So far I’ve found three downsides to atheism besides the obvious, if cynical, problems with being on the losing end of Pascal’s wager:
1. Nobody to talk to during sex.
2. Screaming “Scientific materialism!” when you miss the birdie in badminton just doesn’t feel good enough. I played doubles yesterday and my Muslim partner was screaming “Allah!” every time he missed a shot, and a game earlier the Christian was shouting “Jesus!” and the Balinese have a whole repertoire, and I thought God, we atheists need a god.
3. No invisible means of support.
You can always use “holy crap”. That works for me.
Just because you don’t buy the basic premiss doesn’t mean you can’t use the terminology. But #3 does hold true and I am going to use that line. Thanks.
Re: Holy crap, if there’s no God, the crap cannot be holy. Or can it?
I read your response to Frank Rich’s column in the NYT today and had to follow your link. This post is excellent! Thanks for making me laugh out loud today!
You can try things like -
“Oh my goodness”
“Goodness gracious me”
Even I had to struggle with this for some time after I removed God from my vocab. Hope this helps!
Matt — it can if you’ve been eating donuts.
How about the age old … oh fuck!!
Yes, of course, there is that most beautiful of words, the closest English approximation to the Sanskrit “Aum.” It’s a word that carries a power that extends beyond it’s meaning (the only other word in the English language that I can think of with the same sort of emanating power is the word “Law”), while being the most flexible of words. It can serve the function of a transitive verb (“I fucked Mary”) and intransitive verb (“We fucked”), it can be active or passive (“You’re fucked”), it can be a noun (“Who gives a fuck?”), an adjective (“Fucking hell”), an adverb, whether regular (“It was fucking great” ), comparative, or conjunctive (serving in place of words like therefore, indeed, finally, etc.), and a variety of other parts of speech. It’s also inherently philosophical, almost German in its ability to be a building block within other words, like fuckhead and fuckface. And, fuck, its phenomenological credentials are unrivaled.