“Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione.”*

*“I'm not interested in your dopey religious cult” in Latin.

Knock knock. Bea gets the door.

“Hi, I’d like to share with you the saving power of Christ.” A man wants to talk to us about Jesus. On a Sunday morning. Beside him, his six year old daughter paces the hallway.

“Sorry, it’s not a good time.” Bea, after all, is not exactly wearing her Sunday best. Rubber flip-flops, old shorts, and a ratty tee-shirt are not exactly the best attire for a life-changing revelation.

Bea closes the door. As she passes me on the sofa, she gives me an “I know what you’re thinking” look.

Bea and I have since ceased to be flatmates, but I still keep that image in my head just in case I’m sorely tempted to have at it with religious nutjobs (make that sorely, sorely tempted, when they’re religious nutjobs who bring their toddlers along with them to guilt you into submission).

She knew that, had it been me at the door and not her, I would have had a little fun with Mr. Flanders. Kid or no kid.

“The Bible says that the faithful will be able to drink poisons safely,” I’d say. “I’ve got some bleach here we could test you with.” And so on.

How low is that, you ask? Well, how low is dragging your kid along for some guilt insurance? Richard Dawkins thinks giving your kid a religion is tantamount to child abuse; I’m not that extreme, but Mr. Quality-time-with-my-kid was <----this----> close to crossing the line.

I’ve seen the line crossed many times in my day, from pastors ridiculing teenagers who know just a little bit more about paleontology than the status quo in Sunday School, to schools boycotting science exhibitions outright because it had the dirty little “e” word, to mutaween sentencing girls to a fiery death because they weren’t decently enough dressed to escape a burning building.

And it makes me a little angry. Here we are, in the 21st century, and people are still living and dying by beliefs that have been passed down unchanged for millennia!

2000 years after Christ, millions of people who should know better to still think that the world is 12,000 years old, and that we were descended from a single pair of naked homo sapiens who lived in a garden! And, thanks to a brutal misogyny that lives on in Christianity and Islam, women and girls are sacrificed to a ruthless God that neither Jesus nor Muhammad would have recognized.

Imagine that collective imagination gone to waste - billions who’ve been bullied by their respective religions into thinking that human intelligence should play second fiddle to faith-based nonsense. Each of those brains, capable of so much more, shutting down in deference to ideas that are thousands of years behind the times.

“You have to necessarily believe in Adam and Eve to believe that Christ died for your sins,” I’m told by a Christian in earnest. Facts aren’t important; believing is all. If the evidence points to an earth that’s billions of years older than the Creationists’ estimate, disregard the evidence.

Believing is all.

Faith cheats knowledge. In my experience, the faithful fall harder for flim-flam than skeptics; believers are conditioned to unquestioning obedience to an Idea, making them easier targets for the next con-man who knocks at their door. It’s true that you can’t question the ineffable presence of the Divine, but since when did God demand you throw out thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge to be saved?

The next time somebody knocks on the door with their kid in tow, I have this and a thousand other questions to ask. I’ll push aside Bea’s gently remonstrating look, and inquire. Some things are more important than peaceful Sunday mornings.