The Scathing Atheist

by Noah Lugeons

Today we celebrate Towel Day, one of the greatest of secular holidays. This is a day we set aside to remember the works of the great Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and the less often cited but no less hilarious Dirk Gently series.

Adams was pivotal in my personal trip toward atheism. I had already lost by belief by the time my cousin gave me his tattered copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide. I was about 12 at the time and it was the first time I’d seen religion unapologetically lampooned in a work of fiction. It was the first time I’d seen anyone treat religion the way that I always saw atheism treated. It was the first time in my short and limited experience that I felt like it was okay not to believe in god.

The atheist thread runs deep in all of Adam’s works and he was an outspoken atheist and skeptic throughout his public life. His works continue to inspire and amuse and while it is hard to call such a recent work timeless, it is harder to imagine a day when analogies like:

“The ships hung in the air much in the way that bricks don’t”

will cease to be funny.

In addition to inspiring me to embraced my disbelief, Douglas Adams is also the person that inspired me to write. He sparked a lifelong passion that has done more to define the person that I am than anything else.

I will carry my towel with pride today.

I’m too late this year, but I’d like to put out an open call from the wide expanse of the interwebs (or the laser-narrow portion that reads this blog) for plenty of Towel Day Carols for next year. I can’t imagine anything that would be a more appropriate tribute to the life and works of Douglas Adams than a bunch of sacrilegious, sarcastic songs about a bullshit holiday celebrating towels.

I’d like to close this brief tribute with one of the most atheist appropriate quotes that one could find in Adam’s writings:

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”