Okay; perhaps a wee bit o’ hyperbole in the blog title. I refer to the crop of contestants in the current season of The Great British Baking Show. And I am rooting for some of them. This is rare; I usually root for everyone. But (so far), not this time.
Moiself is disappointed with this year’s…crop of contestants…no; that’s not quite it. What do you call a group of bakers – an oven? A rise? A batch? A batter – that’s the one.
Yet again, I digress.
I am disappointed with this year’s batter of bakers. Maybe, like mold on the forgotten pie that’s been cooling on a windowsill since the Fourth of July, they’ll grow on me. Usually, I like the majority of the home bakers and root for them all. But more and more, as in, with each passing season and TGBBS gains popularity and viewership, it seems to me that there are certain contestants who don’t care about the baking as much as they care about what they think being on the show can do for them: get themselves in the public eye, and establish – gawd, I hate even typing this – a brand or platform for future ventures. These wannabe celebs mug for the cameras – they act Special Enough ® to be the attention getters, whether through their on-show behavior or their carefully curated bios, and they joke with and chummy up to the show’s judges as if they are peers with Paul Hollywood and Nigella Lawson…. [1]
( hint to contestants: you are not )
I can think of two contestants in two different seasons of TGBBS whom I’ve actually loathed and actively rooted against, due to (what I perceived were) their respective senses of entitlement. Both were older contestants; one was German, the other British. Both were talented home bakers, and both seemed to be more experienced than the other contestants – two facts they each seemed to be aware of (read: smug about). And both made it to the finals, and each lost their respective season’s final, which frosted my cupcake, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
Oh honey you know I do.
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Department Of Adulting 1101 – The Graduate Seminar
“There are no bad guys here.
Just sad guys.”
Lather; rinse; repeat.
Why do I feel like someone died? I ask moiself. Because some thing did die: a decades-long, cherished friendship has become collateral damage to one of Life’s festering shit shows—in this case, years of terminal illness and its aftermath.
“I have to watch a movie where I’m guaranteed to laugh,” I told MH, two days into my week-long funk after having received the news I was predicting/dreading. I could’ve put on Airplane!
…but I wanted something with more… human, as in humane, laughter situations. The first thing that came to mind was Little Miss Sunshine. No matter how many times I’ve seen it, the movie’s climatic dance-performance-at-a-kiddie-beauty-pageant slays me.
But a microsecond after I had the thought, moiself cringed for the memory that used to be heartwarming but which now is a wistful reminder of loss. The friend whose life circumstances triggered her withdrawal took me to see Little Miss Sunshine after she’d already seen it – specifically, she told me, to watch my reaction to that scene.
There are no bad guys here…
I keep repeating that. Because it’s true. [2]
* * *
Department Of Filling Holes That Don’t Exist
Dateline: earlier this week; returning from local errand. Moiself’s route took me past a local church, which has one of those message/bulletin boards on the church’s front lawn, facing the street. You’ve seen them: aside from listing the time of their worship services, some of the boards have (what the church bulletin board posters believe are) are pithy or profound proselytizing-ish sayings, ala:
This particular church changes the sayings on a regular basis. The saying of the week I drove past was something along the lines of, “Let Jesus fill the hole in your heart.” Ones in prior weeks have included messages (sometimes rhyming) about how “…only God can _______ (solve a certain problem).”
Moiself finds these messages to be the gotcha! tipoff to how Christian theology operates. I imagine a conversation with the pastor [3] who put up that first sign and who is pitching a Happy Heathen ( such as moiself ) as to why I should be attending his church. [4]
Pastor:
“Come hear the good news, about how Jesus can fill the hole in your heart!”
Happy Heathen:
“No thanks. Actually, I don’t have a hole in my heart.”
Pastor:
“Come on in anyway, and we’ll give you one!”
With the likely exception of some forms of Buddhism, [5] most religions’ theologies purport to solve problems that are nonexistent, at least in the real/outside-of-their-religion world. Theology is the ultimate scam. It invents a nonexistent problem, then tries to convince you that (a) you have this problem, and that (b) believing/following the tenets of their particular religion is the only solution to this problem.
Imagine the person who punches you in the face, then offers to sell you an ice pack to ease the swelling around your bruised eye.
Christian theology purports to “solve” problems that are, in fact, its own inventions. Even more creepily, it must convince you that you are broken, in order to “fix” you. The very concept of sin comes from the Christian scriptures. And then there is Sin Deluxe: witness the “problem” of Original Sin – a doctrine which, BTW, didn’t exist until Augustine coined it in the fourth century (and which no other religion, from Judaism to Hinduism to Buddhism to Islam, extrapolates from the stories in the Hebrew Scriptures). Ladies and Gentlemen, we’d like to introduce you to the problem of Original Sin, and its resulting estrangement of humanity from god, which can only be fixed via…may I have a drum roll, please?… ta da!, Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s give a big round of applause for the Doctrine of the Atonement!
As former minister Dan Barker put it, ” ‘Sin’ is a religious concept, hence ‘salvation’ is merely a religious solution to a religious problem. Would we respect a doctor who ran around cutting people with a knife in order to sell them a bandage?”
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [6]
* * *
May no one ever convince you to fix what ain’t broke;
May you weather the inevitable waxing and waning of relationships;
May you enjoy TGBBS no matter how smarmy certain contestants are;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] This season’s judges. Paul Hollywood has been a judge from the start; Nigella Lawson replaces Prue Leith, who retired from the show after the previous season.
[2] And then I watched, Morning Glory.
[3] or whichever church member is responsible for choosing and putting up the weekly saying
[4] actually, I don’t have to imagine it; I’ve had these conversations.
[5] Which tends to be more of a life philosophy than a religion. Rather than a theology, Buddhism is more of an observational list for natural truths, and provides suggestions for how one might live with, for example, the knowledge of the truth that we human beings are of the nature to get sick, and eventually die.
[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
