Friday, July 18, 2008

A revelatory event

If you haven't yet seen the video spoofing Richard Dawkins and the amazing response of Dawkins and his crowd in not knowing they were being spoofed, see Mark Shea's excellent summary: Not So Bright | Catholic Exchange

This is one of those events which show us things about our humanity we half knew but could never entirely grasp without the revelatory power of the event. Now, the whole Dawkins-atheist religion is laid bare, humiliated for being out of touch with humanity.

Reason alone cannot do the revealing job because reason is always a distillation of previous events. Revelation into the paradoxical human tensions of the present day requires the coming together of new scenes that relate parties in new and unpredictably revealing ways.

A new and successful event like this video, thanks to the amazingly blind response to it, should have the revelatory power of an event like Cortes defeating Moctezuma. But it's one of the sad facts of our history-bound humanity that the losers often take a long time to realize they've lost. And sometimes the winners, while masters of one event, are not all they think they are.

3 comments:

Dag said...

Well, maybe that wasn't quite your funniest post to date but it was certainly intriguing. In fact, it is remarkably interesting.

I never know what to do with this sort of thing. I sit and ponder for hours and sometimes start to respond, which, days later, I find I'm not near completing. Nice.

truepeers said...

Funny, you want funny?

If I were always on, the wit o' the morn, I wouldn't have to write this off-line stuff!! Thanks!

truepeers said...

So Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens walk into a bar...

...Everyone laughs, raises a glass, "five stars!" "on the house!!!" "on me!!!"

Sorry, that's the best I've got right now...

(The Dawkins crowd originally gave the big thumbs up on Youtube to the video mocking them...)