With the passing of Proposition 8, religious “morals” are weighing down many adults. California now legally discriminates on the basis of the acceptability of relationships between two adults, determined solely by religious bigotry. As this is not healthy, I present the Six-day Challenge to help you lose those sensibility-threatening pounds of religion. You will shed the theological weight that promotes suffering, faith in beliefs that completely lack real and tested evidence, and humility as merits. You’ll be freed from others’ claims to know the intentions of some sky-god. The Six-day Challenge will help you defeat such assaults on the health of collective human intelligence everywhere.

Day One: Do not pick up your holy text, either written by people who believed the spread of disease is God’s wrath or written by a science-fiction author whose brilliance linked the words “Science” and “Tology.”

Status check: Are the voices in your head louder? If not, continue to day two! If so, don tin-foil hat, repent immediately and cease the Six-day Challenge.

Day Two: Repeat Monday’s activity and refuse to pray. Thank no one for the food you are about to receive except those real people who are responsible for buying and preparing the food. When you go to bed, do not even whisper, “… And if my soul to take…” etc. You can do it!

Status check: Did you wake up alive? If so, continue to day three! If not, we would say cease the Six-day Challenge, but there is no need.

Day Three: Repeat Monday’s and Tuesday’s activities, and throughout this day periodically raise a fist to the sky and say out loud, “Why I oughta!” Yes! You oughta!

Status check: Are you unexpectedly projectile vomiting in social situations? If not, continue to day four! If vomiting nails, repent immediately and cease the Six-day Challenge.

Day Four: Repeat the activity of the previous three days and add the activity of making fun of other people that have faith in things supported by no testable evidence. Call them, for instance, “superstitious narcissistic boobs.” Especially mock creationists that use cellular telephones and ATMs and get flu shots.

Status check: Has your body been covered in oozing boils and blisters? If not, continue to day five! If so, periodically apply calamine with oatmeal extract, repent immediately and cease the Six-day Challenge.

Day Five: Repeat the activity of the previous four days, add a refusal to fast and make a nice meal of shrimp and pork. Become a bit more emboldened and mutter to just yourself, for example, “[insert deity] sucks. What a stupid mofo. Can you really believe that shit? Who does it think I am?”

Status check: Have you gone blind or lost a limb? If so, apply tourniquet if necessary, repent immediately and cease the Six-day Challenge. If not, continue to day six!

Day Six: Repeat the activity of the previous five days. Take an image of your deity of choice and cut it into several pieces. Actually, to be sure you offend the real deity; do this with images of Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, the Pope, Thor, Baal, Zeus, Krishna, Vishnu, Sai Baba, L. Ron Hubbard, the Sun, spaghetti, spruce trees, etc. Burn all the pieces and say to yourself, “As this smoke rises from this rubbish, so too my ignorance goes with it. I will no longer take part in religion’s siege on human knowledge.”

Status check: Is the smoke coming from your anus? If so, cork, repent immediately and cease the Six-day Challenge. If not, you have made it! Go look at yourself in the mirror and marvel at the incredible lack of guilt and the missing desire to force others to adhere to absurd notions lacking a basis in reality.

If your deity really exists and is active in the world and blessing your life, then your life should become a living hell. If, however, your life is not a living hell at the end of this sixth day, if you have had just as many “blessings” in the past six days as you have had when you were an accomplice to ignorance, then you must ask yourself, “Why?” This I have asked for the past three years and counting, feeling lighter and healthier than ever before.