When it is confined to churches and mosques, I can just about abide religion. At least people have a choice whether to go to church to listen to the bullshit or not. When it comes to preaching in the street, though, I have a real and growing problem. Surely people have a right to go about their business in peace, and not to have religious dogma forced upon them by preachers yelling through microphones, demanding we all start to believe their set of myths and submit to their authority. To do that seems to me the height of arrogance; to force their views onto everyone else , shouting that we will all burn in hell if we don’t believe their baseless crap, seems utterly perverse. Such dogma has been used to trap and control people for aeons, and I find seeing it being imposed on the public in high streets and public places quite sickening.

I now think street preaching ought to be banned, especially in multicultural, multi-ethnic cities such as London. Of course, those who defend it will do so by saying they have the Freedom of speech; yet people also have a right to go shopping without being forcibly indoctrinated. What such preachers are doing is aggressive and repressive: It usurps people’s fear of death to sucker them in, so that they can be controlled and manipulated, often bribed into ‘donating’ huge sums of money. Surely this has no place in any modern society, and should be seen as the scam it is. For this to be happening on the high street, where people are forced to listen to this arrogant indoctrination, is surely sickening.

I was up in stratford recently, just for a walk. There is a huge shopping complex there, next to the olympic park. Just outside the tube station is a public square. There was quite a large group of religious zealots, all gathered around a man who was mouthing his head off about how ‘Jesus was the only way to be saved’. He was shouting very loudly indeed, so that there was no way to ignore him; he was forcing his views and beliefs onto everyone in the area. If he had been shouting about anything else, I have no doubt he would have been arrested for disturbing the peace; or even sectioned as mentally ill, given the baseless, absurd gibberish he was spouting. Yet because it was based upon Christianity, he was allowed to keep shouting, demanding that everyone believes what he did; insisting that what he said was the only ‘truth’ and that all other views were invalid; and that anyone who did not listen to him was going to suffer for eternity after they die.

As much as I believe that all views can and must be tolerated, I have a real problem with this. Religion is nothing but a scam: a trap which has held people back for centuries. While it claims to give people hope and a sense of belonging, that hope is based upon nothing but a delusion, one which ensnares people, bringing them under the control of preachers so that they can be exploited. Such preachers use the fear of death, among other things, to entice people, trapping them into a baseless delusion they are never allowed to escape from; such delusions are reinforced over and over again in the name of ‘peace’ or ‘hope’, but simply act to maintain the authority of religious leaders. They cannot allow anyone to question the validity of the myths they derive their authority from, lest such authority evaporate. We see conspiracy theorists doing exactly the same things: using people’s fears to control them, entrapping them with proven falsehoods and outright lies, offering people secret knowledge which only they have access to. Why, then, is one shunned while the other is revered? If we saw someone in the high street shouting that the moon is made of cheese, 9/11 didn’t happen and that wanking makes you go blind, passers by would either ignore them or call the police.

After all, the idea that the world was created in six days by an omnipotent, omnipresent creator-being about seven thousand years ago is surely as ridiculous as the notion that the Earth is flat rather than spherical, and the idea that it is a globe is a huge hoax spun by NASA, or other inane conspiracy ‘theories’. Yet where conspiracy theorists are, these days, mostly confined to spouting utter tripe on Youtube in their increasingly desperate and laughable efforts to attract viewers, we award religious preachers the authority of teachers, doctors or politicians, despite having never been elected by anyone, or never having gone through the rigorous academic training doctors or teachers have. Just like conspiracy-spouting idiots talking bollocks about things they barely understand to people even more ignorant than they are, all preachers do is invoke a book of two-thousand year old myths which have now been widely and thoroughly discredited. Yet rather than being treated as the snakeoil-selling nutcases they so obviously are, they are addressed with titles like ‘Reverend’ or ‘Father’, and considered to be social leaders and authority figures. I’m sorry but I have a very real problem with this.

I have written about my problems with organised religion before, although I suppose I could live with it if such deceptions and delusions were kept in churches. At least then people could choose whether to go in to be indoctrinated or not, just as we can choose whether to watch Youtube videos or not. Yet I cannot accept having such nonsensical bullshit hurled at me and others in the street; being told what to think and how to behave by people speaking with such arrogance and superiority, but whose authority is derived from baseless myths. It offends me deeply: I find it aggressive and arrogant, to the extent that I cannot ignore it. Obviously there will be those who will seek to defend such activity, but they merely want to maintain their ability to indoctrinate and ensnare: to dupe others into going to church so they can be brainwashed and used, just as they have been.

I therefore want to campaign to get street preaching banned. This would outlaw everything from handing out leaflets to standing by tables offering people books to shouting at people through speakers. Anything designed to religiously indoctrinate people, to fool them into going to a particular church so that they can be brainwashed and exploited, should be against the law. Freedom of speech, thought and belief are one thing, but such activity extends far beyond that into scaring people into submitting to the control and authority of others. It is a form of attempted oppression, and must be spoken against. It’s time for this con-trick, founded upon the perpetuation of ignorance in order to maintain the authority of people who have not earned it, to end.