The Real Apocalypse

I have a nit to pick with the religious nuts who are running rampant in the world today. These fanatics kill in the name of "love" or blow themselves and others up in the name of a "merciful" god. These lunatics want blood to flow.

I'm driven to despair to find the words. Here's a bit that sums it up for me:

In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today’s Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.

This is from an article entitled "What they Hate about Mumbai" by Suketu Mehta in the NY Times.

Christianity has its reforming fanatics such as Savanarola and the Muslims have their moujthpieces of God who speak through massacres such as Bin Ladens. As Mehta points out, these religious fanatics refuse to allow people to live their own lives and instead want to straightjacket them into some ridiculous religious vision of a "pure" life:

Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India, symbols of the city that gives the industry its name. It is no wonder that one of the first things the Taliban did upon entering Kabul was to shut down the Bollywood video rental stores. The Taliban also banned, wouldn’t you know it, the keeping of songbirds.