Penn Jillette - God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jillette, Penn.
God, no! : signs you may already be an atheist and other magical tales / Penn Jillette.
p. cm.
1. ReligionHumor. 2. AtheismHumor. 3. American wit and humor. I. Title.
PN6231.R4J55 2011
818.607dc22 2010043439

ISBN 978-1-4516-1036-9
ISBN 978-1-4516-1038-3 (ebook)

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If god (however you perceive him/her/it) told you to kill your childwould you do it?

If your answer is no, in my booklet youre an atheist. There is doubt in your mind. Love and morality are more important to you than your faith.

If your answer is yes, please reconsider.

CONTENTS

Introduction:
The Humility of Loudmouth Know-it-all Asshole Atheists

Afterword:
Atheism Is the Only Real Hope Against Terrorism:
There Is No God (but Allah)

INTRODUCTION

The Humility of Loudmouth Know-it-all Asshole Atheists

You dont 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 dont know. I remember sitting in a room full of skeptics when I first heard Christopher Hitchens say, Atheists dont have saints and we dont have martyrs. Im a little afraid to put that in quotes, because no matter how brilliantly I remember any Hitchens phrase, when I go back and check, what he said was better than I remember. He is better at speaking off the top of his head after a couple of drinks than I am at remembering his brilliance later while referencing notes.

I know nothing about drinking, but I know that Hitchens did drink, and when he made that comment he was sitting next to me on the dais with a drink in front of him. But the drink was irrelevantI could never see that it made any difference to his abilities. My doctors brother (hows that for a source?) said there is such a thing as state-dependent learning. This explains the brilliance of all the jazz cats on heroin and how Keith Richards could play even a specially tuned guitar while as fucked-up as... well, Keith Richards. Theyre performing in the same state in which they practiced. Hank Williams was so fucked-up we dont even know which of the United States he died in. Hanks driver drove him across many state lines all night in his long white Cadillac and when they got to Oak Hill, West Virginia, Hank was dead. Hanks genius might have been state-dependent, but his dying wasnt even that.

For years it seemed Christopher Hitchens was always drunk, so he was calling up information in the same state (drunk) that he learned it (drunk). I did the Howard Stern radio show a lot in the late eighties. Many times I was on with Sam Kinison. Ive never had a sip of alcohol or tried any recreational drug in my life, and Id come in to the Stern show as rested as carny trash could be that early in the morningfocused and ready to work. Sam would come in fucked-up. Really fucked-up. Stern would kick off the show and Sam was always so good. I would be sweating into the mic, trying to get a clever word in here and there while in awe of how fast, insightful, profound, and motherfucking funny Sam was every second. Howard would keep us on for a long time, and at the end of the show Id be exhausted, and Sam would just stagger out like he came in.

I used to wonder: if that was how he was in a fucked-up state, if he ever were sober, couldnt he sweep the Nobel Prizes and throw in a Fields Medal?

You dont have to be very smart, fast, or funny to be an atheist. You dont have to be well educated. Being an atheist is simply saying I dont know.

When I was a professional dishwasher, I worked with a man named Harold. Harold sent in lyrics and the little bit of money he saved up to song-poem companies that advertised in the back of the National Enquirer and Midnight. Hed pay a full weeks wages to have song sharks set his poems to music, record the songs, and try to sell them to make Harold rich. Part of the scam was to send the victim a copy of his song on a record. I now collect copies of those song-poem records. Nothing is labeled very well, and most of them are about Jesus or Nixon. Ill never know if Im listening to a song Harold cowrote with a rip-off artist, but when I listen, I feel like Im in touch with him. Most of the song-poems are unlistenable, but the ones that are good are heartbreaking. They are all you want in artthe cynical blas skill of out-of-work studio musicians sight-reading hastily scribbled sheet music while a competent but bitter vocalist sings unedited, pure, white light/white heat lyrics from the heart of someone who doesnt know what the word cynical means. Beat that, Bruce Springsteen.

Harold was fat and ugly and sweaty. He didnt have any brainpower or hair at all, and I looked up to him. I knew other people who were a zillion times smarter than Harold, but Harold managed to show up for work, get the pots and pans clean, and deal with all the smart-assed punks, hippies, drunks, and drug users who washed dishes briefly and badly at Famous Bills Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Famous Bills contained the word famous because theyd gotten a good review of their lobster pie in a travel magazine in the fifties. I was a hippie punk who worked with Harold for one summer and then went on with my life with Penn & Teller. Harold knew a couple little jokes, and he knew how to be polite and get to the restaurant on time and back to his apartment after work to write songs. I never talked theology with HaroldI dont know if he believed in godbut I heard him say I dont know about a lot of things. His smile when he admitted he didnt know was unapologetic, unless you were asking a question related to his job. If you were asking him if he liked Kerouac or Thailand, he would just say I dont know as a simple statement of fact. He knew very well that he didnt know.

I try to claim that I was friends with the genius Richard Feynman. He came to our show a few times and was very complimentary, and I had dinner with him a couple times, and we chatted on the phone several times. Id call him to get quick tutoring on physics so I could pretend to read his books. No matter how much I want to brag, its overstating it to call him a friend. I would never have called him to help me move a couch. I did, however, call him once to ask how we could score some liquid nitrogen for a Letterman spot we wanted to do. He was the only physicist I knew at the time. He explained patiently that he didnt know. He was a theoretical physicist and I needed a hands-on guy, but hed try to find one for me. About a half hour later a physics teacher from a community college in Brooklyn called me and said, I dont know what kind of practical joke this is, but a Nobel Prizewinning scientist just called me here at the community college, gave me this number, and told me to call Penn of Penn & Teller to help with a Letterman appearance.