This is just getting sad. Summary of this week: Gary Miller (yes, that Gary Miller) explains why people should be smart. In possibly the dumbest way possible. A taste:
A giant bunny poops out chocolate eggs once a year to commemorate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But Aristotle, the father of logic, has no mythical, commemorative mammal. That’s a telling paradox, isn’t it?
…right. He goes on to decry religious fundamentalism and champion atheism. Which is good and fine, since I’m no cheerleader for religious fundamentalism myself, but for the love of God can we please rub two braincells together before we attempt to write columns about this?
I don’t have much else to say about this one. I’m a little busy furrowing my brow, cocking my head to the side and staring at my computer screen, wondering how many IQ points I just lost. For Gary:
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And again I ask, WTF is wrong with college newspapers these days?
A) I have never heard that the Easter Bunny POOPS out chocolate eggs. Delivers decorated eggs, yes. Is around when chocolate eggs are hidden for the egg hunt, yes. Is eaten in effigy as a chocolate bunny, yes.
But not POOPING OUT chocolate eggs. Maybe Gary watched that old Cadbury Creme Egg commercial with the clucking bunny laying a Creme Egg one too many times in his formative years.
B) Aristotle is a fertility symbol?
The quote is kind of stupid, but I have no problem with the rest of the article. Universities should absolutely be a place of questioning beliefs and using reason to solve problems – that’s the purpose of academia.
I truly enjoy those who decide, without ever stating HOW they came to this enlightened state of mind, that all religion everywhere is stupid, irrational, unenlightened and false. We recently had one of these dingbats publish in the Queen’s Journal and blame religion for all atrocities and war throughout history (forgetting of course the WWI, atrocities in Rwanda, USSR, China etc).
My problem with this article is that its gross generalizations do nothing to prove Mr Miller’s point. That there is some sort of objective “Reason” out there that we all need to subscribe to and which will be the means through which we all can gain an equal footing is naive. Perhaps I’m just suspicious of any claims to objectivity as I’m not sure that it exists. To align the Easter Bunny (generally a figure of advertising) with the Christian high Holy Day of Easter is absurd, the Easter Bunny is to Easter as a McDonald’s burger is to a sirloin steak. I’m not with the “funnymentalists” (as my Grandpop called them) on religion, but nor is it inviting to go with the atheist camp with views religious people as idiots. I accept his call to investigative intellectualism, but wish he had practised what he preached before he put pen to ink.
As my lovely (atheist) boyfriend just wrote me “this guy is to my atheism as james dobson is to your christianity”.
On the Onion link: I went to BU, and that guy is sadly not fictional [I mean he is, but he's not]. I swear I lived next door to him my freshman year. He did a lot of coke.
His roommate, however, was very nice, although he did insist on hanging out wearing only one sock. And, y’know, clothes…but only the one sock. Strange room.
Aside from the awful misuse of the word “paradox”, that sentence sounds like it could be the opening of a lighthearted humor piece in which the author proposes a MLK Jr. Day Wombat (crushing injustice with its butt!) or a Father’s Day seahorse. Would that it were so.
Now all the atheists in the house now how Christians feel whenever someone at Townhall writes an article.
It is obvious that Gary has never studied rhetoric. Setting aside the ridiculous Easter bunny crap, his assertion that “reason” is the only intelligent and productive means of communication is absurd, and would certainly amuse Cicero, classical master of communication, who advocated ending all (or at least most) speeches with pathos, an appeal to emotion rather than reason. And even Aristotle, the famous and fertile “father of logic” who loved reason and wished all communication could be conducted in appeals to logic, even he recognized the intrinsic value of the rhetorical use of not only logos (appeal to reason) but also pathos and ethos (appeal to character) in discourse.
Aristotle’s reasoning here is that human beings are imperfect, our faculties flawed, our understanding finite. It’s not that we’re not good enough for pure reason (although that is part of it), but that we are not suited for it. In a sense, pure reason is not good enough for us. Gary’s mention of that other “embarrassing artifact of the world”–slavery–is an interesting one, since it was not rational argument but rather a religious (Christian) moral outrage that drove the British Empire to abolish slavery.
On a different note, can someone please help me understand this:
What do Easter egg hunts have to do with anyone’s understanding of their religion? Is he saying Easter eggs have something to do with Christian theology, or am I just overtired?
Katy if there’s no such thing as reason then how can we ever prove that one position is less coherent/more idiotic than any other position?
That is such a bizarre argument. The Easter Bunny has nothing at all to do with Christianity or Jesus, as far as I know, and…it should hardly need saying, but ‘bunnies’ don’t lay eggs. Or indeed ‘poop them out’. Finally, the author obviously doesn’t understand what ‘paradox’ means.
I mean, I’m an athiest myself, and am all for logic and reason, and questioning religious practices. But misrepresenting religions, and in such a stupid way, just makes the author look like an idiot.
A paradox? Really?
A paradox?
Gah.
Aristotle must be spinning in his grave.
Reason is the starting point we should all agree on; honest argument can only begin after that.
It’s hard to have an honest argument with someone that you suspect isn’t arguing in good faith, and given his track record, Miller will pardon me if I have my doubts. Besides, how can you have an honest argument with someone who blatantly abuses “paradox” and who tries to imply that Darwin was an athiest?
Father’s Day seahorse–wish I’d thought of that!
Well, that article was a gem all right. The Easter bunny quote actually made me laugh a little bit, but the rest of the article was fairly craptastic. It’s almost as thought the author had a deadline to meet on an exam night and spent a total of fifteen minutes penning the article.
Then again, maybe he was drunk.
He also argues that being religious is incompatible with Logic and Reason and the Scientific Method. Because nothing says “rational” like a false dichotomy.
Oh Lord, preserve us from stupid atheists.
Ooooh. A father’s day seahorse—how delightfully gender bent is that? Go Kiru!
Aristotle may nt have had a bunny, but Plato have a cave, and Zeno had an arrow.
I don’t know what point I’m making, I’m up too early.
Wow, that was dumb. I agree with Katy’s boyfriend’s comment.
For the record, I did always think the Easter Bunny was supposed to be laying those eggs somehow — like it was a miracle bunny with chicken powers of some sort. But you know, the “crapping eggs out” chocolate-as-scatological rendition just NEVER occurred to me for some reason, maybe because I’m not a misogynist half-baked-provocateur asshole.
Atheism certainly doesn’t have to nullify the validity of religion as one of its missions. I also don’t think “the scientific method” ought to be considered “just another religion” in some sort of grand moral equivalency exercise, because it’s knowledge of a completely different type that ought to complement, not compete with or be directly compared to, religious knowledge.
Is ‘religious knowledge’ an oxymoron? OR IS IT A PARADOX!
I’m sorry, could someone tell me what the Easter Bunny actually has to do with religion anyway? Like, isn’t it a more cultural icon than a religious one? And also a leftover vestige from Eostre fertility celebrations?
Next thing you’ll be telling me that Santa Claus really is the reason for the season.
Oooh, well played, norbizness. Well played.
Father’s Day seahorse is effing awesome. I may have to make a seahorse t-shirt for my own father, now.
Here’s a quote from a Wikipeidia article on the origin of the Easter Bunny:
The Wikipedia article contains much more information, and it is consistent with other accounts of the origin of Easter and the Easter Bunny that I have seen (and heard, on a recent edition of Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac.”) This is another example of the Catholic Church adopting popular pagan practices.
Now, whether a rabbit would have to “poop” an egg to lay it, I have no idea, and I would prefer not to think about it, really. My children eat Easter Eggs.
I honestly think that the Scientific Method is incompatible with religious explanations.
Both science and religion offer competing explanations and answers to questions like “what is the meaning of life?”, “how were we created?” and “how should we explain certain phenomena?”.
There is no grounds to suddenly start using religious explanations if you’re a scientist. I am of course assuming that the scientific method doesn’t lead us to posit supernatural beings as explanations (it’s beyond the scope of these comments but I think it’s fair to assume for now). Given this, it would be inconsistent to restrict the scientific method to certain area. We should therefore believe that there is no meaning/purpose to life given by a higher power/design etc.
[emphasis added]
I’m an atheist, have been for a while, and the above quote points toward the attitude among many atheists (and religious people, of course) that betrays that they’re not coming to the table for a discussion, but rather to preach.
I think the applicable motto is,”scatology will spice up an otherwise bland creative work.” Screenwriters have been using this one for years. ;)
Genetically transformed rabbits that lay eggs like birds? Mysterious forces from the sky bringing the dead back to life… with enough strength that they can roll huge boulders away from cave mouths?! Pink and yellow “candy” chicks made of some unknown, gooey substance?
I’m with Pandagon and Cat & Girl on this one… Easter is a time for zombie films.
Jim- I assume the eggs come out of the bunny the same place as a baby rabbit would…. cause it’d have to be a female bird/bunny anyways… so female parts, eh? If it were a male bird/bunny I could see the confusion.. but really, it’s a female – that’s why it lays eggs in the first place… (now if it had been a seahorse turned into a bunny, we’d have an entirely different discussion… not to mention the new holiday traditions…)
Something about this thread reminds me of this exchange in The Venture Brothers:
Henchman 24: Come on! They have one female servicing a large group of males. That implies a species that lays eggs.
Henchman 21: Oh my God, you’re crazy! They’re so obviously mammals!
Henchman 24: Please! She’d be in estrus 24/7 if she didn’t lay eggs.
Henchman 21: Smurfs don’t lay eggs! I won’t tell you this again! Papa Smurf has a fucking beard! They’re mammals!
I think the big question here is about all the things that science does not currently have a (complete) explanation for. Science is good at noting that science itself is incomplete; lots of theories, even more hypotheses, very few facts, if any. As I understand it, a lot of scientists are religious in part because of this fact–there is room for mystery in science, between the cracks and at the outer edges and in the big huge questions that we are a long way from understanding. Where there is room for mystery, there is room for religious, or spiritual, or mystical explanations, and they’ll grow there. That’s not even necessarily unscientific, because isn’t some hypothesis, however difficult to test, better than none at all?
A fundamental question here, I think, is whether you believe that science could eventually answer every single question and fully explain how everything in the universe works. Of course, this belief can’t be proven right or wrong either… if you believe this, it’s a matter of faith. A lot of scientists call this kind of belief, and other unprovable beliefs in science and the scientific method as an article of faith, “scientism” as opposed to “science.” Michael Shermer is a big advocate… a lot of other scientists feel that this makes for bad science. At least in my family.
That’s not chocolate you’re eating.
Enjoy!
Ha! That’s why I liked that particular excerpt, but then again, I fully admit to having a six-year-old’s sense of humor.
Jill, I would have appreciated the line by line pick-apart on this one.
Of course there’s no holiday for Aristotle. He was a charisma-deficient asshole. At least JC had the people skills.
[/flippant classicist]
lots of theories, even more hypotheses, very few facts, if any.
Umm… to paraphrase Asimov, a scientific theory is not just something scientists made up after a heavy night of drinking – they’re based on and around facts and hard observational evidence.
Which largely proves that scientific method is incompatible with anything based on a biblical or scriptual faith – anything that gives people a way to discern facts from fiction tends to foul up things that rely heavily on people ignoring the whole tricky issue of “and how do we know that this is the irrefutable word of God then?”
However, just because such scriptual based rleigions are probably absolute bollocks, doesn’t make them not worth believing in. And to be fair, if they are all bollocks, then why spend so much time trying to prove stuff that any megachurch preacher worked out a long time ago? When you and your opponent are in agreement, why continue arguing?
The thing that twisty and berube and that other guy get wrong when they start going on about the flaseness of religion is that they try to prove it false according to their own standards – which is how the religions they’re attacking define “false”, argueing science with a theologian or theology with a scientist is like trying to teach patriotic self sacrifice to a cat – it ain’t gonna work.
The fact that the more noxious the religious person, the more staunchly athiest they are in their behaviors and beliefs proves taht the evangelical atheists (not to be confused with atheistic evangelicals that run the megachurchs) are getting their approach all wrong and are doing nothing more that preach to the already converted.
What do you mean it’s not chocolate!!?
Rhiannon’s response is eye-opening: I confess to thinking of “Peter Rabbit,” obviously a male figure. And that would pose a problem with the eggs, wouldn’t? As long as I’m suspending belief, I may as well suspend thought …
But if the Easter Bunny is female, she wouldn’t lay eggs through her pooping parts, would she? Or am I really ignorant of the female rabbit anatomy (a real possibility)?
LOL! I don’t think that’s chocolate the giant bunny is making!
Rabbits are mammals and they do not lay eggs. Newspapers in America are a joke nowadays, let alone college newspapers. People just read them for the comics.
“But if the Easter Bunny is female, she wouldn’t lay eggs through her pooping parts, would she? Or am I really ignorant of the female rabbit anatomy (a real possibility)?”
No, rabbits have vaginas like any other self-respecting placental. Unless the Easter Bunny is a monotreme (convergent evolution?), in which case she would indeed lay her eggs through a cloaca = combined pooping/baby-making part.
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