Anything Can Be Made To Sound Ridiculous

The old reductio ad absurdum: stating an opponent's argument in a weak manner in order to build an easily destroyed strawman.

 

I suppose we've all been guilty of that at one time or another. For some, sadly, it is a habit. Hopefully most of us just sometimes get carried away with our enthusiasm.

 

I did a Google search of the phrase "anything can be made to sound ridiculous" and found a rich and colorful selection of appeals to that thought variously stated:

 

Anything can be made to sound ridiculous if said with a certain tone....

 

Anything can be made to sound ridiculous if it is sufficiently distorted....

 

Anything can be made to sound ridiculous if you're willing to lie about it....

 

Anything can be made to sound ridiculous. A Rembrandt etching could, after all, be described as a piece of torn paper into which a scratched piece of metal has been pressed.

 

Almost anything can be made to sound ridiculous by dumbing it down in such a
manner.

 

By the way, notice how anything can be made to sound ridiculous if you phrase it the right way?

 

Anything can be made to sound ridiculous by gutting them of their meaning and
value....

 

Anything can be made to sound ridiculous if you try.

 

Almost anything can be made to sound ridiculous when it is mocked by
exaggerating it to the extreme.

 

Anything can be made to sound ridiculous and petty if the debaters are skilled
enough at rhetoric.

 

But anything can be made to sound ridiculous if it is taken out of context and
subjected to the reductionist approach.

 

Part of my point is that anything can be made to sound ridiculous or terrible if you word it the right way, and focus on some detail, taken out of context.

 

Using your sarcasm, anything can be made to sound ridiculous.

 

Anything can be made to sound ridiculous or conspiratorial if you try hard enough.

 

Well yeah, I mean if you're gonna cherrypick quotes like that, then anything can be made to sound ridiculous.

 

Anything can be made to sound ridiculous. It's in the eye of the beholder.

 

I think we bloggers are prone to doing this, especially when we are riding our hobby horses. Alas, we are only human.

A Premonition In The 1936 Gainesville, Georgia Tornado

One of the most devastating tornadoes to strike in the United States took place on April 6, 1936, in Gainesville, Georgia. The official death toll of over 200 people in a city of (in 1936) 17,000 does not include its black residents, who, due to the shameful racism of the era, were not counted at all. Also, the collapse of the Cooper Pants Factory, causing the deaths of approximately seventy persons, still stands as the highest count for single building deaths due to tornado.

 

According to accounts of the catastrophe, which can easily be found online, the assault on Gainesville was actually the result of two separate tornadoes that converged on the downtown area. So catastrophic was the event people still talk about it today.

 

In fact, just this week, Johnny Vardeman of the Gainesville Times wrote a column devoted to it, from which I take the following story.

 

One of those who did not survive the deadly tornado was Mary Hudgins Evans. She worked in downtown Gainesville in the offices of the Wright's Ice Cream Parlor.

 

On the night of April 5 she had a premonitive dream which she shared with her husband. In the dream, Mrs. Evans' mother visited her to let her know that she was coming for her. She told her husband that he would now be responsible for raising their young child.

 

The deadly tornadoes struck the next morning, shortly after 8 a.m. Some ten minutes before the tornadoes, Mrs. Evans placed a final call to her husband in order to say one last good-bye to him.

 

This is the type of tale - of which I could give hundreds, many from my own experience - that convinces me there is more than meets the eye in this complex Cosmos of ours.

 

It leads me to believe the Cosmos is the product of a Master Mind and that our minds are but small parts of that Master Mind, that we can in some sense tap into that Master Mind and receive direction.

Is God In The Details?

What if the Ultimate Intelligence - allow me for simplicity's sake to use the popular word God here - determined to bring about highly intelligent creatures of reason capable of developing God-consciousness? 

 

What if the only true theology were Natural Theology. Let's define that:

 

Oxford Dictionary:  Theology or knowledge of God based on observed facts and experience apart from divine revelation.

 

Dicitonary.com: theology based on knowledge of the natural world and on human reason apart from revelation.

 

I included both of those definitions because they allude to all the things I feel are important in consideration of the God question: observance of the natural world, personal experience, and human reason.

 

Humans have attempted to cobble together a metaphysical spirituality from those raw data for a long time now. I think the metaphysicians have mostly done a wonderful job.

 

But then there is that bugbear known as "special revelation" that also arose in the distant past and that complicates matters and haunts us to this day. Special Revelation is the source of religious tension (religious tradition versus religious tradition) and even the war between believers and unbelievers. (On that latter I would suggest that if we just limited the discussion to observance of the natural world, personal experience, and human reason, at most we would have a difference of opinion about whether or not there is indeed a Big Picture, or purpose in reality.)

 

I believe we can explain much with Natural Theology and make good sense of reality by its application. However, the atheist also can make use of the tools of Natural Theology to build their case for God being just a figment of the human imagination.

 

Perhaps our personal experience informs our reason and tips the scale one way or the other.

 

Believers feel that they have metaphorically put out their hands and "touched the face of God," while the unbelievers have not and feel the believers are guilty of indulging in wishful thinking.

 

Reason of course is a grand thing. But as Albert Einstein once observed, "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." Is that merely a fluke? Do my feelings inform my reason here or is it the other way around?

 

Then there is observing the world around us. But believers and unbelievers alike tend to find what they are looking for. Those minds of scientific bent have both found and not found God through their telescopes, microscopes, and petri dishes. Avid naturalists both find God or fail to find God in their studies. So it goes.

 

The Christian religious philosopher and theologian Augustine wrote something I stumbled on many years ago and which I have contemplated much:

 

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

 

What if it were true? What if God-consciousness were the goal?

Listening For The Divine

I used to say (and think I'm ready to return to saying it) that it isn't that God doesn't speak to us anymore; it's that we just don't take time to listen.

 

That thought originally occurred to me at the time in my life when finally I had come to realize that the Bible - noble as it is in many respects yet desperately flawed in others - just could not be God's revelation to human kind.

 

I had lost my faith in the Bible God, or the God of the popular religious conception, but still felt surely there must be something powerful, even majestic behind everything. I remained unsettled in my God-thinking for a long time, then slowly moved ever closer to atheism as I waded into freethought.

 

But it was silence that brought me back to my roots. It was quiet reflection that allowed me to get in touch with the all-connecting power of the Cosmos. Only when I shut out the cares of life and its many distractions could I tap into, what is for me at least, an inner source of truth.

 

In this I don't think I am alone.

 

Theodore Parker, the renowned nineteenth century liberal theologian, in one of his prayers said this:

 

A greater revelation is Your still small voice, which whispers in our soul that all this magnificence is but a drop of You, a little sparklet that has fallen from Your presence, O Central Fire and Radiant Light of all. The outward things are but a whisper of Your wisdom.

 

Then there is also a lovely Native American prayer that has been variously attributed which begins: "Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the winds and whose breath gives life to the whole world...."

 

Yes, Great Spirit, I too think I have heard your voice. I contemplate this wonderful Cosmos and I too desire that you would "make me wise that I may understand what You have hidden in every leaf and every rock."

 

My choice is to listen for that small voice and not ignore it away. My life has been energized and enriched by the thought of divine purpose. My sense of responsibility to others has deepened because I no longer feel like an insignificant speck among insignificant specks adrift in a meaningless universe.