In the wake of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, I think it is a good time to discuss the relationship between religion and jokes. Purely from an observational standpoint, it very much appears to me that the more religious someone is, the less of a sense of humor they tend to have.
Category Skepticism
Fundamentalist religious believers went on a shooting rampage in Paris apparently over a cartoon poking fun at the Muslim prophet Mohammad — intolerance be upon him. While reading up on this breaking story, I saw a 2012 quote from Charlie Hebdo journalist Laurent Leger. The quote reads, “You don’t throw bombs, you discuss, you debate. But you don’t act violently. We have to stand and resist pressure from extremism.”
I haven’t created a YouTube video in a while, so I figured now might be a good time to get back into that. In my latest video, I ask religious believers and former religious believers about the line of religious crazy. Basically, I am curious about what aspects of religion are too crazy even for the religious. Check it out:
I’m a pretty progressive person, but there is one thing that I think many of my fellow liberals get wrong. Maybe it is because I am a former radio talk show person, but I never liked political correctness. I see it as the enemy of free speech and free expression. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that words have power and there are consequences for saying certain things, but I also think that humor – dark humor in particular – can have a healing quality to it. The down side is that dark humor sometimes is politically incorrect and taken out of context might offend the very people it seeks to heal.
Atheism is on the rise in America and yet we are constantly discriminated against and marginalized because of our lack of belief in imaginary friends. For atheists who value reason, logic, and the scientific method, it sometimes seems like the inmates have taken over the asylum. But it shouldn’t have to be like this. Atheists make up a larger percentage of the American population than Jews, Muslims, and every other non-Christian religion in America combines. If we want to be less marginalized, there are things we can and should be doing.
I recently received a comment from a Christian pointing out that the Bible supports fasting for health reasons and that a scientific study has shown that fasting can be beneficial to cancer patients on Chemotherapy. The commenter then added that “this was another case of science catching up with God’s advice.”
Look, I understand that in countries like China, Iraq, Egypt, or Israel, it is certainly possible and even probable that a Christian might be persecuted for his or her religious faith, but in America where 80% of the country is made up of Christians and roughly 95% of our government is made up of Christians (including the President), it is extremely unlikely. It is more likely that a Republican would be persecuted in Alabama than a Christian to be persecuted in the United States.
Even though Tom Cruise is an outstanding actor who picks mostly good to great movies to star in, that isn’t the reason why I love him. I love him because he is such an outspoken Scientologist.
A while ago, I created a Facebook page specifically for Dangerous Talk, but it really didn’t take off the way I was hoping it would for a variety of reasons. For starters, I mainly posted there at 2am and as a result fewer people saw those posts on their feeds. Also, I had one other content creator and he was busy with his own stuff and didn’t post there that often either. But mainly I think the problem was that most people don’t know what Dangerous Talk is. The name alone could mean anything. It just isn’t descriptive enough to people outside of my blog.
Matt Stopera of BuzzFeed asked 22 Creations to write down some questions for the scientifically literate following the Nye/Ham debate. I thought it would be fun to answer these questions playing the role of Bill Nye The Science Guy. You can see the photos of the Creationists asking the questions on the BuzzFeed article.