And now for a little Christian science, evolutionary and big bang theory, along with a proposal to trade in your Volvo for a Datsun 120Y ...

(Above: Click to enlarge Christian science at work. You can get more seventies Spire Christian comics here in pdf form. The page is slow to load but persistence brings rewards beyond imagining).

Usually it being Sunday, the pond would visit the land of the Pellists, but truth to tell, after last Monday's Q&A, the pond is proper right Pelled out.

Is it possible to imagine a superabundance of Pellism so sickly that, like dark chocolate - 70% please - too much richness in the end is too hard to swallow?

Worse, we're stuck with lagged, delayed Pellist insights because they're a week behind at the Sunday Terror - by golly the power of fresh Pellist insights must be a great incentive to buy the rag - so at the moment we're only getting talk about Easter.

Now it's true that this offers some marvellous insights into evolution, in a way certain to put Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin back in their boxes, just as Pell despatched them to the boundary last Monday:

It is reasonable to believe in the Creator God, unique, spiritual, fantastically intelligent (think of all those mathematical equations and laws which govern the universe), maker of the immeasurable cosmos, which was created through the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.

Indeed. Which is naturally why this Creator God deemed it fit and right and proper to mate with a married woman in the Middle East to produce his only son and heir a couple of thousand years ago.

Why not China? Well they got Confucius ...

This is the Creator God, beyond space and time, who saw life develop from inanimate objects into replicating plants, animals and humans. God saw the development of the human brain and eye, the thumb and forefinger and even more remarkably the voice box, which enables us to communicate our thoughts to one another.

Hang on, hang on, this is beginning to sound suspiciously like intelligent design:

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. (here)

Pell sounds like he isn't up to the irreducible and specified complexity nonsense of creationists trading as intelligent designers - wiki here - nor does he bother to explain how god seeing these things resulted in a kind of Picard "make it so" moment (go on, you know you want to watch Picard say it over and over again on YouTube here).

And by golly, Pell is deadset against a thousand monkeys typing for a squillion years to produce the works of Shakespeare:

It is irrational, against reason, to claim something came from nothing. The odds against the world evolving through chance are impossibly high, like claiming a runaway truck through a rubbish dump might produce Michelangelo's Pieta, the statue of the dead Christ with Mary his mother in St. Peter's, Rome.

Indeed. But the odds of the runaway truck being driven by Catholics who chiselled the penis off Michelangelo's sculpture of Bacchus are quite high, suggesting how easy it is for something to turn into nothing, or at least a rubbish dump of ruined once penis-like marble.

And of course if you have a remotest interest in Big Bang theory and singularity, the very first thing you encounter is the notion that at one moment there was nothing, and then there was something - the universe:

Discoveries in astronomy and physics have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that our universe did in fact have a beginning. Prior to that moment there was nothing; during and after that moment there was something: our universe. The big bang theory is an effort to explain what happened during and after that moment. (here)

Only a devoted Pellist could compare Big Bang theories to a truck running rampant through rubbish, or perhaps the Vatican.

The metaphor is so extraordinarily banal and silly that it exemplifies the depths of Pellist thinking. Bury us all in shallow waters before he gets even deeper.

Oh golly that 70% chocolate is so sweet and tasty, especially when you give it a nice orange flavouring.

Now how about conflating religion with physics? Sure thing:

What does go beyond secular reason is to believe this Creator or "Singularity", which we call God, is pure Love, interested enough to send his Son among us.

So god is now singularity. How singular, after fourteen billion years or so, and thousands of years of human evolution, that this singular chap settled on the Middle East a couple of thousand years ago. How to explain this cosmic flash?

Why it's a mere doddle, easy peasy:

That God sent his only Son to live with a human mother in a backward and troublesome province of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago is only a bit more improbable than finding human life on our tiny planet. Despite years of searching for radio signals from space the evidence so far is that we are "Home Alone".

Sheesh. So we're Macaulay Culkin, and god is some kind of combination of Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern? Well that clears everything up ...

But how handy to learn that a belief in god is only a bit more improbable than finding human life (yes cockroaches and mosquitoes you don't count).

Meanwhile, it's true that the hunt for life continues - c.f. Pharyngula's Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites - but what's amusing is Pell's exceptionalist notion of humanity and life on earth here and now, alone at home, and the way this somehow redeems the absurdity - in a galactic and evolutionary sense - of Christ turning up a couple of thousand years ago.

Yet all who came before him missed out on the chance of going to god because the only path is via Christ. Where's the reasonableness in that? Okay, cue the concept of limbo and purgatory to tidy up the story.

There's another vexing thought. Is Pell content to ascribe a complete lack of imagination to his god?

Surely as a world builder - a favourite sci fi meme - he should be off building worlds and creating life all over the place, seeing as how there's billions of stars and millions of planets on which to come up with something a tad better than humanity.

I mean to set all that in motion and then settle in the Middle East. And also settle for Pellist thinking ....

What a heart-rending lack of imagination.

Meanwhile, over at the Sydney Anglicans, there's a post-Easter lull. We're waiting anxiously on part five of Michael Jensen's epic sins of Sydney series - is a love of dark chocolate only a venial sin?, why has he forsaken us? - because all we have this week is a learned dissertation on what vehicle Jesus might chose should he chose to move amongst us when the rapture comes.

Yes, David Mansfield broods mightily in What Would Jesus Drive? to arrive at this conclusion:

So WWJD?

Would he not have made small sacrifices in motoring comfort and other lifestyle choices for big benefits in mission and compassion to the world he co-created and the men and women he lay down his life for?

Sydney Anglicans, give up delusionary, grasping greedy thoughts of Mercs, Beamers and Rollers. You need to give generously so that homosexuals can be driven out of Africa by dint of missionary effort, and the insidious invasion of the domestic churches by women can be stemmed before it's too late, and Peter and Phillip Jensen are swept away by the matriarchy in all its anti-Timothy heretical forms.

Sadly, it turns out that Mansfield's piece is just the usual bit of rhetoric, designed to come to no real conclusion - who knows WWJD - except the need to make small sacrifices in an Anglican way ...

If only they'd caught up on the news that Cardinal Pell has offered atheists a free trip to heaven provided they're good ... without any need for gathering in cliquey conclaves of Christians or worrying about whether they should trade in the Volvo and buy a Datsun 120Y so the Anglican assault on gays in Africa can continue ...

(Below: atheists in Pellist rapture, the pond is already pre-booked having led a life of exceptional purity and goodness, though there might be a spat at the end of the flight about god being such a Singularly heartless and indifferent and angry goose).