Koyaanisqatsi

What are you boys laughing at? And if you say Jimmy Fallon, I'll know you're lying!
- Homer Simpson, Home Away From Homer, first aired May 2005

... which btw is a vastly underrated episode. Broad satire and stereotype is largely replaced by irony and a deeper examination of human nature, so it is criticised for slowness and lack of humour. Even the pseudo-"porn" scene is criticised for, well, not being more pornographic ... on a prime time show aired without parental warnings!

Because the objection to Ned's moustache has no grounds beyond "hippie lip" it is seen as pointless and humourless, when in fact the humour lies in its being one of many equally pointless social taboos, in real life as throughout the Simpsons canon. (Remember Don Mattingly's sideburns in the Simpsons softball episode?) This time, it happens to be perfect Ned who runs afoul of it ... for no reason whatsoever.

Reasons are easy ways out, which allow us to laugh and point at communities whose reasons we don't share and therefore find absurd, without ever having to question our own a prioris. The Simpsons chooses the more challenging road, not once, but repeatedly.

Of course, if you take that line of thinking just a little bit further, the point hits very hard: why should some social taboos be proper and others be pointless?

Another common objection is continuity: why should Ned object to shaving his moustache off in Humbletown, when he did not object to shaving it off over a deal with Homer? But ... a deal he made of his own free will, as opposed to a policy socially forced upon him. Should that make a difference?

Why this particular straw that broke the camel's back? Surely Homer has done worse things to Flanders, repeatedly? The proverb itself calls it a "straw", something of negligible weight that makes no difference by itself, but all the difference when added to the rest. Nor is this particular straw such a negligible one: not when, for the first time, Ned realises that the entire community shares Homer's values more than his, and that Ned himself is so far outside them as to be a common target of mockery. No longer is it simply Homer who takes advantage of him. In one step, he has gone from simply Homer's dupe to utterly alone in the entire community -- and at that point, what remains to anchor him to it?

Having decided to leave, having joined a community that he discovers too late shares all his values but a single key one (and which chooses to ostracise him for it), Ned now faces a new choice: to stay in a place where everyone else looks down on him, or to return to a place where, even being alone, he can claim the moral high ground over everyone else? Lisa has also faced a variant of this choice when she was jumped to third grade, and quickly found that she was no longer at the top of her class. Would she choose to stay in third grade?

Principal Skinner: And Lisa, you have a choice. You may continue to be challenged in third grade, or return to second grade and be merely a big fish in a little pond.
Lisa: Big fish! Big fish!

Why do we want to be spoon-fed everything? Why do we come to the television determined to turn our brains off? It is not as though most of us worked all that hard during the workday. Eight hours a day of desk work? and over a quarter of that spent slacking on the Internet? Talk to me after you spend dawn to dusk for even one harvest week working in agriculture.

But Fallon's humour ... sorry, I don't see it. Even when you tell exactly the same types of jokes as those which had been written for Conan O'Brien, you manage to wring all the laughter out of it, mostly because you laugh so hard at them yourself. Your Saturday Night Live co-actors did not care for this habit either. Do you intend to keep being the guy next to the water cooler whom everyone avoids because he keeps laughing uproariously at his own weak jokes?

To you, o Roots, you are not legendary. Max is legendary, he worked with Bruce Springsteen as part of the E Street Band long before he ever set foot on Late Night With Conan O'Brian -- and he was wise enough to understand that "legendary" is never something you call yourself, only something you can earn. You have not earned it. Maybe someday you will, but that day is not today.

There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen. In some places there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poictiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.
— John Calvin, Traité Des Reliques

To which Rohault de Fleury replied by making detailed measurements of all known fragments of the True Cross in his Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion. He assumed pinewood for density -- others identified olivewood instead -- and worked out an original total weight of around 75 kilograms and original volume of 0.178 cubic metres. The total volume of all his catalogued framents only came out to 0.004 cubic metres.

But set this aside for the moment. Set aside also the many questions of "whether". Assume, for the sake of argument, that what is venerated as the True Cross is everything it is claimed to be, a piece of wood literally baptised in the blood of the Lamb.

Assume even that everything Calvin says about the total number of fragments is true also.

Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the miraculous signs he had performed on the sick. Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. The Jewish Passover Feast was near.

When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, "Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?" He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.

Philip answered him, "Eight months' wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!"

Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, spoke up, "Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?"

Jesus said, "Have the people sit down." There was plenty of grass in that place, and the men sat down, about five thousand of them. Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.

When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, "Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted." So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
- John 6:1-13

Do you still refuse to understand?

Half a year after its release, I have finally seen Religulous. I knew Bill Maher is a skeptic, I had heard he might be a seeker, I know he has a sense of humour, and so I had come into the seeing with hopes. Nearly my first thought upon seeing what he was doing with his chosen subject matter was, ah, Karash Nekroden.

(Only you, Karash, did it much, much better. Ever though Maher had complete control of his medium and his editing -- if not of his interview subjects -- he came across much more weakly than you ever did.)

The song introducing the documentary is particularly ironic. There are agnostics who truly are seekers, but Bill Maher is not one of them. He prides himself in his doubt, in not knowing for sure – and yet there is one absolute certainty in his life: there is no God. This is not the sign of a doubter. His faith in rationality and atheism is every bit as strong – and as irrational – as the faith in God of those to whom he speaks.

Whether or not he realises it, he has come into his "seeking" with two a priori assumptions:

1. If a thing can be explained rationally, it does not require God.
2. If God is part of the explanation, it cannot be rational.

The net effect is perfectly circular. No one will ever be able to prove a God to Maher's satisfaction, because he has set up his criteria to exclude every possibility. Even were circumstance to jolt him outside the constraints of his rationality, he would probably dismiss anything observed at that time since he, the observer, would not be in a rational state of mind at the time of observation.

We all work from exactly the same base evidence. Beyond that, it is a matter of which "best" explanation you wish to put on it. In his documentary, Maher proved exactly one thing: that no matter what evidence were placed right in front of him, he would always find a way of explaining it that required no God. He would rather believe in blind chance and coincidence. In this, he believes, lies mankind's true salvation.

But we have already discovered what happens when the world around us is emptied of religious meaning. It has already happened once before, in the late 19th century. As faith in God ceased to have meaning, it was replaced by faith in nationalism. We know the outcome of that.

In our time, we have arrived at a three-way division. Some believe within a societally sanctioned structure. Some refuse to believe, with the fervency of true belief. While the basis of belief may pass unquestioned, the quality of belief for these two groups is constantly tested.

The third group seek or practice belief in their own fashion, with or without having tested the structure upon which they build all other aspects of their lives. Many among this group cherry-pick among the various choices. Some may choose to follow all aspects of bushido except obedience ... without which the entire structure of bushido collapses. Others pick and choose among structured and unstructured belief structures, finding those pieces that most appeal and rejecting those that don't, which are also often those which require the greatest personal effort.

To achieve what is worth achieving, be it mundane or a matter of faith, can be gained only by assaying the path of thorns: but every instinct in us cries out against any real challenge. We may claim to seek, but if it does not come easily and fit perfectly into what we already know, most of us quickly lose interest at best, attack at worst. It can be inviting guests into the controlled environment of The O'Reilly Factor, and cutting off the microphone of anyone who disagrees and can't be shouted down. It can even be as simple a thing as wondering why one-time friends, whether in person or on the Internet, have gone their own way: never once realising that the only time we sought their company was at our own convenience. If we don't make any kind of effort, in time their interests and convenience will diverge from ours. How can they not? Conveniences come with editing and an off switch. True friendships don't.

Writers too are susceptible, as are all storytellers. With total control over characters and plot, what more natural thing than to maneouvre each so that things work out as we think they should work?

But this tendency is not limited to fiction. Non-fiction is not an absolute. Like a pure letter, it means nothing without other letters. When telling the story of a 1930s social advocate, do we mention that he believed in eugenics, that most educated people of the time believed in eugenics, that he stopped believing in eugenics when he visited Nazi Germany, or omit the point altogether? Do we enter the discussion of eugenics more generally, and start questioning not only the morality of it, but also who will take the responsibility for paying for the children of those incapable of doing so themselves? (So many values erode instantly upon being confronted with the bill.)

Ultimately, every debater, every advocate, every lawyer, every documentary maker is a storyteller. We choose which facts to tell and how to present them. Exactly the same point can seem its own polar opposite when framed appropriately.

Yet one of the primary assumptions of rational thought is that facts are objective things which can stand on their own. If we are completely unaware -- or refuse to believe -- otherwise, then presentation takes on the quality of objective fact, and all observed things which differ from previous assumptions become absolute questions of truth or lie. Once established, so strong is this need for an absolute that if even a single piece of the core structure is found failing, we will reject the whole and swing, even more strongly, onto the opposite branch. Atheists become the deepest believers, and former believers the strongest atheists. Few reject smokers as strongly as the former smoker. Few are so biased as those who have been prejudiced against -- and few will see it less.

Brush all that aside, and cling unquestioningly to the primacy of rational thought. In the end, how can it not lead us to something like Religulous?