Osculating Hank’s rump: an allegory

November 13, 2015 • 8:30 am

This short comedic sketch, “Kissing Hank’s Ass,” parodies a famous theological argument. Surely you can guess which one! But maybe it’s not a parody but an allegory, for, after all, theology is often indistinguishable from comedy.

The YouTube notes say that this was “originally written by Reverend James Huber,” though I don’t know who he is. But this dense and hilarious video ranks as one of the great parodies of theology along with the LOLCat Bible, which all ailurophiles and atheists should read.

h/t: Michael

 

40 thoughts on “Osculating Hank’s rump: an allegory”

      2. That version is even better, I think, ending as it does with ‘Hank’s desktop’. The punchline (as I interpret it) is the guy with the cool hair is ‘Hank’ and this is the wind-up of the century.

        cr

  2. Oh, that is low.
    Impressively low.
    Crampons in the crotch low.
    I’m impressed. Well done. An I feel the need for some seriously smelly cheese now. And I’ll relllllllish the “condiments” too.
    I don’t know who the “Reverend James Huber” is either, but his website at http://www.jhuger.com/ betrays a certain attitude which promises more rewards like “Kissing Hank’s Ass”. For starters, his parody of many proofs of “God’s” existence using Adam Savage’s turd-polishing abilities sets a good precedent.
    From The Rev’s “About” page :

    Q: Why do you use offensive language?
    A: To offend a certain kind of people. I reference sexual and excretory functions; the people I’m mocking reference hellfire. Out of fucking, taking a shit and being burned alive, which is on your avoid-at-all-costs list for this weekend?

    And

    Q:If you don’t believe in God, why do you spend so much time talking about Him? You don’t spend time talking about the Toothfairy or Santa Claus.
    A:The people who believe in the Toothfairy and Santa Claus don’t vote, neither do they threaten to beat the shit out of people I care about. When people start beating my friends for not putting teeth under their pillow, or there’s serious talk about defining marriage as between one man and eight tiny reindeer, I’ll start complaining about that.

    Sounds like the rest of the site is going to be worth a read. Definitely a “fellow traveller”.

    2. Interesting that “Huber” uses a Solomon’s Knot as a … identifying glyph. I’m having a brain fade for what I mean. It’s not a monograph, or really a logo. Or … dammit, what’s the word?
      I remember seeing the term “Solomon’s knot” for the first time when looking at some particularly fine Roman mosaics in Sicily just a few months ago. It seems a little pretentious a name for a very simple, but nice, pattern, but the name seems to be ancient.

    3. Another snippet from “Huber”‘s site … just a taster. Many of the geekier element here will recognise the style.

      Imagine that the universe is a big ol’ computer, and we’re all just geekin’ away.
      Theists are using a GUI like windows or a MacOS. […]
      Atheists are using a command line interface like DOS or UNIX. It’s fast and powerful, and they have all the control they need; but it can be very inhuman.[…]
      Mystics try to do everything using raw current.[…]
      Enlightenment comes from understanding that different UI’s have different strengths and weaknesses. […]

      1. Heh. ‘Enlightenment’ is also a desktop/window manager for X (the windowing system universally used in *nix). I just checked to see if it’s an option on my current system (Debian understands that different UI’s have different strengths and weaknesses) but it doesn’t seem to be one of the ones that Debian currently packages.

        I’d add to the definition of theists ‘… but their system does not permit them to change their UI, ever’

        cr

        1. I’ve certainly seen, and possibly installed, Enlightenment. Never been one for glitzy displays though. I’m still trying to find out if my current laptop actually has any sort of graphics acceleration, because a seismic analysis package is really struggling on it. I might have to get a post-2010 laptop, but that is getting close to having to fight with UEFI again.

          1. I just upgraded my tower case server with a new motherboard, CPU etc. I had a bit of a tussle (amid much googling) with all the newfangled whizzbangs, installing Debian on it, I seem to recall my main interation with UEFI was selecting “Use BIOS legacy mode” in the BIOS options.

            cr

          2. I haven’t used a desktop machine for … about 8 or 9 years. In fact, it it wasn’t for taking my expenses paperwork into the office (instead of posting it), I probably wouldn’t have seen a desktop machine outside of a computer shop for that long. I’ve just stopped wasting my time on that level of interaction with the hardware.

          3. They’re great fun for tinkering with, specially the tower case ones with removable side panels. (Mine lives on an upper shelf, where it’s safe from having things poked into it by accident).

            I just like fiddling with bits of tech hardware.

            cr

          4. Been there, done that.
            CHOOSE to get out of that game. The hardware is just a tool for the software to do something useful on. Though things like graphical co-processors are changing some aspects of that game.
            I had a friend a few years ago (well, probably still have ; haven’t seen him for sevveral years), who was trying to put a multi-Transputer system onto a PCI card to put into a desktop PC, the desktop providing I/O . Moore’s “Law” killed it.

          5. Yeah but it’s very satisfying to put together something and have it work, isn’t it? Sorta like Lego, or a model train set, only geekier.

            🙂

            cr

    1. Yeah, I remember seeing it in prose form way back when; never occurred to me it was a script. 😀

  6. I liked that! Quite appropriately, Carlin’s Religion is Bullshit appeared afterwards.

    “the LOLCat Bible”.

    I’m waiting for the CuckooHOO [Hooting Out Overtly] Quran.

    1. I think this line of reasoning applies to Islam as well. Don’t want to submit yourself to Allah? Well, you can burn in hell too. And ofcourse submitting yourself to the islamic faith and “Allah’s will” often means submitting yourself to the preachings of a narcissistic imam.

  7. I had not previously been vouchsafed the truth of kissing Hank’s Ass. This was annoying and hilarious.

  8. It was when I moved to a small town in the rural Midwest in the early ’80s (in my late 20s) that I first became inundated with the kind of logic described in KHAss. I had been blessedly sheltered from that sort of religiosity in the sort of liberal Episcopal churches I was used to. (I was what San Francisco gay activist Dan Savage calls a “nalt Christian” [Not All Like That Christian]. Savage coined the phrase and now there’s an online group by that name.)
    In Ohio, this Hank’s ass logic was ubiquitous- you couldn’t escape it.

    Huber describes his online church as “A funky-cool place where pagans and old hippies feel at home until they start talking about chakras and the healing powers of crystals, then they get laughed out the door.”
    Definitely my kind of place!!
    (And he describes himself as “Reverend Jim’s personal philosophy is influenced by Zen Buddhism, Universal Unitarianism, Neo-Paganism, his hippie roots, Carl Sagan, James Randi, British comedy ( especially Monty Python and Douglas Adams ), sunsets, rainstorms and sex; not necessarily in that order.”)

    Re LOLcat Bible, A less well known but incredibly savage verse-for-verse parody of the Bible (available in print only and in limited hardback editions) is the Queen Jane version of the Bible. (And there’s always the Brick Bible & R. Crumb’s rendition of Genesis.)

    1. Hell yeah! I’ll be surrounded by many religious relatives soon. Can’t wait to hear them osculate the rump of Ben Carson.

  12. Brilliant! I can’t believe I’ve never seen that (or the original) before.

    And of course Christians won’t get it.

    It’s an irony that the first and seemingly most obvious impulse for non-believers is to point out the craziness of Christian beliefs by reductio ad absurdum. (Sam Harris uses them all the time – e.g. the “praying over pancakes turning them into the body of Elvis” analogy to communion).

    Yet from what I’ve seen it seems to be the least effective form of arguments for Christians. They just don’t get reductio arguments. To them it simply computes “But what you’ve just argued results in an absurdity; since my beliefs aren’t absurd, your argument is a red herring and not applicable to my beliefs.”

    Since they are locked in circular reasoning, Reductios utterly baffle Christians.

  13. BTW,

    I’m sure this has been discussed in other threads but if so I’ve missed it.

    Previously I could always add comments quickly, but now it requires my entering my name and email for every single comment.

    What has happened, and will this be fixed any time soon?

    If there is a previous discussion on the topic I’m happy to be pointed there.

    Thanks.

    (Of course, out of habit, I pressed “Post Comment” but was immediately instructed to fill out the name/email fields…sigh…)

      1. jblilie,

        I’ve never had a wordpress account (and I doubt a lot of people here have one). Yet I was always “remembered” on this site, but now I’m not and have to fill out info every time. I just wonder what has changed and why.

    2. Yeah, Vaal, you’ve missed much discussion over that. It’s happened to a lot of us and we’re all very annoyed by it! Complaints have been registered & Jerry’s informed WordPress, so far to no avail.

  14. Well, isn’t that typical. Hank has obviously made himself known to only an isolated, special group of people and then expected the news to somehow just diffuse to the rest of us. I feel left out. And unworthy. Thanks a lot, Hanksters.

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