Historically, atheists have skewed towards the left side of the political aisle (see: Atheism and politics and Secular left and Atheism and communism).[3][4][5][6][7]
Although the secular left is known for ridiculing religion since at least the time of French Revolution (see: Atheism and mockery), the secular left is known for its humorlessness when it comes to others mocking its ideology (See also: Atheism and intolerance and Atheist hypocrisy).
The writer James Thurber declared: "The leftists have made a concerted attack on humor as an antisocial, antiracial, antilabor, antiproletarian stereotype,” Thurber wrote in 1960, “and they have left no stereotype unused in their attacks, from ‘no time for comedy’ to the grim warnings that humor is a sickness, a sign of inferiority complex, a shield and not a weapon."[8]
Heywood Gould wrote in Heatstreet:
“ | The left is trying to remake the world and feels immune to ridicule. It condemns humor as a bourgeois plot to make the oppressed laugh at and accept their exploitation.
Bernie Sanders admits he has a “bad sense of humor.” He won’t need it once his Revolution comes, According to Marxist theorist Tom McLaughlin: “Under Socialism there will be no classes and consequently no class conflict. Humor will cease to reflect any objective reality and will wither away.”... When Jerry Seinfeld revealed that fellow comedians had warned him away from colleges because they “were too PC,” he was savaged by the left media. Columnist Amanda Marcotte accused him of making excuses for being “a second rate hack.”[9] |
” |
Various comedians often complain on how humorless the politically left has become.[10]
The new atheist Richard Dawkins said about New Atheism, "[O]ur struggle is not so much an intellectual struggle, as a political one: What are we going to do about it?”.[13]
The Shadow To Light blog commenting on the new atheist strategy of using ridicule and mockery wrote:
“ | As we have seen, ridicule and mockery of the religious are key components of the New Atheist Movement. According to John Loftus, “It’s not just the so-called “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, and PZ Myers who advocate ridicule. I do too (see below). So does Richard Carrier, as does Stephen Law.” The ridicule not only come from the writings of the New Atheists, but they also engage in such tactics with their memes and their YouTube videos.
As they have told us, the mockery and ridicule is part of a socio-political plan, meaning that it is propaganda... Clearly, the ridicule/mockery is “used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda” and to “produce an emotional rather than a rational response.” Thus, a movement that postures as if it champions reason is actually relying on propaganda, demonstrating the so-called committment to reason is a sham.[14] |
” |
Gayle Trotter wrote in First Things about Mary Eberstadt's satirical book on New Atheism:
“ | In an anything-but-apologetic apologia, Mary Eberstadt challenges the many spokesmen (and they are almost all men) for the New Atheism in her satire, The Loser Letters...
Why does she take on the New Atheists? As Eberstadt said at her book launch, “their movement has repeatedly assailed religious people as self-righteous, ignorant of history, and humorless, all the while remaining self-righteous, ignorant of history, and humorless itself to a quite remarkable degree.” As a result, “this movement aids and abets our cultural dumbing down.” On another level, you might call The Loser Letters a defense of western civilization itself.[15] |
” |
Michael Schulson's Slate article entitled Jonathan Sacks on Richard Dawkins: “New atheists lack a sense of humor” indicates:
“ | You write that “atheism deserves better than the new atheists.” What kind of thinkers do atheists deserve? Is there a type of atheism that our society needs?
Well, you know, Bertrand Russell was an atheist with a sense of humor. And the new atheists tend either to lack a sense of humor, or the only humor they’re capable of is sarcasm. I mean, somebody with a little intellectual humility does not say, “Anyone who disagrees with me is stupid.”[16] |
” |
See also: Richard Dawkins and anger and Abrasiveness of Richard Dawkins
The movie The Atheist Delusion features the new atheist Richard Dawkins being the object of audience laughter due to something unreasonable he said.[17] Dawkins indignantly asked the audience, "Why is that funny?".[18]
Dawkins has encouraged his supporters to ridicule religious believers and to go beyond humorous ridicule.[19] He wrote, "I lately started to think that we need to go further: go beyond humorous ridicule, sharpen our barbs to a point where they really hurt."[20] See also: Richard Dawkins' cult of personality
See also: Soviet atheism and Atheism and communism
According to the University of Cambridge, historically, the "most notable spread of atheism was achieved through the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which brought the Marxist-Leninists to power."[21] Vitalij Lazarʹevič Ginzburg, a Soviet physicist, wrote that the "Bolshevik communists were not merely atheists but, according to Lenin's terminology, militant atheists."[22] Soviet atheism/communism advocated the spread of atheistic communism around the world and efforts were made to spread communism outside of Russia.
The Soviet Union practiced state atheism and the atheism was of a militant atheism variety. See also: Soviet atheism and Atheism and communism
Listverse declares in its article 10 Bizarre Ways The Soviet Union Controlled Its People
“ | For comedians in the Soviet Union, every attempt at humor had to be read from a government-approved list of comedic material. Each year, comedians were required to submit every joke they’d written to a section of The Ministry of Culture called The Department of Jokes, and they couldn’t crack a single one until it had been approved.
Jokes against the state, of course, were forbidden, as was everything even remotely edgy. Even jokes against the United States had to be tame. When the list came back, comedians were usually left with just a handful of tame jokes about their mother-in-laws. For the next year, they could only tell jokes from their approved list. Improvisation was strictly forbidden. The only way a comedian could keep an act fresh was to steal gags from the competition. Plagiarism was fine, as long as the material you stole was approved.[26] |
” |
The website Open Culture was about the Department of Jokes:
“ | For example, about twenty minutes into his.. interview, Smirnoff discuss the serious subject of joke approval in the Soviet Union. That’s right, in all seriousness, he tells us, comics were required to submit their material to a Department of Jokes. Smirnoff also once spoke expansively on the subject in a 1985 Chicago Tribune piece on him at his peak.
Yep. There’s a Department of Jokes. Actually, the Ministry of Culture has a very big department of humor. I’m serious now. Once a year they censor your material, and then you have to stay with what they have approved. You can`t improvise or do anything like that. You write out your material and mail it to them, and they send it back to you with corrections. After that, you stay with it for a year. It is perhaps for this reason that comics in Soviet Russia borrowed liberally from each other, rarely did original material, and never, ever improvised. Says Smirnoff: “I would do some original material, but that would be unusual. Also, it was OK for comedians to borrow—if one of the big comedians went on television and did a monolog, next day 10 or 20 other comedians would do the same thing in clubs. That wasn’t considered stealing.”[27] |
” |
Vladimir Lenin similarly wrote regarding atheism and communism: "A Marxist must be a materialist, i. e., an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist, i. e., one who treats the struggle against religion not in an abstract way, not on the basis of remote, purely theoretical, never varying preaching, but in a concrete way, on the basis of the class struggle which is going on in practice and is educating the masses more and better than anything else could."[28]
Craig A. Lockard, author of the book Societies, Networks, and Transitions, described the militant atheist and communist Vladimir Lenin as being "humorless and uncompromising".[29]
Joseph Stalin, the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1953, patronised the League of Militant Atheists, whose chief aim, under the leadership of Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, was to propagate militant atheism and eradicate religion.[23][24]
Dwight Eisenhower said that Joseph Stalin was humorless.[30]
See also: Atheism and sloth
Soviet state atheism was largely unsuccessful in making converts as a whole and state atheism had more success in urban regions than rural regions.[31] See also: Atheism and its retention rate in individuals
In the former Soviet Union, a popular joke was that the workers pretended to work and the Soviet Union pretended to pay them.[32]
In 1955, Chinese communist leader Zhou Enlai declared, "We Communists are atheists".[33] In 2014, the Communist Party of China reaffirmed that members of their party must be atheists.[34]
Jiang Qing was the Chinese communist Mao Zedong's wife and he entrusted her with leading the Cultural Revolution. Mao directed her to lead efforts as far as attacking his opposition. She said of herself, "I was Mao's dog. When he said to bite, I bit."[35]
Richard Nixon wrote about Jiang Qing. "I have never met a more cold, graceless person... Jiang Qing was tough, humorless, totally unfeminine, the ideal prototype of the sexless, fanatical Communist woman".[36]
Margaret MacMillan in her book Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World wrote that Jiang was "humorless, self-righteous, capricious and vengeful."[37]
See also: Atheism and sarcasm
North Korea practices state atheism and belief in God is actively discouraged.[38] Open Doors, an organization based in the United States, has put North Korea at the very top of its list of countries where Christians face significant persecution - for 12 years in a row.[39]
Tina Nguyen wrote about North Korea at Vanity Fair:
“ | Kim Jong Un just can’t take a joke. The last time the North Korean dictator found himself on the receiving end of some gentle ribbing, as the subject of James Franco and Seth Rogen’s assassination comedy The Interview, Kim’s repressive regime allegedly hacked Sony Pictures, apparently in retaliation. Now, the absolutist leader is taking his hostility toward humor to a farcical new extreme, banning all sarcasm throughout the Hermit Kingdom in an attempt to crack down on dissent and quash any further laughs at his expense.[40] | ” |
The Finnish news organization Gbtimes says about North Korea in their article Laughing at the humorless, "No one really knows anything about North Korea, except that it’s a funny country where hardly anyone ever laughs."[41]
See also: Atheism and mass murder
The Christian apologist Greg Koukl writes in his article The Real Murderers: Atheism or Christianity?:
“ | Finally, in Cambodia (and this was close to me because I lived in Thailand in 1982 working with the broken pieces of the Cambodian holocaust from 1975 to 1979) "as a percentage of a nation's total population, the worst genocide appears to be that in Cambodia, formerly Kampuchea. According to the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, more than one third of the eight million Khmer were killed between April 17, 1975 and January 1979. One third of the entire country was put to death under the rule of Pol Pott, the founder of the Communist Part of Kampuchea. During that time towns, money and property were abolished. Economic execution by bayonet and club introduced for such offenses as falling asleep during the day, asking to too many questions, playing non-communist music, being old and feeble, being the offspring of an undesirable, or being too well educated. In fact, deaths in the Tuol Sleng interrogation center in Pnom Penh, which is the capitol of Kampuchea, reached 582 in a day."[42] | ” |
Asia Week wrote:
“ | Khieu Samphan, 67. French-educated, his thesis provided ideological basis for the Khmer Rouge. Studious and humorless, was appointed prime minister of KR government in 1979. Has the highest international profile among the KR leaders. Sends faxes to Sihanouk. One recently warned of an assassination plot.[43] | ” |
The New York Times indicates about the atheist and communist Fidel Castro that he was humorless as a child.[44]
The book Cuban Fiestas by Roberto González Echevarría, which was published by Yale University Press, indicates: "Castro is humorless, not like a Cuban at all."[45]
See also: Secular right
According to Murray N. Rothbard, who writes for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, most libertarians at the present time are atheists.[46]
Ayn Rand was a libertarian and atheist. Patricia Ward Bedierman wrote in the LA Times, "Effectively preaching a philosophy of selfishness and laissez-faire capitalism that came to be known as objectivism, Rand was a rigid, humorless, charismatic individual whose devotees valued her every word."[47]
The conservative Russell Kirk wrote about one one of the most prominent libertarians of his day: "The ruinous failing of the ideologues who call themselves libertarians is their fanatic attachment to a simple solitary principle-that is, to the notion of personal freedom as the whole end of the civil social order, and indeed of human existence... The representative libertarian of this decade is humorless, intolerant, self-righteous, badly schooled, and dull."[48]
See also: Comedy and satires on atheism and evolution
Although mere appeals to ridicule is a logical fallacy, parody and satire certainly have their place. Because Christianity is so well attested to via evidence and sound argumentation such as the work of Simon Greenleaf and other Christian apologists, Christians certainly have liberty to use parody and satire.
In terms of Christian satire, the Christian apologist JP Holding features a humorous Christian satire work entitled You may be a fundamentalist atheist if..... The biblical creationist organization Answers in Genesis has used satire to ridicule evolutionism.[49]
See also: atheism and arrogance and Atheism and narcissism
Oswald Chambers declared about atheism: "The real attitude of sin in the heart towards God is that of being without God; it is pride, the worship of myself, that is the great atheistic fact in human life." [50] See also: Atheism and arrogance
It is often said that atheism is a result of demonic deception (see: Atheism and satanic deception).
In a 2008 interview, Dinesh D'Souza declared:
“ | Look at Satan's reason for rebelling against God. It's not that he doesn't recognize that God is greater than he is. He does. It's just that he doesn't want to play by anybody else's rules. This idea that it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven is Satan's motto, and it turns out that this is also the motto of contemporary atheists such as Christopher Hitchens.[51] | ” |
Thomas More said, "The Devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.".[52]
See also: Atheist trolls
Both atheists and Muslims have developed a reputation of being thin-skinned (and for wanting to impose their ideology on others). It has been quipped that "Atheism is the easiest religion to troll".[53][54] Internet trolls often actively pursue trolling atheists due to their penchant of being so proud and so easily angered.[55]
In 2012, The Guardian published an article entitled Limmy's Show: Confessions of an internet troll which had the subtitle There's a witch-hunt going on against internet trolls right now. But, argues Scots funnyman Limmy, randomly goading atheists, jocks and non-existent techno geeks can be fun.[56] And of course, being thin-skinned is symptomatic of having excessive pride.
Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, a self-described provocateur, indicates "the reason I have a go at atheists is that it's fun. They are so thin-skinned. They are like libertarians, or...they are like liberal Democrats in the UK or..feminists in fact. They are so easy to wind up... They are so touchy."[57]
Most people and cultures take a very dim view of proud people and some cultures are known for actively engaging humbling successful people and/or proud people (Several Anglosphere nations are known for having tall poppy syndrome and Filipinos are known for having a "crab culture". Crabs in a bucket of water will pull down crabs trying to escape from the bucket).
Atheist trolls and atheist bullying:
At the same time, atheists are known for trolling others and for engaging in internet atheist bullying.[58][59]
"I once wanted to become an atheist but I gave up . . . they have no holidays." - Henny Youngman[60]