Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Humor

  • Two Cows

    I think I first saw this thing about two cows several years ago, but there have been several more instances added in this version. Some of the new ones are even funnier than the earlier ones. It looks like people have just been tacking examples on the end. (HT: 42)

  • Dino-fied Children’s Bible?

    OK, this is just too funny. I have to link to it: Daniel in the Dino’s Den. No comment is actually necessary. HT: Dispatches.

  • The Balance of Outrage

    Frequently I see the challenge to outrage on blogs or even occasionally in print media. It goes something like this: Group A has been very outraged by X, the horror of which is minimized by the writer. The writer describes something that outrages him or her, surely much more horrible than X, and wonders if Group A will be duly outraged by this new thing. If they don’t, they are inconsistent and possibly morally reprehensible.

    I’m not really aiming this at anyone in particular. I’m certainly guilty of this very behavior. The idea is that we have to expend appropriate amounts of outrage and the various bad things that happen. Our outrage should balance, and will say something about our true moral beliefs. A lack of expressed outrage is sometimes taken as an indication that someone secretly approves of the horrifying action, or perhaps is totally apathetic.

    Well, I’m resigning from this little game. I think it’s silly. I cannot be outraged about all the outrageous things that go on in the world. There are simply too many. I cannot express my outrage at all the things that do outrage me. Time at the keyboard would fail me.

    Many different things go into personal outrage, a personal connection being the most important. Other factors also enter into writing about such outrage. There are a number of issues that have angered me a great deal, but yet have not moved me to write. Often this is because I can’t think of anything to say that I feel would be constructive. In other cases, I don’t believe I can gather enough facts to back up whatever I say. (Sometimes that doesn’t stop me!) At other times I feel that so many people have expressed themselves on an issue that anything I might say would be superfluous.

    So when I express outrage at something here, it means nothing more or less than it says. It doesn’t mean that’s the only thing that annoys me at the moment. It doesn’t mean that I think other issues on which I have not commented are unimportant. It doesn’t mean that I have created a hierarchy of outrage, and am now blogging through the top 10. If you challenge me to outrage so as to prove my sincerity, I’ll evaluate it in the same way. If you think this makes me insincere, well, that’s you’re problem.

    Enjoy being outraged! 🙂

  • And then there was Herman Cummings . . .

    I encountered a comment by Herman Cummings on the Florida Citizens for Science Blog. I’m sorry, well, no I’m not, but I just really couldn’t resist. Here’s a guy who claims to be the foremost expert on Genesis. I kid you not.

    I quote from his web site:

    I am the foremost terrestrial authority on the book of Genesis.

    The web site is otherwise filled with large amounts of, well, pompous and vacuous claims. He’s offered his help to boards of education, governors, defendants in various cases, including Dover, only to be rejected. None of the seminaries will pay him any attention.

    He calls his comment a “guest article” and says that the real controversy is not between evolution and creation, but between all of the above and “the Oberservations of Moses.” Of course, there are no observations of Moses. One may argue that Genesis 1 is many different types of literature, but it has no points in common with any report of observations.

    I found that his article has been published elsewhere. Let’s see, it’s on The Conservative Voice. More likely that should be lunatic voice.

    Well, Mr. Cummings, someone is paying you just a little bit of attention, and I’ve tagged it under the proper category–humor. I simply find your articles way too funny to just ignore. In my wildest imaginings, I couldn’t make up anything nearly this bizarre. Let’s see, he dates Noah’s flood to 2611 BCE which was probably a huge surprise to the many thriving civilizations of that time. Unfortunately, they forgot to mention it. He knows how to scatter the days of creation around, because he, and only he, understands Genesis.

    I’m just going to quote a couple of screamers from his comment:

    Lets look deeper into evolution. The theory does not take the responsibility of stating how life originated. It delegates that to the theory of the “Big Bang”, which states that all matter in the universe was somehow contained In a very small dense hot atom, molecule, or singularity, which exploded into all the elements and celestial bodies of the universe, about 16 billion years ago. . . .

    Biologists will doubtless be shocked to find out that life was generated by the big bang. I don’t recall learning this in High School biology class.

    Now, with supposition upon supposition, we have the Earth formed, and many years passing by as it cools and becomes suitable for life. I guess that the molecules of life had to remain in a holding pattern around Earth until the conditions were “just right” to sustain life and get the “primordial soup” ready. The Primordial Soup theory suggests that life began in a pond or ocean as a result of the combination of chemicals from Earth’s atmosphere and some form of energy to make amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, which would then supposedly evolve into all the species. It seems that secular science is only interested in theories that are the best sounding fantasies, as long as it does not address the reality of the supernatural.

    I just have this wonderful picture in my mind of “molecules of life” (a substance sadly neglected in the last chemistry course I took) orbiting the earth waiting to land whenever conditions were right. One assumes that conditions were better in outer space prior to that. Of course, this picture is promptly contradicted if life instead forms in the primordial soup.

    . . .Genesis states that God created our universe, but it does not give us details on the process. The Bible only gives us the amount of time (144 hours) it took to complete. What we can gather is that the supernatural realm, gave birth to our natural
    existence in one week, about 4.6 billion years ago.

    And this is the product of the “foremost terrestrial authority on Genesis.”

    What Genesis does give us is what we will call the Observations of Moses (OM). God showed Moses, on Mt. Sinai in 1598 BC, six
    days from the ancient past which Moses would later write down (or have written) in the book of Genesis.

    I just couldn’t make that up. Note that most experts on chronology would not accept 1598 BCE as a potential date for the exodus.

    Well, so much for the humor break. I just couldn’t resist. I return you to your regular programming. If you truly want more of this nut, just type “Herman Cummings Moses” into a search engine. The words “Moses” sorts the articles out nicely, because he simply cannot avoid using the phrase “observations of Moses.”