Doug Stanhope is a comedian who, like millions of Americans, saw Wolf Blitzer awkwardly ask an Oklahoma tornado victim named Rebecca Vitsmun if she thanked God for her survival, only to find out she was an atheist. She didn’t seem angry—nobody seemed all that angry—but Stanhope was outraged. He took his anger to the Kickstarter-esque IndieGogo site, and started a campaign to raise money for the woman in question. Which could be sort of nice, except he makes it clear that actually helping her is not his intention. “I didn’t do it because I felt sympathy because she got all her s*** destroyed by a tornado,” he says in a video. “I did it simply to be a ***** to her Okie-Christian neighbors, hoping that they were still eating off of FEMA trucks when someone drove up and presented Rebecca with a giant cardboard check.”
Huh. Well, first of all, as we know, this Stanhope is not representative of the atheist community as a whole. We’ve seen a few stories this year of atheists reaching out to religious communities and vice versa. This is one guy who’s clearly very angry about religion and, well, here we are. If there’s a positive side to all this, it’s that Stanhope’s campaign has raised $126,000 for Vitsmun, which is nice. Hopefully, her “Okie-Christian” neighbors will be happy for her …
