Saturday, June 21, 2008

surprised by arbitrary assertions


I hadn't intended for this to be Kooks Korner for Religious Fanatics.... but I just saw an interview with Stephen Colbert and N.T.Wright. The subject was Wright's new book. If you think religion is arbitrary and illogical... you aint seen nothing yet. And this guy is sort of... mainstream.

Wright basically proposes (at least on Colbert's show) there is an "after-after life". In other words, after all of you go to heaven (I suspect I wont make the cut) you will then have an afterlife after that. As if it were not arbitrary enough to propose one, why not two? This is sort of the reverse Occam's Razor. I am going to call it Occam's Beard. Hell, I might even think we should have an after-after-after life. And I think we should also start worshiping god's creator while we are at it.

My favorite quote of this guy was this:
The great thing about Anglicans is that we have no theology of our own. If something is true the Anglicans believe it.... You chaps [Catholics] have stuff you look up in these big books all the time.

I suspect the concept of "Anglican truth" is not based on evidence of the senses here -- especially judging by the context of the statement. Let me translate what he said into plain English:
We don't need the proof of data written in a book by flat-earth superstitious folk in the dark ages then madly edited by the Catholic church in a quest for squashing knowledge and maintaining power. That's way too structured for us. We'll just obtain magical truth and believe it.

1 comment:

Enos Straitt said...

I would like to see his biblical foundation for this. I am far from a scholar but I don't remember reading THAT in Revelation.