I
just joined a new atheist group because my old one was too much talk and too
little partying. In the new group, people like to get drunk and play Strangulation (that’s what we're doing in the picture). If you win, you get to
strangle real puppies and kittens while everyone else laughs so much that they cry
and roll around on the floor. Because atheists don’t have God telling us what
to do, we’re not uptight all the time, so we can do that kind of stuff and have fun with it. That’s what I love most about being an
atheist—that and getting to spend Sunday mornings sleeping off hangovers.
Here ’s what inspired me to write this post. The
other day, Peggy wanted to take off from work to go to a picnic. She’s been to
this same picnic every year for something like 20 years, but she forgot to put
in for time off, and she couldn’t get any of the other nurses to
swap with her, so she was all bummed about it. The other nurses and I said, “Well,
duh, just call in sick, doofus.” Of course, Little Miss Goody-Goody wouldn’t do that. “My
middle name is Integrity,” she purred with a self-congratulatory smile. Just so you’ll know, she really
said this, but she probably just said it to me because she wouldn’t have wanted
to risk making the other nurses mad by saying it to them, whereas she wouldn’t give a
rip if she made me mad. As it turned out, she didn’t make me mad, but she did make me laugh my
ass off. Ever since then, she’s had to listen to me call her Ms Integrity in a snide voice a hundred times a day while pointing and snickering, and that’s starting to make her mad—not that I give a rip.
To
tell you the truth, I’ve never seen it as a case of her being Ms Goody
Two-Shoes and me being Mr. Slug Shit from Hell, although she looks at it
that way. When she gets on my case, I say, “Peg, coming home drunk at 4:00 a.m. with a drunk woman on
either arm and a trunkful of stolen drugs and money isn’t immoral, it’s alternatively
moral—for an atheist, anyway. Hell, what do we care? If you’re just dead when
you die, go for the gusto. Rape, kill, and mutilate if that’s what it takes to get your rocks off. Know what I mean?”
No, Peggy doesn’t know what I mean,
yet she doesn’t believe in the supernatural anymore than I do. What’s up with
that? Why couldn’t I have married a drunken party-girl/puppy strangler like all my
infidel buddies? Why did I have to get stuck with Ms “Integrity is my middle name”? That right there is proof that there’s no justice in the universe and
therefore no god in the universe either.
If
this weren’t a clean blog, I would say a dirty word about now, but then people
might start praying for me again, and I would just hate that. It’s bad enough
having Bible verses thrown at me, but at least I can throw them back
(they might not get resurrected after three days, but they do start smelling like fish), but I can’t throw a prayer back. Besides, prayers make my
head spin in circles while I spew garbage cans full of green vomit onto the walls, and when
that happens, I always wake up the next day with a sore neck and a lot of
housework. Bible verses don’t do that. They do make me break out in pentagram shaped hives that itch like the devil, but Benadryl clears those hives right up. If not for Benadryl, I would have to get an exorcism, and it would scare me to do that because the preacher might decide to burn me at the stake instead.
Anyway, I just wanted to go ahead and admit that you Christians are right about us atheists not caring what we do to other people as long as it feels good to us. Like right now, I would trade the lives of 27.5 million people for a bowl of ice cream. To you, that might make me seem like a bad person, but I don’t see it that way because I would really enjoy that ice cream. Now, if I were willing to simply give away the lives of all those people without getting any ice cream, that would be bad because it would mean that they died for nothing. So you see, my morality is every bit as good as your morality but in a slightly different way.
Anyway, I just wanted to go ahead and admit that you Christians are right about us atheists not caring what we do to other people as long as it feels good to us. Like right now, I would trade the lives of 27.5 million people for a bowl of ice cream. To you, that might make me seem like a bad person, but I don’t see it that way because I would really enjoy that ice cream. Now, if I were willing to simply give away the lives of all those people without getting any ice cream, that would be bad because it would mean that they died for nothing. So you see, my morality is every bit as good as your morality but in a slightly different way.