God's blog.
Later:
Wow. Just wow. I don’t even know where to start. So the man and his buddy the rib-thing have dominion over everything. They’re going to get pretty unbearable really fast. What You need to do is make them think that there were other, bigger, scarier creatures around a long time before them. I suggest dinosaurs. No need to actually create dinosaurs—just create some weird-ass dinosaur bones and skeletons and bury them in random locations. Man will dig them up eventually and think, What the f?
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81 comments:
We are not amused.
Nope, not even a little bit.
Forty three species of parrots! Nipples for men!
The New Yorker is as deliriously awful as a Woody Allen movie.
The voice of the mandarin class.
And yet from Adam until today, not one person that has traveled through this chaos has missed the opportunity to be happy, to be sad, to experience success, to know failure, a granted great joy, suffer deep pain, or make small and significant choices.
Ah, the choices - always the ability to choose: kindness or coercion, lift a burden or add a burden.
I mean, from this perspective one could easily get the idea that we're being educated - that we're undergoing all kinds of things that would be hard to explain to us unless we first experienced them.
A perfect example of a Lefty who thinks he's smart and funny and is neither.
Problem is, the people who hired him have the same problem.
Benchley and Parker are spinning.
WV "bubtoi" Breast man.
Slugs! *He* created slugs! They can't hear. They can't speak. They can't operate machinery. Are we not in the hands of a lunatic?
It's funny. I laughed out loud.
Not all that funny. It's funnier to watch Ricky Gervais read the children's book about Noah's Ark.
I hate hate hate hate "Wow. Just Wow."
Hate it.
I'm with Jason. This shtick was done in Time Bandits. Yawn.
I can't possibly be the only one who noticed that the piece is dated August 8, 2011.
Makes sense. Progressives think they are God. Why not write it down?
Hey, I'm both an evangelical Christian and a geologist (first two degrees, at least). The whole six 24-hour days thing is miserable theology and even worse science.
If God is perfect Truth, and science is the search for Truth, then the two will be in harmony, not conflict.
The problem for wooden Christian literalists -- I suspect that when Jesus says "I am the door." they look for hinges and a knob -- is that they have chosen to define God by what is unknown.
Consequently, each expansion of knowledge threatens their concept of God.
Those of us who are both scientists and believers can find plenty within what we already know that points us towards God. See Romans 1:20.
As we learn more about the universe our understanding of God expands, instead of being threatened.
God made the world in six days.
On the seventh, He said, "I'll rest."
So He let the thing into orbit swing,
To give it a dry-run test.
Four billion years went by,
And He took a look at the whirling blob.
His spirits fell, and he said "Oh, well...
It was only a six-day job."
Just poorly written, unfunny stuff.
It's possible to write a really good parody of a canonical text (e.g., Tom Stoppard, Jim Chace), but unfortunately it takes talent. If talent is in short supply, then you need at least an ear for the language. The author of God's blog seems to have confused Genesis with some dreary report, written in airless bureaucratese, put out by the Dept of Education. At least, that's the level of writing it takes as the target of the attempted parody.
Pathetic.
I remember joking with my friends about this kind of stuff when I was a kid. I hear my kids and thier friends joke about it now. (I know people who visit the Creation Museum, but I don't laugh in their face.)
The humor is old and worn. Only funny to adults who enjoys being condescending and juvenile. And, they suffer from delayed adolescence.
I subscribed to the New Yorker for a year because it was about $.95 in some offer they sent. So I subscribed thinking at least the cartoons will be good. But the whole thing was flat, and arrogant, the way that almost all Democrats have become, epsecially in print. The only article I finished reading the entire year was one by Ian Burumi about Theo Van Gogh's murder in Amsterdam by the Muslim. I later went and bought Ian Burumi's book, called Murder in Amsterdam. Not bad, except there's no ending. The ending requires a judgment of some kind, and Burumi is a typical liberal in that he's thrown that outside the window in favor of tolerance. Any kind of judgment strikes liberals as totalitarian, so they've gotten rid of the whole idea that one should exercise discrimination and judgment in thinking. Their writing is now an endless attack on the judgment of anyone who pretends to be an authority on anything. Hence, this parody about God's judgment and discrimination.
You, a Supreme Being!
The nature diversity is astounding.
The beauty of the geology is astounding.
The individuality from fingerprints to DNA is astounding.
But the men created to enjoy this world are never satisfied. They all want to be the creator.
Lots of luck with that.
Or just pretend and call it science.
If God blogged, his humor would be really amazing. Like Paul Zrimsek.
Oh, for fuck's sake, lighten up.
You have to appreciate the commenter who said "Putting boobs on the woman is sexist." I'm sure we've all encountered this commenter, shrieking about the heteronormative hegemony because you used "mankind" instead of "humankind".
They even have Mick represented with the request to see Adam's birth certificate.
It's cute, and yes it's been done before, but not exactly in this context; and I'd categorize this as smile-worthy funny. Not LOL stuff, but it's worth a smile.
I'm not sure why the separate comments don't have screen names of the contributors, though.
Q: "s this humor from The New Yorker funny?"
A: Who still reads The New Yorker?
OK, occasionally there's a nugget of gold in there. But one has to wade through so much dreck to find it that it hardly seems worth the effort.
I noticed a comment from nevadabob there:
I liked the old commenting format better, when you could get automatic alerts when someone replied to your comment. This new way, you have to click through three or four pages to see new comments, and they’re not even organized by threads. Until this is fixed, I’m afraid I won’t be checking in on Your creation.
The blogosphere as the universe. I lol'd.
I'm with Jason. This shtick was done in Time Bandits. Yawn.
Yup.
Ands what was the final line of the movie, as God answered the question about Satan and evil: "I think it has something to do with free will?"
A universe containing beings with free will has to be an apparent mess.
Reasonably funny. My favorite comment was the shoe one. The general idea reminded me of the LOLCat Bible Translation Project.
Nothing from the New Yorker is worth reading including this dreck
This "humor" isn't trying to make fun of God. It's trying to make fun of people who comment on blogs.
The author should be burned at the stake.
If hal of the jokes weren't borrowed from "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" 30+ years ago, I would say it was pretty funny...
Keynes failed.
He's been replaced, though, by a ZOMBIE
Chaos is how it was "before the beginning."
Now, it's just entropy all the way down.
God's dyslexic. He was trying to spell "dog."
I enjoyed the jokes about comments on blogs.
I didnt write it, so I'm not going to hell over it. Found it funny though.
Meh--not that funny. And parrots are really damn smart, BTW:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6KvPN_Wt8I
You'd think a superior intellect who has a blog on a publication like The New Yorker would have been well-informed enough to know all about Alex the famous grey parrot.
Mr Deity does it better.
http://www.mrdeity.com/
Monty Python OWNS the parrot!
A little too Look How Cute I Am.
This thread has become a fascinating piece of performance art.
There's a story told about Dirac. Famous for being a physicist who said little. And, it's the story about a pet store with parrots for sale.
In goes Einstein. To buy a parrot. And, the store's owner tells him that he's got one parrot, who speaks 10 languages. And, costs $100.
Then, he's shown another parrot who speaks 100 languages. And, costs $500.
There's also a parrot in this store that speaks NO language at all. So, Einstein asks "how much?" And, he's told $100,000.
And Einstein says "You mean the one that has no language skills costs so much?"
"Yes," says the proprietor. Because "He thinks."
You're welcome.
You need another choice:" Smug condescension."
The lefty urge to ridicule religion is always there. At Washington Monthly, Steve Benen has posts about "the God Machine." It's part of the Marxist "opium of the people" thing. I know it was Lenin who said that but it's part of the ideology. No higher power.
Every one of your polls needs to start with a "Didn't read it" node and then have separate branches for registering opinions about the article in question.
Tolerance on parade.
What a bore. Stale, predictable, badly written ...
Comparing to the paradises that atheists created when in power, relatively religious Americans did way better. Although, not religious person myself, I think "Man created in the image of God" is pretty powerful uplifting and inspiring message.
It's no wonder that agressive atheists, especcially from the left, hate the message, and try to present that it's all about parrots and dolphins. Empowering the man makes these social ideologues redundant.
Wasn't Joan Osborne more amusing?
Parrots are smart.
wv: ablys
They're very ablys creatures.
Bart Hall - "
As we learn more about the universe our understanding of God expands, instead of being threatened."
===============
I don't agree. As we began exploring the Solar System and the Universe , we quickly discovered there was no intelligent ordering. There was nothing out there showing any shaping force past the outcome of the Big Bang and the interactions of various forms of matter and energy. We realized how hostile space and most planets were to man. The distances, and how utterly insignificant Earth...once thought by most religions to be the Center of the Universe, truly was.
If God was in the soul business and created the Earth for that reason...he might have elected to create other "soul places" in the hundreds of billions of stars and their solar systems in the 100s of billions of galaxies out there. But we see no sign of that.
And if he took the "soul creating place" approach and we haven't yet seen any signal or visual manifestation because we lack the technology to see all the great stuff God did on other "Earths" he created...then you have to ask if he was busy elsewhere, how credible are the tales of the ancients? Why would he squander his "only begotten son" on some backcorner of the universe or waste time talking to some shitty little desert tribe busy killing the locals to grab Canaan and help them with their conquests? Or bother with some desert bandit who saw Paradise as some party central where if you killed the right people - you could do drugs, drink wine, and screw an unending line of virgins forever??
Even in the local neighborhood, the Solar System, God had enough raw material to create several dozen Earths. Or of course, just pop all the necessary gold and all the other elements into existence on Godly whim and create 1,000 Earths around the sun. Instead we got one world and two once habitable worlds now dead over the billions of years, and a pile of dead objects outside Mars bathed in deadly radiation.
Nope. As we learn more about the universe, the less credible the God of Mohammed, the God of the early Christians, the Hebrew fairy tales or Greek fairy tales or Ba'al happen to look.
Hubble is beloved by atheists in the scientific community because they believe it has contributed mightily towards ending the "God Delusion".
I gave up reading the New Yorker 20 years ago when their Easter issue showed a crucified Easter Bunny on the cover.
That said, this piece is fairly funny and not sacreligious. The best line was:
The lemon tree: very pretty. The lemon flower: sweet. But the fruit of the poor lemon? Impossible to eat. Is this a bug or a feature?
Seems to me that the piece is poking fun at blog commenters.
Funny how so many of us didn't pick up on this at first. Is that a lesson we should take to heart? :-)
Lucious - Parrots (crows, Mynahs) have also wrecked the belief that intelligence is correlated to brain size. And the belief that all intelligent creatures must have a long dependency on others, developmental period...
In some ways the drive in evolution favors bigger brains in the abscence of other factors because it enables extra capacity. But other factors like not being able to fly well with a 3 lb sphere of fat and neurons in a boney shell drive evolution to create the most effecient brain per gram of weight.
Some social species can still be successful with the herd putting up with prolonged infancy and development. But other species cannot. Evolution and "norms" push fast development in species expected to contribute to the group as early as possible or fend for their own meals.
(Even humans - I doubt earlier societies would have indulged people wanting to be parasites until after age 30. They would get with the program or get left for the wolves to dine on. )
It's cute, and yes it's been done before, but not exactly in this context; and I'd categorize this as smile-worthy funny. Not LOL stuff, but it's worth a smile.
That's it for me. I just don't have the time for a lot of comedy like I used to. But it seems reasonably funny. Probably won't rival Stephen Potter's books in my world but there you go.
I don't really understand the whole adamant "There's NOTHING EVER in the New Yorker that's worth reading!" Is being such a hardcore ideologue THAT much fun that you end up saying stuff like that?
Not bad.
But Mark Twain did it better (albeit from the perspective of Adam and Eve rather than The Big Guy).
How about "not as clever as they think they are, but mildly funny"
In the same vein, there's The Diary of Adam and Eve by Twain.
and also.. I agree with Bart Hall.
As we learn more about the universe our understanding of God expands, instead of being threatened.
I think as we learn more about the universe our understanding of the Bible expands.
I love these polls because I have an incredible streak going. I am the LUCKY WINNER every time. Whoo hooo!
As we began exploring the Solar System and the Universe , we quickly discovered there was no intelligent ordering. There was nothing out there showing any shaping force past the outcome of the Big Bang and the interactions of various forms of matter and energy. We realized how hostile space and most planets were to man. The distances, and how utterly insignificant Earth...once thought by most religions to be the Center of the Universe, truly was.
There is ordering, argue over the definition of "intelligent ordering" if you want. The laws of physics describe this ordering. It seems quite intelligent to be able to create ordering with one big bang rather than infinite years of meddling.
Do you have to be the center of the universe to be significant? Did God create man to be a conceited narcissist? Why should the entire universe be man friendly? Facing dangers and overcoming obstacles gives meaning to life.
I don't see anything you said as valid arguments against the existence of God. Just that God didn't create the entire universe for the pleasure of humans.
"If God was in the soul business and created the Earth for that reason...he might have elected to create other "soul places" in the hundreds of billions of stars and their solar systems in the 100s of billions of galaxies out there. But we see no sign of that."
Nice try, but this makes a huge assumption which is that God is incapable or unwilling to create soul places that can't see each other.
But of course, if God was able to create the one soul place we inhabit, it seems a very small matter to install a method that prevents us from seeing others.
Not funny, but I don't really enjoy the sophisticated humor of Maher or Stewart either.
"If God was in the soul business and created the Earth for that reason...he might have elected to create other "soul places" in the hundreds of billions of stars and their solar systems in the 100s of billions of galaxies out there. But we see no sign of that."
Quayle - Nice try, but this makes a huge assumption which is that God is incapable or unwilling to create soul places that can't see each other.
But of course, if God was able to create the one soul place we inhabit, it seems a very small matter to install a method that prevents us from seeing others.
Your argument is the fallback, "God can do anything" one. God created all of us as God's children to "spread his word" - but he used those all powerful God Commands to conceal all the other "Gods children out there" from Contact.
"If there are 100s of billions of galaxies with hundreds of billion stars..the reason God sent his only begotton son to Earth to die for us is easily explainable as God cloned hundreds of billions of Jesuses. One dead Jesus per world".
"Of course, an infinitely powerful God just tested our Faith with all those fossils and dated rocks he put to make us question him. The Earth is 6,000 years old. And all Hubble and those other telescopes see is what God wants them to see."
You know what's weird about that lemon tree song? It doesn't mention thorns. And they're big-ass thorns too that will stab you right through if you're not careful.
The continuous ridicule of the non-existent god is a stretch.
The existent God made this world to enjoy his artistic side.
He then created Adam and Eve in his image but as part gods and part animals to show his sense of humor.
He crafted them from dirt as men who could join Him in defeating the prideful rebellion of Lucifer, and thereby show off what he could do with mere dirt.
Let me know when test tube human life has been created by man, Because that is the day that He will send out the last call.
Let me know when test tube human life has been created by man, Because that is the day that He will send out the last call.
There ya go again. Creating God in your image.
Are some of you people missing the point that the content of the article is not really God's blog, but rather the clueless prattling of the commentariat nitpicking Creation? No? Well, I thought it was tolerably funny...
Blue@9, it made me think of "The Diaries of Adam and Eve" too. (I also thought Twain did it much better.) It also reminded me of the time travelers' forum which was, to me, a funnier representation of how commenters act.
Personally I thought it was hilarious.
Some of the people here seem to think the article was ridiculing God or religion. Um, no. It was ridiculing the inanity of comment threads!
On the reality show "The Glee Project" there was this kid Cameron who was a committed Christian who didn't like the idea of kissing some of the girls in the music videos or simulating sex as it went against his beliefs. That caused a big problem for the show runner who said he always wanted to write a "Christian character" but how could they put him on the show if he wouldn't do what they wanted. That is act against his beliefs. The kid thought about it and said you know what....my faith is more important than getting a chance to be on network television show and making a lot of money.
I have an enormous amount of respect for him. You don't see that everyday. Or anyday it seems.
You can learn everything you need to know about life from reality TV.
People are fine with religious principles until people actually want to follow them.
Then it's a big problem.
It happens all the time. That's why they love to mock them.
"Your argument is the fallback, "God can do anything" one."
That's not my argument at all.
I caught you in a logical fall.
To underpin your first argument, you made a whopper of an assumption that was inconsistent with the premise. It's called the fallacy of the necessity.
It is an error of circularity to state that you know that God must or would do something, he didn't do it (or I can't see where he did it), therefore there isn't a God.
To put it another way, if (as you argue) there are no soul supporting planets because we haven't seen the other soul supporting planets, on what basis would you then advocate continuing one more day doing any investigatory science?
By your logic we should have stopped counting planets in our solar system when we reached 5 because we hadn't yet seen any more than 5.
I was sad to see Cameron go home on the Glee Project, especially because it meant that that shrill one-note diva Alex is still there. (Even though cameron took the bullet meant for Damian, who I like, not for Alex, who Ryan Murphy apparently likes for unknown reasons)
I did appreciate that Cameron realized how naive he was coming into the show. Keeping true to one's self must be rare for Christians in Hollywood.
Well Alex is what they are talking about when they talk about diversity.
Same old, same old.
A committed believer is like a Martian to them. TV will never be diverse to have one of them as an admirable character. They always have to be the murderer or the hypocrite or something. A true believer who follows his religion be it Christian, Orthodox Jew or devout Muslim are anathema to Hollywood.
That kid had a lot of guts to do what he did. I hope he has a big career.
Once again, it's all way over my head, but I will adopt the winning answer and defend it passionately and rudely without even a trickle of doubt.
No wonder, in the beginning, obama said there were 57 states.
You can sort through this by 57, not just for Heinz, anymore.
Not just parrots.
Crows are smart. I've seen them count.
I pronounce a fatwah on the New Yorker staff, author and all commenters. You are all released to the mayhem.
You know, as a Christian, I'm not so much offended as just unimpressed. There's just no humor at all. Is this the sort of faux-witty type of bad comedy that certain people are supposed to pretend is funny just because it's mocking religion? FAIL.
I'm religious and I like it. It seems to comment more on us humans then it does on God.
It's also a great example of why God is silent, and doesn't come out and say, "well here I am."
I realized this a while ago when I was active on message boards. Can you imagine if God ran and moderated a message board, complete with trolls etc.
The only thing that God says in that entire blog is just a paraphrase of what he says in the bible. It's all the commentors which provide the humour, and they reflect us in our imperfection.
"Not funny, but I don't really enjoy the sophisticated humor of Maher or Stewart either."
Sophisticated? HaHa. Good sarcasm there.
This reminds me of "Spy" magazine which claimed to be funny and 'irreverent' - and was neither.
This is so lame, I don't think even Bill Maher would smile.
BTW, haven't read the New Yorker in about 15 years. Read it years ago when they had good cartoons, John McPhee, and Pauline Kael.
"Death is but a door. Time is but a window. I'll be back."
-Vigo The Carpathian
As to God, I'll just say I don't know. True believers are frightening, and there are plenty.
The "joke" is that even the creation of the universe by God himself could not survive internet commenters as a praiseworthy event.
For related evidence of the truth of this observation, see the recent Gabby Giffords thread.
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