How to Insult the One Percent

It has come to our atten­tion that Helen Thomas has fired her­self from her job for insult­ing the entire Jew­ish com­mu­nity by stat­ing that they should get the hell out of Pales­tine and go some­where else like Poland or Ger­many. The White House even stepped into the fray and denounced the crotch­ety old lady and she has since apol­o­gized for voic­ing an unpop­u­lar and appar­ently offen­sive opin­ion like all the rest of us do, only we put them on YouTube anonymously.

So we started think­ing, huh (which is how we always start our think­ing) I won­der what would hap­pen if she insulted an even big­ger reli­gious minor­ity in the U.S.? What if she’d said some­thing rep­re­hen­si­ble about the non-religious?

Let’s be clear here that the head­line specif­i­cally men­tions athe­ists (around 1% of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion as of 2008, at least for those will­ing to claim them­selves so) while we just side-tracked into those who claim no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion (around 15% of the U.S.) which may mean that they still believe in god, or a god, or per­haps sev­eral gods or the fly­ing spaghetti mon­ster or who knows what, but they clearly have no home­land to claim based on some book that was writ­ten by some guys hun­dreds of years ago for a joke (speak­ing, of course, of the Holy Madlibs).

Of the total pop­u­la­tion of the United States, 2.2% are self-proclaimed Jew­ish peo­ples. So about twice as many Jews as God-haters. Still, con­sid­er­ing the rel­a­tively small num­ber of peo­ple who don’t believe in a supreme being with mag­i­cal pow­ers who has a grand plan that none of us are smart enough to under­stand, par­tic­u­larly when oil is spilling into the lungs of inno­cent sea crea­tures while Lind­sey Lohan can’t seem to kill her­self with drugs no mat­ter how hard she tries, it’s fun to con­sider what would hap­pen if Helen Thomas had said some­thing unto­ward about atheists.

The chal­lenge is, obvi­ously, what can you say that would incense an atheist?

Con­sider that athe­ists have no orga­nized belief struc­ture, per se. And by ‘belief struc­ture’ we mean ‘orga­nized set of semi-arbitrary rules which may be applied only as it fits the set of peo­ple for whom the rules apply ben­e­fits.’ So, you know, things like get­ting mar­ried to your mis­tresses when you tire of your wives is okay, but mar­ry­ing the per­son you love and stick­ing with them if they hap­pen to be of the same sex is not. Things like that.

Okay, so, ground rules set. How, then, to proceed?

Obvi­ously, using any form of after­life threats is out of the ques­tion. “Gad damn you,” for exam­ple, is com­pletely point­less. Sim­i­larly, “Go to hell!” or “God hates (your par­tic­u­lar lit­tle clique)!” are use­less. You sim­ply can’t threaten them with any­thing post-life.

Which leaves you with life, itself. Remem­ber, please, we’re speak­ing now of insults and not threats. You can cer­tainly say, “I’m going to kill you, you fuck­ing (niche group mem­ber)!” but that’s not insult­ing. And while Jews have been per­se­cuted for basi­cally ever, athe­ists have been left alone because they’re just so quiet. Homo­sex­u­als, sim­i­larly, get nailed to fences and kicked in the balls and shoved into some of the same ovens as oth­ers have been — birds of a feather? not so much, it turns out — but athe­ists sit over in the cor­ner read­ing their books and feel­ing silently supe­rior to you and your funny ideas about how mur­der­ers might get off scott free, but they cer­tainly have another thing com­ing to them after they live to a ripe old age and finally die of the same dis­ease that claimed your grandparents.

You might think that athe­ists just don’t care about any­thing. After all, apa­thy and athe­ist sound almost alike! But it’s not true. They just don’t care about your god, or your sav­ior, or your prophet. All those things, they regard as sim­ple mis­un­der­stand­ings on your part, or sim­ple con­fu­sion about how things actu­ally work (remove “mir­a­cle” from your vocab­u­lary entirely and sub­sti­tute it with either “nat­ural” or “coin­ci­den­tal” and you’ll start to get the big pic­ture). They care about you, which I know seems weird since there’s absolutely no dri­ving force that would impel them to. If there’s no reward for doing good things, you say to your­self, then why do them?

Which brings us back to the old woman who lived in a shoe in her mouth. Poor, put upon Helen Thomas. Telling the Jews to get out of Pales­tine because they acci­den­tally shot a bunch of peo­ple on a boat — oh, and built a wall — oh, and there was some tank thing or other? And, sure, they have the right to defend their home(land) and maybe the Pales­tini­ans don’t and why don’t they just shut up and go back where they came from already? But God gave them that land! Along with the United Nations and a char­ter, so it’s legally bind­ing as well as Jesusy — or what­ever His name is.

Speak­ing on behalf of the One Per­cent, we offer only this; we don’t know why you believe what you elect to believe and we don’t really care. We’ll con­tinue to close our doors to Jehovah’s Wit­nesses and Mor­mons and go back to mak­ing cook­ies. Our souls aren’t lost and we aren’t going to hell. We don’t want a holy land (and we don’t think you need one, either) and we think peo­ple should be treated nicely just because it makes liv­ing here a lot eas­ier and more pleas­ant than the alternative.

Satan said so.