In the South Park episode, Trapped in the Closet, which touches on Scientology there's a scene were a Scientologist is explaining Scientology to Stan and as he explains it with accompanying animation depicting the description there is a caption on the bottom during the duration which reads THIS IS WHAT THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVE pointing out that they are not making this up, this is, in fact, what they actually believe. They recycled the joke for the episode on Mormonism when the story of Joseph Smith is explained.

There's a certain bias here from Stone and Parker in that they single these two religions out like this as being of a particular level of ridiculousness because, let's face it, the joke works with every religion.

They did on two occassions in South Park try to tackle atheism but on neither of them were they able to actually mock the worldview itself. On one episode Stan's parents become atheists and keep talking 'shit' (literally, shit came out of their mouth) and on the other they had Richard Dawkins have a pretty funny love affair with Miss (previously Mr) Garrison and some side-story of people in the future worshipping science, saying things like, "In the name of science" and there was some war between multiple factions of atheists with slightly different scientific believe. Basically falling into the tiresome, "atheism is a religion too". No where could they actually mock the lack of belief itself, no where did we see THIS IS WHAT THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVE.

I've only seen one stand-up comedian try tackle atheism, and that was Dane Cook, who talked about some atheist guy sneezing in an elevator. Dane says, "God bless you." The guy says, "I'm an atheist." Dane asks him what he thinks happens when he dies? The guy says (something like) he believes when he dies he'll go back into the ground and grow into a tree (?). Dane says something like he hopes that tree gets cut down and made into paper used for Bibles.

Now, this is passive aggressive for a start, its like that joke about the Marine who punches the atheist professor saying, "God sent him", after the professor (vainly, according to the joke) asks God to strike him down. Trying to show nothing will happen. But, that aside, I'm not bothered about that, notice he doesn't actually make any type of witty deconstruction of atheism. He takes the piss out of a particular guy who, if the story is true and happened how he told it, sounds like a bit of a prat.

Now you compare that to the amount of material religon has provided for comedians over the last, over the last ever. From legends like Dave Allen, George Carlin, Eddie Izzard, Monty Python and Not The Nine O'Clock News. Religion is absolutely ripe for ridicule. It sets itself up like a straight man about to be pied. The nonsense they come out with stretches incredulity so far the only way break the tension is to laugh.

Can anyone think of any comedian who has successfully mocked the atheist's non-belief? Is it possible that atheism is untouchable in this regard, not being a ridiculous position and one primed for ridicule that goes beyond religious passive aggression or needs to be straw-manned to sound ridiculus (atheists believe that the universe came from nothing, by nothing)? And; will Lion reply that atheism isn't used in comedy because it's boring, the little train that coudn't, choo-choo?

Well yeah, how can you mock "I don't believe this shit because there is no evidence". The only way would be like how we might ridicule Michael Behe for ignoring all the stacks of evidence about the evolution of the immune system in the Dover trial - but that only works because there IS such a mountain of evidence that he was ignoring, and if there was evidence like that for the existence of a deity most of us wouldn't be atheists in the first place.

And for the most part when theists find ways of mocking atheists - it's as you say, strawmanning on a massive scale - take the aforementioned Lion, who in order to respond in kind for the contempt his posts receive, needs to twist them out of all recognition to convert them into something so stupid it can indeed be mocked.

I imagine it's about as easy as making fun of people for not believing the world is run by an evil cabal of shapeshifting lizard people. Trying to do so is likely to be quite self-defeating.

Animavore wrote:
Can anyone think of any comedian who has successfully mocked the atheist's non-belief?

William Lane Craig has a pretty good routine. Doesn't get too many laughs though. But he tries hard.

"Have you heard about the atheists who couldn't commit genocide because objective moral values and duties prevented them? Neither have I!" *burump-um* *






* disclaimer: not an actual verbatim WLC bit.

That's sort of funny. Maybe not for the reasons it is intended though.

Anything can be mocked, that's easy. Good humour (more difficult) however provokes reflection and that's always a desirable thing IMHO.

BBC News - "Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe"

If God DID exist, he'd be pretty pissed off. In fact, if I was god I would probably have gone back in time and punished Hawking in some horrible way...

Nope, no sign of that.

There's a few good ones like this, but not many. And they don't have much to do with atheism.

Anything can be subject to scorn and derision. Mockery, on the other hand, implies that the target of said attention exhibits an absurdity worthy of subjecting to illumination by a suitable spotlight. Not accepting uncritically unsupported blind assertions is inherently bereft of any such absurdity. Supernaturalists might heap scorn upon atheism, but they cannot truly mock it for this reason, whereas the absurdities writ large within supernaturalism lend themselves easily to mockery. This asymmetry is one of the reasons supernaturalists resort to their usual methods.

It seems to me to be a bit hard to mock simply believing or not believing in a god. There doesn't seem much to go off of. Religions, however, create belief systems around their belief in a god(s), and that seems to be the meat that mockery lives on. Maybe it is hard to mock atheism because people don't tend to build a belief system around it.

Of course it can be mocked - but that doesn't mean it has to make sense! I'll bet a fundie will be along soon to show us how!

Seem to be slim pickings when it comes to quips about atheism. Even Rosemarie Jarski's A Word From The Wise (in which witty quotes are arranged according to subject) has only a few entries under the heading 'Atheist'. Here are the "best" of them...

Why isn't there a book about someone losing their faith and it being a beautiful experience?
- Julia Sweeney

The annoying thing about being an atheist is that you'll never have the satisfaction of saying to believers, "I told you so."
- Mark Steel

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
- John Updike

I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up -- they have no holidays.
- Henry Youngman

Ani, the elevator joke was well funny!

Elevator joke?

They try, but lets face it, it's really not funny when they do...

Animavore wrote:Elevator joke?

You know the one about the skeptic lady and the coffee guy?

Oh wait...

And here was I thinking, Peter Sellers.

Laurens wrote:

They try, but lets face it, it's really not funny when they do...

Oh, it's funny alrigh.

Crocodile Gandhi wrote:It shouldn't be hard to mock or ridicule individual atheists, but it's much harder to mock atheists as a group or atheism as a concept. Similarly, it's piss easy to mock conservatives, yet you don't often see progressives succesfully lampooned. For instance, the conservative version of the daily Show simply doesn't exist and I don't think it could.

Fox News tried it, and failed miserably.