interestrateripoff Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 In light of recent events and that every (all) religious fundamentalist nutjobs like to claim they are doing God's work and taking vengeance in their name that you have in some way offended God, therefore does God have a sense of humour? God is supposedly omniscient and omnipresent but does God have a sense of humour? Does God enjoy satire, especially badly drawn cartoons? If God is that offended why is their no Godly smiting of those concerned, why have mere "mortals" intervene? So does God have a sense of humour? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Northerner Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Patfig Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 I hope so because she's black Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StainlessSteelCat Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 I can only imagine they must get some kind of perverse comedic pleasure from the various squabbles about whose version is the right God. I know I do. That's if they exist, of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bloo Loo Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 god, who is omniscient, wasnt very clear in what he said to the various profits ( about 5000 of them I gather)... God needed people to interpret what he said. and he told 5000 different stories to 5000 different profits. sometimes god has mates. and god has no clue what the devil is up to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
erat_forte Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 There are so many different individual gods, you can't generalise like that. Some, like Loki, almost define themselves by their warped humour. I would say Yhvh is the most dour, humourless one of them all, so stuck up and self important, thinks he is the only one! And thinks he made everything! Funny, yes, but sense of humour, no. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boughtin95 Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 It would seem so. To quote Woody Allen "If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans" Sad thought though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
winkie Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 What do you think? If God made us. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Patfig Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 who made who, who made you Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Austin Allegro Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 This is the premise of the book 'The Name of the Rose', if I remember rightly. The 'McGuffin' was some ancient text which showed that Christ (as God incarnate) had a sense of humour. If true, it would mean that people could laugh at God and He would lose His authority, or so the monks thought. If you are a fundamentalist, and believe that God is the supreme being, God of Gods, Lord of Lords and Only Ruler of Princes (as the Prayer Book has it) then why should you worry what people say about Him? He cannot be harmed. Sticks and stones, and all that. If your conception of God is, like a lot of non-fundamentalist religious people, a symbol of deep truths about life and humanity, that cannot be put into words, then it is almost your duty to laugh at simplistic anthropomorphic conceptions of Him. It's a sort of healthy pricking of the pomposity of some religious symbolism and there's no real harm in it, in my view. We might laugh at the Crucifixion, like in Life of Brian, but would many of us laugh at the concepts it represents - self-sacrifice, love in the face of betrayal, etc - probably not. When people start laughing at concepts like lthose that's when I'll start worrying, not when they laugh at silly cartoons. That said, I'm looking at this all from a post-enlightenment, educated western perspective. I can see sort of see why people from superstitious cultures would be offended by jokes about God etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nuggets Mahoney Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 This is the premise of the book 'The Name of the Rose', if I remember rightly. The 'McGuffin' was some ancient text which showed that Christ (as God incarnate) had a sense of humour. If true, it would mean that people could laugh at God and He would lose His authority, or so the monks thought. My understanding is that laughter, even smiling, was viewed by the church fathers in the middle ages as being an expression of the base, physical aspect of man's nature. Whenever laughter is mentioned in the Old Testament it's invariably associated with the wicked and the foolish. The New Testament was lighter, particularly before the Council of Nicaea took all of Jesus' best knob gags out. As I recall, St Augustine was against humour in principle. Aquinas was OK with occasional moments of restrained light-heartedness and joviality, but nothing that was too funny. 1980s era BBC sitcoms basically, a couple of times a week, tops. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nuggets Mahoney Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 There are so many different individual gods, you can't generalise like that. Some, like Loki, almost define themselves by their warped humour. I believe this has come up on OT (Off Topic, not Old Testament) before, but the Trickster archetype is widespread and goes back as far as we know... wiki: Trickster I quite enjoy the fuzziness of the archetype concept. Does the Trickster exist as a discrete entity? Is it one facet of a greater consciousness? Is it an expression of human nature? A by-product of the way existence is wired? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
interestrateripoff Posted January 13, 2015 Author Share Posted January 13, 2015 My understanding is that laughter, even smiling, was viewed by the church fathers in the middle ages as being an expression of the base, physical aspect of man's nature. Whenever laughter is mentioned in the Old Testament it's invariably associated with the wicked and the foolish. The New Testament was lighter, particularly before the Council of Nicaea took all of Jesus' best knob gags out. As I recall, St Augustine was against humour in principle. Aquinas was OK with occasional moments or restrained light-heartedness and joviality, but nothing that was too funny. 1980s era BBC sitcoms basically, a couple of times a week, tops. God in the Old Testament was a tad on the aggressive side smiting humanity on a whim with the flood and Sodom/Gomorrah then it appears God had a complete personality change and became loving/kind etc... in the New Testament. It's almost as if its a different entity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nuggets Mahoney Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 God in the Old Testament was a tad on the aggressive side smiting humanity on a whim with the flood and Sodom/Gomorrah then it appears God had a complete personality change and became loving/kind etc... in the New Testament. It's almost as if its a different entity. There was a time when thinking like that would get you a crusade up your rear end The idea of two gods or principles, one being good the other evil, was central to Cathar beliefs. The good god was the God of the New Testament and the creator of the spiritual realm, as opposed to the bad god, whom many Cathars identified as Satan, creator of the physical world of the Old Testament. On the subject of humour, I can't remember who said it but the expression 'There is no such thing as a joke' has always struck a chord. Jokes are usually at someone's expense. I recall some of the classical Greek philosophers arguing that humour was an expression of hubris and a sense of superiority. I can't recall if self-deprecating humour got a pass edit: the tradition of self-deprecating Jewish humour might support the suggestion that the God of the Torah is OK with people taking the p1ss, as long as it is out of themselves Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
council dweller Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 Oh yes, `in the name of the rose` I forgot to mention that on the Youtube film thread, a pretty good film IMO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LC1 Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 We need look no further than the duck-billed platypus. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nuggets Mahoney Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 We need look no further than the duck-billed platypus. You had me at duck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
council dweller Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 Pandas at number 2. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LC1 Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 You had me at duck I am conscious that I have just attempted humour at the poor platypus' expense. Mind you, I'm confident that were they to develop sufficient sentience & self-awareness that they would make self-depricating jokes about their patently ridiculous appearance too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecrashingisles Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 We need look no further than the duck-billed platypus. Ed Miliband was sufficient proof for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qetesuesi Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 I am conscious that I have just attempted humour at the poor platypus' expense. Mind you, I'm confident that were they to develop sufficient sentience & self-awareness that they would make self-depricating jokes about their patently ridiculous appearance too. They'd laugh at nothing so much as at those denialist European zoologists gulled by their own scepticism Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turned Out Nice Again Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 possibly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
happy_renting Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 God has a sense of humour and the entire Universe is His joke. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Austin Allegro Posted January 14, 2015 Share Posted January 14, 2015 God in the Old Testament was a tad on the aggressive side smiting humanity on a whim with the flood and Sodom/Gomorrah then it appears God had a complete personality change and became loving/kind etc... in the New Testament. It's almost as if its a different entity. Strict Christians or those who believe in an anthropomorphic conception of God would say that's because Christ's death was a 'full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction' (as the BCP puts it) for the sins of humanity. His death meant God stopped being an angry shouty man with a beard, (perhaps like Brian Blessed, if he was Jewish) and instead became a more softer Christian beardie, perhaps like Rowan Williams. Those with a more metaphorical conception of it all would probably point to the fact that the idea of God in the NT is different because Graeco-Roman thought, with its more rational and philosophical concepts of deity, began to combine with Judaism, most notably in the case of St Paul who was originally a pagan Roman rather than a Jew. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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