Do you ever look at things and think… hmmm… I wonder how that came to be? Take this roll of toilet paper (or ‘bathroom tissue’ as the Americans call it, because they can’t bring themselves to say that word. You know. TOILET. This is in keeping with the more comprehensive American belief that if you don’t acknowledge an ‘icky’ thing exists – like, oh, Palestine, say, or sex, or atheists – everything is SO much nicer). ((I exclude from this assessment, of course, Americans who are reading Tetherd Cow Ahead. Or who can read, generally.)) ((Whenever I hear an American say ‘I’m going to the bathroom’ I have to strongly fight the urge to say ‘Really? Again? You must be so clean – you just had a bath a couple of hours ago!’))
Anyway, back to this roll of toilet stuff with which you wipe your ass after you’ve had a shit.
Why is it named in the way it is? Are angels particularly known for their softness? It’s not an attribute that immediately springs into my mind when I imagine an angel. Take this angel, for example. It is the Archangel Michael:
Does this picture say ‘softness’ to you? That spear looks sharp to me. Not the kind of thing I want near my tender parts (I will observe that he has funky shoes though).
Here is another picture of a some angels:
These ones have swords. Would you let angels like this go swinging their sabres around in the vicinity of your nether regions? I wouldn’t. And here’s another picture of the Angel Michael. Can you see what he’s doing with that pointy spear?
Yes! That’s right! He’s aiming to stick it right up Lucifer’s bottom! Is that a caring, comfortable, soft image, my friends? I think not!
So how is it, do you think, that advertising people arrived at the brilliant idea of calling toilet paper ‘Angel Soft’, when it’s apparent to anyone with a modicum of religious art experience that angels are anything but soft? How can they get away with such a blatant untruth? Well, as usual, the ad people have included an escape clause in their work. Did you spot it?
There it is! Those rascally advertising types! They’ve registered the term ‘PS’ and tacked it onto their brand name! Genius!
So, their product can now be called ‘Angel Soft (PS®)’, where the PS obviously signifies:
PS: If it feels like someone’s sticking a sword up your ass, then it’s not our fault. You should have paid more attention in Sunday School.
The area where I’m staying in Los Angeles has a large Orthodox Jewish population. I’m quite fond of experiencing diversity in my surroundings but I have to say that I find being among strong religious communities rather off-putting. It emphasises for me the way that religion is a kind of mass delusion that encourages people to do very silly things.
For example: the Talmud states that, as a devout Jew you should ‘Cover your head in order that the fear of heaven may be upon you’ and Jewish men are strongly recommended not to walk more than four cubits with their head uncovered. To this end, I see many local men in this neighbourhood wearing the small skull cap called a kippah (or yarmulke) as they go about their business.
Yesterday while I was in the supermarket, I noticed a guy wearing a kippah which must have been pretty much the most minimal thing you could put on your head and get away with calling a ‘head covering’. It was not much more than the size of a Ritz cracker, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that he bent down to take something off a lower shelf, I doubt I would have seen it at all.
The problem I have with this kind of thing is the way that humans have decided to interpret an edict from the Holy Scripture to suit their own, human, purposes. Followers of many religions propose that something is The Word of God and then seem comfortable with adding as many human caveats and qualifications as they see fit. They act like disobedient children, who, when asked to do something they don’t like, interpret it to suit their own agendas. Where is there any kind of rigor in this way of thinking? It is yet another example of the countless double-standards that riddle religious doctrine. ((Not that I’m advocating fundamentalism, you understand, but at least the logic of it is coherent.))
I’m betting that the original intention of the Talmud was that you should wear a proper head covering like a hat or a scarf. ((Which, even in itself, is a berserk religious instruction that makes little rational sense.)) It’s obviously a pain in the ass to wear a hat all the time, so someone, somewhere got the idea that they could interpret the ruling a little more loosely, and a generous head covering became a cap, and a cap became the kippah we usually see today. The ridiculous little cheese cracker that I saw yesterday seems to me to be the most grudging acceptance of religious commitment. It prompted me to wonder why, instead of wearing the daft thing at all, the guy didn’t just go bare-headed and pretend that the supermarket was less than four cubits from his house. As far as I can see, it’s exactly the same kind of logic.
You’ll all have heard about the mysterious and sad case of Kristin and Candice Hermeler, the Australian twins who apparently attempted to commit a double suicide ((Only one of them succeeded.)) at a Colorado shooting range a couple of weeks back. The weekend’s Australian Herald Sun ran this headline for the incident:
Suicide twins Kristin and Candice Hermeler had God Delusion in their luggage
The headline is, of course, referring to Richard Dawkin’s book of that name. I say no more than that the two women also had a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment’ ((Tolle is, as you may know, Oprah Winfrey’s guru du jour. I am deeply suspicious of people who think they’ve found the ‘answers to everything’ and especially of those who feel the need to impart this wisdom to others at a price.)) and The Wisdom of the Native Americans among their belongings as well, but apparently those weren’t as headline-worthy. Funny that. ((Shout out to Bruce Hood for catching this one.))
In other Australian newspaper news in the same vein, Cardinal George Pell, a religious man of big pretensions and small intellect, has called those without faith ((We are to take this as Christian faith, it goes without saying. I don’t think Cardinal Pell believes for a minute that Muslims have any leverage with the Invisible Sky Man.)) ‘coarse, uncaring and without purpose’. He accuses atheists of having ‘nothing beyond the constructs they confect to cover the abyss’, which is odd since it seems to anyone with half a brain that it’s much more appropriate to describe people who hold the fanciful beliefs of religion with those words. Atheists, as anyone with the faintest grasp of philosophy understands, don’t ‘confect constructs’ of any kind, because atheism is simply a lack of belief. And, unlike religious people, we don’t attempt to ‘cover’ the abyss with anything – we just accept it’s there. ((Cardinal Pell’s fear of the unknown is plainly profound. His contemplation of the ‘abyss’ obviously terrifies the wits out of him.))
In the same sermon Pell goes on (quite embarrassingly, in my opinion) to invoke the hoary old Atheism = Nazism argument, and so, via Godwin’s Law, automatically loses all credibility. ((C’mon. We’re tired of this one. It makes no sense. It never did, and it never will.))
George Pell accuses those without faith as being ‘fearful’, when it is plain to all but the most obtuse who’s really the scaredy cat in this picture.
The Guardian reports today the shock horror story of the decade – if you’re a dedicated ‘horrorcore’ hip-hop fan, anyway.
It turns out that the Insane Clown Posse – those rapper doyens of the crass, the violent and the sexist – known for such moving lyrics as:
I stab people, 4, 5 people everyday
I tried to see a shrink to stop that shit but it ain’t no FUCKing way
…and:
I grabbed her by her neck
And I bounced her off the walls
She said it was an accident and then apologized
But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes
…and:
If I was a king all bitches would blow me
Big bag piles of jewels for my homies
We would go to war and take everybody’s land
No clothes allowed for female citizens
…have, all this time, been Evangelical Christians.
My mind flip-flops between being flabbergasted and entirely unsurprised. Flabbergasted because I find it hard to believe that people who call themselves Christians can write these kinds of things, and then unsurprised because I guess I can. And it’s not that the Juggalo ringleaders have suddenly had a Road to Damascus moment, either – they say that they’ve been Christians all along.
Apparently, their music is all just an act, cunningly crafted to sneak up on all those unsuspecting fans of theirs and deliver the message of God under the cover of necrophilia, dismemberment, rape and murder. Not since the Spanish Inquisition has morality been so deeply confused. ((My observation here is that if this is true, then they are treating the people that buy their music with the utmost disrespect – firstly, they are trading on being something that they are not in order to disseminate some dubious moral agenda, and secondly they think their audience is stupid. Which may be true, but doesn’t that just smack of cynical exploitation?!))
This is how Violent J (Joseph Bruce), one of the two figureheads of ICP, puts it:
To get attention, you have to speak their language. You have to interest them, gain their trust, talk to them and show you’re one of them. You’re a person from the street and speak of your experiences. Then at the end you can tell them God has helped me out like this and it might transfer over instead of just come straight out and just speak straight out of religion.
This was the same Violent J who was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in New Mexico. Apparently you need to physically show ‘them’ that you’re ‘one of them’ as well. That’s a slippery slope for which I wouldn’t want to attempt to mount a moral defense.
Recently, as part of their overt ‘coming out’ the Clowns released this video of their song Miracles, in which they apparently find everything miraculous, including UFOs, fog, and the Pyramids: ((How magnets, the Pyramids, UFOs and ghosts fall into the category of Miracles Wrought By God is kinda hard to fathom…))
It appears that they use the term miraculous here in a religious sense, rather than as hyperbole. In other words, they are rapping about all these ‘miracles’ as literal Works of God. The clue is the part of the lyric that says:
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
Yep, it’s those evil scientists at it again. As one science blogger has put it, the video
…is not only dumb, but enthusiastically dumb, endorsing a ferocious breed of ignorance that can only be described as militant. The entire song is practically a tribute to not knowing things.
I figured most people would say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know Insane Clown Posse could be deep like that.’ But instead it’s, ‘ICP said a giraffe is a miracle. Ha ha ha! What a bunch of idiots.’
Yeah, see, the problem is, Violent J, that your observations aren’t so much deep as breathtakingly banal…
Plant a little seed and nature grows
Niagara falls and the pyramids
Everything you believed in as kids
Fucking rainbows after it rains
there’s enough miracles here to blow your brains
… and, to be frank, it’s terrible music to boot – the rap in this song is possibly the worst I’ve ever heard. Take away the trademark in-your-face offensiveness and Insane Clown Posse just have nothing at all to offer.
As it stands, for all their ghetto posturing and murderous carnival grotesquerie, I say that the Insane Clown Posse are nothing more than Insipid Clown Pussies. It takes guts to look the universe squarely in the face and endure all the uncomfortable consequences of the realization of the measure of your insignificance. ((Conversely, it takes no guts at all to beat up a woman, and it follows that to write a ‘song’ about doing so is the work of a very tiny soul indeed. Don’t spin me your ‘whatever it takes to get the Lord’s message through’ bullshit, you hypocrites.)) Religion, especially the brains-on-the-floor flavour of religion offered by Evangelical Christianity, is the ultimate avoidance of facing up to reality. It says, in no uncertain terms, that if you trust everything to God, all will be hunky dory. It’s the easiest of cop-outs for a difficult challenge. In this respect, ((…and possibly others, it has to be said – pardon my cynicism.)) then, it is less confronting to discover that the members of the Insane Clown Posse are Christians, than it would have been to have heard they were philosophers, atheists or scientists.
One of the great things about traveling is that it opens up whole new vistas of opportunity for Cow Scrutiny. This post is the first in what I think is likely to be a continuing riff, as I commence my long stay in the US. These posts will all be grouped together under the new Stranger in a Strange Land category. ((As if I don’t have enough categories already!))
Of course, one of the first things a Stranger in a Strange Land needs is a guide. And when in Rome Los Angeles, the must-have accessory is satellite navigation. On my arrival, therefore, I was provided with a TomTom XL – the XL presumably referring to the ‘extra large’ screen that I requested (it actually doesn’t seem particularly ‘extra’ large to me, which is remarkable in a land where ‘extra large’ usually means ‘so big that a normal human can’t deal with it in any meaningful way’).
The TomTom XL is a masterpiece of irritating technology. The TomTom people have taken the miracle of Global Positioning and created a way to interface with it that is clumsy and frustrating. It is a breathtaking accomplishment. Never in my life have I sworn at an inanimate object quite so much. ((I mean, seriously. Operating systems don’t need to be like this folks. This is why we Apple fanboys bang on so much about how good Apple stuff is – it’s all in the operating system and the interface! TomTom people – just take a look at the Maps app in the iPhone. See how EASY that is to use? There ya go.)) Of course, my hatred for it is amplified by the fact that it has a robot voice that pretends it knows more about the world than I do, and we all know how fond I am of that idea.
One of the ‘features’ of the TomTom system though, is that you can log in to the TomTom site and change the default voice (Female Moron #1) for one of hundreds of alternatives. Some of these are for sale and feature the professionally recorded voices of luminaries like Kim Cattrall and Burt Reynolds (I kid you not) or ‘humourous’ instructions provided by C3PO and SpongeBob. Why ANYBODY thinks this kind of thing is a good idea is completely beyond me, unless of course you opt to choose the voice of someone you really hate in order that your levels of rage and frustration from using the device can be amplified just that little bit more. The last thing I want to hear as I miss the exit to the freeway because the damn thing told me to ‘go straight on‘ when it should have said ‘take the right lane‘ ((I’m not exaggerating – the TomTom frequently tells you to do something which is plainly not correct, and I have become convinced that it is maliciously programmed to do so.)) is Yoda advising me that I should have used The Force.
Most of the downloadable voices on the TomTom site are free, however and (Oh frabjous day!) are created by the TomTom community. Now the fact that a person is willing to even admit that they belong to the TomTom community is enough to indicate what kind of very special surprises might be in store here. Sure, there are pages of interminable ‘My Sister’s Funny Voice’ and ‘Me Doing Impressions of a Dalek’ ((Still not exaggerating.)) but there are also some gems. Such as the voice of Alan from the Macedonia Primitive Baptist Church. ((Now, I didn’t even know there was a thing called the Primitive Baptist Church, but the words ‘primitive’ and ‘Baptist’ do sit quite comfortably together.))
Hey hey! Christian navigation! That’s bound to be laff riot. A typical ‘instruction’ from Alan’s voice is:
God has blessed you on your journey. You have reached your destination.
Of course if God doesn’t bless you on your journey and you die horribly in a collision with a truck you won’t ever get that message, but hey, that’s how religion works, right?
My mind goes wild when I try to imagine Alan’s other instructions. OK, we’re coming to an intersection… Alan! Which way do I go?
At the next intersection, take your advice from Genesis 13:9: Is not the whole land before thee? separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left.
Or, on approaching the entrance to the freeway:
You are about to enter the freeway. Let me remind you of Isaiah 35:8: And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.
Yes, I can see it now. First traffic lights and Alan and the TomTom would be out the car window and into the LA River.
I’ve been here one week and already I can see the root cause of America’s road rage problems. What, with all the sugar in the breakfast cereals and celebrity voices directing traffic it’s a miracle that anybody gets anywhere in one piece.
If these were an actual product ((I’m pretty sure someone just photoshopped this up, sadly.)) they would be the perfect way to end any argument in which a religiously-inclined person attempts to use logic to justify faith.
