Five things that atheists don’t want you to know

January 29, 2016 • 10:15 am

This is an experiment in PuffHo/BuzzFeed/Thrillist clickbaiting. So, here goes:  “Five Things That We Atheists Don’t Want You to Know About Us.”

1. We’re all secretly nihilists, because we realize that life without God has no meaning. But we keep that to ourselves.

url

2. We’re all scared shitless of death, as we know that it’s the end of the line. Worm food—period.

hqdefault

ADVERTISEMENT

You can adopt this d*g—or you can click on to the next page.

2014-world-ugliest-dog-contest-peanut

Hundreds of friendly but abandoned d*gs are languishing in shelters, forced to live in small cages until someone adopts them—or they are put down. Please, give one of our homeless d*gs a loving Forever Home.

SCUM (Society for the Care and Upkeep of Mutts), Binghamton, New York

3. We know that our atheism involves as much faith as does religious belief. After all, you can’t prove a negative!

quote-absolute-atheism-starts-in-an-act-of-faith-in-reverse-gear-and-is-a-full-blown-religious-commitment-jacques-maritain-250464

4. Despite our claim that we’re all independent free-thinkers, we look constantly to our old, rich, white cisgender heterosexual male leaders to tell us what to do.
Screen Shot 2016-01-29 at 7.36.10 AM

ADVERTISEMENT
41LtTBdpNJL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_
Click on cover to order
“This book is the worst thing I’ve ever read. It won’t even admit
that dogs can’t get into Heaven.”
—Edward Fleaser, Duane Gish Professor of Religious Confabulation,
Pasadena City College.

5. We’re really atheists because we realize that since morality comes only from God, we’re free to act on our most bestial, venal, and criminal impulses. It’s FUN!
5f7483ff274587b3c58c2d1ab40e-morality-is-subjective-therefore-no-moral-code-is-better-than-another

Next: The Ten Best New Restaurants You Shouldn’t Miss

129 thoughts on “Five things that atheists don’t want you to know”

    2. If you were a real atheist, you’d sacrifice and eat babies.

      Take your agnosticism and shove it up your d*g’s butt.

      Reply

          3. WEIT readers are too clever – you’re all noticing my screw up! Pity I didn’t before I posted it this morning. I made several other mistakes in that post as well, and had to re-publish four times before I noticed them all. (My record is nine times!) 🙂

            But at least I remembered to post it. I wrote a couple of thousand words about the GOP debate last night, then forgot to hit “publish.” I wondered why the post was getting no hits for about fifteen hours before I worked it out.

            My excuse is GOP debates damage the brain 🙂

          5. The truth is I never learned to type properly, and thus my fingers frequently don’t get things in the same order as my brain. However, I often still read them how I meant to type them rather than how I actually typed them.

          6. @ The Rose

            Much simpler than naming what is evolutionarily not trout. (Assuming you itemize.)

  2. How could they call it heaven if there are no dogs there? Everyone will just go where all the dogs are, and god will be left in a lonely hell of his own creation.

    Reply

    1. Revelation 22:15, speaking of heaven: “Outside are the dogs…” This is my favorite verse!

      Of course, there is nothing *specifically* about cats being on the inside, but I think that that was probably taken for granted.

      Reply

    3. So that’s what Planned Parenthood does with all those baby body parts – the secretly own a chain of underground baby bistros.

      Which is easier to unload – a truck full of bowling balls or a truckload of dead babies?

      Reply

  6. That was excellent & hilarious!

    1. Religous people (in general) can’t grasp that there is a difference between I VALUE LIFE versus LIFE AS INTRINSIC VALUE. But as the saying goes, «life without God has no (I would add ULTIMATE/objective)meaning.»

    A relative meaning is good too (relative to our subjectivity).

    2. Dead. We are afraid of suffering, not of dead per se. MARK TWAIN said :

    “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

    I want more hilarious stuff like that! haha

    Reply

    1. I like Epicurus:

      Why should I fear death?
      If I am, then death is not.
      If Death is, then I am not.
      Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?

      Reply

        2. Agreed.

          That’s another reason I am an atheist: what god would give us such a wonderful gift as life, only to take it way again after only a few (too few!) decades, just as we are starting to get the hang of it?

          Reply

          1. It seems to me, were humans a naive and irrational species, you could take this desire to keep existing and make a profit somehow. Monetize it in some way, prey on people’s desire for the show to keep going with them at center stage. Hmmm….how could we do this?

          3. Srsly. Who’d ever buy something as ridiculous as an…uh…um…oh, let’s call it an “afterlife.”

  8. The “Adopt a D*g” ad in the middle was my first LOL of the day – what a face! A face only an atheist could love!! Because everything in atheism is ugly and twisted and malformed!! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!! (shuffles off all hunched over to do some vivisection just for fun)

    Reply

    2. I was going to ask Prof. Coyne where he has found the d*g photo. If it is authentic, whoever owns the animals could make big money by selling him to an horror movie producer.

      Reply

  9. I bet this post gets quoted a lot… by people who can’t and/or don’t want to recognize sarcasm and/or satire

    I sure hope you know what you’re getting into. And if you do, I sure hope it stays fun.

    Reply

      1. Nobody can get away with accusing you of making serious admissions in any situation where someone serious will be there to cite serious reasons why their serious accusations do not hold and people will subsequently take these reasons seriously.

        People iz funny, tho. It’ll be fun to find out.

        Reply

        1. Alternatively, earnest but ridiculous misunderstanding, thy name is also theism.

          Theists like to think they’re all about appreciating subtlety and nuance while atheists are low-brow, black-and-white thinkers. Nothing could be more backward.

          Reply

          1. They name is also He Who Shall Not Be Named, but has the initials CJW. This’ll be all the proof he needs that New Atheists are giving other atheists a bad name. At least this time he won’t have to make up his quotes from scratch!

            Good on you Jerry. This is hilarious! I love it! 😀

    2. I recognize it, but in terms of serious feedback, I honestly don’t mind the title or list format. If Jerry wanted to use those methods in nonsatirical articles, I’d be fine with it (to some extent…too much of anything gets old). The most annoying thing about clickbait “style” is (a) hiding the content until you click (here, below the page), (b) the intermixing of ads and/or huge amount of the page not devoted to content, and (c) something Jerry thankfully didn’t add, pop-up windows or apps that run when you click on the bait.

      Reply

  10. When I clicked on a similarly named email yesterday I was sent to a blank page. I thoght that was the joke! That there is nothing atheists don’t want you to know!

    Reply

      1. Oh, and I thought the Xxx in lieu of text were kisses just for me. Must be my arrogant, delusional atheism affecting my judgement again. 🙂

        Reply

  11. Five Things That We Atheists Don’t Want You to Know About Us.

    Our real names!

    The first thing that came to my mind, before clicking on the clickbait to see what the five would be, was “Our real names.”

    Of course, that’s only because we don’t want to be showered with so much Christian love, because we hate loving kindness or something.

    Reply

  15. This post is a nice change of pace. What fun. Yesterday I clicked on the link and went to a blank page; I’m glad today it had substance…well, sort of. 🙂 Bravo PCC(e)!

    Reply

  18. Had to read it twice… but that made the joke even more fun! I wonder if PCC has ever considered writing standup…

    Reply

  20. You forgot:

    We’re all just angry at God, because he hurt our little feelings.

    And since we’re angry at God (and they’ll make us admit it eventually), we’re not really atheists because … wait for it … you can’t be angry at something that doesn’t exist!

    gotcha

    Reply

  22. As per #4, I wear the label of “Sam Harris fanboy” proudly.

    Which of course means I uncritically imbibe everything he says. I also have a 4’x6′ poster of him on my wall which I regularly pray to for guidance.

    Reply

  23. I take this as a bit of verbal irony, sarcasm in the vein of “A Modest Proposal” or the dangers of “Dihydrogen Oxide.”

    Alas, my fear is that some will think it is all “true, true, true!”

    Mind you I do sometime worry about the eventual heat death of the universe, when I go to bed at night.

    Reply

  27. I came back here to post something silly but the subsequent post on the Holocaust has erased any humor from my mood. The emotional whiplash of these two posts is too much for me.

    Reply

  29. What about the 500 million Buddhists, aren’t they all atheists?
    Apologies if I’m not the first to post the idea.)

    Reply

  30. “Five things that atheists don’t want you to know”
    I think PCC(E) may be on the cusp of a new career.

    Reply

  32. It occurs to me that although there are lots of arcane technical terms in theology, there is none for those who believe or disbelieve in the presence of dogs in heaven.

    I propose canocaelists and acanocaelists for believers in dogs in heaven and their opponents respectively.

    Reply
  33. Pingback: For WIET Readers | Heather's Homilies

      1. Is the orgy itself the surprise, or is the surprise IN the orgy like it’s a surprise that Brad Pitt is showing up not announced in advance?

        Reply

      1. Eh. Who’m I kidding? The ever-increasing baginess under my eyes would be plenty reminder even if we didn’t observe birthdays.

        I used to wear a goatee, but I shaved I off for a while. I then thought I’d try the hipster beard thing. I was mortified to see it come in largely white. No beard for me.

        But thank you! 😉

        Reply

        1. Well, I always envision you as looking exactly like your Gravatar anyway. Ever thought of getting a wig like that?

          Reply

          1. In all sober seriousness, yes.

            Not recently, but when I was young, 6-8, I thought it would be a lot of fun to dress up in 18th c garb and pretend to be Bach, Haydn, etc. Never got to dress up, but, and hereafter shall my nerd-cred be unimpeachably established among WEIT readers, at 7 my parents got me an ink well for xmas so I could use the quill pen I’d carved from a goose feather.

            Here’s some extraneous information you may not really be interested in: that bust resides in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig. Bach’s title in Leipzig was Thomaskantor, and the Thomaskirche was the city’s primary church, but he was in charge of the music at all four of Leipzig’s large churches.

          2. I think your quill pen/ink well stage was wonderful! Very creative! As a parent, I was surprised to discover that I could walk all through ToysRUs w/o finding anything I really wanted to buy. My kids got some very atypical gifts..

            And it’s cool to know the story behind your gravatar. 🙂

            You’ve been into music from a very early age–are your parents musicians? (Tell me to bug off if I’m being too nosy.)

          3. Not really. Mom plays piano a bit; dad plays…here we go…washtub bass, jugs, and the musical saw. None of them well. I have a hypothesis that I inherited most of my oddness from my dad.

          4. “…here we go…washtub bass, jugs, and the musical saw.”

            😀 “And the doctor said, give him jug band music, seems to make him feel just fine.”

            Also–there goes another of my excuses for not being a musician…

          6. The inkwell is pretty funny considering you were 8. I’m glad your parents indulged your interests instead of discouraging them like so many parents tend to do when they see their kids have out-of-the-main-stream-interests.

  38. I am inspired. I’ve got a blow-torch and pliers, now all I need is a vicar.

    Her’ll love it – it’s a way of life.

    Reply

  39. On #5 there’s a scene in the beginning of the Invisible Man where Claude Rains runs down the street throwing rocks through windows where , in MST3K fashion, I imagine him shouting, “Yahoo! I’m an atheist!”

    Reply

  41. Somebody should tell PZ about No 4. He’s always slagging off at Harris and Dawkins.

    To be honest, the Appeal to Authority fallacy is not always bad. We appeal to authorities if they have a track record of giving accurate information, with the caveat that they could still be wrong, and not simply because they are an authority.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Richard Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *