You Sexy Atheist, You

I am an atheist, but I’m no dry stick who hates the idea of propagating the species. Despite what you’ve heard about the low reproductive rate of us nonbelievers, atheists like me are overflowing with desire and bursting to mate, and there are plenty of us around. We atheists walk with a swagger that says, “Lookit, I am hot to produce papooses.”

Yes, life is terrifically sexy for us atheists, so clear-eyed are we, so unsuperstitious, so scientific. I know that only atoms and void exist, that there are no entities beyond simple necessity, yet I am constantly flinging my belt buckle open and bursting my buttons to procreate. I like nothing better than to sit around the dinner table with my secular wife and nine humanistic kids and discuss the Big Bang theory or the principles of thermodynamics. Last night the topic of the eventual energy death of the ever-expanding universe so aroused my wife Cindy and me that we had to skip dessert and head upstairs, while the soulless products of our marital couplings cat-called after us and enjoyed the meaningless lives we’ve given them.

But not all atheists hit the mattress as hard as Cindy and I do. It amazed me to learn that France, where you can tell the religious skeptics by the berets they wear and baguettes they carry, is declining in native population. With its low birth rate, France, the land of love, will become the land of the elderly. Everyone’s age increases by fifty years. Nursing home residents will be the new teenagers, and retirees on government benefits the new kids. For some reason Franco-freethinkers can’t replicate themselves. The women don’t want kids, the men don’t want women, I don’t know what it is. All they seem to want is wine and pensions and the end of American world dominance. Exit France, stage left.

As for the secularized Japanese, they suffer from overwork if they are men, and from overworked men if they are women.The maternity scenes in Japan and Russia are similarly bankrupt. By the year 2050, the total population of these two countries added together will fit comfortably in one Super Wal-Mart store. It’s amazing. President Putin of God-free Russia has gone around offering money to women to get pregnant rather than drag their empty wombs around; might as well put something in them. He also kisses the bellies of the few children he can find around Moscow, knowing that in a few more barren years he’ll forget what they taste like. As for the secularized Japanese, they suffer from overwork if they are men, and from overworked men if they are women. Japanese men and women can’t stand to be in the same room together, or even hemisphere. Many suffer from hikikomori, or the inability to undress. And since they have no immigration, they’re down to cloning to fill their fading cities.

The adherents of feisty religions, on the other hand, are reproducing in record numbers. Roman Catholics, Christian evangelists, and Muslims, are fertile as minks. Some of these frisky believers find it odd that I, an atheist, am as fruitful as they. Just last week a Mormon with five wives and 27 children said to me, “Mike, how is it that you, a materialist more staunch than Marx, a Darwinist more strict than Dawkins, and an atheist on a par with Hawking, are not a desiccated old tuber, but overflow with life’s juices and drool life’s nectar and can’t leave your equally spiritless wife alone to the tune of nine godless brats?” I replied, “I really don’t know, my friend, why atheists like me sing the body electric, hear America singing, and rock endlessly like cradles. But we do. I know there is no God, and I am hot to trot.”

When I first met my wife Cindy, she had recently abandoned all organized religion. She’d thrown away her rosary, tossed out her veil, trashed her meditation cushion, and she was good to go. She found me in the philosophy section of the library curled up with Bertrand Russell, whose Why I Am Not a Christian is the Kama Sutra of godless lovemaking. She slammed shut her Susan B. Anthony and came up to me. “You sexy atheist, you,” she said, grasping my lapels in both her hands. “Know that I am nubile and fecund, and a nonbeliever.” She kissed me passionately, then spoke of me as if she were describing a hero: “He needs no opiate, this man. He has no false gods before him, he harkens to no prophets. He is horny as no god can make him, randy as only a scientist can be. By the laws of mathematics and physics, his glands glisten with secretions and his vessels are a-teem with seed. By golly, his number shall increase.”

The tomes of Russell and Anthony got knocked to the floor as we coiled ourselves in genetically determined poses. “When you describe the behavioristic twitches of the human frame of flesh, you describe love,” I breathed back. “O godless, fertile woman, be mine.”

The librarian asked us to leave. We went to my place where on the bedroom walls hung portraits of Voltaire, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Hwang Woo-suk, the South Korean hero of embryonic stem-cell research, now unfortunately disgraced for fakery. We coupled like products of the Enlightenment. Then we went to her place, where on the bedroom walls hung portraits of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Margaret Sanger, Lou Salome, and Captain Kathryn Janeway of the starship U.S.S. Voyager.

“Captain Janeway?” I asked. “She one of us?”

“I don’t know. But all the time she was caught in that time loop, she remained sexy. I think that says it all.”

We made it, slick as robots. Two weeks later a justice of the peace married us in the chem lab where I work. In our wedding vows we pledged to fill the world with joyous nonbelievers like us, and with nine to date (and one more little nut about to roll out of the toolbox—that’s an announcement), we think we’re off to a good start. Believers, watch out: It may take a few generations, but one day we atheists will join hands around the planet and raise our voices high in our atheistic song—John Lennon’s “Imagine.”