It’s been said that the Christmas season is a time for Christmas movies and movies about Christmas, and deep in our hearts we like to believe it’s true.
If you find yourself sitting down to enjoy a fine Christmas film—or even one of the very many memorably shitty ones—but find yourself surrounded by dopes who habitually ruin movies for their friends by blurting out important plot points, get the drop on them by blurting something out first. Because that’s the true meaning of the Christmas season: ruining surprises for the ones you love.1
Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983): In this harrowing tale of the Victorian Era,
London is overrun by Scottish ducks and horribly large rodents. This is
unlike modern London, which of course no longer has problems with ducks.
A Very Brady Christmas (1988): The Brady family learns heartwarming lessons about
architectural structural integrity, how to solve life’s problems in two hours (minus
commercials), and how easily replaceable Cindy turned out to be.
Ernest Saves Christmas (1988): We all learn a
heartwarming lesson about not watching “Ernest” movies.
How The Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966): The Grinch steals Christmas.
Home Alone (1990): Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern learn headwarming lessons about
the crucial role of slapstick violence in the Christmas season.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (2000): The three words that
best describe this are as follows, and we quote: “Stink, stank, stunk.”
A Christmas Story (1983): You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.
A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965):The first—and to date, only—American
Christmas special to refer, even in passing, to the birth of Christ.2
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964): Fraught with dramatic tension, razor-sharp
dialogue, and incisive social commentary on conspicuous consumption and intergenerational conflict,
this classic film’s message is perfectly summarized by the graphic slow-motion climax in which
Santa slaughters almost two hundred Martians with his bare hands.
The Star Wars Holiday Special (1979): George Lucas learns a
heartwarming lesson about avoiding really shitty decisions. He holds this
lesson close to his heart right up until the very moment he creates Jar Jar Binks.
NOTE
1. We don’t really mean this, Mom.
2. We’re sure this isn't actually true, but being snide is easier than being honest.
May 21, 2011, Harold Camping’s iron-clad-guaranteed beginning of the end of the world, turned out to be far less apocalyptic than initially anticipated, with a jaded handful non-Raptured skeptics attempting to convince themselves that Doomsday had completely passed them by, and even the stoutest believers in Camping’s predictions going to bed slightly worried at the slim chance that they’d somehow missed out on witnessing the deaths and damnation of several billion people.
When reached for comment on the day’s events, every human on Earth observed that they didn’t feel a single damned thing out of the ordinary at 6:00 local time. “You’d think that a worldwide earthquake signaling the end of all creation would have been, you know, noticeable,” said everybody, “But, then, what do we really know about science?”
The answer there is, of course, nothing. Over the past five hours, expert physicists from the Family Radio Institute of Fantastical Science have meticulously concocted scientific evidence that proves that this absence of any sort of evidence is in fact guaranteed evidence that the apocalypse has indeed begun just as predicted, except for all the things that had actually been predicted to happen but clearly didn’t. According to their official statement released just minutes ago,
“When the entire planet is shaking at the same time, it’s physically impossible for anybody on the Earth to notice the movement. Think of the Earth as a giant hula dancer, its entire surface moving, gracefully and somewhat seductively, in all directions at once. You never actually see the hula dancer move, do you? Of course not. The Earth is just like that, except made out of rock and water, very very large, not particularly Hawaiian-looking, and without the flowers and the grass skirt.
“Therefore, to actually witness the tremor that hit the Earth today at precisely 6:00 in twenty-four different time zones—that is, in a single, perfectly simultaneous instant occurring over the course of a twenty-four-hour period—one would have to view the Earth from a distant, stationary viewpoint such as, for example, heaven, or the moon. Since no living human is in heaven, and the only human to have visited the moon is Jimi Hendrix, the lack of human witnesses to the apocalypse proves that it did, in fact, happen just as predicted.
“So now that that’s settled, please send your remaining assets, in the form of cashier’s check or money order, to the Family Radio Phenomenally Embarrassing Failure Relief Fund. You will receive your reward in heaven on October 21, 2011, when the end of the world has been, for the first time ever, mathematically guaranteed to occur.”
Yep, everything's swell here. Well, except for all the usual death, disease,
poverty, drugs, murder, hate, pain, bad dental hygiene, and reality
television. But still, no apocalypse, so we're good. Thanks for asking.
The Boston Bruins look to take a commanding 3-to-1 series lead against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Saturday’s NHL Eastern Conference final. Game time is 11:30 Mountain Daylight Time, check your local listings for cable and satellite availability.
In other news, the Apocalypse is set to make its long-awaited debut at precisely 6:00 pm with a global earthquake that will signal the second coming of Jesus Christ, as predicted and guaranteed by Harold Camping of Family Radio in Oakland, California. Camping is confident in his calculations, having used his in-depth knowledge of the Bible and complex mathematical techniques that have proven to be infallibly correct, unless you count that one time when the world didn’t end at all, not even just a little bit, back in 1994 when he said it would. He took his Doomsday Mulligan on that one, however, and we’re fully confident that we should be pretty sure that he definitely might have it right this time around. Totally.
It has to be true. Says so right here on the internet.
Having made our own calculations, however, we strongly suspect that Camping has failed to take into account the necessary adjustment for Daylight Savings Time, which is a modern-day concept not to be found in the Bible and therefore probably overlooked in during his otherwise rigorous number-crunching.
And that spells deep, deep trouble for Harold Camping, because when the Rapture happens at 5:00 local time instead of the 6:00 he predicted, boy oh boy, will his credibility be shot.
It has come to the attention of the Bowling in the Dark Legal Department that Comedy Central news anchor Stephen Colbert—supposedly a paragon of unassailable, serious journalistic integrity, a self-styled beacon of truthiness in a field otherwise filled with clowns and would-be comedians like Jon Stewart or Dan Rather—has been sneaking into our brains at night and stealing our ideas.
Listen, Colbert, we were criticizing Bill O’Reilly before it was popular—three weeks ago. What rock were you hiding under while we were out risking our necks on the cutting edge? Falling asleep in class, obviously, planning to crib notes for the big test from the funny-looking kid who’s desperate to make a new friend.1 Way to go, Colbert. You may think you’re a big shot—with your big-budget show on one of cable TV’s top 157 networks; your competently-ironed suits; and your audiences that can actually be proven to exist—but we know better. We know you’re just a big fat copycat, a copycat copying us, your obvious intellectual superiors.
Sometimes we wonder if you’re really even a conservative.
NOTE
1. No, we haven’t entered into a bad-metaphor contest, but now we’re kind of wishing we had.
On January 4, 2011, on his television show The O’Reilly Factor, commentator Bill O’Reilly provided yet more evidence that one can be very successful, especially in television, without actually using one’s head.
O’Reilly’s guest for the evening—or at least for a short segment of it—was David Silverman, the head of an atheist organization that had bought space on a billboard in Huntsville, Alabama, that both invited residents to a regional meeting of atheists and described all religions as scams.1 The latter part struck O’Reilly—and, to be fair, probably plenty of others in Huntsville, and a large percentage of however many people watch The O’Reilly Factor—as rude and offensive.
Whether it was indeed rude—and whether O’Reilly’s rather inhospitable treatment of his guest was any more appropriate—could be the subject of a long, energetic, and almost certainly fruitless debate that doesn’t particularly interest us at the moment. Suffice it to say that regardless of one’s point of view, the discussion between Silverman and O’Reilly probably managed to find a way to irritate or offend just about everybody watching, one way or another, without actually solving or illuminating a thing.
However, more important to us than O’Reilly’s interest in polite behavior—or at least his interest in witnessing it, if not actually participating in it himself—is the example he used, over the course of the conversation, as evidence that religions aren’t scams. After prefacing a statement earlier in the show by admitting “I know I’m not the smartest guy in town,” he then—in an apparent giddy rush to prove himself right—offers, as evidence of God’s existence, the fact that “[The] tide goes in, [and the] tide goes out.”According to O’Reilly, the tides are proof that God exists because “You can’t explain that.”
Bill O’Reilly’s argument, rephrased for convenience, is that because we can’t explain tides, God exists. According to his reasoning, then, being able to explain the tides would be evidence that God doesn’t exist. It’s actually somewhat fortunate for O’Reilly—not to mention very fortunate for God—that his logic is shit.
O’Reilly’s argument here is a sort of variation on the Argument from Ignorance—he’s essentially saying that if he can’t explain something, then it can’t be explained. While the flaw in this line of reasoning should be fairly obvious, please allow us to illuminate them anyway by using the same argumentative framework O’Reilly uses on the following statement:
“Yo-yo goes down, yo-yo comes back up. You can’t explain that.”
Here’s how the O’Reilly method operates here (and why it fails):
I don’t know how a yo-yo works. (This part, I’m sorry to say, is true.)
Therefore, nobody knows how a yo-yo works—not even those who dedicate their lives to studying, designing, and constructing yo-yos, assuming people like this still exist.(This statement does not logically follow from the previous statement, and is also demonstrably false.)
Therefore, yo-yos are magic. (This also isn’t true, and it also does not follow from the above statements.)
Ancient yo-yoing is apparently for real. Who knew?
The only thing that an argument from ignorance really has a chance at proving is—sorry, Bill—the “ignorance” part.2 And indeed, tides are actually very well understood and have been for centuries; moreover, they can be easily explained to, and by, folks with little scientific expertise:
To put it simply rather than thoroughly, tides are caused by the gravitational pull of Earth’s moon and, to a lesser degree, the Sun. (While the Sun is far more massive than the Moon, it’s also some sixteen to eighteen miles farther away, and thus its influence on tides is diminished to about half of the Moon’s.3)
The sun and the Moon both affect the Earth’s tides; higher tides result when the two pull in the same direction. All objects life-sized and to scale.
All matter is affected by gravity,4 and therefore everything on Earth—not just the oceans, but also dirt, pandas, tractors, pirates, and even Cream of Wheat—is influenced by the Moon’s gravitational pull. It’s been estimated, perhaps even measured, that the tidal pull of the Moon moves the ground beneath our feet by around a centimeter. However, as the oceans are mostly liquid,5 and thus much more malleable than solids (examples of solids: continental plates, tractors), it’s in the oceans that the tides are most noticeable; in certain places such as the Bay of Fundy, the difference between high and low tide can be as much as 55 feet.6 If the entire Earth moved to the same degree that the seas do, tides would be much harder to observe—but they’d still be going on.
In order to affect the tides, an object must be extremely massive.
So at the risk of patting ourselves a tad too hard on the back, we believe the above is a decent if very basic explanation of what causes the tides, and astute readers will note that the question of God’s existence7 is no more or less settled than it was two or three paragraphs earlier. We believe it’s perfectly clear that we haven’t offered any opinion whatsoever on the existence or non-existence of God, and simply hope that—whatever your opinion of God, organized religion, atheism, science, or The O’Reilly Factor—it’s clear to everyone that both God and religion are very fortunate that Bill O’Reilly is not their best or only defender.
Please check back soon; in a future installment we hope to reveal the fiendish sorcery responsible for elevators.
NOTES
1. If you haven’t yet clicked on the link above and are wondering, this is not hyperbole on our part. The word used on the billboard was indeed “scams.”
2. One has to wonder if O’Reilly is concerned about whether a high enough tide might tip Guam over.
3. All figures made up on the spot.
4. We’re pretty sure about this, although we have a hunch it gets disproved in at least one or two Star Trek episodes.
5. The ice caps, being ice, are solid, but they don’t amount to much, especially lately. Cream of Wheat, on the other hand, somehow appears to be simultaneously liquid and solid—go ahead and try to explain that, atheists!
6. We have no idea how big a distance this is, but we suspect it’s at least five or six times larger than a centimeter.
7. We are aware that for many of our readers (not to mention our billions of non-readers), God’s existence is not in question. To be fair, though, to plenty of other folks, God’s non-existence isn’t in question either. So we’re just going to leave it exactly as we wrote it in order to irritate everybody equally.
The following is the relevant segment from The O’Reilly Factor. The host’s comments about the tide occur a little after 1:48.
Barely twenty-four hours after I claimed there’d be a billion-to-one chance that Pat Robertson would ever read my criticism of his Haiti comments, we here at the local Bowling in the Dark branch office were stunned to receive a visit from none other than the Reverend himself. He informed us that God had not only told him about the posting but also given him directions to our secret mountain stronghold, so, sure enough, he hopped into his solid gold Learjet and crossed the country to have a good sit-down talk.1
And I’m glad he did. We had a great discussion about—among other things—TV ratings, hypocrisy, tremendous amounts of money, warped self-image, and the nature of bullshit, and it turns out that Pat isn’t interested in any of those things.2
We spent a good long while on the subject of predictions, and any number of things Pat mentioned on the subject made good sense.4 He pointed out, for example, that any old fool with years of extensive education and a degree in meteorology can predict the weather, but by predicting things that haven’t actually happened yet, that poor honest bastard runs the risk of being proven clearly and indisputably wrong.
A fool without a meteorology degree, on the other hand, can easily predict things that have already happened, and can blame their happening on any reason the aforementioned fool pleases, so long as the stated reason (1) matches his existing prejudices and (2) cannot be factually verified in any meaningful way.
I took great notes on all this, and even asked him to help me explain the weather in a couple of select locations across the globe, so I could see for myself how it worked. I’m new to this, so I won’t begin to pretend that I can pretend to explain a devastating tragedy such as a tsunami, earthquake, or New Kids on the Block reunion tour. For now, I’ll stick to today’s weather, but rest assured that Pat (or, as I call him, Pat) and I made these predictions ourselves, basing them on the Patented Pat Robertson Prediction Method personally endorsed by Pat Robertson himself, and available to you for a minimal price plus shipping and handling:
Castro District, San Francisco, California: Mostly sunny, high of 56°F, slight breeze.
Pat Robertson’s God continues to smile, day by pleasant day, on this happy and rainbow-bedecked little neighborhood.
Qandahar, Afghanistan: Sunny, high of 64°F, moderate winds.
Lovely weather for flying kites or being a Muslim.
Los Angeles, California: Sunny, 62°F
The Los Angeles area, home of legions of Hollywood liberals and the International Church of Scientology, is currently being blessed with its 2,130,452nd consecutive day of perfect weather.
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming: 112 earthquakes within the last week.
All of these earthquakes were minor, indicating that God is merely irritated rather than genuinely wrathful. Turns out he's irked at the U.S. government for limiting snowmobile access to the park, and he's also upset with Himself for the final design for the moose, which He says “looks like a jerk.”
Fairbanks, Alaska: Bitterly cold (–3°F), 17+ hours of oppressive darkness per night.
God’s angry at white Alaskans for taking the land from the native Inuit; at the native Inuit, for being mad at the white Alaskans for taking their land; and polar bears, for being buttholes. Also snow—He particularly dislikes snow, but appreciates irony, so He plans to continue to smite snow by burying it under snow.5
Virginia Beach, Virginia: Overcast, gusting winds, freezing rain. Generally horrible, horrible weather.
Hoo boy—somebody here sure pissed Him off.
NOTES
1. Pat informed me that he initially wanted a solid gold helicopter, but God told him that He didn’t approve of anything but fixed-wing aircraft. Pat said that God had been on the fence for a long time, and probably would have given helicopters His thumbs-up if only the Army had named their AH-64 Apache the AH-64 White Person, or if Igor Sikorsky’s name hadn’t made him sound “like he was probably a commie.”
2. And I super totally believe this.3
3. Totally.
4. Zero is a number.
5. I don’t actually know anything about Alaskan history. It’s possible that white settlers and Inuit get along swimmingly and always have; I really don’t know. I can say for a fact, though, that polar bears really are buttholes—especially the ones around Fairbanks, who are so self-absorbed and unsociable that people believe that you can’t find polar bears anywhere near Fairbanks. Look it up.
I was tempted to either begin or end this particular commentary by calling Southern Baptist minister Pat Robertson an insulting, vulgar, and potentially humorous name, and had even begun to narrow down my options. But it occurred to me that I’m thirty-five years old now and—at least chronologically speaking—almost certainly an adult. On top of that, one of the things I find most disturbing and offensive in current American society is our mindless, unbridled incivility, and it’d be awfully stupid and hypocritical of me to contribute to that.
This is not to say that I don’t find what Robertson recently said about the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, to be thoughtless, embarrassing (to him), and appalling (to me). In case you haven’t heard about this already, here it is:
If I’m hearing that right—and please feel free to correct me if I’m not—Pat Robertson is suggesting that the Haiti earthquake is a result if an alleged pact with Satan made by Haitian slaves during a 1791 rebellion against the French. Basically, he's implying that they're getting what they deserve—“cursed by one thing after another”—because they crossed God.
While it’s a bit hard to believe, post–World War II, that overthrowing the French would require breaking a sweat or even particularly rigorous pre-rebellion stretching, much less calling in special support from Satan, what I really wonder is this: How fucking long does Pat Robertson think Haitians live?
By my math, the revolt in 1791 happened 219 years ago. The oldest person in verifiable human history lived to be 122 years old; a Haitian born at the precise moment of the Haitian Deal With The Devil, if she’d lived to the same age, would have died almost 97 years ago.
If we’re willing to accept that a deal with the devil is actually possible, I suppose it’s no less unreasonable to figure that the dealmakers could have been crafty enough to con Old Scratch into giving them some sort of Highlander-style immortality in addition to their freedom.1 But while I generally don’t presume to speak for Pat Robertson, it seems pretty safe to say that this isn’t what he had in mind.
So assuming that Robertson believes that Haiti is populated with ordinary mortal Haitians, rather than 250-year-old immortal Satanists, he’s telling us that modern-day Haitians have been and are being punished—cursed, to use his word—for something they didn’t do.
My older brother and I weren’t exactly hellraisers as little kids, but we got into our fair share of trouble, sometimes on our own, sometimes while working as a team.2 I can’t recall a single time in all our years of acting stupid where I got a spanking for something my brother had done, or vice versa. Our parents, fair and thoughtful but far from omniscient, somehow managed to avoid punishing somebody who wasn’t to blame.
According to Robertson’s apparent worldview, though, either
(1) God is punishing Haitians for their naughtiness because He’s unaware that the actual guilty parties have been dead for a hundred years or longer,
or
(2) God knows no living Haitian had anything to do with this (probably mythical) deal with the devil, but doesn’t care whether He’s punishing the guilty or the innocent.
I don’t claim to know whether Robertson prefers to believe in an unaware God or an unjust God, but if he really believes that Haitians is being punished for the probably-imaginary actions of their long-dead ancestors, it’s tough for me to see a third option. I prefer to believe in a God that doesn’t behave like some sort of drunken cowboy, firing off bullets in all directions, hurting random people for things they didn’t do wrong.
I’m not trying to say that Pat Robertson is not without his redeeming qualities. He and his 700 Club folks are, for example, working to raise money for disaster relief in Haiti . . . which is more than I’ve done.3 And I’m going to resist writing what the childish part of me would like to write about Robertson, because I’m all grown up now,4 and instead tell Robertson—as if he actually had better than a billion-to-one chance of ever reading this—that it’s not too late for him to consider the possibility that God is more just, more reasonable, and a bit less mean-spirited than some of His children.
NOTES 1. If you’re going to make adjustments to your standard deal-with-the-devil contract boilerplate, immortality is a good way to go. It’s way more useful than a golden fiddle, and at least as hard to come by these days.
2. At least one team effort involved sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night with several rolls of toilet paper in tow. That was a lot of fun right up until we found out our mom thought we’d been kidnapped and had called the police.
3. The tangled question of whether Robertson is defying God by helping these ageless Satanists—by interfering with the punishment he himself seems to believe God is meting out—is a topic for another day, probably one that will never come.
4. But if I did write what I wanted to write, it'd read “Pat Robertson is a dick.”
I appreciate Some Guy saying that he followed Monty Python's Flying Circus religiously. And while I can, unfortunately, confirm that he was a dork in high school (weren't we all?) I need to thank him for providing the foreshadowing to my post. For as I constantly strive to seek universal Truth (that's with a big T) I start to tackle the human condition known as religion (see what I did there - my bias on display already!).
The recent book "The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures" by Nicholas Wade explores his theory that people have a genetic impulse to worship due to the natural selection benefit provided to early societies that adopted religion. I have read books on the historical development of religion, by both atheists (such as Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion") and those of faith (including "The Dawkins Delusion" which I recently started), and I intend to put Mr. Wade's new addition on my list as well. Fortunately, my new favorite newspaper columnist, John Tierney of the New York Times Science section, did read it. The money quote (which includes a quote from the book itself):
In “The Faith Instinct,” after discussing some of the challenges to traditional beliefs (like the arguments of scholars that Jesus had little to do with the invention of Christianity, and that Muhammad might not even have existed), Nicholas notes that music appreciation, like religion, is a universal human faculty that draws people together, stirs the emotions, and exalts the mind to a different plane. He then observes:
Is there not some way of transforming religion into versions better suited for a modern age? The three monotheisms were created to meet conditions in societies that existed many centuries ago. The fact that they have endured for so long does not mean they were meant to last for ever, only that they have become like some favorite Mozart opera that people are happy to hear over and over again. But the world of music did not achieve final perfection in Mozart.
This is a brilliant observation by Mr. Wade. I hazard to guess that high-ranking officials in each of the Big Three Religions (in case you live under a rock - uh, a rock with Internet access - the Big Three consists of Christianity, Judaism and Islam) agree with portions of this sentiment. They DO need to evolve, and have done a piss-poor job of this in, oh, say the past 600 years. While standing around in their official garb (hey - it's a word!), the priest the rabbi and the imam (no, sadly this is not the beginning of a joke) would be loathe to admit that people only go because it has been something they are used to hearing over and over, like Mozart. It may not be a good reason, but it may just be the most common reason. And just like fans of the New York Yankees, they need to understand Mr. Wade's point - that just because they've been the winner before does not mean their institutions should endure.
Dawkins presents his argument in unabashedly indignant fashion, and this can feel like a club of the figurative head while reading his material. A biologist by education, Dawkins can (somewhat ironically - check me here, Some Guy) be "holier than thou" in his assertions, almost daring people to argue with him and giving off a vibe that if you beleive in God it is because you're not smart enough not to. But he brings with his arrogance a certain scientific credibility in his arguments. This is something I believe, for obvious reasons, the faithful cannot counter, for much of their argument boils down to "we believe it all happened, so it must have". This doesn't make it wrong, just as it doesn't make it right. On this issue, rarely do people use logic over emotion, and the discussion quickly breaks down.
Perhaps Dawkins' fatal flaw is that he doesn't distinguish between religion, faith and god, three very different ideas. God is the all-powerful being itself, and faith is the belief in.....well, something. But religion, while presumably based on the first two (faith in God) has become an entirely separate, almost corporate, entity, which can seemingly exist regardless of the actual existence of a supreme being. And maybe this is where Wade will shine, as he seems to identify a need to worship as something separate from the existence of god (or God, which ever he's talking about). Tierney wraps up his article discussing one idea for the evolution of religion:
What would the product of such a transformation look like? One possibility that occurs to me is a version of environmentalism, but with better music and with rituals that are more elegant than sorting garbage. A Church of Green could provide some of the same moral lessons and communal values as traditional religions, and I suspect it’s no coincidence that green fervor is especially prevalent in European countries where traditional religion is on the decline.
I can't wait to read Wade's contribution to the ancient and escalating debate. What do the faithful of Bowling in the Dark think?
