Alienate to accumulate

[hirez]

You know all this creationist[1] nonsense? Hateful pish thought up by cost-accountants and VB coders. People with no bloody soul or sense of wonder at the insane complexity that is the universe. The invisible sky pixie(s) boshed an entire planet and ecosystem up in a week for the convenience of the baldy-ape-people, like it was just some lifeless theatre backdrop or an advertising hoarding for low-tar tabs.

That's a telling and grim paucity of imagination for you right there. Bet they're a riot in the pub with their halves of lager and racy tales of printer drivers.

Not for them rock strata made of space dust, heaved about and folded by bits of the planet scraping together and then finally scraped into shape by a massive wall of ice. No. Sky pixie put hills there like child with model railway.

[ I ought to go on, but I'd turn into deathboy and one's plenty. ]

I also ought to mention that the poetry in the KJV and the English country church is pretty damn special too. Just in case anyone got any funny ideas about consistency.


[1] Of course, an average rant has been spoiled by inaccuracy. What I mean there is creation myth. Creationism being the new-age sop to the Revolutionary Forces of Darwin. Bloody authoritarians. They just can't handle it if someone isn't in charge. Blame. Responsibility. Only following orders. More'n my job's worth, pal.

Comments

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder what we might have accomplished if all of efforts of millions of people over thousands of years hadn't been wasted on their imaginary friends ... but actually I like cathedrals. Still, impressive though they are I'm not sure that they were worth it, particularly as religion seems to have had a hand in so much of human misery.

[mrph.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure it's fair to blame an imaginary friend. Whether or not there's a God (or gods) out there, the main cause of human misery is humans looking for excuses to victimise other humans and do stuff that might not be considered acceptable in polite society.

God sometimes makes a good figleaf for the great and powerful to hide behind, though. It's probably harder to argue with leaders who are giving orders in the name of $deity than those who are aspiring to some political ideal, though.

[steer.livejournal.com]

That's a telling and grim paucity of imagination for you right there.

Ah... now I think you are actually vastly unfair here.

For me, the whole first part of genesis is a riot of imagination with many quirky and fascinating points. It's only familiarity breeding contempt that tends to make us forget that actually the Judeo-Christian mythos is actually, extremely imaginative, mystical and very strange indeed. If you'd never come across it before and it was rewritten in a modern style and presented as a whacked out fantasy you'd lap it up I'm sure. When you add to this a lot of the stranger creationist thinking (the Omphalos in particular) and creationism itself is an outpouring of imagination.

Compared to this the whole "Everything since the big bang is a product of a set of a small number of simple rules. Unfortunately, we don't know all the rules and can't really calculate the consequences." approach seems a bit pedestrian. It does have the advantage of being true (IMHO) but it's certainly less interesting as an explanation.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

For the sake of dramatic wossname, possibly.

But it's the kind of one-dimensional and arrogant magical thinking about how all this stuff turned up that makes a chap have a quiet seethe.

"A big spirit did it and ran away..."

I guess I react badly to the idea that people actively don't want to know why and how things work.

It all might as well be made from phlogiston.

[steer.livejournal.com]

"A big spirit did it and ran away..."

Better or worse than "There's some rules. There just are OK."?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

"Because I said so" really doesn't work for me.

"Because the evidence we've collected appears to fit the theory, we can be reasonably sure that the world wasn't created on or around 6006BC" does, however.

[steer.livejournal.com]

But as an explanatory mechanism, all our current science bottoms out as "it just is" too -- which is not much more intellectually satisfying -- it's just complicated enough that joe punter takes a while to get to the "it just is" and most people are put off enough by the frills and complexities to not notice that it isn't actually an explanation.

This is not to say it's not tremendously intellectually satisfying but as a "why/how" for creation it just exactly missed the point and stops at "well, don't ask me, them's the rules, I just work here."

So unless you're going for an anthropomorphic principle approach or you can get some bootstrapping grand unified theory which circles round and tells you why the theory is what it is (which would be a neat intellectual trick) you're sort of left with "because it was said so" which is just "because I say so" passive voice really.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

But...but...my imaginary friend is nice. A bunny...with pink fluffy ears and a yellow cotton tail. No, really--its tale is made of cotton. She lost her original tail in a bicycle accident. Tragic really, but she's not bitter. When she's happy, she chirps the Moonlight Sonata. But when she's angry--oh, ouch--she spews venom out of its eyes that turns you into a newt.
(A newt...you're not a newt.
I got better.)

One time, about a million years ago, my imaginary friend created a world on the tip of a blade of grass. And then she peed on it, just because she could.

[reddragdiva]

I'm trying to work out the phrasing that will most infuriate creationists with which to explain that God was created by evolution.