You don’t have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is “I don’t know.
The ends never justify the means. We’re all living only in the means and we don’t ever get to see the real end. We don’t get any big accounting of projects at the end of our lives. We just get our lives, day by day, minute by minute, and we have to be good. There’s no punch line. There are no ends, there are only means.
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.
Everyone’s second album sucks—even the Clash’s second album isn’t that good—but Springsteen’s second album is the best in his career. I like it even more than any real Van Morrison record. It’s amazing, it rocks, it swings, and it touches my heart. It kills me. And if you haven’t heard it, you’d love it too. Anyone would like this album. That’s Springsteen’s style.
If you were a man in a monogamous relationship with a woman, and you were fucking a guy on the side and your wife asked you, “Are you seeing another woman?” and you said, “No,” and felt you were telling the truth, you are a liar as sure as if your name were Liar Liar Pantsaflame!
There is no god, and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
When you tally up the deaths from the attack of September 11, 2001, don’t ever forget the people who have been killed in the reaction to that. Human life is human life. And the death penalty is wrong.
When someone says that Jesus loves them, it’s always so sad and desperate. If your Christ lives outside of time, then the time he takes to love you means nothing, and anyway, why did he make your football team lose?
(Yup, there’s such a thing as a Christian skeptic—ESP is too weird for them, but they’re fine with zombie saviors.)
When I watched the Twin Towers fall, I said aloud to my naked friend, “There go our civil liberties.” A few months later I called George Carlin and we were chatting about America’s reaction to the attack. I told him my thoughts. He excused himself, put down the phone, and went and got his journal. As the Twin Towers fell, he had written, “There go our civil rights.” I was so proud to have had a similar thought at a similar time to a genius. We were sad to be right.
God, No!
God, No!
God, No!
