Highland, N.Y., where I live, was founded by the Pang Yangs, a free love cult. Exiled from their communities in Rhode Island, they followed their leader, Jemima Wilkinson, on a trek to what she promised would be a new Eden—the American Middle West.

They never made it. Instead, they named the local hilltop Illinois Mountain and set up shop around Lily Lake. The Pang Yang cemetery is a mile from my house, all creepy headstones and gnarled trees—very Blair Witch Project.

Even in their day, to say nothing of the present, the Pang Yangs were ridiculed, and justly so. How could anyone believe that Illinois of all places was Paradise?

With the release of the cinematic version of that shittily-written best-seller, The DaVinci Code, the relationship between religion and ridicule has once again taken center stage. The cilice-wearing folks at Opus Dei are all up in arms because the film portrays it as an evil Catholic splinter group that practices corporal mortification, rather than what it really is—a ridiculous Catholic splinter group that practices corporal mortification.

The truth is, all organized religions are ridiculous. All of them, every single one, without exception.

In the name of religion, we are told to mutilate the genitals of our newborn boys, wrap up our women in shapeless bags, abstain from premarital sex, employ bedsheets while having conjugal sex, condemn the use of condoms to stem the AIDS epidemic, treat certain members of society as untouchables because of who their parents happen to be, blow up cafés where Israelis gather, blow up cafés where Sunnis gather, relegate our children to orphanages because they are girls and it's better to have boys, live in Utah, deny women the right to do things like drive cars and have jobs and speak in public, prohibit outsiders from entering our holy cities, risk being crushed to death during our pilgrimages to those holy cities, burn books, censor the press, destroy ancient statues of holy figures we don't find holy, fly hijacked airplanes into skyscrapers, eschew meat on Friday, and ensure that Katie Holmes does not cry out while giving birth.

These things are all patently and indubitably ridiculous.

That, say, Judaism is much older than, say, Mormonism doesn't make one less ridiculous than the other. They are both equally ridiculous, and for pretty much the same reason. All organized religions—or all the ones organized enough to have any clout—share the same three core beliefs:

1. Sexuality is shameful, especially
2. Homosexuality, which is downright evil. Also,
3. Anyone who doesn't believe what we believe is damned.

The first keeps therapists in business (except among Scientologists, who equate psychiatry with homosexuality). The second fosters a collective homophobia that is as abhorrent as it is ignorant. But the third is the worst of all. Because of the third, oceans of blood have been spilt, and will continue to be spilt. That's the most ridiculous thing of all.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created protected classes. Thanks to this groundbreaking piece of legislation, it is unlawful to discriminate against someone based on his race, sex, color, country of origin, or religion. Of those protected classes, interestingly, only religion is volitive. We can't change the color of our skin, our gender, or where we were born, but we can choose what religion to follow. That religion was included suggests that religion is deeply in ingrained in who we are—too deeply ingrained to analyze rationally.

But religion should be analyzed rationally. Consider:

1. None of us know for certain what the answers are.
2. Those who claim to know for certain what cannot be known for certain are full of shit.
3. People who are full of shit deserve to be ridiculed.

That's just common sense. But we've been conditioned to button our lips when questions of theology crop up. It's not nice, we're told, to ridicule someone else's religion. Well, guess what? It's not nice to throw wives onto their husbands' funeral pyres, either, or to fly hijacked airplanes into skyscrapers, or...but you get the idea. Hiding disgusting behavior behind the burka of religion does not excuse it. Perhaps if we were encouraged to ridicule that which deserves to be ridiculed, a period of self-reflection would begin, a healthy discourse would develop, and people would stop believing that seventy-two virgins would be waiting for you when you blew up the crosstown bus. Violence is the result of repressed feelings, it says here.

If something strikes you as ridiculous, say so. And don't worry about offending someone. It's our Constitutional right to offend people. Hell, it's patriotic. After all, the institution that produced the Inquisition has no business taking umbrage at a Tom Hanks movie.

And the Pang Yangs? With all the evil being perpetrated all over the globe in God's name, Jemima Wilkinson had one thing right: the world needs all it can get of free love.

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