Tip for Tat

Last week, I wrote a bit about a pastor who decided to stiff her server because the server was geting a higher percentage than god.

Not only was I sure that this story was true, I had read a follow up article that told me the pastor felt really bad about what she wrote but still got her server fired.  For the record, here’s the check in question:

My answer: Because I’m real

My response, as an atheist, is not to think that all Christians are assholes.  It is to think that some Christians are assholes and some people are cheap fucks and this person happens to live at the intersection of a Venn Diagram of Christian assholes and Cheap Fucks.  There are plenty of Christians out there who cheerfully tithe 10% of their income to the church and still have no trouble tipping their server.  Some even tip as high as 20%!

Whoa!

But there are also a lot of Christians who felt that we atheists clearly were feeling superior because there is no such thing as a cheap atheist so this new check started making the rounds:

As an atheist, my first reaction to this is “holy shit!  What a dick!  I would never stiff a server because they told me to have a blessed day.  They are just being nice!  This atheist is a whining wanker!”

And if that atheist were real, my response was completely reasonable.  But this asshole atheist is not real.  The post is from The Comical Conservative, which is a conservative comedy source*.

The source is dubious enough but beyond that, the check looks photoshopped.  There are four adult meals for $147 total and a kid’s meal for $47?  Doesn’t sound right.  More damning than that is the fact that web searches for the topic yield no mainstream media references to this incident.  I mean I know the mainstream media has a “liberal bias” but not even Fox News picked up on this.

It didn’t happen.

What did happen was a bunch of folks on Facebook who call themselves “moderates” started saying “look – Christians do it and so do atheists so the atheists should pipe down.”

Except, and this is really important, the atheist didn’t do it.

While I have no doubt that some atheists don’t tip and I imagine a few even don’t tip because their server said “god bless,” the fact is before you pompously pronounce that atheists are “just as bad” as Christians because they “do the same thing”  you ought to have proof they did.

The internet is an amazing place that is filled with more facts than you can possibly imagine.  Many of those facts are actually true.

A lot of them aren’t. So before you start judging whole groups of people based on a “fact” you have discovered, you might want to spend a little bit of time ensuring that the fact in question is one of the facts on the internet that is actually – you know – a fact.

For those who vocally stand in the middle of the Christian/Atheist “debate,” the goal seems to be to prove that we are both unreasonable idiots.  OK, fair enough.  I don’t think agnostics are idiots – I just think that there is no evidence for god and I feel that makes atheism more honest.  For me.

If you want to do that, though, stop trying to do it by creating perfect comparisons.  Instead of pointing out how some atheists can be dicks to some Christians in completely different ways, people decide to fabricate atheists being dicks in exactly the same way.

And then the act all smug about it.  “Look at how reasonable I am,” they say, ” because I’m not a cheap fuck who uses my atheism/religion as an excuse to not tip.”

How tiresome.  You want to talk about what atheists and/or Christians do wrong?  How about you stick to the stuff we’ve actually done?

*I have to say, though, that I looked at a lot of material on their Facebook page and while it is most definitely conservative, it sure isn’t very comical….