An Atheist parable

Religion is like a penis but please don’t whip it out and wave it around because it’s not only the Atheists who don’t like it

I actually envy some of the comforts that the religious have that I never will. I have anxiety over this being the only life for me. About not seeing my dead loved ones again. About praying for but never getting divine intervention. For them it is so easy to be told what to do by someone else. The ultimate fall guy- God- is the one on the hook for encouraging their behavior. Why try to work to solve a problem if you can just pray it away? Try that before a math test and let me know how it works out for you.

An atheist born (as we all are) I was never taught to do anything but think for myself.  About the only big rule I have for my own kids can all be distilled down to, “Don’t be an asshole.”

My parents allowed me to go to church with friends, and considering this was often a condition of my getting to stay a Saturday night with them it was something I frequently had to endure.

awesome graphic from David Hayward, the Naked Pastor

As I grew older and more vocal about my disbelief, the parents of these kids grew less desirous of having me around. I was planting “seeds of doubt” that made the dogmatic brainwashing of my friends a bit more difficult.

At the tender age of 8, I had to call my Dad to come and pick me up from a friend’s church when it became apparent that the insanity of the Sunday School was too much to bear. The teacher had just implied that the earth was under 10k years old. I asked how that could be, considering dinosaur bones and other fossils were millions of years old.

He belittled me, my “belief” in “Evil-lution” and claimed it was analogous to having “…this table change into a dog after a hundred years!”  I gathered my things, walked to the door, and remarked as I left, “If you are so ignorant as to think that, I can’t respect you as a teacher. I’m going home.”

At a friend’s house before dinner we had to join hands in a circle around the table and pray- a process so lengthy that the food grew cold before it was finished. I went along because as a guest in their house, it was rude not to.  The entire time I was not listening to the prayer, but instead summoning the fortitude not to run screaming from the house.

Earlier the mother (who prepared the meal) killed a cockroach in the corner of the pantry with her forefinger– the way you and I might crush an ant crawling on us- and she had not washed her hands.  As disgusting as that was, the prayer moment was far more uncomfortable for me. I never ate with that family again.

While there are understated churches that allow you to come in blue jeans and don’t sing, dance, writhe in the aisles, or speak in tongues, I still felt like a turd in a punchbowl- just waiting to be “outed” as the heathen atheist I was.

Now as an adult I feel like the only normal person at a Freak Show- who wants to  flee for their sanity when the freaks chant “We accept her one of us, gooble-gobble!”

Scene from Todd Browning’s Freaks

Would they notice I wasn’t reciting that prayer? Would they catch on when I didn’t kneel, didn’t drink the kool-aid, didn’t sing? Most of these “displays of faith” are done in public, around a dozen or more other people you probably don’t know all that well.  What would happen when they found out? Would they try to make me into a freak as well?

From a great website with more atheist cartoons!

Sure I’ll come to your church, friend, but when people start chanting, singing, waving their hands in the air like their trying to contact the almighty with some kind of flesh antenna, I feel kinda weirded out!  (For the record, I feel just as retarded waving my hand in the air at a concert holding a lighter and crying out “Free Bird!”)

Cognitive dissonance, as a feeling, is not comfortable for me. I quit “playing pretend” years ago.

It’s hard to describe to someone who has grown up “doing the motions” how idiotic, corny, meaningless and immature these things seem when someone who is not “used” to doing it is made to participate.

Faith and religion are like your genitalia- they should be kept private and most people don’t appreciate having it shoved in their faces.

So I liken the uncomfortable, embarrassed, self-conscious feeling I have in a church to what must be going through the mind of a person who suddenly finds that the beach party he is attending is on a nude beach, and he is expected to promptly strip down or leave.

All his friends and acquaintances, perhaps his boss and spouse are there, most are butt-nekkid and flaunting their privates shamelessly.  There is a lot of pressure to participate. If he does, he’ll fit in, but people will see what he had no intention of revealing, and he will feel uncomfortable about it the entire time. If he left without undressing, ostracization would follow.

So let’s allow our hypothetical person to strip. If the other nude beach-goers find he has normal genitalia (meaning just like them), then wonderful. But wait- this one is circumcised- but that’s OK.  Here is one that is bigger or smaller than the others, but you can still tell what it is.  They even welcome the people whose genitals reveal they’ve had a sex change.

After revealing that he would rather not undress for them, he tells them why. It isn’t just that he wanted to keep his religion- like his genitals- private. He isn’t ashamed of his genitals, but he knows that they are not like any of the others.

He is the one on the beach who would freak the rest out. They simply can’t understand how that could be possible. So he shows them.

He removes his pants.

The beach-goers stare. The guy has no genitals. At least none they could see.

They gather around. “How to do pee ?”   “You have children- how is that possible?”  “You seemed like such a nice person before!”  “Oh no- I’ll pray for God to restore your genitals.”  “Here- you have lost your codpiece- let me help you find it”  “I made you one- try it on- it will fit!”  “Death to the man with no codpiece!”

He points out that they have no genitals either.

“Look” he says, “What you are thinking is natural to you isn’t- it is an artificial construct. You guys are like me underneath all this fake exterior. You think you’re naked, but you are hiding the thing we all share with this-”

He shows a few that what they thought was their penis is really an artificial codpiece placed there by adults years ago.

Some people had made their own codpieces, others had cobbled together a codpiece with parts borrowed from friends. Some were remarkably sophisticated, almost looking like the a natural penis, others were crude representations. All were proud of theirs, and claimed theirs was the best. Many were comparing sizes and holding pissing contests to prove it. Some even escalated into fights.

Everyone should have noticed that this guy had the best codpiece!

A few men look underneath and see their real genitals- which aren’t anywhere near as flashy, glittery, special or exclusive as their pretend ones were.

But for the most part, they refused to look, since the codpiece they were wearing was comfortable, had always been with them, and seemed to be working just fine- how could it be anything but natural?

The man, having shown them what they wanted to see, puts his pants back on.

And he never went back to that beach.

Originally published at Madmikesamerica on September 17, 2010 by Morgan Williams

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