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Monday, August 28, 2006
Out of the Mouths of Babes
Belle is reshelving a bunch of books and Zoë (age 5) is helping. Zoë’s eye is caught by the striking Breughel image on the cover of George Steiner’s After Babel. (I don’t have it in front of me, but - if memory serves - it is this one.) Zoë wants to know the story, so Belle tells her the story of the Tower of Babel. Zoë [thinks]: “I used to believe in God, but now that I know he’s crazy, I don’t believe in him any more.”
Comments
Hmmm . . . ‘zis picture a metaphor for the demise of Theory?
At the age of 18 months or so my son Max kept removing from the shelf a book by a former colleague of mine named Heather James. The book, which I quite admire, is called Shakespeare’s Troy. A friend had to explain out to me that Max was intrigued by the image of the Trojan horse on the cover and decided to flip through the book looking for more pictures.
Does this mean that I shouldn’t believe in Noam Chomsky any more either?
The crazy God is the only one worth believing in.
(Now I’m picturing Jesus in the Temple throwing around tables and yelling, “You wanna get nuts?! Let’s get nuts!")
The idea of a crazy God does have a certain appeal.
C. S. Lewis famously argued that Jesus was “Lord, Liar or Lunatic”. Are we allowed to pick more than one of these?
Alternative take on the gospels: Jesus slowly descends into paranoid schizophrenia, and starts to suspect his friends of being informants for the Romans (in additions to the hallucinations, violent outbursts, delusions of being the Messiah etc). Just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you: Judas really is an undercover informant. Realising that Jesus is about to do something suicidal, Judas decides it’s time to call in the cops…
On an obliquely related note: I highly recommend the new film of Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly”
"The crazy God is the only one worth believing in.”
Well put, Adam. Credo quia absurdum and all that.
At the very end of this clip we have a child’s assent to an adult’s observation about god:
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And it starts with astronomy, so it resonates with Adam’s post.
“I used to believe in God, but now that I know he’s crazy, I don’t believe in him any more.”
Not so far from Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov, is it; simply insert a conditional and a few more modifiers thusly:
“I used to believe in God, but I realized if He exists, He must be crazy, sinister, sadistic and chaotic, so I don’t believe in Him any more.”
et voila! Ivan, if not Voltaire himself.
Adam’s middle paragraph about Jesus and Judas could almost be a back-cover blurb for Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation.
What a great video clip.