In which the pond goes on an epic journey with the bromancer and ends up picking the wings off flies ...

There are probably a few still doing the rounds, who remember Time magazine and its April 1966 cover ... others can do a Greg Hunt here ...

Of course Nietzsche had raised the question long before that, it's just that American magazines are very slow ...

Yes the good folk at Adelaide Uni have a translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra available in full here ...though the notion turned up in his earlier work, such as the 1882 The Gay Science, as Greg Hunters can discover by heading off to Gott ist tot ... and it has to be noted, like all three word statements that sound weirder in German, Nietzsche didn't quite mean what many took him to mean ...

Nonetheless, whenever the question turns up, the pond is immediately flung back into the 1960s, like a bad acid trip.

And speaking of very slow people and bad trips, that always produces flashbacks ...

Oh fuck. After 135 years, the Catholic Boys' Daily finally gets around to asking the question, and chooses the dullard vehicle of the bromancer's befuddled brain to explore it?

The google splash looked even weirder ...

The western has much to lose in banishing Xianity?

Oh no, not the pond's father's favourite form of entertainment, where blowing a man to Kingdom come was a righteous deed indeed ...

Naturally the bromancer blew away all opposition this day, even prattling Polonius and Dame Slap and nattering "Ned" - all out and about keening and wailing - as the pond settled in for a very long, and remarkably silly read of the fundie Xian kind...

Oh fuck, stop right there ... do we have to start everything with a quote from Orwell?

Surely there's a sub-section of Godwin's Law that covers this dire sort of monstrous stupidity and willingness to cherry pick?

No? Oh very well ...

Another thing should be said at the get go. As a secular atheist, the pond long ago embraced a form of laïcité, which included the notion that we didn't need an Anglican Pom as Australia's head of state ...what with complimentary women and all that ...

But there's no point in arguing with a true believer.

These fanatics are certain they're right and they will brook no alternative, and the first thing they will do in their fanaticism is insist that anyone who is an atheist is also some kind of religious freak and nutter ... as fervently delusional as a god botherer ...

No, there's no point in arguing, rehashing old matters, sticking the elbow in tepid water, sipping on a cuppa from much-used tea leaves ...

The pond is presenting this simply in an ethnographic, anthropological manner. This, after all, is the man charged with the business of writing about foreign affairs (of a stately kind) for the lizard Oz.

Whenever an Islamic tells the pond that the Murdochian media is full of crusaders, fanatical Christians who want to maintain the crusades of medieval times (by coincidence the pond found Runciman's history of the crusades at the bottom of a drawer last night), the pond usually dissembles and shrugs shoulders and says 'oh surely not, surely not.

Surely in these troubled times and Fox News, there are more interesting questions to ask ...

But as if in answer to the wise Islamic's prayer to his god, here comes the bromancer, rabbiting on in a way only the bromancer can manage, ignoring that question, because truth to tell, the Murdochians and Fox News killed the truth in their infinite wisdom ...

There are of course so many monstrous stupidities in this sort of carry-on that there's no point in arguing. It can only ever end in a brawl outside Maguire's pub ...

Take that line "virtually everything we like in our current society, and in our political culture, derives from Christianity..."

It's such a stupid thing to write, ignoring as it does not just Rome and Greece but all the tasty things like pasta that we scored from the Chinese pagans long ago ...

And what about that favourite pond past-time?

It was Plato who imagined what it would be like for strange prisoners dwelling in a cave and looking at the shadows on the cave wall ...

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. 
That is certain. 
 And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, - what will be his reply?

Um, sorry Plato, the pond reads the reptiles of Oz and the bromancer, and you know, like the Xians all they do is rip your kind off and call it their own ... might just as well keep looking at the shadows on the wall ...

More here but meanwhile it's on with the bromancer ...

Weird, that constant feeling of being back in the 1960s with a very stupid and very earnest member of the Evangelical Union, or even worse, some loon from Opus Dei ...

Well yes, read that magazine and you could end up having sex with the devil, or worse, John Cassavetes, or perhaps a drugged under-age girl, forcing you to flee to Europe ...

Oh okay, even on an anthropological and sociological level, the bromancer is excessively turgid and tedious, and we're only half way through ...

Indeed, indeed ... there's no doubt that Xianity has delivered some of the very best outcomes here and in the United States ...

Ah yes, thanks to Xianity, it's a rich and wonderful world ...

The problem is that the bromancer seems not to know how to wrap it up or how to shut it, but instead is determined to prove that the likes of nattering "Ned" are lightweights incapable of a real ultra-marathon ...

By this point, the pond was begging for mercy and offering concession after concession ...

Yet he still kept on and on, blathering philosophical stupidities and reminding the pond of that Orwell quote it mentioned, but which now seems like it belongs to another era ...

Well the good news is that even the stupid must end sometime, and this - even for a balanced sociologist interested in the anthropology of the event - has been an epic journey into the stupid ...

After all, it has been rightly said that when people believe in God, they can accept that working for Murdoch is somehow a contribution to the common good ... and at that point, you might well be better off believing in nothing, or anything ...

It's at moments like these that the pond understands the urge to smash the temples and tear down the gods so that the wind might whip the sands across the shattered statues, and wear them down to nothing ...

But meanwhile there's a last gobbet to endure ...

Here's a confession. During the great modem crisis, the pond thought it might miss its reptiles ... go through a kind of junkie withdrawal ...

Funnily enough, the pond didn't miss them at all ...

Oh sure the pond missed some really stupid Xians ...

... but all the pond really missed were the cartoonists, including the infallible Pope, with more papery to be found here ...

No doubt some will be sent into a frenzy by the bromancer ... but please allow the pond to suggest an alternative hobby, as mentioned in relation to Dad and Dave and found at Project Gutenberg here ...

There had been a long stretch of dry weather, and we were cleaning out the waterhole. Dad was down the hole shovelling up the dirt; Joe squatted on the brink catching flies and letting them go again without their wings—a favourite amusement of his ...

Yes instead of arguing with the bromancer, how about picking the wings off flies? 

Help eradicate the four pests, and we might begin a long march to somewhere else, and it might even help eradicate the Murdochians ...