From Charles Oliver, “Brickbats,” Reason (May 2006 print edition):
When Scottish developer Marcus Salter started to move a big rock in the middle of his development, neighbors in St. Fillians complained he would disturb the fairies that lived underneith it. At first he thought they were joking. Then the local community council started talking about complaining to the authorities, and he decided to have the project redesigned to leave the rock in place.
Reached for comment, former Taliban government mouthpiece and current Yale undergrad Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi gave the St. Fillian’s community his blessing, noting that under rocks are precisely where fairies belong—even if reaching such a happy resolution means sometimes having to help the rocks along by physically collapsing them on the fairies (who, he noted, should be properly hog tied to prevent them from trying to scoot away and make filthy man love in the Kush).
I get a warm fuzzy feeling from this sort of thing. There’s not enough magic in our lives outside of baseball season.
Until, that is, the fairies start telling the fairy believers to cut the heads off of fairy heretics.
Oh sure. It’s all a big joke until the milk turns sour and the pixies start raping your cat…
You don’t think my sucubus was under that rock do you? I could get real pissed if that was the case.
You should be ashamed of yourself, Jeff. It’s one thing to execute a fag if you’re brown and Allah commands it, but to ridicule the practice itself is beyond the pale. Not everyone believes in JEWhovah and Western values, so just keep your fetish for universal individual rights to yourself, oppressor.
Not just scholarship, but also, I hope, affirmative action. Those that are unfortunate enough to be educated to believe in mythology rather than secularism should be afforded more access to learning. Whe shouldn’t hold them back because they believe in fairies and adam and eve, rather we should help them overcome their stunted educations.
Sayed then quoted from the Koran: And the trees and rocks will cry out, “Behind me is a fairy, come and kill him!”
The poor guy’s just trying to help some fairies get their rocks off. It doesn’t seem very tolerant of the St. Fillians community to, uh, frustrate his efforts to lend a, um, helping hand, so to speak.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
So it’s not the Hindu Kush anymore? Just asking.
Thanks a lot, Joe. You know how embarassing it is to find oneself laughing out loud at a computer screen?
Usually I can count on this site for wry grins, but actual laughter? Now you’ve gone too far.
Uh, Sayed? It’s not that kind of fairy.
And you’d better hope this isn’t read in certain parts of Iceland, Jeff.
Hee hee hee. Consider this an old-fashioned trackback.
Personally, having once seen what I can only describe as a faerie (I actually thought it was just a lightning bug until it flew through a closed window), I would leave the stone be. I would imagine that many of the people there have relatives who have seen a faerie or think they have.
I think the Yale admissions office is still trying to decide between “grief pimp” Cindy Sheehan and ex-Homeland Security Deputy Brian Doyle for the last spot on their acceptance list at this time.
. . .your faith in reason is touching.
My pleasure, Bezuhov. Or it would be, if I could just get a hand from Mr. Salter, too …
TW: building
oh, the frisson …
You do both faith and reason a disservice with this sort of crap.
My goodness, actus–I rarely see you so worked up. Yet another tick in the ‘actus is a live person, and not a ten-line perl script’ column.
Though the glib sanctimony is an equal point in the other column, I’m afraid. (How can someone who advocates ‘secularism’ over ‘mythology’ care what violence I do or do not do to the idea of ‘faith’? What is faith to you–seriously? How do you define faith, exactly?)
A *disservice*? How so? Because I find it deliciously naive that you think only people who don’t know any better–that is, who don’t have your education or mine–believe irrational things? Because I’m amused at a so-called champion of reason so impervious to doubt that he/she can speak without irony of enthustiastically proselytizing for ‘secularism’ rather than ‘mythology’–and education as a path which, properly followed, leads to only one *correct* set of beliefs? I don’t know who to direct you to first–Hume, William James, William Barrett, Kierkegaard, Sartre–but then, given that I don’t believe that even the best argument from any of them will shake your *faith*, I probably won’t bother.
Besides–I still can’t shake the unnerving suspicion that I’m talking to a Turing machine that was fed half a shelf of Chomsky’s library.
And talking to inanimate objects is–well–*weird*.
Faith and reason are different things. You mix them up with that sort of junk.
Well, reason doesn’t end up with beliefs. That’s faith.