Sherri Shepherd of The View has uttered, in all seriousness, that “Jesus came first.” Shepherd seems to believe that, in the great collective whole of human existence, there was no religion before Christianity. One must ask how such an ignorant fuckwit was picked from the available pool of candidates and hired as co-host. Granted, one does not expect penetrating insight from The View, but surely there are minimum intelligence standards. Surely, there is some producer on the show who is doing more than tearing out hair and begrudgingly accepting this dunce as a talking head for our time. Because this baffling statement truly represents the nadir of talk shows. I’d expect such a conclusion from a four-year-old who still believes in Santa Claus and doesn’t know any better, not a forty year old adult who has had decades to form her conclusions. But there it is. “Jesus came first!” A statement as foolhardy as shouting “The world is flat!” at a geography convention.
If this were a just world, Shepherd would be employed at a full service gas station somewhere, assuming of course that her diseased mind was capable of understanding that inserting the nozzle does not come first (although Jesus DOES come first and he shall save you from rising gas prices!) and that you actually unscrew the cap before putting in the nozzle. Of course, since this is a task repeated multiple times throughout the day, perhaps after the thirty-seventh time, she might catch on. Then again, maybe not. Because as seen in the clip, when presented with the facts by her peers, Shepherd is incapable of even confessing that her co-hosts may be right.
Why the hostility? Because this isn’t just about the glorification of ignorance, but the glorification of people who refuse to accept anything but their ignorance. A remotely thinking person would stop in his tracks and realize that they’ve made a mistake or consider that facts and evidence may have some bearing on maintaining a mind set. And here’s the thing. It’s not as if Shepherd is being asked to weigh in on the Jungian influence on advertising or distinguish between an AK-47 and an M16, but she’s being asked to respond to a basic fact that anyone with a basic elementary school education knows! In continually employing a numbskull as dumb and dense as Shepherd’s on the show, The View‘s producers are complicit in celebrating one of the most abhorrent qualities that has pervaded this country. Maybe Mike Judge was right. If we continue to accept such rampant stupidity without protest, at this rate, we’ll be queuing up for Ass: The Movie in a lot less than 500 years.
“A statement as foolhardy as shouting ‘The world is flat!'”
Which she did. Kind of.
Take a breath and think for a moment about the fact you’re getting worked up over The View.
Many Americans have childish, or childlike, religious beliefs, which they’ve never bothered to think about, let alone examine. They simply parrot something they heard, and probably misunderstood, in a Sunday school class when they were 7. The level of ignorance she expressed is shared by millions of Christians, unfortunately. And yeah, this woman shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a national media outlet.
When I was 10, a classmate — a girl who was being raised in the Pentecostal church — argued the earth was flat like a table, because, she said, the Bible refers to angels standing at “the four corners of the earth.” After that, I ceased talking theology, or anything else with her beyond “pass the salt, please,” in the school cafeteria.
The thing is, you know, even the most theologically conservative Christians believe that there were people and religions here before Jesus: the Old Testament is full of them. So I’m really baffled by her answer and her insistence, and I’m generally pretty adept at interpreting theo-speak.
Actually she may be referring to the opening lines of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” In this formulation, apparently (or possibly) influenced by Aristotle’s metaphysics, John the author presents Jesus as the a priori Form to / from which existence becomes actual.
Boy it’s still sounds stupid though. Whoo-eee.
Wouldn’t I make a good hostess on “The View?”
I suggest she was going for the Holy Trinity thing but found it difficult to grasp the whole “three” thing.
Nice of you to suggest that only morons work gas station jobs (there’s not much difference between the old “attendant job” at a gas station and working at Corporate _______ Store.) Really quickwitted and brilliant. It’s so much smarter to write 25,000 words in two weeks for as much cash as your local gas station attendant makes in 40 hours. It must be exhausting to do research on the internet. Just exhausting. My dad working 70 hours a week as a carpenter and a seasonal employee at Ace is just crying in his sleep for you. When he sleeps, that is.
If you’re going to go apeshit on someone who is clearly deranged, at least lump her in with her own kind. Job and social class have nothing to do with her stupidity. Clearly.
Math is hard.
Seth: Where did I write that I considered gas station attendants to be dumb? And are you honestly suggesting that a professional writer is dumber than a person not being able to identify the basic fact that there were many religions before Jesus Christ? And I don’t just do research on the Internet for a piece, you dumbass. Ever hear of the library? That’s where my ass was today. So you can take your deranged paralogia and shove it up your ass. You’re one of those rodents who sees peanut butter in a glue trap and who blames all the smarter mice for being prejudicial when they’re just being smarter.
“If this were a just world, Shepherd would be employed at a full service gas station somewhere, assuming of course that her diseased mind was capable of understanding that inserting the nozzle does not come first.”
Implication: Shepherd is stupid, therefore she can only work at job ______________, which is for stupid people. And what planet do you live on where there’s gas station attendants? Oh, that’s right, the I’m Important and Smarter Than Everyone Else Because I Perform a Dying Function, That of a Book Reviewer.
Call me a dumbass all you want: I make a living instead of pretending and begging. Earth to Ed: you’re never going to be David Mitchell. Shit, you’re never going to be Mark Sarvas. Get a job, or quit yer bitching.
Oh, but I’m much happier than you are!
Clearly. Have fun composing 10,000 word emails to your cable company and reading the comments on your blog at 9:54 p.m. on a Friday night in “the greatest city in the world.”
At least you like Lydia Millet. You’re not completely stupid.
But Daniel, she did not say “Before Abraham was, was who?” “JESUS!” She said nothing predates Christians.
And what’s wrong with suggesting that in a just world, she would be living in obscurity at a comparatively ill-paid, tedious job rather than being a media personality with high exposure? How can a person infer from Ed’s saying that, that he thinks gas station attendants in the real world deserve no better than they got? “Dick Cheney will be among the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” “Oh, so you think everyone killed by Franco deserved it?” Paralogia, right.
Hair-splitting. By which I mean this dickering over the birth date of a fictitious character. The ignorance in question goes beyond the lady’s foggy chronology, but it’s well within her rights as the adherent of a popular superstition to claim that her hero predates *everything*. Isn’t this a little bit like laughing at someone for claiming that the Hulk has powers of invisibility?
It would be exactly like that, if Marvel Comics were one of the most important theological/social/political forces of the last couple millennia, and if anyone believed that some version of the Hulk ever existed historically.
“It would be exactly like that, if Marvel Comics were one of the most important theological/social/political forces of the last couple millennia…”
You mean it’s not?
“…and if anyone believed that some version of the Hulk ever existed historically.”
People, as I have noticed, are, and clearly always have been, willing to believe *all kinds* of nonsense. Not much else to do with the allotted three score and ten, is there? If “we” hadn’t been so busy erasing most of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Prime Real Estate we now think of as The West, we’d be as familiar with *all kinds* of goofy Creation Myths as the one “we” currently venerate at the beginnings of “our” ball games.
Even if such a fellow (or a composite) answering to scriptural accounts actually once breathed/ate/pooped, he damn sure wasn’t the product if either a semen-free conception or a mess-free birth, neither walked on water nor re-animated the dead, and did not himself return from a terminally untaxable condition with all of the supernatural advantages that being the direct heir of the architect of the known universe entails. Minus the fairytale, he is/was “not” the Jesus Christ of whom the funny lady on television was speaking, rendering Thine point moot.
Now, excuse me, I’m off to genuflect before a graven image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (in exchange for its promise of my immortality, and riches untold)…
I think you’ve misunderstood my point. That people believe all kinds of crazy things doesn’t negate the fact that the sort of people, crazy or otherwise, who believe in the figure commonly called “Jesus Christ” usually know when that figure was supposed to have lived, at least to the point of not believing that no one lived before him (except in the theological sense that Daniel mentioned above), and that other religions existed before Christianity; and even people, crazy or otherwise, who aren’t Christians usually know enough about it as a force in world history over the last couple thousand years to know that it wasn’t the first thing in the world. Knowledge about the Hulk does not (yet?) so pervade the world, perhaps to our detriment. That’s my only point.
“Knowledge about the Hulk does not (yet?) so pervade the world, perhaps to our detriment.”
Then let us spread the Word (with the sword, if necessary)!
Seth: By the way, I’m so sorry that you loathe your job at Downers Grove High School in Illinois.
Amen, Steven! And I think it’s time we heal the gray Hulk/green Hulk schism, too.
Not to mention the whole “David” vs “Bruce” dissonance (which is not quite as arcane as the “Al Hedison/David Hedison” paradox, but it will do for starters).
Let the healing (and the crusading) begin.
“Seth: By the way, I’m so sorry that you loathe your job at Downers Grove High School in Illinois.”
Am I alone in finding it kind of unseemly when Ed posts something like this?
Feeling kind of unseemly yet strangely compelled by Ed’s blog is the norm around here, no?
I do love my job here. And I think it’s pathetic and sad that you would post that—though pathetic and sad and strangely compelling does seem to be the norm.
Would you like to post my home address and phone number as well? Here’s my email: sethgoldenrod@yahoo.com . Everyone who reads this can hector me. I’ll be ready for all ten of those emails.
Sorry I can’t post my son and daughter’s information, nor the times and dates I leave my home. You do seem to be tougher on the internet, though: maybe I should tell you where I go online so you can meet me and type things at me.
Anyone who disagrees with you or counters your vitriol gets outed, is that how it goes? Fine, then. I don’t have a crappy blog to use to do a sad imitation of intimidation.
I too think the gas station reference was clearly classist, as is the high school teacher reference. Won’t be reading this blog anymore. What a creep.
“Anyone who disagrees with you or counters your vitriol gets outed…”
Seth, face it. You were trolling. Instant Karma and so forth.