PENN JILLETTE: There Is No God

From NPR courtesy of This is not a compliment:

I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond Atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

Click here read or listen to the rest.

Even though I'm not an atheist, I've just gotta love this radio essay. Jillette's reasoning is sound, and rather appealing to me because the God in which I believe doesn't really do much in the way of human affairs these days--as I've noted before, I'm something of an old-school deist, which seems to differ from atheism only on the question of God's existence, but nothing else. I suppose I live my life as though I were an atheist: I don't do good in order to inherit eternal life; I do good because I have a rational sense of morality, arrived at by rational thought, that compels me to do good. "Yeah, yeah," I can hear the atheists saying, "but you still believe in a magic fairy being." Well, okay, but it doesn't hurt anybody, does it? Anyway, Penn Jillette is always fun and interesting. Go check it out--be sure to listen to it, though; the reasoning flows better when spoken than read.

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