So…everything?

I’m insulted by that hate-filled, anti-religious tract. It’s garbage like that, that alienates the Community of Faith from academia and the Left. Insulting and demeaning.

From Wikipedia:

Throughout the text, Bakhtin attempts two things: he seeks to recover sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel that, in the past, were either ignored or suppressed, and conducts an analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language that was not. It is by means of this analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is carnival (carnivalesque) which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism (grotesque body) which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body.

OK, it’s official: FSM is not funny any more.

Actually the community of faith does a fine job of alienating itself.
That at and people like you.

“.. but I repeat myself.”

There’s no proof Dogu… you just have to believe

:-)

Anti-religious? Sure, if you like.

Garbage? Fair comment, as your subjective opinion.

But hate-filled? Not in the slightest – the only hate I detect here is yours. Precisely the kind of hate that alienates academia, the Left and many, many other individuals and groups (including many on the Right and more temperate religious people) from your hate-filled “Community of Faith”.

I bet you hated Life of Brian, too, and thought that was motivated by hate. Look up the word “parody” sometime. The worst you will find is “ridicule” – but I doubt there is any accepted definition that employs the word hate.

But well done! Do keep up the good work. No, seriously…

However, most of the laughing, you will understand, comes from the reactions of those not yet touched by his noodly apendage.

I have not been touched by it either unless the irrestable urge to laugh at religious foolery is a sign of being ‘touched’.

In that spirit I would like to toss a well ripened Roma tomato (great for sauce) in the general direction of those who see “hatred” in the meat balls of the FSM.

Those who see hate in this parody clearly expose themselves as persons motivated by fear, hatred, and other negative psychological states.

The fear, anger and yes hatred that pours from these followers of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, reflects very clearly on the nature of their pseudo gods.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Touched_by_His_Noodly_Appendage.jpg

Did you, perhaps, look at what it was created in response to? I think it works in it’s context.

And, well…I have more respect for anything that can laugh at itself.

When it stops being relevant, it will die. Unfortunately, the idiocies are still apparent.

Regards,

Dug North

At the Mid-Atlantic Subgenius Devival last weekend in Baltimore, Rev. Ivan Stang gave a shout-out to the FSM, though as a point of saying “Bob” is not a joke like the FSM, revering it nevertheless. And, as the Subgenius central tenet says, Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

How much ya wanna bet the CNN link is a spoof?

This is one of the things that drives me nuts with most blog posts (not just here); the links provided almost NEVER go to the source but rather to a secondary source that references another secondary source that…in an almost GNU-like recursive link set that goes nowhere.

Proof anybody?

im off to dig out my “all your base are belong to us” tshirt

Although intentionally non-sensical, FSM is presented as an alternative to the traditional idea of God and thus represents the ultimate resolution of what is currently unknowable, unknown or plausibly debatable. FSM seems to be most enjoyed by those who are explicitly atheist and as such disavow anything “Transcendent” or (classically) metaphysical. In these intances, FSM is employed to ridicule (by absurdity) any reference to a Transcendent with the implication that all unknowns will eventually be resolved through purely scientific inquiry. Thus at one level, FSM is a derisive atheistic construct which serves as a scientifically optimistic placeholder in discussions involving the limit of their own or others’ current knowledge.

No one doubts that the limit of human knowledge exists. What FSM boils down to is whether or not a portion of that unknown is inherently transcendent. Atheistic use of FSM would say ‘no’ while a great many others (who may or may not believe in “God”) would say ‘yes’. Thus FSM represents the age-old issue as to whether scientific inquiry will eventually answer all questions.

I doubt AAR is interested in FSM solely for its atheism, since atheism has been previously dealt with by theologians/philosophers near ad naseum in the past through engagement with much more sophisticated arguments. I suspect the interest lies in its use as a placeholder for the transcendent, a theme which is alive and well in contemporary religious and philosophical discussion along “post-metaphysical” lines thanks to major players like Heidegger, Derrida and Jean Luc Marion. These thinkers (all within the school of Phenomenology) agree that traditional views of God/Transcendence, in which the Transcendent speaks or interacts in highly anthropological terms, need to undergo a rethinking or ‘deconstruction’. But none posits that a Transcendent does not exist. The degree to which one can know anything about the Transcendent is at question in their discussions.

And I think it is here that FSM has traction with AAR interests. If the new interweb meme of FSM stands as a contruct for the Transcendent (whether mockingly or otherwise), at the very least it demonstrates that such a placeholder exists (vigorously) in the most contemporary vocabulary of bright scientifically-minded intertube front-runners such as yourselves (and I do consider you all as such). The existence of FSM suggests that the conceptual universes of atheists and transcendentalists are not so diverse and that it proves useful in both instances to create a placeholder for the unknown. The difference seems to boil down to whether one fills that placeholder with either an optimistic scientism which holds that all unknowns are inevitably resolvable through enough scientific inquiry or a form of transcendentalism which posits that certain unknowables find their resolution only in what cannot possibly be experientially or phenomenologically ascertained.

Or maybe i am completely mistaken and the AAR discussions of FSM will revolve around the possible dimensions of the cosmic meatballs which make up its/her/his eyeballs…

Maybe it works b/c the Christianity which this monster most clearly parodies is already scandalous in the same manner, with the creator of all things becoming a man and dying in order to undie by virtue of the deep magic of an indistructible life, so now the christians say “the redepmtion of our bodies,for in this hope we were saved”

so, bodies that rot and turn to ashes can get permanent entropyless bodies because god punished god to death for violations of nongods.