Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (56 page)
Read Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) Online
Authors: Dale McGowan
When her frazzled mama faints dead away, Bessie figures it’s the heat.
George Carlin
The comedian George Carlin (1937–2008) made a career of bursting sacred balloons. And he wasn’t above ridicule when he felt something was ridiculous.
In one routine he noted that God has a list of ten things that you should not do. Then Carlin’s voice rose as he described a place God created, “full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish,” to lock you away forever if you break any of the rules.
“But He loves you,” Carlin added quietly.
See that, right there?
That’s
the fig-leaf moment. Under this particular leaf was the contradiction between eternal damnation and a loving God, captured in four perfectly placed words, delivered by Carlin with a sudden softening of tone —
but He loves you.
The contradiction is funny and true — and it’s funny
because
it’s true.
Carlin’s work reframed religion to drive home a point. Instead of praying to God, he said he’d started praying to the tough guy actor Joe Pesci, because “he looks like a guy who can get things done.” Carlin noticed that “all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci are being answered at about the same 50 percent rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don’t. Same as God, 50-50.”
In another routine, he boiled the Ten Commandments down to two, including “Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course they pray to a different invisible man than you.”
Like a lot of comedians, Carlin’s work is sometimes dismissed as lowbrow entertainment. That’s about as far off the mark as you can get. George Carlin is a thinking person’s comedian if ever there was — and an articulate atheist.
The Onion
The Onion
(www.theonion.com) is a parody news organization found both online and in print. Its fake news stories deliver some of the smartest satire available, and one of its favorite targets is religion.
A favorite example of mine is an article with the headline, “Pope Calls for Greater Understanding between Catholics, Hellbound” in which Pope John Paul II is said to have called upon the world’s Catholics to build a bridge of friendship between themselves and “the eternally damned.”
It continues for several paragraphs, contrasting the idea of earnestly reaching out to others in friendship and love while still maintaining that they’re going to hell.
Two weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, while other comedy outlets were frozen in place,
The Onion
ran an article titled, “God Angrily Clarifies ‘No Kill’ Rule.”
Some other Onion favorites include the following:
Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World
Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity with New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory
Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian
God Answers Prayers of Paralyzed Little Boy: ‘No’, Says God
Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law of Thermodynamics
Pope Vows to Get Church Pedophilia Down to Acceptable Levels
God Cites ‘Moving In Mysterious Ways’ as Motive in Killing of 3,000 Papua New Guineans
Poking orthodoxy in the eye: Voltaire
In the 18th century, Voltaire (who wasn’t an atheist but a Deist) railed against intolerance, tyranny, and superstition by using satire. His best-known bust is the only one I know carved with a smirk.
In his short story “Micromégas,” Voltaire goes after one of the most essential elements of most religions — human specialness. A traveler from another world visits Earth. He is 20,000 feet tall and more than 400 Earth years old and hails from a planet 21 million times larger than Earth. Banished from his planet for 800 years for writing a heretical book about insects, he takes the opportunity to travel, makes a tiny friend on Saturn (who is just 6,000 feet tall), and then heads to Earth.
At first the two are convinced the planet is uninhabited, then (like a scene from
Horton Hears a Who!)
realize that very tiny beings live down below. They both agree that the beings are far too small to have any intelligence — then to their shock, they realize the little things are
speaking.
Short story shorter, they eventually learn that humans are convinced the entire universe was made for them, and the two giants nearly shake the planet to pieces with their laughter. It’s a pretty direct comment on one of the centerpieces of the Christian worldview — that the human species is the center of God’s concern (more on that in
Chapter 3
).
I haven’t done it justice here. Search online for it and enjoy.
None is just a cheap laugh for its own sake. Each is a critique of some aspect of religious belief or practice, including young earth creationism, intelligent design, homophobia, prayer, the Catholic sex abuse scandal, and the problem of evil.
As Erasmus and Voltaire both demonstrated (see the nearby sidebar), the ability to laugh at religious ideas that are harmful is a powerful way to get a serious conversation started.
The Power of Parody: The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
One of the most effective ways to make a satirical point is to pretend you’re on the same team as the target — then hoist it with its own petard. A great example on the political side is Stephen Colbert, a comedian who pretends to be an enthusiastic conservative so he can ridicule conservatism in its own language. What Colbert does for politics, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) does for religion.
FSM was born in 2005, shortly after the Kansas State Board of Education voted to introduce “intelligent design” (ID) into the state science curriculum. Board member Kathy Martin said at the time that evolution had been proven false, whereas intelligent design was “science-based and strong in facts,” and so deserved equal time in the classroom.
The response was swift and strong. Many supporters of ID wrote in to praise the decision as a victory for all that’s good. The board also received letters from scientists, educators, parents, and members of the general public decrying the policy, including one signed by 38 Nobel laureates urging the board to reverse the decision.
One of the more creative responses was an open letter to the board by Bobby Henderson, a recent graduate of the Oregon State University physics program. The letter pretended to agree with the board’s decision to allow multiple points of view, then claimed that another religious perspective, one based on the worship of a Flying Spaghetti Monster, also deserved to be included.