Jobar

You know, it may be that Amos here is an argument against the theistic lack of humor. He often makes *me* grin, anyway.

C'mon, Amos, tell the truth. Do you laugh whenever you post stuff like this?

Kantian

Actually the books i refer to are written by mortals- John Milton, Dante Alleghri. They most certainly were not written from heaven, unless you are referring to some mythopoetic realm as in "state of mind."

I don't know about Seneca, one of my least favorite philosophers of the bygone era. What of Seneca's insincerity and artifical appeals of passion where he renders Phaedra as a conscienceless and amorous person? It's hard to take this sad imitator seriously when the ancient Greek playwrights did their stuff so much better.

~Transcendentalist~

Amos

That's exactly what I had in mind. Both Milton and Dante wrote divine comedies and to write about the details of a 'failed divine comedy' one must have knowldedge of the divine.

Senecan Tragedies are failed divine comedies because resurrection did not follow the crisis moment. MacBeth is such a tragedy and so is Titus Andronicus except that Titus deals more with the actual metaphysics of the crisis moment itself.

I am not big on Seneca except that he was a contemporay of Jesus and the two stories exist to juxtapose each other.

Laurentius

AVE

Indeed, there is a lot of wit stored in comedies, and this is the reason I mentioned them in the first place.

But in order to show that God is little likely to be all-witty like he would like now, we should draw the distinctions between four categories that come now to my mind:
joy
laughter
humor
wit.

The main idea is, I think at the moment, the fact that the first three are visible and accesible.
The last is not.

Could God be that witty that we may fail to notice it? (classical Christian argument: we lack the ability to see the infinitely big picture - to comprehend the uncomprehensible)
I doubt it. If I try to reveal myself entirely to a kid and he misses one of my qualities, it is not he but I that should be put the blame on.

I'll come back with some thoughts on the categories above so that the essence wit may be clearly excracted theoretically.
My hypothesis is that God lacks it and Christians exclude it from the list of qualities leading to personal fulfillment.

AVE

Amos

True, our serpentine qualities are not desirable while we are trying to be 'good Christians' and even less if we are trying to be bad Christians. Christians are supposed walk upright and take suffering and punishment like an ambassador of Christ etc.

I am just opposite to this and think that they miss the mark completely.

VirusInTheSystem

I asked God why he is so humor-less.

He replied, "Do you think I have a physical body like you do?"

"I doubt it."

He said, "So I probably don't have arms like you do, right?"

"I guess so."

"So it would go without saying that I don't have a funny bone"

I laughed out loud. That was pretty origninal, I had to admit... no funny bone, HA HA...

ummm... wait a second.

<img src="confused.gif" border="0">

Amos

Just having a ball and please know that I write for my own pleasure.

I think it is a very clever argument and it is just nice to see how the Catholic Church can be peeled out of the gospels and remain untouchable by the rest of the world.

Let's be honest Jobar, do you really think that they used to go boating in the nude and swimming in a heavy cloak?

Or that there is no fish on the left side while there is big fish on the right side of the boat while they are easy to catch?

If I am right, do you realize that everybody (?)else is wrong and not just wrong here but wrong from beginning to end?

luvluv

Maybe His jokes are omni-funny, so we would have to be omni-humorous to get them.

Laurentius

AVE

Less rigorously than I've planned, I'll just quote some stuff I've found and make sporadic comments that may lead to something related to the topic.

Humor is native to man.
Regardless of sex, race, belief, all people have access to humor. God should too, since we're built in his image.

Folly need only be observed and imitated by the comic dramatist to give rise to laughter. Observers as early as Quintilian, however, have pointed out that, though folly is laughable in itself, such jests may be improved if the writer adds something of his own; namely, wit.
Therefore laughter seems just instinctual, while wit is elaborated, intentional, and sophisticated - created. Wit: a matter of creation - this looks like God's domain already.


A form of repartee, wit implies both a mental agility and a linguistic grace that is very much a product of conscious art.
There should be no problem for God, the "spiritual embodiment" of the word.


When a comedian tells a story, he deliberately sets out to create a certain tension in his listeners, which mounts as the narrative progresses. But it never reaches its expected climax. The punch line, or point, acts as a verbal guillotine that cuts across the logical development of the story; it debunks the audience's dramatic expectations. The tension that was felt becomes suddenly redundant and is exploded in laughter.

Replace aggression by sympathy and the same situation - a drunk falling on his face, for example - will be no longer comic but pathetic and will evoke not laughter but pity. It is the aggressive element, the detached malice of the comic impersonator, that turns pathos into bathos, tragedy into travesty.

Malice may be combined with affection in friendly teasing; and the aggressive component in civilized humour may be sublimated or no longer conscious. But in jokes that appeal to children and primitive people, cruelty and boastful self-assertiveness are much in evidence.

To put it differently, laughter disposes of emotive excitations that have become pointless and must somehow be worked off along physiological channels of least resistance; and the function of the "luxury reflex" is to provide these channels.

A glance at the caricatures of the 18th-century English artists William Hogarth or Thomas Rowlandson, showing the brutal merriment of people in a tavern, makes one realize at once that they are working off their surplus of adrenalin by contracting their face muscles into grimaces, slapping their thighs, and breathing in puffs through the half-closed glottis. Their flushed faces reveal that the emotions disposed of through these safety valves are brutality, envy, sexual gloating. In cartoons by the 20th-century American James Thurber, however, coarse laughter yields to an amused and rarefied smirk: the flow of adrenalin has been distilled and crystallized into a grain of Attic salt - a sophisticated joke. The word witticism is derived from "wit" in its original sense of intelligence and acumen.

God may fail to be all-witty because his aggressivity lacks intelligence and, above all, sophistication.

AVE

hinduwoman

If God's attributes are beyond human understanding, then how do you know, sending the bear did not strike God as deliciously witty?