23/05: Sex is icky. Or so we hear.
Funny. So I hear via Brent Rasmussen’s Unscrewing The Inscrutable that the ever-clownish Jerry Falwell, ranting on The Da Vinci Code, is doing the usual peeved fundy schtick in reaction to that work. You know… evil book, how dare he make up such silly, ridiculous stories utterly unsupported by historical evidence… That’s our department!… And so on…
My earlier comments on who’s got the high ground between hack novelists and the various Christian sects are here, for what it’s worth, and I’ve got little to add to that. That’s not really my subject today, nor what amused me most about Falwell’s comments.
The most amusing thing here, if you ask me, is more Falwell’s views of the notion that his magical Messiah might have actually got married, had kids. His quibble there is, apparently, and I quote:
So I guess Falwell’s taking a page from the ‘Better to marry than to burn… but not much’ book penned by ole’ man Paul all these years ago. And it’s a nice little reminder, isn’t it, of the actual mindset we’re dealing with here? It’s not just that they think all sex outside marriage and for the purposes of procreation is bad—which, hey, you’d think would be irrational and extreme enough, all on its own. Nope. They think that variety of sex is bad, too. Yes, even sex between married people planning on having kids.* And if it were practical, apparently, we must presume they’d try to outlaw that, too.
Now and then, I read something like this, and I find myself thinking the real problem with this bunch—Falwell, Paul—the lot of them—and thus much of the religion associated with them—is they live and lived their entire lives as frightened little boys embarrassed by their own biology—and never quite matured past the ‘Girls have cooties’ stage of social and intellectual development.
*Yep, a perfectly orthodox biblical view, if you’re reading Paul.
My earlier comments on who’s got the high ground between hack novelists and the various Christian sects are here, for what it’s worth, and I’ve got little to add to that. That’s not really my subject today, nor what amused me most about Falwell’s comments.
The most amusing thing here, if you ask me, is more Falwell’s views of the notion that his magical Messiah might have actually got married, had kids. His quibble there is, apparently, and I quote:
“When you question the integrity and morality of Christ, you take it a level beyond questioning his deity,” Falwell said.
—Falwell not a fan of Code, on newsadvance.com
Heh. Right. ‘Cos, you know, it’s immoral to get married and have kids… Or somethin’…So I guess Falwell’s taking a page from the ‘Better to marry than to burn… but not much’ book penned by ole’ man Paul all these years ago. And it’s a nice little reminder, isn’t it, of the actual mindset we’re dealing with here? It’s not just that they think all sex outside marriage and for the purposes of procreation is bad—which, hey, you’d think would be irrational and extreme enough, all on its own. Nope. They think that variety of sex is bad, too. Yes, even sex between married people planning on having kids.* And if it were practical, apparently, we must presume they’d try to outlaw that, too.
Now and then, I read something like this, and I find myself thinking the real problem with this bunch—Falwell, Paul—the lot of them—and thus much of the religion associated with them—is they live and lived their entire lives as frightened little boys embarrassed by their own biology—and never quite matured past the ‘Girls have cooties’ stage of social and intellectual development.
*Yep, a perfectly orthodox biblical view, if you’re reading Paul.
15/05: In praise of hack novelists
Okay, actually, I haven’t even read The Da Vinci Code yet… and probably won’t anytime soon. It’s one of those books, I figure, sooner or later it’ll be forced upon me, anyway. I’ll get marooned on a desert island or at a cottage in Québec or in a coffee shop in New Jersey or some other equally terribly uncivilized place, and it’ll be the only intact book left after the horrific plane crash that stranded me there. And after a few weeks of isolation and privation I’ll be having bizarre delusions compelling me to believe that the abandoned statue of a Tiki god left beneath the island’s only coconut palm (or beneath the plastic coconut palm next to the espresso machines) is speaking to me in my dreams, demanding I read Dan Brown’s bestseller…
And I’ll get to it then. And until then, let’s not rush things… Though I did read the first few pages a while ago, and found myself concurring with the advice of a wise colleague who told me I was unlikely to enjoy it much:
“It’s kinda light,” he said. “And kinda obvious.”
And yeah, it kinda looked that way to me, too. And yes, this is probably a very unfair conclusion to come to, given my very brief reading, but then, I’m a very unfair person.
All that said, I’m gonna come to its defense anyway.
No, not so much on whether it’s much of a novel. More on whether it is actually some kind of dreadful, spiritually corrupting heresy, or a Satanically-inspired revisionist history spawned in the depths of Hell and unleashed upon the weary Earth to deceive the unwary. ‘Cos, apparently, that’s the concern among certain Christian types, these days.
Yep. The Catholics in particular are on about it, but there are Protestant sects jumping onto this bandwagon too. Oh, it’s a terribly deceptive book, they’re sayin’. Says stuff about their messiah which almost certainly isn’t true. Crazy stuff… Like he married this Mary Magdalene woman, in particular.
(Okay… Yes… I suppose that might qualify as a spoiler if you’re the one other guy in existence who hasn’t listened to the chanting Tiki god yet… My apologies. And, hey, listen to Papa Moai and read it already, will ya? I want to be the last holdout. It’s all about the bragging rights. Anyway….)
Funny thing they’re getting so upset about this, and funny those organizations in particular should be saying such things. Because yep, it sure does sound like Brown’s story certainly gets a few things wrong, takes a few things and exaggerates their certainty, presents some pretty wild stuff as fact. I mean, forgetting, for a moment, that this is, actually, a novel, and thus presumably may be expected to contain certain quantities of fiction.
But this is the thing: while some of that stuff in the last category (the very not-real Priory of Sion) is easily enough dismissed, some of the rest of it is on a slightly different footing.
Some of the rest of it, in fact, is really, at this point in history, not much more flakey than the now-canonical stories these ‘orthodox’ sources would like to insist are the ones you should believe… And not much more poorly supported by the evidence that remains.
The fact is, we don’t know a whole hell of a lot about what—if anything—actually happened in the alleged Earthly life of the guy the Christians now seem to feel is/was a god, a ghost, and the god’s son all at once. The fact is, the reasonably credible scholars working on that question do differ on the particulars more than a bit. And it’s quite clear there were, prior to the selection of the canon at Nicaea, a wide range of differing traditions telling different versions of the tale, and a lot of them since didn’t survive to the current day nearly as well as did the canonical versions. In the wake of all that, what went on between the god/ghost/son guy and Ms. Magdalene isn’t terribly certain, but yes, there are those fragments suggesting they may have been very good friends.
And the fact is, it doesn’t take a whole lot of research to conclude that even the synoptic gospels aren’t all quite telling the same story. So what we have now are a handful of slightly different mythologized stories of some long-dead guy’s life… Or, for that matter, Judaised retellings of an older Greek (and, earlier, Egyptian) myth—since no, not everyone even agrees there was a historical figure around 2,000 years ago in that area of the middle East who served as the spark in the tinder, and yes, they’ve got some reason to doubt it, since curiously, no one else but the Christians preserving their mythic tradition seem to have noticed him (and Google ‘Josephus’ and ‘interpolation’, if you’re still having trouble accepting this reality, thanks).*
So, finally (and getting that that funny thing), what we have here is a bunch of folk complaining about Brown’s fiction, saying hey, that stuff he’s saying is all either (a) wrong or (b) unproven…
Okay. True. So it is.
But then, so is your version, guys, remember?
Yep. And where else, I ask you, could this happen? You are currently seeing a bunch of guys jumping up to say: ‘What? He got married and settled down?! Well, that’s just silly! Everyone knows he was crucified, and then rose from the dead three days later…’
Ummm. Yeeeeah. How wacky can you get, Brown? Married. Settled down. Pshaw. What have you been smoking, dude.
Seriously, the way I see it, Brown’s really got the high ground here.
I mean, at least his fiction is shelved in fiction.
* Addendum: This really isn’t so much intended as a scholarly essay, as you might have guessed, so it’s a bit light on the footnotes. But if you’re curious about all this stuff, I might recommend to you for a nice, capsule discussion of the quality of evidence in this area, and various interpretations of it, the ‘God Incarnate’ chapter of Taner Edis’ The Ghost in the Universe, as the most recent I’ve read. It’s nicely put together, reasonably concise, and altogether a very good introduction to the subject. I’m also told George Albert Wells’ stuff on the subject is worthy reading, but can’t recommend it directly, yet, as it’s still in my inbox.
And I’ll get to it then. And until then, let’s not rush things… Though I did read the first few pages a while ago, and found myself concurring with the advice of a wise colleague who told me I was unlikely to enjoy it much:
“It’s kinda light,” he said. “And kinda obvious.”
And yeah, it kinda looked that way to me, too. And yes, this is probably a very unfair conclusion to come to, given my very brief reading, but then, I’m a very unfair person.
All that said, I’m gonna come to its defense anyway.
No, not so much on whether it’s much of a novel. More on whether it is actually some kind of dreadful, spiritually corrupting heresy, or a Satanically-inspired revisionist history spawned in the depths of Hell and unleashed upon the weary Earth to deceive the unwary. ‘Cos, apparently, that’s the concern among certain Christian types, these days.
Yep. The Catholics in particular are on about it, but there are Protestant sects jumping onto this bandwagon too. Oh, it’s a terribly deceptive book, they’re sayin’. Says stuff about their messiah which almost certainly isn’t true. Crazy stuff… Like he married this Mary Magdalene woman, in particular.
(Okay… Yes… I suppose that might qualify as a spoiler if you’re the one other guy in existence who hasn’t listened to the chanting Tiki god yet… My apologies. And, hey, listen to Papa Moai and read it already, will ya? I want to be the last holdout. It’s all about the bragging rights. Anyway….)
Funny thing they’re getting so upset about this, and funny those organizations in particular should be saying such things. Because yep, it sure does sound like Brown’s story certainly gets a few things wrong, takes a few things and exaggerates their certainty, presents some pretty wild stuff as fact. I mean, forgetting, for a moment, that this is, actually, a novel, and thus presumably may be expected to contain certain quantities of fiction.
But this is the thing: while some of that stuff in the last category (the very not-real Priory of Sion) is easily enough dismissed, some of the rest of it is on a slightly different footing.
Some of the rest of it, in fact, is really, at this point in history, not much more flakey than the now-canonical stories these ‘orthodox’ sources would like to insist are the ones you should believe… And not much more poorly supported by the evidence that remains.
The fact is, we don’t know a whole hell of a lot about what—if anything—actually happened in the alleged Earthly life of the guy the Christians now seem to feel is/was a god, a ghost, and the god’s son all at once. The fact is, the reasonably credible scholars working on that question do differ on the particulars more than a bit. And it’s quite clear there were, prior to the selection of the canon at Nicaea, a wide range of differing traditions telling different versions of the tale, and a lot of them since didn’t survive to the current day nearly as well as did the canonical versions. In the wake of all that, what went on between the god/ghost/son guy and Ms. Magdalene isn’t terribly certain, but yes, there are those fragments suggesting they may have been very good friends.
And the fact is, it doesn’t take a whole lot of research to conclude that even the synoptic gospels aren’t all quite telling the same story. So what we have now are a handful of slightly different mythologized stories of some long-dead guy’s life… Or, for that matter, Judaised retellings of an older Greek (and, earlier, Egyptian) myth—since no, not everyone even agrees there was a historical figure around 2,000 years ago in that area of the middle East who served as the spark in the tinder, and yes, they’ve got some reason to doubt it, since curiously, no one else but the Christians preserving their mythic tradition seem to have noticed him (and Google ‘Josephus’ and ‘interpolation’, if you’re still having trouble accepting this reality, thanks).*
So, finally (and getting that that funny thing), what we have here is a bunch of folk complaining about Brown’s fiction, saying hey, that stuff he’s saying is all either (a) wrong or (b) unproven…
Okay. True. So it is.
But then, so is your version, guys, remember?
Yep. And where else, I ask you, could this happen? You are currently seeing a bunch of guys jumping up to say: ‘What? He got married and settled down?! Well, that’s just silly! Everyone knows he was crucified, and then rose from the dead three days later…’
Ummm. Yeeeeah. How wacky can you get, Brown? Married. Settled down. Pshaw. What have you been smoking, dude.
Seriously, the way I see it, Brown’s really got the high ground here.
I mean, at least his fiction is shelved in fiction.
* Addendum: This really isn’t so much intended as a scholarly essay, as you might have guessed, so it’s a bit light on the footnotes. But if you’re curious about all this stuff, I might recommend to you for a nice, capsule discussion of the quality of evidence in this area, and various interpretations of it, the ‘God Incarnate’ chapter of Taner Edis’ The Ghost in the Universe, as the most recent I’ve read. It’s nicely put together, reasonably concise, and altogether a very good introduction to the subject. I’m also told George Albert Wells’ stuff on the subject is worthy reading, but can’t recommend it directly, yet, as it’s still in my inbox.
10/05: Good advice
The wife of the man who died soon after he was said to have been healed by American televangelist Benny Hinn seven years ago had this bit of advice for sick people who plan to attend Hinn’s crusade this month: Visit a doctor instead.
—‘Forget Benny Hinn, go to the doctors instead’, Trinidad and Tobago Express
Randi commented in his excellent Faith Healers a while ago how very painful it was seeing the ‘healed’ sitting around the auditorium after the Brylcreemed wonders like Popoff and his ilk had done their ‘yew aw HEALED’ schtick… apparently, it just ain’t pleasant, seeing several infirm, now effectively immobile elderly folk pathetically waiting for someone to help them to the kerb, since their crutches have been dramatically broken for the benefit of the cameras, and now, ten minutes after the show, they’re realizing they still need them.The TV audience, of course, never sees the follow up, so that sight doesn’t normally trouble anyone but the stage crews. But here’s one for the masses, and something a bit more painful still than just getting stuck at the auditorium, while the crew unhooks the cameras and moves on: from Trinidad: a man with heart disease, kidney failure, and hypertension, dead 33 days after Hinn ‘healed’ him.
That’s good advice his wife’s giving, there*. Granted, at 61, with all that going on in your plumbing, getting yourself going again isn’t exactly going to be easy, and so I’ve a little sympathy for someone wishing some big father figure in the sky could help him out with it. But let’s face it, kids: long as long as your odds might get, having some twit with a bizarro haircut push you over on stage is not a recommended course of therapy for clearing the plaque from your arteries.
*Well, about the doctor, anyway. The stuff about putting yer faith in ‘Jesus Christ’ really probably ain’t much better than putting it in Hinn. One small advantage: Christ, as he is either (a) a long-dead Essene or (b) an entirely fictional and confused amalgam of birth-death-rebirth gods is significantly less likely to push you over as part of his stage show. Which is, I guess, a little safer, at least.
