Add Homonym Attacks! #36
Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse Beyond the Threshold’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)
A Christmas Story
Now, this being the last AHA! before Christmas, I feel partially obligated to talk about it. My gut feeling says to talk about the nativity story and the manger and all that jive, but it really doesn’t interest me too much. So, I’ll point out a few things, and then move on to greener pastures, bigger fish, and different eggs.
First, we’ll talk about the virgin birth thing. God takes a different form, impregnates a young woman, and creates a half man/half god. It’s a very Zeus thing for Yahweh to do. It makes Jesus a demi-god, at least in a technical sense. Hercules was conceived in a fairly similar manner. Come to think of it, both Jesus and Hercules died and were reborn as gods on high. And they had similar haircuts.
Anyways, as the story goes, the Magi followed a star to the post-natal waiting room of Emmanuel. Carl Sagan noted in The Demon Haunted World, that most people in our modern world don’t realize that stars rise and set. (Well, technically the world spins, but you all know that much.) Unless you are in the northern hemisphere and following Polaris, following any one star isn’t going to help you get anywhere. But hell, these are people that brought frankincense to a baby shower; what right do they have to the wise men label?
We also have Matthew 2. In Matthew 2, Herod kills all of the kids in Bethlehem, 2 and under. Now, I know the bible usually likes to throw in some stories about baby-killing, but this one seems a little gratuitous. The historian Josephus wrote detailed records of the life of Herod, but never bothered to mention this thing. In fact, most historical scholars believe that Herod the Great died in 4B.C.E.
But screw all that and let’s get to the important stuff!
Flying Reindeer!
All right, Santa Claus has flying reindeer. Hovering Rangifer tarandus, if you will. Every depiction of them hat I have encountered has shown them with antlers. He’s had these things for a while; they must be fairly old. Therefore, all of the reindeer are female.
You see, both sexes of reindeer have antlers. The antlers of old male reindeer fall off in December, though, Dasher’s little secret. But hey, that is probably beneficial. A female reindeer can weigh as little as 135 pounds, which I imagine is a lot easier to make fly than a 600 pound male.
Assuming one has the resources to make reindeer fly, why bother with the reindeer at all? Why wouldn’t Santa just make the sled fly? He’s already levitating the sled. I mean, the flying reindeer are all in the front of the sleigh. There is nothing holding up the other end of the sled. So, the sled itself must be able to hover. So why bother with the reindeer? Does St. Nick’s magic only work against gravity?
But that can’t be the case either. There is a need for another miracle solution to propel the sled forward. The reindeer are floating and have nothing off of which to push. They’d just be treading air with their hooves. So again, the reindeer don’t really add anything to the equation. It just seems like a show-offy thing for that jolly old elf to do.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just use a helicopter, or some sort of bird at the very least? Why flying caribou? What is it about the caribou that made people look at it and say, “I betcha these things could fly!”
We tell our kids weird things.
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