You will not get a fight from me.

Jack - I've had little else from you as you persist brawling over at least two threads that I know of when all I've done is offered the observation that religion arises from people's spiritual needs in order to profit from them in the same way Pornography profits from people's sexuality. Neither Porn nor Religion is real - they both trade in lies, stereotype and the manipulation of the most fundamental and most beautiful aspects of our humanity and reduce them into badly lit, clichéd, laughable, formulaic parodies of the real thing. At their worst of course, they are the cause & justification of human abuse of the worst order - dehumanising the victim by making them complicit in regimes built on inquisition, human trafficking, paedophilia, torture, genital mutilation, bondage and drugs (and that's just religion).

These are the things I find offensive, Jack the Sailor - things that are enshrined in the very institution of a myriad mutually exclusive belief systems perpetuated in the mistaken faith that there is a God out there who gives a fuck. The only evidence for this in is the centuries old ravings of idiots whose ideas were redundant as soon as they hit the page, however so fascinating they might be historically. Again I feel obliged to mention Ryland's Papyrus P52 which I often go to see if I'm passing. This is a construct of human myth - nothing more. If people attach to it any greater significance the they are acting in a way that negates the very notion of our common human right to freedom of thought and the enlightenment that arises therefrom.

Like Folk Music and Model Railways, Religion is just one small part of a vast common human reality encompassed by the barely conceivable vastness of the cosmic scheme which we've been trying to figure out these past 50,000 years and more. Our landscapes are patterned with attempts - from the Thornborough Henges to the Large Hadron Collider - which a testimony to our innate inquisitiveness, itself just as much a part of our humanity as the darker sides that would drag it all into the mire of ignorance as manifest by Religion, Pornography, War, Thatcherism, UKIP, etc etc.

The Atheist looks upon the world as being common to all; the Religious see that God created it only judge a chosen few to inherit his rancid scheme, whatever that scheme may be; there are a fair few of them - all of which are made up, and all of them perpetuated by those who seek comfort in their fear of death by putting such errant nonsense into the heads of the innocent.