God, No! (10 page)

Big fake tits, tattoos, and obvious Auto-Tune feel atheist to me. All of a sudden I’m pretty happy with Fergie, and Ke$ha, and if I throw in loving anyone who is on the front lines fighting for the First Amendment, have I painted myself into a corner where I have to say that Janet Jackson is the perfect human being? I guess so. Janet does seem almost as cool as a carny pig who eats out of the trash and tattoos doodles on his ankle.

“Rock Your Body”

—Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at the Super Bowl

The Bible’s Third Commandment

Thou shalt not take the name of the lord thy god in vain, for the lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

My friend Lana is a new atheist. She wrote this to me: “For me, the biggest part of letting go of god was holding myself accountable for my own actions. Life is so much easier when you think someone else is doing the deciding for you. It is easier to place blame on ‘god’s will’ than to say ‘I fucked up’ or ‘I need to work harder.’ It felt safer to be a passenger in my own life than to take the wheel.”

ONE ATHEIST’S THIRD SUGGESTION

Say what you mean, even when talking to yourself.
(What used to be an oath to god is now quite simply respecting yourself.)

Preach to Me and Pray for Me—Please!

T
he party line for atheists is that they don’t mind religious people hanging around in polite society as long as they don’t proselytize. It’s okay for one to believe bugnutty shit as long as one shuts the fuck up about it. I don’t agree. Proselytizing is annoying, but not proselytizing is immoral. Not proselytizing is anti-American.

I was on some Joy Behar show on CNN. There was some smart guy sitting next to me. We were talking about religion. I described myself as a “hard-core atheist.” Joy and the smart guy scoffed, and Joy said mockingly, “What’s a ‘hard-core atheist’?”

“I don’t even believe that other people believe in god.”

My buddy the scientist rob pike was the first person I heard say that line. Rob didn’t say it to be clever. He wasn’t trying to get a laugh. It’s hard to believe people believe in god. If people really believed in god, how could they ever sin? If I thought that having sex before marriage would displease an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omni-nosey power, if I really believed that, then the entire staff, male and female, on-and off-camera, every single body, of Kink.com could never have even been able to get my cock hard. What cost/benefit analysis allows one to sin? They build in that “sin in your heart” thing so that everyone feels
guilty, but even with that—man, if I’m believing in the god almighty of Abraham, I can keep thoughts of Maggie Gyllenhaal bringing me coffee out of my mind (thankfully I don’t have to). I don’t know that anyone really
really
believes in god. Even the most faithful must feel at least the same little itch of doubt about religion that I feel about abstract painting. I love nutty art, and I know it really is great, but in the deep recesses of my mind I hear, “Maybe my four-year-old
could
do that. Maybe it really is just bullshit.”

Modern art is great, it really speaks to me on an intellectual and visceral level, but there’s a little stone in my shoe worrying that it might all be just jive. Anyone who believes in virgin births in a species other than lizards and other non-breasted life, anyone who believes that there’s a benevolent force in the universe that cares if we jack or jill off, must be worrying in the back of his or her mind that Christ might have been just spilling random paint on the canvas about what we should be doing before we exit through the celestial gift shop. I love Stockhausen and Half Japanese, but there is a chance some of it is just noise. There’s always doubt.

But let’s just say that someone really believes in the life-after-death spook show and eternal life for reals. Not like I believe that Sun Ra planned exactly what the sax solos would sound like, but like I believe in gravity. They can feel it. Okay, let’s go to my favorite example. This one hypothetical religious guy, let’s call him Charlie Manson, really believes that “Helter Skelter” wasn’t just about roller coasters and fucking. He has faith that the Beatles and/or the Bible really sent clear messages about race riots, life after death, fashion, diet, and homosexuality. If our Charlie really believed that there was everlasting life through Jesus Christ, piggies, or L. Ron Hubbard, how can he not proselytize? How can it be moral to be politely quiet about something that important? If our life here is really just a brief vale of tears and the real joy is after we croak off the mortal coil, if someone really truly believes all that like ice like fire, don’t they have to preach to everyone all the time?

I don’t know you from Adam, but if I saw you standing on the
railroad tracks in dark clothing, in the middle of the night, right after a bend in the tracks, and I heard a train a-comin’, rollin’ down the track, doesn’t everyone’s morality mandate my saying, “Yo, there’s a train a-comin’, rollin’ down the track—move off the goddamn tracks, stupid”?

You reply, “Shut the fuck up, you out-of-fashion, train-believing whack job, leave me alone, or I won’t invite you to any cool parties.” What if even while you’re saying that, I feel the train a-rumblin’, rollin’ down the track, shaking the very ground beneath our feet, and I say, “Can’t you fucking feel that? Can’t you tell that you’re about to be hit by a fucking train, a-comin’ rollin’ down the track?”

“No, leave me alone, I have a right to not believe. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and other really smart guys, say there’s no train a-coming and these aren’t even tracks. And Christ, are you really wearing a black tie and a white shirt and riding a fucking bicycle door to door? You’re never going to get any pussy.”

Now I can see the train, but the poor blind, deaf, numb, deluded atheist can’t believe a train is a-comin’, can’t believe he’s about to be turned into haggis. Isn’t there a point when any moral person just tackles the stupid cocksucker, knocks him off the track, and saves his life? That’s the only choice . . . if you really believe in that crazy imaginary train.

If someone really believes in everlasting life (that’s a big, big “if,” but stay with me—Jackson Pollock really is great, I love Duchamp’s snow shovel, and Cage’s notated silence really is music), then letting someone fuck up everlasting life is much worse than letting someone get hit by a train. Fucking up everlasting life is being hit by a train forever, and “forever” in this case is even longer than the time between when you cum and when she cums. This is like real no-kidding motherfucking forever, like dentist-drilling-into-your-teeth forever. You have to do whatever you can, even if the heathens laugh in your face and think you’re worse than the stupidest of the Baldwin brothers. You can’t respect someone’s right to not believe in something that’s going to give him or her eternal life. That’s not real respect, that’s callous disregard. That’s negligent eternal homicide.

If you believe in everlasting life, and you keep annoying me about it, you are insufferable. Get away from me! If you believe in everlasting life and don’t annoy me about it, if you’re polite and let me believe what I want, even though I’m going to spend eternity in real break-is-over-back-to-the-handstands-in-the-river-of-shit hell, what kind of scumbag are you? Get away from me! How much do you have to hate someone to let that everlasting train of lost eternal life squash someone’s heathen ass?

“Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Atheist.”

“Atheist who?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t go around knocking on your door when you’re trying to relax.”

Atheists are also morally obligated to tell the truth as we see it. We should preach and proselytize too. We need to help believers. Someone who believes in god is wasting big parts of his or her life, holding back science and love, and giving “moral” support to dangerous extremists. If you believe something, you must share it; it’s one of the ways we all learn about truth.

I made this argument for proselytizing on one of my video blogs. Proselytizing is a moral imperative and feeds the marketplace of ideas. I want to hear everyone tell the truth as they see it. I want to learn from everyone.

I’m such a fucking idiot.

That video got linked around with the fundamentalist whack jobs and I became the poster boy for evangelical crazy-ass Christians. Fuck me. They didn’t just link to it on the web, but also burned it to DVDs and showed it in big megachurches all over. You could find web pages that gave you a sermon to preach around it. You read this speech, then turned it over to “famous atheist Penn Jillette” to show how important spreading the word was, and came back to pass the plate. Most of the churches just stole my video outright. They didn’t ask me for my permission, and they didn’t ask Sony. They just used my words to spread “the Word.” I wasn’t
going to get involved in a lawsuit. The legal status is up in the air. But it’s funny to me how few of them respected my intellectual property. More of this “end justifies the means” jive. It does, however, fill my heart with hope and joy that so many of them did respect my ideas, if not my property. Most of the showings I heard about kept in all the stuff I said about there being no god. They might have edited out a “fuck” or two, but they kept the ideas. Maybe they felt that it strengthened their case that I was an atheist, or maybe they were just doing the right thing.

The Campus Crusade for Christ was one of the groups that did everything right—you know, other than being the Campus Crusade for Christ. They wrote a nice letter to me and to Sony asking for permission to use the video. They gave me their word that they wouldn’t change the context. Everyone would hear my message within their message. They would spin around it, but they’d keep my part intact. I surprised myself and some atheist friends by okaying their use of my words and image. Penn Jillette is part of the Campus Crusade for Christ. They were playing by the rules, and I like that.

That proselytizing video of mine didn’t have quite the market penetration of
Dancing with the Stars
, but it was seen by millions of people. Over .0001 percent of those millions have shown up in person after the show to talk to me. They bring me Bibles and really heartfelt wishes that I’ll find Christ. One man comes by our show every couple of weeks to look in my eyes, shake my hand, give me a few of his personal preaching DVDs, tell me he’s off to Israel, and remind me he’s praying for me. I don’t know much about the Christian demographic or what keeping the Sabbath holy means, but when we took our children to the Adventuredome amusement park at Circus Circus on a Sunday afternoon, it seemed like every single mom with a stroller had seen my video in church that day. I’ve gotten a package of letters written by children at Christian summer camps explaining how they watched the video and are praying for me.

I’m deeply touched, saddened, disgusted, and a little freaked out by it all. I’m sent vanity-published books that write about my proselytizing video. I’ve become these Christians’ favorite atheist. It’s pathetic and
annoying, but their hearts are in the right place. I believe they really care about me, and I care about these bugnutty freaky whack jobs.

My love and respect for the marketplace of ideas (that the only cure for bad speech is more speech) was reinforced by one woman who came up to me in the lobby after watching our whole show. Most of the Christian freaks don’t watch our Vegas show, they just know where I’m going to be afterward and show up there to pray for me without having to give me any money. This woman hovered until the other patrons had greeted me, then told me her story. She explained that she’d seen my video at her big megachurch. She liked it. She liked it more than her church had expected her to. She did a web search and found other videos of me yapping. She said she watched them all. That little pebble of doubt in her shoe became a boulder. She wasn’t calling herself a full atheist yet, but she’d quit the church and she was well on her way. She thanked me. Man, my little Grinch heart grew ten times in size. I felt like less of a dipshit for being part of the Campus Crusade for fucking Christ.