Another alternate reality

Well, no one should be particularly surprised at my silence here lately, since I said on 2 June (“Have a nice day”) that I was running out of anything worth saying. However, in my wanderings around the blogo-
sphere, or just in my casual encounters with what claims to be the real world (filtered through such windows as The Funny Times and the Onion newspaper), I frequently run across little items that strike me as so insane that they seem to deserve some comment, although I rarely get around to making any. But this one can hardly go by unnoticed.

As usual, I ran across this in a long and complicated sequence of following one Internet link after another—a sort of Internet free-association—and eventually ended up in a blog called “Dadahead”, where a post on 29 March 06 (“Galileo was wrong”) mentions the work of Robert Sungenis and his argument that Earth really is the center of the universe and does not rotate, and the Sun rotates around Earth. This is, of course, simply another instance of the same sort of lunacy as Creationism/Intelligent Design, and although one would think that “geocentrism” would be somewhat more difficult to sell, it turns out that Sungenis, while probably the best known proponent, is by no means the only one; there are several other such fruit-loops. And the kicker is that Sungenis is not, like most proponents of Intelligent Design, an evangelical fundamentalist, but a Roman Catholic—president of “Catholic Apologetics International.” And it turns out that, even though both beliefs are based on biblical literalism, the Creationists don’t always support the Geocentrists. Even among the literalists, there is disagreement about which parts of the Bible are more literal than others. I once asked a literalist how she reconciled the belief that Creation was supposed to have occurred in six “days” with the fact that a day is biblically defined as the rotation of the Sun around Earth and the Sun wasn’t created until the fourth “day.” Or, for that matter, where the “light” on the first “day” came from before the Sun was created. She looked vaguely uncomfortable and lamely muttered that it was a matter of “faith.”

What is there about religion that brings out the worst in people?—the worst stupidity, the worst cruelty, the worst fanaticism, the worst hatred and intolerance. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; it was supposed to bring out the best in people—and occasionally still does, although apparently to an extent that seems to be diminishing daily. Those whose religion inclines them to love and peace and justice and acceptance are rapidly losing ground to the growing number of those who use their perversions of religion to justify ignorance and hatred and intolerance and war and murder, and of atheists who dismiss all religion because of the evils perpetrated by the fanatics and theo-fascists.

Several years ago, the Onion ran a story about a new movement among fundamentalists to replace the (Newtonian) theory of gravity with the theory of Intelligent Pushing: objects do not fall to Earth because they are “pulled” by gravity but because they are pushed by God. Someone once said that a satirist is always faced with the problem of dreaming up a story so manifestly absurd that it won’t eventually become a fact in the real world.

Monty Python’s The meaning of life features a song in which the last line is: “Pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, ’cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth.”