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From the Ministry of Silly Ideas comes the government's latest impressively stupid proposal: not content with making huge cuts to public services like post offices, they've now decided that the few that are left should be handed over to god-botherers. Because, of course, that's what our post offices really need: forget having to walk long distances to get there after your local one was closed, or having to face huge queues when you get there 'cos everyone's flocked to the last remaining ones, what people really don't like about post offices is the fact that they're not churches. What?

The most obvious objection to this is quite simply: what's the point? Letters have been posted and delivered for hundreds of years now without entrusting them to people who peddle fairytales, so why start now? In a rare case of a Bishop having something useful to say, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres gave us the answer when he described it as a sign of the government's support for religious groups. In other words, it won't help deliver better public services, but it will give scrounging bishops and similar preaching parasites a good excuse to milk more money from the state to try and prop up their failed ideology. He also spoke about the way that churches used to play a more central function in the community, but skipped over the reason why they don't play that role any more - the simple fact that people have realised their ideas don't make any sense and don't offer us any real answers, so they've abandoned them.

If the useless politicians who came up with this scheme really can't understand why religion is such a harmful force, they could do worse than turn their attention to Boston, where members of One Mind Ministries are being tried for starving a 16-month-old boy to death because it didn't say "Amen" after meals. The boy's mother has agreed to a plea bargain on the condition that all charges will be dropped if the boy is miraculously resurrected, and her attorney has come out with the wonderful claim that "she wasn't delusional, because she was following a religion." This may be an extreme case, but it serves to illustrate the basic problem common to all religions: when the needs of real living human beings clash with the desires of their imaginary gods, they will always side with the latter - often with horrific results.

We should be cheering on the decline of churches, not trying to reverse it, and especially not by pouring cash into these decaying, irrelevant institutions. We can live freely without gods, we can behave morally without the threat of eternal damnation scaring us into obedience, so why the hell (no pun intended) should we need the help of the invisible man in the sky to post a letter?
Sin dios!

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