Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! Read Online Free PDF Page B

with “that’s not true” and you’ve really said something. There was a power to not swearing, especially in light social situations. “Oh my god, what a load of bullshit” becomes “My word, that’s simply not true.” That sure as fuck means something.
    The experiment faded away. I like the way the rhythm of swearing works in sentences and it’s one of my social habits. I say “fuck” and “shit” around my children, but they rarely hear a “goddamn” or “Jesus Christ.” I don’t want them to be confused by any of that from me. The messages from the other children at school get garbled with the home messages, and once when her little brother said, “Oh my god,” Mox responded, “You shouldn’t say that, because there is no god.” Well, she’s right, but I’m not sure that’s why her Christian classmates don’t say it either.
    I wanted to take all the power away from the idea of god and Jesus Christ. I wanted to see if I could speak more carefully. I wanted to have the strength to tell people to their faces that I didn’t believe what they were saying was true. I wanted more than just the balls to call bullshit.
    I’m thinking maybe I’ll go back to the no-swearing thing. It worked well for my parents, but whether I do that or not, I’m going to try to phase out all the hateful terms and ideas. I’m sick of racial and sexual stereotypes or even making fun of those stereotypes. I believe people are people. Differences between men and women may exist in the aggregate, but they mean nothing at the street view. I know gay men who are a bit prissy, and I know gay men who are slobs. Gilbert Gottfried is the cheapest motherfucker on the planet, but that has nothing to do with Jews, that’s Gilbert.
    I’m embarrassed that I wanted to make my African-American, gay, Jewish (background, now atheist) friends (I do have more than one friend who is all of those: African-American, gay and Jewish) prove how much they trusted me every time I felt like making a hack joke.
    If I really don’t believe in tribalism and I really want all those stereotypes to go away, it’s much faster to just stop using them than to teach everyone to understand when I’m kidding. I’ve made a mistake or two being overheard or typing in a forum online that I thought was private, when someone didn’t know my relationship with the person I was writing to, and accused me of being a kind of person I’m really not. It really upset me. Isn’t it easier to just not do it than to make it easy for people who are trying to misunderstand?
    I appeared on the same episode of
Politically Incorrect
as Jerry Lewis once. I had just done
The Aristocrats
and I was on the show selling it. Jerry was saying that he didn’t work blue; that he didn’t swear or make dirty jokes (I believe he meant in public). I decided to turn it on him, for the show, and as Bill Maher took the show out, I was saying things like, “Jerry, I think you’re good enough to make dirty jokes. I really do. You’re good. I bet you could work blue, if you worked on it. You may not be as good as Johnny Carson, Red Foxx, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, or George Carlin, but I bet you could do a pretty good job if you tried. I think you’re good enough to work blue, give it a try.”
    I thought it was really funny at the time, but maybe it was true. I’m not as good as that list of people. When I make jokes using those hateful terms, am I adding to our culture like Johnny, Red, Pryor, and Carlin? When Lenny was swearing and doing all that ethnic stuff, it took a lot of bravery, ideas and talent, but times have changed. It’s no longer brave or smart. We’ve gotten to the place where it’s too hard to tell whose side the harelip bartender is on. Even one person’s misunderstanding may not be worth the next guy’s laugh.
    Don’t worry about any of that for the rest of this book. I’ll still use “fuck,” but Canadian Thanksgiving is at a different time than