Author: Ophelia Benson

Alan Greenspan is funny too.

[A] humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

A state of shocked disbelief…that people who ran lending institutions were more excited about their own bonuses and profits than they were attentive to shareholders’ equity. Is it just me or does that seem ever so slightly naïve?

Not quite just me; Henry Waxman had a similar thought.

“You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the committee. “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?” Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw.”

Ah, have you! Well spotted!

Mr. Waxman noted that the Fed chairman had been one of the nation’s leading voices for deregulation, displaying past statements in which Mr. Greenspan had argued that government regulators were no better than markets at imposing discipline. “Were you wrong?” Mr. Waxman asked. “Partially,” the former Fed chairman reluctantly answered, before trying to parse his concession as thinly as possible.

How would things be looking now if you’d been entirely wrong?

Those atheists – what are you gonna do – they’re such a pain. They’re almost as bad as earmarks, or fruit flies, or pally terrorists, or socialists. Atheists are such dreary depressing dismal boring tedious gits that – you’ll hardly believe me when I tell you this – even their funerals are no fun. Can you believe it? Now that takes some doing, to turn a funeral into a gloomy occasion. I could see it if it were weddings or dinner parties or trips to Paris, but funerals? That’s pathetic. When you think what the funerals thrown by normal people are like – well it just makes you sorry for atheists, that’s all. Normal believing people have the best funerals – great music, brilliant food, dazzling wine, dancing till dawn, sex, conversation, prizes, jokes, a ferris wheel – there’s just nothing better. So the fact that atheists manage to turn them into dismal occasions is just half-funny, half-sad. It’s because atheists are so tightly wound, apparently.

Far from relaxing and enjoying life, most atheists I have encountered are gloomy blighters with a depressing and nihilistic message that there is no purpose to life so where’s the point of anything? They so often fall into the category defined by GK Chesterton: “Those that do not have the faith/Will not have the fun.” You only have to attend one of their dreary humanist funerals to see that – I am never going to another of those, just to be made miserable.

Well no; quite; naturally not. It would be simply foolish to keep going to dreary atheist funerals when you could be going to riotous theist ones instead. I can’t wait for my next funeral; I do love a good time.