Author: Ophelia Benson

Don’t I feel stupid. Sometimes I miss comments here. I don’t have one of them there RSS things, so no little bell goes off, no stoat leaps out of a hole in the corner of the screen, no spark ignites a small charge of powder to explode the ‘k’ key and get my attention. In short, nothing alerts me that a new comment has been posted, and so…if some days have passed…and I’ve forgotten what number they were on…then I overlook them. I feel guilty sometimes, as if I’ve been snubbing people, or ignoring them when they say something interesting. And I miss good stuff, too. I should get one of them there RSS things, I suppose. But I’ve been busy, and…

Anyway, I missed two valuable ones on a post last month. First of all – Brett – The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. There. I mentioned it. Never mind feeling guilty – just read it! Actually – here’s a helpful thing. Just start it. The bulk of it is illustrative – and it’s great stuff, and you should certainly read it if you have time, but it’s illustrative of the basic point. In other words you shouldn’t miss the first part because you don’t have time to read the whole book. I hope Jonathan Rose wouldn’t mind my saying that. It’s not that it’s not all worth reading, but that if you have time only for part, you should read part!

Second item – hardindr (you don’t mind if I call you hardindr do you?) – thanks for telling me Bérubé had struck back! Too bad it took me two weeks to notice, but I got there in the end. And laughed a lot when I did. Inexplicably, he didn’t seize the opportunity to say what a self-satisfied preening buffoon I am (probably figured it was too obvious to need saying). Anyway apparently my recommendation to refrain from reading his blog caused such a stampede of eager readers that his server immediately collapsed in a smoking pile of htmls. Well great. Am I humiliated or what. I tell people not to read a blog so what do they do they all rush off to read it. There’s authority for you! Fine. Fine. Don’t listen to me. I don’t care. Hey, go spend all your time reading Keith Burgess-Jackson, it’s no skin off my nose.

No but seriously, to be fair, Chris Martin had a point: Bérubé does have a terrific style. The rattlesnake line is hilarious. So don’t listen to me. (I seriously don’t recommend K B-J though. Just look back at that ‘dispute’ he had with Richard at Philosophy Etcetera if you wonder why.) Bérubé is funny, and he spends energy rassling with Horowitz.

What’s especially curious about this most recent spike in readership is that it comes just after Butterflies and Wheels did not recommend this blog…When I read that, my heart just sank. Butterflies and Wheels does not recommend my blog – and it was personal, not business! Readers, you know perfectly well there’s no way for me to keep the style and bag the preening. So I figured I might as well fold my little blog-tent and go home. I mean, sure, this humble blog has been, from time to time, smugly self-satisfied and absurdly self-aggrandizing, but self-infatuated? Ouch! Surely my days were numbered. Imagine my surprise, then, to be hit not only with Ms. Benson’s stern disapproval (which hurts quite enough on its own), but with a series of overage charges to boot. April is indeed the cruellest—and the busiest—month.

Mock mock mock, as Margo Ledbetter liked to say. Some people like to aggrandize themselves, other people like to dispense stern disapproval, especially if they then get to have little girls’ beloved tiny dogs killed. I am proud to say I am one of the latter. We are what we are.

But a comment I did not miss came in today and alerted us (thank you, Stewart) to this gorgeous item at the Onion.

“Unlike Scientology, which is based on empirically verifiable scientific tenets, Fictionology’s central principles are essentially fairy tales with no connection to reality,” the AIR report read. “In short, Fictionology offers its followers a mythical belief system free from the cumbersome scientific method to which Scientology is hidebound”…Fictionology’s central belief, that any imaginary construct can be incorporated into the church’s ever-growing set of official doctrines, continues to gain popularity. Believers in Santa Claus, his elves, or the Tooth Fairy are permitted—even encouraged—to view them as deities. Even corporate mascots like the Kool-Aid Man are valid objects of Fictionological worship.

Exactly what I’ve been waiting for all this time. Now I can pray to the Pillsbury Dough Boy and Kramer and the Mercedes hood ornament. Bliss.

“Scientology is rooted in strict scientific principles, such as the measurement of engrams in the brain by the E-Meter,” Kurz said. “Scientology uses strictly scientific methodologies to undo the damage done 75 million years ago by the Galactic Confederation’s evil warlord Xenu—we offer our preclear followers procedures to erase overts in the reactive mind. Conversely, Fictionology is essentially just a bunch of make-believe nonsense.”

Remember a couple of months ago when some Vatican honcho (no, not Ratzinger, some other honcho) pitched a fit about people believing all the silly nonsense that’s in The DaVinci Code? Dang, that was funny. I bet that’s what gave the Onion the idea. Way to go, Oniers.

Kansas, eh. I have to tell you, I’m having second thoughts about that move to Topeka.

This time, Darwin’s critics insist they are not religiously motivated creationists, but are scientists who believe that certain things in the universe, including human life, are too complex to be explained by natural causes and must be the product of an intelligent creator. They call this theory ”intelligent design,” and while they resist publicly declaring that a Christian God’s hand is at work, they also suggest that proponents of a key tenet of evolutionary theory — that changes over time can result in new species — are atheists or secular humanists.

Atheists or secular humanists – ew ick. Those nasty proponent people wouldn’t just be scientists would they? Rationalists? People like that? Whose atheism or ‘secular humanism’ is just a by-product of the fact that they don’t look for magical explanations of things in general? Is that possible? No, no, of course not; stupid of me; they’re part of that movement of card-carrying secret-handshake-giving atheists that Dylan Evans entertained us all with last week. And yet – proponents of natural selection and the mutability of species probably don’t believe that Bugs Bunny is an actual existing rabbit, either, but they also probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, or worrying about what kind of abugsist they are. As Russell pointed out and as a lot of people reminded Dylan E last week, we’re all atheists about an infinite number of gods; atheists just include the local god on the list. Big deal.

But I still want to know – and no one has yet explained it satisfactorily – why, if IDers think everything is too complex not to have been designed by a designer – then why wouldn’t they think exactly, but exactly, the same thing about the designer? Why aren’t they required to acknowledge that that’s an infinite regress, and therefore kind of a waste of time and probably the wrong answer? Huh? Why? If the universe is so complex (and I wouldn’t dream of denying that it is complex – very complex – no argument from me on that score) that it needs a designer to design it – then what the hell must that designer be like?! I ask you! And if that’s what it’s like – where did it come from? People get baffled enough asking where Shakespeare came from, but a designer who designed all this stuff leaves Shakespeare in the dust (the designer designed the dust, don’t forget). So that designer is one complex thing, am I right? So if a complex thing needs a designer – then who designed the damn designer? Don’t just say god – that’s a tautology, and begging the question, and going around in a stupid circle. Say something convincing. If you do, I’ll have James Randi buy you lunch.

Let’s pay a nice visit to the pope again. We haven’t dropped in on him in awhile, and he always repays attention. Let’s see what he’s been up to, the dear man. Dylan Evans tells us that religion is beautiful, and a metaphor, so let’s take a look at some beautiful metaphors.

A pope “must constantly bind himself and the Church to the obedience of the word of God in the face of all the attempts to adapt it or water it down,” Pope Benedict told a packed congregation. “That’s what Father John Paul II did when faced by all such attempts which were seemingly benevolent towards man. When faced with erroneous interpretations of freedom, he unequivocally underlined the inviolability of the human being, the inviolability of human life from conception to natural death. “Freedom to kill is not a true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces the human being into slavery,” he added, to applause from the congregation.

There’s beauty for you. Rigourous thinking, too. Obedience to the word of God. Err – which word? How do you know? How do you choose? Are we talking Bible here, or what? The Catholic church isn’t all that literalist about the Bible, but then how does it know what the word of God is and above all how does it sort them? In other words, what’s he talking about?

Nothing, really, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s the pope, so he can get away with it. He can get away with announcing that he is in charge of what ‘the word of God’ is and with separating it from ‘all the attempts to adapt it or water it down.’ Do please take note of that phrase. He means human beings must not take thought and decide what are good useful reasonable laws and what are not – no, they must ask the pope what the word of God is, instead, and if the pope happens to be a benighted conservative like Ratzinger well that’s just too bad.

Make no mistake. ‘That’s what Father John Paul II did when faced by all such attempts which were seemingly benevolent towards man.’ Ah yes – ‘seemingly benevolent’ – but we know better. We here in the Vatican know that telling people not to use condoms, and telling them that condoms don’t work, is not seemingly benevolent but really benevolent – because that way they are more likely to die a horrible death and leave their children destitute orphans, which is obviously really benevolent as opposed to merely seemingly so. What luck that we deluded humans have churches to tell us what the word of God is when we get confused.

And then of course there’s the bit about natural death. Er – what? What natural death? The one ‘Father John Paul II’ had? The one Terri Schiavo spent fifteen years having? That’s natural?

Well maybe he doesn’t mean it like that. Maybe it’s a metaphor? And I’m just too secular and atheist and unartistic and thick to get it. Nothing like a little religion to tell us about our longings for transcendence, is there.