Author: Marc Alan Di Martino

The art of the biblical limerick

A few years ago the Guardian posted a story on Rev. Christopher Goodwins, who rewrote the Bible in limerick verse. Readers of this blog know that I’ve been working up my own repertoire of atheist limericks, some of which deal with biblical themes. First, the Rev. Goodwins:

An Ishleham vicar called Chris
wrote scripture in limericks. “This
should help people read,
about Jesus, indeed,
and enjoy it – not give him a miss.”
________________________________________________
Now me:
The Bible’s a book full of stories
of God’s wrath at human vainglories,
of murder and war
and oh, so much more
you’d feel sick if you heard what the score is.
__________________________________________
I think we’ve managed to read two different books with the same title.



Atheist limericks: “Unintelligent Design”

Today’s limerick is on (un)intelligent design. Proponents of so-called “intelligent design” are always rambling on about watchmakers and 747s being whipped up by the Maker from the junkyard of spare biological parts lying around. They make it sound like everything is so intentionally, wonderfully designed that there can only be One Answer as to how things are as they are. But they never seem to distinguish the miserable from the horrible, as Woody Allen once said. We are all miserable. But why would an “intelligent” designer design my deviated septum? Or my wife’s intestines? Or my mother’s knees? Why such horror?

“Unintelligent Design”

If life on this earth was designed
with all of us neatly in mind
why isn’t it clear
just why we are here,
not to mention the crippled and blind?
_________________________________________________

Atheist limericks: “The Pope”

Limericks are flooding my notebooks, yielding all sorts of interesting results. I write them in the train on the way to work, over breakfast, in my sleep. I’ve even committed a few pornographic limericks – the truest to the form – which you won’t read here, to memory.

Again, feel free to cut and paste in the comments section of your favorite atheist blog, or tweet them, or put them up on your own blog. Or read them and forget about them, or whatever. Here’s today’s limerick.

“The Pope”

He once ruled over vast wastes of land
with a nonchalant wave of his hand
but confined to an isle
of protected square mile
now he broods in his kingdom of sand.
__________________________________

Atheist limericks: “Pharyngula”

I’ve been penning limericks lately. I wouldn’t publish more serious poetry on my own blog, but I figure limericks are topical, humorous and eminently memable. So feel free to cut and paste in the comments section of your favorite atheist blog, or tweet them, or put them up on your own blog. Or read them and forget about them. Whatever. This one is called

“Pharyngula“

PZ once enraged a whole slew
of religious fanatics – he threw
a Qur’an in the trash
and then with a dash
of élan, he threw in Dawkins, too.
____________________

Stay tuned for further atheist limericks!

Sex and death

from Sleeper (1973)

Luna: “Oh, I see, you don’t believe in science. And you also don’t believe that political systems work. And you don’t believe in God, huh?”

Miles: “Right.”

Luna: “So then, what do you believe in?”

Miles: “Sex and death. Two things that come once in a lifetime. But at least after death you’re not nauseous.”

Who’s afraid of Holly Near?

Holly Near wrote one of my favorite songs, which should be the anthem of all freethinkers. It’s called “I Ain’t Afraid” and it begins:

I ain’t afraid of your Yahweh
I ain’t afraid of your Allah
I ain’t afraid of your Jesus
I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your God

With all respect to Holly, my favorite version of the song is actually in Yiddish. That’s how I discovered it, and that’s how I hear it in my mind or sing it when in the shower.

Keyn moyre far ayer el shadai/ keyn moyre far ayer ala/ keyn moyre far ayer yezus/ kh’hob moyre far dem vos ir tut lekoved ayer got.

Here are the Klezmatics doing their version of the song with a Yiddish-language chorus. They alternate between Yiddish and English so anyone can follow along, learn some Yiddish and one of the great songs of our time. Play loud.

Hypatia

It has been wryly suggested that Agora, the recent film about Hypatia of Alexandria, was a kind of religious film turned on its head. “St. Hypatia, murdered by oyster shell,” was one version I heard. Well, the film has no oyster shells, but I won’t spoil anything for those who haven’t seen it. If freethinkers have saints – which I surmise they don’t –  Hypatia would be one. But, like I said, there are no saints of freethought.

The Hypatia portrayed in the film is wise, compassionate, restless, moderate in all things save intellectual fire. She is not a “pagan” in the sense that she is not given over to worshipping statues and whatever deities the Alexandrian Christians of her day were out to topple. She was a sect of one. Like Thomas Paine, her church was her own mind.

“You cannot question what you believe; I must.” That is the motto of the freethinker. Whether or not the historical Hypatia was indeed such a person may never be known. We do know that she was a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. But what I find interesting is that a major historical epic chose to promote a freethinking “saint.” Was this a belated answer to Mel Gibson?

Agora could not, to my mind, have been made ten years ago. A secular renaissance was necessary in order for a big-budget movie to take such a rationalist stance against religious fervor and the pitfalls of pious politics. Indeed, the Christian mob charged with Hypatia’s murder overtly resembles the Taliban. That’s no accident.

Was Rachel Weisz’s Hypatia improbably chaste? She was a bit too perfect, as if the director felt the need for a freethinking Madonna. She could’ve used at least one good temper tantrum, considering that her beloved city and her entire culture was collapsing at her feet.

Baron d’Holbach

“Men will be good, when they are well instructed, well governed, and when they are punished or despised for the evil, and justly rewarded for the good, they do to their fellow creatures.”

Carl Sagan on astrology

I promise I’ll stop kvetching about astrology after this post. I felt a positive note was needed, and there are no more positive notes to be sounded than those of the great Carl Sagan. This is a segment on astrology from “Cosmos.”

The curious case of Shermer vs. Armstrong

Searching for skeptical responses to astrology, I came across this video entitled Vedic Astrology: Michael Shermer vs. Jeffrey Armstrong. The video is a clip (not a whole episode) from Exploring the Unknown. In the clip Armstrong, a “Vedic astrologer” – after assuring us that Vedic astrology is the only “scientific” astrology out there – appears to “read” a group of people with nothing other than the date, time and place of their birth, and their gender.

Armstrong got a 77% overall result. So does this validate Vedic astrology?

There is a long thread on James Randi’s website dedicated to Armstrong vs. Shermer. Most of the commenters are skeptical of the clip, mainly because Shermer doesn’t get his two minutes to explain the seemingly overwhelming success of Armstrong’s powers. Mostly people seem interested in Shermer’s silence. Why didn’t he promptly and clearly debunk his astrological debunker? Was Shermer a defeated skeptic after all?

Shermer pops up midway through the thread, in an email response attributed to him. We can probably assume these are Shermer’s words, because Randi’s site would have probably taken them down had they been exposed as a fabrication.

Here is meta-Shermer:

“The short story is this: we ran out of time at the end of the filming day to conduct any more experiments with Armstrong. I protested that it was going to make it look like he was successful, but to no avail as I did not have final authority over what was produced for the show, Exploring the Unknown, and so I just hoped that in the editing process it would be cut in a way that dealt with that problem, but it wasn’t and I couldn’t do anything about it, so it aired and no one noticed back then (in 2000), but someone posted the clip you reference and now we’re dealing with the fallout from it. It is an unfortunate reality of the series that I didn’t have enough control over the production and filming process. You can post this explanation if you like.

***

“My memory on what we were trying to do that day of filming is a little vague, but if I recall correctly there was to be another stage of the experiment where Armstrong had to match his astrological readings with the profiles of a group of new subjects, and then have them do the same, picking out their reading from a batch he produced, and then compare them. But we ran out of time. Here’s how it works in the film/television industry: camera crews are unionized and have strict rules about working only so many hours in a day, after which they get paid double time and even triple time, need a certain number of breaks in the day, etc. Our budget for that show required that we were done by 5pm, and we simply ran out of time and the producer called the shoot over, and there was nothing I could do about it. Very frustrating.”

If you’re interested, watch the video and judge for yourself. But keep in mind that if Vedic astrology really is all Jeffrey Armstrong and his commenter trolls crack it up to be, then why hasn’t it been more widely embraced by the scientific community? Or, why hasn’t it been embraced at all? Is he a lone rogue scientist, a modern-day Copernicus, a Galileo who will be vindicated long after those who ridicule him are forgotten, their memory scattered by the winds of time?

I doubt it. Armstrong and his visionary cronies are on the outer rings of science, the fringe. To penetrate the inner core of accepted scientific knowledge, Vedic astrology would have to amass mountainous proof of its validity and its ability to stand up to ceaseless testing and prove itself compatible with the existing body of scientific knowledge. Anything less than this, no matter how many lucky hits he brings home (who couldn’t get a few hits just by taking a stab in the dark?) means that astrology – Vedic or otherwise – is destined to remain on the outer limits along with mind-reading, tarot cards, Bible codes and legion other curios of the human intellect.

Or is Vedic astrology, like Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, a game-changer?