The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas
42 atheist celebrities, comedians, scientists and writers give their funny and serious tips for enjoying the Christmas season.When the Atheist Bus Campaign was first launched, over £150,000, was raised in four days - enough to place the advert 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life' on 800 UK buses in January 2009. Now dozens of atheist writers, comedians and scientists are joining together to raise money for a very different cause.The Atheist's Guide to Christmas is a funny, thoughtful handbook all about enjoying Christmas, from 42 of the world's most entertaining atheists. It features everything from an atheist Christmas miracle to a guide to the best Christmas pop hits, and contributors include Richard Dawkins, Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown, Ben Goldacre, Jenny Colgan, David Baddiel, Simon Singh, AC Grayling, Brian Cox and Richard Herring.The full book advance and all royalties will go to the UK HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust.
Читать The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas онлайн беплатно
The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas
EDITED BY
ARIANE SHERINE
Contents
The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas
It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Christmas
A Child Was Born on Christmas Day
Hark the Herald Villagers Sing
The Ironed Trouser: Why 93% of Scientists Are Atheists (Depending on Who You Ask)
The Large Hadron Collider: A Scientific Creation Story
How to Understand Christmas: A Scientific Overview
Things to Make and Do at Christmas
How to Have the Perfect Jewish Christmas
How to Have a Peaceful Pagan Christmas
I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas
How To Stop Worrying and Enjoy Christmas
If God Existed, Would He Have a Sense of Humour?
The First Honest Christmas Round-Robin Letter
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
Designing the Atheist Bus Campaign
A Day in the Life of a Godless Magazine
Welcome to The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, the atheist book it’s safe to leave around your granny. Here, you’ll find no chapters titled ‘666 Ways to Diss the Pope’, ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Church Graffiti’, or ‘How to Bash the Bishop’. There’s only one joke about Islamic fundamentalists, coming up now:
Q: Why was Abu Hamza a rubbish receptionist?
A: Because the phone was always off the hook*
and an undecided number of jokes about agnostics† (we wanted to write some, but we weren’t sure, and then we thought we might, but we weren’t certain).
*Abu Hamza was indeed a receptionist in a West London hotel in 1983. This was before he had a hook, but let’s not pull apart a joke that wasn’t fit for a Christmas cracker to start with.
† For the purposes of this Christmas book, they should henceforth be known as ‘eggnogstics’.
What you will find are forty-two* brilliant contributions from the world’s most entertaining atheist scientists, comedians, philosophers and writers, who have all donated their time, thought and jokes for free to help you enjoy Christmas.
Maybe you bought this book for yourself, or perhaps there’s a price sticker over the ‘A’ of ‘Atheist’ and your devout great-aunt bought it for you, hoping to make you more religious. Either way, all royalties are going straight to the UK’s leading HIV and sexual health charity, Terrence Higgins Trust, so to whoever bought it: thank you. (What do you mean, you haven’t bought it yet and you’re still loitering in the bookshop reading this with your grubby thumbs on the pages? Take it to the counter this instant!)
Whenever I read book introductions, I start bellowing internally, ‘Shut up and let me get on with the book!’ So I hope you enjoy every page, and that you have a truly excellent Christmas.
ARIANE SHERINE
*Because forty-two, as explained in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is the answer to life, the universe and everything. If you haven’t yet read it, you might want to buy it along with this book. Although the sales assistant may then think you only buy books with the title format The _____ Guide to ______.
‘I’ve already done all my Christmas shopping for this year. I bought all my aunties socks and Y-fronts. See how they like it.’
For many years, that was my only Christmas joke. Seeing as Christmas can be quite a lucrative time for a jobbing comic, a time when you can get paid two or even three times your normal fee in compensation for having to entertain people who are two or even three times more drunk and rowdy than normal, you would think I would have written a slew of seasonal zingers to keep the paper-hatted hordes chuckling into their lukewarm mulled wine. But I never did. I would kick off with my little morsel of Christmas humbuggery and then carry straight on with my usual cavalcade of jokes about smoking, drinking and slagging off Alanis Morissette. Why, I imagine you’re wondering, was this so? Why would somebody who, particularly in his early circuit days, was so eager to churn out crowd-pleasing material not hit that stage with an arsenal of Yuletide yuk-yuks? Surely someone with such a pragmatic approach to comedy would have at least a solid five minutes of holiday-based lateral thinking thrown into a box of sarcasm, wrapped in whimsy paper all tied up in the pink bow of impeccable timing? But no.
