Laughing in Disbelief: Challenging the Divine with Humor
One of the sacred principles of freethought that’s "sacred" by the first definition is that no question is unaskable, no authority unquestionable. One of the greatest, timetested ways of busting through the wall of immunity that surrounds religion is laughter. The agnostic Mark Twain knew this better than anyone. "Power, money,persuasion, supplication, persecution these can lift at a colossal humbug," says the character of Little Satan in The Mysterious Stranger, "push it a little, weaken it a little, century by century but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast." It’s true. A timeless connection exists between comedy and truth. Comedy theorists note that a joke is often funniest when it reveals something that’s true but hidden by a fig leaf. The laugh comes as the fig leaf is yanked away,and the strength of the laugh is what comedian Lenny Bruce called a Geiger counter for the truthfulness of the joke. If no truth is revealed, then it isn’t as funny. The laugh’s strength often depends on how obvious the revealed truth is after that fig leaf is gone. Institutions, ideas, nations, and people who stand on firm foundations can endure a joke or two at their expense. But if the foundation is built on sand well, to quote Twain again, “No God and no religion can survive ridicule.” This thread offers a small, selective taste of the long and glorious history of humor used to challenge religious ideas.

Mark Twain
For most of his life, Mark Twain (1835–1910) stayed away from religious targets, which is why most people don’t even know he was an agnostic. But toward the end of his life, the gloves were off. “The Bible . . . has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies,” he said in Following the Equator. “Faith is believing something you know ain’t true . . . If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be a Christian . . . If there is a God, he is a malign thug.” Huckleberry Finn it ain’t. You probably notice some bitterness there and not much humor. Twain was writing through a lot of personal pain at this point. But in some of his last contributions, he managed to make a heartfelt case that religion is both false and ridiculous. And he did it by using the beautiful, devastating weapon of satire. Several of Twain’s best humorous assaults on religion weren’t published until after his death in fact, in 1972, a few years after the first moon landing. The delay was his idea. “I expose to the world only my trimmed and perfumed and carefully barbered public opinions,” he wrote near the end of his life, “and conceal carefully, cautiously, wisely, my private ones” including his true thoughts about religion. He instructed his editors to only gradually release some of his less “perfumed” thoughts over the course of a century after his death. Here I discuss two examples:
“Thoughts of God”
In the essay “Thoughts of God,” Twain skewered what is now called “intelligent design theory” by wondering what kind of being would ever create the fly on purpose. Not one of us could have planned the fly,not one of us could have constructed him,” he said, “and no one would have considered it wise to try,except under an assumed name.” He imagines the moment the fly is created and sent into the world to persecute sick children, settle on the open wounds of soldiers, spreading disease and death. “Go forth,” says the fly’s Creator, “to please Me and increase My glory,Who made the fly.” It’s a wicked, dark humor, but it’s still humor. It strips away the protection of sacredness and calls the perfection of the world into question in a few sentences. It makes me think. If Twain succeeded, I’m not just entertained but more convinced that he has a point. That’s good satire.

“Little Bessie Would Assist Providence”
In his essay “Little Bessie Would Assist Providence,” Twain put innocent and unanswerable questions in the mouth of a four-year-old girl:
Bessie: Mama, why did the neighbor boy die of typhus?
Mama: It was God’s judgment for his sins.
Bessie: Why did the roof fall on that kind man who was trying to save the old woman from the fire?
Mama: Don’t ask me why,because I don’t know. I only know it was to discipline some one, or be a judgment upon somebody,or to show His power.
Bessie: You know the lightning came last week, mama, and struck the new church, and burnt it down. Was it to discipline the church?

The questions keep coming in rapid fire. Mom does the best she can to give the party line, and Bessie comes to the only conclusions she can: that God sends all the troubles and pains and diseases and horrors in mercy and kindness to discipline us. So it’s the duty of every parent to help God by killing and starving their children and giving them diseases, she says “and brother Eddie needs disciplining, right away! I know where you can get the smallpox for him, and the itch, and the diphtheria, and bone-rot, and heart disease, and consumption, and . . .” When her frazzled mama faints dead away,Bessie figures it’s the heat.

Do you believe in anything supernatural?

bluaero:
Do you believe in anything supernatural?

This is not an argumentative thread and m pretty sure cloudgoddess thread covers the topic of what supernatural really mean I think U should visit it, n U free to mention me there.

Well..the question was not meant to be argumentative. I just wanted to know your thoughts.

George Carlin
The comedian George Carlin (1937–2008) made a career of bursting sacred balloons. And he wasn’t above ridicule when he felt something was ridiculous. In one routine he noted that God has a list of ten things that you should not do. Then Carlin’s voice rose as he described a place God created, “full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish,” to lock you away forever if you break any of the rules. “But He loves you,” Carlin added quietly. See that, right there? That’s the fig-leaf moment. Under this particular leaf was the contradiction between eternal damnation and a loving God, captured in four perfectly placed words, delivered by Carlin with a sudden softening of tone but He loves you. The contradiction is funny and true and it’s funny because it’s true. Carlin’s work reframed religion to drive home a point. Instead of praying to God, he said he’d started praying to the tough guy actor Joe Pesci, because “he looks like a guy who can get things done.” Carlin noticed that “all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci are being answered at about the same 50 percent rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don’t. Same as God, 50-50.” In another routine, he boiled the Ten Commandments down to two, including “Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course they pray to a different invisible man than you.” Like a lot of comedians, Carlin’s work is sometimes dismissed as lowbrow entertainment. That’s about as far off the mark as you can get. George Carlin is a thinking person’s comedian if ever there was and an articulate atheist.

The Onion
The Onion ( www.theonion.com ) is a parody news organization found both online and in print. Its fake news stories deliver some of the smartest satire available, and one of its favorite targets is religion. A favorite example is an article with the headline, “Pope Calls for Greater Understanding between Catholics, Hellbound” in which Pope John Paul II is said to have called upon the world’s Catholics to build a bridge of friendship between themselves and “the eternally Damned.”
It continues for several paragraphs, contrasting the idea of earnestly reaching out to others in friendship and love while still maintaining that they’re going to hell. Two weeks after the attacks of September 11,2001, while other comedy outlets were frozen in place, The Onion ran an article titled, “God Angrily Clarifies ‘No Kill’ Rule.” Some other Onion favorites include the following:
1. Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World
2. Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity with New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory
3. Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian
4. God Answers Prayers of Paralyzed Little Boy: ‘No’, Says God
5. Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law of Thermodynamics
6. Pope Vows to Get Church Pedophilia Down to Acceptable Levels
7. God Cites ‘Moving In Mysterious Ways’ as Motive in Killing of 3,000 Papua New Guineans

Poking orthodoxy in the eye: Voltaire
In the 18th century, Voltaire (who wasn’t an atheist but a Deist) railed against intolerance, tyranny, and superstition by using satire. His best-known bust is the only one I know carved with a smirk. In his short story “Micromégas,” Voltaire goes after one of the most essential elements of most religions human specialness. A traveler from another world visits Earth. He is 20,000 feet tall and more than 400 Earth years old and hails from a planet 21 million times larger than Earth. Banished from his planet for 800 years for writing a heretical book about insects, he takes the opportunity to travel, makes a tiny friend on Saturn (who is just 6,000 feet tall), and then heads to Earth. At first the two are convinced the planet is uninhabited, then (like a scene from Horton Hears a Who!) realize that very tiny beings live down below. They both agree that the beings are far too small to have any intelligence then to their shock, they realize the little things are speaking. Short story shorter, they eventually learn that humans are convinced the entire universe was made for them, and the two giants nearly shake the planet to pieces with their laughter. It’s a pretty direct comment on one of the centerpieces of the Christian worldview that the human species is the center of God’s concern. I haven’t done it justice here. Search online for it and enjoy. None is just a cheap laugh for its own sake. Each is a critique of some aspect of religious belief or practice, including:
Young earth creationism
Intelligent design,
Homophobia,
Prayer,
The Catholic sex abuse scandal, and
the problem of evil.
As Erasmus and Voltaire both demonstrated, the ability to laugh at religious ideas that are harmful is a powerful way to get a serious conversation started.

The Power of Parody: The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
One of the most effective ways to make a satirical point is to pretend you’re on the same team as the target then hoist it with its own petard. A great example on the political side is Stephen Colbert, a comedian who pretends to be an enthusiastic conservative so he can ridicule conservatism in its own language. What Colbert does for politics, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) does for religion.
FSMwas born in 2005, shortly after the Kansas State Board of Education voted to introduce “intelligent design” (ID) into the state science curriculum. Board member Kathy Martin said at the time that evolution had been proven false, whereas intelligent design was “science-based and strong in facts,” and so deserved equal time in the classroom. The response was swift and strong. Many supporters of ID wrote in to praise the decision as a victory for all that’s good. The board also received letters from scientists, educators, parents, and members of the general public decrying the policy,including one signed by 38 Nobel laureates urging the board to reverse the decision. One of the more creative responses was an open letter to the board by Bobby Henderson, a recent graduate of the Oregon State University physics program. The letter pretended to agree with the board’s decision to allow multiple points of view, then claimed that another religious perspective, one based on the worship of a Flying Spaghetti Monster, also deserved to be included. It was a classic, straight-faced satire in the Stephen Colbert mold, and it was brilliant. “I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them,” he said in the letter. But he added that he was concerned students would only hear one Intelligent Design theory.He and many others around the world, he said, believed that the world was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Henderson asked that the science curriculum be split not two but three ways, teaching Intelligent Design, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and what Henderson calls “logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.” Henderson’s satirical letter spread like wildfire online. The Associated Press praised it as “a clever and effective argument” and the Daily Telegraph said it was “a masterstroke, which underlined the absurdity of Intelligent Design.” The following year, four of the six religious conservatives on the Kansas board who had approved the nonsensical policy lost their seats in an election, and the new board quickly voted to reject the change. Many credit Henderson’s letter for showing how untenable the board’s position was. In the end, by yanking the board’s fig leaf away,satire may have been even more powerful than the serious objections of 38 Nobel laureates.

Missing the joke: Poe’s Law
The Internet has developed its own set of rules, laws, and adages attempts to explain or describe aspects of the online experience. “Poe’s Law,” named for its originator, Nathan Poe, notes that it’s pretty much impossible to create a parody of religious fundamentalism that won’t be mistaken for the real thing. The website for Landover Baptist Church ( www.landoverbaptist.org ) is a perfect example of Poe’s Law in action. The site is filled with over-the-top characters like Pastor Deacon Fred and Betty Bowers (America’s Best Christian), as well as pronouncements, suppressed sexuality, and moral calls to action that are so close to religious fundamentalism in the real world that it’s hard to be sure they’re kidding. Tocomplicate matters, another site called Objective:Ministries ( www.objectiveministries.org ) has an ongoing project to shut down Landover Baptist, calling it an “anti-Christian fraud.” But it turns out Objective:Ministries is itself a parody site. And how can I be sure it isn’t serious? Well . . . I guess I can’t. But that wasn’t the end, not by a long shot. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has since exploded into a worldwide phenomenon, especially on college campuses. Along the way, it has developed its own rituals, scripture, and words and phrases including the following:
1. Pastafarian: A worshipper of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
2. “I Have Been Touchedby His Noodly Appendage”: I am blessed
3. The Olive Garden of Eden: Where it all began
4. Antipasti: People opposed to Pastafarianism
5. The Eight “I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts”: Instructions for moral living
6. RAmen: Said at the conclusion of a Pastafarian prayer

Now lest you think FSMism is just an extended joke amusing but not all that powerful try explaining to a Pastafarian exactly why her religion is fake and another (take your pick) isn’t. Arguing that the hearsay and revelations of one prophet are inherently more valid than those of another isn’t easy. Or you may want to talk to Nico Alm, an Austrian Pastafarian who learned that his government forbade hats in driver’s license photos unless they are of religious significance then showed up to the driver’s bureau wearing a pasta strainer on his head, claiming it was a religious mandate for worshippers of the FSM. When the government failed to come up with a decisive way to distinguish Pastafarianism from any other belief claim, Alm got his wish.

Blaspheming at the Movies: Life of Brian
In the late 1970s, fresh off the success of their film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the members of the British comedy group Monty Python were asked what the title of their next film would be. Without missing a beat, Eric Idle answered, “Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory.” It was meant to be a joke, but the more they thought about it, the more there seemed to be something there. No one had ever written a comedy set in Biblical times. Why not? Because it’s bloody hard, that’s why not. The cloak of sacredness, is like a wet blanket. The more they tried to work up a direct satire of Christ, the more it fizzled. But they didn’t give up on the idea, and after months of research began to identify the problem and the solution. As Python member John Cleese said, the founders of great religions tend to be extremely intelligent people with good ideas that are instantly mangled and misinterpreted by their followers who also tended to turn them into gods (or sons thereof). That’s where the comedy is not in the words of the Sermon on the Mount, but in the way Bob and Martha mishear it from the back of the crowd (“Blessed are the cheesemakers?!”) Messiah fever was very much in the air in first century Judea. There was no shortage of people claiming to be The One or having others claim it for them. Life of Brian (1979) is built not around the life of Jesus, but on the life of Brian, an average putz born the same night in the manger next door. Brian eventually becomes the unwilling focus of a cult of worship, and there begins some of the best religious satire ever written. One scene captures the history of Western religion in 60 seconds. When Brian, pursued by an adoring crowd, loses his shoe, one follower stops and picks it up, then declares loudly that it’s a sign they must all take off one shoe! Another follower loudly insists that no, it’s clearly a sign that all shoes must be gathered up. Yetanother insists it’s a sandal, not a shoe, while another urges the crowd to forget the shoes and gather around a gourd Brian had touched. The crowd splits into bickering factions. When they all catch up to Brian the next morning, he scolds them. “Look, you’ve got it all wrong! Youdon’t need to follow me! Youdon’t need to follow anybody! You’vegot to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!” “Yes!” the crowd replies in perfect unison. “We’re all individuals!” Christ appears only briefly in the film and is never joked about directly. This wasn’t skittishness on the part of the Pythons as their BBC overlords could attest, they never hesitated to go wherever the comedy was. But in this case, the best material was in imagining the guaranteed nonsense all around him. Of course this nuance had little effect on the controversy that followed as controversy always does whenever the sacred veil is breached. The film was banned in several countries, protests were held across the United States, and commentators decried the supposed attack on Christianity. Most hadn’t seen the film, of course, and the protests only created a larger demand, as such things always do. Some of the Pythons were atheists or agnostics, while others held religious views. But all saw terrific value in bringing smart satire to bear on human religion, especially on the things that are declared off limits.

Bringing the Blasphemy Home on TV
The three most successful animated television series today all include a huge amount of humor aimed at religion, and atheists and agnostics created all three. The following three shows have drawn the predictable wrath of religious groups and social conservatives for their irreverent treatment of religion. But irreverence is very much the point of comedy that’s how to bust through that veil of sacredness and ask otherwise unaskable questions. Whether any given plotline or joke goes too far is up to the individual viewer. For many people, believers and nonbelievers alike, shows like these play a valuable role in knocking the big questions down to manageable size.

The Simpsons
Religious belief and practice get more airtime in The Simpsons than just about any other aspect of culture. The Simpsons go to church and say grace before dinner, they have a conservative Christian next-door neighbor, and they shop at a convenience store run by a Hindu. Bart Simpson’s favorite entertainer is a Jewish clown, and little sister Lisa becomes a Buddhist. Homer meets God, Bart sells his soul, and the family briefly joins a cult called the Movementarians. Youcan’t swing a three-eyed Jesus fish in Springfield without hitting a religious reference, and the result is some savvy insight into the role of religion in today’s culture. Series creator Matt Groening identifies as an agnostic the ideal position for an equal opportunity satirist of religion.

South Park
The edgy and risky animated series South Park sprang from nontheistic heads in this case, atheists Trey Parker and Matt Stone. South Park goes after its targets relentlessly, sparing no one, including Parker and Stone’s fellow unbelievers:
[b]1. In one episode, a boy is fostered into a “strict agnostic” home in which a tyrannical father demands absolute uncertainty. The correct answer to any question is “I don’t know,” and Dr. Pepper is declared the only proper drink for an agnostic because “nobody’s sure what flavor it is.”
2. The boys seek the origin of Easter traditions, only to learn (in mysterious Da Vinci Code fashion) that St. Peter was actually a rabbit.
3. In the midst of the Catholic child sexual abuse scandals, the local priest goes to the Vatican to demand a better response, only to learn that the doctrine of celibacy for priests can’t be changed because the document it was written on has been lost.
4. A family of Mormons moves to town, and one of the boys is drawn in by their kindness, then repulsed when he learns the Mormon origin story,then convinced that the family’s kindness is more important than the odd beliefs of their church.
5. After an episode in which Scientology is lampooned largely through a straightforward description of its beliefs Isaac Hayes, one of the voice actors for the series who is himself a Scientologist, quit the show.
6. One character travels to the future to find that everyone is an atheist. There’s no more religious war instead, the United Atheist Alliance now battles the Unified Atheist League, shouting “Oh my Science!” as they die.
7. An episode in which a character in a bear suit is said to be the prophet Muhammad drew death threats from a New York-basedIslamic group and was censored by the Comedy Central network even though the suit opens at the end to reveal not Muhammad inside, but Santa Claus.[/b]

Family Guy
Family Guy is the brainchild of Seth MacFarland, another atheist who mines the rich material of religion. In the course of the series, his characters have founded a religion that worships the TV character Fonzi; converted to Hinduism, Mormonism, and Jehovah’s Witnesses; and timetraveled to meet Jesus in person. God burns down the local bar while trying to impress a woman by lighting her cigarette with a lightning bolt, and Brian (the dog) identifies as an atheist. In one unusually serious episode, the Christian Scientist parents of a boy with leukemia rely on prayer in lieu of medical treatment, leading two of the main characters to kidnap the boy so he can be treated.

I'm a huge fan of Family Guy

Downloading Disbelief
Mr. Deity
After hearing religious leaders try to explain how a loving God could allow the deaths of 230,000 people in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, film director Brian Keith Dalton sketched out a brief satire in which God played by Dalton as a kind of self-absorbed Hollywood film producer works with his assistant Larry to figure out what evil would be allowed to exist. Far from making light of the tragedy,Dalton was asking one of the oldest questions in religious thought, first proposed by Epicurus: God is said to be all-good and all-powerful. Yet evil exists. Either
1. God wants to abolish evil but can’t, in which case he’s not all-powerful; or
2. He can but doesn’t want to, in which case he’s not all-good; or
3. He can abolish evil and wants to but then, why is there evil?

The sketch became the script for a short web video, which in turn became the pilot episode of “Mr. Deity,” a web series exploring (and lampooning) religion. Other topics from the first five seasons include the following:
1. Mr.Deity asks Jesus to do him a “really big favor” go to Earth, live a sinless life, and die in agony.
2. Mr.Deity explains how he handles prayers (by voice mail).
3. Mr.Deity is outraged to learn that humans are attributing the Bible to him, when in fact they entirely left him out of the editorial process, and it makes him look “schizoid.”
4. Lucifer (also known as Lucy), the Deity’s wife, hires the philosopher Nietzsche to kill Mr. Deity.
Dalton was Mormon until his late 20s, and several episodes take particular aim at Mormon theology, including the idea that dark skin is a curse from God. Dalton now identifies as an atheist.

Jesus and Mo
It sounds like the setup for a bad movie or a really good comic strip. Jesus and Muhammad share an apartment. Once in a while they head downstairs to the Cock and Bull Pub, order a couple of beers from the atheist barmaid, and talk about (and criticize) each other’s religions. Moses sometimes tags along. That’s the simply premise of Jesus and Mo ( www.jesusandmo.net ), a webcomic that’s been turning out thoughtful and funny religious satire twice a week since 2005. Each of the two main characters sees the flaws in the other’s religion, meaning one or the other serves as the voice of reason in a given strip. When religion itself is satirized, the atheist barmaid is the voice of reason and a kind of Greek chorus for both. And Moses, being a prophet shared by both religions, creates a useful triangle for certain topics. So how does the cartoonist get away with drawing Muhammad, something that Islam prohibits? It’s not Muhammad, he says, but a body double. Adding a layer to the joke, the atheist barmaid never appears in the frame because, as the website explains, “it is forbidden.”

cloudgoddess:
I'm a huge fan of Family Guy

Eternal Earthbound Pets
When the Rapture comes, and Christians are taken up to glory,what will happen to the loving pets they leave behind? That’s the question posed by one of the most original religious satires I’ve ever seen, a website called “Eternal Earthbound Pets” ( www.eternal-earthbound-pets.com ). The website claims to be a group of dedicated animal lovers who are also confirmed atheists, meaning they’ll still be on Earth after the Rapture leaves Christian pets ownerless. For a nominal fee of $135, Eternal Earthbound Pets guarantees that if the Rapture occurs within ten years of payment, one pet per residence would be cared for after the Christian owner is raptured away. The “company” confirms that each of their representatives had properly blasphemed in accordance with Mark 3:29, which promises that whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven. That guarantees they will be left behind when Christ returns, leaving them free to provide the needed petsitting. In case anyone can’t decide whether it’s serious or satire, the website answers the most important question of all: Is this a joke? The answer: “Yes.”

Very interesting thread.

I'm a big huge, great fan of South Park. I admire Trey Park and Matt Stone.

From their episodes on scientology, atheism, Mormons, I've come to realise how easy it is to start a movement to control people and then It goes haywire.

These guys did a Broadway show called "The book of mormon". While I've not watched it, I've downloaded the official soundtrack of the songs and I've listened the album more than 20 times. There is a lot of satire and mockery, but done in amazing comedy. It's brilliant.

I'm also a fan of Goerge Carlin. He acted in Kevin Smith's film "Dogma", a controversial film which is really offensive to the average christian and has Been denounced as blasphemous