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The philosopher Homer. Simpson! Really!


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Posted by Sammy_boy
Take a look at this BBC article comparing The Simpsons with heavyweight philosophers like Plato and Kant, and how it tackles actually quite big philosophical issues in a simple but effective way, for example:

Quote:

in the episode Homer the Heretic, Homer gives up church and decides to follow God in his own way: by watching the TV, slobbing about and dancing in his underpants.

Throughout the episode he justifies himself in a number of ways.

"What's the big deal about going to some building every Sunday, I mean isn't God everywhere?"
"Don't you think the almighty has better things to worry about than where one little guy spends one measly hour of his week?"
"And what if we've picked the wrong religion? Every week we're just making God madder and madder?"
Homer's protests do not merely allude to much subtler arguments that proper philosophers make. The basic points really are that simple, which is why they can be stated simply.


Philosophy's First Family
Of course, there is more that can and should be said about them, but when we make decisions about whether or not to follow one particular religion, the reasons that really matter to us are closer to the simple truths of the Simpsons than the complex mental machinations of academic philosophers of religion.

And that's true even for the philosophers, whose high-level arguments are virtuosi feats of reasoning, but are not the things that win hearts and minds. They are merely the lengthy guitar solos to Homers crushing, compelling riffs.

However, being simple is not the same as being simplistic, which is one of the greatest crimes in the Simpsons' universe.

We can see this when Homer's house catches fire, in what could be seen as divine retribution for his apostasy.

But what actually led to the fire was not God's wrath but Homer's hubris and arrogance. Sitting on his sofa thinking smugly, "Boy, everyone is stupid except me," he falls asleep, dropping his cigar.

What really caused the fire was thus a slippage from the simple into the simplistic. Homer's mistake was to think that because the key points which inform his heresy are simple, that the debate is closed and he has nothing left to learn from others. But this is being simplistic, not keeping things simple.




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