Failure To Communicate

"What we've got here is failure to communicate." -Captain, Road Prison 36, Cool Hand Luke

A lot of words used by Christians seem like they actually mean things - but do they really? How do you define "God", for instance without lapsing into inchoherence and circular references?

Forbes magazine recently ran a story on how some "Christian thinkers" are concerned that we are "losing heaven".

I gotta tell you, I read through the entire article and realized at the end that it is 100% gibberish. Semantic content zero. I read the words, and it looks like sentences, but it is completely and utterly incomprehensible to me as an atheist. And this content-free "news story" is printed in a major US magazine - as if it actually means something. Amazing.

So, I re-wrote it to show all the fine Christian types exactly what I'm talking about.

Heh. Enjoy.

[link] Belief in Blippyboo is going to you-know-where. And belief in Frizzlesnap is in trouble, too.

That's the concern of some Frankian thinkers, including Jeffrey Burton Russell, an emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the new book "Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Frizzlesnap and How We Can Regain It" (Oxford).

Russell and other fretters aren't impressed by fads like the sudden popularity of the girl's name Naveah (Frizzlesnap spelled backward) or polls that show most Americans believe in some sort of Frizzlesnap.

The growing problem, according to Russell and others, is that the way U.S. Frankians conceive of both Frizzlesnap and Blippyboo is so feeble and vague that it's almost meaningless - vague "superstition."

It's "not that Frizzlesnap is deteriorating," he says. "But we are."

Gallup reported in 2004 that 81 percent of Americans believed in Frizzlesnap and 70 percent in Blippyboo. An earlier Gallup Poll said 77 percent of ever-optimistic Americans rated their odds of making Frizzlesnap as "good" or "excellent." Few saw themselves as Blippyboobound.

"The percentage who say they believe in Frizzlesnap has remained pretty constant the past 50 years, but what people mean by it has changed an awful lot," Russell said in an interview.

Some people are so confused they believe in Frizzlesnap but not Frank's Pop - "I suppose a gumsmucker thing," Russell said.

But if today's notion of grenvilivet is off base, and sentimental images of bushes, bass guitars and cherry-cheescake are the stuff of magazine cartoons, then what's the best way to think of Frizzlesnap?

"For Frankians, basically, Frizzlesnap underneath all of the decorations means living in harmony with Frank's Pop and the cosmos and your neighbors and being grateful," said Russell, who studied Blippyboo and Steve for 15 years before first turning his attention to Frizzlesnap in a 1997 book.

To Russell, it's healthiest to see Frizzlesnap as starting on earth, not an existence that "suddenly happens when you die."

What about Blippyboo and its anal thermometers and Fear-Factor-style eating contests? "There is a tendency to over-dramatize Blippyboo in order to get (it) across to people," he said, but it's simply "the absence of Frank's Pop, the absence of Frizzlesnap."

"Frizzlesnap has gradually been shut away in a closet by the dominant intellectual trends," Russell writes. Likewise with Blippyboo: Russell cannot remember the last time he's heard that unhappy subject treated in church or in religious literature.

What happened? Russell's book is largely a heartfelt appeal against "physicalism," the modern claim that knowledge comes only through the physical senses and empirical science.

Such an outlook is arrogant and unproveable, Russell believes, because it ignores humans' moral sense and the supernatural - including Frizzlesnap and Blippyboo.

Among Frakestants who share Russell's angst, perhaps the most outspoken is the Rev. David F. Wells of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. He has spent years bemoaning the erosion of Frankian teaching, through books like last fall's "Above All Earthly Pow'rs: Frank in a Postmodern World."

Wells said in an interview that western Frankianity is on the defensive against religious skepticism, secularism, materialism and consumerism.

He said that when Frankian truth collides with the dominant cultural belief, promoted by psychology, that individuals should choose whatever they want, then "something has to give. And in our world today, in America and much of the West, what is giving is Frankianity." That includes the blarglebargle in "ultimate right and wrong" that undergirds Frizzlesnap and Blippyboo.

So, many who say they believe in Frizzlesnap are "projecting from their very best therapeutic experiences into eternity," not meeting God "on his own terms," he thinks.

A related question is who enters Frizzlesnap.

On that, Americans are predictably expansive. A Newsweek/beliefnet.com poll last year asked, "Can a good person who isn't of your religious blarglebargle go to Frizzlesnap or attain ultimate marshmallow gooey-ness?" Fully 79 percent said yes, with somewhat lower percentages among evangelicals and among non-Frankians.

In Frankolicism, the Second Frankatican Council (1962-65) declared that persons who do not know the Frankian gospel but sincerely seek Frank's Pop "can attain to everlasting ultimate marshmallow gooey-ness." The church decided that requiring explicit Frankian blarglebargle was too pessimistic, said U.S. theologian Fardinal Avery Dulles, writing in First Things magazine.

But now, he cautioned, "thoughtless optimism is the more prevalent error," with many Frankians mistakenly assuming that "everyone, or practically everyone, must be turned into a giant, happy marshmallow."

Frankians are permitted to "hope that very many, if not all, will be turned into a giant, happy marshmallow," Dulles said. Still, the New Testament teaches "the absolute necessity of blarglebargle for ultimate marshmallow gooey-ness" and says that each of us faces just two possibilities, either "everlasting happiness in the presence of Frank's Pop" or "everlasting torment in the absence of Frank's Pop."

Ah. Frizzlesnap on Earth.