Atheist Parable of the Train

No one has ever cut off a head in the name of atheism. No one ever has cut into human flesh and looked into a camera and said: in the name of NOTHING! – Jim Jeffries

I discovered Jim Jeffries’ comedy thanks to a friend who introduced him as an “atheist comedian” and showed me his early religion routine. Later, I saw his God is drunk at a party routine and realized that I’ve become his fan, although I don’t always like him. But foul-mouthed Jeffries has moments where he’s brilliant.

In the middle of his last comedy special, which is titled Freedumb and features a huge American flag in the background, the Australian standup comedian serves an insightful critique of how freedom has come to mean nothing in American discourse. He jokes, seriously, that Americans love to hear that we’re the land of the free when in reality we have the largest prison population on Earth, twice as large as the next country (South Africa). The supposedly “freest country” has the least percentage of free people. He then makes a few comparisons of our freedoms versus those of freer countries like Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands.

He also shared a parable to explain how atheists see the religious mobs, arguing that “religious people are holding us back”, and explaining that it is a myth that we need to save “the Earth”. Earth will continue fine without us. In fact, when seen from space, the signs of human civilization look like mold on a petri dish. When we’re gone, Earth will thrive without us. It’s our species that must save itself from itself.

In the parable of the train, he compares humanity with a train that is running slowly. He argues that atheist scientists are inside the first car, running the engine and making the entire thing work.

In the second car, he jokes that you can find agnostics, who annoy him with their lack of intellectual stamina.

It’s in the back of the train that one finds the religious mobs being carried by the scientists up front. There are so many of them, and relatively so few people at the front of the train, that the poor thing can’t run properly and is struggling to even move.

I realize that this is only a joke, but there are more kernels of truth than most people will admit. About 95% of the members of the Academy of the Sciences are atheists, and in recent weeks there has been a media storm around Ken Ham’s unveiling of his so-called replica of Noah’s Ark, which is a huge and profoundly stupid waste of money and resources that could have gone to scientific research, or to provide education or self-sufficiency assistance to people in poor countries, or to many, many other worthy causes. Instead, it celebrates a Bronze-Age myth that is taken seriously by almost half of the population in the United States.

The politically-incorrect idea that religious people are indeed holding us back was posited over a century ago by Nietzsche, who proposed that the Overman–our next evolutionary phase–must rid her/himself of religion and make his own meaning and value. In fact this has been said time and again by atheists throughout history, and it’s becoming increasingly evident.

By the way, there is a REAL Noah’s Ark somewhere in icy Norway. Scientists there stored seeds and DNA samples from all the Earth species that they were able to acquire and placed them in a vault to be perpetually preserved at sub-zero temperature so that, should many of those species die out or go extinct in a great cataclysm, they can be brought back. Another better way to spend money than Ham’s inane and retrograde Noah’s Ark museum project. We need more people in the first car of the train!

Also Read:

Comedy as an Ideological Weapon

Against the Use of Empty Words