Bugger, no, that's Infamy, isn't it. Never mind. I thought I'd wrap up last post's anguish by recycling the comments. (Neat trick, huh? Bet no-one's ever thought of it before.)
It seems to me that blasphemy is only possible under a limited set of conditions. For a start, you can't blaspheme if you believe. Contradiction in terms. (Could you do it if your relationship with God was so bad all you wanted to do was diss the Deity? That might work.) And neither can you blaspheme if you don't believe. Belief systems become just more stories, as likely to be satirized as any other. (Well, more so, natch, because the reaction is likely to be more pronounced.) I think you could do it if you once had a faith and then lost it. Which would be me, not that anyone in RL knows this. And I suppose you could do it by accident - y'know, one man's enquiry into the nature of faith is another man's blasphemy.
Tim said talked about irreverence, irony, sarcasm and self-deprecation as defining characteristics of British culture. He's right, of course, and the thing about all these is that, in order for them to be understood and appreciated, the audience has to have an understanding of what is being poked fun at. F'rinstance, rhe more you keep up with current events, the funnier the News Quiz is. I used to get a bit fascist about The Sopranos, and wanted every potential viewer to take some sort of test, to make sure they got it, and didn't take it at face value. Therein lies a danger - anybody without a grounding RE hearing a blasphemy will take it at face value, and their understanding / potential faith will be skewed or destroyed. Children would be particularly at risk.
I've only seen a bit of the site in question, but there was one illustration, ironically the one the rector's wife sent back as one which made her laugh immoderately, which struck me as hilarious, but also made me slightly uncomfortable. It's this one. I don't want to blaspheme, I really don't, so I guess if I'm guilty it's because I peddle the stuff rather than cook it up myself.
Yup, still going to Hell.
PS - Dave, where did Jesus use humour, exactly? Absolutely nothing springs to mind.
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6 comments:
Ah well, of course humour in that time and place might not be recognisable to us today. He didn't tell knock knock jokes. Somewhere I've got a book all about the humour of the Bible.
A lot of it involves exaggeration. So don't try to pick the bit of sawdust out of your neighbour's eye when you've got a great big plank in your own eye. It's a silly image - of course we couldn't get a whole plank in there.
Just look at the human body and tell me it wasn't made by a God with a sense of humour.
Does it still count as blasphemy if you put a positive adjective in front of the deity? For instance: 'Good God, I've just caught my gonads in my fly.'
oh I had something really intelligent to add (*ahem, clears throat, cough cough*) but now my mind is tracking on knock knock jokes
I'll spare you, since I've got a terrible sense of humour
mind you, even I could see the funny side of the lego
what I did think tho is how many amazingly talented people there are out there. . . and thank (insert name of your favourite deity) for the internet
carry on up the khyber, is it? i love that one.
i don't expect god is too bothered about this kind of 'blasphemy' - if he were, i'm sure my ave maria alarm clock, bought for me (in a holy kitsch competition) by one of the other mums on a school trip to lourdes, wouldn't still be working. it would surely have been struck by lightning ... (and me with it). it's people - mostly silly ones, who get themselves all worked up about it.
if you look at it from the point of view of the sanhedrin, jesus was the all time champ of irreverence.
Dave, thank you. If you stumble across the book, and could take the trouble to give me more details, I'll be grateful. Of course, it could pop up on your blog sidebar thing if I'm lucky.
100 words - save a place for me if you get there first.
ILTV - knock knock.
MM, I have a very cross-looking wind-up nun (two inches high, made of plastic! Get a grip!) who spits fire out of her mouth when you get her going. Oh alright, not so far removed from the real thing then.
FN, they really didn't like Him, did they? Trouble is, two thousand years later all we get is the way the story turns out, and we lose all the atmospherel and any sense of just how worrying the Man was. I heard a fairly good sermon the other day, picking apart the image of The Good Shepherd, and how far removed our cosy image is from the dangerous reality, when shepherds generally didn't mix with society, and were respected, valued and feared rather than cuddled up to. No wonder Christianity struggles, when all context is lost.
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