poe's law

(pictured above: performance art)

today, a "colleague" of mine posted a link to an article called "is my husband GAY?" from a site called "ChristWire." the article is full of hilarious over-generalizations, distortions of fact, projections, wishful thinking, and a general sense of closeted-ness--all things i've come to strongly associate with conservative christianity.

the article had like a trillion comments, mostly from persons filled with righteous indignation. at that point it occurred to me that the article could possibly be a savvy, hit-generating satire. i mean, it is the internet after all. i can easily imagine a rather bored person stringing together a series of semi-coherent homophobic statements and presenting them as if they are the thoughts of a committed, but horrendously naive, christian. christ, i've even pretended to be a christian on 4chan just to annoy atheists (i think i've done this in real life as well, but i was pretty drunk).

after mulling it over for a bit, i decided i couldn't tell. i've heard christians say some really, really strange things (that modern day lizards are exactly the same as prehistoric dinosaurs, that the universe is 10,000 years old, that god made man before he made single-celled critters, that compassion is good, and the list goes on).

all this reminded me of something called poe's law. the law states that parodies of fundamentalist/whack-job flavors of christianity can be indistinguishable from the genuine article without a wink or a nod or some other external cue. in other words, fundamentalists can be so crazy that parodies of them are, in some cases, not really parodies at all.

to expand the law somewhat: 5 years ago when i was more callow and optimistic, i might have made a joke about universal healthcare being a bolshevik plot to destroy private property, end christianity, and exterminate the old and the sick. now, it wouldn't be much of a joke. there are people out there who really believe this. i guess one could say that it's a joke that they believe these things, but that's more sad than funny.

to bring this to a close: i suggested to a friend once that we might be entering a stage of history when things are becoming increasingly beyond parody (take a look at jersey shore--it's easily funnier than anything anyone could write about how stupid italian-americans are). this probably isn't as much a function of more people having more absurd beliefs (i hope that's remaining constant, or decreasing by the grace of god), but rather our exposure to such beliefs. one of the effects of the global village and web 2.0 is now we have access to the information necessary to construct some of the most realistic world-views in the history of the species. we also get to see what everyone else seems to be concerned with, which can be fairly underwhelming and disheartening.

+mc