I’ve studied all the great philosophers and I’ve decided my
favorite philosopher is Henny Youngman. And my favorite Henny Youngman quote is,
“I once wanted to become an atheist,
but I gave up - they have no holidays.”
Professor
Youngman makes an excellent point. How come the atheist activists you see on
the news fighting against stuff like public nativity scenes always seem so
dour? Atheists ought to have parades and celebrations just like everybody else.
Atheists have a lot to celebrate. Being
a born again atheist feels quite liberating. It’s like finding yourself
suddenly debt free. And you can stop worrying about silly shit like whether or
not life is meaningless. Who cares? Even if you determine that life itself is
meaningless, that doesn’t mean your life therefore has to be meaningless, too. It’s not
an undertow. If staring at a piece of concrete all day gives your life meaning,
then your life isn’t meaningless. You’re free to find meaning in whatever you
want.
And who says
born again atheists can’t believe in miracles? Inside my skull is this grayish
glob. It looks like a head of cauliflower or a hunk of putty sent through a meat grinder.
Inside this glob there are constant thunderstorms going on. This glob barks out orders all day and all
night. It never takes a break. It’s telling me to write this right now. And
this glob is so damn demanding. It insists on a constant supply of oxygen and if it
doesn’t get it, even for a few minutes, it will shut this whole operation down.
There’s this other blob of membranes in my chest. It beats and beats and it
never stops, all in the loyal service of pleasing the tyrannical glob. The beating blob is the slave
shoveling coal into the furnace. Someday it will become too fed up or exhausted
to continue.
The point is,
all that is a fucking miracle.
And there’s also a
certain sense of relief that comes with acknowledging the indifference of the universe
toward humans. Suppose a tornado blows away your hometown. If you are the
center of the universe and the point of all creation, then you have to wonder
what you did to piss off the universe so bad that it blew away your hometown.
But if the universe is indifferent, you don’t have to torture yourself like
that because you know that whatever happens, it’s nothing personal. It’s all
just business.
But what if
atheists did come out to the point where they had some kind of big atheist holiday
celebration on the scale of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, balloons and all? It might be
dangerous. I’ve always been tempted to conduct
an experiment. First I’ll buy a battered, rusted wreck of a car. But I won’t
drive it anywhere. I’ll park it and put vanity license plates on it that say ATHEIST
of even 8THEIST. And then I’ll see how long it is before the windows are broken or the tires are slashed.
An atheist
holiday might cause a riot.