Word of the day: Religionard

I’m going to do a series on words and phrases. Some of these will be ones I made up, others will be borrowed. I’ll tell you which ones those are. First up, one of mine :-

Religionard

Now before we go any further, let’s make something clear: I don’t hate all religious people, in fact I'm very fond of quite a few of them, even though we will never agree about this. I do have serious issues with some religious people, though, and that’s why I need a new word, to differentiate between the nice people I know who happen also to be religious, and the nutjob fruitcake headbangers whom I would cheerfully strangle if only I were allowed to, in order to get them to shut the fuck up. And stop them trying to interfere in my life, or anyone else’s, because of their absurd delusions.So I thought I’d put ‘religion’ and ‘retard’ together to sum up the ones I want to identify.

So what, exactly, is a religionard?

Religionard n. a person whose faith in whichever invisible being or beings he or she happens to believe in is such that it causes them to reject all information that might be a challenge to that faith; someone who believes in the literal truth of a holy book; someone who believes pseudoscience that agrees with their preconceived belief and denies real science when it conflicts with that view; someone who attempts to have their crackpot theories and pseudoscience taught in schools as if they were true; someone who refuses to allow their children to learn real science because it is in conflict with their unproven beliefs; someone who attempts to convert others to their point of view with no respect for those others’ prior beliefs or cultural traditions.

There might be a few more in there, but I’ll add them later.

Now let’s be clear; religionards are not the only certifiably whacko nutcases out there. There’s a whole catalogue of conspiracy theorists, climate-change deniers, alien abductees, ‘Ancient Aliens’ believers, moon-landing deniers, ‘Bermuda Triangle’ devotees, Nessie-spotters, spiritualists, mediums, water-diviners, dowsers, ley-liners, mind-readers, and I know not how many other categories of believers in completely, outlandishly and redundantly stupid notions that have not ONE SHRED of evidence between them. But we’ll get to those. Just now we’re only talking about the delusions based on theism. Let’s not complicate things.

I should also make clear that I am not talking about the Billy Grahams, Kent Hovinds, Ken Hams or William Lane Craigs of this world, or the legions like them. In my opinion, these characters are anything but retarded. They are cynical, deeply amoral individuals who have spotted a way to make fortunes of tax-free money off far less well-educated, often desperate and poor people. They may be the worst of parasites (well, I can’t think of a worse one) but they are not stupid. They are almost invariably, with the exception of Hovind and the likes, very well educated (if inappropriately) extremely eloquent (it helps them to lie persuasively) and, above all else, very good businesspeople – well, again with the exception of Hovind, who got caught fiddling his taxes and was busted. (Maybe Hovind is a religionard after all; he just got lucky for a while.)

In the main, however, religionards are the poor ignorant schmucks whom these despicable bloodsuckers relentlessly exploit, in order to line their own pockets and further their own world view — which is rarely in anyone else’s interest. Religionards are the footsoldiers, the cannon-fodder of religion.

So there we have it; religionard: a person who lets faith make him or her stupid.