Teapot has fallen !

A Covid Coda post.

Teapot is dead – long live teapot.

In 1952 the philosopher Bertrand Russell said…..

“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.

But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

In 1958, coincidentally the year of my birth Russell went on to say …..

“I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.“

For most of my later adult life I considered myself to be a rational atheist because I believed that proof of the existence, or not, of god, couldn’t be proved in either direction but that I should think the existence of god to be unlikely because the universe didn’t seem to require it. I thought, for example, that the science of cosmology could adequately explain the creation of the universe back to a few billionth’s of a second after the big bang which itself was some form of quantum fluctuation ; I don’t claim to actually understand any of that , by the way, because at that level physics is mostly maths……and i’m crap at maths. Whatever….there seemed to be good science to support how the universe came about and none of required an outside creator or ‘prime mover’.

A few years back I chose to display my rationality by way of a small practical joke at my work station, I built a trio of cabinets above my desk that form a kind of altar piece a bit like a triptych and at it’s top and center I placed a small blue ceramic teapot on a decorative wooden plinth…thus ‘teapot’ was born. The rest of the display was to be based on an old idea called a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ and in my own example would slowly get filled with a mixture of maritime pictures, models and artifacts, similar stuff from my nursing career and then lots of odd stuff that somehow caught my eye.

Not mine (below) but a similar idea.

I still tinker with the cabinet of curiosities from time to time -for example one of it’s more recent additions is an all steel miners compass that also works as an inclinometer – the very tool that would once have been used all around here in the Tin mines. Last year I was searching for samples of the various minerals that would have come out of the Cornish mines , some of them are really pretty….but pretty toxic at the same time as one major product of the Cornish mines later on was Arsenic…….not a lot of people know that.

The original post : https://dirtywetdog.co.uk/2019/03/08/the-curious-cabinet/

Many of the early C of C’s were luxury items of furniture made of rare and valuable materials and then often stuffed with gems and equally high value items, later on the trend seems to have been more for biological oddities and curio’s – dried puffer fish and strange corals were common and the odd human skull almost mandatory.

My own theme was going to be anything to with the sea so already iv’e got some bits of old charts, some wooden blocks from Inanda and some maritime art prints , so far the only boat model is a push-fit card one of a Junk and I always intended to make some half models of the oddball boat types that I like but so far never found the time to build them. At some time I would like a halved Nautilus shell and I have often thought about doing something like a glass sweetie jar full of small colorful seashells – I already have one jar with stones picked up when I beached the boat in Brittany…….anyway, I both digress and ramble all in the same post so…….

Teapot has fallen – oh woe is me.

My version of the rational ‘joke’ was a small blue teapot and for fun I was going to write up the cult of teapot in which teapot’s two celestial companions would be the holy biscuit barrel and the sacred milk jug , I was even thinking about the first great coffee schism and a scientific explanation of quantum T…….I could go on but feel that maybe I shouldn’t. The joke could equally have been Professor Dawkins’s ‘flying spaghetti monster, in fact I was working on one part of the CC triptych being a Breughel-esque or Bosch-esque kind of hellscape inspired by the right hand panel of the Garden of Earthly delights being presided over by the flying spaghetti monster.

One problem with the visual teapot joke is that only my partner and I got to see it and I had to explain it to her – any joke that has to be explained fails pretty quickly so teapot has fallen, or at least been taken down and lightly dusted. My problem right now is that I have nothing to replace it with although one idea that came to mind was a small rolled up towel and the number 42 although I guess most people wouldn’t get that either.

So look, I think it’s time to kick open a new thought compartment in the Covid Coda or perhaps a different direction of thinking.

At the outset I originally intended the Coda to be a simple practical look at how to stay healthy , fit and sane when the government, aided by the mainstream media, tell us a load of BS, misinformation and downright lies…..and then create a whole load of senseless rules which were basically about fear and control. My experience of the pandemic has been partly shaped by concentrating on a difficult project during which iv’e been solving practical problems nearly every day and then writing about it – aside from that I found it a very reflective time and then an intensely disturbing one at times : being alone a lot iv’e had to learn to live ‘in my own head’ even more than I would do normally.

Over the course of the last year iv’e found my own poorly thought out ‘rational‘ atheism less and less easy to support and poor jokes like the little blue teapot gradually became less and less funny while at the same time I was perhaps experiencing some crisis of conscience after my mother died in 2021 and not having a way of dealing with it.

The curious cabinet doesn’t have to represent anything but merely to be an interesting backdrop to where I sit and write, except though that the things in the cabinet do represent something – exactly what i’m not sure. I have to admit though that what I did was to put something in the most prominent position which kind-of represented the ultimate (I thought) rational atheist joke – i’m a bit prone to liking things like ‘Teapot’ and would have added the flying spaghetti monster had I found a good print of it.

At some time in the future, when I get around to making some glass shelves for the 3 cabinets I might put teapot back on display along with other ‘dank’ memes such as the flying spaghetti monster, the number 42, a small rolled up towel and the comforting words ‘Don’t Panic’ : for now though i’m wondering what should go high, front and center. If I can no longer strictly call myself an atheist then what am I – an agnostic perhaps – and what would represent that ?…..it’s another joke and slightly troll but my first thought would be a container of sharp wooden splinters to remind me that the best definition of sitting on the fence is a butt full of splinters.

I find that iv’e been watching several video clips from some catholic friars, priests and scholars, I’ll have to talk about that in a separate post because i’m thinking about it so much. I notice of course that all of the aforementioned priests and friars always have at least one thing – a crucifix or other christian image in clear view. Although I currently find that a bit difficult to deal with then at least it’s something that they are showing to be high and central in their lives and I respect that ; with a view to that then Teapot seems now to be a rather cheap and meaningless mockery and a badly thought out piece of philosophy too.