I love satire. Of most colours. I like it when Chris­tians satirise our own cul­ture, and when non-Christians do it too. Satire is reveal­ing. It is good for teach­ing. It makes me laugh.

LarkNews is one of my favourite satire sites, I know of a few peo­ple who have fallen for its satire in the past…

Peo­ple repost­ing satire as real news is pretty funny — like when a cou­ple of main­stream news out­lets picked up an Onion piece that reported the moon land­ing was fake.

Poe’s Law didn’t make the Wikipedia list of epony­mous laws I men­tioned pre­vi­ously — but you can read it on this page — RationalWiki’s page.

With­out a wink­ing smi­ley or other bla­tant dis­play of humor, it is impos­si­ble to cre­ate a par­ody of Fun­da­men­tal­ism that SOMEONE won’t mis­take for the real thing.

It’s one of those Inter­net sub­cul­ture things par­tic­u­lar to debates with athe­ists (along with the No True Scots­man Fal­lacy) that comes up all the time. It’s a short­hand thing that pre­vents any real dis­cus­sion tak­ing place spring­ing from an extreme posi­tion. The prob­lem is that some­times extreme posi­tions may be cor­rect. This is my biggest prob­lem with all the con­ver­sa­tional threads I’ve read on the athe­ist blogs I fol­low. If it turns out that God exists (as I believe he does) they’re going to look like idiots. This is the prob­lem with Occam’s Razor, and in fact any other epony­mous law that becomes com­mon par­lance. There are times when there’ll be a com­plex expla­na­tion for some­thing that is true while a more sim­ple expla­na­tion with less steps may be wrong. There are times when it’s appro­pri­ate to ref­er­ence Hitler in an argu­ment (Godwin’s Law). There are times when some­one will be claim­ing to be a Scots­man when they’re not (the No True Scots­man Fallacy).

Using these laws in con­ver­sa­tions who don’t know about them makes you look like a prat. Espe­cially if you end up quot­ing them and being wrong.

I’m going to posit my own epony­mous law — and I’d like it to catch on. Campbell’s Law. It states:

“As the length of argu­ment on the inter­net increases the prob­a­bil­ity of ref­er­enc­ing an irrel­e­vant epony­mous law or incor­rectly iden­ti­fy­ing a fal­lacy approaches one.”

I’ll posit a sec­ond law.

“Just because some­one, some­where, has described a com­mon phe­nom­ena as a “law”, it does not nec­es­sar­ily ren­der the prac­tice a transgression.”

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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