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Theologian and linguist of the week

6 May 2009 / / 7 Comments

I’ve done my best to ignore Not-Joe the Not-Plumber all these months because I’m hoping he’ll go away. Unfortunately, he keeps poking his head into the public discourse, and I’m going to comment this time because ignoring dangerous things can get you hurt somewhere along the line.

Joe’s used to speaking outside his expertise — he’s opined about politics and economics, badly — but now in his recent interview with Christianity Today, he takes a hatchet to gay people, and along the way, he makes a truly strange argument about language.

Interviewer: In the last month, same-sex marriage has become legal in Iowa and Vermont. What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?

Joe: At a state level, it’s up to them. I don’t want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it’s wrong. People don’t understand the dictionary—it’s called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It’s not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that. You know, God is pretty explicit in what we’re supposed to do—what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we’re supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I’ve had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they’re people, and they’re going to do their thing.

If I understand his argument, he’s saying that being queer is “strange and unusual”…because the dictionary says so. And there’s only one dictionary. You know — the dictionary! That one.

People have all kinds of attitudes about language, but it takes an especially obtuse individual to insist that a dictionary definition is the true meaning of a word. Words have different senses, as with ‘queer’. It’s hard to make the argument that the dictionary definition for one sense of a word should determine the meaning of a completely different sense. It’s like going to the bank for some cash and being surprised not to find a river there because ‘the dictionary’ says that a bank is ‘sloping land by a river’.

There’s a lot more to the article: his “state’s rights” trope that was used to justify racism in the South. And his admission that he’s ‘had some friends’ who are gay. (Why do they always say that?) But of course he won’t let his friends near the kids. Feel the Christian love.

A fool for his doctor

2 May 2009 / / Comments Off on A fool for his doctor

An article in the New York Times gives a clue as to why the Swine Flu is killing so many people in Mexico.

Mexicans may have been hit by a different, deadlier strain, or the flu may have infected more people who had other health problems, researchers speculate.

But one important factor may be the eclectic approach to health care in Mexico, where large numbers of people self-prescribe antibiotics, take only homeopathic medicine, or seek out mysterious vitamin injections. For many, only when all else fails do they go to a doctor, who may or may not be well prepared.

By now, the message should be out there: homeopathy doesn’t work. It’s had two hundred years to make its case, but we still have no reproducible studies that show that it works any better than a placebo.

In most circumstances, the consequences of using homeopathy (and indeed, any so-called alternative medicine) are not very serious, except for the waste of money. You take the pills, they do nothing, and you eventually get better on your own. But world-wide pandemics are not to be messed with, and relying on junk medicine can kill you.

Natural selection is great and all, but I’d rather not see it work this way.

Changes to the dictionary

30 April 2009 / / Comments Off on Changes to the dictionary

Language changes, but these lexicographers aren’t exactly happy about it.

My one beef: Did she say that English was a beautiful language? English? I don’t know of any standard to measure ‘beauty’ among languages, but I admire English more for its tenacity and size of vocabulary than for any aesthetic properties I can think of. In private moments I wonder that it works at all.

via Language Log

UWA Atheist meeting

27 April 2009 / / 4 Comments

The UWA Atheist and Agnostic Society is having its AGM on Tuesday, 28 April. We’ll be voting for committee members and probably having some discussion on some activities we’ll be having later on in the year. Talks? Debates? Piss-ups? All on the table.

If you’re a person of little faith (or better yet, none), why not drop on by? I’ve been acting as sort of an unofficial faculty supervisor, but I may well find myself on the committee.

That’s tomorrow at 1 PM, in General Purpose Building 2, room G16.

Teabagging in the corpus

22 April 2009 / / 3 Comments

Teabag Wednesday in the USA really only had two good outcomes: first, we got to mock libertarian/republican rightwads for their cluelessness on sexual terminology, and two, they got to add a new item to their vocabulary, if not to their repertoire.

As a linguist, I tend to be pretty hip with the lingo, taking into account how hard it is to be hip over 40 when we’re talking about sexual acts no one actually does. (Be honest.) But Dan Savage’s latest article has thrown me into a spin — he asserts (and he should know) that teabagging is performed by the one with the teabags. That is, a male teabags a female and not the reverse, as I had always assumed.

To teabag someone, you need a scrotum with which to teabag them: The teabagger dips sack; a teabaggee receives dipped sack. It’s a little confusing, I realize, in that it’s the opposite of a blowjob: The person with a dick in his or her mouth is giving the blowjob; the person being sucked is receiving the blowjob. But language is funny that way.

I tend to side with Mr Savage, not only because of his expertise on all matters sexual, but also for his influence in bending language to his will. He did, after all, introduce us to ‘santorum‘, and while it hasn’t lasted, I give him props for getting it as far as he has. What I mean is that if teabagging meant what I thought it did before he wrote his column, it has a good chance of meaning what he thinks it does by right about now.

I can’t be the only one to have had this misapprehension, if my reading of ‘Overheard in New York‘ is representative.

Husband: Then I can teabag you.
Wife: Wait. They go in my mouth. Wouldn’t I be teabagging you?
Husband: My teabags, my act of teabagging.
Wife: That doesn’t sound right.
Husband: Whatever. Teabagging will occur.

So, to the Corpus. I took a somewhat selective view of the top Google hits for the term “I was teabagging” (minus ‘halo’ — don’t ask).

This page has it both ways:

[A commenter]”So the other night I was teabagging the hell out of this sexy ass bitch…”

[Another commenter] “I love teabagging- well, at least in the sense that I always understood it: putting a man’s balls in your mouth while giving head.”

This page has a bit of both as well:

“Because you kept telling me how much you liked my big balls when I was teabagging you, and I’d hate to think that you’d lie to me at such an intimate moment.”

“I’d just like to point out that, in the phrase, “I was teabagging you,” the teabagger is not the one dipping the bag, but the one receiving it.”

The Official Ninja Forum is fairly unambiguous:

Long story short, while I was teabagging Ashley my male member slithered out of the apartment…

A Wonkette commenter agrees with Savage:

“Personally I wouldn’t want to teabag any of those people. If they’ve come from the CPAC conference, then who knows where their faces have been.”

A little more research turned up this interview from director John Waters, who popularised the term in his film ‘Pecker’.

“Teabagging” is by my definition the act of dragging your testicles across your partner’s forehead. In the UK it is dipping your testicles in your partner’s mouth.

Regional variation, but both definitions put the action onto the one with the teabags.

And can we really argue with Urban Dictionary? Teabagging as an action-with-nuts is far and away the most upvoted.

That does it. I’m convinced. Now to contemplate the physical improbabilities of the act, barring cold water. YMMV.

Patmos mushrooms are primo

17 April 2009 / / 1 Comment

Reverend Smith, creator of the Brick Testament, has finally gotten up to Revelation.

It’s surreal to see the beasts with the six wings and and eyes all over. Seeing them depicted makes me think, “I believed this?”


The greatest part for me was how Jesus was depicted. You will remember, of course, from your reading of Revelation that John says Jesus had eyes like fire, and a double-edged sword coming out of his mouth. Well, so it is here. Like, every time Jesus appears, there’s that sword!


Wonder if he has a hard time making himself understood. Perhaps he just has exceptionally clear diction.

Separated at birth

13 April 2009 / / 1 Comment

Dear Sister sent me a lovely Easter email with a picture of Jesus coming out of the tomb.


Phwoar, smells like someone’s been dead for three days in here.

Anyway, I’m no expert on Middle Eastern physiognomy, but I’m reasonably certain that Jesus wouldn’t have looked like the lead singer of Boston.

Backlash! The Freak-Outening

10 April 2009 / / 2 Comments

It’s been nothing but bad news for Christian bigots. First the ARIS poll shows that the percentage of self-identified Christians has dropped by 10% — oh my lack of god! from 86% to 76%! It can only mean one thing: the end of Christian America! Which is funny, because that’s the title of the Newsweek article.

Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler [president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary] posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. “A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us,” Mohler wrote. “The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.”

I hope I’m around when they get down to 50.

But that’s not all. It’s been an amazing week for marriage equality in America. Iowa allowed gay marriage, then Vermont, and finally D.C. has decided to accept the marriages of same-sex couples from out of state. I think the religious haters are used to thinking of the world as a cesspool of evil, and they love to imagine that (like Abraham in Sodom) they’re the only reason god is forestalling judgment on the nations. But I don’t think they’re used to seeing setbacks like this.

And predictably, they’re freaking. Never mind the laughable NOM ad. There’s a lot more crazy out there. Try this article on for size:

‘Gay marriage’ in Iowa more damaging than a 500-year flood
…
Flood waters erode the soil. “Gay marriage” erodes the soul. A flood impacts for a decade. “Same-sex marriage” destroys generations. A flood draws a community together. “Homosexual marriage” tears the family apart. Communities recover from floods. The promotion of un-natural unions has an eternal consequence.

As always, vague on details. How does homosexual marriage tear anyone’s family apart? How does it destroy generations? Aren’t you worried of running out of scare quotes?

As a native Iowan and as a pastor, I cannot remain silent. In light of this, I would exhort the church in Iowa to do three things:

— First, we must honor biblical marriage in the church and in the home.

Hawt! Polygamy and concubines! Oh wait, that’s Old Testament. What about New Testament marriage? Hmm. Paul says don’t bother. Hmm. The bible doesn’t sound too traditional to me.

But the prize for delusional pattern matching goes to Morality in Media President Bob Peters in his essay ‘Connecting the Dots: The Link Between Gay Marriage and Mass Murders’. He argues that mass murders are caused by things he’s afraid of: black people (and their rap music), sexual liberation, and gay people.

The underlying problem is that increasingly we live in a ‘post-Christian’ society, where Judeo-Christian faith and values have less and less influence. Among other things, Judaism and Christianity taught that murder was wrong and that included murder motivated by anger, hatred and revenge. Both religions also taught that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves and to forgive others.

People God kills in the Bible: 2.3 million plus.

“For many citizens, what has replaced Judeo-Christian faith and values is the secular value system that is reflected in films, rap/music lyrics, and videogames and on TV and now the Internet, where the taking of human life for just about any reason is commonplace and is often portrayed in an appealing manner and in realistic detail. Murder motivated by hatred and revenge is also justified.

Yeah, I was just getting ready to watch some murder on the Internet.

“This secular value system is also reflected in the ‘sexual revolution,’ which is the driving force behind the push for ‘gay marriage;’ and the Iowa Supreme Court decision is another indication that despite all the damage this revolution has caused to children, adults, family life and society (think abortion, divorce, pornography, rape, sexual abuse of children, sexually transmitted diseases, trafficking in women and children, unwed teen mothers and more), it continues to advance relentlessly.

Yep, an unbroken line straight from gay marriage to mass murder.

People see what they want to see, of course, but religious people are especially skilled at it. The defense of their illusory worldview depends on being able to see illusory patterns, and they must defend the worldview because without it nothing makes sense to them. And it’s even worse than usual because, like I say, the latest setbacks on gay marriage has hit these believers especially hard, leaving them without a feeling of control. There’s a pretty interesting psychological study on the effects of lack of control here. From the abstract:

Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions.

It’s making them even more delusional than even they would otherwise be.

I hope the next state to allow gay marriage does it within the next month or so. The bigots will be so rattled, you’ll be able to hear them coming down the street.

Spell check madness at the Daily Looniverse

8 April 2009 / / 3 Comments

Can anyone at BYU score me a copy of the Daily Universe from a couple of days ago?

Thousands of issues of Brigham Young University’s student newspaper were pulled from newsstands because a front-page photo caption misidentified leaders of the Mormon church as apostates instead of apostles.

An apostate is a person who has abandoned religious faith, principles or a cause.

The photo in The Daily Universe on Monday was of members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a governing body of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at the weekend general conference.

The caption called the group the “Quorum of the Twelve Apostates.” The mistake happened when a copy editor ran a computer spell check and apostate was suggested as the replacement for a misspelling of apostle.

Make sure you follow the Apostates. A message from the Crotch of Jesus Thrust in Leather-gay Pants.

Missed it by that much

6 April 2009 / / 2 Comments

I found this rather amusing.

Mecca mosques ‘wrongly aligned’

Some 200 mosques in Islam’s holiest city, Mecca, point the wrong way for prayers, reports from Saudi Arabia say.

All mosques have a niche showing the direction of the most sacred Islamic site, the Kaaba, an ancient cube-like building in Mecca’s Grand Mosque.

But people looking down from recently built high-rises in Mecca found the niches in many older mosques were not pointing directly towards the Kaaba.

Some worshippers are said to be anxious about the validity of their prayers.

Oh, I’m sure their prayers will have exactly the same efficacy as always.

I suppose every religion will find itself somewhere on the literal/metaphorical continuum. But a discovery like this shows why the whole literalism thing is untenable. Suppose your god is a hyper-literalist, and needs to have everything just so before he’ll listen to you. In which case, a simple slip-up like this will invalidate all your prayers for millennia. Plus your god is a jerk.

Unless you figure your god will allow you a ‘gimme’ because your intentions were good. In which case, the need for super-orthodoxy collapses because the big guy will come through for you no matter what you do. Seems the letter-of-the-law people have made an awfully slippery slope for themselves.

UPDATE: I’ve changed my mind. Ultra-orthodoxy is the ultimate rationale for why religious methods don’t seem to work. The religion didn’t fail. You failed for not wearing quite the right shade of yellow or not doing the little dance properly. And if your god decides to honour your request anyway, despite your unworthiness, well, it just shows how cool he is.

It’s perfect, isn’t it?

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