It’s a now-familiar tactic when minority groups seek attention and enhanced self-esteem: find a universally admired historical figure of note and claim that he or she was a member of that group. Abraham Lincoln was gay! Cleopatra was black! (That worked out well…) Jesus was gay AND black! Still, I didn’t see this coming, but the Great Stupid knows no bounds, apparently:
Worshipers at a Trinity College at Cambridge were treated to a sermon by Joshua Heath, currently seeking a PhD in theology. He argued that Christ takes on a transgender body in historical artwork, appearing both masculine and feminine in different paintings. As proof, he displayed Jean Malouel’s painting called “The Pieta,” in which the body of Christ is shown with blood running down his side. Heath noted that the blood coming down from the side wound of Christ to the groin in the painting “takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance.” “[I]f the body of Christ as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body,” Heath concluded.
Oh. So if someone paints a portrait of me a few centuries from now showing me with the head of an aardvark, that would be solid evidence that I had the head of an an aardvark? Good thinking there, Ace. Paintings of Jesus prove absolutely nothing, as the “Jesus was black” advocates correctly pointed out. The evidence indicates he was probably dark-skinned and swarthy, and less than five feet tall. But trans is “in,” so we now have to debate whether Christ “identified” as a woman.
The residents of Woke World are apparently incapable of saying, “That’s ridiculous” when an “in” group is the topic, so Michael Banner, the Dean and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies at Trinity College felt it necessary to endorse Heath’s fantasy. He wrote in response to a complaint about the sermon that Heath’s “speculation was legitimate, whether or not you or I or anyone else disagrees with the interpretation.”
Can The Great Stupid get more stupid than this?
_______________
Source: Campus Reform
Ethics Alarms 
Jack asked, “Can The Great Stupid get more stupid than this?”
We’ve been shown that stupidity has no limits, none whatsoever.
Yes, the great stupid can get more stupid than this…
Unfortunately.
Although…
These things do make me wonder about the depths of stupidity.
I wonder, if Joan of Ark is painted with an erect penis coming out of her forehead, does that mean she was a Unicorn?
Inquiring minds want to know.
What’s clear is that…
Oops, Joan of Arc.
Duh Steve.
Not Joan Van Ark then?
Nope. Jean Claude Van Damme.
jvb
What would Jesus say?
Not a practicing Christian ..wouldn’t the holy spirit of the Trinity make a better transgender? Truly the definition of nothing is sacred
Genius has limitations. Stupidity knows no boundaries. The stupid will go on and on, like the song that never ends. It will continue until people put a stop to it, or society collapses. My money is on the latter option.
“The Song that Never Ends”! RIP, Sheri Lewis.
I loved that show as a child. Now I hear that song in my head every time I read the news. How children’s entertainment went from Lamb Chop to half dressed drag queens is beyond me.
Apparently Lewis’ daughter is carrying on the tradition with Lamb Chop and the others.
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
-Albert Einstein
I’m often left speechless by Woke World, but this one takes the cake. I’m physically sickened by this claim. I have no problem with the LGBTQ crowd, although when their group constantly holds their needs/wants/ideals over the importance of everyone and everything else, it becomes an issue. As for the trans community, I feel very sorry for those adults who believe they were born the wrong gender. I feel that this conviction comes from the mind of someone who is mentally ill. Mutilating healthy body parts, removing healthy organs, using heavy duty medications one’s body doesn’t actually need is considered Xenomelia (Body Integrity Dysphoria)…which is classified as a mental illness. I consider transgenders in this category. My heart breaks for someone in that much pain. I believe that someone suffering from such a serious illness should be treated with complete compassion. With that said, the transgender movement for children is unconscionable, and does not deserve the same leniency. I could go on passionately about my thoughts on this particular topic for hours. So could many of the medical professionals and juvenile transgender clinic administrators who are finally speaking out. But this blog post isn’t about transgenderism. It’s about a minority population trying to insert itself into everything. I’m what I call a “conflicted Catholic” (obviously with some major concerns with The Catholic Church), but as an adult, I decided that I can be devoted to God via my personal bond with Him, and no one else dictates my beliefs. With that in mind, I do consider something like Joshua Heath’s thesis defense to be sacrilegious, and wish I didn’t have to constantly see these various groups introducing themselves into everything. My husband, a former Catholic Scholar, had this to say: “Heath is shoehorning horseshit into abstract Ivory Tower concepts. There IS actual evidence to suggest that some painters of sacred works would give Jesus both masculine & feminine physical traits in order to make Him more accessible to a wider crowd. But these are extremely esoteric ideas injecting political twaddle into the conversation.” The Great Stupid is its own worst enemy.
I’m just glad that he didn’t do this with Piss Christ.
This is hilarious. The guy’s probably working on a thesis. I can just imagine the dopes who will sit on the panel during his defense all nodding their heads in approval.
And wasn’t that wound inflicted with a spear by a Roman soldier? Clearly, he must in fact have been a surgeon doing sex reassignment surgery!
Someone should ask him if ancient Egyptians had their eyes on the sides of their head.
They DID walk like an Egyptian.
The more fundamental stupid is in the fact that his theology proceeds from paintings.
Let me see if I understand this theory: an artist for 1600s painted a picture with an androgynous Jesus which represents the Lord’s embrace of transgenderism? At a time when transgenders didn’t exist? Nope.
jvb
Oops. The 1400s.
jvb
At this point, what PhD thesis isn’t just a non-ironic self trolling exercise?
There are so many PhD’s over the past centuries on a wide variety of topics that have been discussed *to exhaustion*. Some topics have NOTHING new to discuss. Yet to get a PhD, you have to have a dissertation on something new or new-ish.
So at some point these younger candidates in old and well discussed field increasingly must push the envelop on what to invent to talk about.
So increasingly bonkers ideas will increasingly and unintentionally troll their own disciplines.
You know, Michael, this came to my mind as well. As a point of interest, I think it was about twenty years ago my good friend and English professor then emeritus mentioned in passing that originality was no longer a required aspect of a Ph.D. thesis. The academy had evidently acknowledged what you’ve described: information overload. So, for quite a while now, Ph.D. candidates don’t have to come up with anything original; they can rehash prior scholarship.
Well that’s at least a good development.
The problem is that there are so many graduate programs now with so many graduates that the quality has been horribly watered down. In the 1960’s, there were one or two Ph.D. granting institutions in most states and now it is 7 or 8. Great work usually requires the best people bouncing ideas off one another, so we separated them into different institutions and made all the work mediocre. There really isn’t that much research that needs to be done, so now we just get a lot of garbage. Add DIE requirements to the mix and you get this.
You used to be able to do creative work for a Ph.D. in the humanities, (write a NEW play. write some NEW hymns, write about a historical event that hasn’t been widely covered) but that is hard and requires creativity., so now they just try to reanalyze the creative work of other people. These are ‘make work’ Ph.D.’s, which used to at least involve doing something that needed to be done, even if it didn’t require a lot of insight or creativity. A good example of a ‘make work’ Ph.D. project and what happens when you give it to an actual creative person was that of Albert Einstein.
Einstein had just shown that light was made of particles, atoms were real, and that time, mass, and distance depend on the relative velocity of the observer. He had a bachelor’s degree, but he didn’t pass the biology test, so he couldn’t get his teaching license. They needed to get the guy a Ph.D. so he could teach at a university and they needed to get it fast. No risky far-out project would do. They needed a fast, sure thing. Well, people need to know the viscosity of lubricating oils, but the viscosity changes with temperature. So, he was supposed to measure the viscosity of a bunch of lubricating oils at a wide range of temperatures, put them in useful tables and publish them. Quick, guaranteed, not creative, and yet it is useful information that is needed. Well, Einstein didn’t play those games. Instead, he studied the oils and came up with a theoretical model of what causes viscosity and how it changes with temperature! This paper is his MOST cited work.
https://sites.uwm.edu/nosonovs/2018/08/05/albert-einstein-and-nanofriction/
Note that Einstein’s doctoral dissertation is only 18 pages long. This joins other famous dissertations such as Sir William Lawrence Bragg’s dissertation on X-ray Diffraction and Prince Louis deBroglie’s dissertation on the wavelike properties of matter that are all under 25 pages. Important new ideas don’t necessarily need a lot of paper to justify themselves. My guess is that the dissertation on the painting of Christ will have an introduction longer that any of the dissertations above.
As my psychiatry professor repeated, “There is a thin line that separates sanity from insanity.” Hopefully, we are approaching the dark, low point of this insanity and the world will eventually see thee light.
I want a Ph.D. in theology. My thesis is that the apostles were Japanese because in Acts 2:1 they were ‘in one Accord’.
Yup, the Great Stupid takes another step off the cliff into the utterly absurd..
“Nature is Amazing”: Feathers Fly Over Claim of Scientific Americans Editor that Birds Have Four Sexes