John Waters has a book to plug, and Derek Mooney comes out...
... as an atheist, that is, if I was understanding right DM's comment at the end of the discussion with JW, and some poor 'agnostic Catholic Quaker' (I think by the name of John McKenna). The last's thoughtful musings on his struggles between belief and unbelief seemed a very odd choice to 'put up against' Waters' full-bore reactionary nonsense, and our host's jovial apparent bemusement at the whole topic. (More than once he asked a 'how do you manage to go around thinking about this type of stuff?" sort of question.)
And having something to sell's about the best thing I can find to say about Waters' recent media interventions. Perhaps he needs the money, in these straitened economic times; certainly if he feels he's morally (or morale-ly) uplifting anyone, I reckon he's on a hiding to nothing. His central thesis seems to be 'atheists think they're so smucking fart', with a side of the recently 'popular' "Christians are such a poor persecuted minority" line of whine. In what I feel is a somewhat characteristically "writerly" way, his fix is not to come up with any better ideas to justify his religion, or religion in general -- or, heaven forfend, actually reconsider his own position -- but to throw several bucketfuls of prolix prose at the problem, thereby somehow seeking to edify the sheer emptiness of the same stuff that people so clearly found so inadequate in the first place. And not only are his arguments numbingly banal, they're startling in the dissonance of their juxtaposition. We went right from "Fianna Fail ministers are entitled to their agreed terms and conditions of employment" -- unlike, say, the rest of the public service, it would seem -- to hand-waving exhortations to look up from the humdrum mundanities of material concerns. And from suggestions that the religious thinking of many is too narrow and compartmentalised, to paeons of praise for Der Panzerpapst (a rigorous thinker, and a writer of weepingly beautiful encyclicals, Waters finds). For me most jarringly of all, was when he went right from a rhapsody about the smallness of a human being's place in the universe (or multiverse, he seemed to imply -- does he get into M-brane theory?), to the most idiotic of arguments-from-incredulity about the possibility of his own non-existence. Is even *he* paying any attention to what he's saying, at this point? What it comes down to is that he seems to think we have a choice between materialist triviality, and the most conventional of religious observance. Or given his track record, a mix'n'match between the two. Could he not possibly just consider some sort of 'neither of the above' possibility?
What a bollix.
And having something to sell's about the best thing I can find to say about Waters' recent media interventions. Perhaps he needs the money, in these straitened economic times; certainly if he feels he's morally (or morale-ly) uplifting anyone, I reckon he's on a hiding to nothing. His central thesis seems to be 'atheists think they're so smucking fart', with a side of the recently 'popular' "Christians are such a poor persecuted minority" line of whine. In what I feel is a somewhat characteristically "writerly" way, his fix is not to come up with any better ideas to justify his religion, or religion in general -- or, heaven forfend, actually reconsider his own position -- but to throw several bucketfuls of prolix prose at the problem, thereby somehow seeking to edify the sheer emptiness of the same stuff that people so clearly found so inadequate in the first place. And not only are his arguments numbingly banal, they're startling in the dissonance of their juxtaposition. We went right from "Fianna Fail ministers are entitled to their agreed terms and conditions of employment" -- unlike, say, the rest of the public service, it would seem -- to hand-waving exhortations to look up from the humdrum mundanities of material concerns. And from suggestions that the religious thinking of many is too narrow and compartmentalised, to paeons of praise for Der Panzerpapst (a rigorous thinker, and a writer of weepingly beautiful encyclicals, Waters finds). For me most jarringly of all, was when he went right from a rhapsody about the smallness of a human being's place in the universe (or multiverse, he seemed to imply -- does he get into M-brane theory?), to the most idiotic of arguments-from-incredulity about the possibility of his own non-existence. Is even *he* paying any attention to what he's saying, at this point? What it comes down to is that he seems to think we have a choice between materialist triviality, and the most conventional of religious observance. Or given his track record, a mix'n'match between the two. Could he not possibly just consider some sort of 'neither of the above' possibility?
What a bollix.