Monday, September 12, 2005
Sometimes Satire Is Just Ignorant
To write good satire, you have to have a good and thorough understanding of that which you satirize. Clearly this guy does not.
Who is it that's not very bright here?
All of which has come as something of a shock to Bobby Henderson, an unemployed physics graduate from Oregon. According to Mr Henderson, the FSM - as His Noodliness is sometimes known - "revealed himself to me in a dream". Like most mysterious prophets, Mr Henderson communicates with the outside world only occasionally, although this may be more to do with having only one telephone line to his home in the small town of Corvallis and a Google e-mail account swamped by hundreds of messages every day."Creationism" may hold to the young earth stuff, but ID does not. All this satire, all these electrons, all these smug people thinking they are so smart -- and they are aimed at the wrong target.
Not that he ever saw himself as a rival to Mohammed or Abraham. The divine inspiration that came to the 25-year-old one night earlier this year was originally intended as a satire on attempts by some Christian groups to change the way evolution is taught in science classes in some American schools.
In particular, Mr Henderson was taking aim at the concept of Intelligent Design, or ID, which provides a supposedly scientific alternative to the Old Testament belief that God created the world in six days and nights, but which dismisses most of the fossil record as false and which relies on the Earth being far younger than geological evidence shows.
Who is it that's not very bright here?
