Religion is Stupid, Period.

Working at a public library is interesting, and I'll tell you why: It's the only job I know of in which you're able to see a completely accurate cross-section of the community you live in. Therefore, if your library is in a crappy part of town, the patrons who frequent it are far more likely to be certifiably insane than if it's located in a suburb. At my library, we get a mix of a little bit of everything. The fact that we're located between two wealthy suburbs and the city of Columbus means that we get everything from wealthy, stay-at-home white moms to illegal immigrants forging documents with the copier.

Now, I need to start this off by saying that I'm generally a pretty congenial person. I'm pleasant with people who ask me questions, (no matter how inane those questions might be) and I try to be as helpful as possible without tearing my eyeballs out of their sockets in frustration. There is, however, one group of people in the community that I love to fuck with: The religious nuts.

There is a sizable homeschooling community around the library, and nearly every family that is a part of it is "Christian." You see what I did there? I put "Christian" in parentheses because this particular demographic believes that to be Christian you have to think and do the exact same things that they do. ("Oh you didn't have Corn Flakes for breakfast? Well I did, and I'm Christian so you're going to hell!") I really wouldn't mind these people if they would all go hide in a cave somewhere and quit bothering the rest of us, but the problem is that they seem to be fond of breeding and then filling the heads of their offspring with nonsense, while completely sheltering them from anything real or tangible. Home-schooled kids aren't kept at home because their parents actually think they could do a better job of teaching the required curriculum than certified teachers. No, these kids are kept at home so that they don't "accidentally" learn anything that might cause them to question their steadfast faith in a book that was hastily thrown together almost two thousand years ago, and whose misogynistic authors spent more time promoting their own, personal agendas than actually trying to make logical sense of anything.

There is one little boy in particular who visits the library at least once or twice a week and is an avid reader. He would be very intelligent if his mother could pull her head out of her ass for long enough to realize that filling innocent children's heads with complete nonsense is probably some form of child abuse. Here is how my encounters with this boy usually play out:

Me: "Hi!"

Kid: "Hi! I'm looking for a good book to read."

Me: "Ok, well do you have a favorite type of book?"

Kid: "I like fantasy! Oh, but I'm not allowed to read anything with magic, witchcraft, superheroes, monsters, killing, or scary things."

Me: "........."

On occasion, he's also asked me for non-fiction titles:

Me: "Hi!"

Kid: "Hi! I'm looking for this one book. It's got a long-necked dinosaur on the cover."

Me: "Hmmm, well we have lots of books about dinosaurs. Do you remember anything else that was on the cover of the book?"

Kid: "Yeah! It had Jesus on the cover too!"

Me: ".........."

To be fair, the kid actually made my job a lot easier with that qualifier, since I simply had to swivel around in my chair so that I was facing our delightfully small section of 290s, and pull out the only world "history" book that's shelved in that section. Sure enough, there was a brachiosaurus and Jesus on the book jacket. Had this child been allowed to attend a regular public school, I'll bet he would have known that it was a brachiosaurus, but since he lives under a rock, he had to resort to calling the animal by its "Land Before Time" name. Fantastic.

So you see, you really can't blame me for deciding to take matters into my own hands with these kids. If their parents are going to try to destroy any chance of them ever becoming productive, functional human beings, it becomes my job to plant the seeds of doubt into their heads, one book at a time. If I can't give them the Harry Potter books, I can at least give them The Giver by Lois Lowry, and I know their parents won't complain or try to find "questionable content" in that one because it's a Newbery winner...suckers. (On a side note, the majority of religious nuts who refuse to allow their children to read the Harry Potter books do so not because the books have magic in them, but because J.K. Rowling is a champion of reason, logic, and tolerance, and her characters who exhibit overly religious qualities such as blind faith and xenophobia are punished with not only their own deaths, but the death of everything they stand for.)

Unfortunately, I work at a public library, which means we must serve the needs of the public, and if our patrons demand books full of religious bullshit, then that's what we have to buy. For instance, yesterday I was unpacking some new books, and we received a series of books called, "The Chosen Girls." In case you are unfamiliar with "The Chosen Girls," (and I certainly hope you are) they're three teenagers who decide that God wants them to form a Christian rock band so that they can share their religion with those who actually like that kind of music, and force it down the throats of those who don't. Also, they look like Bratz except with crosses on their eyeballs:

I tried reading the first couple of pages of one of these monstrosities and I almost lost my breakfast, so I had to stop. No child deserves this kind of torment, and those crossy eyeballs are enough to give any normal kid nightmares for a week. Also, last time I checked, most "Christian" parents were kind of against the whole "Jem" look. If I didn't think it would possibly get me fired, I would slip notes inside each and every one of these excuses for books that read:

Dear Kids!
Jesus is make-believe, just like Santa! He is a tool
your parents are using to control your behavior,
except they want you to believe that if you get on
Jesus' "naughty" list, he doesn't bring you coal, he
simply allows you to be raped by demons and set on
fire for all eternity.

Your parents don't KNOW what happens after death.
They're just so freaked out by the idea that we
might simply cease to exist that they're desperate
to believe anyone's ideas, no matter how stupid they
are. If you truly believe that in order to be a good
person, every Sunday you have to drink the blood and
eat the body of a zombie carpenter who claimed to
be his own father, and force other people to do it
too, for the sake of the rest of the world, please
move to Texas and stay there. Once we've got you
all in the same state, we're going to go ahead and
nuke it.
Thanks!!:)

Maybe I will stick notes in those books. After all, it's not defacing the book in any way, and religious people shove pamphlets in my hands all the time. Why shouldn't I do the same to them?

Lastly, I'd like to say that if you're religious and you've been offended by this post, "GET OVER IT." Religion is going the way of the dodo, and we're just going to have to be satisfied that there are some questions we can't answer. If Jesus were alive today, he would hate Christians so much that he would build a time machine, set the dial to 2,000 years ago, and beat the crap out of himself so that the whole religion would never come to exist. Then he'd set the dial forward about 600 years and find Muhammad so that they could compare their awesome beardage.




Yes, I drew a picture of Muhammad, I will draw more pictures of Muhammad, and all of them will be comical. Deal with it. Also, the next time that one kid asks for a fantasy book, I'm handing him the Bible.