Tetherd Cow Ahead

Sometimes you find some very disconcerting things whilst browsing in secondhand shops.

Introducing MetaHumour.

Tetherd Cow Ahead Presents: The Baffling Bible
Episode #5: Jesus and the Fig Tree

When I was a kid in Sunday School, I learned lots about the life of Jesus. I knew the stories of the Sermon on the Mount, the casting out of demons into swine, the miracle of the loaves & fishes, the overturning of the moneylenders’ tables in the tabernacle and many other colourful yarns that have turned out to have about as much relevance to my adult life as they did to my ten-year-old self.

One baffling tale that doesn’t usually get much of an airing when the life of Our Lord is being recounted, though, is the story of Jesus and the Fig Tree. It certainly didn’t make it into my Bible class back in the day – I think it’s just possible that’s because a ten-year-old might’ve empathized with it all too well.

To set the the scene: Jesus has returned from his 40 days and nights in the desert where he has had a lengthy hobnob with God, and is traipsing across the countryside accumulating crowds ((We should take mentions of ‘crowds’ in the Bible with a grain of salt. That part of the world was not especially densely populated at that time, and I suspect that if you got a toothless man and his wife and their goat to come out and look at you, that probably counted as a ‘crowd’. Especially in the eyes of someone spinning a yarn to beat up some PR, as Matt and Mark unquestionably are.)) of the faithful and assembling the cabal of chaps who would end up as his apostles. This is the Jesus of Matthew and Mark. This is the Jesus we all know and love from the comic books; he has just appeared to his followers (and Matthew & Mark’s readers) in dazzling white raiment which of course proves he is not just some guy like all the other common-garden-variety Messiahs who were touring the land at the time. In addition, he takes every opportunity to voice noble (if mostly obvious and occasionally curious) moral advice, and he performs miracles. Lots of them. ((I feel I have to point out that, in the light of the way we are familiar with ‘healings’ & clairvoyance and visions of the Virgin and other contemporary ‘miracles’, you don’t have to try too hard to come up with fairly reasonable non-supernatural explanations for all Jesus’ marvellous conjurations. And given nearly 20 centuries of undoubted ’embroidery’, well…))

The Story of the Fig Tree is one such miracle. We’ll take up the tale with Jesus waking up one morning after having spent the night in the countryside outside Jerusalem (somewhere around here I figure). Over to Matthew to relate the tale in his compelling literary style:

Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered.

And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away.

And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away!

~(Matthew 21:19)

In other words, because Jesus was hungry and there were no figs, he threw a tantrum and did the supernatural equivalent of punching his fist through the wall: he put a curse on the tree. Kapow! Take THAT you stupid tree! I’ll teach you not to have figs out of season!

Now religious scholars are quick to put forward all kinds of explanations for this decidedly tetchy Saviour behaviour. It’s certainly not fashionable these days to have Jesus to appear to petulantly invoke his super powers out of spite, so most modern Christian scholars interpret the story of Jesus and the Fig Tree as some kind of metaphorical statement about the condition and the predicted eventual fate of the Jewish nation.

But I want you to pause and reflect on that for a moment. None of Jesus’ other miracles get the ‘allegory’ explanation. If Jesus does a really cool thing – like healing a blind man, say, or walking across a lake – that’s not a metaphor. That’s a myrrh-soaked, gold-plated, frankinsence-doused, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die-and-never-be-resurrected MIRACLE! But when Our Lord chucks a tanty and fries a fig tree, well then, that must be symbolic…

That’s all well and good, and I might even buy it except for one thing: both Matthew and Mark independently make the effort to point out that Jesus was hungry. This tiny detail makes nonsense of the fall-of-the-Jewish-nation explanation. How does that high-falutin’ symbolism have anything to do with Jesus not getting breakfast? Plus, it just gives the whole story a ring of truth – I mean, we’ve all been there, right?

No, Faithful Acowlytes, I believe that the most reasonable hypothesis for this story is that Jesus just got out of bed on the wrong side and took his grumpiness out on the first thing he saw (and I offer this as scientific endorsement of my assertion). Luckily it was just a tree – his dad had something of a tendency to take his pique out on entire cities.

Or maybe, just maybe, the Westboro Baptist Church has had it right all along, only their bibles have a small typographical error…

Image CSIRO

The Conversation is carrying an enormously insightful article by Dr Matthew Bailes, the Pro-Vice Chancellor of Research at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Dr Bailes was one of the discoverers of the ‘diamond planet’ that you can’t fail to have heard about recently if you follow any kind of science news. It even made a sizeable appearance in the mainstream media all across the world.

…the diamond planet has been hugely successful in igniting public curiosity about the universe in which we live… Our host institutions were thrilled with the publicity and most of us enjoyed our 15 minutes of fame. The attention we received was 100% positive, but how different that could have been.

How so? Well, we could have been climate scientists.

As Dr Bailes goes on to point out, the scientific process involved in discovering a diamond planet is exactly the same scientific process involved in gathering data on climate change. And yet, the media and the general public is happy to accept the scientific community’s assessment of one and not the other.

I highly recommend you read this article and Tweet it, Like it and otherwise recommend it to your friends.

(Oh, and seriosuly, make sure you subscribe – for free – to The Conversation. Real news, real journalism, no agenda. As it should be.)

You will remember, Faithful Acowlytes, that some months back I brought you news of the mirth-inducing Trinfinity8, a miraculous new technology that fixes every complaint known to humankind ((This is only mild hyperbole on my part – you should read the claims!)) by mainlining mathematics straight into your brain. Well, Trinfinity8 seems to have done a superb job at sucking people in since we last examined them. In the following YouTube clip you can see nitwits by the dozen clutching ‘crystal’ hand grips and sitting hypnotized in front of screens of extremely ordinary fractal animations while listening to New Age drones, all the while convincing themselves that they ‘feel energized’.

And the thought strikes me for, oh, the twelve BILLIONTH time today: Why are people so FUCKING STUPID?

For those of you who couldn’t be bothered sitting through the video (and truly, I wouldn’t blame you for a nanosecond) let me synopsize:

• Dr Kathy Forti, inventor of Trinfinity8 (and producer of execrable science fiction web movies) tells us how she noticed the following wonderful results being delivered by her gadget: a renewed sense of energy; a sense of peace; a sense of being connected; dissipation of anxiety. I get all that from a small glass of Ardbeg, and it doesn’t cost me anything like the $8000 you pay for a Trinfinity8 system. These are the kinds of diffuse and meaningless claims made by snake oil peddlers since before recorded history. The ‘inventor’ of Trinfinity8 is not promising you anything more than you’d get from half an hour of meditative relaxation. Which, needless to say, would cost you absolutely nothing.

•A woman who has been hanging onto the plastic crystal handles tell us: ‘I kinda felt a tingling and I kinda almost felt like I was having an out of body experience’. Well, that’s definitive.

•Ms Forti earnestly tells us ‘We’ve used this on people who’ve said “I don’t feel any hope to live anymore” and we’ve said “Well, why don’t you just try this.” (which is a masterful way of implying that there was a result, without actually claiming one).

•A homeopathist named Dr Malcolm Smith tells an amazing story about a guy whose life was empty of all meaning, and then uses the Trinfinity8… and guess what? It turns this guy’s white hair back to its normal colour! And then Dr Smith bursts into tears. What. The. Fuck.

•An optometrist named Dr Jon E. Fitzpatrick tells an amazing story about how the Trinfinity8 cured a patient’s blindness! Well, kinda, sorta, maybe… just don’t press him on the details.

•An acupuncturist named Laurie Schneider tells an amazing story about how the Trinfinity8 fixed the libido of a housebound patient.

•A surgeon named Dr Thom E. Lobe ((I really hoped he was a brain surgeon or an ear surgeon, but he isn’t either. He appears to be one of those perplexing very highly qualified people who has no critical thinking capability.)) tells us that “Trinfinity8 is a new kind of medicine that you’re not going to find in very many medical practices”. And, Dr Lobe, I would suggest that there’s an excellent reason for that.

Dr Lobe claims, as if it’s fact, that “…everything from the air we breath, to the people we’re around, to the food we eat, to the music we listen to actually changed (sic) the expression of our DNA.” Not to be daunted by a point of view shared by exactly NOBODY who knows anything about DNA, he goes on to bury himself even deeper by ‘explaining’ how DNA works. Hand me a fork, someone, I want to plunge it into my brain. This guy is a surgeon? It’s enough to turn me religious and plead that God keeps me from ever going under his knife. ((Dr Lobe reminds me of the painter who did our house. Except the painter knew more about DNA.))

•A whole lot of people say a whole lot more stupid things about ‘energy’, vibrations, “finding themself (sic) with a capital ‘S'” and so forth. The stupid is so bad that it hurts.

•Kathy Forti says: “I am the first one to be astounded by these hundreds of reports that I get and hear each month of the changes made in someone’s life.” Yeah, I just bet you’re astounded. Astounded by the utter gullibility of people and their capacity to swallow your horseshit. And astounded by how the sale of the $8000 Trinfinity8 machines are filling up your bank account, I bet. You should truly be ashamed of yourself Ms Forti. You are nothing more than a snake-oil seller trading on the insecurities of damaged, ignorant, lonely and insecure people. Sometimes I really wish there was a Hell, because I know there’d be a special place reserved there for morally bankrupt people such as yourself.

Well, all the comments on the YouTube video are falling over themselves to tell us that the Trinfinity8 is the most wonderful thing to come our way since the invention of the Turbo Encabulator, so I thought I’d best redress the balance somewhat.

Ah, of course. Moderated comments. What’s the best way to make sure everybody believes whatever you tell them? Silence anyone who disagrees! A tried and true modus operandi of pseudoscience.

Well, Trinfinity8 is well and truly in my radar. We will not be letting them off that lightly.

What Shoo!TAG‘s ‘science’ sounds like to anyone who knows real science:

___________________________________________________________________________

With thanks to Sir Joey for the lolz

___________________________________________________________________________