Authors: Penn Jillette
W certainly knows more about Islam than I do. What the fuck do I know about Islam? I don’t know jack shit. One of my fleeting goals a few years ago was to learn to read Arabic well enough to read the real Koran, but I decided to learn to bow Bach on my upright bass instead.
Maybe I’ll learn Arabic next year and see if I can get added to a few more watch lists. I won’t change my name to Cat Stevens or anything, but just chatting on the iPhone in Arabic might get me flagged faster than a squishy bomb in my panties and my dad ratting me out.
I didn’t learn Arabic, and I haven’t read the Koran, not even in English. I’ve read the Bible three times cover to nutty cover, but I’ve barely thumbed through the Koran at the Vegas Barnes & Noble. I have no idea what’s in it. I have no reason to attack Muslims. I don’t know anything about the revealed wisdom or even the culture. I have no beef (or pork) with any Muslims. None. Muslims are people.
I have been to Egypt. Teller and I shot some TV show there. Our hotel in Cairo had “This way to Mecca” arrow stickers on the dressers to point everyone in the right direction for prayer. Teller’s room was directly below mine and the same size and shape, but someone had moved his dresser to the perpendicular wall. The sticker had not been reaimed, so if Teller had trusted the sticker, his
salah
would have pointed the wrong way. Remember, it wasn’t us that moved the dresser. We were in the Middle East; we were scared to monkey with anything.
In the USA, I’m an asshole, and that can get some idiots writing angry letters. So what? I’m committed to my beliefs deeply enough to have an assistant read some angry letters written in crayon, but I’m not committed enough to actually risk anything. Calling Mother Teresa “Motherfucking Teresa” on TV in the USA wasn’t a big deal. It just got one more dipshit in his garage somewhere who calls himself Catholic even after his divorce, and claims by his lonesome to be a “league,” to take offense. He wrote a few threatening letters and added me to his thinly veiled death-wish list with Bill Maher, Sarah Silverman, and Trey Parker on his FrontPage–produced, Geocities-hosted cheesy website. Matt Stone and Teller weren’t on his hate list. Catholic boy was too stupid to realize that the partner who doesn’t do the specific voice might still do some writing. Saying “Motherfucking Teresa” a zillion times on TV got me less flack than giving my daughter the middle name “CrimeFighter.” I think that shows you how much serious power religion in the USA has nowadays.
But we’re careful with Muslims. Again: Christopher Hitchens said, “There are no atheist martyrs.” That’s good thinking. If Penn & Teller were ever going to seriously punk a religion, we’d pick the Amish. Fuck them all and the nonviolent horse and buggy they rode in on.
In Egypt, loudspeakers would call people to prayer while we were trying to shoot our stupid TV show, and every time I heard the English translation of the Shahada, “There is no god but Allah,” I would hear the first four words and think it was great. I really agreed with the first four words, “There is no god . . .” Man, I am so down with that. Agreeing with two-thirds of something religious is a personal best for me. In “Jesus died for our sins,” there’s nothing I agree with. I’m not sure Jesus ever lived. I don’t believe dying helps anything, and I’m not down with the idea of sin. I’m not even happy with “for” or “our,” those jive little pissant words. There’s nothing in Jesus for me.
Of the 1,200,000,000 Muslims in the world today, about 1,200,000,000 of them are good people who will never hurt anyone. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are good because the overwhelming majority of people are good. But of the terrorists who have attacked the USA recently, a lot of them were followers of Islam. George W. Bush and Obama have to say how it’s just a few bad Muslim apples, and that’s just true. The number of Muslim bad guys attacking the USA is very low, but the Muslim percentage of terrorists attacking the USA is pretty high. Even if you call the antiabortion murderers and PETA whack jobs terrorists, the Muslims still have a high percentage. The 9/11 guys, they were followers of Islam. The would-be shoe bomber was and is a follower of Islam. The (would-be in one sense, and actually in another sense) dick bomber was and is a follower of Islam, and is still a dick. The Fort Hood guy was Muslim, but a lot of people seem to want to say he “went postal” instead of “he went Islam.” Being a letter carrier is a job; Islam is a faith. Any job deserves respect; faith does not.
It’s not fair to blame all the Muslims for the horrible acts of a few people. That’s wrong. You cannot blame all those people. And we shouldn’t blame a particular faith for the horrible acts of a few people. At least we shouldn’t blame just Islam. We should blame all faiths. We
should blame faith in general. But Bush and Obama couldn’t do that. No religious person can do that. Being religious means being okay with believing in things without evidence. That’s the most important part of any faith. Catholics say that questioning is bad; Jews say questioning is good; but they all say that faith is a-okay. They have to. The deal religious folks make with each other is: we’ll argue about the specifics of our separate bugnutty crazy, but the general idea of being bugnutty crazy is good. Once you’ve condoned faith in general, you’ve condoned any crazy shit done because of faith.
The only people who can really speak out against religious terrorists are atheists. We’re the only ones who can say, “We don’t respect crazy shit that you believe.” If someone believes they have the intellectual and moral right to believe that there is a positive force in the universe that watches over us and created us, well, that’s not just the camel’s nose under the tent on a slippery slope, it’s the whole camel on roller skates living in your kitchen.
If you can say that you believe something just because you feel it, what do you say to Charlie Manson? Are you going to attack Charlie Manson for not being faithful enough? Look in those crazy eyes, just south of the crazy swastika carved into the crazy skin of his crazy forehead. There’s some real faith in there. There are things that Charlie Manson takes on faith. And how is that faith different? Is the argument against Charlie that not enough people share his faith? Of course it’s not true that the Beatles were sending Chuck messages to kill those people, but Charlie sure had faith that they were. If you assert that you believe shit you can’t prove because you feel it, don’t you have to give everyone that right? I’m not just talking about obvious crazy shit like virgin birth, arks full of critters, and seas parting. I’m talking about any kind of faith.
If you believe that your warm, snuggly feeling about the universe means a god . . . then Charlie Manson can tell you that those people were killed because the Beatles told Charlie about an impending race war.
We all act on things we can’t prove. Einstein had to imagine E = MC
2
before he had all the evidence. That’s different than faith. There’s
a humility to just imagining. There is a world of safety in doubt. The respect for faith, the celebration of faith, is dangerous. It’s faith itself that’s wrong. I deny terrorists the moral right to have faith in a god that will reward them for killing people with airplanes. That means I have to deny Christians the moral right to a faith that Jesus Christ died for their sins. That means I have to deny the warm, fuzzy faith that there’s some positive conscious energy guiding the universe. That means I have to get pissed off when Luke Skywalker trusts “the force.”
The only real argument against religious terrorism is to try to share the reality of the world. The world is plenty. We have each other. We have love. We have family. We have art. We have time. We have an impossible universe full of awe and wonder. We have an infinite number of questions we can work on. We have all the glory that is real and is us. We must stop glorifying faith.
Fuck faith.
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS •
Thanks to my editors, Kerri Kolen and Sarah Hochman, who kicked it off, and all the cats and kitties at S&S. Thanks to my agent, Steve Fisher, who made the deals. Thanks to my good buddy Robbie Libbon for reading this over and over and giving suggestions. Thanks to Glenn Alai, who runs all of Penn & Teller and all the subsets, and who got the idea for me to do this book. Thanks to Peter Golden and Spicoli; they’re both great. Thanks to everyone who is mentioned in the book, for giving me these stories and being part of my life. Thanks, Teller. And, of course,
EZ
Mox
Zz
I don’t need to pretend to have god’s love when my wife and children give me all the real love in the world minus zero, no limit.
*
I’m making up and improving all the dialogue in this story—it was thirty years ago, give a fellow a break.
†
Linda is not her real name—she no longer minds people knowing that we went to Cape Cod just to sleep together and fuck, but I don’t want to be writing snotty stuff about her liberal parents. I saw them at the county fair last time I visited and I really liked them.