Archives December 2008

The Kids Are All Right

While walking back from lunch today, I saw a group of preachers in the
semicircular plaza in front of the student union. One had a big banner
telling people to repent their sins and come to Jesus Christ, and the
main ranter was wearing a sandwich board that said pretty much the
same thing in front. On the back, it had a list of people who should
beware the wrath of God, the merciful, the most compassionate. I’m
going to trust
Amanda Gibbs’s
transcript, because it sounds about right:

WARNING

Fornicators, drunkards, sodomists, pot smokers, gangster rappers, immodest women, darwinists, gamblers, feminists, socialists, abortionists, pornographers, homosexuals, jihadists, dirty dancers, hypocrites

JUDGMENT IS COMING!!!!!

I walked around the back to read the whole thing. Broke out laughing.
Saw a bunch of smiles appear among the people in the front row.

It took me back to my own student days, when
Tom Short
would stand in front of the library and rant fundamentalist Christian
inanity for hours.

It gladdened this shriveled old cynical heart to see the reaction of
the students watching today’s spectacle. It ranged from outrage to
mild amusement to wild amusement. One woman ran out to get a piece of
chalk and draw pagan signs on the ground around Ranty Sandwich Board
Guy.

So it looks to me as if the young’uns are being pushed away from
right-wing crazy religion, and toward either moderate religion or no
religion.

I struck up a brief conversation with one of the students in
attendance, in which he told me that he too had been raised Russian
Orthodox, and had been pressed into service as an altar boy a few
times. So we laughed, shook hands, and swapped stories of abusing the
communion wine.

Yeah, I think they’ll be fine.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

A while back, I was visited by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. At one
point, they resorted to argumentum ad wishful thinking: “Well,
don’t you want to live forever?”

They were very surprised when I said no.

Back in 2006, at the Montreal Comedy Festival, John Cleese
expressed
some of the thoughts that went into my answer (starts about 15:52 in):

I’ll tell you something sad, and it is this: as you get
older, I don’t think you laugh quite so much. The trouble is, there’s
only eight million jokes in the world. And when you’ve been doing it,
as I have, for forty-three years — I now know 7,980,000 of those
jokes. And even the ones I don’t know, I can kind of guess. I can
guess what the shape is.

I don’t laugh as much. Occasionally, when you’re young, at twenty,
you discover Buster Keaton, or in my case Peter Cook, or Woody Allen
and Steve Martin. These are great moments. But as you get older, it’s
not so frequent to be really excited by a new
discovery.

(Note: this is heavily edited for flow.)

And this is a problem with immortality: as you learn more and more,
especially in a given field, there’s less and less that’s really new,
and even that falls falls into known patterns..

I’m far from jaded, and I certainly don’t want to die just yet. But I
can see how, after two hundred years, or a thousand, or a million,
life would become dull. I don’t want to sound gloomy and pessimistic,
because there’s no cause to be. I’m sure that I’ll die regretting that
I lacked time to sample anything but the tiniest fraction of what life
has to offer. But at the same time, I can see where thing are going.

(Of course, since we’re talking about either magic or highly-advanced
technology, we can consider things like selective memory editing,
e.g., deliberately forgetting everything about Woody Allen so you can
discover him anew again. But I won’t go into that here.)

So if I were offered a shot at immortality, I’d demand an escape
clause. Better oblivion than eternal boredom.