Add Homonym Attacks! #47
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.)
Intro
My columns have been short of late. It is a mixture of reasons really. One of the biggest ones is that Wednesday is my writing day. For the last couple of months, Wednesday is also the day in which I drive 35 miles across the city of Chicago through Dan Ryan construction to take my daughter to her ballet class.
As the fella says, “the things we do for love. . .”
Of course, I am speaking of my love of the ballet.
At any rate, we are short and rambling again this week.
The Big G
Yup that’s right. We’re here to talk about the big G, something we’ve done a time or two before. It is a force that is everywhere, not just here on Earth. We can’t see it. We study it, but don’t really understand it.
There are some things we do know for certain about the big G.
We know that none of us would be here without it.
We know that it exists between a mother and her child, even if we can’t feel it.
We know that it is always there. That it brings things together.
Though at times it may seem insignificant, we know that it can move anything in the universe.
So I would just like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to the big G.
Thanks gravity. Thank you for causing things on this planet to accelerate at 9.8 meters per second per second.
….
I would’ve thanked God, but unlike gravity, he doesn’t treat women equally.
See:
Genesis 3:16
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
1 Corinthians 14:34-36
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
Ephesians 5:22-24
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
1 Timothy 2:11-15
Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing.
It’s like that old joke says:
Q. What’s the highest position a woman can hold in the Catholic Church?
A. Nun (none)
It all wraps up together with homonym.
Genius.
You know, cuz it’s like the title.
Appendix: a Vestigial Organ
I actually had a friend who had one of the “wives submit to your husbands” readings at her wedding. She’s studying to be a preacher now. I wonder if she still has to submit to her husband. I think that sort of thing merits a chart.
I had a teacher who would make a graph of St. Augustine’s ideas of power and godliness on a Cartesian plane. Evil was “falling away from God” and resulted in a loss of power, such that demons were less powerful than angels, but more powerful than men since they had a higher starting holiness. The whole thing reeked of D&D nerds lacking the sophistication of exp. points and a d20.
Ah theology, that most useful thing.
Theologians, don’t know nothing. . .
