Miranda Celeste Hale, an English professor and an atheist, has started a new website, Exquisite With Love, that deserves your attention. Take a look, for example, at her latest post, “Rabbit is the Question,” a great satire of a truly dreadful piece of theologizing, “God is the Question,” written by Mark Vernon in this week’s Guardian.
Rabbit is the question
December 29, 2009 • 9:24 am
I strongly object.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the question.
The Rabbit is dead.
Thank you SO much for the kind words and for recommending my blog, Jerry. I’m very grateful.
I hadn’t heard of Mark Vernon before I came across that piece. Oh, how I long for those halcyon days, as I’ve now read a few of his other pieces and, sweet bejesus, they’re even more awful and clueless than you’d expect, and that’s saying a lot:
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=65504
http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/index.php?post/2007/11/25/790-meeting-dawkins
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/15/evolution-sacrifice-cooperation-religion
Blech!
Your article is pure satire win. I linked it over on our site, too.
Thank you so much! It was my first attempt at satire, and I was rather nervous about it, so I’m quite relieved that it has been generally well-received.
Nonstampcollector’s take is also pretty succinct!
“The thing that made the things for which there is no known maker.”
The ‘thoughts’ expressed by the pair in that little animated film remind me irresistibly of the theologian Keith Ward in his pathetic attempt to take Dawkins down a peg. And also, of course, of the Ineffable Eagleton, from whose wafflings the Venerable Vernon seems to have learned.
Vernon version:
Q: What is the Rabbit?
A: What is the Rabbit?
Matrix version:
Q: What is the Rabbit?
A: I’ll take the red Rabbit.
Shakespeare version:
Q: What is, or is not the Rabbit, that is the question?
A: … With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. – Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my Rabbits remember’d.