The only clue the old man inside might actually be the author of “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Cat’s Cradle” is a red bumper sticker taped to the door that reads: "God is coming and is she pissed."
-Hi.
Need a clue to the sticker cited above.
Thank you.
It’s intended as humour:
God is portrayed as a woman, which is highly unusual.
pissed = ‘pissed off’ (highly annoyed) rather than ‘drunk’. This upholds the generalisation that an angry woman is something to be feared.
I’m not familiar with the novels and don’t know if the clue relates directly to a quote from them. If not then the ‘clue’ is probably in the fact that the same attitudes are displayed in the books as on the sticker.
I believe you’re right, Beees. I myself didn’t happen to read the author in the original but it’s his way of presenting things alright, as he’s been tagged as " America’s most cheerfully dour author".
Regards.
This is typical humor of the late 1960s. I don’t think Americans would laugh at it today.
Gee, I just did!
That’s because you’re from the 1960s. You appear to be from Vonnegut’s generation.
That’s because Mister Micawber is not American but Canadian ;-).
TOEIC listening, talks: Telephone message
Well, I am still alive and laughing today, so I think a good number of Americans and—god knows!—Brits would still laugh at God suddenly being depicted as an angry woman.
The point is that it was funny in the 1960s because of its shock value, but almost 50 years later, it’s not shocking anymore and therefore not funny. Nor are the jokes about God being black. Or the joke with the punch line, “I saw God, and she’s black.” People’s values and images of women and minorities have changed, so the joke has lost its effectiveness.
Not for me. I still picture Him with a long white beard like the one talking to Bob Hope in the last Simpson’s.
Most religious Christians are taught that God is a spiritual being and therefore has no physical appearance as we think of it. They also are taught that artistic depictions of God, and even pronouns referring to God, are merely to make certain aspects symbolically comprehensible to the finite human mind. Sometimes God is shown as an old man, sometimes as just a hand, sometimes as light, sometimes as fire, once as a burning bush – it varies. God is even depicted as female in some parts of the Old Testament (generally various poems). So a joke like that is basically funny to non- or anti-religious people who have limited understanding of how religion conceives of God and who imagine that Christians believe in a big, invisible old man who pushes us around like Lego and Matchbox cars.
So a joke like that is basically funny to non- or anti-religious people– That’s me!
who have limited understanding of how religion conceives of God and who imagine that Christians believe in a big, invisible old man who pushes us around like Lego and Matchbox cars.– That’s not me! However, I do have an unlimited understanding of pompous believers in primitive myths, however they conceive them.
I find that if you question an atheists beliefs in “science”, and ask them “why, why, why” or “how, how, how” all the way to the core, their beliefs are usually actually built on a foundation of primitive mythology and superstition. It’s blind faith in science. They can’t help it. Religious people generally believe in science, but they more readily believe that beyond a certain point, science can’t explain things yet. They also admit that just because science can’t currently prove something, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Atheists usually pretend that anything that can’t be proven by science at its current stage of development definitely does not exist, which is nonsense.
Scientists of the past used to think that flies were spontaneously generated by rotten meat put into a glass vessel, or that people would die if they were on a vehicle moving more than 25 miles an hour. These were enlightened men of intellect.
Sorry, but that statement is nonsense. The whole point about science is that it is willing to learn and adapt depending on evidence. The whole point about religion is that it is based on faith despite evidence.
In your example about enlightened men of science believing that flies were generated by meat - I would assume that experiments were done and this was shown not to be true, so hypotheses were thought up or observations made and the boundaries of science and knowledge expanded.
Scientists and atheists are certainly ready to accept that science doesn’t have all the answers yet, but they are also likely to believe that the truth will be found through the scientific method, rather than by blindly accepting ancient myths that have little to no basis given what we know through science.
Science has evolved and expanded, while religion is still basically a stone age belief system that denies the facts.
…isn’t this supposed to be an English language forum?
Thredder, you’ve actually got it a bit wrong, because in religion (I can only speak for Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and mainline Protestantism) it is taught that science is the way toward better understanding of the world and of God, because better understanding of an object leads to better understanding of its “creator”. Except for weird fundamentalist sects, it is even normal in Christianity for the actual events of the Bible to be researched and checked against archeological and other evidence, which is why Christians know certain aspects of the Bible are not literally true and that some are not factually true at all (but use fiction to convey philosophical premises). This is why at any trial in the US regarding the teaching of evolution in schools, there is testimony from a Catholic or Protestant theologian explaining that the theory of evolution is not in contradiction to Christian belief – basically, mainline Christians know the creation story in Genesis is not literally true and that its purpose is not to recount factual history, so it doesn’t contradict science any more than a Harry Potter book does.
Meanwhile, there are situations in the scientific community where its “high priests”, as we might call them, behave as inquisitors. For example, the Darwinian belief in evolution through random mutation is now accepted by many as religious dogma, and it is taboo to question it. There are now scientists – some religious, some atheists – who point out that there are certain developments that cannot be accounted for by random mutation, often because they had no intermediate stages and an intermediate stage would not have served any adaptive purpose anyway. They also point out that the case for intra-species evolution is still weak. These people are often persecuted in the scientific community, fired from their jobs, and given trouble in other ways. Often they are slandered as “biblical creationists”, even if they don’t believe in the Bible or God.
Science also goes through funny flip-flops. When I was a kid, many scientists would not accept the Big Bang theory, because it had been proposed by a Jesuit priest (who was a scientist) and came suspiciously close to the biblical theory of creation. Now I read columns in scientific publications in which physicists or astronomers rip into “religious people” for not accepting the Big Bang theory. This is doubly comical because the Big Bang theory is the favorite theory of biblical fundamentalists for exactly the same reason scientists objected to it 40 years ago. So the anti-religion physicist is ignorantly siding with the enemies he is criticizing.
Yes, this is an English language forum, but we stray on to many different subjects once the original question is answered. So far I haven’t seen you object to that until I criticized an atheist. And you didn’t criticize the atheist for getting off the subject and ripping into religion, so it seems your objections go in only one direction.
Well Jamie, you obviously know more about practising religion and religious teaching than me, so I’ll accept what you say about moderate Christians. I currently live in Poland and see the views and state of knowledge and education here, and what I see/hear about in the States (creationist museums, Republican candidates that deny evolution etc) though I accept that may not be the norm…everywhere.
I don’t agree with what you say about evolution being ‘religious dogma’, I see it as the best and only reasonably proven model for life that we have. Sure, there may well be holes in it, but the vast majority of it has evidence to justify it. I’m curious that you say that Genesis creationism is no longer mainstream Christian belief, and then you go on to question Darwinian evolution. How do mainstream Christians believe life started?
And, yes, I’m only here fairly infrequently so haven’t had a chance to ‘stray onto different subjects’ with you before. I didn’t mean to ‘criticise’ you specifically, it was just a throw away comment at the end (I have been criticised before (by Mr M) for straying off-topic. Sorry if you felt persecuted.