Another Sunday Sermon

There is a old virus out, it is a virus of the mind. It has been infecting minds since the beginning of civilization. This virus will pollute and destroy rational thought and wisdom and will replace it with it's own metastasizing immoral ideology. The virus is called religion.
From the Sleepy Hermit's post on a Hermitary Forum:
The Mind Virus called Religion
I feel religion might be a type of mind virus, or at the very least, it behaves like one. Religion tends to infect minds that are weakened in some way, like a weakened immune system. Loneliness seems to be a type of mental vulnerability that religion can seep in through. This is why so many hermits are raging religious fanatics, in my opinion.
Once religion has taken root in its host, it starts to spread, like all viruses. Religiously-infected people, with their minds agitated by the infection, constantly work to spread it. It becomes their chief goal in life. And just like the drug addict becomes enslaved to their addiction, the religious person becomes the servant of the mind virus. The mind virus' goal to spread becomes the person's goal.
Intelligence is not a defense against religious infection. Religion targets the emotional centers of the mind. There's no shame in becoming infected with religion, it's just a disease like any other. Learning about this disease is your best defense against it, and this is the idea behind this thread. We need to learn about prevention and treatment of this infection to protect ourselves, just as we do with all diseases.
What's the danger of this disease? The more the mind virus takes hold, the more damage it does. The host begins to lose touch with reality and they ultimately become stark raving mad. Many times they become violent and even consumed by homicidal rage, and sometimes suicidal as we see with suicide bombers.
Like all viruses, religion is a simple organism and not intelligent. Just like ordinary viruses, many times they will kill their hosts by feeding off their mind, debilitating the host to where it's no longer stable enough to maintain survival (as in suicidal religious behavior). Religion appears to be intelligent because it feeds off the intelligence of man, but it's really just an infection of the mind.
An interesting study that can be done here on the Hermitary is to watch how the religiously-infected hermits try to spread the virus to the non-infected hermits here in the Secular section. They can't resist doing this; they're a vehicle of their viral host. They're not at fault, we shouldn't get mad. They're just sick. But we can use this to learn. We can watch carefully and learn about the different ways in which it spreads.

The religiously-infected person will twist words in any way to make a person's mind susceptible to infection. They contradict themselves left and right. They'll change the name of 'religion' to something less threatening sounding like 'spirituality'. Call it what they will, it's the very same virus.

So let's sit back and watch and learn. The religiously-infected can't help themselves, they will continue to try to spread it, so we will have more then enough fresh examples coming in.