God, No!
Page 23
If you believe that your warm, snuggly feeling about the universe means a god . . . then Charlie Manson can tell you that those people were killed because the Beatles told Charlie about an impending race war.
We all act on things we can’t prove. Einstein had to imagine E = MC2 before he had all the evidence. That’s different than faith. There’s a humility to just imagining. There is a world of safety in doubt. The respect for faith, the celebration of faith, is dangerous. It’s faith itself that’s wrong. I deny terrorists the moral right to have faith in a god that will reward them for killing people with airplanes. That means I have to deny Christians the moral right to a faith that Jesus Christ died for their sins. That means I have to deny the warm, fuzzy faith that there’s some positive conscious energy guiding the universe. That means I have to get pissed off when Luke Skywalker trusts “the force.”
The only real argument against religious terrorism is to try to share the reality of the world. The world is plenty. We have each other. We have love. We have family. We have art. We have time. We have an impossible universe full of awe and wonder. We have an infinite number of questions we can work on. We have all the glory that is real and is us. We must stop glorifying faith.
Fuck faith.
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS •
Thanks to my editors, Kerri Kolen and Sarah Hochman, who kicked it off, and all the cats and kitties at S&S. Thanks to my agent, Steve Fisher, who made the deals. Thanks to my good buddy Robbie Libbon for reading this over and over and giving suggestions. Thanks to Glenn Alai, who runs all of Penn & Teller and all the subsets, and who got the idea for me to do this book. Thanks to Peter Golden and Spicoli; they’re both great. Thanks to everyone who is mentioned in the book, for giving me these stories and being part of my life. Thanks, Teller. And, of course,
EZ
Mox
Zz
I don’t need to pretend to have god’s love when my wife and children give me all the real love in the world minus zero, no limit.
* I’m making up and improving all the dialogue in this story—it was thirty years ago, give a fellow a break.
† Linda is not her real name—she no longer minds people knowing that we went to Cape Cod just to sleep together and fuck, but I don’t want to be writing snotty stuff about her liberal parents. I saw them at the county fair last time I visited and I really liked them.