{"id":6710,"date":"2006-07-24T13:26:31","date_gmt":"2006-07-24T13:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/we-interrupt-any-seriousness.html"},"modified":"2006-07-24T13:26:31","modified_gmt":"2006-07-24T13:26:31","slug":"we-interrupt-any-seriousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/we-interrupt-any-seriousness.html","title":{"rendered":"We interrupt any seriousness.."},"content":{"rendered":"

…to muse about Dane Cook. Of whom I had never, ever heard before an episode of The Office<\/em> in which Michael (the clueless boss, played by Steve Carrell) says to a group of kids (brought there on "Bring Your Daughters to Work Day" – a great episode.), in an attempt to entertain them, "Now who likes Dane Cook"  – and they all enthusiastically jump and raise their hands. The point being, I suppose, that it is inappropriate for kids to be listening to Dane Cook. <\/p>\n

So, I guess Dane Cook is a comic – quite popular among young adults. He was raised Catholic and that’s a part of his act – born in 72, so you get a taste of how the post-Vatican II babies view their upbringing – total lack of seriousness, no "there" there at all, blasphemous about Eucharist, coming up with all sorts of "cute" names for it, and so on.<\/p>\n

But then…<\/p>\n

Last night, after Deadwood <\/em>(which I really only half-watch, partly because of the language, partly because I have no idea what’s going on) on HBO, they played a snippet of a Dane Cook act – apparently one of his more well-known riffs on a conversation with an atheist.  It starts off with an atheist being offended when Cook says "God Bless You" after a sneeze. Cook responds, the atheist responds – "Y’know, "Cook says, "like he’s gonna school me<\/em>!" Cook’s atheists waxes on about how after he dies, his being or whatever will be transmogrified (or whatever) into a tree, and Cook proceeds to take us through what will happen to the tree…wouldn’t it be cool, he says, if the tree grows really big and is chopped down by a guy with an ax<\/em> (and we think, ah, this is all about revenge)…and then taken to a paper mill, and Cook goes on and on until the climax until his fantasy has the former atheist-then tree being ground up and made into paper…for a Bible.<\/em><\/p>\n

There may be nothing else in the Cook ouevre, <\/em>such as it is, worth salvaging, but that bit, with the utter contempt for the atheist’s arrogance and the perspective of God’s Ultimate Irony…was refreshing.<\/p>\n

Now…for the next step, which is always the hardest. God exists…so what? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…to muse about Dane Cook. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}