Here you go. 20 minutes long. Transcript included if you prefer to read.
I love the crackle of old recordings.
Bertrand Russell v. F.C. Copelston on the existence of God
– May 7, 2012
God Archive
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In which Andrew Sullivan goes full hippy
– February 13, 2012
Do you want to know what Andrew Sullivan thinks about dropping mushrooms? Here you go.
tl;dw: Jesus.
2
God’s quads
– December 20, 2011
I’ve touched on religiosity in sports in the past (and am clearly enamored enough with Carlin’s take on Christian athletes to embed the clip twice without remembering I’d already done so), so why not go there a third time, right? This week’s Yahweh blah-weh comes, surprisingly, not from the Denver Broncos and their Mile-High Messiah (aka, the 1.6 Kilometer-high King of Kings), but from my very own (as in, I have nothing to do with them in any material sense whatsoever) New England Patriots.
Via the Boston Globe:
Patriots defensive end Andre Carter will be placed on injured reserve, ending his season, a league source confirmed last night.
Carter injured his left quadriceps on the final play of the first quarter of Sunday’s 41-23 win in Denver and will require surgery.
The 11-year veteran took to Twitter last night, tweeting, “God is great. Thank you for showing me and my family support this season. It’s been a blast. Wouldn’t change it for anything.’’
Really, Andre? You wouldn’t change it for anything? You wouldn’t, say, change it if God offered to heal your goddamn leg?
I hope you and Adrian Gonzalez have a gay old time this offseason reminiscing about not the playoffs. (Not like that though: we already know God’s take on The Gays.)
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Bachmann goes Robertson
– August 29, 2011
Remember two Januarys ago when not-good-person Pat Robertson blamed the earthquake in Haiti on a pact their founders made with the devil?
Remember yesterday when genuine presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann blamed the dozens of fatalities and billions of dollars worth of damage caused by Hurricane Irene on government spending?
“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.”
I think God needs to work on a subtler way to get people’s attention.
***
UPDATE: According to the Boston Globe one hour ago,
her campaign today denied she meant the comments to be taken seriously. “Obviously she was saying it in jest,” campaign spokesperson Alice Stewart told TalkingPointsMemo in a statement.
Ah yes, jest. BECAUSE THE STATEMENT WAS MADE BY A JESTER.
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God loves NASCAR
– July 5, 2011
So last Saturday, David Ragan won the first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race of his career. Now, perhaps that sentence means as little to you as it does to me, but whether it does or doesn’t, I encourage you to listen to the first 30 seconds or so of his victory speech following the race:
In case you didn’t catch all that (or didn’t feel like waiting for Danica to shut the hell up), here’s a transcript of Ragan’s opening remarks.
“This is fun. Uhh, what better place to do it than Daytona. Uhh, first of all, I’ve got to thank the Lord for, uhh, for looking after me. Uhh, Sprint. We delivered a win for UPS. How ’bout that? We’ve been promising all those UPSers for, uhh, for a couple of years and finally got it in Daytona. It couldn’t be any better. A great points night. Coca-Cola — Coke Zero 400. It couldn’t be a better night. I’ve gotta thank Matt Kenseth for helping me. My Ford teammates worked great together.”
For those keeping track at home (or, let’s face it, at work — get back to that spreadsheet, cubicle monkey!), that’s four references to four different sponsors in less than 25 seconds. Morgan Spurlock would be proud.
Fortunately, Ragan also remembered to thank God a solid five words and two verbal pauses before launching into his brand-heavy homily. Because if J-HOVA is interested in influencing anything in our turbulent little corner of the universe, it’s the outcome of motor car races. Cue The Man:
Le sigh…We miss you George…
Oh, but I’m sure you would have been tickled to death (you know, metaphorically speaking) to be proven wrong last November:
2
Cheez-It Christ
– April 5, 2011
According to the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, young adults who frequently attend religious activities are 50 percent more likely to become obese by middle age than are young adults with no religious involvement.
Lest you question the rigor of their methodology, keep in mind that the study tracked more than 2,400 men and women for 18 years, took into account “differences in age, race, sex, education, income, and baseline body mass index,” and still found that “normal-weight young adults ages 20 to 32 years with a high frequency of religious participation [i.e., attending at least one religious function per week] were 50 percent more likely to be obese by middle age.”
The authors don’t speculate much on why this correlation exists, but I think the answer’s pretty obvious: Communion wafers are full of trans fat, yo! (I mean, Jesus may be ripped, but that doesn’t mean he’s good for your cholesterol.)
***
Sudden thought: if Communion wafers really are the body of Christ, then Piers Gibbon could film his next NatGeo special right here in America.
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The Insufficient Impracticality of David Foster Wallace, Pt. 2
– February 23, 2011
All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, Free Press, 256 pp., $26.00 (C$29.99)
***
I ended the last installment of this review on a cliff-hanger: Are Dreyfus and Kelly just taking us one step closer to terminal nihilism? If so, do we have to take the step with them? In other words, are we fucked?
Don’t worry. I will get to these questions. These questions will have answers by the end of this review. But why keep you in the dark? Life’s about the journey, right? What good is it to distract you from enjoying the ride with unnecessary suspense about the destination?
So what is our destination? The destination I’m going to try to steer us to is this: To a point, I think Wallace, Dreyfus and Kelly are right, and that we’re in pretty deep shit. But, I think that DFW did make a critical mistake, the recognition of which might have stopped him short of the cliff’s edge. This mistake isn’t quite the one that Dreyfus and Kelly propose (though they take us part way there in proposing it). In fact, in their haste to get out of his head, I think they miss a pivotal DFW insight, an error on their part that places understanding his real mistake (and how to avoid it) beyond the horizon of their discussion.
Ambitious, right? I know. And it’s stressing me out. You’re probably thinking, man, I hope this fool has some ace up his sleeve; one hell of a fucking ace. Well that’s neither here nor there. But before I talk myself out of even trying, let’s buckle our seat belts and get out of the driveway. Driving is believing. Zoom zoom zoom.
3
The Insufficient Impracticality of David Foster Wallace, Pt. 1
– February 21, 2011
All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, Free Press, 256 pp., $26.00 (C$29.99)
***
It was going to be the big test of what kind of adult I would be—well… a test of what kind of adult I would be. Would I be the kind with the self-discipline and curiosity to read brain-straining, skull prying, headache-inducing, ten-page-at-most-per-hour “important” books without a professor holding a letter grade to my head? Or would I instead be the kind who’d never read Being and Time (which is most people, and would be totally socially acceptable).
Seven months after learning that Hubert Dreyfus’ course lectures on the book were available free for download, I’ve listened to a bit more than half of them and knocked off a solid hundred and fifty of my edition’s 592 pages. Not great, but not horrible. I’d been planning to get back to it, not only because it really is the most exhilarating kind of brain fucking, but because I missed Dreyfus as well. He has this way of getting excited when the text trips him up or otherwise flummoxes him when he’s in the middle of making a point that’s endearing something awful. An egotist would be flustered. I would be flustered. Not him. He’s delighted, and invites you by his tone to join him in his scholarship in action. It testifies to a rare humility, but we’ll get back to humility later. It also testifies to his genuine enthusiasm for material he still recognizes as alive and untamed.
