Last night, Richard Dawkins was interviewed on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, and again mentioned the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
You can’t disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster. – Richard Dawkins
The FSM comment is at about 1:50.
[youtube]RA9EiSJaXww[/youtube]
I personally liked the interview. The whole point of the Colbert Report is to mock real news shows and “attacks” guests just as Bill O’Reilly and others do. Its Sattire, plain and simple. If it frustrates anyone, thats kind of sad. Its a joke after all, kind of like a certain deity with a noodly appendage.
Anywho, I thought Dawsons points were very interesting and I’m excited to read his new book. The concept that he broke no new ground isn’ relevant becasue no one breaks new ground now a days in the field of Religion. Its a dying field so to speak.
~Ravenbleu
Oh, come on! you people prob don’t know what Colbert is about if you are complaining about his style. It’s clear even Dawkins was playing into his game.
that was frickin hilarious! i’ve read several of his books and enjoyed them mightly, but this is the first time i’ve seen dawkins speak and i liked it. this was also my first visit to you sight and as a closet pirate meself, methinks i’ll be a convertin’ to the pasta view.
Colbert, like Jon Stewart, never learned the difference between wit and wise-assery. The latter is easy. Wit is hard. It isn’t hard to do a wise-ass-expression camera take and wait till everyone starts laughing. Wit means risking maybe you won’t get the laugh.
Tom Lehrer–he was witty. Mark Russell is wise-ass. The Onion is witty. And sometimes also wise-ass.
But you don’t get to stay on mainstream corporate media feeds unless you pitch to the lowest common denominator, while telling them they’re the smartest people in the world. Advertising revenues are plotted and transacted using statistical measures of central tendency, and that means how many eyes get delivered to a particular show. Marketing people have this all worked out–take a graduate degree in mass communications research, and you’ll learn all the tactics and strategies that turn broadcasting into a vast wasteland peopled by wingnuts, dipsticks, and idiots of all ilk. The approaches are the same ones used in religion. And religious broadcasting.
This is why much wittier people, like CBC’s Mary Walsh or Colin Mochrie, or BBC’s Jennifer Saunders, aren’t invited to do Comedy Central political humor. Mary Walsh could chew Stewart, Colbert, the whole lot, up and spit ‘em out in ANY of her razor-tongued Maritimes personae.
I did see Colbert do a guest stint on “Whose Line” a few years ago, and he was amusing. Not funny. Amusing. And kind of nice. Collaborated well with the other comedians, but was more of a beta than a Colin Mochrie or Wayne Brady alpha trickster.
What I don’t understand is why people don’t realize that O’Reilly, Limbaugh, and that insane woman with the rictus for a mouth ARE satire. Like Mark Twain said, the US rarely, if ever, turns out good satirists because our nation itself is satire. If people on the “left” would develop a sense of humor, these idiots would be laughed right out of business. But no. We take them seriously.
Which is precisely why Cheney and Rove et al. set them up there. To draw fire.
Dawkins is OK…but doesn’t understand the rhetorical form known as the “pathetic fallacy.” This deficiency in language education leads him to some hilarious, imprecise statements about how the world works.
I’m much more fond of Niles Eldridge, who is no stylist, but a much better atheist than Gould ever was. Current favorite writer on these topics (evolution and religion) has got to be Pascal Boyer, though at times even he slops up his rhetoric with really poor choices of metaphor.
Getting free of metaphor and rhetoric in science and reason is a topic all its own. This is why mathematicians like to believe they’ve created (they’d say discovered) the perfect language for such things. Though it seems pretty clear to me that math is an expression of the human mind’s feature of pattern recognition, and generation of patterns where there aren’t any (one of the psychoneural features that also leads to superstition, and religion).
what happened to video? anyone have a copy? I needs my video hit of His noodly goodness.
Wit for wit’s sake is boring and about as useful as alliteration. Style and skill are wasted if the topic/subject/art form are not relevant, genuinely expressive, or actually useful. (Example, I don’t care if Sting, for instance, didn’t have the power and range of a classically trained opera singer, (many of) his songs were great.) Jon and Steven do a great job bringing topics of the day to light in a fun and provocative manner.
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The most impresive thing about Jon and Steven is how they handle guests who are definitely in the other camp.
@ All pastafarians, atheists, humanists, Brights, and free-thinkers,
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Ahoy there!
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I’m copying this post onto a few threads because I’d like as many people as possible to notice it. (Bobby, if you should read this, is there any chance of a new thread?)
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You might have spotted on these pages Richard Dawkins’ high-profile references to the FSM, unmasking himself as at the very least an honorary pastafarian and certainly a friend of pirates the world over. He’s done his bit for the FSM – here’s a chance to return the favour.
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His many books on evolution and, in particular, his recent book ‘The God Delusion’ have influenced a lot of people here.
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Anyway, here in Britain, one of our national newspapers, The Daily Telegraph, in conjunction with Morgan Stanley, is running the third annual ‘Great Britons’ awards. People are invited to vote for the British person they think has been the most ‘Great’ (somehow) in each of seven categories.
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Me salty guts tell me that a hearty lot of pirates’ll want to support their own and put their cutlasses behind Richard Dawkins, by far and away Britain’s noodliest man of 2006, and doubtless also he of the biggest meatballs.
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I nominated him earlier today, in the ‘Campaigning’ category. You can add your nominations by visiting greatbritons.org. It takes barely a minute and might help one of the FSM’s finest sea-dogs to the gain the legendary status he deserves. You can even put in a 50-word explanation of why he gets your vote, which would probably strengthen the case (if you’ve anything to say). If you’d like to know more about him, try visiting richarddawkins.net.
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Douglas Adams fans might like to note that Dawkins and Adams were close friends and that Adams credited Dawkins’ books ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ and ‘The Selfish Gene’ as having influenced his reasoning towards atheism. Dawkins wrote a ‘Lament for Douglas’ immediately after Adams’ death, and delivered a eulogy at his funeral.
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I’ve a second reason for recommending this. The Telegraph ran an article by regular columnist Charles Moor on Saturday that dismissed ‘The God Delusion’ as ‘fashionable’ and gave a very selective, wilfully interpreted representation of its content. It’s a good newspaper but pretty thoroughly conservative – not an obvious place for pastafarianism to thrive. In light of this, I think it doubly worthwhile to demonstrate the strength of support that Richard enjoys among the world’s many pirates to the Telegraph.
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(Note – I’ve left http:// off the website addresses in this post, as the first couple of times I tried to post it, it got stuck awaiting moderation. Hopefully this’ll help.)
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Nominations for the awards continue until November 24th. If ye can spare a second of plunderin’ time, set a course for greatbritons.org and add your cannon to a broadside for free thinking and the FSM!
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May His Noodly Appendage be upon ye all.
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RAmen
I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a wise ass. I don’t watch Jon and Stephen for wit, I watch them for the wise assery; I don’t think there is anything wrong with that; its good fun.