Thursday, June 03, 2004

It's Worse Than I Thought

It all started as an innocent joke. I wanted to inspire Fr. H to step forth from the gloomy shade of his clerical Batcave and rejoin the blogging world. I thought it would be funny to see his reaction to the claims that I am both bloggers. But, as they say in grade schools, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. What has happened to this blog is much worse than a little poke in the eye.

Apparently, scholars at various theological seminaries and universities have been following Catholic Ragemonkey as a form of watching Revelation continue to be played out. They had the good taste not to assume that what is written here is new Revelation, but more of an act of theological fisking. Anyhow, my post concerning the non-existence of Fr. Hamilton has thrown the group into confusion. They are asking, "How can we know that the posts marked "Fr. S.T." represent a truthful communication?" These wise scholars have decided to form a seminar to study our writings.

The scholars have named their effort "The Ragemonkey Seminar." They propose to read everything we have written and then color code the statements in order of rank based on how likely it is we have said it or if it is a case of the community we speak to interpreting and interjecting into our work some form of false theological extrapolations.

For example, one of the first articles they are working on concerns authentic Fr. Hamilton writing, referred to as "the H source." Then they want to compare word choices and context of the writings of mine, aka "the T source" and see if there is any overlap that would suggest duplicative authorship. Also, there seems to be a contention that all of this comes from an unknown source, a "Q source" if you will, that provides all the content but uses a priestly identity to hide himself and lend credence to the ideas he is proposing. This is similar to the theory behind the letters of disputed Pauline authorship. But I digress.

So, it turns out, that by casing doubt upon the existence of one Ragemonkey, I have doomed us both.

P.S. If you don't find this funny, there are two reasons for this. One, I am not that bright and I don't write comedy all that well. Two, you have never had to sit through a boring lecture on theoretical conjectures concerning the origin of the Gospels.

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