Paleoconservatives are such an odd and scary group. They tend to be delusional, they’re often (but not necessarily Catholic), and they use lots of old, tired, dead arguments, so they aren’t even very entertaining. They also aren’t very stable. I was laughing at arguments from a group calling itself “Intellectual Takeout” years ago, but they’re gone now; they got absorbed by a right-wing think-tank called the Rockford Institute, which also splintered to form the Howard Center for Family, Religion (you can guess what they’re about), which has renamed itself the Charlemagne Institute. They were big supporters of Pat Buchanan, which should help focus their goals in your mind, because they sure are hard to track, they’re so busy covering their trails with new names and new organizations.
Anyway, they publish online something called Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. They’re probably not worth following unless you’re the SPLC and are tracking neo-Confederates or are just a connoisseur of stupid.
I’m the latter. How could I resist an article titled A Stand-Up Comic Stands Up for God: Evan Sayet Obliterates the Atheist Origin Myth, which is purportedly a review of the book illustrated on the right? The review starts thusly:
To be on the left is to be humorless. This makes sense when you consider how the left views the world as a perpetual occasion for an oppression fest, where the clock is ticking on their quest to free all the world’s intersectional victims before the climate apocalypse kills everyone. Sure, in line with their Manichean, comic-book ideology, they take an adolescent delight in hypocritically bullying everyone who dissents from their disordered views, and they equally detest and fear those opponents who give back in return to them more than they get. This is especially so if the opponent uses humor to buttress the case for dissent with ridicule.
I do appreciate the irony of a criticism that uses “Manichean” as an insult while simultaneously splitting the world into Left and Right and characterizing the entirety of the Left as a humorless monoculture. I was going to point out that a lot of great comedians, like George Carlin and Janeane Garofolo and Sarah Silverman and David Cross, etc. etc. etc., are godless liberals, while the conservatives limp along with the likes of Greg Gutfeld and Steven Crowder and Dennis Miller, etc. etc. etc., but then I realized that no one from the Charlemagne Institute would find George Carlin funny at all, so that argument would be pointless. Humor is a matter of personal taste.
But sure, open your review by levying baseless accusations at people you don’t like. It’ll rally the troops on your side.
Then we get to the meat of the review.
It is why the left loathes and fears people like Evan Sayet.
Who? Never heard of him.
It is with good reason. Consider his remarks about his latest book, Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, and Horny Aliens from Outer Space: The Patently Absurd Wholly Unsubstantiated and Extravagantly Failed Atheist Origin Myth: “Trying to litigate against atheism is like trying to litigate against the Emperor’s clothes; atheism needs to not just be disproved but ridiculed for the patent absurdity that it is.”
Uh-oh. The book title gives the game away: Evan Sayet is an anti-evolutionist. Like the reviewer, he is going to mischaracterize the thing he doesn’t like, in this case science, and presumably he’s going to do it with jokes, because right-wing creationists are far funnier than left wing bullies who are competing in the oppression olympics, obviously. I hope the book is funny, although the title isn’t, and Sayet’s bona fides aren’t exactly promising.
A stand-up comic who has written for television shows such as Politically Incorrect w/Bill Maher,
A very bad sign, that.
Evan Sayet has tested and proven his mettle as a political observer and activist. Behind the scenes, Sayet has counseled and penned speeches for presidential candidates and, eventually, a president. Further, risking his livelihood in the leftist-controlled entertainment industry, Sayet has courageously and continually expressed his trenchant insights on television and with the written word. He has not shied away from rich targets for his pointed wit, no matter how powerful.
Wait wait wait — I thought it was lefties who were involved in an oppression fest
, but now we’re told that Evan Sayet has been oppressed by a leftist-controlled entertainment industry
? And simultaneously he has been counseling a president (I can guess which one)? It must be Schrodinger’s Oppressor. He’s everywhere on all sides all at once.
So what’s his argument?
Sayet refuses to let the atheists off the intellectual hook, even skewering them with science to salt the wound. Starting with teleological arguments of Intelligent Design and “Fine-Tuning,” and, ultimately, in his own inimitable fashion moving on to St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Five Ways” (Quinque Viae from the Summa Theologiae): (1) argument from motion, (2) argument from efficient cause, (3) argument from necessary being, (4) argument from gradations of goodness, and (5) argument from design. Sayet employs all of these methods and more to demonstrate the existence of God.
Great. As is typical, a conservative site considers the philosophical arguments of a 13th century theologian to be definitive. We’ve been soaking in that nonsense for eight centuries, and it’s been unpersuasive to everyone other than shallow poseurs.
(1) The unmoved mover could be a physical agent, a singularity or Big Bang, not your peculiar and specific god-thing. We don’t need to propose the Unmoved Mover was any kind of god at all.
(2) Likewise, the first cause could have been a hiccup in the firmament, a twitch in the fabric of space-time, and invoking a sentient, humanoid entity is superfluous.
(3) Again, the problem is that you think you know who the ‘necessary being’ was, and how its mind worked (if it even had one), and its intent. It could have been a cosmic fart, for all any of us know.
(4) “Goodness” is a matter of human perception. It is not a universal force. The universe, in general, seems to be a pretty nasty place, so why you would think there must be a Supreme Good Guy is a mystery.
(5) The argument from design boils down to pointing at complicated things you don’t understand and announcing that someone smarter than you must have made it. This is trivially refuted by revealing that dumb processes can make some pretty complex things.
None of those arguments demonstrate the existence of God,
a concept, I note, they don’t bother to define, probably because they just assume that God is the body of superstitious theological assumptions they already believe. Like I said, these are just old, tired, dead arguments that we’ve heard time and again; Sayet is incredibly unoriginal and uninteresting.
Thus, does Sayet proceed to plumb the shallow depths of militant atheists’ theological Sitz bath, and he drowns them with the proofs for God’s existence.
Whoa, I started reading this article warned that I was going to be obliterated, and we instead end up relaxing in a Sitz bath? How nice. It’s kind of hard to drown in a Sitz bath, you know. I suppose it could be done if you contort yourself and use it improperly, but I’ll leave the twisty delusional distortions to the Christians.
The good news: I just discovered that Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, And Horny Aliens From Outer Space: The Patently Absurd Wholly Unsubstantiated and Extravagantly Failed Atheist Origin Myth is available for free on Kindle unlimited.
The bad news: it’s 177 pages of drivel. We’ll see how far I can get reading it.
Five minutes I’ll never get back, I looked up this turkey on YouTube and watched a couple of snippets, enough to form a precise opinion: ignorant, opinionated, idiot.
There are no conservative comedians. Good luck trying to find one.
Right from the start,
I knew where it was headed: it’s projection all the way down.
No apostrophe necessary in the word “its” there, which of course brings down your entire argument and proves the existence of God.
Or a sneeze.
Thanks, but I’ll skip the drivel. However, on the “humorless lefties” straw man, I would say that based on my experience of watching quite a lot of stand comedy snippets, many of them are of the left/liberal spectrum with many very openly atheists…and very funny about it. Admittedly, it’s probably a function of the algorithm that I see so much of these types of comedians, but when a “Christian” comedian slips into my feed I seldom find them particularly funny.
Yeah, it is a rehash of old, tired rehashed creationist logical fallacies.
The claim that the universe is benign and designed for us is particularly obviously wrong.
.1. The vast majority of our 13.8 billion year old universe is either uninhabitable or unavailable to us. Most of it is a near vacuum at 2.7 degrees K, just above absolute zero which would be, minus 453.8 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 270.45 degrees Celsius,
.2. Even the earth isn’t all that habitable for us.
A lot of it is desert or the poles, which aren’t all that easy to live in.
96.5% of the earth’s surface water is ocean which is 3.5% salt. We can’t use that salt water for much of anything. Drinking it will kill us eventually.
Giant space rocks and ice balls populate our solar system and occasionally slam into the earth, causing massive damage. Ask the dinosaurs how that worked out for them.
St. Thomas Aquinas was a vicious cold blooded advocate for the murder of heretics and atheists.
He was not a good person at all.
The Catholic church killed millions of people as heretics and that included atheists.
Up until a few centuries ago, being an out atheist was a death penalty offense in Europe.
Doesn’t take much to be a hero to the trad Catholics.
Right wingers are rarely funny. Aristophanes, Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Buckley. That’s about it. And by modern standards they aren’t all that conservative, or at least not insanely so.
A few, like Dennis Miller, Scott Adams, and Johnny Hart, WERE funny but stopped being so when their politics changed.
Magic Soup – It was more of a goo. No magic, just chemistry.
Typing Monkeys – ??? I have no idea how that ties in with atheism. I have heard of surfing monkeys.
Horny Aliens from Outer Space – I’m pretty sure there are aliens. I don’t know if they are horny since they have never visited. They might have antlers instead.
Technically, we are typing apes.
They get bent out of shape if we lump together the Young Earth Creationists with the Not Quite So Young Earth Creationists.
But then they conflate Magic Soup Theory, Typing Ape Evolution (not even being able to tell monkeys from apes), and the admittedly fringe Horny Aliens From Outer Space Proposition.
Are they truly that ignorant. or are they just being duplicitous?
Sorry Sayet, but Thomas Aquinas was a member of the Scholastic school of philosophy, which for a couple centuries provided (what they thought were) better and better arguments that proved the existence of God. The Scholastic school was ended once and for all by William of Ockham, who showed that the existence of God cannot be proved by any resoning or argument (this is what he was most famous for back then, not the Razor.)
That was in the 14th century, so there’s no excuse for Sayet to not know it. Not to know that Aquinas was thoroughly refuted on this point by Ockham, and that Sayet cannot “demonstrate the existence of God” by argument.
The Rockford institute, not permitted anywhere near the Rockford File.
.
There are such a multitude of conservative think thanks, the American Enterprise Institute is one of the least crazy ones (although David Frum got thrown out for saying the attempts to stop Obamacare were getting stupid).
The American Heritage Institute is a breeding ground for dangerous Kaiju monsters. Dick Cheney took ideas from there and inserted them in the so-called patriot act.
And he shaped US foreign policy after a AHI paper, while Dubya was , I dunno, eating hamburgers ?
Yes. And most people agree that good comedy does not punch down. But the aggrieved “down people” that shouldn’t be punched is also personal taste.
I am pretty sure Jor-El did not believe in gods. His origin story right up to the moment he became a journalist in Metropolis is well known, and there is no mention that he lacked a sense of humor.
Kal-El.
I am watching Young Sheldon. I am astonished that he is an outspoken atheist in a sitcom.
Larpar I think his reference to typing monkeys has to do with the infinite monkey theorem.
Sayet was successfully canceled until PZ brought him to our attention.
@stochastic:
“Are they truly that ignorant. or are they just being duplicitous?”
that is binary thinking. I’m pretty sure they lie on a distribution between ignorant and duplicitous. And I suspect that distribution is sharply peaked at ignorant and duplicitous.
The most obvious person with no sense of humor is Donald Trump. He smirks a lot, but that’s not laughing.
infinite monkeys reminded me of this passage in Kittel’s Thermal Physics textbook:
“The meaning of “never.” It has been said that “six monkeys, set to strum
unintelligently on typewriters for millions of years, would be bound in time
to write all the books in the British Museum.” This statement is nonsense, for
it gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers. Could all the
monkeys in the world have typed out a single specified book in the age of the
universe?
Suppose that 10^10 monkeys have been seated at typewriters throughout the
age of the universe, 10^18 s. This number of monkeys is about three times greater
than the present human population of the earth. We suppose that a monkey
can hit 10 typewriter keys per second. A typewriter may have 44 keys; we
accept lowercase letters in place of capital letters. Assuming that Shakespeare’s
Hamlet has 10^5 characters, will the monkeys hit upon Hamlet?
(a) Show that the probability that any given sequence of 10^5 characters
typed at random will come out in the correct sequence (the sequence of Hamlet)
is of the order of
(1/44)^100 000 = 10^(-164,345)
where we have used log 44 = l.64345.
(b) Show that the probability that a monkey-Hamlet will be typed in the age
of the universe is approximately 10^(-164,316). The probability of Hamlet is
therefore zero in any operational sense of an event, so that the original statement
at the beginning of this problem is nonsense: one book, much less a library,
will never occur in the total literary production of the monkeys.”
The book is surely even duller and more stupid than this review, or even than the title, which is saying something.
It would be both depressing and scary (and probably also horrifying) to see what makes people like this laugh in real life.
Only two subjects really ever do so: the suffering of anyone and everyone they hate, and especially envy, and convincing praise of their own godlike perfection.
This reviewer sounds like some teenage Incel desperately talking himself into a random murder spree to “get even.”
These are desperately proud, horribly bitter people – and all without any real excuse.
Still over-priced.
I had to laugh at his Wikipedia page.
Conservatives wouldn’t lie about work experience. Would they??
He can spend his entire life repeating as many philosophical arguments for some form of god as he likes, but not a one of them carries as much weight as would a single concrete item of evidence. I wish him joy in his preference for engaging in mental masturbation.
God (Remastered 2010)
Nuff said …
gijoel @ 24, rejected scripts still count in their view as written, even if never performed outside of their own twisted tiny minds.
So, a lie of omission, not by direct commission. Hence, in their view, not a lie. And besides, one is allowed to lie for their god.
It’s a side effect of their belief in recursive arguments, recursive thoughts, all built upon and cycling under their originating fallacies.
Rob Grigjanis @ 16
I stand corrected.
Robbo @ 19
Bravo!
The origin myth in Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries (first chapter) has two aliens named Gord and Lod visit the early Earth and throw away a dirty handkerchief.
I spent about all the time I want to spend looking up “number one conservative comedian” and, sure enough, a name popped up. But, after looking at a few videos it’s clear this guy never performs on TV or late night or in comedy clubs. Churches, only churches. Here’s a sample, paraphrased:
Hey, y’all as tired of “woke” as me? (some affirmative noise)
Well, I hope to live long enough to see “woke” die! (some laughter)
But, not just die, first it has to SUFFER! (howls of laughter and applause)
So, first of all, there’s no joke. Second, it’s not funny, joke or not. Third, the response of the audience to SUFFERING was quite disturbing but with “these people” cruelty is the point, suffering is the point.
I watched a little more but it was all the same: cruelty, suffering, punching down and a smug aura of superiority.
They obliterated our origin myth?! I didn’t even know we HAD an origin myth! Dammit, why do I never get these memos?!
tbp @ # 8: Aristophanes, Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Buckley. That’s about it.
According to my archives, we had basically this same discussion in 2011 at Ed Brayton’s “Dispatches” blog when it lived at FtB. I stretched a point by claiming P.J. O’Rourke had a few good moments, and later cited Florence King.
Churchill did emit a good number of zingers.
We might add H.L. Mencken & Al Capp to the list of funny-before-they-turned-right.
birgerjohansson @ # 15: I am pretty sure [Kal]-El did not believe in gods.
One archivist avers he had two religious affiliations (“Methodist / Kryptonian religion”).
Per the same source, Lois Lane was Catholic; Reed Richards was a humanist, sometimes a believer and sometimes not; Oliver “Green Arrow” Queen an agnostic/liberal Marxist; and Ben Grimm & Kitty Pryde were Jewish. Both Dick Grayson & Kurt “Nightcrawler” Wagner were raised as “Gypsy/Roma”.
At least they got the “mettle” vs “metal” distinction right.
Yeah, felixd, but that superfluous comma (“Thus, does Sayet proceed”) is noticeable.
(So, not immaculate)
Feralboy12 @ 4: I like the Arkleseizure ref, but… with birgerjohansson @ 30 suggesting study of the works of Stanislaw Lem, this Origin question is becoming more complex than I had thought.
A long time ago now there was a video about conservatiove “humour” shared here with a long youtube analysus.. Hoped to find it here but google fu failing me so far.
Thougtslime? Cody from whatsit?
you know this discussion has led me to a thought which does have some personal resonance to my own catholic experience. The thought started this time with the first line of the John Lennon song “god is a concept by which we measure our pain”. and the further thought
taking those things together seems correct then the need for a god is a response to the pain much of it unlike the weather is almost solely created by human action on other humans and judging from my perspective of the history of “civilization” from the middle east through Europe to the western hemisphere it is a long history of cruelty of all kinds . so it might imply that the conservatives and the fundies in there glee to inflict pain in the name of what gods they profess to must be carrying a very large burden of pain and from my own catholic experience learned self inflicted.
god is a very stupid and ignorant childish idea and a very ineffective response to the pain it seems more like a way to perpetuate the pain and suffering then relieve it in practice
My origin myth involves horny human teenagers, not horny aliens thank you very much.
@billseymour #3
Projection… wouldn’t that imply some self awareness? I don’t think they look that closely in a mirror. Unless the projection is subconscious.
Habit is unconscious. How early the habit was formed and who role-modeled it is a different matter. Moving attention related to things someone has done, is doing, or will do.
Education makes system one practice into system 2 reaction.
We’re aware of the internal things going along with our habits, but don’t tend to work on isolating and identifying things unless we need to.
I have it on good authority that it was, in fact, a cosmic wank sesh that got everything started.
Aha! this one I think!
^ @ 37 -8 Cody’s Why Is Conservative Comedy So… Not Very Good? – SOME MORE NEWS 1 hour & 20 mins long. rounded up.
Sure that’s the one PZ posted ages ago.
StevoR, 1 hour & 20 mins long, eh? That quite a bit of opinion right there.
—
PS
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/08/03/the-point-of-satire-is-to-comfort-the-afflicted-by-afflicting-the-comfortable/
and
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/10/08/a-humor-question/
—
Opinion is opinion, I grant.
But 80 minutes of someone’s opinion? Bloody hell!
(Better you than me)
Pierce R. Butler@33 Nightcrawler is Catholic. This was in part the basis of a really bad plotline when Chuck Austen was writing for the X Men franchise. The Church of Humanity, an anti-mutant group, plotted to have him made Pope. They would then fake the Rapture in an attempt to make it look like mutants were connected to the Antichrist. Austen apparently didn’t know that the Rapture isn’t part of Catholic doctrine. Or that a mere priest becoming Pope is pretty much impossible.
timguegen @ # 48 – Thanks for that info; I’d missed that sequence.
Though I do recall some incomprehensible-to-me theological anguish on Nightcrawler’s part somewhere along the line.
… a mere priest becoming Pope is pretty much impossible.
I think it’s happened at least once, but don’t have time to go digging for it now. Besides, repeat after me:
@ timgueguen : Don’t all Popes at least start as mere priests at least in this era rasther than the Medici ones secured by wealth and political power and maybe others? (Not terribly educated on Catholic & esp papal history myself but..)
StevoR, some facts (various sources)
Worldwide:
1.378 billion Catholics
407,872 priests
5,340 bishops
240 cardinals
1 pope
(What are the odds, then? ;) )
1 “It’s impossible for a thing to be the cause of itself.”
Is it? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4FIo15GTE50
“…before the climate apocalypse kills everyone.”
You believe everyone but Christians die. Not only do they die, they get tortured forever and ever.
“ Atheism needs to not just be disproved but ridiculed for the patent absurdity that it is”
Great! And if you’re wrong, we get to do the same to you. :)
Fine tuning arguments
“If things were different, we might not exist, and since it isn’t, that means my god is real, created everything, and only my religion is real. No other explanation could ever exist!”
What caused the first cause? I know of three resolutions of this, the Paradox of Origin, but none of them are satisfactory.
Maybe the first cause had a cause, which had a cause, and so on, stretching back to infinity. I call this the Line.
Or maybe the first cause had no cause. I call this the Ray.
Or maybe causation flows in a loop, so the first cause caused its cause. I call this the Loop.
The Line is infinite, and therefore incomprehensible. The Ray is chaotic, and therefore unreliable. The Loop is paradoxical, and therefore unpredictable. Any normal explanation is finite, orderly, and logical; but origin is not normal.
To me, the Line seems ‘traditionalist’ or ‘legalist’ in nature. The Ray seems ‘monarchical’. The Loop seems ‘democratic’. I prefer the Loop, specifically if the Loop involves the entire universe, with the First Cause causing every event, which together cause the Final Effect, which causes the First Cause.
Nathaniel,
You are confused. This is no paradox at all, it’s simple as.
If it is is first cause, it cannot be caused. That’s definitional.
It follows that from the meaning of first, only an uncaused cause qualifies, and nothing can cause itself.
Only because you are confused. Maybe it’s a linguistic thing.
Heh. I’d forgotten this video:
@ ^ John Morales : Thanks. Yeah, its like a lottery. Astronomical odds but someone does have to win it.
@8 tbp1
PJ O’Rourke? (Spelling?)
@53. Nathaniel Hellerstein :
Sounds like that Isaac Asimov short story where the evolving supercomputer Multivac becomes God to answer the question about entropy reversal.. The Last Question
Read here : https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
StevoR, no, it does not.
—
You want another silly story in that same vein? Predates Asimov’s.
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God
BTW, this always amused me:
“Clarke and Asimov first met in New York City in 1953, and they traded friendly insults and gibes for decades. They established an oral agreement, the “Clarke–Asimov Treaty”, that when asked who was better, the two would say Clarke was the better science fiction writer and Asimov was the better science writer. In 1972, Clarke put the “treaty” on paper in his dedication to Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations.”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#%22Big_Three%22)