“There are no dinosaurs in Venice – but very fine wine.”
- Father Giuseppe Leonardi, as quoted in Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos
Well, I’ll guess I’ll just do this, because, what the hell, Rakuen started it. That’s right, crossie is going to DEFEND RELIGION ON THE iNTERNET.
This will be good.
Let’s start with a story, because that’s what I do. I tell stories to make my points. And make jokes. It’s a true story.
Okay, so one day I was in the grade school library (obviously this is not a recent story), and back in the day, I was a big fan of what the cool kids are now calling “cryptozoology,” but I was calling at the time “stuff like Bigfoot.” In this case the book I was returning was about Bigfoot, and it ended with some vague theorizing that maybe Bigfoot was the missing link between apes and man.
Anyway, another young student, we’ll call her Girl-Who-Likes-Dogs (because she was a girl who liked dogs), noticed my book and, having read the book herself, offered her opinion on it. We both agreed the missing link theory was dumb. I thought it was a dumb theory because, you know, it was a dumb theory, but she thought it was a dumb theory because God made man on the seventh day (or whatever it was in Genesis).
So, anyway, yeah, that was in grade school, but it wasn’t like her views on religion or how the world works or anything like that changed drastically during our senior year (it was a small town, so it’s not like I barely knew her before or after the original event). Anyway, as fate would have it, she was voted the female Most Likely to Succeed. I mean, she was smart and probably would have made a good business person (where not understanding evolution doesn’t really effect much, after all), but she went and got pregnant that last semester (after the voting, apparently) and because she (and her parents) were strict Christians, she kept the baby (not saying that I necessarily disagree with that part) and married the guy, and now she has Most Likely Succeeded to be a white trash mother. For the record, the male voted Most Likely to Succeed for my class was, uh, me, actually. What a wash, huh?
See, she missed the point of religion; she used religion as an excuse to not think, to effectively ignore centuries of science, to take the easy path, but when it actually came down to, you know, following the rules of the religion, well, screw that! Literally! I mean, if you’re fundamentalist enough to be Creationist, you’re fundamentalist enough to believe that sex with someone you’re not married to is a no-no.
I’m not sure why I created a pseudonym for this person now, since referring to her as the anonymous pronoun “her” worked pretty good, actually. Oh, well.
Religion is not a comfort blanket. How the universe was created is, you know, an interesting question, but it doesn’t tell you why. That’s the point of religion to me.
Every Christian has their conversion story, so here’s mine, if you’ll allow me. Yes, I’m preaching. This is a sermon. Downvote already if you’re uncomfortable. Anyway, here goes nothing.
My favorite dinosaur is Tyrannosaurus rex.
Every kid loves dinosaurs, but I loved dinosaurs a lot. My aunt met an author a children’s book about dinosaurs, and why maybe it’s a blessing they’re extinct (where would they fit them in zoos? was one example. It was a children’s book, remember.). Anyway, he told her that he had met hundreds of aunts like her who were sure their nephews couldn’t name the dinosaur on page whatever-it-was; so, he bet her another brand new dinosaur book that me and my brothers couldn’t guess it, his standard offer, which had never been guessed in those hundreds of aunts before.
Anyway, it was a Postosuchus, which is kind of cheating, since Postosuchus is technically not a dinosaur, but a crocodile like archosaur from the Triassic period that everybody just assumed was a crocodile before us, apparently. Rookie mistake.
Because we didn’t just know Triceratops and Stegosaurus and T. rex, or even the factoids like Brontosaurus isn’t really real (it’s an Apatasaurus) or Pteranodons aren’t actually dinosaurs, but their own thing which every little boy knows but forgets that he knew as an adult. No, we knew the science of dinosaurs.
It was the early nineties, and it was an exciting time in dinosaur science; I wanted to be a paleontologist all through grade school. John Ostrom had found Deinonychus and was beginning to think maybe these guys were awfully bird-like, which influenced Bob Bakker, who had an awesome beard and cowboy hat, to write The Dinosaur Heresies, which made dinosaurs really cool (oh, yeah, they were cool because they were big, which is important for little kids, but I converted to the “warm blooded” theory when I realized it made them even cooler), and Jack Horner (boo, hiss, the Judas of this Gospel) was naming a duck-billed dinosaur Maiasaurus because he thought it might have actually raised its infants like a mother mammal or bird, unlike a reptile.
And all this time, we’re learning about concepts like “evolution” and “geologic time” and other things that the fundies really, really, really hate, and, oh, yes, there were attempts to head it off. Books from grandmother about dinosaurs that attempted to prove man and dinosaur lived together. Biblical serpents and dragons and Mkele Mbembe (cryptozoology again!). Another with the joke “Why did the dinosaur cross the road?” and the rejoinder “Because chickens hadn’t been invented yet!” And now I see the implications of the word “invented,” but at the time it was just nonsense in a nonsense joke.
But, in the third grade, my church, the United Methodist Church, gave every kid a Bible (oh, Sunday school was attended semi-regularly, but Methodists are a “liberal” church, thank God Almighty, and most of our lessons were actually “tree-hugging hippy crap” as my mother called it, believe it or not). And I loved to read, so I set down to read that mother cover to cover (uh, still not got there, actually, though I did skip ahead to the end. Revelation is pretty metal.), and ran into a problem.
Mom asked me what I thought of it, and I said, “I kind of think it’s fiction.”
From the mouth of babes.
Now, to be clear, here, I was not punished for this. We were a Christian family (except for maybe my dad, who may have converted, may still be an atheist as he claims he was who goes to church for appearance sake, or may actually have been, or still is, an agnostic, but is such an agnostic he honestly doesn’t care to use the right word), but not that Christian. And it’s not like my mom had anyone to blame other than herself; who else had bought all those books and videos explaining those uncomfortable-to-fundies concepts like “geologic time” and “evolution”.
But it was still a source of discomfort; a cognitive dissonance, if you will. See, I was raised in a Christian household (mostly, as previously noted), so I was never not a Christian. But dinosaurs offered that crisis of faith; you can’t be “born again” Christian if you are “born” Christian.
See, I suppose I could have gone atheist; there truly is no evidence for God. Now, there is evidence for Jesus (historians agree on two things about Jesus; he was an actual historical figure, and that the makers of the documentary Religulous are not historians), but once again, we don’t have much evidence supporting that whole son of God thing, or even much eyewitness data to corroborate that whole “He is risen” thing. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, sure, but it is also not evidence.
I did not need a creation story from the Bible, because I already had one. Dinosaurs had provided it; but neither dinosaurs nor Christianity were done with me yet.
Okay, now is the time for the reading of Scripture portion of the sermon. Please take out your copy of Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos, and turn to “The Dinosaur Trackers”, Chapter 2, Verse 39-40.
Wait, hold up! Okay, first of all, you’re saying, you don’t have a copy of this book! Well, that’s your own damn fault; it’s a great book, you should get it. But anyway, you’re also complaining that isn’t Scripture always from the Bible. What, you think God only speaks through the Bible? Once, He spoke through a burning bush, for His sake, because He’s God, and He’ll speak any old darn way He pleases, thank you very much. Catholics know this; they believe He speaks through the Pope. Evangelicals know this; they call it “personal revelation.” That being said, I’m a Methodist, so I’m not part of either group, but whatever.
Anyway, I’ll drop the goofy “reading Scripture” thing and preface this as an interview with paleontologist Father Giuseppe Leonardi. He is asked “Why would God create a T. rex?”
“Oh, that you must ask to Him. I think that God is generous with life. He gave space to many forms, many animals, all of them important, they are splendid. They are also, like us, in the image of God. Not anthropomorphically, but because we are alive, intelligent and beautiful. So Tyrannosaurus rex is an image of God. Because he has life, and God has life. Because he is beautiful, and God is beautiful. Because he has a meaning, and God has a meaning. In many, many ways, each animal, each star, each butterfly butterfly, each flower, are an image of God. So dinosaurs are also.”
I don’t know, I thought that was a pretty good answer. But almost as important, it’s a really good question. The question is not “How.”
The question is “Why.”
Father Leonardi’s story is amazing. He was trained as a scientist, but felt the call to missionary work (I’m sure the prayer went something like, “So, Jesus, should I dick around with old bones or help the poor and needy … oh, wait, I kind answered my own question. Good talk, Jesus!” Except in Italian.). While there, he literally stumbled upon a treasure trove of fossilized trackways in the streets of the Brazilian town he was missioning (if that’s the verb) in. Everyone, not just believers, knows the story of Jonah; God says do this, Jonah doesn’t, world’s most famous case of vorephilia porn. But, apparently, the opposite can be true; man loves dinosaurs, man loves God, man gives up dinosaurs for God, God gives man back dinosaurs.
So T. rex led me to Christ.
And that’s why I can’t be an atheist; because, though religion is not a set of rules to follow any more than it is a comfort blanket, atheism doesn’t serve a function. Atheism doesn’t create beauty; it doesn’t create meaning. It doesn’t create anything. Because atheism is nothing. Literally.
What has atheism created? Really? A bunch of obnoxious snobs who are high on the smell of their own “intellectual superiority,” just as content to not think as any fundamentalist; not to defend fundies, in fact, screw those guys just as hard, but you’re the same coin, different sides. The best atheism has come up with artistically is H.P. Lovecraft; stilted prose and rampant racism (and I’m a fan!).
I call myself a Christian of hope; not of faith. I’m like the apostle Thomas, i.e. Doubting Thomas. He didn’t believe in the resurrection until Jesus literally told him to finger his hole. Except in Aramaic. My faith is not strong; they talk about the gifts of “faith, hope and love.” Faith is not my gift (and I don’t need to back up the claim that love isn’t it, either, do I?). I got stuck with hope, which is kind of the crappy one of the three. Because it can lead to disappointment really easily.
But right now I got hope; hope that I mean something, you mean something, this stupid post means something, the stupid cat I rescued from the side of the road sleeping next to me as I write this means something, it all means something, because if it doesn’t mean anything, well, I might as well just fuck that cat, right in her cat ass, because she doesn’t mean anything, and I don’t mean anything and the act of fucking doesn’t mean anything at all, and the only real consequence is that I’ll only get to do it once and honestly, at least I won’t have to fucking clean up her shit anymore, you know what I mean?
Why shouldn’t I fuck a cat death, if it all means nothing? Why?
No, really, why? I’m asking you, why?
Why?
Being an atheist means never having to ask why.
Jack Horner, the maiasaur guy, he decided T. rex was a scavenger, because that makes sense. Anyway, he somehow became the main advisor on the Jurassic Park, despite the fact that Bob Bakker was Michael Crichton’s main inspiration for the books. Anyway, in the second movie, there was an obvious Bob Bakker parody, which, admittedly, probably was not directly Horner’s fault. Most people probably didn’t get the joke, but a guy who could recognize Postosuchus could recognize who a paleontologist with a cowboy hat and ZZTop beard was supposed to be.
The bad blood between Horner and Bakker was that Bakker criticized the T. rex as a scavenger theory. In the movie, the heroine character actively criticizes the Bakker parody’s theories (despite the fact that the real Bakker didn’t hold those theories either) while making a spectacularly idiotic spectacle of herself, while the Bakker character is eaten by a T. rex.
Bakker sent Horner a note saying, “See, I told you T. rex was a predator.”
I read that story on TVTropes recently; I clicked the link to Bakker’s Wikipedia page; turns out, he’s actually an Ecumenical pastor. Like Father Leonardi, who is quoted in Hunting Dinosaurs as saying, on Genesis, “That text is poetry. It is a song and it is beautiful. But it is not a scientific demonstration,” he doesn’t believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.
I have to disagree with Leonardi, however. Genesis isn’t poetry to me. I still hold, just as I did all those years ago, that Genesis is a fiction.
I told you I like stories, in the beginning. I guess that’s why I’m a Christian.
It makes a better story, when things have meaning.
“There are no dinosaurs in Venice – but very fine wine.”
- Father Giuseppe Leonardi, as quoted in Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos
Well, I’ll guess I’ll just do this, because, what the hell, Rakuen started it. That’s right, crossie is going to DEFEND RELIGION ON THE iNTERNET.
This will be good.
Let’s start with a story, because that’s what I do. I tell stories to make my points. And make jokes. It’s a true story.
Okay, so one day I was in the grade school library (obviously this is not a recent story), and back in the day, I was a big fan of what the cool kids are now calling “cryptozoology,” but I was calling at the time “stuff like Bigfoot.” In this case the book I was returning was about Bigfoot, and it ended with some vague theorizing that maybe Bigfoot was the missing link between apes and man.
Anyway, another young student, we’ll call her Girl-Who-Likes-Dogs (because she was a girl who liked dogs), noticed my book and, having read the book herself, offered her opinion on it. We both agreed the missing link theory was dumb. I thought it was a dumb theory because, you know, it was a dumb theory, but she thought it was a dumb theory because God made man on the seventh day (or whatever it was in Genesis).
So, anyway, yeah, that was in grade school, but it wasn’t like her views on religion or how the world works or anything like that changed drastically during our senior year (it was a small town, so it’s not like I barely knew her before or after the original event). Anyway, as fate would have it, she was voted the female Most Likely to Succeed. I mean, she was smart and probably would have made a good business person (where not understanding evolution doesn’t really effect much, after all), but she went and got pregnant that last semester (after the voting, apparently) and because she (and her parents) were strict Christians, she kept the baby (not saying that I necessarily disagree with that part) and married the guy, and now she has Most Likely Succeeded to be a white trash mother. For the record, the male voted Most Likely to Succeed for my class was, uh, me, actually. What a wash, huh?
See, she missed the point of religion; she used religion as an excuse to not think, to effectively ignore centuries of science, to take the easy path, but when it actually came down to, you know, following the rules of the religion, well, screw that! Literally! I mean, if you’re fundamentalist enough to be Creationist, you’re fundamentalist enough to believe that sex with someone you’re not married to is a no-no.
I’m not sure why I created a pseudonym for this person now, since referring to her as the anonymous pronoun “her” worked pretty good, actually. Oh, well.
Religion is not a comfort blanket. How the universe was created is, you know, an interesting question, but it doesn’t tell you why. That’s the point of religion to me.
Every Christian has their conversion story, so here’s mine, if you’ll allow me. Yes, I’m preaching. This is a sermon. Downvote already if you’re uncomfortable. Anyway, here goes nothing.
My favorite dinosaur is Tyrannosaurus rex.
Every kid loves dinosaurs, but I loved dinosaurs a lot. My aunt met an author a children’s book about dinosaurs, and why maybe it’s a blessing they’re extinct (where would they fit them in zoos? was one example. It was a children’s book, remember.). Anyway, he told her that he had met hundreds of aunts like her who were sure their nephews couldn’t name the dinosaur on page whatever-it-was; so, he bet her another brand new dinosaur book that me and my brothers couldn’t guess it, his standard offer, which had never been guessed in those hundreds of aunts before.
Anyway, it was a Postosuchus, which is kind of cheating, since Postosuchus is technically not a dinosaur, but a crocodile like archosaur from the Triassic period that everybody just assumed was a crocodile before us, apparently. Rookie mistake.
Because we didn’t just know Triceratops and Stegosaurus and T. rex, or even the factoids like Brontosaurus isn’t really real (it’s an Apatasaurus) or Pteranodons aren’t actually dinosaurs, but their own thing which every little boy knows but forgets that he knew as an adult. No, we knew the science of dinosaurs.
It was the early nineties, and it was an exciting time in dinosaur science; I wanted to be a paleontologist all through grade school. John Ostrom had found Deinonychus and was beginning to think maybe these guys were awfully bird-like, which influenced Bob Bakker, who had an awesome beard and cowboy hat, to write The Dinosaur Heresies, which made dinosaurs really cool (oh, yeah, they were cool because they were big, which is important for little kids, but I converted to the “warm blooded” theory when I realized it made them even cooler), and Jack Horner (boo, hiss, the Judas of this Gospel) was naming a duck-billed dinosaur Maiasaurus because he thought it might have actually raised its infants like a mother mammal or bird, unlike a reptile.
And all this time, we’re learning about concepts like “evolution” and “geologic time” and other things that the fundies really, really, really hate, and, oh, yes, there were attempts to head it off. Books from grandmother about dinosaurs that attempted to prove man and dinosaur lived together. Biblical serpents and dragons and Mkele Mbembe (cryptozoology again!). Another with the joke “Why did the dinosaur cross the road?” and the rejoinder “Because chickens hadn’t been invented yet!” And now I see the implications of the word “invented,” but at the time it was just nonsense in a nonsense joke.
But, in the third grade, my church, the United Methodist Church, gave every kid a Bible (oh, Sunday school was attended semi-regularly, but Methodists are a “liberal” church, thank God Almighty, and most of our lessons were actually “tree-hugging hippy crap” as my mother called it, believe it or not). And I loved to read, so I set down to read that mother cover to cover (uh, still not got there, actually, though I did skip ahead to the end. Revelation is pretty metal.), and ran into a problem.
Mom asked me what I thought of it, and I said, “I kind of think it’s fiction.”
From the mouth of babes.
Now, to be clear, here, I was not punished for this. We were a Christian family (except for maybe my dad, who may have converted, may still be an atheist as he claims he was who goes to church for appearance sake, or may actually have been, or still is, an agnostic, but is such an agnostic he honestly doesn’t care to use the right word), but not that Christian. And it’s not like my mom had anyone to blame other than herself; who else had bought all those books and videos explaining those uncomfortable-to-fundies concepts like “geologic time” and “evolution”.
But it was still a source of discomfort; a cognitive dissonance, if you will. See, I was raised in a Christian household (mostly, as previously noted), so I was never not a Christian. But dinosaurs offered that crisis of faith; you can’t be “born again” Christian if you are “born” Christian.
See, I suppose I could have gone atheist; there truly is no evidence for God. Now, there is evidence for Jesus (historians agree on two things about Jesus; he was an actual historical figure, and that the makers of the documentary Religulous are not historians), but once again, we don’t have much evidence supporting that whole son of God thing, or even much eyewitness data to corroborate that whole “He is risen” thing. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, sure, but it is also not evidence.
I did not need a creation story from the Bible, because I already had one. Dinosaurs had provided it; but neither dinosaurs nor Christianity were done with me yet.
Okay, now is the time for the reading of Scripture portion of the sermon. Please take out your copy of Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos, and turn to “The Dinosaur Trackers”, Chapter 2, Verse 39-40.
Wait, hold up! Okay, first of all, you’re saying, you don’t have a copy of this book! Well, that’s your own damn fault; it’s a great book, you should get it. But anyway, you’re also complaining that isn’t Scripture always from the Bible. What, you think God only speaks through the Bible? Once, He spoke through a burning bush, for His sake, because He’s God, and He’ll speak any old darn way He pleases, thank you very much. Catholics know this; they believe He speaks through the Pope. Evangelicals know this; they call it “personal revelation.” That being said, I’m a Methodist, so I’m not part of either group, but whatever.
Anyway, I’ll drop the goofy “reading Scripture” thing and preface this as an interview with paleontologist Father Giuseppe Leonardi. He is asked “Why would God create a T. rex?”
“Oh, that you must ask to Him. I think that God is generous with life. He gave space to many forms, many animals, all of them important, they are splendid. They are also, like us, in the image of God. Not anthropomorphically, but because we are alive, intelligent and beautiful. So Tyrannosaurus rex is an image of God. Because he has life, and God has life. Because he is beautiful, and God is beautiful. Because he has a meaning, and God has a meaning. In many, many ways, each animal, each star, each butterfly butterfly, each flower, are an image of God. So dinosaurs are also.”
I don’t know, I thought that was a pretty good answer. But almost as important, it’s a really good question. The question is not “How.”
The question is “Why.”
Father Leonardi’s story is amazing. He was trained as a scientist, but felt the call to missionary work (I’m sure the prayer went something like, “So, Jesus, should I dick around with old bones or help the poor and needy … oh, wait, I kind answered my own question. Good talk, Jesus!” Except in Italian.). While there, he literally stumbled upon a treasure trove of fossilized trackways in the streets of the Brazilian town he was missioning (if that’s the verb) in. Everyone, not just believers, knows the story of Jonah; God says do this, Jonah doesn’t, world’s most famous case of vorephilia porn. But, apparently, the opposite can be true; man loves dinosaurs, man loves God, man gives up dinosaurs for God, God gives man back dinosaurs.
So T. rex led me to Christ.
And that’s why I can’t be an atheist; because, though religion is not a set of rules to follow any more than it is a comfort blanket, atheism doesn’t serve a function. Atheism doesn’t create beauty; it doesn’t create meaning. It doesn’t create anything. Because atheism is nothing. Literally.
What has atheism created? Really? A bunch of obnoxious snobs who are high on the smell of their own “intellectual superiority,” just as content to not think as any fundamentalist; not to defend fundies, in fact, screw those guys just as hard, but you’re the same coin, different sides. The best atheism has come up with artistically is H.P. Lovecraft; stilted prose and rampant racism (and I’m a fan!).
I call myself a Christian of hope; not of faith. I’m like the apostle Thomas, i.e. Doubting Thomas. He didn’t believe in the resurrection until Jesus literally told him to finger his hole. Except in Aramaic. My faith is not strong; they talk about the gifts of “faith, hope and love.” Faith is not my gift (and I don’t need to back up the claim that love isn’t it, either, do I?). I got stuck with hope, which is kind of the crappy one of the three. Because it can lead to disappointment really easily.
But right now I got hope; hope that I mean something, you mean something, this stupid post means something, the stupid cat I rescued from the side of the road sleeping next to me as I write this means something, it all means something, because if it doesn’t mean anything, well, I might as well just fuck that cat, right in her cat ass, because she doesn’t mean anything, and I don’t mean anything and the act of fucking doesn’t mean anything at all, and the only real consequence is that I’ll only get to do it once and honestly, at least I won’t have to fucking clean up her shit anymore, you know what I mean?
Why shouldn’t I fuck a cat death, if it all means nothing? Why?
No, really, why? I’m asking you, why?
Why?
Being an atheist means never having to ask why.
Jack Horner, the maiasaur guy, he decided T. rex was a scavenger, because that makes sense. Anyway, he somehow became the main advisor on the Jurassic Park, despite the fact that Bob Bakker was Michael Crichton’s main inspiration for the books. Anyway, in the second movie, there was an obvious Bob Bakker parody, which, admittedly, probably was not directly Horner’s fault. Most people probably didn’t get the joke, but a guy who could recognize Postosuchus could recognize who a paleontologist with a cowboy hat and ZZTop beard was supposed to be.
The bad blood between Horner and Bakker was that Bakker criticized the T. rex as a scavenger theory. In the movie, the heroine character actively criticizes the Bakker parody’s theories (despite the fact that the real Bakker didn’t hold those theories either) while making a spectacularly idiotic spectacle of herself, while the Bakker character is eaten by a T. rex.
Bakker sent Horner a note saying, “See, I told you T. rex was a predator.”
I read that story on TVTropes recently; I clicked the link to Bakker’s Wikipedia page; turns out, he’s actually an Ecumenical pastor. Like Father Leonardi, who is quoted in Hunting Dinosaurs as saying, on Genesis, “That text is poetry. It is a song and it is beautiful. But it is not a scientific demonstration,” he doesn’t believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.
I have to disagree with Leonardi, however. Genesis isn’t poetry to me. I still hold, just as I did all those years ago, that Genesis is a fiction.
I told you I like stories, in the beginning. I guess that’s why I’m a Christian.
It makes a better story, when things have meaning.