The Blogospheric Adventures of Christ Man and the Earth Lamb

This may be a heinous breach of Department protocol, but here’s a thing I don’t hate: blog comments. Blog comments are hilarious. These pages have seen their own mini-shitstorm of back’n’forth in the form of a ham-fisted attack on the Department’s values by a posse of anonymous Jesus-boners (which you can check out here and here), so perhaps I should take a moment to explain how this particular display of limp-wristed outrage was sparked by a comment of my own, elsewhere.

During an idle moment in an evening mainly spent weeping and chewing timber, I happened upon the blog of a tortured young soul named Philip “The Christ Man” Christman. The Christ Man is tortured, you see, because he has given up reading for Lent, and has dedicated his own toxic little corner of the blogosphere to sharing his pain with his fellow giants of the mind. Oh good gracious, whatever shall a poor intellectual do? Sure enough, a veritable orgy of back-slapping, name-dropping and Jesus-loving inevitably ensues, causing these tired eyes immeasurable distress.

I have so many issues with the premise of this guy’s site I can barely even think about it without spitting blood. Even leaving aside the ass-clenching stupidity of writing a blog when one is not even supposed to be reading, Christ Man’s sacrifice for the Lord involves giving up the one thing that might have a chance of saving him from total imbecility. Keep reading, dickhead, it’s your only hope! There’s no point linking Dostoevsky and Noam Chomsky if you remain unable to think for yourself, especially to the extent that you are still swallowing thousand-year-old mythology like it was anything other than a quaint little fairy tale.

So, I decided to let Christ Man know how I felt. In my opinion, my comment was reasonable, balanced and uncharacteristically polite, but I suppose you can judge for yourself. In any case, it didn’t take long for our great man of letters to ban me from commenting, ostensibly for making fun of one his retarded buddies. Beforehand, however, he did manage to send a few of his flock over to these parts, and I am happy to say that they will continue to enjoy the privilege of posting comments for as long as they please, making fun of whoever the fuck they want. I’ll leave it to the book-lovers over at the Virtual Cantina to indulge in censorship.

One of these anonymous halfwits has been weighing in on the God debate, insofar as there is one, regurgitating a palsied version of one of my favourite arguments, best paraphrased like this: “You can’t get something from nothing … uh, unless you’re talking about God, in which case you can”. I’ll leave that up to philosophical bad-ass Bertrand Russell to deal with (don’t you click on that link, Christ Man – stay strong!), but it should be noted that had Anon managed to hold that Chicken/Egg analogy in his head long enough to follow through on its implications we may have had a break-through of sorts, right here on these pages. Instead, we appear to have the world’s worst biologist.

Funnier than all that, though, is the latest post from Matt “sensitive Earth Lamb” Lind, riding in with kinetic exuberance to defend Christ Man’s virtue from the barbarian blogging hordes. The post is pretty innocuous as a whole (he calls me a “cockroach”*, oh crumbs!), but the choicest moment is right at the end where he solemnly intones “God bless America” as if I had hijacked a United Airlines flight and crashed it into the south tower of his friend’s website. I honestly think this might be the funniest shit I have ever read, and it is proof positive that belief in the personal-empowerment hype of the blogosphere is the death knell for every last shred of a sense of proportion. “Oh me oh my, the nasty man said a bad thing on Phil’s blog, God bless America, oh dear!”

Seriously man, have you no self-respect? God bless America? Dude, I bet even God thinks you’re a fucking pussy.

Well, it’s been a fun journey. It’s a bit of a shame that I had to do this in the main body of the blog – it would have been fun to have had this out in a comments section somewhere, but these literary types are awfully sensitive, it seems. It’s really too bad I’ve been banned. But who knows, if one or two of you rational, free-thinking types out there happen to make it over to visit the Christ Man or the Earth Lamb, perhaps you could drop them a line on my behalf?

Happy hatin’, folks. And tell ‘em Snotty sent ya.

*The Earth Lamb would like us to make clear that his "cockroach" line is a reference to Kafka, because the Earth Lamb, like his chum Phil, is at pains to establish his high-brow credentials. If a person refers to Kafka he is a genius and that is all there is to it, so please ensure that you feel appropriately humbled when you visit his learned pages. It is also useful to have a flexible definition of sarcasm in mind, otherwise you will miss all the quality jokes. Thank you.