Me Too Smart for Religion!
The good Doctor Rampage, Metahero, with considerably more patience than yours truly could bring to bear on the question, dissects the polemic of Adam Savage, Mythbuster Extraordinaire, where Doc Savage savages the religions of the world with more enthusiasm than wit or logic.
Some of the many nice points made by Doc Rampage:
Finally, Adam assures us that he understands the desire for someone to be in charge. This condescending gesture is a common trope of the too-smart-for-religion believers. I think that many of them actually view their ability to offer psychological theories of a religious instinct as some sort of refutation of religion. To the extent that they think this, it is unworthy of their extreme smartness. First of all, it is a capricious form of argument that can be turned in any direction with equal ease. For example: “atheists want to believe that there is no God because they fear being held responsible for their behavior”. Or how about “atheists are just like high-school kids playing goth who want to be different and shocking to everyone else”. Or we could reverse the argument with respect to religious people, “Religious people don’t want to believe in God because they are afraid of judgment, but they believe anyway so there must be some explanation besides psychology.”
Furthermore, there is no logical connection between the desire to believe something and the likelihood that that the thing is false. I want to believe that I have a hundred dollars in my wallet. Does this imply that I don’t have a hundred dollars in my wallet? Does it imply that I my belief that I have a hundred dollars in my wallet is just wishful thinking? Does the fact that I would like to believe this make you think that I don’t actually have sound reasons for believing it? Yes, there is such a thing as wishful thinking, but there is such a thing as pessimistic thinking too.
Yet another reason that this argument is not worthy of smart people is that hundreds of years before any atheist came up with this argument, Christians already knew that there is a religious instinct (and they used the existence of that instinct as an argument for the existence of God). Since Christian theology has a coherent and functional place for the religious instinct, the existence of this instinct cannot be used as an argument against Christianity without begging the question and assuming that Christian theology is wrong.
This paragraph by paragraph autopsy of a brain dying of its own self-infatuation is here
For those of you unfamiliar with Adam Savage, he is the first fully-artificial test tube baby, or Chimera, cloned from genetic material taken from Black Adam and Doc Savage, hence his name.
Doctor Mindbender of the international terrorist group COBRA is said to have performed the operation, but as a baby Adam Savage was rescued by Pat Savage, and raised according to the ultimate scientific training techniques available in his day to the peak of human perfection, mental and physical.
Adam Savage and his Beautiful Aunt Pat Savage (file photo copyright Bob Larkin)
A team of scientists assembled by Pat deliberately trained the mind and body of Adam to his amazing abilities almost from birth, allowing him to excel as a physician, surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, researcher, debunker of religion and master of many sciences. In the photo above, Adam Savage can be seen facing the sinister and dark forces of Religiosity, including hypno-drugged Muslim human bombs, Jewish Kosher Butchers, Fanatic Puritan Adventurers, and Killer-robojesuits constructed in hidden Papal laboratories known as ‘The Deathbots’
Mythbusters
Adam Savage is currently employed by the Mythbusters, a New York based desupernaturialification and ectoplasm-superfund clean up corporation (founded in 1984 by Noam Chomsky and Great Prince Bael, who reigneth over the Towers of the East of the Infernal regions, and hath command of 66 great legions).
The Mythbusters, you may recall, back in 1987 brought the Statue of Liberty temporarily to life in order to defeat the Mitteleuropean revenant and necromancer Vigo Von Homburg Deutschendorf, who was no doubt some sort of religious nutbag.
Vigo Von Homburg Wright… Oops, wait a minute.
Here is a photograph of the sinister undead alchemist and sorcerer Vigo — Hold on! That is not Vigo! That is my High School photo, taken of my when I was in Religion Class in Catholic High School, leaning How To Be Evil. I remember now! My teacher was Lord Voldemort. I addition to classes in Closing Our Minds and Disbelieving in Darwinism, we also learned Scandal Cover-Up, Hypocrisy, Evil and Advanced Evil, Hypnotic Mind Control, Oppression, Uglification, and Defense Against the Bright Arts.
Defense Against the Bright Arts! I got top marks in that class! This last was taught by Severus Snape, before his untimely death on the top of the Empire State Building battling the forces of Humanism.
Snape was burned to smithereens by Harvard-trained Symbologist Richard Dawkins via his never to be sufficiently damned Skepticism Eyeballs-Beams, the one power against which we agents of the Theocracy of Darkness have no defense! Curse them! It was a sad day in Evil School when we brought the ashes of our beloved teacher back to the Crypts of Horror for temporary burial!
The Man Who Taught Me How to be Evil
We merely await until the Dark Infinity Mechanism can be shipped from the buried Vatican catacombs by Albino assassin monks from the Opus Dei, so that our old and beloved teacher can be stirred to the hideous semblance of life, and rule us again as one of the Curia of the Nine Ever-Living Masters, which includes, in various stages of arrested decomposition, Ayesha Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, the Count de Saint-Germain, Captain Van der Decken, Ahasver the Jew, Ut-Napishtim, Duncan McLeod, Vandal Savage, and of course Mum-Ra of First Earth. (Snape the Deatheater will replace Professor Henry Jones, immortal since 1939 when he drank of the One True and Most Holy Grail to be cured of a Nazi bullet wound, not realizing he then would be burdeoned with the Imperishable Sword Calipurn, and the duty as Grail Knight to guard the Sacred Cup until the Return of Arthur.)
You might wonder why an international, if not interdimensional, Catholic conspiracy against the Brights is ruled by a pagan sorceress, a Jew, a Protestant Dutchmen, a Sumerian, a supervillain, and a cat-faced undead Mummy from a children’s cartoon, eh? BECAUSE WE’RE EVIL! We don’t need to follow our own rules!
The only Catholic on that Curia list is Duncan, a Paddy Irishman who shows up to the meetings drunk, babbling something about “a gathering” and complaining people are trying to behead him. I mean, if we were Lawful Good we would not have things like Senators voting pro-abortion in our Catholic Conspiracy. If we meant it, we’d actually, you know, catechize our members. BUT WE’RE NOT! WE’RE EVIL! EE-VIL!! EE-EVVIILL!!!
ALL HAIL THE THEOCRACY! Here is our terror-inspiring Emblem!
All Hail the –! choke — ! Wait a minute—
Hold on a sec! THAT is not the terror-inspiring emblem of the all-powerful Theocracy! That is the terror-inspiring emblem of our hideous yet superintelligent foes, the Technocracy.
TECHnocracy, not THEOcracy!
The Technocracy is an offshoot of the Aetherical Scientific Illuminati founded by Ben Franklin, itself a rebel faction of the Circle of Solomon, founded in antique days by the First Freemasons of the Temple, where the final remaining Tesseract of Atlantis was once kept. (We have it now, or we did, until Arch-Atheist superhero Daniel Dennett, and his ninja-acrobatic flying team of jetpack-rocketeers, stole it from the guarded vaults of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.)
Technocrats. Not to be confused with Theocrats.
Darn those Technocrats! Them and their cursed black helicopters and death towers and chemtrails! They are always horning on on our Conspiracy-Theory Action!
When we Catholic Conspirators managed to get the book “Twilight” on the best sellers list (as part of our long term plot to do something or other. Oppress women? I think that is one of the things on our list. Also, betray England and her Protestant Witch-Queen to the attacking armada of jet-planes from Mars in 2012) who got the credit?
The Technocracy! Curse them! When we secretly had the Pentagon built according to an Occult Architectural Precept, in order to drain English ‘manna’ into the gold deposit of Fort Knox, who got the credit? The Technos!
When we finally got the Matter Transmitter we stole from Tibet working, and we able to teleport a crack team of Benedictine Exorcists and Franciscan Animal-Control Empaths to the Nazis base on the dark side of the moon, we were all ready to make a deal with the astro-Nazis and learn their secret of the Vril power, but NOOOO, the Technocrats were there first, in that little waiting room beyond the air lock, feet up on the coffee table, smoking little black cigarettes, and palling around with Fritz.
And after all the guff we took over that ‘Hitler’s Pope’ bullshit, you’d think the Krauts would be grateful, but oh no, the Technocrats and their stealth spaceplanes, all their little James Bond gimmicks, weapons built into their fingernails, that sort of junk, that impressed the octogenarian moon-Nazis.
Just wait until you have a Vampire you need to turn, hey, Space Adolf! Ever think of that! Oh, you’ll go crying to us — PLEASE evil Theocracy, lend us some Holy Water, give us a Crucifix, because Count Chocula is coming in the airlock! And we’ll be all like, Hey, you stupid astro-Krauts, how come you didn’t think of that when you were playing footsie with the Technocracy, huhn? Maybe you can get SCIENCE to save your sorry butts! Lets see how well you can force an unclean spirit back into the grave with a gun that shoots poison gas or a laser hidden in your eyeball that injects the target with a virus — But I guess vampires don’t breathe or get diseases, DO THEY, Fritz!?! Talk to the silk gloved black hand of my Father Confessor! Yarg! Those Space Nazis are Lutherans anyway. I hope a Space Vampire bites them on their collective German buttocks.
But I still blame the Technocracy for stealing our thunder!
AND THEN when THEY send one of their sinister Dacoit agents from Shambala, their buried city at the core of the world, to assassinate President Kennedy, and Irish Catholic from political sleeper cell ‘Beta’ — who gets the blame? US! It is so unfair. He was one of our guys, with ties to organized crime and everything!
I would write a letter to the newspapers and complain, except that the press is secretly controlled not by the Technocracy nor by the Theocracy, but by the Mutantoid Time Travelers of AD 4000, the Chronocracy, who are manipulating the events of our time to bring about their own existence on their poisoned and radioactive hell-world in the far future.
ALL HAIL THE THEOCRACY! Our terror-inspiring Emblem!
All Hail the Theocracy!
An entirely DIFFERENT World Conspiracy from those other blokes!
That is more like it! I admit that the three-sided double Moebius strip design of the terror-inspiring emblem of the Technocracy is kinda cool, not to mention eye-catching, but for real spookiness to unnerve our ancient foes, the Brights, nothing says ‘EE-EVIL’ with a capital EE like the terror-inspiring emblem of the blood-red Double Cross of Lorraine!
The Brights will never prevail against Our Powers of Darkness and Evilness, not while we have Bene Gesserit Witches using their centuries-old genetic breeding program to interbreed the remote Merovingian descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene to bring forth once more the recessive gene combination of the Messiah DNA, which gives a super-being the power to make it rain in the desert! He name shall be a killing word!
(Of course, since Mary Magdalene did sleep around a bit, there is always the off chance that we shall only succeed in recombining the recessive genes of a John from First Century Palestine, and I don’t mean no Baptist, neither.)
The Howard Families and their centuries-old breeding program will not succeed! We, not they, shall produce the prophesied Immortal One! For that matter, Mentat of Arisia and their centuries-old breeding program will not succeed. We, not they, shall bring forth the prophesied Children of the Lens! For that matter, how the heck many secret centuries-old breeding programs are going on here on Earth? It’s annoying!
OF COURSE WE THEOCRATS WILL PREVAIL! ALL HAIL!
Go Theocracy! We dress in scary Red and Black!
You think you, one man dressed in a mask, can stop our invincible power, which is based on fear, ignorance, comedy-relief levels of incompetence, fear, secrecy, superstition, a fanatical devotion to the Pope, and dressing in scary-looking red and black? Ha HO, it is to smirk condescendingly! What can one vigilante do? What is your plan? To bury gunpowder kegs under our famous buildings and blow them up?
(Hey — hold on just one more time. Ain’t that Guy Fawkes, failed Catholic Assassin? Is not he one of OUR guys? Sort of an odd symbol to pick to your side, brighties.)
Let us display once more our TERRIFYING Emblem of Terror! Quail before our unstoppable power!
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
