Atheism is Just So….Dull – 2

Hats with cool names. We have miters and birettas and zuchettos (which means ‘little pumpkin’ in Italian.) and I have a saturno made out of Norwegian beaver –don’t worry he died a natural death–and one made out of straw.

Name one atheist hat. Just one. See you can’t.

Think of all the really very, very interesting stuff we religious people have. We’ve got snake handlers and people who speak in tongues and faith healers and televangelists. That’s all very interesting, and that’s just the Protestants. We’ve got levitating saints, incorrupt bodies of Saint Bernadette and others.

We’ve got relics. Now that’s very interesting and curious. Have you ever seen the head of St Catherine of Siena?

Then we’ve got visionaries and apparitions of Mary and the Turin Shroud and the Holy Stairs that Jesus walked up and St Helena brought all the way from Jerusalem and you can go up them on your knees saying the rosary. And we’ve got monks and nuns and St Simeon Stylites who sat on top of a pillar in the Syrian desert for 35 years. Now that’s interesting.

Show me an atheist stylite. Show me just one who lives in a cave and eats locusts and throws himself into stinging nettles naked.

Geesh, all the religions are interesting. They’ve got nice stuff like those Buddhist boy monks in orange robes and shaved heads who look real cute and they’ve got the Buddha sitting under the Banyan tree and they think all the suffering will go away if you just think hard enough about it–like Christian Scientists.

Even the wacko religions are more interesting than atheism….like Mormons who wear special underwear and believe when you die you will be the king of your own planet somewhere, and the Scientologists who think you can be better by being wired up to a machine that reads your mind or the Jehovah’s Witnesses who are very, very serious and think about the end of the world all the time, or the really wacky religious people like the Episcopalians who think two men can marry each other.

I’m not done. Think about it. We’ve got Shakespeare and Tolkien and C.S.Lewis and all those poets and writers and that’s just the English. There’s Dostoevsky and Dante and Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn…

Native Americans dressing up like eagles and dancing around the fire and Egyptians building pyramids and that city of Machu Pinchu. That was religious and so was Les Miserables and little country churches in English villages and Baptist preachers and gospel music by Aretha Franklin.

Where are the atheist gospel singers huh?

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