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Religion
I must say I am tempted. $100,000 per movie, or per director more accurately. That is 3,000,000 baht which I have to work very hard to earn. I could pay for someone here to do it for me and still make a tidy prophet, (see what I did there!).
As an atheist I would not be killing because of any perceived insult to a deity but because the movie is, by all accounts, appalling. I would also extend the same service to any movie with Adam Sandler and Jake Galafianakis if they paid enough. There are no standards today, art, from books and TV to movies and painting and music, is deemed good by the mere fact it has been made at all. It is seen as elitist to criticise, unfair to the perpetrators of crap, so this Railways minister is to be lauded and not criticised, even if his motives may be questionable.
All this reaction to this movie just plays into the hands of atheists like me. Or actually not like me, more like Richard Dawkins, who is a more aggressive type of atheist because he wants change. He wants a world free of religion and does what he can to achieve it, whereas I see that as a futile quest and am more prepared to go with the flow. I live in a Buddhist country but that religion (way of life) is not exempt either because it imposes a set of strictures, or beliefs and, as practiced here, prevents people from taking responsibility for their own actions or thinking for themselves. Seeing how Buddhism is practiced here you would assume its purpose is not to instill some morality in people, but as a supplier of lucky numbers and fortune telling.
I can't imagine what it must be like to be hungry. I mean really hungry, not just because you had to skip lunch today, but because you have no food or any prospect of getting any. Or to be dying of cancer, racked with pain. Or to imagine what I would feel like if someone murdered Ploy. Would I look for something else, some meaning, some better future; would I look to some mythical being who could provide that, who change things for the better. Rationally, as I write this, I would say no, it would be a pointless exercise and in some ways demeaning of everything I have been taught and everything I have tried to comprehend. But the fact is I do not know.
But I can understand the need, to find some meaning where none may be apparent, (and why does there have to be meaning). Science can and will provide answers to most things, to why I have cancer and not a politician, but it can't answer all the why me questions. And unless we eradicate all these reasons there is no hope for religion to disappear anytime soon. And there is also one reason for some belief in afterlife or meaning or purpose that may prove difficult to eradicate, and that is death.
And even, even if we do all of that. Well the next possible president of the United States is a Mormon and the candidate before that was a Creationist. These people are not on the poverty line so how do we explain their need to believe in something so irrational. No the whole prospect of eradicating religion is futile and the more reactionary atheists become the more they demean themselves. Our satisfaction will come in the I told you so seconds before Armageddon.
Mankind will do what it will do and for the last four or five millennia, that has been to destroy itself. Maybe religion is just nature's way of telling us to chill out. Or else.