has failed me because I represent that small portion of humanity who cannot believe something when it is said one way and then it is acted or shown another way. It doesn't match so when you put this to religion, the believers will always say that a divine hand is at work here: either He is testing mortals or He has a Plan that we don't know and cannot possibly know.

Which of course, in our present juncture in history is all crap.

My experience with religion is dramatic as well as tragic.My personal life has been ruined because of religion. I cannot see any other paths other than religion. But religion kills all morality in human terms (not divine nor sacred terms).

Religion is an education that makes you increasingly stupid.

You can't go too far to describe religion by giving an example. I will provide one here. If you go for a dump, your shit is the worst thing that you would like to to jettison at that point in time. But the urge is biological: you can't help it. Now, if you were to consider the moment you ingested foods, then that is where the parallax or inconsistency or incongruence begins. If you ate animals, they had the same functions and organs like you, yet you cut them, cleaned them, cooked them and ate them. You evidently made it  edible at the retail level and presentable at the dining table level. That the shit was formed in the animal, nobody wants to know.

That the animal also ingested foods that were insects, vegetation, meats or other animals, do not bother you. That this went through a chemical process in their body like ours, doesn't seem to concern us. You just happen to like this (cleaned?) animal you got from your favorite grocer, and you even specified the special portion of the animal's organ for a consummate way of cooking, i.e. consumption.

That we do this regularly shows how vain we are because if we can't stand our dump, yet we also ate the thing that has exactly the same organs and functions like we have, and still dumps, yet we separate these from our conscious thought and say, hey, this animal is already processed just for us, so it is okay for us to consume and then take a dump.

Now, if this line of reasoning fails that religious believer who was fatuously upset over that glaring yet simple bumper sticker, Religion is fiction, let me give another example.

This time, it has got to do with the air with breathe. Air has weight but we can't see. Dark Matter has weight but we can't see. That some people in the past who claim to be the direct recipient of a very special message from God said that there are things that have weight that you can pass through them and vice versa, and equate that to some jinns, angels and devils, sitting across your shoulders recording your actions (and obviously being voyeuristic at the same time) comes across as evidently true to religion and therefore to its believers. That this is superstition never occurred to them but they see something they would like to see: a miracle so people who believe in miracles, "see" miracle therefore have "faiths". That this scientific fact is summoned to be the reason why this was predicted 1400 years ago by an illiterate and mad person whose personage was later accorded the greatest personality ever lived, cannot easily be surmised to a mental condition that is symptomatic of hallucinations and/or schizophrenia makes one wonder how scholars see this as coming from God and licensed themselves to become the best group of fiction writers the world has ever seen.

To say that Dark Matter is now a new physical phenomena that ages far beyond our best calculations of the Universe, and to say that a darling prophet saw this 1400 years ago is where religion is like an infant. In fact, as science discovers, they say that prophet already said or predicted that.

Like he predicted Ebola.

This isn't about a prophet or son of God or one who speaks to God on a mountain; it isn't even about one religion or many of the other polytheistic religions that to date we know these figures are fiction.It is about creating our new bumper sticker that should read: Evidence isn't Ignorance.

- Onn Ibrahim