So while the Jesus people have given us
centuries of oppression and resisted the forward march of civilization, what
have the nonbelievers given us?
Western civilization, that’s what. Science,
technology, the arts, philosophy, modern economics. People who don’t buy
the God stuff include Zuckerberg and Gates and Buffett. Confucius, Laozi and
Kant. The more intelligent of the Greek and Roman philosophers (none of whom
believed in Jehovah or Jesus). Clarence Darrow. People who fought for your
rights like Elizabeth Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Betty Friedan, Andrei
Sakharov, and the founder of Planned Parenthood.
People who don’t buy the Jesus stuff made the original
discoveries for DNA, hydrogen, the Big Bang, the first television tube, the
telephone, the transistor, Boolean algebra, nylon, evolution, subatomic
particles, radioactivity, quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity,
holograms, surgical sterilization and anesthetics, free-market capitalist
theory and Ricardian theory, galactic astronomy, a cholera therapy that saved
50 million lives, the microchip, statistical analysis, marrow transplants to
cure leukemia, cybernetics, the typhus vaccine, blood transfusion, Pavlovian
conditioning, Turing computer theory, cloning, actuarial theory, and a little
thing called the World Wide Web.
The nonbelievers include Kafka, Pushkin, Gorky, Keats,
Mencken, Nabokov, Mahler, Munch, Brahms, Chaplin, Copland, O’Neill, Shelley,
Dali, Godard, Proust, Steinbeck, Conrad, Eliot, Maugham, Arthur Miller, Pinter,
Sartre, Hemingway, Ibsen, Twain, Brecht, Chekov, Schubert, Van Gogh, Matisse,
Monet, Schumann, Bergman, Shaw, Vidal, Vonnegut, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf,
Berlin, Zola, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the creators of Sherlock Holmes, the Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo, The Stranger, the Forsytes, Catch-22, Stranger In a
Strange Land, Brave New World, Space Odyssey, Raisin in the Sun, and Frankenstein.
So there you go. Mass murder, religious warfare,
terrorism, oppression and resistance to new ideas are overwhelmingly the work
of the God People, because their Good Books tell them to do so. Nonbelievers
are the thinkers and builders and artists who move humanity forward.
