Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore – or – the problem of evil, solv’d

I’m assuming his testicles (what’s he doing with his left hand, there, in the picture?) are of diverse sizes, for which he has comically exaggerative names, and that in fiddling he has twanged one completely off such that it rebounded upon his eyeball. Hence the tears. Though he should thank God that it was the smaller of the two.

The atheist seems to be a pre-Darwinian one. Can you imagine the squirrel carrying down the pumpkin from the oak tree?

I like the church in the background.

There’s something really awesome about the atheist, enjoying sitting in the grass, perceiving nature. It’s like they know that there’s something there in nature that causes you to leave the church… even if they haven’t got it yet.

should it not read “had that bough a pumpkin borne” ?

Large pine cones actually can kill those on whom they fall, so, uh, there you go.

Not to mention coconuts.

RB, wasn’t it one of the traditional benefits of Heaven that you could look down on Hell and enjoy the suffering of the damned?

I hope not, but it sounds plausible, doesn’t it? I’d be interested in seeing that explanation.

Tertullian. Google him and “sight of hell”…

I don’t know about Catholic Theologians, but Jonathan Edwards, the American “Great Awakening” preacher, would go on and on about how much of the joy of heaven was watching the damned suffer. Since he was a Calvinist this seems particularly twisted and unpleasant. Then again, he also went on and on about how God hated us and looked upon us like we look on the most loathsome spiders and the like. I mean, late 18th Century New England and all, but I’m not sure why people went in for that stuff.

I think God fucked up with the jackfruit.

The Tertullian passage is quoted at length in The Genealogy of Morals, btw.

Pumpkins & poetry go back at least to Seneca’s satire on Claudius. Where divinity was also an issue. Go figure.

Countess of Winchilsea, not Duchess. And Countess by accident: Heneage Finch was a younger son and when she married him no-one expected him to succeed to the earldom.

Thanks all. In the little verse I wrote I was thinking of here-and-now luck, which of course isn’t the point at all to the, um, spiritually encumbered.

There are many on-line sources for comment on the “pumpkin papers” found in Whittaker Chambers’ garden that led to the conviction of Alger Hiss. Here’s one:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_hiss.html

An awesome gourd, all right.

Obviously, the guy hasn’t heard of the durian fruit:

A durian falling on a person’s head can cause serious injuries because it is heavy, armed with sharp thorns, and can fall from a significant height.Wearing a hardhat is recommended when collecting the fruit.

…How can they be in Seneca’s satire of Claudius: Pumpkins are new world vegetables.

Obviously she’d never seen a cocoanut.

It’s an 18th century atheism based on a kind of neoclassical “decorum,” then. Big trees should have big fruits. A wholly aesthetic kind of atheism.

an ethical constraint has prevented God from creating the well-proportioned world that the atheist imagines. It would have been unethical for God to put pumpkins in trees because it would have subjected humans to unnecessary suffering.

The existence of durians refutes this claim.

I am an atheist. I have a question. Why did Allah create God and Buddha?

Durians and cocoanuts do not grow on English trees.
Yet more proof, if proof need be, that God’s love shines on Winchelsea.

What, no-one will point out that this poem is but a translation of La Fontaine? Here goes
Dieu fait bien ce qu’il fait. Sans en chercher la preuve
En tout cet Univers, et l’aller parcourant,
Dans les Citrouilles je la treuve.
Un villageois, considérant
Combien ce fruit est gros, et sa tige menue
A quoi songeait, dit-il, l’Auteur de tout cela ?
Il a bien mal placé cette Citrouille-là :
Hé parbleu, je l’aurais pendue
A l’un des chênes que voilà.
C’eût été justement (1) l’affaire ;
Tel fruit, tel arbre, pour bien faire.
C’est dommage, Garo, que tu n’es point entré
Au conseil de celui que prêche ton Curé ;
Tout en eût été mieux ; car pourquoi par exemple
Le Gland, qui n’est pas gros comme mon petit doigt,
Ne pend-il pas en cet endroit ?
Dieu s’est mépris ; plus je contemple
Ces fruits ainsi placés, plus il semble à Garo
Que l’on a fait un quiproquo.
Cette réflexion embarrassant notre homme :
On ne dort point, dit-il, quand on a tant d’esprit.
Sous un chêne aussitôt il va prendre son somme.
Un gland tombe ; le nez du dormeur en pâtit.
II s’éveille ; et portant la main sur son visage,
Il trouve encor le Gland pris au poil du menton.
Son nez meurtri le force à changer de langage ;
Oh, oh, dit-il, je saigne ! et que serait-ce donc
S’il fût tombé de l’arbre une masse plus lourde,
Et que ce gland eût été gourde ?
Dieu ne l’a pas voulu : sans doute il et raison ;
J’en vois bien à présent la cause.
En louant Dieu de toute chose,
Garo retourne à la maison.

It’d be heaven if you didn’t remember who they were.

I see I accidentally wrote an almost couplet. Let me fix it:

The cocoanut, the durian, they hang not from an English tree.
Yet more proof, if proof need be, that God’s love shines on Winchelsea.

Pardon my french, if I may say so.

What God does, he does it well. Without seeking the proof
Wandering in the whole Universe,
In pumpkins I found it
A villager, considering
How big this fruit is, and how frail its stem
What was the Author of it all thinking?
This pupkin, he did misplace
By God, I would have hung it
To one of these oaks there.
That would have been precise business.
As fruit goes, as tree, and all is well.
It’s a shame, Garo, that you did not advise
The one whom your priest preaches
All would have been better; for why for instance
Acorns, which are smaller than my little finger
Do not hang from this place?
God was confused; the more I gaze
At these ill-suited fruits, the more Garo
Concludes that there has been a quid pro quo
This thought embarrassed our man
One cannot sleep, says he, with so much wit
Under an oak , immediately, he goes to sleep
An acorn falls; the nose of the sleeper bleeds
Awake; feeling his face with his hand
He finds the acorn, hanging in his beard
His bruised nose prompts a change in tone
Oh, says he, I bleed and what would it be
If from this tree a greater mass had fallen
And if that acorn had been a pumpkin
God did not wish it so: undoubtedly he’s right;
I can now see well enough the cause
And praising God in all things
Garo returns to his home.

I regret the wonderful “By renting God of any thing”.

Why should one suppose that Anne Finch (or LaFontaine) is arguing (and who is she arguing with)? The poem is slight, humorous, a bit catty, but more simply setting her own (probably too comfortable) faith, with a little gratitude for it. I doubt from her life history that she was much given to arguing, but if she were going to argue against atheism (it’s usually the atheists arguing against the theists as far as I can tell) she would have done better than that.

The reason that the satire on Claudius usually refers to the gourd (whatever that happens to have been in Pliny and Seneca) is that the sound of the word is rather ridiculous in Latin, and pumpkin sounds a lot more silly than gourd in English (plus it has a repeated consonant like colocynthum). The other reason being that various fruits or vegetables have lots of symbolic value, of everything from life to oral sex, mostly having to do with moisture and seeds, and gourds, at least in the Western United States are typically dry.

I keep meaning to get through my bilingual Tertullian to his wife in my decent Latin and bad French, but until I do I just remember that growing up as kids we were taught that unlike the other Church Fathers (but like Origen, a greater and better man but arguablypretty unbalanced) Tertullian hadn’t been canonized owing to his psyche having led him in perverse and unhuman directions — considering that Jerome was canonized, that must have made him pretty extreme.

@54

Finch (by the way, the convention is to refer to her as “Finch”, not as “Countess of Winchilsea”, or “Anne”, certainly not “Duchess of Winchelsea” which gets neither her rank nor the place right) wrote a number of translations of LaFontaine: this one, “The Battle between the Rats and the Weazels”, “The Eagle, Sow and Cat”, “The House of Socrates” (which should appeal to John) and so on, about three dozen, all told, plus another dozen fables from other sources.

Translation is ordinarily not considered an honor-code violation.

But the Finch (if that’s what the profs say, it’s good enough for me, although during her life she would never, ever have been called that) is not merely a translation – it’s a much harsher piece.

The La Fontaine “villager” is a country bumpkin who never doubts the existence of God, merely His good sense. After he muses on God’s apparent error, he falls asleep and is hit, by accident, and wakes reassured of God’s surpassing wisdom, whereupon he returns home. We the readers are assured that the country-folk’s naive belief is secure, and we chuckle indulgently at the foolish but good-hearted villager.

The Finch “atheist” is a young man of status and education, who denies God outright. Immediately, God intervenes to punish him. He is given no opportunity to repent, and instead the poet herself berates him with a sadistic fantasy of his brains beaten out of his skull.

It’s a completely different poem in tone and purpose. Not a translation at all.

was there a great deal of atheism* around pre-1720 to be in any kind of dispute (teasing or serious) with? wikipedia led me to one Jean Meslier, whose dates pretty much match ann of finchelsea’s, but whose big book on it was only discovered after he died — in 1729

*obviously there was a vast amount of argument in the 17th century — and civil and military strife — about which arm of christianity was the correct one, including plenty of extremely inventive indie and avant garde xtian sects, actual non-theism was really quite rare, wasn’t it?

belle le triste: “was there a great deal of atheism* around pre-1720”

Apparently there was some. John Bunyan’s book The Life and Death of Mr Badman contains a story about an atheist who wrote a book against God and the soul (“though I think it was not published”), but who gets his comeuppance when he suffers a stroke, loses the power of speech and is partly paralysed. The Godly rejoice greatly to see him helplessly sit and drool. They were presumably also pleasurably anticipating their view of the torments of the damned in Hell.

I think that this has been re-done as popular music, too, come to think of it. There was a song on the album “Talking Acorns ’77” — whose themes were later repeated in “More Songs About Buildings and Pumpkins” — called “Don’t Worry About God” or something like that. As best as I can recall the lyrics:

I see the clouds that move across the sky
I see the deity that moves the clouds away
It moves the clouds over by the building
I pick the building that I want to live in

I smell the oak trees and the punpkins in the woods
I see the pinecones that fall by the highway
Sometimes they fall and kill people
I pick the building that I want to live in

It’s over there, it’s over there
My building has every convenience
It has sitting atheists convenient to me
I can watch as they look to the sky
I can relax as they get hit in the eye

But I don’t remember the rest, sorry.

Was it Johnson who said that the 18th.C. was an age of unbelief? In Sacred Poetry Gray’s Elegy is profusely illustrated. Arnold asks why Gray’s production was so scanty and the answer he proffers is that Gray was born into an age of prose. Lady Anne’s poem is a poor argument but it is poor poetry because it is an argument. It aspires more to wit and ‘splendid diction’ than to enthusiasm.

Is there any atheist poetry that celebrates unbelief or argues for it? Arnold was wistful and regretted it in ‘Dover Beach’.

‘On First Looking into Darwin’s Origin’ by R.Dawkins. Strutting like a rook, declaiming, with his glittering eye.

Since the ‘God’ that the everyday priesthood preached about was so evidently a bogeyman/consolation-prize for the downtrodden and unfortunate, ignoring him when you were rich, famous, talented and convinced of your own inherent superiority made a lot of sense.

“The myriad gods of the empire were all regarded by the common man as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the philosopher as equally useful” – Gibbon.

Chapter XV (+- 1) in Decline & Fall is a superb example of the most bald-faced irony – without ever directly making a mocking statement, but just by taking everything at face value, he manages to make Christian theology look utterly ridiculous.

Did you know that 150 people are killed by falling coconuts each year?

Just kibitzing in on the conversation here; Bloix is running riot here. Where’s the strident atheistic poet to challenge him? Has theism finally found its preordained avenger?

It is at times, watching this erudite smug scoffing at the delusional believer and his delusional beliefs, as though the mighty, in indignation and righteousness of cause while yet still-beleaguered and minority in number, forces of the Abolitionist campaign were to be seen attacking the peculiar institution of slavery, with the full measure of their wit and knowledge, by ridiculing the slaves themselves, and ripping to small shreds their dull reasons and feeble justifications for continuing so to arduously work without recompense, for masters whose only hold on them is violent coercion and fear.
Slaves whose only real justification can ever be that immoral force, and the inescapable fact of their captivity.
It is much safer to vent spleen on the unarmed and hapless, and their confused and conflicted, and equally enchained leaders, than to track those chains back to the forge, and to the initial order for their manufacture. And then to track forward the lines of profit that extend from that rewardless labor to…well, yes, to where?
Some will cavil that hordes of addled believers yet rampage freely, even that they increase daily though recently not quite so much, and hesitate not at all to attack any unbeliever who makes his claim in public, so that professions of atheism are in fact dangerous and not safe at all, even now, deep as we are in centuries of Reason’s Age.
This is while true in great part a misdirection, as with the dogs at guard in the grounds of an estate. An estate besieged by angry villagers whose catalog of misuse and injustice has caught fire and driven them hence for retribution.
Yes there are dogs, yes they will tear your pants and worse if they can get at you, and yes they are a grievous nuisance to legitimate petitioners, but they are there as are the slaves out in the field and in the back parts of the house, to serve their master, and ensure his wealth and comfort.
Some will cavil in turn at that, and say, with disdain, that it is a great frustration of this conflict, that the believers’ faith in a non-extant master makes them an opponent like the Hydra, or like a cloud of biting insects, or some other biological metaphor that has no accountable, defeatable head.
And, say those cavillers, cavalierly, why not slap and thwack and ridicule and mock, it has its cathartic benefit, it confirms us in our affinity, and may in time even succeed in diminishing the power of superstition, and the superstitious, in society. Why not?
Why not laugh at the slave in his chains?
Because it is a weak thing to do, and inferiorly motivated.
And because it leaves undone the task presented the working conscience when one asks “Cui bono?”.
That and the glaring fact that no one here in this troubled world has the slightest idea where we are or what we’re doing, beyond the basest and most simplistic subjective explanations.
We don’t understand time for all that we can measure it with astonishing accuracy. We don’t understand gravity except by what it does. We have a working definition of light, but only that, and our knowledge of the infinite universe both exterior and interior is like an infant’s knowledge of its crib and its digestive processes, growing rapidly, but as yet very immediate.
The more we do learn, the more the rationalist’s objective universe looks like a comforting, pragmatic myth.
In light of that ignorance this mockery of believers and their beliefs appears more like the superior airs and posturings taken on by a privileged house slave toward his less fortunate brothers and sisters in the field, and not at all the compassionate regard of the free and honorable man confronting, with humility and an open heart, the brutal fact of lives lived in chains.

It is at times, watching this erudite smug scoffing at the delusional believer and his delusional beliefs, as though the mighty, in indignation and righteousness of cause while yet still-beleaguered and minority in number, forces of the Abolitionist campaign were to be seen attacking the peculiar institution of slavery, with the full measure of their wit and knowledge, by ridiculing the slaves themselves, and ripping to small shreds their dull reasons and feeble justifications for continuing so to arduously work without recompense, for masters whose only hold on them is violent coercion and fear.
Slaves whose only real justification can ever be that immoral force, and the inescapable fact of their captivity.
It is much safer to vent spleen on the unarmed and hapless, and their confused and conflicted, and equally enchained leaders, than to track those chains back to the forge, and to the initial order for their manufacture. And then to track forward the lines of profit that extend from that rewardless labor to…well, yes, to where?
Some will cavil that hordes of addled believers yet rampage freely, even that they increase daily though recently not quite so much, and hesitate not at all to attack any unbeliever who makes his claim in public, so that professions of atheism are in fact dangerous and not safe at all, even now, deep as we are in centuries of Reason’s Age.
This is while true in great part a misdirection, as with the dogs at guard in the grounds of an estate. An estate besieged by angry villagers whose catalog of misuse and injustice has caught fire and driven them hence for retribution.
Yes there are dogs, yes they will tear your pants and worse if they can get at you, and yes they are a grievous nuisance to legitimate petitioners, but they are there as are the slaves out in the field and in the back parts of the house, to serve their master, and ensure his wealth and comfort.
Some will cavil in turn at that, and say, with disdain, that it is a great frustration of this conflict, that the believers’ faith in a non-extant master makes them an opponent like the Hydra, or like a cloud of biting insects, or some other biological metaphor that has no accountable, defeatable head.
And, say those cavillers, cavalierly, why not slap and thwack and ridicule and mock, it has its cathartic benefit, it confirms us in our affinity, and may in time even succeed in diminishing the power of superstition, and the superstitious, in society. Why not?
Why not laugh at the slave in his chains?
Because it is a weak thing to do, and inferiorly motivated.
And because it leaves undone the task presented the working conscience when one asks “Cui bono?”.
That and the glaring fact that no one here in this troubled world has the slightest idea where we are or what we’re doing, beyond the basest and most simplistic subjective explanations.
We don’t understand time for all that we can measure it with astonishing accuracy. We don’t understand gravity except by what it does. We have a working definition of light, but only that, and our knowledge of the infinite universe both exterior and interior is like an infant’s knowledge of its crib and its digestive processes, growing rapidly but as yet very immediate.
The more we do learn, the more the rationalist’s objective universe looks like a comforting, pragmatic myth.
In light of that ignorance this mockery of believers and their beliefs appears more like the superior airs and posturings taken on by the privileged house slave toward his less fortunate brothers and sisters in the field, and not at all the compassionate regard of the free and honorable man, confronting, with humility and an open heart, the brutal fact of lives lived in chains.

Brilliant rebuttal, Dave. I wanted to get pumpkins and Higgs bosons in there, but I ran out of 19th century steam. Maybe that would have helped you flesh things out a little. Next time, okay?