Educating Trevor Noah

Trevor Noah, the soon-to-be host of The Daily Show, has been called out for his promotion of negative views of atheists. While his comments about overweight women and Jews, among others, are being dismissed/excused as jokes that "didn't land" (um, yeah - hilarious!), his tweets about how he views atheists aren't at all jokes - he wants the world to know he holds atheists in contempt, no kidding.

He's in good company: Oprah and Stephen King feel the same way, unfortunately, and atheists.

If Noah, a South African, is going to be the host of one of the most popular television shows in the USA, a country that is incredibly diverse not just in terms of ethnicities, but also in terms of values, education, economics, etc., where everyone belongs to a different community of faith OR NONE AT ALL, he's got a lot of catching up to do to learn about our not-at-all-unified culture. I hope he starts his education about the USA with learning about atheism in our country, and learning about it from atheists themselves.

He could take an hour and read through the following 20 essays about atheism and, perhaps, understand why his tweets - and his publicly-stated view of atheists - are so off-the-mark, and why such make us reluctant to watch The Daily Show:

Penn Jillette's excellent essay, "There Is No God" NPR's "This I Believe" series

What Religious People Have Dead Wrong About Atheists (from Your Atheist Muse)

Contrary to what the Catholic League says, I believe in so much... (from Your Atheist Muse)

Does Secularism Make People More Ethical? From Der Spiegel

Not a Christian (from Your Atheist Muse)

The joy and truth I feel (from Your Atheist Muse)

Do Atheists have faith? (from Your Atheist Muse) (from Your Atheist Muse)

The Atheist Response to Tragedy (from Your Atheist Muse)

Quit trying to convert me! (from Your Atheist Muse)

Why Are Believers Willfully Ignorant About Atheists?

Rethinking His Religion (from The New York Times)

Remembering Butterfly McQueen (from Your Atheist Muse)

the arrogance of religion (from Your Atheist Muse)

Satanic Suffering (from Your Atheist Muse)

Why I "do good"; Why I try to be kind (from Your Atheist Muse)

The power & the glory of hope, WITHOUT a God (from Your Atheist Muse)

Love is logical. Love makes sense. (from Your Atheist Muse)

Lovely things that feel magical in the natural world (from Your Atheist Muse)

If "God is good all the time", then God is really lousy (from Your Atheist Muse)

Why I love being an atheist (from Your Atheist Muse)

Maybe Trevor Noah could read these and, instead of deriding atheists, he could either apologize or just not talk about us at all - the latter of which will be quite hard to do on the Daily Show... at least as it currently exists.