Posted on 01/20/2003 3:07:38 PM PST by Houmatt
The magic-comedy team of Penn & Teller has performed a stunt parodying the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, offending some attendees of a major magicians' convention, reports columnist Norm Clarke of the Las Vegas Review.
The skit, performed last week in Las Vegas, included Teller, dressed as Christ on a full-size cross, entering the room on a cart. According to the column, a midget dressed as an angel "performed a simulated sex act on the near-naked Teller." Penn, in a Roman gladiator costume, unveiled the scene by pulling away a "Shroud of Turin" that covered the cross.
A group of people attending the event, billed as a roast of magician Amazing Johnathan, walked out in protest, says Clarke.
According to Rick Neiswonger, a longtime magician and marketing executive, said "the majority" of the 400 who attended the roast were offended.
"They (organizers) warned everybody that something offensive was going to happen, but my God, where do you draw the line? … This was beyond bad taste," Neiswonger told the Review.
One magician, Lance Burton, defended the stunt in an address at the finale luncheon of the conference.
"I told them, 'You were warned ahead of time.' It was a roast; it was held late at night (midnight)," he said, according to the Review column. "Penn & Teller are my dear friends and I would take a bullet for them, and you can write that."
Amazing Johnathan told the Review he was aware that a number of what he called "gospel magicians" walked out of the performance.
"This was performance art," said Johnathan. "I know that Penn is a practicing atheist, and I agree with him that Christianity can be dangerous. Look at the Trade Center. That was done in the name of religion."
Clarke said in his column that Penn & Teller declined comment.
Standard cop-out tagline. Anything's game in "performance art."
I guess I can add these two clowns to my never watch again list.
Well, the laws of logic are internally consistent. But the laws of logic are absolutely useless for establishing morality without an axiomatic base. Again, logic is of no use unless basic moral axioms have been established first. In Euclidean geometry (and every other form of math), laws of logic are similarly useless without a set of unprovable axioms. Logic is then used to derive Euclidean geometry from those unprovable axioms (and as Einsteinians know - Euclidean geometry does not correctly describe the universe anyway!). As an atheist, you can use logic all you want - but if you're talking about morality, it's because you have come up with your own arbitrary moral axioms. Stalin was completely logical. You know - in order to establish collective farms, I need to get rid of those in my way... Of course, his moral axioms were far, far different from Christian moral axioms, and were made up in his own mind. Relying on logic for morality is like telling your kids to rely on logic to behave themselves - without telling them the general and handed down principles of good behavior to begin with. That way can (and does) lead to the Lord of the Flies. Most all of the world's worst despots - Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc., were quite logical. Most understand that right and wrong exist outside of logic.
Well, if you make that arbitrary a moral axiom. Most would say, as an example, that a man who relentlessly goes about shooting and torturing and killing innocent little children does not have the same claim to self-defense as someone like St. Francis. But of course, they have moral axioms that set their own ideas of good and bad. Most people get those axioms from God, rather than arbitrarily making them up in their heads.
Does anybody have a credible source? World Nut Daily has been sinking to the Debkaka level of late.
Who says? You? There is nothing in atheism from which to distill the existence of such a right. The Darwinist model of mindless, aimless, godless natrual selection and survival of the fittest posits no moral "truths" at all. The only truth it posits is: the stronger, cleverer, and more ruthless get to mate and leave offspring; the rest die. The "right" to self-defense is an abstraction. Darwinist theory gives no place to abstractions.
Show how that's derived from materialism. The rule would be survival of the fittest.
A superb and well-written and well-argued post - laden with truth about morality.
I haven't seen anything in Randi's actions to be outraged by, he seems to be interested in revealing fraud. I don't have a problem if he were even exposing "faith healers". A church music leader that I know jokingly referes to televangelists as the "professional wrestling" of religion. Everyone on tv isn't a fraud but there are a number of charletans.
Those who do not believe in UFO's have never seen one.
Yenda may have been usuing lieterary licence.
So was my grandad. Until he was 101 and a few minutes before his death when he saw Christ and believed.
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