“Laughter is poison to fear.” — George R.R. Martin “If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.” — Robert Frost “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.” –Kurt Vonnegut “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.” — Billy Joel

I’ve heard from a lot of people here in the United States who say that the Christian God deserves respect; that I should not make fun of Him.

I disagree, and I’d like to frame the disagreement as responses to three objections I tend to hear when I or others make fun of Christianity.

1. Straw Man

Likely the most frequent objection. What a Christian usually means when they say this is, “You weren’t addressing my particular form of Christianity, so your criticism is invalid.” News Flash: It is extremely difficult to find two individual Christians with the same theology, let alone two denominations. It’s not a straw man until you give your position and the person has falsely represented it. More often than not, however, the “straw man” criticism comes into play when someone discusses a theological strain of a Christian’s position that they don’t like. If that’s the case — Why not just laugh at it, if you don’t like it, and then explain, “Actually, I think something different”? Perhaps the person is making fun of it for the same reason you reject it. Congratulations. You have common ground. Now you can start there and share a different way.

More often than not, however, I hear a Christian say, “Straw man” without bothering to really follow up on it or every expressing their own point of view. You can’t do this, really — if you think something differently from what is being made fun of, you should explain what, exactly, it is. To say “straw man” without clarification ignores the fact that, somewhere, the person laughing picked that ridiculous section of your religion up, and it probably has some degree of influence in culture, or at least in this particular person’s life, and laughter is one way of dealing with it.

I mean, think about your own case. Imagine if you lived in a country or had a life that was deeply influenced by a religion outside of yours — you would probably, I think, find relief in laughing at it instead of being serious about the authority of the religion, wouldn’t you? And I’m asking that question because, thousands of times (at least) I’ve heard from Christians who insist their religion be taken seriously laugh hysterically at, say, New Agers or Mormons. How much more would they feel a need for comic relief if one of these ways of thinking governed their lives?

2. It Hurts Religious People’s Feelings

If you are a religious person, I want to ask, straight up: Why does it bother you? You believe in this big, powerful God. Honestly, when someone made fun of me when I was a Christian, it was water over my back. I believed in God; He would take care of it. Why would I personally get offended? God could defend Himself, and He had thick skin. When I left Christianity, it honestly took me by surprise how sensitive other Christians were regarding their religion.

That said, even if I assume that you don’t really believe God is big and powerful and is basically something to make you feel better about your life, I still don’t follow this objection from Christians in the United States. I can almost see this with a minority religion, like the Native American religions, whose proponents make up, together, about .3% of the population. Although they are not religious, I could even see the “don’t hurt their feelings” argument being applied to atheists to some extent, as they make up around 2.4% of the population. However, I hope you understand my hesitancy to agree that Christianity, when it is the religion claimed by 78% of the population and every member of our three federal branches of government, is in the most danger of being oppressed. It actually seems to be doing most of the oppressing.

And what are people to do when, due to various strains of Christianity, they become suicidal because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer? What are they to do when they begin to fear hell for themselves and for their friends? What are they to do when they see a history of the Bible — due to straightforward, not roundabout, reading — being used to justify everything from physical child abuse, to race-based slavery and keeping slaves in line, to creating climates in which lgbtq individuals are more likely to commit suicide, to….hold on, here’s a list with 75 more that I wrote because I kept running out of space trying to catalogue the clusterfuck of ways Christianity has hurt and continues to hurt society, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. As an avid blogger, I literally see at least a couple new instances in the news every single day that I didn’t know about before.

So those of us who have, frankly, had enough of Christian bullying, and who have been profoundly damaged by it or profoundly impacted by seeing others who have had their lives damaged by it…we can cry and be angry, or we can be callous or indifferent, or we can laugh. I think it’s needed, at times, to laugh. We go through, and have gone through, all this bullshit because people believe in a Bible whose stories are, quite frankly, ridiculous. Some of us have been intimidated by its use, some of us were once believers in it and forced to respect it. We don’t anymore. So we feel free to laugh at it, and some of us laugh to keep the tears away, and others of us laugh out of relief that no — we don’t have to heed any of what it says anymore, and the rest of us laugh because it’s funny.

If Christians ever end up in the oppressed minority — legitimately, not just because they feel like they are — then believe me, I’m going to be the first one in their corner, saying they’re oppressed. But you’re 78% of the goddamn population. You’ve got control over our government, and you have so many abuses and ways that you’ve damaged society that you should be criticized. While LGBTQ suicide rates swell especially among the youth, most Christians seem to be doing pretty darn well; it doesn’t seem that someone making fun of your religion is going to tempt you to put a bullet in your head, but respecting a book whose straightforward reading in common translations indicates that homosexuality and being trans is a sin might put a bullet in a teenage brain. If you want me to force someone struggling under the weight of Christianity’s oppression to respect Christianity, I’m liable to protect them by making fun of it myself. Harmful beliefs should be criticized, and humor is one effective way to do it.

I’m not laughing because I’m heartless. I’m laughing because I want to protect the right of the people you have hurt to laugh, I want to reserve a spot for them, because I’d rather they laugh instead of cry, and I think that laughter can expose the absurdities of injustice when they are insulated in false sacredness.

3. It’s Disrespectful

This one is strange. I don’t believe in God, first of all, so I can’t disrespect a being I can’t believe in. I can disrespect a concept other people believe in, but let’s not get this twisted — the religion disrespected me first. I mean, for starters — although I know there are a zillion types of Christianity out there, most of them say that we are all sinners in need of God’s grace. That’s an insult. Why? Because I’m not a sinner. If your religion comes to me and says that we’re all sinners, I’m liable to think that’s so much nonsense that I’m tempted to laugh.

The alternative that the Christian often seems to offer instead of laughter — respecting the fact that they think I’m a sinner in need of grace — is itself offensive. What, you want me to respect the concept that I’m a sinner? Seriously? Like, you basically tell me that I am a in a horrific moral state, which is the most disrespectful thing you can say, and you want me to respect that? No. I have no desire to respect the fact you think I’m a sinner, and I’m not going to respect the fact that you think we are all sinners; I respect humanity too much for that nonsense. So for the love of all humanity and existence I’ve decided to spend the average of 75 years of my life in amused laughter at the concept while I continue with the business of living.

The more I think about it, the more it is jaw-droppingly astonishing to me that Christians can unabashedly hold some of the most insulting views and demand respect for them — and that, when they are insulted back with much less intrusive insults (I’m not saying you’re a sinner; I’m just saying you’re dangerously wrong, and there is no afterlife involved), suddenly the person who rejected the original insult is seen as the insulting one. I know that this happens because we live, here in the United States, in a place in which Christianity is dominant and thus has become more socially acceptable; we’re used to it being prominent and respected, and when it’s not it takes us by surprise. But when you distance yourself from that bias and look at the pure facts of the case, it seems so obvious who is being more disrespectful to whom that when someone gets it twisted, it seems remarkable.

Thus, it seems to me that respect of the humanity that does exist entails some degree of disrespect for the nonexistent dictators of humanity who do not.

Hopefully that’s somewhat clear.