-- The Dead Kennedys, "Religious Vomit"

Welcome. You are about to be treated to the ABJ "Godless Heathen Edition". I’ll just launch right into it from the get-go -- be ready to hear a tirade on religion, schools, stupidity, and just about anything else that comes into my head. If there is one thing I hate it’s religion. Not only is it a bunch of pie-in-the-sky fantasy designed to keep oppressed people passive and accepting -- remember all that garbage about only the poor getting to heaven, and the meek inheriting the earth -- but it’s just so stupid when you stop to think about it for even a second. I mean, sure it may have seemed credible in the Middle Ages -- it really sits well with a bunch of ignorant serfs who believe in magic, witches, vampires and all that -- but how can anyone believe it today. Give me a break.

I remember being in high school and a fellow student actually believed that if you flew up in an aeroplane you could see Heaven and angels in the cloud tops. He claimed he’d seen pictures -- I didn’t bother asking the name of the tabloid. This amount of ignorance has always been a mystery to me -- whatever happened to the Enlightenment, or even common sense for that matter. This particular mystery was solved when I met the student’s Uncle and found out that he thought the sun was a reflective piece of aluminum foil God had placed in the sky. But not everyone who believes this God thing is an ignorant Peon. Or are they? What’s going on?

Well, in short, religious people are weak and gullible. Not that they were necessarily born that way, although some certainly were, but because they are made that way by our culture and our school system.

The school system is about turning out a bunch of "good workers" -- mindless clones who don’t think too much. The only thing I learned in school was "be on time", "don’t talk back", "shut up and do it". Perfect for bosses who want obedient workers to arrive on time to punch the time clock on a production line, but a little less useful for creating thinking people. I got detentions repeatedly for lateness, and that’s about all I can remember of school. And Mike Harris wants to dumb us all down even further by eliminating "unproductive" subjects like art, history, and the social sciences. Even at the university level, Harris sees these things as a waste of resources. I mean, we can’t afford to have all these jobless academics running around making trouble can we? I mean look at this Zine for example...

Anyway, the school system melts minds. For a start it teaches the bare minimum of history, letting people grow up without knowing about the Winnipeg General Strike, the Russian Revolution, Louis Riel, or for that matter even about World War II. I knew a proud graduate of Ontario High Schools who thought his father had died fighting for Canada’s freedom against the Russians in World War II.

What you are taught in school is a crock -- I tried as hard as I could to forget everything I was told at the end of each year in order to minimize the long term damage. But mostly the system just let you get by without learning anything. The real lesson plan is to break your spirit. I remember that a whole year in Grade 6 we just copied stuff off the board -- no attempt was made to discuss stuff and we were never even tested on it. I wrote down hundreds of pages of stuff off a black board about History, Geography, etc and to this day I can’t understand the point. Didn’t learn a thing, don’t remember it at all -- except as a sort of endless hell.

And you aren’t supposed to ask questions -- just sit back and be told. They get you used to hierarchy and their absolute authority at a very young age. Get you used to that Paternalism, let it grow in young minds...

And whatever the system doesn’t do to you directly, it turns a blind eye to while it’s done by your peers. The trendy "in crowd" try to break you, especially if you’re smart or different. They’re a bunch of xenophobic morons, conditioned like the Hitler youth to smash those who don’t conform. And the system looks away. At least this is how it all went in the seventies and eighties -- maybe things are looking up now -- I don’t know.

Anyway that’s how you get a bunch of people ignorant enough to believe in religion, because it’s just an extension of the teacher at the front of the class. Because "our Father" is just like Big Brother -- catching you in all your sins. And every day when I was in school they made you say prayers to "Him" in school. "Our father who art in heaven...". All that Amen stuff is for fools, people who want to believe that the next life will be better because they were too cowardly to face up to making this world a better place.

And the whole patriarchal nuclear family is just one more extension and reflection of the big Dad in the sky -- watching over you, but beating you down if you get out of line. I hate your religions, and the ignorance that makes it live on. And most of all I hate the system that lets this stuff be, that uses this ignorance as a prop to preserve its power and privilege.

"Religion is the opiate of the masses" -- better smoke some today, because tomorrow their whole fucking dream world is gonna be toppled.

God, I fucking hate your religion. And if God existed I’d hate him as well.