Penn Jillette: An Atheist's Guide to the 2012 Election | Big Think

Penn Jillette: An Atheist's Guide to the 2012 Election

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Penn Jillette rates the various candidates for the U.S. Presidency in 2012 from the perspective of an atheist.

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PENN JILLETTE:

Penn Jillette is a cultural phenomenon as a solo personality and as half of the world-famous Emmy Award­-winning magic duo Penn & Teller. His solo exposure is enormous: from Howard Stern to Glenn Beck to the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. He has appeared on Dancing with the Stars, MTV Cribs, and Chelsea Lately and hosted the NBC game show Identity. As part of Penn & Teller, he has appeared more than twenty times on David Letterman, as well as on several other TV shows, from The Simpsons and Friends to Top Chef and The View. He co-hosts the controversial series Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, which has been nominated for sixteen Emmy Awards. He is currently co host of the Discovery Channel's Penn & Teller Tell a Lie and the author of God, No! and Presto!

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TRANSCRIPT:

Penn Jillette:  Everybody seems to think that Obama is in his heart an atheist and in his heart a skeptic.  The church he belonged to in Chicago is a whack-job church.  It’s about equal to Palin’s church.  Granted, he hasn’t been as religious as… do we know off the top of our heads the most religious president in history in terms of references… referencing to god… references to god and in terms of appearing in churches?  Who the most religious president in history was?  It’s an interesting answer and I got this information from NPR, so it’s probably not slanted in the way you think.  The most religious president in history in terms of appearances in churches and mentions of the bible was Clinton.

Bill Clinton is the most religious president we’ve had.  He beats George Bush hands down and he beats Carter, who we know was a born-again Christian.  He beats him hands down.  So Obama does that too.  I mean at the 9/11 thing, maybe appropriately he read from the Bible.  But you have two choices with Obama.  You either believe that he is a man of Christ who prays for decisions in the White House, which he said he was or you think he’s a liar.  And I’m surprised by the number of atheist free thinkers that support Obama and their argument is essentially, he’s lying about being religious ‘cause you have to do that to be elected.

I’m not happy with either one of those.  I mean, Obama is wicked smart, he’s a wicked good talker, there is no doubt in my mind that his heart is in the right place, unfortunately I think that about almost every president we’ve had, but I think he wants to do good.  I don’t think there’s any malicious quality to him at all.  But I think in some sense, he’s a believer or he’s a liar.  So one to 10?  I rate him pretty high on the skepticism, maybe a six or a seven, but I rate him that way because somewhere in my heart I think he might be lying about being religious and that’s horrible.  It’s a horrible reason to like somebody.  I like him because he might be a liar.  Horrible.

Question: Michele Bachmann.

Penn Jillette:  Michele Bachman’s blasphemy is greater than anything I’ve ever accomplished.  I have tried with friends to say the most blasphemous sentence I can possibly say and it does not come close to the blasphemy of Michelle Bachman saying that earthquakes and hurricanes were the way God was trying to get the attention of politicians.  I cannot imagine a serious religious person reading that quote or hearing that quote and saying, “Yeah, right on.”  It is solipsistic, it is opportunistic, it is cynical.  It is deep and it is wrong and it is an insult to religious people everywhere.

For an atheist, it’s a burlesque; it’s a little bit of a joke you can dismiss her.  But I can’t see it as an atheist.  I see it through my father’s eyes, you know, my father was a Christian his whole life.  And if he had heard Michelle Bachman say that, he would have looked away from the TV.  The idea that you would lightly state that people were suffering and dying in order to, to prove that God was on the side of one politician is sickening.  The only reason that Bachman and Rick Perry are able to say this stuff is because of a magic word.  And this magic word is, “Christian.”  And if you look back in history, the word “Christian” doesn’t really appear in the way we use it today until the anti-abortion debate in the ‘60’s.  ...

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