Everything You Know About God Is Wrong

CONFESSIONS OF AN ATHEIST

Editor's Note: Paul Krassner has been skewering and defying authority for a half-century now, and he's known primarily as a satirist and trickster. His legendary magazine (later a newsletter), The Realist, infamously mixed fact and parody so artfully that readers often couldn't tell which was which. But Krassner's crucial place in the history of secularism is often overlooked. From its beginning during the Eisenhower administration in 1958—thus predating the Counterculture—The Realist courageously served up hardcore atheism, usually in the form of acid satire on religion but sometimes via frontal attacks (including articles by Madalyn Murray O’Hair).

THE PARADOX OF my own peculiar spiritual path is that I’m an unbeliever who engages in constant dialogue with the deity I don't believe in. For example, as a stand-up satirist, before I walk on stage to perform, I always look in the mirror and pray out loud to the deity I don't believe in: “Please, God, help me do a good show.” And then I always hear the voice of God come booming back at me: “Shut up, you superstitious fool!”

I had developed that habit of communicating with my imaginary friend when I was a kid who actually believed in an all-knowing, all-powerful Being. It was his idea to have extra skin on people's elbows so they could bend. I wondered whether he had intended for boys to button their shirts one way and for girls to button their blouses another way.

My faith disappeared when I was thirteen. I was working early mornings in the candy store on the ground floor of our apartment building. My job was to insert different sections of the newspaper into the main section. On Sundays rows and rows of piles of papers were stacked high, and it would take me hours. On the day after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, I would read that headline over and over and over and over again. That afternoon, I told God I couldn't believe in him any more because he had allowed such devastation to happen.

“Allowed? Why do you think I gave humans free will?”

When I got beaten up by the class bully because I was Jewish, I told him, “I’m not Jewish. I don't believe in God.”

“Okay, well, I’m exercising my free will to believe that you don't exist.”

“All right, it's your loss!”

THE ONLY THING I can remember from my entire college education is a definition of philosophy as “the rationalization of life.” For my term paper, I decided to write a dialogue between Plato and an atheist. On a whim, I looked up “atheism” in the Manhattan phone book, and there it was: “Atheism, American Association for the Advancement of.” I went to their office for background material.

The AAAA sponsored the Ism Forum, where anybody could speak about any “ism” of their choice. I invited a few acquaintances to meet me there. The event was held in a dingy hotel ballroom. There was a small platform with a podium at one end of the room and heavy wooden folding chairs lined around the walls. My favorite speaker declared the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not take thyself too goddamned seriously.” Taking that as my unspoken theme, I got up and parodied the previous speakers. The folks there were mostly middle-aged and elderly. They seemed to relish the notion of fresh young blood in their movement.

However, my companions weren't interested in staying. Had I left with them that evening in 1953, the rest of my life could have taken a totally different path. Instead, I went along with a group to a nearby cafeteria, where I learned about the New York Rationalist Society. A whole new world of disbelief was opening up to me. On Saturday night I went to their meeting. The emcee was a former circus performer who entertained his fellow rationalists by putting four golfballs into his mouth. He also recommended an anti-censorship paper, The Independent.

The next week, I went to their office to subscribe and get back issues. I ended up with a part-time job, stuffing envelopes for a dollar an hour. My apprenticeship had begun. The editor, Lyle Stuart, was the most dynamic individual I’d ever met. His integrity was such that if he possessed information that he had a vested interest in keeping quiet—say, corruption involving a corporation in which he owned stock—it would become his top priority to publish it. Lyle became my media mentor, my unrelenting guru, and my closest friend. He was responsible for the launch of my own magazine, The Realist. The masthead announced, “Freethought Criticism and Satire.”

I NOW LIVE IN A SMALL TOWN in California. The official slogan was recently changed from “People, Pride and Progress” to “Clearly Above the Rest,” and so heaven would be the theme of the Chamber of Commerce installation dinner at the Miracle Springs Hotel. The waiters and waitresses would be dressed as angels. The stage in the hotel ballroom would be overlain with a cottony white cloud, enhanced by a fog machine. There would be a blonde angel playing the harp. And I was invited to perform.

At 7 P.M., the salad would be served. At precisely 7:15, a clatter of pots and pans would be heard, then I would be thrown out of the kitchen, directly into that heavenly scene in the banquet hall. Oh, yes, and I would be dressed as the devil, who had been kicked out of heaven. The devil isn't merely a metaphor. The latest poll indicates that 68 percent of Americans believe Satan exists.