I haven’t been posting much lately, and what I have been posting hasn’t been very positive. I figure that my loyal readers–all six of them–deserve something uplifting and happy once in a while. So here is the tale of Gerald McBoing Boing. This is a cartoon short written by none other than Dr. Seuss, dating from the golden age of animation. Enjoy.
Today is “Talk Like a Pirate Day”, so it’s the perfect day to read Chesterton’s poem On the Dangers Attending Altruism on the High Seas. If that whets your appetite for silly poetry and even sillier illustration, then you should procede to this piece, which also comes from Chesterton’s first book, Greybeards at Play.
I love to see the little Stars
all dancing to one tune
I think quite highly of the Sun,
and kindly of the Moon.
The million forests of the Earth
come trooping in to tea.
The great Niagara waterfall
is never shy with me.
I am the Tiger’s confidant,
and never mention names:
the Lion drops the formal “Sir,”
and lets me call him James.
Into my ear the blushing Whale
stammers his love. I know
why the Rhinoceros is sad,
— ah, child! ’twas long ago.
I am akin to all the Earth
by many a tribal sign:
the aged Pig will often wear
that sad, sweet smile of mine.
My niece, the Barnacle, has got
my piercing eyes of black;
the Elephant has got my nose,
I do not want it back.
I know the strange tale of the Slug;
the Early Sin — the Fall —
the Sleep — the Vision — and the Vow —
the Quest — the Crown — the Call.
And I have loved the Octopus,
since we were boys together.
I love the Vulture and the Shark:
I even love the weather.
I love to bask in sunny fields,
and when that hope is vain,
I go and bask in Baker Street,
all in the pouring rain.
Come snow! where fly, by some strange law,
hard snowballs — without noise —
through streets untenanted, except
by good unconscious boys.
Come fog! Exultant mystery —
where, in strange darkness rolled,
the end of my own nose becomes
a lovely legend old.
Come snow, and hail, and thunderbolts,
sleet, fire, and general fuss;
come to my arms, come all at once —
oh photograph me thus!
Last Saturday I went to the zoo with my fiance. We saw orangutans.
And cheetahs.
And an oryx or two.
(These are not my pictures, by the way.)
When I was a child, my parents took me to the zoo almost every time that we visited a major city. When I grew up, I stopped attending zoos. That lasted until my third year of grad school, when I returned to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago to relive the grand experience of being mere inches away from a polar bear.
What makes some people like zoos and others not? Why do some, such as myself, seesaw back and forth between both camps? It is a mystery. One might as well ask how the cheetah got his spots.
It’s now late in the evening of September 10. Tomorrow we will comemorate the anniversary of one of the most important events in human history, a time when the forces of Muslim extremism launched a brutal attack on of the greatest cities in western civilization. But though taken by surprise, the defenders of the West united and made clear that they would never be defeated.
The date I’m refering to, needless to say, is September 11, 1683, when the Ottoman Turks were laying seige to Vienna, capital of the Austrian Empire. Acting in accordance with an earlier treaty and following an appeal from the Pope, King Jan Sobieski of Poland led his army to the defense of the beleagured city. Finding the Turkish force unprepared, the Polish army attacked at once and easily routed the enemy. This was the last time that the Ottoman Empire posed a serious threat to central Europe.
Today, many of us know very little about history, and even those who do probably don’t pay much attention to the history of eastern Europe. For myself, I knew nothing of the siege of Vienna until I read Hilaire Belloc’s The Great Heresies. Belloc truthfully reminds us that though we tend to be dismissive of Muslims as backwards, their civilization was larger and stronger than ours for many centuries. It is only because of a centuries-long string of heroics by men like Sobieski and his army that Christian civilization survived the constant attacks from the south and east. We owe them endless thanks and praise.
Now it is this simple truth which, like many others, is too simple for our
scientists to see. This is where they go wrong, not only about true
religion, but about false religions too; so that their account of
mythology is more mythical than the myth itself. I do not confine myself
to saying that they are quite incorrect when they state (for instance)
that Christ was a legend of dying and reviving vegetation, like Adonis or
Persephone. I say that even if Adonis was a god of vegetation, they have
got the whole notion of him wrong. Nobody, to begin with, is sufficiently
interested in decaying vegetables, as such, to make any particular mystery
or disguise about them; and certainly not enough to disguise them under
the image of a very handsome young man, which is a vastly more interesting
thing. If Adonis was connected with the fall of leaves in autumn and the
return of flowers in spring, the process of thought was quite different.
It is a process of thought which springs up spontaneously in all children
and young artists; it springs up spontaneously in all healthy societies.
It is very difficult to explain in a diseased society.
The brain of man is subject to short and strange snatches of sleep. A
cloud seals the city of reason or rests upon the sea of imagination; a
dream that darkens as much, whether it is a nightmare of atheism or a
daydream of idolatry. And just as we have all sprung from sleep with a
start and found ourselves saying some sentence that has no meaning, save
in the mad tongues of the midnight; so the human mind starts from its
trances of stupidity with some complete phrase upon its lips; a complete
phrase which is a complete folly. Unfortunately it is not like the dream
sentence, generally forgotten in the putting on of boots or the putting in
of breakfast. This senseless aphorism, invented when man’s mind was
asleep, still hangs on his tongue and entangles all his relations to
rational and daylight things. All our controversies are confused by
certain kinds of phrases which are not merely untrue, but were always
unmeaning; which are not merely inapplicable, but were always
intrinsically useless. We recognise them wherever a man talks of “the
survival of the fittest,” meaning only the survival of the survivors; or
wherever a man says that the rich “have a stake in the country,” as if the
poor could not suffer from misgovernment or military defeat; or where a
man talks about “going on towards Progress,” which only means going on
towards going on; or when a man talks about “government by the wise few,”
as if they could be picked out by their pantaloons. “The wise few” must
mean either the few whom the foolish think wise or the very foolish who
think themselves wise.
There is one piece of nonsense that modern people still find themselves
saying, even after they are more or less awake, by which I am particularly
irritated. It arose in the popularised science of the nineteenth century,
especially in connection with the study of myths and religions. The
fragment of gibberish to which I refer generally takes the form of saying
“This god or hero really represents the sun.” Or “Apollo killing the
Python MEANS that the summer drives out the winter.” Or “The King dying in
a western battle is a SYMBOL of the sun setting in the west.” Now I
should really have thought that even the skeptical professors, whose
skulls are as shallow as frying-pans, might have reflected that human
beings never think or feel like this. Consider what is involved in this
supposition. It presumes that primitive man went out for a walk and saw
with great interest a big burning spot on the sky. He then said to
primitive woman, “My dear, we had better keep this quiet. We mustn’t let
it get about. The children and the slaves are so very sharp. They might
discover the sun any day, unless we are very careful. So we won’t call
it ‘the sun,’ but I will draw a picture of a man killing a snake; and
whenever I do that you will know what I mean. The sun doesn’t look at all
like a man killing a snake; so nobody can possibly know. It will be a
little secret between us; and while the slaves and the children fancy I am
quite excited with a grand tale of a writhing dragon and a wrestling
demigod, I shall really MEAN this delicious little discovery, that there
is a round yellow disc up in the air.” One does not need to know much
mythology to know that this is a myth. It is commonly called the Solar
Myth.
Quite plainly, of course, the case was just the other way. The god was
never a symbol or hieroglyph representing the sun. The sun was a
hieroglyph representing the god. Primitive man (with whom my friend
Dombey is no doubt well acquainted) went out with his head full of gods
and heroes, because that is the chief use of having a head. Then he saw
the sun in some glorious crisis of the dominance of noon on the distress
of nightfall, and he said, “That is how the face of the god would shine
when he had slain the dragon,” or “That is how the whole world would bleed
to westward, if the god were slain at last.”
No human being was ever really so unnatural as to worship Nature. No man,
however indulgent (as I am) to corpulency, ever worshipped a man as round
as the sun or a woman as round as the moon. No man, however attracted to
an artistic attenuation, ever really believed that the Dryad was as lean
and stiff as the tree. We human beings have never worshipped Nature; and
indeed, the reason is very simple. It is that all human beings are
superhuman beings. We have printed our own image upon Nature, as God has
printed His image upon us. We have told the enormous sun to stand still;
we have fixed him on our shields, caring no more for a star than for a
starfish. And when there were powers of Nature we could not for the time
control, we have conceived great beings in human shape controlling them.
Jupiter does not mean thunder. Thunder means the march and victory of
Jupiter. Neptune does not mean the sea; the sea is his, and he made it.
In other words, what the savage really said about the sea was, “Only my
fetish Mumbo could raise such mountains out of mere water.” What the
savage really said about the sun was, “Only my great great-grandfather
Jumbo could deserve such a blazing crown.”
About all these myths my own position is utterly and even sadly simple.
I say you cannot really understand any myths till you have found that one
of them is not a myth. Turnip ghosts mean nothing if there are no real
ghosts. Forged bank-notes mean nothing if there are no real bank-notes.
Heathen gods mean nothing, and must always mean nothing, to those of us
that deny the Christian God. When once a god is admitted, even a false
god, the Cosmos begins to know its place: which is the second place. When
once it is the real God the Cosmos falls down before Him, offering flowers
in spring as flames in winter. “My love is like a red, red rose” does not
mean that the poet is praising roses under the allegory of a young lady.
“My love is an arbutus” does not mean that the author was a botanist so
pleased with a particular arbutus tree that he said he loved it. “Who art
the moon and regent of my sky” does not mean that Juliet invented Romeo to
account for the roundness of the moon. “Christ is the Sun of Easter” does
not mean that the worshipper is praising the sun under the emblem of
Christ. Goddess or god can clothe themselves with the spring or summer;
but the body is more than raiment. Religion takes almost disdainfully the
dress of Nature; and indeed Christianity has done as well with the snows
of Christmas as with the snow-drops of spring. And when I look across
the sun-struck fields, I know in my inmost bones that my joy is not solely
in the spring, for spring alone, being always returning, would be always
sad. There is somebody or something walking there, to be crowned with
flowers: and my pleasure is in some promise yet possible and in the
resurrection of the dead.
G. K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men
(Continued from part one)
In part one, we looked at what atheists are saying about the gospels being copied from Pagan myths. We found that it was not true. Bluntly, what these people say about Pagan myths is one hundred percent wrong. In the relevant mythology, the Pagan deities and characters simply don’t do what proponents of the myth say they do. None of the Pagan characters in question were born of a virgin, none were resurrected, none had twelve disciples, &c… &c… So in short, there’s nothing to see here. Are all the atheists who promote this theory just big, fat liars?
Yes and no, but mostly yes. If we want to know where the copycat hypothesis came from, we can trace it back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time there were a few scholars, though not many, who believed it. Modern-day proponents of the copycat hypothesis constantly quote books that are more than a century out of date, since all more recent and rigorous scholarship flatly contradicts their beliefs. Francis Cumont’s The Mysteries of Mithra, published in 1903, is a favorite of these people.
Are there more modern sources that support the copycat hypothesis? Yes. The best known is Achyra S., a pseudonym for a women who claims to be “scholar” but has never published any academic material or held any position in any field relating to the history of Jesus. She describes her website as a hub of astrology and other things that scientific atheists normally despise, yet they continue to quote her abundantly. Why? Beats me.
Ms. Achyra’s articles are classics of intellectual dishonesty, fact-twisting, and outright absurdity. For example, take a gander at this article entitled Was Krishna Crucified? Achyra says the answer is yes because Krishna was shot with arrows, which is kind of like being crucified. Her source this is the book Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, which was published in 1882. She does not present any more recent source to justify her claim about similarity between Krishna myths and the gospels. Likewise every article on her website is littered with ridiculous, out-of-date sources and nonsensical arguments.
So besides Achyra S., is there anyone still upholding the Christ myth theory today. The name one most commonly hears is G. A. Wells, who the atheists will refer to as “a scholar”. They do not mention that he was a scholar of German language, with no credentials in any field related to the Gospel. They also don’t mention that Wells ended up changing his mind and acknowledging that Jesus did exist.
I could go on. And on. And on. Thanks to the technological marvel known as the internet, anyone can post anything, and among atheists there will always be plenty of people willing to believe whatever they read, rather than asking critical questions. Anyone who puts real research into the topic will quickly find that the advocates of the copycat hypothesis don’t have a leg to stand on. The same is true regarding the old flat earth argument and countless others. Why is this? Don’t we all know that atheists are rational, skeptical, and plunge through the layers of mythology to find the cold, hard truth? And that Christians are deluded and credulous and brainwashed? So why is it that whenever we do actual research on an issue, the actual facts found by actual scholars always support the Christian viewpoint?
Why indeed?
Online resources:
Bede’s Library. A short but professional and well-written list of articles responding to copycat claims and others.
Tektonics. An excellent online apologetics ministry with a comprehensive debunking of copycat claims.
GakuseiDon. More apologetics work, though unfortunately not updated often.
Print resources:
The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, by Dr. Craig Blomberg
Lord or Legend: Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma, by Gregory Boyd and Paul Rhodes
The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel
The 1950’s is famous for goofy monster movies in which lizards, spiders, and other critters grow to enormous dimensions after being exposed to radiation and rampage across the landscape, flattening civilization in the process. These classics of scientific paranoia were presaged by a little-known science fiction novel published in 1947: Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.
The story begins when a lowlife salesman by the name of Albert Weener meets an ambitious scientist by the name of Josephine Francis and a makeshift workshop in suburban L.A. Francis has developed a new compound that will allow plants to derive nutrition from any substance. Weener decides to demonstrate by spraying it on an ugly patch of lawn in an ugly neighborhood. Within days, the grass on the lawn has grown taller than the surrounding trees and no one is able to cut it. Soon it is destroying buildings and the military is called into to combat the weed. Those familiar with genre conventions can probably guess the rest.
What makes this novel stand out from the crowd is the character development and the sharp, satirical tone. Ward Moore is a keen observer of human nature and he gives us a plethora of unique characters to laugh at. Besides Albert and Jospehine, we get a montage of newspaper writers and editors, military men and their offspring, religious leaders, explorers, servants, and business types. The story is all about the every-growing, devilish grass, but all of the characters respond in different ways. Some seek to make a profit of it, others turn to it for artistic inspiration, and others take a purely scientific approach. Nobody in the story truly understands the magnitude of the situation or really responds appropriately–an astute warning at a time when global warming and national debt loom on the horizon.
The main idea of the book, though, is simply to wring humor from the outlandish characters. Albert Weener manages to land a job as a newspaper columnist, and his adventures in writing and publishing take up a good chunk of the story. He works under an abusive editor named W. R. le ffacase–no typo there–and their personalities rebound off each other to hilarious effect. Moore includes some pointed parodies of writing styles from his time period. Today, it seems amazing that newspaper articles ever included so much flourish. All-in-all, Greener Than You Think is an excellent satiric science fiction novel and well worth a bit of time and money to procure.
(Here is another review of the book for those who are interested.)
The Blog that was Thursday 
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