{"id":34186,"date":"2025-04-01T06:53:15","date_gmt":"2025-04-01T10:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/?p=34186"},"modified":"2025-04-01T06:53:06","modified_gmt":"2025-04-01T10:53:06","slug":"april-fools-day-and-irreverence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/april-fools-day-and-irreverence\/","title":{"rendered":"April Fools Day and Irreverence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

IT\u2019S APRIL FOOLS DAY\u2013A PERFECT TIME FOR SOME IRREVERENCE!<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One of my continuing reading delights is anything written by Anne Lamott. In her struggles with faith, she is equally intense in both her relentless pursuit of the transcendent and her irreverence. In Bird by Bird<\/em>, she writes that \u201cthe mind frequently has its head up its own ass\u2014seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colorectal\u00a0theology, offering hope to no one.\u201d<\/p>\n

The phrase truly inspires a picture worth more than a thousand words. I don\u2019t mean to just pick on theologians, though; there\u2019s plenty of colorectal philosophy, too. A Jesuit priest who was one of my professors and mentors during graduate school days once described logical positivism,\"\"<\/a>\u00a0the rigorously reductive philosophy of language that dominated philosophy in the English-speaking world during the middle decades of the twentieth century, as \u201cmental masturbation.\u201d I\u2019ve been trying not to further develop the picture of Rudolf Carnap, A. J. Ayer, and Moritz Schlick in a Vienna Circle jerk, one that Ludwig Wittgenstein refused to join, ever since I heard the phrase.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>My sense of humor tends toward non-sequiturs, irony, sarcasm, and (especially) irreverence. My comic heroes include Monty Python, The Three Stooges, just about everyone in\u00a0The Blues Brothers<\/em>, Jon Stewart, the late Robin Williams, and Gary Larson;\u00a0I\u2019ve frequently told my students that the day Larson stopped writing\u00a0The Far Side\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0was one of the darkest days in the history of Western Civilization; Stewart\u2019s retirement from\u00a0The Daily Show<\/em> rivaled it in darkness\u2013I\u2019m glad he\u2019s back, at least for a while.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Given that academics tend to take themselves FAR more seriously than any group of human beings ever should, hardly a day goes by at work without my having the opportunity to be irreverent. Nietzsche (a very funny guy) wrote that \u201cthe noble soul has reverence for itself.\u201d My response is that the healthy soul has reverence for very little.<\/p>\n

Humor is one of the best antidotes to an overly serious and somber attitude toward things religious and spiritual. I learned this, amazingly enough, from my Baptist minister father whose sense of humor I inherited.\u00a0He was always quick to shine an irreverent\u00a0light on religious smugness and pomposity, although I most often saw his humor in action in the privacy of our home. There\u2019s very little humor in the Bible; Jesus is not reported as ever even smiling (let alone laughing), so far as I\u2019m aware. I wrote once about a great novel in which two characters have an ongoing debate about whether Jesus ever laughed:<\/p>\n

Jesus on April Fools Day<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n