ChristopherWhite.info

“It’s a common misconception, held by all truly stupid people.” - Kryten to the Cat, Red Dwarf series five. (I was, coincidentally, watching this today.)
I imagine many misconceptions are pretty common. Try this one:

Reporting on a case of parthenogenesis (or “self-fertilisation”) in a Komodo dragon, National Geographic have taken the opportunity for a nice, Christmassy “virgin birth” story. They’ve quoted Chester Zoo’s curator of lower vertebrates, Kevin Buley, as saying:

“Essentially what we have here is an immaculate conception.”

Which I guess in one sense is true, but only in as far as all animal conceptions are “immaculate”.

Immaculate conception doesn’t refer to the alleged virgin birth of the alleged son of god, but to the theory that at the time of Mary’s conception god allegedly intervened to keep her soul free from the stain of original sin, as a sinless life was necessary for her to bear Jesus.[1]

Who’s more foolish - the fool that said it, or the fool that printed it?

Ok, it’s not that important a distinction in the grand scam of things, particularly given what an absolute crock the whole story is anyway. But even I know this particular piece of Roman Catholic dogma, and probably the only person more anti-religion than me is flatmate Andy, who actually requested excommunication.

Those readers that know me[2] will be used to my misanthropy, but the general level of popular ignorance is beginning to frustrate me immensely (and I recognise that this is just intellectual snobbery, but there you go…). Having become mostly bored [3] of arguing on Comment Is Free, I’ve been sending the odd letter to The Northern Echo.

Some of the paper’s readers write in with “facts” so wildly inaccurate they’d make even Polly Toynbee blush, so I occasionally put my incredibly large knowledge base[4] to use disabusing them (for which read: pedantically pointing out mistakes[5]).

Unfortunately, the Echo’s features editor keeps cutting out comments such as “…as you would know had you availed yourself of the facts before commenting” and “…as the correspondent would be aware had they ever bothered to look it up”.[6]

Fair enough. It’s their paper and they can do what they like, and such remarks are perhaps gratuitous. But it’s a shame, because I firmly believe most of the world’s problems could be solved if people just bothered to sit down and actually read a book once in a while. Or at least we could have an intelligent discussion, without comments such as this made by some kid (who, it has to be said, was on my side) arguing with a street preacher: “They can’t have written down the Bible - they didn’t have any pencils.”

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

1. Quite why a chap allegedly born 2000 years ago in Roman Judaea, who in all probability spoke Aramaic, would have a Spanish name is beyond me. I’ve heard him (not “Him”, thank you…) referred to as “Yeshua of Nazareth”, and one would think that the closest corresponding name is Joshua. Wikipedia says that: “The name “Jesus” is an Anglicization of the Greek Iesous, itself believed to be a transliteration of the Hebrew/Aramaic Yeshua or Yehoshua, meaning “YHWH is salvation”. I bet he got bullied for that name.
2. Which is all of them, bar those stumbling across this site looking for dead/imprisoned friends, the spambots, and Mickel’s dad. (More on statcounter trawling later…)
3. Please don’t look at this in Internet Explorer. I uploaded it to the school’s content managment system while working in Firefox, and, due to supreme idiocy, forgot to check it looked alright in IE. It doesn’t. At all.
4. Wikipedia.
5. As an example, one particularly stupid woman, responding to an earlier letter, claimed that Islamic terrorist couldn’t possibly have anything to with western foreign policy, as the twin tower attacks were before Afghanistan and Iraq. I pointed out that continued agression against Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War was cited by Osama Bin Laden in his 1998 fatwa as one of the crimes of America, as she would have known had she informed herself before forming an opinion.
6. Yes, I’m aware that I have myself come out with some severely malinformed nonsense. I’ve already admitted it.

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