While it is commonly associated with being another Christian spin-off religion, many people who identify as Quakers may also answer to the category of atheist or agnostic, or may also belong to some other religion. The reason this "religion" is much less stupid than both orthodox and protestant Christianity is because they have done away with any established church hierarchy and emphasized the personal relationship with "god." Whatever it may be that you experience that is 'god', it is ok with them.
You could potentially be identified as a Muslim, and consider yourself a Quaker if you kept your experiences and beliefs to yourself. I think we can quickly see that without a) a power structure in place to get involved in the dealings of money and authority, and b) a desire to assert your "one right way" upon other people, that such a religion would be far less destructive than most others.
They also do not regard the bible as the final truth and wisdom of god, but as maybe a small part of something greater.
The easiest thing to make fun of them about is plainness in speech and dress, etc. They think that plainness in dress is avoiding vanity which is going to, I don't know, take you off the godly path? They are onto something good there, and that is that we don't need to keep up with all the latest fashions, that consumer culture creates incredible waste, that we can make our own garments and wear the ones we have longer, and we can still look just fine doing it.
Of course, it can become a dogma like anything else, and I'm sure there are groups of Quakers who would judge outsiders only by the 'vanity' of their clothing.
All in all, I am not going to lose any sleep at night wondering if Quakers are trying to kill me for speaking against their religion. Now if they could just drop the label, save time by not worrying about the god concept at all, integrate with modernism and participate in changing our society towards their counter-consumer values, I would love them.
9 Jainism
Making fun of Jainism is a lot like making fun of retards - retards are perfectly nice, harmless, friendly, and can even do really kind nice things, but at the same time they make genuinely funny retarded faces and noises. It's not that you feel anything negative towards them at all, it’s just that they are retarded and it makes you laugh sometimes.
Jains value non-violence and self-responsibility in one's actions topmost, don’t believe in any omniscient being or creator, and they have a kickass logo. Not only are they commonly vegan, some Jains wear masks throughout their lives to kill less air-born germs and organisms they breathe in. They also sometimes limit their unnecessary steps on the earth or sleep only laying on their side so the least amount of their body's surface area contacts the ground which may kill microorganisms there. All of these exercises are practiced because of their idea that through maximum detachment and compassion you can come to fully understand the nature of your soul and be free from the cycle of rebirth into a world of misery.
In Jain belief, the universe was never created and will never cease to exist, and this is absolutely in line with the most modern of cosmological data and theories.
Clearly, if we woke up tomorrow with the whole word converted to Janism, much of our problems would be solved. A lot of their ideas have clear benefits for all of us to introduce into our lives, and their concept of karma, along with the Hindus' and the Buddhists', is at its heart a rephrasing of the golden rule that nearly all religious traditions have in some form.
What the Jains don't realize is that dogmatically living like this is a damned waste of time. I didn't go into the details here about how they have mountains of literature written through the centuries on philosophies of rebirth, the soul, discovering one's soul, and the 'science' of breaking all of known time into various ages that all have certain characteristics... (which seems completely trivial if the universe has no beginning or end?)
What about if instead of deeply studying these 6,000+ year old Indian terms and philosophies and arbitrary systematization of time and the futility of attaining MOKSHA, Jains instead focused their compassion for life on fighting mistreatment of animals, feeding Somali children, and stopping all war? That would be all too practical.
Don't get me wrong, a Jain is a friend of mine, I can tell you that much. But I would question that friend on why he spends a great deal of his life chasing the elusive "soul" and following irrelevant writings, rather than just focusing on compassion for life as a good value to have for sustaining life. That concept does not have to be read from any holy book to understand its truth.
8 Buddhism
So every time I meet someone new who learns about my religious-abolitionist beliefs, one of the first things fired back my way is, "WELL WHAT ABOUT BUDDHISM?? IT IS 100% GOOD, YOU CAN'T TALK SHIT ABOUT IT." All of the shit I may have to talk about Buddhism comes down to this: Look, no educated person is calling into question the real physical and mental benefits of meditation, and I don't question the fact that very interesting experiences and states of consciousness can be attained through various meditation practices, many of which science cannot currently explain. I also have great respect for people like Buddhists who greatly value self-responsibility in their actions and who try to live consciously... these aspects of the tenets of Buddhism are great. Absolutely do I wish that the whole world was Buddhist over its current given state, of course. In fact, it may be better off than if the world was all dogmatic atheists because being an atheist doesn't guarantee a person is a conscientious decision-maker.
So what is the problem with Buddhism? To claim that you: possess the highest knowledge in the world regarding things that nobody can know such as philosophies of reincarnation; that you have books that perfectly outline rules to best attain self-realization; or that you know of a book that contains the true answer to the purpose of our lives, is to live non-scientifically and to limit one's thinking. Why can't we take the ideas of responsibility, accountability, and understanding one's place in life through deep personal reflection from Buddhism, and leave the 227 rules of the rule book for monks behind?
7. Baha'i faith
All gods are actually the same god. All religions are actually the same one. All of mankind will one day realize this and one day be as all-understanding as those of the enlightened Baha'i faith. Since this one unitary god is unknowable and incomprehensible, we comprehend god through his/her/its manifestations on earth, including but not limited to: Muhammad, Jesus, and Buddha. What unmitigated bullshit.
Anyone who has taken five minutes to crack open the religious scripture of a faith outside of one's own will quickly realize nearly all faiths are incompatible with each other. If we assume the Baha'i premise that all religions are the same thing, which means that all of the differences that we observe in different faiths must necessarily be incorrect. Unfortunately, if we pull these components of claims of absolute correctness from various religions, their whole feeble framework utterly crumbles. So if all religions are the same, that means all religions as we know of them now, are wrong. If all religions are wrong, doesn't that remove religion and god entirely?
The remaining of their main tenets is to unite all of humanity. I know what you are thinking, "Come on man, are you seriously going to talk shit about someone for wanting to unite humanity?" YES. It's a noble cause, but it is horribly self-contradictory. Suppose as a Christian I just wanted to go on a mission to unite all of humanity —by making them convert to Christianity. Or a Muslim who wants nothing more than world peace and to unite humanity —by means of converting the world to Islam. Well the Baha'i faith is one step worse than these two examples, because at least the Christians and Muslims could actually achieve the goal of uniting humanity if they did actually convert everyone, whereas the Baha'i ideals are self-defeating. In granting all religions equal respect as all being valid but the same, you only nurture an environment of free religious tolerance, encouraging people to push whatever ridiculous beliefs about the nature of the divine that they wish into the public sphere. "atheist-moderates" are guilty of the same thing, insisting that while they believe there is no god, the theist has his right to believe and practice whatever he wants, turning the other cheek to schools which begin removing evolution and other sensitive subjects from their curriculums out of "respect."
In granting all religious beliefs a degree of validity, the Baha'i adherent is actually ensuring that his goal of global unity is never met. Peace is not possible so long as religious belief exists.
6. Sikhism
Let's start with what is cool... their god is really a monistic concept of god being everything and more all at once, non-gendered, incomprehensible by humans. If you are going to call something 'god', this is just about the only permissible concept you could do so with. You might as well be an atheist who just refers to the universe and the general flow of nature as "god", even sarcastically. The original teacher of the philosophy was purported to have taught, "There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim", and probably, "there is no Sikhism," (but sikh just means something like 'student'). Sounds great so far! Now let’s pile on unnecessary complications and stupidity to make living life harder: like Hindus, they hold tight to the unfounded idea of reincarnation. Next, the founder insisted that as a student of knowledge, the only knowledge that was worth gaining was what you could learn through your guru or teacher, which of course was the founder himself to begin with. Freedom from the human condition can only be attained by devout devotion to god, and since god is intangible, salvation is only attained through your gurus, which of course have only been MEN in the disciplic line of gurus thus far. To be fair, there were some renowned Sikhs that fought for equality of women, opposed sati (bride-burning), and stood up to defend other groups like Hindus; at the same time there have been many militant Sikh groups. But the Bottom line is: why, as a "student" in a quest for the most knowledge, would you invite upon yourself the limitation of only learning your knowledge from one outlet. Why, also, create a new distinction for yourself as belonging to a religious group, which can only serve to create confrontation in disagreement?
5. Hinduism
Create a new religion in your head based on the following: It is not really a religion, and you can't exactly call it a way of life because there is no one way that specifically dictates how to be; there is a god or goddess for every day of the week, every year, every emotion, every color, and every geographic region; there is a god or goddess associated with every food or plant item and one for every working occupation; not only are there gods and goddesses for every world and overworld and underworld, there is a whole volume of texts that predate Christianity and perhaps Judaism by thousands of years systematizing and further systematizing our universe into abstract ages and sub universes and galaxies, all subdivided into further delineations of time and space.
Now for your made-up religion's structure, draw from a collection of texts that are among the oldest in the world written in one of the oldest known languages in the world, with authors unknown and the various texts relations to one another obscured. Then have various people through history focus on random selections from the mountainous volume of ancient scripts, and in turn, each write their own body of books with their own interpretations on these different topics. Have each of these authors be teachers of their particular method of interpretation throughout their lives, and their disciples spending their lives to become teachers, further interpreting on their master's work and further writing new volumes. All the while across these various branches, they find some obscure explanation about how they are really all one in the same, but paradoxically continue to live by their specific interpretations on bits and pieces of older traditions.
Now run an entire subcontinent on this system and let it propagate through 7,000 years and very little outside influence in the world other than a Muslim conquest on the upper half of the subcontinent. This is Hinduism. It is surprising to learn that the volumes of Hindu scripture through the ages were NOT the product of mind altering-drug trips. Given the facts about Hinduism, I would have ventured a guess that their culture since ancient times had revolved around LSD if I hadn't known better. Yet surprisingly, most Hindu theologies encourage a drug and alcohol free lifestyle to stay "clear-minded." It is so interesting because if you try to understand any one aspect of the clusterfuck that is Hinduism, I guarantee you will not be able to make heads or tails of it.
For instance, take one of the 300 million gods pictured here, Ganesha. Ganesha is a god of intellect and wisdom (I’m sure there are several other gods of wisdom) and has an elephant's head and four arms, traits that were vaguely influenced from various symbolisms of past idols and icons hundreds of years previously which have long since been forgotten. Of course! For fuck's sake, seriously go onto wikipedia and type in "mythological anecdotes of ganesha" and check out that article. It’s about three pages of text summarizing stories and traits attributed to this one god.
Now multiply that article times Hinduism’s self proclaimed "300 million gods" and that is not an exaggeration. There are literally stories just like that filling volumes of ancient texts about every one of their mythological gods.
If you were to survey India today, you can still find the entire gamut of gods being individually worshipped by individuals or maybe whole communities who focus on one god of choice.
Hinduism is absolutely insane, it is just batty. Now that that has been established, lets highlight why it is so high on this list at only number 5:
central to all those wildly varying branches of Hinduism, are some key tenets of karma, non-violence, and detachment from material "sense-gratification" as they call it. These concepts which go back into their ancient texts are the foundations that Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism were born of out of Hinduism. If you take karma in the non-spiritual sense, these are really great values to live by. By detachment from sense-gratification they mean asserting the idea in your life that you are not what you wear, you are not what latest ipod you have, and you are not your job title, there is more to you as a person. These are actually great values, and unlike Jainism or Buddhism which may lean towards full renunciation of life and going off to live in a cave, a majority of Hinduism teaches that you should in fact have a job and provide for your family, but be conscious that the material things don't make you who you are.
There is great knowledge to be had there, and the crucial step is recognizing there is no reason we can't read this knowledge from a Hindu book and exercise it in our own lives, but disregard the idea of all the ages, multiple worlds, and millions of gods with their random detailed stories. Hinduism earns fifth on this list because there are violent strains within Hinduism, Hindus still live with a very much real caste system, and much of the Indian landscape is still in economic, environmental, and humanitarian ruin.
To end on a good note, all of that engrained systematization has been raising generations of great electrical engineers, technicians, mathematicians, programmers, assemblers of microprocessors, and tech support agents for DELL. We don't do those things in America anymore because we are just waiting to be raptured up to heaven by Jesus H. Christ.
4. Judaism
Astrong case can be made that Judaism should actually be the number one most retarded religion if one focuses on history and the permeating negative effects the world has felt because of Judaic traditions, but I am giving Jews the benefit of the doubt and weighing more on the side of evaluating what their religion is today.
You see, if you go back I don’t know, 5,000 years before Jesus, (no one is exactly sure exactly when Judaism-proper actually surfaced into something distinctly new), 'religious' traditions in the middle east were as varied as the number of villages in different regions. There was every spectrum of belief as you moved between every geographic area, and these pre-Judaism religions of the land from what we know were very much in common with the ancient religions we see across the entire rest of the world: polytheistic, worshipping idols, thinking of all varieties of religious practice as essentially the same thing and therefore respecting other idols and cultures as equal to an extent... You see this monistic/deistic/polytheistic/tolerant approach in ancient Hinduism, pre-Judaic Greek mythology, and various native traditions of north and South America.
And then came a drastic new way of thinking that is first credited to the Jews: They came up with this new idea that there was strictly one god, and to call him anything else but god or to suggest that he had many equal deities which were all god was completely wrong and blasphemous. In addition, they inflicted upon themselves a ban on any form of idol worship and all kinds of stigmas surrounding diet, sexuality, pleasure and so on.
If this sounds familiar it is because it was from these corrupt foundations that Christianity and Islam were laid, maintaining much of these stigmas and strict monotheism.
Had we not ever invented this idea of strict monotheism with the Jews, perhaps this religious arrogance of "I am right you are wrong and I will kill for it" never would have evolved into its present form, since we don't find that in any other traditions before Judaism. (Correct me if I’m wrong, I haven't learned of any.)
Perhaps had we only kept all of the pagan traditions of all the lands and never been introduced to the madness of monotheism we could have evolved socially together as the world got smaller in the industrial age, and may have been perfectly armed to realize that these ancient traditions about god were silly.
But thanks to Judaism we have a handful of these religions now that insist that they possess a book that god wrote and that their way can be the only right way, and we have been well on down the road of the annihilation of mankind ever since.
That is the devastating historic stupidity. Then there are any number of tenets of the religion even as it stands today that are thirsty for criticism: the racist ideal that god chose "your people" over everyone else in the world, that god himself promised you certain real estate in his role as 'omniscient real estate broker' (Sam Harris), the completely arbitrary food purity laws, and the scarily anti-progressive and anti-outsider Hassidic/conservative groups. Judaism is weak, and to grant it one bit of respect since it claims exclusive truth one has to also respect any other tradition which asserts its exclusive truth. With all of them contradictory to one another in their mutual exclusivity, that means they can't all be right. The only stance a sane person can take is to not respect any of them as anything legitimate.
3. Christianity
Clocking in at number 3 I place Christianity. You will notice that Mormonism is number 2, but in reality Christianity is number 2 and I would include Mormonism in with that as well as Catholicism and so on. In this case I wanted to make a special slot for Mormonism at number 2 just to highlight its extra laughability.
But I really don't think that Christianity being charged as the second or third most retarded religion ever needs much of an explanation at all. You've got your crusades which mind you was many different wars waged across hundreds of years. You’ve got your inquisition. You’ve got your Salem witch trials. You’ve got your puritans sailing over and slaughtering the natives because it was their god-granted destiny, you've got anti-abortionists; you've got your Jerry Falwells, Pat Robertsons and Ted Haggards.
You’ve got money schemes and pedophilia engrained within the traditions. You’ve got children home schooled on nearly nothing but creationism and the bible (see jesuscamp).
You’ve got the endless guilt, shame, confusion, and self-hatred that are instilled generation after generation in Christian youth who are lectured against the evils of sex, masturbation, and basically any other religion or tradition that is not like theirs in any way.
2. Mormonism
like Sam Harris says, you take Christianity’s already absurd belief system and sprinkle in a bunch of unthinkably stupid things in on top and you've got Mormonism.
For starters Mormons, you want us to believe that an ordinary white man was visited by an angel and received the words of god, of which all evidence god purposefully destroyed afterwards, but you want us to reject the IDENTICAL story of the Arabian Muhammad? The story of the foundation of Islam is perfectly equated with the story of the creation of Mormonism as far as their level of likelihood or evidence of historic fact.
Two common fallacies that religious people appeal to are that the large number of their adherents and the length of time their belief has sustained make their religion true. Ex: "if its 2,000 years old and a quarter of the world still believe in it, it must be true!" Well, on these accounts, Islam is more "true" than Mormonism. Muhammad was getting revelations halfway through the 7th century, while Joseph Smith "received" his new vaguely Christian revelations in the early 19th! Islam claims over 21% of the world's sheep, I mean followers, while I'd be surprised if Mormonism was followed by 1%.
YOU LOSE, DIPSHITS. GOLDEN PLATES MY ASS.
We have yet to find a single archaeological record of any massive human civilizations in North America that predate Jesus, or of a great battle of immense proportions that was purportedly fought in North America in which tens of thousands perished on the battlefield.
I haven't even addressed aspects of their beliefs that are harmful and retarded, and I’m too pissed off for having to think about Mormons for this long so I’m just going to stop here.
1. Islam
Is this a surprise to anyone? Can you find anyone in an industrialized society that disagrees? Look, start with a ridiculous ancient Jewish religion that was around thousands of years before Christ, then take Christ’s further perversion of the established tradition into the Christians' whole weird thing, then take 7th century Arabian Bedouin tribal blood-feudal culture and have one of its members invent a new religion to gain power, all at once trying to appeal to both of the other two ridiculous traditions and incorporating the ancient desert disregard for human life, and you get Islam. Many Islamic countries have basically stayed at a cultural intellectual standstill since that invention in the 600's AD.
While it is debatable who has been responsible for the MOST religious killings in all of history between Christians and Muslims, I am going to argue that 1) the Christians had been at it 600 years longer 2) the Christians stopped endorsing it a long time ago 3) Muslim attacks nature on the side of being more brutal, barbaric, and misdirected. They aren’t just openly waging a declared battle against Christians, Jews, and nonbelievers, blowing up churches with missile strikes; they are blowing themselves up all over the place idiotically killing men, women, and children of their own kind. I don't know the statistics for a fact, but I would be willing to guess some Muslim Americans peacefully working in the trade center on September 11th 2001 were killed amidst the senseless killing. The crimes perpetrated by Islam are absolutely senseless and bloodthirsty. The religion is violent oppressive trash through and through. Its followers even kill each other through sectarian violence, with much collateral civilian death as a part of the endless fighting.
1300 years of Islam have many Islamic societies war-torn and in destitute poverty, its citizens hungry, exceedingly xenophobic and uneducated; where Islam is practiced there is a vacuum of human rights.
That anyone still speaks of Islam with any inclination of apology or kindness in this day is a sick joke. We cannot have intellectual honesty or global unification until we together address the problem of Islam for the sickness to the world that it is. Their children need to saved from rape, murder, and brainwashing, their women need to be liberated, their bloodthirsty grown men indoctrinated with the violent Koran all their lives - well, that’s the hard part. Not if, but WHEN it comes to the world vs. Islam, it will have to be addressed.
-GD
Too bad I was without my cell phone camera yesterday evening as I examined with a cautious horror the bacterial slime waste in what looked to be a decade-old package of meat at the supermarket. Plastic containing one pound of some form of a pig oozed alone and unpurchased at the bottom of the bloodbath, at the lonely left end of the 10 yard meat shelf. The meat in question was brown, with large strips of discolored fat hardened to the flesh belonging to a once oinking and stomping friend. 
This book reveals vivid, beatific memories of this former African Muslim’s life that is now lived under security protection. Hirsi Ali recounts her profound experience of gender oppression and general subservience within the confines of Islam, her former religion. I read this and felt everything: nostalgia, frustration, repulsion, nausea, sadness, happiness. In a composite discussion of her life, Hirsi Ali describes her gradual realization that she is an atheist, not a Muslim as she’d tried to believe her entire life. Particularly interesting were her accounts of daily life growing up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya with her family. Her family members struggled with the task of maintaining their tribal identities while following closely on the upsurge of increasingly devout practice of Islam. One memory she tells that particularly speaks to her cause against the unbridled violence in Islam is the scene of her and her siblings’ circumcisions, not at birth which could be arguably the least traumatic, but at the ages of four, five, and six. Without numbing, a doctor used scissors to cut off her inner labia and clitoris, “like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat.” He then used a bent needle to sew the wound and used his teeth to break the thread.