I wouldn’t call Mary a minor character. Maybe secondary. She was more prominent in “Roomies” though so if you haven’t read that one, I can see you not remembering her much. She was always kind of a jerk, and a total hypocrite. Maybe her strong personality is why I remember her.
I’m precisely the the kind of new reader our author doesn’t want you to scare off with “It’s Walky” references…. but actually its great the way some college kid turns up for the first time and everyone starts talking about how they fought aliens in a parallel universe. Adds depth. And wierdness.
DON’T YOU KNOW THAT WHEN IT SAYS TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO ALL NATIONS IT ONLY MEANT ONLY THOSE WHO ARE ALREADY CHRISTIANS?
No seriously, a MASSIVE FUCKING POINT of Christianity is to evangelize, and bring those who have not heard the Good Word to church, so they can hear the words of Jesus, accept him as God, and be saved. If you’re viewing church as the cool kid club, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
And I say this as someone who hasn’t been a Christian for about a decade.
There’s an old apocryphal story about a missionary and an Eskimo, wherein the missionary is telling the Eskimo about Jesus. After a long description of heaven and hell, the missionary tells the Eskimo:
“If you know about Jesus and don’t accept him, you won’t go to heaven.”
“What would have happened if you had never come along and told me about Jesus?” the Eskimo asked. “Would I have gone to hell?”
“No,” the missionary said, “because then you’d have been an innocent that never had the chance to learn of Jesus. But now that I’ve told you you are not an innocent, and so if you refuse Him, you will go to Hell.”
The Eskimo thinks about that for a moment, then looks at the missionary with an affronted expression. “So why did you tell me?”
I’ve heard that story with just about every “wise savage” ethnic group substituted for the Eskimo.
Anyway, the Catholic Church came up with a better answer when they invented the concept of Limbo:
“Righteous pagans go to Limbo, which isn’t so bad. You’ll be hanging out with some good people, after all. Still, it isn’t nearly as good as Heaven, where you’ll be hanging out with GOD! Also, it was much easier to end up in Hell before you knew about Jesus – you had to depend on your own righteousness instead of God’s mercy.”
1) It shows that there was once a time when major Christian theologians were uncomfortable with the idea of blithely condemning most of humanity to Hell; and
2) It’s a better answer to the Eskimo than that (probably Protestant) missionary had.
yeah….
Its not a “free pass” if a life-long friend invites you to a party.
Think of it as moving into a new neighborhood – if you already know and are friends with the people who throw the parties, then you don’t have to spend time in that state of “limbo” while you get to the point of “knowing the guy”….
Of course, joining the local gang is an option – as is never trying to get into any of those parties. (imagine the parties being lan parties, if your a geek like me)
The problem is, the way they advertise is, ANYBODY can get into the party, no matter how “good” or “bad” they were. All they have to do is say they were honestly sorry, and will never do it again. And even if they do it again, all they have to do is say sorry again. And it doesn’t even matter how late in their life they decide to change their ways – all they have to do is say sorry and get in.
Meanwhile, people outside the religion have to actually work hard at being righteous, good, moral individuals to become “second best”. It’s stupid, and part of why I reject the faith. If the religion’s god doesn’t have morals and ethics that meet or exceed the standards I hold myself to, then it’s not worth my time.
Of course, you get some funny advertizing by fringe people…
The key word here is ‘honest’. We get so used in school and with parents to lying our heads off and hoping to get away with it that we forget that God ‘sees into the heart’. Lying won’t work. So an honest ‘sorry, I won’t do that again’ is OK – and we’re in! And failing later and being genuinely sorry again is OK, too – we’re not thrown out.
But a lot of people fake it even to themselves and have no genuine intention of carrying through on a promise. They get to be out. Sorry!
Oh, and ‘good, moral people’? How good is good enough? We’re all flawed, and it’s a steady slide from really, amazingly moral to creepily dishonest. There’s no dividing line, and we all slide up and down the slope, depending how we feel and the temptations to be selfish we meet.
What makes Jesus’ promise so unique is that we get accepted for an intro to God just by GENUINELY promising to follow Jesus as boss and do what he tells us – which is a big ask if you’re as independently-minded as I am. Once we’ve left that self-serving trash behind, we don’t have to work to be moral – which is hard work – because Jesus provides the push for us. What a relief!
“Also tell me again why a nice warm place filled with fire is a bad thing.”
Seriously, if you look at the Norse– well, they don’t really have an equivalent to “Hell” in the sense of a place for punishment, but if you look at Niflheim, where I’d say most average people would end up, it’s a cold, cheerless place.
Permanent heat is ony a bad thing if you’re from the desert. 😉
Think I’ve heard of a version where instead of “Why did you tell me?”, the Eskimo puts a spear through the missionary to protect the rest of his family from possibly going to Hell. Always felt that Eskimo was very valiant for his self-sacrifice in order to protect his family.
Unfortunately Catholics (of which I am one) never got that part. Non-Catholics are welcome to attend Catholic mass, but are not allowed to take the E Eucharist. If you don’t take the Eucharist, you go to hell. Thus, you may attend but you’re still going to burn in eternal hell. Even if you’re a Christian.
O_o no? You should probably read back up on the sacraments, because you’ve got them wrong. Badly. Communion is not some magical boolean switch for whether or not you’re going to hell. There is no “Damning force” outside of ones own actions and conscious.
Simply attending mass doesn’t get you into heaven – no one logical would expect it to. If you never *intend* to take the Eucharist, then yes, its probably safe to say that you won’t go *straight* to heaven (would your soul even desire to, at that point?) But for you to claim that inaction damns someone to hell is guilty of that same ignorance you’re blindly accusing all Catholics of.
Nope, I’ve got it straight. Perhaps you need to “read back up”?
“Holy Communion separates us from sin, wipes away venial sins and preserves us from future mortal sins.”
Here it is, straight from Jesus: “”Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (John 6:53–56)”
What do I get if I only know the name “Atreyu”, without any knowledge of the band/artist behind it, and consequently never knew there WAS another version save Bon Jovi’s?
Oh my, there are much much worse people out there giving religion a bad name. Like the Westboro crowd, or Terry Jones, or the people who issue fatwas against writers and cartoonists, or the theocrats. Mary is small-time.
Well Joyce hasn’t done anything wrong, technically. She asked Dorothy, Dorothy could have just said “No, pick something else.” Hopefully Mary will be cool. After all, she’s a chick who likes to stay naked until the afternoon, how uptight can she be?
Anyone can go into a church and be welcome – ill-doers maybe excepted. But that won’t make you a Christian, how ever long you attend or how much you learn. Accepting Jesus as your personal leader and boss is the only way. And no-one else can ever be really sure if you’ve done that – it’s in the heart.
Chill, Mary, chill. Dorothy is as non-confrontational as it gets right now.
Anecdote: I knew someone like her in real life, who among other things told me my (sunday school teaching) mother was a horrible Christian for liking Harry Potter.
Actually, she kinda looked like Mary too.
It’s probably best she never found out I was an atheist, the social situations were horrible enough.
True. That’s why those $4.99 a minute phone psychics are so popular. They’re just vague enough that whatever they say can be applied to anyone they talk to, and just specific enough so it doesn’t sound like they’re spitballing.
My wife was a phone psychic for a bit, but as she’s the
real McCoy and using her gift for so long each day
exhausted her so she had to quit.
First day she had someone call and ask “If you’re psychic, where are my keys?” So she told him. “White jacket back of door, right pocket”
Guy turns out to be a doctor who left them in his lab coat, right where she said.
Assuming your wife’s gift has had time to recuperate in her retirement, I suggest you contact the James Randi Educational Foundation and claim your million dollar prize.
Until I see that all over the papers, I’m going to feel entirely content in calling bullshit.
I mean, where would we be today if we went around questioning things we didn’t understand? We’d value reason and empirical evidence and crazy things like that! Gosh I’m glad we’re all credulous and gullible.
I normally find nice ways to talk to people I disagree with, but not with people who blatantly lie and/or call me stupid. Then the unpleasantness begins.
Too easily explained away if failed. Cosmic interference and temporal displacement, butterfly effect, the further from the current point in time you tried to divinate (assuming you don’t follow the theory of appointed fate, that is– where everything that CAN happen DOES happen because it can’t be avoided) the cloudier the future can be.
With enough viable evidence I’d be willing to accept someone being psychic in the vein of “I can locate where your keys are right now”. Being psychic in the vein of “don’t eat the veal on your honeymoon next week or you’ll get sick” is going to take a much more rigorous degree of evidence to dig it out of the science fiction genre for me.
Until actual tests have been performed and some degree of basic scientific rigor is adhered to, though, I’ll just say that while someone may believe themselves psychic, I do not, and leave it at that.
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a young maiden or girl?”
We’re talking about the prophecy from the Old Testament, which was in Hebrew. You’re talking about the New Testament, which was in Aramaic and Greek. Those are two different things.
Different as in, “one was a prophecy, and one was
written several decades after the fact after the verbal
accounts had had plenty of time to become as accurate
as that fish story my grampa told me, where that trout
got away after eating the next boat over.”
Serious question: is “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: some chick will conceive and give birth to a son” the whole quote, or could it just be the start of something that gets a bit more sign-like? I know I could look myself but, you know, lazy.
Isaiah: “Hey, Your Grace, I know you’re worried about those two kings who’ve made an alliance to crush you. Would a prophecy cheer you up?”
Ahaz: “No, it wouldn’t.”
Isaiah: “Well, I’m giving you one anyway. A chick will conceive and give birth to a son, and by the time that kid’s old enough to know the difference between good and evil, nobody will even remember who those guys were.”
In his book “Asimov’s Guide to the Bible” Isaac Asimov points out that the actual prediction has the Hebrew word for “young girl” NOT “virgin” which is a different word completely. He tells the story of finding an original King James Bible turned to that page in a museum and, as was Isaac’s style, waxed eleqoutely (sp) on why the one word was untranslated from the Hebrew (the Jews that did the translation didn’t want trouble if they translated the word correctly) as he talked, a museum guard wandered over and asked one of Isaac’s friend who the guy was who thought he knew so much about the Old Testament. The friend said; “Don’t you know who that is?” The guard looked for a minute and said; “God?”
Isaac said his friend didn’t have to laugh THAT hard.
The New Testament is only known in Greek. The word in Greek clearly means “virgin,” which is how the whole thing started; most Jews at the time were more familiar with the Septuagint than the Hebrew, since it was expected for anyone even slightly educated to learn Greek, the same way it was expected everyone learn Latin a few hundred years ago. It’s only post-Temple that the laity came to be expected to learn Hebrew.
The point is that the early Hebrew word meant a young, unmarried woman – and in their culture, that was understood to mean a virgin almost for sure. Girls almost always got married by 14 (and boys by 16, latest), so just as the word for ‘woman’ almost always meant ‘married or widowed woman’, understanding the word as ‘virgin’ was a given, which is why the Septuagint Greek translation used that Greek word. And Mary in the NT fulfilled that prophecy honestly.
There’s also the minor problem that the prophecy expired about 700 years prior to the birth of Christ. The prophecy was very clearly to the King of Judah that certain events would happen in his lifetime. Around 732 BC.
Old Testament prophecy states that it must be a virgin birth, because the seed of man is tainted with sin. Therefore because Jesus was not born of man, he wasn’t born in sin like everyone else. Thanks Adam.
Actually the “Immaculate Conception” refers to MARY’s birth to her mother via normal sexual reproduction. Essentially Mary was free from the taint of original sin (as the catholics hold it) because God said so.
Christ was the Virgin Birth. Different concepts, often mixed up in practice.
Anyway, no, women aren’t less sinful. But according to the cathlic dogma at least, God said “this chick won’t have original sin because I said so” and then he popped Jesus in there himself.
Technically, it was still Eve’s fault, but because the old testament is full of bigoted, crotchety old men, women don’t count in passing the lineage, so for them to be born because of a man means extending the Original sin perpetrated by the two original sinners.
Judaism used to be patrilineal. But then came the Crusades, where half the men who went weren’t religious, they were just out for plunder (that’s from kings down to footsoldiers). So when the got to the East, rape was the pastime, whether of Moslem, Jewish or Eastern Christian women, and it was so bad that Jewish descent was change to matrilinear because a family couldn’t always be sure who was the father.
A sad story, reflecting badly on Christendom’s attitudes at the time. True Christians who protested then got ignored or persecuted themselves.
That’s the part that was mistranslated, between the Hebrew and ancient Greek. The translation was called the Septugaint, so called because it was supposedly divinely inspired between seventy scholars who translated it perfectly and identically. However, we know know that the Septugaint differs considerably from, say, the Dead Sea Scrolls. For example, according to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the number of the Beast is 616. Who knew?
Except the book of Revelation wasn’t among the Dead Sea Scrolls. None of the New Testiment books were, because just like you were getting at the DSS were all in Hebrew- meaning they were all Old Testament writings (plus a few that didn’t make the canon of Christian scripture).
You’re right. And most of these scrolls were stuff to do with their own weird sect of Judaism – and tell us more than most other sources about life in those times.
Hm… That definitely makes the Isaiah 7:14/Jesus relationship more tenuous, since the very next line says “By the time he learns to reject the bad and choose the good, people will be feeding on curds and honey.”
I thought that the two words in ancient Hebrew were the same, such that it was rather ambiguous as to which was intended in the Scripture?
Anyways, even as someone who’s a (more-or-less, if somewhat questioning) Christian (Catholic, to be precise), I find Biblical Literalists to be rather frustrating to debate with, on the whole; it’s a general problem with reference points.
Either way, DoAMary’s looking to be rather similar to Roomies!Mary, who was a rather sanctimonious hypocrite. We all know one, whether they’re religious or not (speaking from the experience of knowing at least one atheist who takes more or less the same approach with believers).
The Hebrew words are the same, but the Greek translation of the Old Testament a couple hundred years before Christ’s birth uses a word that only means virgin, not young woman.
Yes and a lot of people talk about this. The Hebrew word almah can be used to refer to a young maiden or a virgin, but is never used to refer to a young married woman in the bible.
Biblical Literalists? You mean those Christians who believe that God actually created the world in 7 actual days as opposed it being some kind of metaphor?
Zap, Jehovah is a term of respect, though I don’t use it. It began in about the 15th century in English bibles. As Jews will do today, it uses vowels from Adonai with [YHWH] to avoid pronouncing the holy name of God. As a Christian, I’m happy to speak God’s true name with respect.
A proper parable contains multiple messages, and context that helps the messages bear impact.
Also, sometimes the stories include the why of a commandment, at which point the story is itself the most succinct form of delivery.
Also, stories have memetic stickiness.
If I yell at you not to eat pork, then whatever.
If I tell you this story about a guy who got weird spiral-shaped welts after eating pork and then a bunch of pigs burst tail-first out of his flesh, well, it might give pause. And even if you decide my story’s totally bogus, the imagery of the story can stick with you.
Now instead of something like dietary habits, imagine the story’s something nice like “be good to people.” If we can make the meme stickier by hooking it to a story, why not?
Even in the last few years of my Christianity, I never really liked the idea of Jesus’ immaculate conception. Not just because the idea itself makes no sense, but because it seems to take away from Jesus as a spiritual leader.
I mean, thinking of Jesus as some type of divine being just seems to actually take away more from who he was as a spiritual leader. If he’s supposed to be the son of god, well yeah, he’s gonna say some profound shit. But if he’s just a regular human possessing that sort of wisdom and can sway people that easily. That’s something really spectacular.
Without the virgin birth there is no perfect sacrifice. Jesus of Nazereth was either a lunatic, a liar, or the Son of God. If Jesus wasn’t the Son of God then he was a liar. In John 14 it says he that has seen me has seen the Father. I respect your beliefs, but I don’t think just a good teacher was an option.
I’m not saying it was, at the very least not for the time, or any time, really. There have been thousands of wise men over the years, and only a very select few have had that type of influence, and nearly all of those that did did so with claims of divinity or divine backing.
Certainly, nobody would have taken him as seriously as they did had he not made the claims that he had. And who knows, maybe there was something divine about him. Maybe he was a little bit crazy. Maybe he just knew what people needed to hear. A liar, a lunatic, or a divine, I don’t think it really detracts anything from his teachings and the things he had to say.
Did he die for our sins? Of course he did, in what sense is the question that I ask. Was it a true absolution, or was it simply the gesture of a man who loved his people and knew what they needed to see to keep their beliefs alive.
Heh, but really, I’m just speculating. I’m sure there are a few answers to several of these questions, and I just haven’t heard them yet. Hell, I’m probably just talking outta my ass here.
In any case, all I know is, whatever he was, Jesus was a great man with a lot of great things to say. Past that, well, I’m neither a theologist nor historian enough to know much more.
I’m glad you didn’t take my comment the wrong way. Most people freak out on me when I start reciting verses. All I can say is that the bible says that anyone who seeks the truth will find it, and I’m glad to see people out there who still seek it.
Good thinking, Daeva. But you need to take the next step. Given that the Gospel records are accurate – and they are – Jesus made a direct claim to be God in person again and again. There’s no way to avoid this claim. That’s where Chuck’s statement comes from. You believe him to be good, he’s too wise to be mad – so he’s God. Proven point. So how do you answer his call to follow him?
Sorry if you saw it that way – I don’t. I’m asking people just to follow where their thinking leads them, and honestly tackle the issues. I do think that most people debating and commenting here are intellectually honest, so can do that.
Orrrrrrrr the dude who wrote John(which was most assuredly not the historical John) made a bunch of stuff up, since those claims are not found in the Synoptic Gospels.
DP, John was SO much the real disciple of Jesus, who stuck to him for years and wrote his eyewitness story later, to add to the others, not just copy them. The internal evidence is rock solid (look it up) unless, of course, you NEED to believe that it’s wrong…
He could have also be something of a legend. A spiritual leader who’s exploits were exaggerated by his followers and who’s metaphors where taken literally. There is also the fact that a man without a biological follower, by definition, cannot be the messiah as the messiah was to be born to the house of David which can only be passed by blood from father to son. Unless God is descended from David.
BMD, cynics pull out that story every century. Jesus was humanly descended from David through both his mother (Matthew 1) and through adoption by his stepfather Joseph (Luke 3). The legend story doesn’t hold water when you look at the recorded facts.
You can have nifty sacrifice without him being a virgin birth. All god has to do is do the same immaculate conception thing with Jesus that he’s supposed to have done with Mary. *Poof* – sinless sacrifice.
If I may nitpick pedantically a bit, it’s my understanding that the “immaculate conception” does not refer to Jesus, but to Mary. In Catholic theology, the argument goes something like this:
1) Mary gave birth to God.
2) God cannot inherit original sin.
3) Therefore, Mary must have been born without original sin.
Theologians were never very good with their syllogism. Interestingly, in 1950, a corollary was added:
4) Death is a consequence of sin.
5) Mary is without sin.
6) Therefore, Mary must not have died, and was assumed bodily into heaven.
Oh man. You can’t make this stuff up. Except when, obviously, you do.
IIRC, Catholics believe that Mary is the Holy Mother to whom you can pray to like you would God or Jesus, while Protestants believe that Mary was just a good jewish girl who was chosen because she was betrothed to a direct decentant of King David.
This is pedantic, I know, but Catholics don’t believe you can pray to Mary like you would God of Jesus. You can ask Mary to intercede on your behalf with God and Jesus. just like you can the saints, and other (alive or dead) people. God is accorded Latria, Mary Hyperdulia and the saints Dulia. See also:
Sorry… even as a no-longer-Catholic, I think that a precise understanding what other people believe, rather than an imprecise understanding, is an aid to communication.
Ah, just looked it up, and yeah, seems I did make a mistake. I was referencing the virgin birth and got the two things confused. Sorry ’bout that. Seems there were plenty of nits to be picked, and I hope they thoroughly nourish the chimp of your inspection.
Heh, yeah it all does start sounding pretty silly when you start spelling it out. But that’s something that sort of fascinates me in ways and depresses me in others. That there can be such a huge movement behind something that, when viewed objectively, is so unbelievably silly! I hold no disrespect for religion as a whole, mind you, but some of the more obvious embellishments and their implications are sort of fun to think about every so often.
Except that Mary wasn’t actually a virgin; she was scrod by God. (This is reasonably explicit, in the KJV at least.) This gave her the divine DNA necessary to allow her to create a heroic son in classic Greek style. She’s still called a virgin because God didn’t accomplish his immaculate impregnation by coming in through the hymen route; he entered through a different path (through the ‘back door’, so to speak).
Or at least, that’s the impression I’ve gotten. There are apparently some who believe that she remained a virgin all her life, too. This gets a little tricky once you remember that Jesus had siblings. And I gather that there are some who believe that she managed to reach the end with her hymen unbroken too – the only thing I can figure is they follow the ‘cabbage patch’ school of childbirth.
Alternatively;
Jesus is God’s only son. We are all God’s children.
Therefore, we are all God’s daughters.
A Christian Scientist would apply this to genetics; if females have XX-chromosome pairs, and males have XY-chromosome pairs, then it is entirely possible that Jesus had the never-before-seen YY-chromosome pair, making him the manliest man ever to be born, and all other men hermaphrodites in comparison.
I hear Immaculate Conception and I just can’t get past the image of Adrian Monk trying to get it on with Lilith Crane in a clean room. The Cheers Lilith, she got more fun in Frasier.
Well, Mary was only around 14 or so when she got knocked up by the Holy Spirit, and was unmarried. By most scholars, that fits the definition of young maiden.
As a Jewish ex-seminarian, I’m chiming in to confirm this: the Hebrew word is not a terribly obscure one and does mean “young woman.” And as such I find this whole incident highly entertaining, from their having evidently just listened to a sermon about how WE got it wrong, to none of them having previously encountered the fact that that Hebrew word just doesn’t mean virgin at all.
Now, I’d consider myself highly knowledgeable about Judaism and very ignorant about Christianity, but I’m curious: assuming Mary WAS a virgin and Jesus WAS a blood relative of God, does that passage not meaning what the Christians say it does still mess up the Christian belief system?
I just wrote this a bit further up – so here it is again:
The point is that the early Hebrew word meant a young, unmarried woman – and in their culture, that was understood to mean a virgin almost for sure. Girls almost always got married by 14 (and boys by 16, latest), so just as the word for ‘woman’ almost always meant ‘married or widowed woman’, understanding the word as ‘virgin’ was a given, which is why the Septuagint Greek translation used that Greek word. And Mary in the NT fulfilled that prophecy honestly.
As a Jewish ex-seminarian, I’m chiming in to confirm this: the Hebrew word is not a terribly obscure one and does mean “young woman.” And as such I find this whole incident highly entertaining, from their having evidently just listened to a sermon about how WE got it wrong, to none of them having previously encountered the fact that that Hebrew word just doesn’t mean virgin at all.
Now, I’d consider myself highly knowledgeable about Judaism and very ignorant about Christianity, but I’m curious: assuming Mary WAS a virgin and Jesus WAS a blood relative of God, does that passage not meaning what the Christians say it does still mess up the Christian belief system?
Completely and totally correct, apart from the Hebrew bit (language hadn’t been invented yet, Hebrew is essentially a modern construct). The Aramaic word “almah” can mean “virgin” in very specific contexts (basically it has to be spelled out afterwards that the young woman hasn’t had sex), but for most uses it translates as “young woman/girl”. Given the context of the original passage in the Torah/Tanakh, it is obvious that the meaning is “young woman”. However when Greek Jews translated the Torah/Tanakh into the Greek Septuagint they didn’t realise the subtlety and translated “almah” as “parthenos” (yes, this could also have been a deliberate attempt by Greek christians to elide Mary with Athena the virgin goddess for conversion purposes), therefore the whole story of Mary being a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus.
Mary’s looking as sanctimonious as ever, but her having a Bible in this scene isn’t a sign of it. Generally, one carries a Bible when attending church.
In some churches or denominations, it’s normal for people to carry their own Bibles with them to church, so they can, for example, follow along with the readings, consult relevant passages during the sermon, take notes in the margins, or what have you. Perhaps Mary comes from that sort of background.
(Sorry, FlyingFish. Didn’t notice you’d said that. But the practice is more prevalent in some churches and denominations than others; most of the churches I’ve attended have Bibles in the pews and don’t expect people to bring their own.)
How dare heathens attend church! Dorothy may be honoring Joyce’s request to try and expand her horizon, but that kind of thing just lets the devil in. How can they not see this?
I’ve been friends with a few Muslims. I also took way more college courses on religion than an art mar had any business doing. 🙂 The saying that there is no compulsion/coercion in religion was repeated in two of my classes and all of my Muslim friends. It would be difficult for me to mistake it.
Interesting forum. I posted No, not really to comment on Plasma’s comment. And it did post right after her comment. I left the forum for a minute, come back, and it now has another comment inserted in front of it. Very odd.
Concurrency is a really hard problem. Concurrency over HTTP with huge variations in link latency is basically impossible. So most software doesn’t even try, and as a result, that kind of stuff happens.
Things get queued up out of order, stuff that has been posted already doesn’t show up even when refreshed…
Also doesn’t help that PHP is terrible, and most things written in PHP are terrible (not that ruby or java or asp.net apps are necessarily any better, but it is endemic in php)
It’s not that complicated to give every post a unique id (per thread) and ensure that its replies end up under it, though. The order might be off, but getting it there doesn’t become a concurrency problem.
quotes from Mathew 1:23 which means the scripture from the new testament I may be wrong here but i am pretty sure Mary just claimed that the TaNaKH predicted Jesus’s coming by quoting something from the New testament.
Yes, the author of Matthew in particular seemed to make a point of quoting passages from the TANAKH to demonstrate how Jesus fulfilled various prophecies and must therefore be the Messiah for whom the Jews had been waiting. “Jesus did X, as it is written in the [Jewish/OT] Scriptures, ‘He shall do X.'”
It’s been a few years since I read the Bible, but I seem to remember that the Messiah prophecies mentioned in the New Testament were paraphrased from verses in later books of the Old Testament.
If you are going to do the abbreviation thing with the Tanakh, wouldn’t it make more sense for it to be TaNaKh, as the K stands for Ketubim, not Khetubim?
Unless the non-Christian is a vampire or demonically possessed, in which case inviting them leads to somebody bursting into flames in church and a mess of ash that SOMEBODY needs to clean up.
Except perhaps for the demons who believe in God, but hate humans. I mean, Angels/Demons have assumedly had direct experience of the Divine. They can’t “believe,” they KNOW.
Doom Shepherd, that’s why there’s a difference between knowledge and believing. They’ve already rejected YHWH as god, when Lucifer led his rebellion with 1/3 of the angels, and they were created without the free will to choose, like humanity was.
It’s reckoned by a lot of scholars (not all) that Job is the earliest story in the bible, pre-dating most of the Torah; nothing to do with its place in the collected book.
I can honestly say Mary is my least favorite character. What’s wrong with atheists going to church? If the church has its act together only good can come out of it. She needs to read Matthew 9.
It seems from her line in Panel 2 that she didn’t know Dorothy was an atheist. She probably assumed Dorothy was one of those (as she’d see it) liberal Christians who play fast-and-loose with traditional theology and who therefore probably aren’t really all that Christian after all.
I wonder if David ever gets himself riled up while writing dialogue like Mary’s up there. I know I have before, but I tend to get a little wrapped up in it sometimes.
As a Christian myself, I gotta say this is completely accurate. Modern Christianity for the most part is an insular club who demands that its values be enacted into law, then craps itself when any other religion tries to do the exact same thing in their own country/countries. Or maybe that’s just American Christianity. Either way, it’s not a pretty sight.
We’ve also got no evangelizing tactics beyond “We’re obviously right because we have a book that says things (just like all the other books that say things) and if you don’t immediately agree, well obviously you’re going to burn in hell! We didn’t want your stupid soul anyway!
And again, this is a CHRISTIAN fully admitting this.
They’ve also got some WEIRD skeletons in their closet, like the posthumous baptism of the dead against their wishes, particularly focused on Holocaust victims. I wish I was making that up.
What do you expect from a group that, when you ask, “Well how do you know that what the Bible says is true?” they respond with, “Well, because it says so in the Bible! Duh!”
Okay, that was tongue-in-cheek, but I have actually seen that sort of circular reasoning used to validate the Bible. Usually from people I suspected had never actually read the Bible.
I’d go with the fact it uses knowledge beyond human understanding at the time it was written. Back when people had no concept of the world being anything but flat, Isaiah writes that the earth is a circle in a blanket of stars. Back when Moishe (a.k.a. Moses) was leading the people out of Egypt, and he was writing down the medical stuff in the bible, there is no use of “then modern” items like crocodile dung and other stuff that later turned out to be worse than doing nothing at all. There’s several places in the Bible like that where it seems modern knowledge was available back then guiding whomever wrote it. Also, to have about 40 people spread across several hundreds of years apart write books that seem to tell one contiguous story when compiled has pretty much yet to be repeated by any other religious book.
Well worth considering that the people who compiled the version that has made it this far in time– The Holy Bible, subvariants and titles nonwithstanding– were essentially a theistic mafia who had lived for years under the methods of “because we tell them God said to do it, they do what we say.” Any writer worth his salt can alter two noncontiguous tales to make them meet up in the middle, and it’s already known that the Roman Catholic Church modified or left out certain texts that could potentially hinder their grip on the body public by altering the dynamics of the overall story.
Granted, much of that could very well have been debunked. I prefer to spend my time doing more productive things than digging through piles of sensationalist bullpucky for tidbits of information regarding historical alterations to holy scripture. After all, when every man has a pulpit, the truth is buried within screaming lies.
Raiser, you bin reading Dan Brown? The whole bible was completed long before there WAS a Roman Catholic Church. We have the ancient Greek copies to prove it, and they’re just what we read today. Don’t believe anti-Christian myths!
Religious zealotry is at the least annoying and at the worst terrorism.
At this point I don’t question the existence of some sort of higher power that created the universe but I do wonder what that being would think of us and all of our petty squabbles.
Given that such a being created both the platypus and quantum physics, I’d guess it has the greatest sense of humor ever and is therefore laughing its metaphysical ass off at us.
The Giraffe is a greater cosmic joke than you know. It meets every single requirement for eating its meat to be kosher. But we can’t find the spot on its neck to kill it in the manner required for the meat to be kosher, because the neck is too long.
Does Mary come from a denomination where converts are discouraged or something? Some kind of “Let’s hog all of gospel to ourselves” kind of denomination? It seems odd that someone could react with such strong opposition to a nonmember showing interest in their doctrine.
Fair enough. Just strikes me as a bit off. Being raised Mormon a nonmember asking sincere questions about the gospel was always one of the most joyous occasions to be found. The kind of thing people got excited about. We spent a lot of time brainstorming ways to make it as convenient as we could for them to find out about us. For a while I remember we were carrying around these cards we could give people with a phone number they could call and have a series of videos explaining what we’re all about delivered to them free of charge. We had a listing of people who were available to drive you to the building on sunday ready for if any prospective member had an issue with transportation.
Here Mary is actively making this an unpleasant experience for Dorothy. Just surprises me. Even the sanctimonious ones I would expect to save that for other members. Pulling the “Holier than thou” bit on someone who doesn’t even gauge morality by the same doctrine seems at best counterproductive.
If Dorothy was being confrontational I’d get that, but this is a Grade A teaching opportunity pretty much just handed to Mary on a silver platter and she looks just about ready to call the bouncers to give Dorothy the bum’s rush. It’s practically an act of violence if we’re assuming Dorothy’s eternal soul is at risk. Like Scar dropping Mufasa off the cliff.
There is a subset of religious individuals out there who are PROFOUNDLY offended by the mere existence of someone who doesn’t agree with their beliefs. Typically, if you meet an atheist who is angry/militant/bitter/etc, it’s often because they grew up with one. Or more.
Of course, Stephen Fry is not so much an atheist as a cynic who loves to offend! And because he is, he dislikes the idea that he can’t be as offensive as he likes without someone objecting.
If you say something that you know hurts sensitive people (not hypocrites) then you need to apologise – then debate.
She has concerns. Obviously if she was already sold on everything the church taught then she’d already be a member. She hasn’t said anything accusatory. Her facial expressions throughout this range from nervous to uncomfortable, but certainly never angry, indignant, judgmental, etc.
If asking a question about the most rudimentary fundamental tenets of her faith is enough for Mary to feel she’s being criticized then she can’t be very proud to be a Christian at all.
It’s not even an odd question. “How do we know Joseph Smith didn’t just make all this up” is practically the first thing on the agenda that needs to be addressed before anyone can even start considering the gospel as potentially truthful. Without addressing that we’re just an overzealous fanclub for a piece of fiction. I guarantee you that getting in a huff over having your beliefs questioned is not the proper response to that question.
If she was uninterested she wouldn’t be asking questions or bringing forth concerns. Uninterested people don’t engage in thoughtful discussion at the end of the sermon. It doesn’t interest them. Of course it’s not like she’s considering converting right now, but if we only addressed the concerns and answered the questions of those who were already considering joining the church then nobody would ever consider it.
Not to offend, but there’s a lot that seems wrong here. Which is weird, because you’re being spectacularly nice.
1) Theists that don’t take instant and massive offense about atheists questioning their religion are thin on the ground. They’re certianly not the norm. If that means that most religions have weak faith, then fine, they have weak faith, but since that’s the norm it raises the question of what the standard is.
2) If you’re a mormon who allows themself to even consider the possibility that JS was full of it, then you’re in an exclusive group as well. I say this having spoken to a number of them, having been raised by them and surrounded by them.
3) Atheists can easily bring up critiques of theology without being interested – for the same reasons a democrat can critique republican policy without being interested – it’s because you thing they’re wrong. Why bother mentioning it then, you may ask? Because you want the errors highlighted and if possible defended, corrected, or abandoned.
4) Dorothy is probably hesitant and uncomfortable because she’s a nice person who wants to be friendly, who knows that what she’s saying is, in fact, offensive to most christians. It’s nigh-certain that it’s not because she’s unsure about her atheist position.
All that said, you seem to be a very nice person. But few theists I’ve conversed about religion with would meet the standards you seem to describe here.
No offense taken of course. I hope the feeling is mutual in that regard.
1) I didn’t say weak faith. I said not proud. It seems like she’s treating Christianity like a shameful secret that outsiders shouldn’t know about. I’m hearing a lot of the sentiment that this reaction is the norm, and I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m merely expressing my surprise since I thought that spreading the word was a large part of Christianity in general, not just mormonism.
2) I’m obviously not saying Mary should be open to the possibility of her church having lied to her. I’m saying she should be prepared answer the question of why that’s not the case. It’s a pretty standard question to ask. Just like how if I asked my professor how we know that ____ is correct he’d answer the question but that wouldn’t entail considering that the theory he was teaching is wrong.
3) Of course Dorothy thinks they’re wrong. Once again implied by the very fact that she’s not a member of their faith. And democrats obviously are interested in what the republicans are doing. It’s very relevant to them. They’re not interested in the marxist leninist policies and as such you’ll never hear them come up during a speech.
4) Never said she was unsure about her own beliefs. She’s not however in any way being vindictive, she’s not attacking them, she asked a question about their beliefs which Mary should’ve been prepared to answer. This isn’t an attack or an expression of hate.
Have to generally agree with you both – begbert, gangler. And I get the feeling that Dorothy is like a lot of people, less Atheist and more Don’t Care.
What you’re all forgetting is that the old testament (Masoretic texts) didn’t have any verses added to it later, the exact same passages have been verified verbatim from numerous ancient texts…there is no room for interpretation, additions, or omissions. Therefore, Dorothy’s current argument is factually invalid regardless of her beliefs or lack thereof.
That’s the problem I see with so many skeptics…they find something in the Bible that sounds contradictory or open to interpretation and run with it, believing every word *without verification*, then accuse believers for being naive for trusting every word in the Bible without factual representation.
Fanatical skeptics are just as bad as Bible thumpers, they’re just on opposite sides of the fence.
Dorothy’s argument is not that the Old Testament was changed. Dorothy’s argument is that everyone said Mary was a virgin, in order for the circumstances of Jesus’ birth to match the prophesy found in the Old Testament.
I mean, unless you want to explain how Moses wrote the account of his own death. Deuteronomy chapter 34 describes the death of Moses, and says that “not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses…” This could not have been written by Moses or even by any author prior to the establishment of a nation called Israel.
Is it just me, or is that Bible backwards? For the book to have its spine facing to the right like that, wouldn’t the title face away from the camera?
Or is this a specific thing that this one church does, have bibles titled like that? I went to a private religious university and was required to take biblical literature and the like, but maybe we didn’t roll that way.
So I take it Mary is a bit more of the aggressive bible thumper type, huh? Was she like that in the original universe or is this a new personality trait for this series?
She wasn’t aggressively religious…but she was aggressively bongoy. And hypocritical. And believed that certain people (e.g Billie) weren’t good enough to be in a circle of friends with her, and actively went out of her way to be horrible to her.
Good thing you have people like Randi to bat away all the difficult truths in the world for you. Can’t have any miracles happen outside the Bible for gods sake. People pray for that and all, but if it actually happened…
And science loves it every time a miraculous event stands up to scrutiny. The miracle of lightning led us to electricity. The miracle of whatever-led-us-to radio led us to radio, which led us to television which lead us to reality telvision shows. The miracle of radiation led us to nifty bombs and carbon dating. Miracles rock the house.
What science has little tolerance for are garbagey fish stories and wishful thinking like the Loch Ness Monster and faith healing. That crap is what’s known as “wasting our precious time”.
Well, Malaya’s a bongo too, but she’s more likely to commit general assholery. An equal-opportunity bongo, if you will. Mary’s specific brand of hate-spewing is shaping up to be more infuriating to me personally than anything Malaya has said.
I’m trying to figure out what this says about me. I’m both a nerd and bisexual (putting me into the “breeder” category), both of which Malaya has insulted. I’m also a Christian, which people like Mary use to justify their horrible behavior. Does this mean I’m more upset about people who make me look bad than people who hate me? Is it because my faith is more important than my interests and sexuality? Am I just psychoanylizing myself to avoid thinking about the big test I’ve got in half an hour?
I’ve read somewhere that people are more likely to get mad at someone who believes what they do- a Christian getting mad at another Christian, for example- than by someone directly opposing them. It’s a sort of psychological, “you’re making me look bad” sort of thing.
I suppose I should include a disclaimer that I can’t remember where I heard that and it could just be speculation, but it certainly makes sense.
I think I can answer this. Malaya is not, by and large, a hypocrite, she is just willfully ignorant, coarse, rude and antisocial. Mary is all these things, with a veneer of self-righteousness wrapped up in a big bag of self-congratulatory hypocrisy. Mary is much, much worse.
Hypocrisy is definitely a factor, as is the fact that Malaya knows how her behavior affects others, but doesn’t care, while Mary seems like the type to assume that everything she does is right and everyone else is wrong. As for my personal reasons to dislike people like her, it makes more sense to get mad at someone who makes people hate you than someone who just hates you. The Marys of the world do a lot more damage in the long run.
Besides, she’s about to shame Joyce for doing something harmless, and even kind of nice. I like Joyce.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be saying Christians are opposed to evangelism – really? I mean, yes, a lot of denominations say, essentially, “if they don’t know the good news by now in this country, preaching is just going to screw up this world,” but to object per se to bringing an atheist to church?
And it’s a bit charitable to say “maybe,” isn’t it? Jesus’ birth is only in Matthew and Luke, the two gospels most removed from the man himself, and their narratives have little in common, much irreconcilable (two genealogies, ten years’ time difference, straight home after the bris yet fled Bethlehem to Egypt), and each contains patent absurdities in its own right (Matthew has the Massacre of the Innocents; Luke the “ancestral home” dealie). If there’s one thing in the Gospels that it can be said with confidence did not happen, it’s that – frankly, I’d put it ahead of even the supernatural claims, and I’m fairly sure there are Christians out there who hold it to be wholly or partially false.
Well, there have been Christian sects (and non-Christian sects that believe in Jesus) that believe Jesus was not a physical being. There are also non-Christians who do not believe Jesus ever existed at all.
And non-christians who believe that though there was probably a historical Jesus, there is every reason to believe that the gospels tell such an exaggerated/mythologized account of him that there is literally nothing in them that we can be certain actually happened as written. Not even the parts where he cut down the cherry tree or threw the quarter across that river.
Well, if you want to deny Christianity, you HAVE to believe that! And no solid scholarship, archaeological evidence, letters, lawsuits or histories from the time will make a scrap of difference. You believe what you gotta, and find the evidence to prove you’re right. The majority think differently.
First, the two genealogies aren’t irreconcilable, especially when you look at the audiences aimed at. Another thing about the genealogies is that to the Jews at that time, if a husband died without offspring, his brother may have stepped in later and sired a son, but the son was credited to the dead brother. If you really look hard at the genealogies, you’ll find two brothers somewhere after David split off, and eventually merge back, not uncommon in a culture where marrying outside of your tribe of Israel was considered a big no-no.
Next up the bris & the flight to Egypt. The bris was to be done 8 days after birth, however, when the Magi got to Herod, his later order to kill all male infants 2 years shows that the Magi probably go against tradition of all those Christmas plays you see performed, and got there much later than the shepherds.
Neither of these makes sense. First, if the reason for the split is that “the son was credited to the dead brother” (as was indeed custom), why would the trees branch off? Shouldn’t that just last one generation? And where would Matthew (Matthew, since Solomon was younger than Nathan) get the “biological” genealogy a thousand years later? And why would he care to? And the genealogies don’t really “merge back” – the only names they have in common after David are the names of the last two kings of Israel, a few common names that come after those two in Matthew and before in Luke, and two names (the grandfathers) that might have been the same name corrupted. It seems unlikely Luke’s talking about the actual kings, since again, why would they have two different genealogies?
As for the second, of course the magi came months later – that’s the point. What were they doing in Bethlehem months later? According to Luke, they went to Jerusalem to circumcise Jesus, then back to Nazareth after the ceremony. There’s no mention of them returning to Bethlehem first, and no reason for them to go after.
Interesting about the Magi. There’s a lot of Medieval myth here, mixed in with the real story. There wasn’t even a stable, for sure – the script only mentions a manger and the rest was added by conjecture from Western lifestyle. In fact, the ‘inn’ of the story is a greek word for ‘guest place’. In the Empire, it was usually a large building with rooms for daily rent – our hotel. But in Palestine then, most except the smallest houses were stone or mud brick with a solid flat roof, and had a shack on the roof for privacy and for guests – same word. The poorer houses usually had one room with half at a level a yard or so lower for the animals. Mangers were put between for convenience. If you read the story again knowing that, it puts Joseph and Mary with the family (probably of relatives) because the guest room was already full of other cousins come for the census. So Jesus would be born among family – and a manger would be an obvious cradle. The story, then, makes the point that they were pretty poor – not king material!
There’s another twist to this, and about the Magi, on http://www.bethlehemstar.net – which is based on the latest astronomical observations. It’s fascinating!
More importantly, though, even if there’s not necessarily a contradiction, there’s the fact that although they each go into such detail, there’s next to nothing they *do* explicitly agree on – Jesus was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born in Bethlehem, his “father” was a descendant of David named Joseph, and that’s *it*. Since literally everything else associated with the birth of Jesus comes from one or the other, they definitely have the appearance of two stories written around a few common parameters, not two accounts of the same event that happened to exactly partition the details between them.
“I used to be an evangelical Christian like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.”
So .. yeah. As Christians it’s our job to try to spread the word of God to the non-Christians of the world. How do we do that? We ask the non-Christians of the world to go to church with us. Naturally.
There are some Christians who think the “unevenly yoked” line means to not spend time with non-Christians *at all*. That makes no sense to me, personally.
Years and years ago (many years pre-Mrs. Animal) I dated a girl who was from a capital-C Christian family. She went to church twice a week, Wednesday night and Sunday morning.
I went once with her out of pure curiosity. This was a real hum-dinger – a jumping up and down, hootin’ and hollerin’, speaking in tongues, gospel-singing, dunk-ya-in-the-big-tank-behind-the-altar church. The preacher was a type I had seen before, the kind of fundamentalist shouter that held farm-country revivals in the area where I grew up. Those usually ended up with folks getting baptized in a stock trough or the creek.
Anyway. This girl went to church every Sunday morning, shouted and sang with the rest of ’em. She usually dropped by my apartment after she was done with that.
And she was always as horny as an alley cat when she showed up. TO put it bluntly, she was so full of ‘The Sperit’ that she had an unconquerable urge to fuck my brains out.
Take from that what you will. At the time (I was 18, after all, an age at which most men are pretty much a pair of testicles with legs) I just went with it.
The only reason I think Mary will be an effective, if unpleasant, character is as a foil to Joyce. Joyce is an overall decent person whose objectionable behavior stems from her naivete, and has the potential for serious character development as new experiences challenge her worldview. Mary is just a bad egg.
It just struck me that this in this particular comic Mary hasn’t done anything wrong.
She calls Dorothy’s Christianity into question when Dorothy suggests one of the core tenets of the faith was made up after the fact as a lie to popularize the church. That’s a pretty fair time to call someone’s Christianity into question.
And it’s not a failure of evangelism to ask why someone who specifically identifies herself as non-Christian has come to church.
The stuff she did last comic? bongoy. The stuff she’ll do next comic? Probably bongoy. The stuff she’s doing here? …Actually kind of fair.
It’s the expression on her face, mostly. If she looked less… outraged? Accusing? Scary? then her reaction would seem perfectly reasonable. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
Well, yeah! She thinks that Dorothy’s a Christian denying some of the key stuff she’s supposed to believe, so of course! Dorothy really screws her with the truth, though! I suppose that Joyce will be next to get stick.
In that first pannel Mary takes bible wielding to a whole new level. It appears as if she’s contemplating bludgeoning Dorothy with her own spare copy… that she probably carries with her at all times.
The churches I attended everybody who was even making a token front at being properly religious packed their own scriptures. That much doesn’t seem odd to me (though people reacting as though it’s strange does).
Mary’s aggravation makes a lot more sense if she actually thought Dorothy was a Christian as well: it can get some of us a little feisty when other Christians start questioning things like the virgin birth.
I was just thinking the same thing actually. They were all going to church, so Mary assumes everyone is Christian. Dorothy then makes an insinuation that the Virgin Birth was “made up” which naturally shocks Mary. So then Mary asks her what denomination (is that the right word?) is, and Dorothy replies that she isn’t Christian. Mary is confused and asks why Dorothy is going to church at all.
So far the worst Mary has done is to be frustrated. No need to break out the torches and pitchforks yet.
That doesn’t mesh well with Mary wanting to exclude Dorothy from the “serious discussion” she wanted to have in the prior comic, though. Sierra was obviously flaky, but Dorothy had done nothing to exclude herself by that point, aside from being atheist.
Well, it may be true, for what we know. Basically in the First Council of Nicaea (google it) they choose what was to be part of the religion and what wasn’t. Features and dogmas of a religion can change with time. Until I think the Renaissance the Pope was considered infallible (Papal Infallibility), and that changed with the rise of the power of the Council.
The Catholic church officially believes in the existence of Satan, but I seriously doubt ANY sane individual actually does.
Besides, you can be Christian and not put up with all/some of the dogma bullshit. In truth, IMHO you should NOT put up with some/most of the dogmas.
No they didn’t: they RATIFIED it. This was what had already been agreed for many decades. The Emperor wanted the council to be held to make sure that he understood it all, and to make straight-line Christianity obvious to the rest of the empire.
By the way, and contrary to Dan Brown’s fiction, the Bishop of Rome didn’t attend personally like most of the bishops – but he sent two observors. This Council was an important one because the emperor had called it, so a lot of people there took notes. We have plenty of original records of exactly went on, so all this is plain truth.
BTW, the Infallibility bit: the Pope was declared Infallible only in official pronouncements – and it was only agreed in 1870 – 150 years ago! Though it was totally retrospective, so that the Apostle Peter became infallible, too.
The Council of Nicaea is kinda relevant to the storyline if only because that’s when it was decided that Jews are dumb at determining when to celibrate their own holidays and that from then on Christians would decide on when Passover is.
I feel like Mary is going to get more bongoy in the next comic.
On a sidenote. Is it me? Or is there something more to Sierra than Willis is letting on? Not anything bad but more like the feeling that she might do something badass at some point in the comic.
I was giving Mary a chance since this is different universe and she can be a totally cool character. Sadly, she is still an A-hole in this universe as well.
Wow Mary, way to make a ton of actual Christians look really bad. Reminds me of when the Pharisees asked Jesus why He spent time with tax collectors and other sinner and Jesus responded “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” I think Mary needs to reread that part of the Bible.
interesting historical note, Caligula believed HE was the Messiah
and A LOT of people thought Sadam was the anti christ because he supposedly wore a “Blue Turban” (never mind the fact that he only ever wore a black beret
Sheesh, Mary, you missed a teachable moment. Texts of Isaiah much older than the Common Era still exist, and you should be able to find that verse in them. So unless the fathers of the Church had access to a time machine, they couldn’t have written this in later ‘cos it was written earlier. But it seems you’d rather take offense than teach.
‘s what you get for letting Satan inspire anger and jealousy in your heart, I guess.
Dorothy didn’t say Isaiah was altered. She said maybe the details of Jesus’ life were altered to match Isaiah, which is distinctly possible since the details weren’t written down until decades after Jesus died.
There are severall problem with equivicating Isaiah’s prophecy in chapter 7 with juesus’s emaculate birth. First is that Isaiah use the word “עלמה” wich mean young woman, and not neseserly a virgin. more over is that the prophecy itself talk about how the child wil suffer under the rign of the king of assyria, an empire that lost it’s hold over judia centuries before jessus was born.
The purpose of the prophecy was to warn king ahaz not to ally himself with the king of assyria, because assyria will betray israel after their common enemy will be defeated.
…is it common to bring your own Bible to church? Mary’s had that book – or _a_ book, anyway – on her since this mini-arc started. (At first I thought she didn’t have one when she entered the church, and left it with a new-ish Bible… but that’s too unsubtle.)
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Ah. Same sanctimonious Mary.
…shit.
Shame, Henry.
I feel like I missed something.
Ah, I didn’t recognize her! That explains what a jerk she’s being.
Didn’t recognize whom?
The dark-haired Bible-thumper chick, I didn’t realize it was Mary. It seems she had lighter hair in IW.
Shit guys, how do you remember all these minor It’s Walky characters? I have a hard enough time remembering the old plot lines.
I wouldn’t call Mary a minor character. Maybe secondary. She was more prominent in “Roomies” though so if you haven’t read that one, I can see you not remembering her much. She was always kind of a jerk, and a total hypocrite. Maybe her strong personality is why I remember her.
I’m precisely the the kind of new reader our author doesn’t want you to scare off with “It’s Walky” references…. but actually its great the way some college kid turns up for the first time and everyone starts talking about how they fought aliens in a parallel universe. Adds depth. And wierdness.
She’s SANCTAMARIOUS!!! =D
Jeez, Mary… I’m a christian and all, but…damn!
DAMMIT JOYCE CHURCH IS AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB YOU CAN’T LET IN THE RIFF-RAFF DIDN’T YOU READ
THIS HAS GONE FROM UNORTHODOX TO…TO…
HIGHLY UNORTHODOX!! -affronted stuttering-
You must understand! There is… Orthodox! … UNorthodox… And HIGHLY UNorthodox!!! *ahem hem hem cough ahem*
A-a-and Joyce you y-you are here! -> Highly Unorthodox!
(Nostalgia Critic FTW!)
DON’T YOU KNOW THAT WHEN IT SAYS TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO ALL NATIONS IT ONLY MEANT ONLY THOSE WHO ARE ALREADY CHRISTIANS?
No seriously, a MASSIVE FUCKING POINT of Christianity is to evangelize, and bring those who have not heard the Good Word to church, so they can hear the words of Jesus, accept him as God, and be saved. If you’re viewing church as the cool kid club, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
And I say this as someone who hasn’t been a Christian for about a decade.
There’s an old apocryphal story about a missionary and an Eskimo, wherein the missionary is telling the Eskimo about Jesus. After a long description of heaven and hell, the missionary tells the Eskimo:
“If you know about Jesus and don’t accept him, you won’t go to heaven.”
“What would have happened if you had never come along and told me about Jesus?” the Eskimo asked. “Would I have gone to hell?”
“No,” the missionary said, “because then you’d have been an innocent that never had the chance to learn of Jesus. But now that I’ve told you you are not an innocent, and so if you refuse Him, you will go to Hell.”
The Eskimo thinks about that for a moment, then looks at the missionary with an affronted expression. “So why did you tell me?”
I’ve heard that story with just about every “wise savage” ethnic group substituted for the Eskimo.
Anyway, the Catholic Church came up with a better answer when they invented the concept of Limbo:
“Righteous pagans go to Limbo, which isn’t so bad. You’ll be hanging out with some good people, after all. Still, it isn’t nearly as good as Heaven, where you’ll be hanging out with GOD! Also, it was much easier to end up in Hell before you knew about Jesus – you had to depend on your own righteousness instead of God’s mercy.”
Yeah, I know the Limbo deal too. I see it as just another example of the breathtaking ease with which people just make shit up.
Agreed, but you have to admit:
1) It shows that there was once a time when major Christian theologians were uncomfortable with the idea of blithely condemning most of humanity to Hell; and
2) It’s a better answer to the Eskimo than that (probably Protestant) missionary had.
Personally I’d prefer that the missionary just left the Eskimo the hell alone, but, yeah.
Honestly, I’d rather shoot for Limbo anyway. Sounds like an actual achievement, instead of getting a free pass because you know a guy.
All the interesting people are going to be in Limbo (at best) anyway.
Pretty sure the Catholic Church renounced the idea of limbo, though
yeah….
Its not a “free pass” if a life-long friend invites you to a party.
Think of it as moving into a new neighborhood – if you already know and are friends with the people who throw the parties, then you don’t have to spend time in that state of “limbo” while you get to the point of “knowing the guy”….
Of course, joining the local gang is an option – as is never trying to get into any of those parties. (imagine the parties being lan parties, if your a geek like me)
The problem is, the way they advertise is, ANYBODY can get into the party, no matter how “good” or “bad” they were. All they have to do is say they were honestly sorry, and will never do it again. And even if they do it again, all they have to do is say sorry again. And it doesn’t even matter how late in their life they decide to change their ways – all they have to do is say sorry and get in.
Meanwhile, people outside the religion have to actually work hard at being righteous, good, moral individuals to become “second best”. It’s stupid, and part of why I reject the faith. If the religion’s god doesn’t have morals and ethics that meet or exceed the standards I hold myself to, then it’s not worth my time.
Of course, you get some funny advertizing by fringe people…
The key word here is ‘honest’. We get so used in school and with parents to lying our heads off and hoping to get away with it that we forget that God ‘sees into the heart’. Lying won’t work. So an honest ‘sorry, I won’t do that again’ is OK – and we’re in! And failing later and being genuinely sorry again is OK, too – we’re not thrown out.
But a lot of people fake it even to themselves and have no genuine intention of carrying through on a promise. They get to be out. Sorry!
Oh, and ‘good, moral people’? How good is good enough? We’re all flawed, and it’s a steady slide from really, amazingly moral to creepily dishonest. There’s no dividing line, and we all slide up and down the slope, depending how we feel and the temptations to be selfish we meet.
What makes Jesus’ promise so unique is that we get accepted for an intro to God just by GENUINELY promising to follow Jesus as boss and do what he tells us – which is a big ask if you’re as independently-minded as I am. Once we’ve left that self-serving trash behind, we don’t have to work to be moral – which is hard work – because Jesus provides the push for us. What a relief!
It’s a clever answer to a legitimately disturbing theological problem, but not as clean or as scripturally derived as universalism.
“Also tell me again why a nice warm place filled with fire is a bad thing.”
Seriously, if you look at the Norse– well, they don’t really have an equivalent to “Hell” in the sense of a place for punishment, but if you look at Niflheim, where I’d say most average people would end up, it’s a cold, cheerless place.
Permanent heat is ony a bad thing if you’re from the desert. 😉
Think I’ve heard of a version where instead of “Why did you tell me?”, the Eskimo puts a spear through the missionary to protect the rest of his family from possibly going to Hell. Always felt that Eskimo was very valiant for his self-sacrifice in order to protect his family.
Unfortunately Catholics (of which I am one) never got that part. Non-Catholics are welcome to attend Catholic mass, but are not allowed to take the E Eucharist. If you don’t take the Eucharist, you go to hell. Thus, you may attend but you’re still going to burn in eternal hell. Even if you’re a Christian.
O_o no? You should probably read back up on the sacraments, because you’ve got them wrong. Badly. Communion is not some magical boolean switch for whether or not you’re going to hell. There is no “Damning force” outside of ones own actions and conscious.
Simply attending mass doesn’t get you into heaven – no one logical would expect it to. If you never *intend* to take the Eucharist, then yes, its probably safe to say that you won’t go *straight* to heaven (would your soul even desire to, at that point?) But for you to claim that inaction damns someone to hell is guilty of that same ignorance you’re blindly accusing all Catholics of.
Nope, I’ve got it straight. Perhaps you need to “read back up”?
“Holy Communion separates us from sin, wipes away venial sins and preserves us from future mortal sins.”
Here it is, straight from Jesus: “”Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (John 6:53–56)”
“no one logical would expect it to” hahaha… haha… ha. Correct, hence you’re wrong.
…um… isn’t the point to get people to accept Jesus? Wouldn’t converting to Catholicism be part of accepting Jesus?
I would say rather that Catholic dogma has accepting Jesus as a part of being a Catholic.
Well, you could let him in if he’s disguised as a famous painting, or carrying a midget casket, or singing back-up…
And if he’s painting the casket if a famous singing midget then by all means…
It’s people like her that give religion a bad name.
“You give religion a bad name…” – yeah, could be a good song.
Wouldn’t match the meter. You’d have to change the song an awful lot for it to make sense.
“You give GOD a bad name…” That would work better syllable-wise.
I know. That’s why I did it.
I didn’t see your post until I posted mine.
I know what you mean. That’s happened to me a few times.
SHOT THROUGH THE HEART! AND YOU’RE TO BLAME! YOU GIVE GOD A BAD NAME!
This post = win.
We really need a thumbs-up button.
This is why I rate you as #2 guy of the comment section. You are just that good.
That’s because condom hats give Kerny super-wits.
One question: Do you hear it as a rock song (like Bon Jovi’s original song) or more like the metal cover Atreyu made?
I’m not really sure what I prefer.
Bon Jovi style, of course. I can’t here it as anything else.
What do I get if I only know the name “Atreyu”, without any knowledge of the band/artist behind it, and consequently never knew there WAS another version save Bon Jovi’s?
I hear it as the one that doesn’t suck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn-ev-yFMOI
And it’s already been done!
Oh my, there are much much worse people out there giving religion a bad name. Like the Westboro crowd, or Terry Jones, or the people who issue fatwas against writers and cartoonists, or the theocrats. Mary is small-time.
Monty Python isn’t THAT bad to religion…
I think you’re probably joking, but just in case, I meant this guy.
But… b-but… but North Korea is Best Korea! After all, Kim Jong Il and his father made the earth, sky and the sun!
(I’m not joshin’ ya. Look that one up. I’d laugh it it weren’t for the fact that there are a great many in North Korea who believe it.)
Still beats the original Mary. This one is kind of a more temperate, right-wing leaning Malaya. Big improvement.
Joyce did a bad bad thing. 😛
…Dammit, I just know that’s a reference to something…
I will let you dwell on that for a while.
…Okay, I’ll bite. What was it from?
Baby did a bad bad thing!
Y’know, from now on, I’m just going to assume that everything you say is either a pun or a reference.
or a punny reference.
A punference?
Good try but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue to well, at least not with my accent.
Drop a syllable to pun’frence and it works well enough. It might still need some work, though.
Punference sounds like it’s a conference for pundits.
I recognize ‘inference’ as a word, so ‘punference’ rolls off my tongue just fine.
What? Showing a non-believer what a believer do every Sunday?
I’m a believer and I sure as hell don’t go to church every Sunday.
So you go on the Sabbath instead?
(sings)
I don’t go to chuuuurch
But I’m a believer!
Not a trace
Of doubt in my mind!
Christ is Lord! (ooooh)
(Tambourine)
And now, in my head, Shrek and Fiona are attending mass. With a very uncertain priest giving them communion.
The Monkees can’t do that song.
“Real” Christians don’t believe in Evolution!
So the inevitable Gorillaz remake would be right out of the question, then?
You say you don’t like evolution?
We-ell you know,
Jesus died to save the world!
They must not know our secret wylding ways!
gravatar win
ISSAK!
No, not really.
Well Joyce hasn’t done anything wrong, technically. She asked Dorothy, Dorothy could have just said “No, pick something else.” Hopefully Mary will be cool. After all, she’s a chick who likes to stay naked until the afternoon, how uptight can she be?
I agree with you, re: Joyce.
Although Mary’s getting pretty cranky over a minor disagreement so I doubt actual wrongdoing not taking place is gonna pacify her.
Especially with her left-side ANGRY EYEBROW.
I say kill Mary and bury her on the bottom of Lake Monroe.
I’ll get the cement shoes.
Too Chicago style.
What about a Sweeney Todd style? you get pie and a bloody Mary!
“Waste not, want not.” Also, one should eat locally produced meats and produce! 😀
mmmmm chicago style….
Well looky there! My inner dialog has a blond gravatar!
Body first then pizza.
You’re just taking advantage of Willis not being around to get the heebies to post creepy kill things.
If Willis was around i would anyway.
Fabulous.
I’d say we make a Jimmy Hoffa out her.
So you’re saying we should elect her president of our union?
And then make her disappear without a trace.
“Jimmy Hoffa’s not missing… He’s in an oil drum in New Jersey!”
No he’s not he’s at the bottom of Lake Huron.
He’s in the Mythbusters’ back office. They’ve been keeping him there ever since they dug him out from under the stadium in that one episode.
Actually scatch that. I got a better idea, send her to The Village.
(A reference the The Prisoner TV searies. The original not the remake)
And what? Make her number 6?
M. Night’s The Village wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. ^_~
Not as bad an idea as him trying to do The Last Airbender was.
Would Roz turn out to be the one who controls Rover, then? The condom on her head is actually an antenna, because latex calls to latex…
Haha somehow reminds me of A Knight’s Tale when William drove the hose into the church and the friar went ballistic.
So you’re saying Dorothy is a horse?
So you’re saying Dorothy is related to Sarah Jessica Parker?
ZING!
No, Wig specifically said “hose”. Obviously Dorothy is long, slender and squirts water everywhere.
Nah, he’s talking about William’s leggings. Hose were common menswear back then too. (So were heels. Emphasizes the calves.)
Because everyone knows only people that already believe in God can go to church.
Anyone can go into a church and be welcome – ill-doers maybe excepted. But that won’t make you a Christian, how ever long you attend or how much you learn. Accepting Jesus as your personal leader and boss is the only way. And no-one else can ever be really sure if you’ve done that – it’s in the heart.
Chill, Mary, chill. Dorothy is as non-confrontational as it gets right now.
Anecdote: I knew someone like her in real life, who among other things told me my (sunday school teaching) mother was a horrible Christian for liking Harry Potter.
Actually, she kinda looked like Mary too.
It’s probably best she never found out I was an atheist, the social situations were horrible enough.
I would have pissed on her stuff the moment her back was turned. You are a more forgiving person than I.
Forgiving, passive, lazy. Same thing sometimes. I just sighed and moved on.
Well, it actually is believed that ‘virgin’ was a mistranslation from the hebrew word for ‘young maiden’
Y’know, that makes a lot of sense.
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: some chick will conceive and give birth to a son.”
That’s a very specific sign. Thanks Lord.
Prophecies are all about being very specific!
True. That’s why those $4.99 a minute phone psychics are so popular. They’re just vague enough that whatever they say can be applied to anyone they talk to, and just specific enough so it doesn’t sound like they’re spitballing.
My wife was a phone psychic for a bit, but as she’s the
real McCoy and using her gift for so long each day
exhausted her so she had to quit.
First day she had someone call and ask “If you’re psychic, where are my keys?” So she told him. “White jacket back of door, right pocket”
Guy turns out to be a doctor who left them in his lab coat, right where she said.
Assuming your wife’s gift has had time to recuperate in her retirement, I suggest you contact the James Randi Educational Foundation and claim your million dollar prize.
Until I see that all over the papers, I’m going to feel entirely content in calling bullshit.
And we’re perfectly happy to let you. Saves time answering stupid questions and all.
Oh, well, god forbid someone who claims mysterious and unaccountable abilities and knowledge should have to answer questions.
I mean, where would we be today if we went around questioning things we didn’t understand? We’d value reason and empirical evidence and crazy things like that! Gosh I’m glad we’re all credulous and gullible.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you Crumplepunch, though you could probably find a slightly nicer way to say it.
I normally find nice ways to talk to people I disagree with, but not with people who blatantly lie and/or call me stupid. Then the unpleasantness begins.
Keys are too easy.
You’re supposed to ask for next week’s Powerball numbers.
Too easily explained away if failed. Cosmic interference and temporal displacement, butterfly effect, the further from the current point in time you tried to divinate (assuming you don’t follow the theory of appointed fate, that is– where everything that CAN happen DOES happen because it can’t be avoided) the cloudier the future can be.
With enough viable evidence I’d be willing to accept someone being psychic in the vein of “I can locate where your keys are right now”. Being psychic in the vein of “don’t eat the veal on your honeymoon next week or you’ll get sick” is going to take a much more rigorous degree of evidence to dig it out of the science fiction genre for me.
Until actual tests have been performed and some degree of basic scientific rigor is adhered to, though, I’ll just say that while someone may believe themselves psychic, I do not, and leave it at that.
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a young maiden or girl?”
We’re talking about the prophecy from the Old Testament, which was in Hebrew. You’re talking about the New Testament, which was in Aramaic and Greek. Those are two different things.
Different as in, “one was a prophecy, and one was
written several decades after the fact after the verbal
accounts had had plenty of time to become as accurate
as that fish story my grampa told me, where that trout
got away after eating the next boat over.”
Serious question: is “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: some chick will conceive and give birth to a son” the whole quote, or could it just be the start of something that gets a bit more sign-like? I know I could look myself but, you know, lazy.
Isaiah 7, paraphrased:
Isaiah: “Hey, Your Grace, I know you’re worried about those two kings who’ve made an alliance to crush you. Would a prophecy cheer you up?”
Ahaz: “No, it wouldn’t.”
Isaiah: “Well, I’m giving you one anyway. A chick will conceive and give birth to a son, and by the time that kid’s old enough to know the difference between good and evil, nobody will even remember who those guys were.”
Ahaz: “That’s… surprisingly comforting, actually.”
Isaiah: “…because the King of Assyria is on his way to wipe you all off the map right now.”
I’m not sure how it wound up being considered a sign relating to Jesus, to be honest.
In his book “Asimov’s Guide to the Bible” Isaac Asimov points out that the actual prediction has the Hebrew word for “young girl” NOT “virgin” which is a different word completely. He tells the story of finding an original King James Bible turned to that page in a museum and, as was Isaac’s style, waxed eleqoutely (sp) on why the one word was untranslated from the Hebrew (the Jews that did the translation didn’t want trouble if they translated the word correctly) as he talked, a museum guard wandered over and asked one of Isaac’s friend who the guy was who thought he knew so much about the Old Testament. The friend said; “Don’t you know who that is?” The guard looked for a minute and said; “God?”
Isaac said his friend didn’t have to laugh THAT hard.
The New Testament is only known in Greek. The word in Greek clearly means “virgin,” which is how the whole thing started; most Jews at the time were more familiar with the Septuagint than the Hebrew, since it was expected for anyone even slightly educated to learn Greek, the same way it was expected everyone learn Latin a few hundred years ago. It’s only post-Temple that the laity came to be expected to learn Hebrew.
The point is that the early Hebrew word meant a young, unmarried woman – and in their culture, that was understood to mean a virgin almost for sure. Girls almost always got married by 14 (and boys by 16, latest), so just as the word for ‘woman’ almost always meant ‘married or widowed woman’, understanding the word as ‘virgin’ was a given, which is why the Septuagint Greek translation used that Greek word. And Mary in the NT fulfilled that prophecy honestly.
There’s also the minor problem that the prophecy expired about 700 years prior to the birth of Christ. The prophecy was very clearly to the King of Judah that certain events would happen in his lifetime. Around 732 BC.
http://500questions.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/54-does-isaiah-714-predict-the-virgin-birth-of-jesus/
I’m so glad I’m not a translator some days, it sounds like an emotional rollercoaster.
I doubt Mary’s a virgin.
According to proper translations of the NT she wasn’t, or at least it wasn’t mentioned.
I was talking about DoA’s Mary.
Unless she lost her virginity before she found religion, I doubt anyone could stand be around her self-righteousness long enough to deflower her.
That’s what gags are for.
There are plenty of other things to be self-righteous about. It’s got more to do with personality than beliefs.
Are you sure I wasn’t? 😉
Old Testament prophecy states that it must be a virgin birth, because the seed of man is tainted with sin. Therefore because Jesus was not born of man, he wasn’t born in sin like everyone else. Thanks Adam.
So women are less sinful? I’m just following a thought here, so, say, a lesbian clone-baby would be where on the virtue scale?
Nope, Mary was a special case. Mary’s was the Immaculate Conception, making her the first woman since Eve to be born without the taint of Eve’s sin.
Ah! Thanks. I comprehend now.
Actually the “Immaculate Conception” refers to MARY’s birth to her mother via normal sexual reproduction. Essentially Mary was free from the taint of original sin (as the catholics hold it) because God said so.
Christ was the Virgin Birth. Different concepts, often mixed up in practice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception
Long story short, Mary was baptized before baptismals were a thing, and before she was born.
Christ, I just posted a long winded explanation of exactly what you asid. Sorry. I’m tired.
Anyway, no, women aren’t less sinful. But according to the cathlic dogma at least, God said “this chick won’t have original sin because I said so” and then he popped Jesus in there himself.
Shazam, man born without sin.
catholic*
So why not just do that for everyone and skip the whole nonsense?
Because that would make far too much sense.
Technically, it was still Eve’s fault, but because the old testament is full of bigoted, crotchety old men, women don’t count in passing the lineage, so for them to be born because of a man means extending the Original sin perpetrated by the two original sinners.
Judaism is matrilineal in many ways; if your mother is a Jew, you’re a Jew. The laws for the priestly caste are a bit trickier.
Judaism used to be patrilineal. But then came the Crusades, where half the men who went weren’t religious, they were just out for plunder (that’s from kings down to footsoldiers). So when the got to the East, rape was the pastime, whether of Moslem, Jewish or Eastern Christian women, and it was so bad that Jewish descent was change to matrilinear because a family couldn’t always be sure who was the father.
A sad story, reflecting badly on Christendom’s attitudes at the time. True Christians who protested then got ignored or persecuted themselves.
That’s the part that was mistranslated, between the Hebrew and ancient Greek. The translation was called the Septugaint, so called because it was supposedly divinely inspired between seventy scholars who translated it perfectly and identically. However, we know know that the Septugaint differs considerably from, say, the Dead Sea Scrolls. For example, according to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the number of the Beast is 616. Who knew?
Except the book of Revelation wasn’t among the Dead Sea Scrolls. None of the New Testiment books were, because just like you were getting at the DSS were all in Hebrew- meaning they were all Old Testament writings (plus a few that didn’t make the canon of Christian scripture).
You’re right. And most of these scrolls were stuff to do with their own weird sect of Judaism – and tell us more than most other sources about life in those times.
Which raises some question about Marvel’s ‘Earth 616’.
Hm… That definitely makes the Isaiah 7:14/Jesus relationship more tenuous, since the very next line says “By the time he learns to reject the bad and choose the good, people will be feeding on curds and honey.”
I… don’t think it actually says that. The whole “mankind is inherently sinful and tainted” philosophy is more or less unique to Christianity.
I thought that the two words in ancient Hebrew were the same, such that it was rather ambiguous as to which was intended in the Scripture?
Anyways, even as someone who’s a (more-or-less, if somewhat questioning) Christian (Catholic, to be precise), I find Biblical Literalists to be rather frustrating to debate with, on the whole; it’s a general problem with reference points.
Either way, DoAMary’s looking to be rather similar to Roomies!Mary, who was a rather sanctimonious hypocrite. We all know one, whether they’re religious or not (speaking from the experience of knowing at least one atheist who takes more or less the same approach with believers).
The Hebrew words are the same, but the Greek translation of the Old Testament a couple hundred years before Christ’s birth uses a word that only means virgin, not young woman.
I understood that. But the original language is ambiguous as to which one it is supposed to be, no?
Yes and a lot of people talk about this. The Hebrew word almah can be used to refer to a young maiden or a virgin, but is never used to refer to a young married woman in the bible.
Though it is, at one point, specifically used to refer to “the way of a man with a young woman.” Take that as you will, I guess.
So, “cleaning the sheets afterward”?
Biblical Literalists? You mean those Christians who believe that God actually created the world in 7 actual days as opposed it being some kind of metaphor?
“..do I really need to gather my whole village to stone my brother for planting two differents crops side-by-side?”
So God originally created pot as a punishment?
OH MY!
No, but you do need to stone Jehovah’s Witnesses for saying Jehovah.
And me too, come to think of it.
I’m standing right behind you.
…sorry, that seemed like the only legit response to that.
But not (and I absolutely must stress this part) not before I blow this whistle.
Zap, Jehovah is a term of respect, though I don’t use it. It began in about the 15th century in English bibles. As Jews will do today, it uses vowels from Adonai with [YHWH] to avoid pronouncing the holy name of God. As a Christian, I’m happy to speak God’s true name with respect.
As our religon teacher once explained you shouldn’t believe the stories in the bible but rather in the message they contain.
So then why do you need the stories? Why not just write out the message?
A proper parable contains multiple messages, and context that helps the messages bear impact.
Also, sometimes the stories include the why of a commandment, at which point the story is itself the most succinct form of delivery.
Also, stories have memetic stickiness.
If I yell at you not to eat pork, then whatever.
If I tell you this story about a guy who got weird spiral-shaped welts after eating pork and then a bunch of pigs burst tail-first out of his flesh, well, it might give pause. And even if you decide my story’s totally bogus, the imagery of the story can stick with you.
Now instead of something like dietary habits, imagine the story’s something nice like “be good to people.” If we can make the meme stickier by hooking it to a story, why not?
OK, I’ll buy that.
Even in the last few years of my Christianity, I never really liked the idea of Jesus’ immaculate conception. Not just because the idea itself makes no sense, but because it seems to take away from Jesus as a spiritual leader.
I mean, thinking of Jesus as some type of divine being just seems to actually take away more from who he was as a spiritual leader. If he’s supposed to be the son of god, well yeah, he’s gonna say some profound shit. But if he’s just a regular human possessing that sort of wisdom and can sway people that easily. That’s something really spectacular.
But that’s just me.
Wow, totally repeated myself just there. Sorry, bad proofreading on my part, but my point stands.
Without the virgin birth there is no perfect sacrifice. Jesus of Nazereth was either a lunatic, a liar, or the Son of God. If Jesus wasn’t the Son of God then he was a liar. In John 14 it says he that has seen me has seen the Father. I respect your beliefs, but I don’t think just a good teacher was an option.
I’m not saying it was, at the very least not for the time, or any time, really. There have been thousands of wise men over the years, and only a very select few have had that type of influence, and nearly all of those that did did so with claims of divinity or divine backing.
Certainly, nobody would have taken him as seriously as they did had he not made the claims that he had. And who knows, maybe there was something divine about him. Maybe he was a little bit crazy. Maybe he just knew what people needed to hear. A liar, a lunatic, or a divine, I don’t think it really detracts anything from his teachings and the things he had to say.
Did he die for our sins? Of course he did, in what sense is the question that I ask. Was it a true absolution, or was it simply the gesture of a man who loved his people and knew what they needed to see to keep their beliefs alive.
Heh, but really, I’m just speculating. I’m sure there are a few answers to several of these questions, and I just haven’t heard them yet. Hell, I’m probably just talking outta my ass here.
In any case, all I know is, whatever he was, Jesus was a great man with a lot of great things to say. Past that, well, I’m neither a theologist nor historian enough to know much more.
I’m glad you didn’t take my comment the wrong way. Most people freak out on me when I start reciting verses. All I can say is that the bible says that anyone who seeks the truth will find it, and I’m glad to see people out there who still seek it.
Good thinking, Daeva. But you need to take the next step. Given that the Gospel records are accurate – and they are – Jesus made a direct claim to be God in person again and again. There’s no way to avoid this claim. That’s where Chuck’s statement comes from. You believe him to be good, he’s too wise to be mad – so he’s God. Proven point. So how do you answer his call to follow him?
Post what beliefs you like, but I draw the line at asking for converts. The last sentence crosses this line. Please do not again.
Sorry if you saw it that way – I don’t. I’m asking people just to follow where their thinking leads them, and honestly tackle the issues. I do think that most people debating and commenting here are intellectually honest, so can do that.
Orrrrrrrr the dude who wrote John(which was most assuredly not the historical John) made a bunch of stuff up, since those claims are not found in the Synoptic Gospels.
OT But is your name taken from Dark Smoke Puncher, perchance? 🙂
DP, John was SO much the real disciple of Jesus, who stuck to him for years and wrote his eyewitness story later, to add to the others, not just copy them. The internal evidence is rock solid (look it up) unless, of course, you NEED to believe that it’s wrong…
Your information is centuries out of date.
He could have also be something of a legend. A spiritual leader who’s exploits were exaggerated by his followers and who’s metaphors where taken literally. There is also the fact that a man without a biological follower, by definition, cannot be the messiah as the messiah was to be born to the house of David which can only be passed by blood from father to son. Unless God is descended from David.
BMD, cynics pull out that story every century. Jesus was humanly descended from David through both his mother (Matthew 1) and through adoption by his stepfather Joseph (Luke 3). The legend story doesn’t hold water when you look at the recorded facts.
You can have nifty sacrifice without him being a virgin birth. All god has to do is do the same immaculate conception thing with Jesus that he’s supposed to have done with Mary. *Poof* – sinless sacrifice.
Just sayin’.
He could have been a good teacher and a nut case. Being mistaken about some aspect of reality doesn’t negate everything you say.
If I may nitpick pedantically a bit, it’s my understanding that the “immaculate conception” does not refer to Jesus, but to Mary. In Catholic theology, the argument goes something like this:
1) Mary gave birth to God.
2) God cannot inherit original sin.
3) Therefore, Mary must have been born without original sin.
Theologians were never very good with their syllogism. Interestingly, in 1950, a corollary was added:
4) Death is a consequence of sin.
5) Mary is without sin.
6) Therefore, Mary must not have died, and was assumed bodily into heaven.
Oh man. You can’t make this stuff up. Except when, obviously, you do.
IIRC, Catholics believe that Mary is the Holy Mother to whom you can pray to like you would God or Jesus, while Protestants believe that Mary was just a good jewish girl who was chosen because she was betrothed to a direct decentant of King David.
And was one herself. That’s the explanation they give for the two genealogies.
This is pedantic, I know, but Catholics don’t believe you can pray to Mary like you would God of Jesus. You can ask Mary to intercede on your behalf with God and Jesus. just like you can the saints, and other (alive or dead) people. God is accorded Latria, Mary Hyperdulia and the saints Dulia. See also:
Sorry… even as a no-longer-Catholic, I think that a precise understanding what other people believe, rather than an imprecise understanding, is an aid to communication.
Ah, just looked it up, and yeah, seems I did make a mistake. I was referencing the virgin birth and got the two things confused. Sorry ’bout that. Seems there were plenty of nits to be picked, and I hope they thoroughly nourish the chimp of your inspection.
Heh, yeah it all does start sounding pretty silly when you start spelling it out. But that’s something that sort of fascinates me in ways and depresses me in others. That there can be such a huge movement behind something that, when viewed objectively, is so unbelievably silly! I hold no disrespect for religion as a whole, mind you, but some of the more obvious embellishments and their implications are sort of fun to think about every so often.
Given: Biological parthenogenesis always produces females (ants, bees, all known lifeforms that can have “virgin births.”
Given: Jesus was a product of parthenogenesis.
Conclusion: Jesus was a GIRL!
Leading of course, to…
“…Bethany is part GIRL?”
Except that Mary wasn’t actually a virgin; she was scrod by God. (This is reasonably explicit, in the KJV at least.) This gave her the divine DNA necessary to allow her to create a heroic son in classic Greek style. She’s still called a virgin because God didn’t accomplish his immaculate impregnation by coming in through the hymen route; he entered through a different path (through the ‘back door’, so to speak).
Or at least, that’s the impression I’ve gotten. There are apparently some who believe that she remained a virgin all her life, too. This gets a little tricky once you remember that Jesus had siblings. And I gather that there are some who believe that she managed to reach the end with her hymen unbroken too – the only thing I can figure is they follow the ‘cabbage patch’ school of childbirth.
Religion is kind of weird.
Alternatively;
Jesus is God’s only son. We are all God’s children.
Therefore, we are all God’s daughters.
A Christian Scientist would apply this to genetics; if females have XX-chromosome pairs, and males have XY-chromosome pairs, then it is entirely possible that Jesus had the never-before-seen YY-chromosome pair, making him the manliest man ever to be born, and all other men hermaphrodites in comparison.
I hear Immaculate Conception and I just can’t get past the image of Adrian Monk trying to get it on with Lilith Crane in a clean room. The Cheers Lilith, she got more fun in Frasier.
Really?
Well, Mary was only around 14 or so when she got knocked up by the Holy Spirit, and was unmarried. By most scholars, that fits the definition of young maiden.
As a Jewish ex-seminarian, I’m chiming in to confirm this: the Hebrew word is not a terribly obscure one and does mean “young woman.” And as such I find this whole incident highly entertaining, from their having evidently just listened to a sermon about how WE got it wrong, to none of them having previously encountered the fact that that Hebrew word just doesn’t mean virgin at all.
Now, I’d consider myself highly knowledgeable about Judaism and very ignorant about Christianity, but I’m curious: assuming Mary WAS a virgin and Jesus WAS a blood relative of God, does that passage not meaning what the Christians say it does still mess up the Christian belief system?
I just wrote this a bit further up – so here it is again:
The point is that the early Hebrew word meant a young, unmarried woman – and in their culture, that was understood to mean a virgin almost for sure. Girls almost always got married by 14 (and boys by 16, latest), so just as the word for ‘woman’ almost always meant ‘married or widowed woman’, understanding the word as ‘virgin’ was a given, which is why the Septuagint Greek translation used that Greek word. And Mary in the NT fulfilled that prophecy honestly.
As a Jewish ex-seminarian, I’m chiming in to confirm this: the Hebrew word is not a terribly obscure one and does mean “young woman.” And as such I find this whole incident highly entertaining, from their having evidently just listened to a sermon about how WE got it wrong, to none of them having previously encountered the fact that that Hebrew word just doesn’t mean virgin at all.
Now, I’d consider myself highly knowledgeable about Judaism and very ignorant about Christianity, but I’m curious: assuming Mary WAS a virgin and Jesus WAS a blood relative of God, does that passage not meaning what the Christians say it does still mess up the Christian belief system?
Completely and totally correct, apart from the Hebrew bit (language hadn’t been invented yet, Hebrew is essentially a modern construct). The Aramaic word “almah” can mean “virgin” in very specific contexts (basically it has to be spelled out afterwards that the young woman hasn’t had sex), but for most uses it translates as “young woman/girl”. Given the context of the original passage in the Torah/Tanakh, it is obvious that the meaning is “young woman”. However when Greek Jews translated the Torah/Tanakh into the Greek Septuagint they didn’t realise the subtlety and translated “almah” as “parthenos” (yes, this could also have been a deliberate attempt by Greek christians to elide Mary with Athena the virgin goddess for conversion purposes), therefore the whole story of Mary being a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus.
So, does Mary just carry around a Bible, or is she stealing from the church?
Inside that bible, there’s a flask of whiskey, except the whiskey is really a bunch of really tiny bibles.
When she’s feeling down she likes to curl up with a bottle of Good Book.
Silly Jacob, she didn’t steal that Bible. She collected it. She collects Bibles from every church she attends to put them into the collection.
Her wallpaper back home is every verse in the Bible.
She carries a Bible around so she can thump people with it.
Kinky.
Great, just great. Thanks, PM, now you’ve turned that into Rule 34 fuel. 😛
Silly hamster, Rule 34 doesn’t need fuel. 😉
I said THUMP not HUMP. 😀
Hee-hee! You said HUMP!
Mary’s looking as sanctimonious as ever, but her having a Bible in this scene isn’t a sign of it. Generally, one carries a Bible when attending church.
Really? I never saw anyone bringing their own Bible to church. Maybe Anglicans just don’t.
In some churches or denominations, it’s normal for people to carry their own Bibles with them to church, so they can, for example, follow along with the readings, consult relevant passages during the sermon, take notes in the margins, or what have you. Perhaps Mary comes from that sort of background.
(Sorry, FlyingFish. Didn’t notice you’d said that. But the practice is more prevalent in some churches and denominations than others; most of the churches I’ve attended have Bibles in the pews and don’t expect people to bring their own.)
And it must be in Hebrew inside – the cover clearly shows that it’s read from right to left!
How dare heathens attend church! Dorothy may be honoring Joyce’s request to try and expand her horizon, but that kind of thing just lets the devil in. How can they not see this?
To me, there is no coercion in religion but if join one, you make sure you are committed to it.
How do you join one if you can’t visit it beforehand though? You wouldn’t really know what you’re getting into…
Your wording suggests Islam? Just curious.
Yes, how did you know about that?
I’ve been friends with a few Muslims. I also took way more college courses on religion than an art mar had any business doing. 🙂 The saying that there is no compulsion/coercion in religion was repeated in two of my classes and all of my Muslim friends. It would be difficult for me to mistake it.
Whoever said there is no coercion in religion never had a Jewish Mother.
Interesting forum. I posted No, not really to comment on Plasma’s comment. And it did post right after her comment. I left the forum for a minute, come back, and it now has another comment inserted in front of it. Very odd.
I’m not sure why that sort of thing happens, I can only assume some kind of bug.
Concurrency is a really hard problem. Concurrency over HTTP with huge variations in link latency is basically impossible. So most software doesn’t even try, and as a result, that kind of stuff happens.
Things get queued up out of order, stuff that has been posted already doesn’t show up even when refreshed…
Also doesn’t help that PHP is terrible, and most things written in PHP are terrible (not that ruby or java or asp.net apps are necessarily any better, but it is endemic in php)
It’s not that complicated to give every post a unique id (per thread) and ensure that its replies end up under it, though. The order might be off, but getting it there doesn’t become a concurrency problem.
This is a bug. SHOOT THE PROGRAMMER!!!!!
Oh, I dunno, the kind that’s inquisitive and questioning of her faith while still remaining faithful?
Y’know, just throwin’ stuff out there.
I mean, you asked and all.
I wonder how Mary would be reacting if Dorothy had actually liked the sermon?
She’d accuse her of not liking it for the right reasons.
Either that or take it as an invitation for further, and more vehement proselytization.
She wouldn’t have asked what sort of christian Dorothy was and thus would be unaware she was an atheist. They’d presumably be getting along fine.
Is the gospel of Mathew in the old testament? because i don’t remember it being in the TaNaKH
quotes from Mathew 1:23 which means the scripture from the new testament I may be wrong here but i am pretty sure Mary just claimed that the TaNaKH predicted Jesus’s coming by quoting something from the New testament.
That’s because the original quote is from Isaiah 7:14. Which last I checked *is* in the Tanakh. But eh.
The first quote I found was from matrhew thanks for clearing that up.
Yes, the author of Matthew in particular seemed to make a point of quoting passages from the TANAKH to demonstrate how Jesus fulfilled various prophecies and must therefore be the Messiah for whom the Jews had been waiting. “Jesus did X, as it is written in the [Jewish/OT] Scriptures, ‘He shall do X.'”
It’s also Isaiah 7:14.
It’s been a few years since I read the Bible, but I seem to remember that the Messiah prophecies mentioned in the New Testament were paraphrased from verses in later books of the Old Testament.
If you are going to do the abbreviation thing with the Tanakh, wouldn’t it make more sense for it to be TaNaKh, as the K stands for Ketubim, not Khetubim?
She’s quoting Isaiah 7:14, as is Matthew.
Don’t worry, Joyce. Nothing bad could possibly happen from inviting a non-Christian to a Christian mass, nothing at all!
(But no seriously, I don’t get it all. I’m the kind of guy that’s very forgiving if someone doesn’t follow a certain faith. Maybe that’s why.)
Unless the non-Christian is a vampire or demonically possessed, in which case inviting them leads to somebody bursting into flames in church and a mess of ash that SOMEBODY needs to clean up.
Don’t be silly, only believers can be turned into vampires or become demonically possessed, everyone else knows that stuff is just superstition.
They believe BEFORE becoming a vampire and/or being possessed by a demon. After, they probably undergo a change of heart and religious afiliation.
Except perhaps for the demons who believe in God, but hate humans. I mean, Angels/Demons have assumedly had direct experience of the Divine. They can’t “believe,” they KNOW.
Doom Shepherd, that’s why there’s a difference between knowledge and believing. They’ve already rejected YHWH as god, when Lucifer led his rebellion with 1/3 of the angels, and they were created without the free will to choose, like humanity was.
Except of course in the Book of Job, which makes it clear that Satan is still on speaking and reporting and wagering terms with God.
It’s reckoned by a lot of scholars (not all) that Job is the earliest story in the bible, pre-dating most of the Torah; nothing to do with its place in the collected book.
Mary, Joyce, this is no time to become Orthodorks about everything.
I can honestly say Mary is my least favorite character. What’s wrong with atheists going to church? If the church has its act together only good can come out of it. She needs to read Matthew 9.
Mary is an outlet for anti-theists to vent their dislike on after their initial opinions on Joyce are charmed into submission.
It seems from her line in Panel 2 that she didn’t know Dorothy was an atheist. She probably assumed Dorothy was one of those (as she’d see it) liberal Christians who play fast-and-loose with traditional theology and who therefore probably aren’t really all that Christian after all.
I wonder if David ever gets himself riled up while writing dialogue like Mary’s up there. I know I have before, but I tend to get a little wrapped up in it sometimes.
As a Christian myself, I gotta say this is completely accurate. Modern Christianity for the most part is an insular club who demands that its values be enacted into law, then craps itself when any other religion tries to do the exact same thing in their own country/countries. Or maybe that’s just American Christianity. Either way, it’s not a pretty sight.
We’ve also got no evangelizing tactics beyond “We’re obviously right because we have a book that says things (just like all the other books that say things) and if you don’t immediately agree, well obviously you’re going to burn in hell! We didn’t want your stupid soul anyway!
And again, this is a CHRISTIAN fully admitting this.
Mormons have really good evangelizing tactics. I’m no Mormon, but they’ve got a fairly good pitch, all things considered.
They’ve also got some WEIRD skeletons in their closet, like the posthumous baptism of the dead against their wishes, particularly focused on Holocaust victims. I wish I was making that up.
Holocaust victims? I always heard that the focus was on Native A Americans.
Mormon tactics weren’t very good when they tried it on me. It was just the usual “there’s a god and this is what we think he is” business
What do you expect from a group that, when you ask, “Well how do you know that what the Bible says is true?” they respond with, “Well, because it says so in the Bible! Duh!”
Okay, that was tongue-in-cheek, but I have actually seen that sort of circular reasoning used to validate the Bible. Usually from people I suspected had never actually read the Bible.
I’d go with the fact it uses knowledge beyond human understanding at the time it was written. Back when people had no concept of the world being anything but flat, Isaiah writes that the earth is a circle in a blanket of stars. Back when Moishe (a.k.a. Moses) was leading the people out of Egypt, and he was writing down the medical stuff in the bible, there is no use of “then modern” items like crocodile dung and other stuff that later turned out to be worse than doing nothing at all. There’s several places in the Bible like that where it seems modern knowledge was available back then guiding whomever wrote it. Also, to have about 40 people spread across several hundreds of years apart write books that seem to tell one contiguous story when compiled has pretty much yet to be repeated by any other religious book.
Well worth considering that the people who compiled the version that has made it this far in time– The Holy Bible, subvariants and titles nonwithstanding– were essentially a theistic mafia who had lived for years under the methods of “because we tell them God said to do it, they do what we say.” Any writer worth his salt can alter two noncontiguous tales to make them meet up in the middle, and it’s already known that the Roman Catholic Church modified or left out certain texts that could potentially hinder their grip on the body public by altering the dynamics of the overall story.
Granted, much of that could very well have been debunked. I prefer to spend my time doing more productive things than digging through piles of sensationalist bullpucky for tidbits of information regarding historical alterations to holy scripture. After all, when every man has a pulpit, the truth is buried within screaming lies.
Raiser, you bin reading Dan Brown? The whole bible was completed long before there WAS a Roman Catholic Church. We have the ancient Greek copies to prove it, and they’re just what we read today. Don’t believe anti-Christian myths!
yes, a circle, which is flat, not a ball, which is round.
Except, Roborat, that the Hebrew word used can refer to either a circle (flat) or sphere (non-flat), based on its usage at the time it was written.
Religious zealotry is at the least annoying and at the worst terrorism.
At this point I don’t question the existence of some sort of higher power that created the universe but I do wonder what that being would think of us and all of our petty squabbles.
Given that such a being created both the platypus and quantum physics, I’d guess it has the greatest sense of humor ever and is therefore laughing its metaphysical ass off at us.
And don’t forget the giraffe. I swear, if there is a God, S/He had a beta copy of “Spore.”
God is outside time. He has a gold copy of Spore VII.
That’s the one with the chocobos, right?
Nah, they’re already in the first game.
The Giraffe is a greater cosmic joke than you know. It meets every single requirement for eating its meat to be kosher. But we can’t find the spot on its neck to kill it in the manner required for the meat to be kosher, because the neck is too long.
Didn’t know that – and love it! Thanks!
Does Mary come from a denomination where converts are discouraged or something? Some kind of “Let’s hog all of gospel to ourselves” kind of denomination? It seems odd that someone could react with such strong opposition to a nonmember showing interest in their doctrine.
Mary’s just kinda sanctimonious.
Fair enough. Just strikes me as a bit off. Being raised Mormon a nonmember asking sincere questions about the gospel was always one of the most joyous occasions to be found. The kind of thing people got excited about. We spent a lot of time brainstorming ways to make it as convenient as we could for them to find out about us. For a while I remember we were carrying around these cards we could give people with a phone number they could call and have a series of videos explaining what we’re all about delivered to them free of charge. We had a listing of people who were available to drive you to the building on sunday ready for if any prospective member had an issue with transportation.
Here Mary is actively making this an unpleasant experience for Dorothy. Just surprises me. Even the sanctimonious ones I would expect to save that for other members. Pulling the “Holier than thou” bit on someone who doesn’t even gauge morality by the same doctrine seems at best counterproductive.
If Dorothy was being confrontational I’d get that, but this is a Grade A teaching opportunity pretty much just handed to Mary on a silver platter and she looks just about ready to call the bouncers to give Dorothy the bum’s rush. It’s practically an act of violence if we’re assuming Dorothy’s eternal soul is at risk. Like Scar dropping Mufasa off the cliff.
There is a subset of religious individuals out there who are PROFOUNDLY offended by the mere existence of someone who doesn’t agree with their beliefs. Typically, if you meet an atheist who is angry/militant/bitter/etc, it’s often because they grew up with one. Or more.
I would go on a little rant about the word “offended” but Stephan Fry has already done the best possible one.
Of course, Stephen Fry is not so much an atheist as a cynic who loves to offend! And because he is, he dislikes the idea that he can’t be as offensive as he likes without someone objecting.
If you say something that you know hurts sensitive people (not hypocrites) then you need to apologise – then debate.
Also Dorothy’s not showing interest; she’s being critical.
She has concerns. Obviously if she was already sold on everything the church taught then she’d already be a member. She hasn’t said anything accusatory. Her facial expressions throughout this range from nervous to uncomfortable, but certainly never angry, indignant, judgmental, etc.
If asking a question about the most rudimentary fundamental tenets of her faith is enough for Mary to feel she’s being criticized then she can’t be very proud to be a Christian at all.
It’s not even an odd question. “How do we know Joseph Smith didn’t just make all this up” is practically the first thing on the agenda that needs to be addressed before anyone can even start considering the gospel as potentially truthful. Without addressing that we’re just an overzealous fanclub for a piece of fiction. I guarantee you that getting in a huff over having your beliefs questioned is not the proper response to that question.
If she was uninterested she wouldn’t be asking questions or bringing forth concerns. Uninterested people don’t engage in thoughtful discussion at the end of the sermon. It doesn’t interest them. Of course it’s not like she’s considering converting right now, but if we only addressed the concerns and answered the questions of those who were already considering joining the church then nobody would ever consider it.
Not to offend, but there’s a lot that seems wrong here. Which is weird, because you’re being spectacularly nice.
1) Theists that don’t take instant and massive offense about atheists questioning their religion are thin on the ground. They’re certianly not the norm. If that means that most religions have weak faith, then fine, they have weak faith, but since that’s the norm it raises the question of what the standard is.
2) If you’re a mormon who allows themself to even consider the possibility that JS was full of it, then you’re in an exclusive group as well. I say this having spoken to a number of them, having been raised by them and surrounded by them.
3) Atheists can easily bring up critiques of theology without being interested – for the same reasons a democrat can critique republican policy without being interested – it’s because you thing they’re wrong. Why bother mentioning it then, you may ask? Because you want the errors highlighted and if possible defended, corrected, or abandoned.
4) Dorothy is probably hesitant and uncomfortable because she’s a nice person who wants to be friendly, who knows that what she’s saying is, in fact, offensive to most christians. It’s nigh-certain that it’s not because she’s unsure about her atheist position.
All that said, you seem to be a very nice person. But few theists I’ve conversed about religion with would meet the standards you seem to describe here.
No offense taken of course. I hope the feeling is mutual in that regard.
1) I didn’t say weak faith. I said not proud. It seems like she’s treating Christianity like a shameful secret that outsiders shouldn’t know about. I’m hearing a lot of the sentiment that this reaction is the norm, and I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m merely expressing my surprise since I thought that spreading the word was a large part of Christianity in general, not just mormonism.
2) I’m obviously not saying Mary should be open to the possibility of her church having lied to her. I’m saying she should be prepared answer the question of why that’s not the case. It’s a pretty standard question to ask. Just like how if I asked my professor how we know that ____ is correct he’d answer the question but that wouldn’t entail considering that the theory he was teaching is wrong.
3) Of course Dorothy thinks they’re wrong. Once again implied by the very fact that she’s not a member of their faith. And democrats obviously are interested in what the republicans are doing. It’s very relevant to them. They’re not interested in the marxist leninist policies and as such you’ll never hear them come up during a speech.
4) Never said she was unsure about her own beliefs. She’s not however in any way being vindictive, she’s not attacking them, she asked a question about their beliefs which Mary should’ve been prepared to answer. This isn’t an attack or an expression of hate.
Have to generally agree with you both – begbert, gangler. And I get the feeling that Dorothy is like a lot of people, less Atheist and more Don’t Care.
What you’re all forgetting is that the old testament (Masoretic texts) didn’t have any verses added to it later, the exact same passages have been verified verbatim from numerous ancient texts…there is no room for interpretation, additions, or omissions. Therefore, Dorothy’s current argument is factually invalid regardless of her beliefs or lack thereof.
That’s the problem I see with so many skeptics…they find something in the Bible that sounds contradictory or open to interpretation and run with it, believing every word *without verification*, then accuse believers for being naive for trusting every word in the Bible without factual representation.
Fanatical skeptics are just as bad as Bible thumpers, they’re just on opposite sides of the fence.
Dorothy’s argument is not that the Old Testament was changed. Dorothy’s argument is that everyone said Mary was a virgin, in order for the circumstances of Jesus’ birth to match the prophesy found in the Old Testament.
Also, what you said is totally not true.
I mean, unless you want to explain how Moses wrote the account of his own death. Deuteronomy chapter 34 describes the death of Moses, and says that “not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses…” This could not have been written by Moses or even by any author prior to the establishment of a nation called Israel.
Unless, wait. Were you meaning AFTER JC’s birth? That, I wouldn’t know about – never tried comparing the OT and the Torah. If so… nevermind.
Here’s an explanation. Deuteronomy was written by Moses until his death, then Joshua wrote about his death, which ends the book.
Oh sure, put her on the spot, why don’t you?
Is it just me, or is that Bible backwards? For the book to have its spine facing to the right like that, wouldn’t the title face away from the camera?
Or is this a specific thing that this one church does, have bibles titled like that? I went to a private religious university and was required to take biblical literature and the like, but maybe we didn’t roll that way.
DoA mary is also an otaku. she imported her bible from japan. she also has a hello kitty themed bible. it’s super kawaii.
Badzt Maru was hugged for your sins.
Aw c’mon Mary, scolding her for trying different things?
I only follow the gospel of Faz.
So I take it Mary is a bit more of the aggressive bible thumper type, huh? Was she like that in the original universe or is this a new personality trait for this series?
She wasn’t aggressively religious…but she was aggressively bongoy. And hypocritical. And believed that certain people (e.g Billie) weren’t good enough to be in a circle of friends with her, and actively went out of her way to be horrible to her.
I’d like it if Joyce’s next line was ‘darnit, Mary, don’t be a jerk, we want people to LIKE Jesus!’
Even more crazy religious people.
Y’all, y’all, come on, I think we’re missing the most important thing here:
…Mary has one of those awesome, like, Australian Bibles or something, where the English title is on the back cover.
The title on the other side is in Australian.
“HAULEY BWIBEL”
Nah. If it was Ozzie, it would by upside down.. So any real ones out there reading pain from us Northeners?
Good thing you have people like Randi to bat away all the difficult truths in the world for you. Can’t have any miracles happen outside the Bible for gods sake. People pray for that and all, but if it actually happened…
But they don’t, so point is moot.
Wha? From whence does this come?
And science loves it every time a miraculous event stands up to scrutiny. The miracle of lightning led us to electricity. The miracle of whatever-led-us-to radio led us to radio, which led us to television which lead us to reality telvision shows. The miracle of radiation led us to nifty bombs and carbon dating. Miracles rock the house.
What science has little tolerance for are garbagey fish stories and wishful thinking like the Loch Ness Monster and faith healing. That crap is what’s known as “wasting our precious time”.
It comes from a few posts back where someone challenged belief in psychic claptrap.
I still want those Powerball numbers.
Okay, I know we’re not supposed to talk about the other universe, but I officially hate Mary more than Malaya.
It’s fine you’re making a comparison of webcomic characters, not actively comparing universes, right?
But yeah, you’re totally right. Mary’s a bongo.
Well, Malaya’s a bongo too, but she’s more likely to commit general assholery. An equal-opportunity bongo, if you will. Mary’s specific brand of hate-spewing is shaping up to be more infuriating to me personally than anything Malaya has said.
I’m trying to figure out what this says about me. I’m both a nerd and bisexual (putting me into the “breeder” category), both of which Malaya has insulted. I’m also a Christian, which people like Mary use to justify their horrible behavior. Does this mean I’m more upset about people who make me look bad than people who hate me? Is it because my faith is more important than my interests and sexuality? Am I just psychoanylizing myself to avoid thinking about the big test I’ve got in half an hour?
I’ve read somewhere that people are more likely to get mad at someone who believes what they do- a Christian getting mad at another Christian, for example- than by someone directly opposing them. It’s a sort of psychological, “you’re making me look bad” sort of thing.
I suppose I should include a disclaimer that I can’t remember where I heard that and it could just be speculation, but it certainly makes sense.
I think I can answer this. Malaya is not, by and large, a hypocrite, she is just willfully ignorant, coarse, rude and antisocial. Mary is all these things, with a veneer of self-righteousness wrapped up in a big bag of self-congratulatory hypocrisy. Mary is much, much worse.
Hypocrisy is definitely a factor, as is the fact that Malaya knows how her behavior affects others, but doesn’t care, while Mary seems like the type to assume that everything she does is right and everyone else is wrong. As for my personal reasons to dislike people like her, it makes more sense to get mad at someone who makes people hate you than someone who just hates you. The Marys of the world do a lot more damage in the long run.
Besides, she’s about to shame Joyce for doing something harmless, and even kind of nice. I like Joyce.
You realize now that you’ve invoked her, she’s going to turn up at some point, right?
Well, yeah! David Willis does read all this stuff… Doesn’t he?
That would be me.
Dorothy is my favorite. First panel Dorothy today/last two panels yesterday have pushed her past all other contenders.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be saying Christians are opposed to evangelism – really? I mean, yes, a lot of denominations say, essentially, “if they don’t know the good news by now in this country, preaching is just going to screw up this world,” but to object per se to bringing an atheist to church?
And it’s a bit charitable to say “maybe,” isn’t it? Jesus’ birth is only in Matthew and Luke, the two gospels most removed from the man himself, and their narratives have little in common, much irreconcilable (two genealogies, ten years’ time difference, straight home after the bris yet fled Bethlehem to Egypt), and each contains patent absurdities in its own right (Matthew has the Massacre of the Innocents; Luke the “ancestral home” dealie). If there’s one thing in the Gospels that it can be said with confidence did not happen, it’s that – frankly, I’d put it ahead of even the supernatural claims, and I’m fairly sure there are Christians out there who hold it to be wholly or partially false.
Yes, there are.
I’d say Jesus’s birth is one of the things we can say is definitely true. Everyone on Earth is born at some point.
Well, there have been Christian sects (and non-Christian sects that believe in Jesus) that believe Jesus was not a physical being. There are also non-Christians who do not believe Jesus ever existed at all.
And non-christians who believe that though there was probably a historical Jesus, there is every reason to believe that the gospels tell such an exaggerated/mythologized account of him that there is literally nothing in them that we can be certain actually happened as written. Not even the parts where he cut down the cherry tree or threw the quarter across that river.
Well, if you want to deny Christianity, you HAVE to believe that! And no solid scholarship, archaeological evidence, letters, lawsuits or histories from the time will make a scrap of difference. You believe what you gotta, and find the evidence to prove you’re right. The majority think differently.
First, the two genealogies aren’t irreconcilable, especially when you look at the audiences aimed at. Another thing about the genealogies is that to the Jews at that time, if a husband died without offspring, his brother may have stepped in later and sired a son, but the son was credited to the dead brother. If you really look hard at the genealogies, you’ll find two brothers somewhere after David split off, and eventually merge back, not uncommon in a culture where marrying outside of your tribe of Israel was considered a big no-no.
Next up the bris & the flight to Egypt. The bris was to be done 8 days after birth, however, when the Magi got to Herod, his later order to kill all male infants 2 years shows that the Magi probably go against tradition of all those Christmas plays you see performed, and got there much later than the shepherds.
Neither of these makes sense. First, if the reason for the split is that “the son was credited to the dead brother” (as was indeed custom), why would the trees branch off? Shouldn’t that just last one generation? And where would Matthew (Matthew, since Solomon was younger than Nathan) get the “biological” genealogy a thousand years later? And why would he care to? And the genealogies don’t really “merge back” – the only names they have in common after David are the names of the last two kings of Israel, a few common names that come after those two in Matthew and before in Luke, and two names (the grandfathers) that might have been the same name corrupted. It seems unlikely Luke’s talking about the actual kings, since again, why would they have two different genealogies?
As for the second, of course the magi came months later – that’s the point. What were they doing in Bethlehem months later? According to Luke, they went to Jerusalem to circumcise Jesus, then back to Nazareth after the ceremony. There’s no mention of them returning to Bethlehem first, and no reason for them to go after.
Damn. Last two kings of Judah, right, not Israel.
Interesting about the Magi. There’s a lot of Medieval myth here, mixed in with the real story. There wasn’t even a stable, for sure – the script only mentions a manger and the rest was added by conjecture from Western lifestyle. In fact, the ‘inn’ of the story is a greek word for ‘guest place’. In the Empire, it was usually a large building with rooms for daily rent – our hotel. But in Palestine then, most except the smallest houses were stone or mud brick with a solid flat roof, and had a shack on the roof for privacy and for guests – same word. The poorer houses usually had one room with half at a level a yard or so lower for the animals. Mangers were put between for convenience. If you read the story again knowing that, it puts Joseph and Mary with the family (probably of relatives) because the guest room was already full of other cousins come for the census. So Jesus would be born among family – and a manger would be an obvious cradle. The story, then, makes the point that they were pretty poor – not king material!
There’s another twist to this, and about the Magi, on http://www.bethlehemstar.net – which is based on the latest astronomical observations. It’s fascinating!
More importantly, though, even if there’s not necessarily a contradiction, there’s the fact that although they each go into such detail, there’s next to nothing they *do* explicitly agree on – Jesus was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born in Bethlehem, his “father” was a descendant of David named Joseph, and that’s *it*. Since literally everything else associated with the birth of Jesus comes from one or the other, they definitely have the appearance of two stories written around a few common parameters, not two accounts of the same event that happened to exactly partition the details between them.
“I used to be an evangelical Christian like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.”
So .. yeah. As Christians it’s our job to try to spread the word of God to the non-Christians of the world. How do we do that? We ask the non-Christians of the world to go to church with us. Naturally.
There are some Christians who think the “unevenly yoked” line means to not spend time with non-Christians *at all*. That makes no sense to me, personally.
I just got to ask… why separate the last two panels?
It visually represents the timing of the gag.
It also looks really cool. It’s a neat way to show how far Joyce is standing away from Dorothy.
Ah, angry self righteous Mary. How we had missed her! Not.
Aaaaaand, Mary’s still a total bongo. Good to know.
And maybe still hypocritical.
Years and years ago (many years pre-Mrs. Animal) I dated a girl who was from a capital-C Christian family. She went to church twice a week, Wednesday night and Sunday morning.
I went once with her out of pure curiosity. This was a real hum-dinger – a jumping up and down, hootin’ and hollerin’, speaking in tongues, gospel-singing, dunk-ya-in-the-big-tank-behind-the-altar church. The preacher was a type I had seen before, the kind of fundamentalist shouter that held farm-country revivals in the area where I grew up. Those usually ended up with folks getting baptized in a stock trough or the creek.
Anyway. This girl went to church every Sunday morning, shouted and sang with the rest of ’em. She usually dropped by my apartment after she was done with that.
And she was always as horny as an alley cat when she showed up. TO put it bluntly, she was so full of ‘The Sperit’ that she had an unconquerable urge to fuck my brains out.
Take from that what you will. At the time (I was 18, after all, an age at which most men are pretty much a pair of testicles with legs) I just went with it.
How… Bacchanalian.
(Which also reminds me that “ecstasy” has several meanings, only one of which refers to the party drug.)
The Two-Backed Beast has a long history in religious rites. And hey – endorphins! Gotta love ’em.
Man, what a bongo.
Dorothy should slap her. And slap Joyce too for good measure. And simply not associate with fundies afterward.
The only reason I think Mary will be an effective, if unpleasant, character is as a foil to Joyce. Joyce is an overall decent person whose objectionable behavior stems from her naivete, and has the potential for serious character development as new experiences challenge her worldview. Mary is just a bad egg.
It just struck me that this in this particular comic Mary hasn’t done anything wrong.
She calls Dorothy’s Christianity into question when Dorothy suggests one of the core tenets of the faith was made up after the fact as a lie to popularize the church. That’s a pretty fair time to call someone’s Christianity into question.
And it’s not a failure of evangelism to ask why someone who specifically identifies herself as non-Christian has come to church.
The stuff she did last comic? bongoy. The stuff she’ll do next comic? Probably bongoy. The stuff she’s doing here? …Actually kind of fair.
It’s the expression on her face, mostly. If she looked less… outraged? Accusing? Scary? then her reaction would seem perfectly reasonable. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
Well, yeah! She thinks that Dorothy’s a Christian denying some of the key stuff she’s supposed to believe, so of course! Dorothy really screws her with the truth, though! I suppose that Joyce will be next to get stick.
In that first pannel Mary takes bible wielding to a whole new level. It appears as if she’s contemplating bludgeoning Dorothy with her own spare copy… that she probably carries with her at all times.
It’s like Linus’ security blanket.
Only better for whacking insects and/or impudent people.
Now I get this image of a minister whomping somebody with a bible, with this big “IMPUDENCE!” explosion-shaped speech bubble overhead.
That’s more or less what Paladins do in World of Warcraft, though it’s usually (but not always) done with hammers, not books.
The churches I attended everybody who was even making a token front at being properly religious packed their own scriptures. That much doesn’t seem odd to me (though people reacting as though it’s strange does).
Mary’s aggravation makes a lot more sense if she actually thought Dorothy was a Christian as well: it can get some of us a little feisty when other Christians start questioning things like the virgin birth.
Not saying it’s justified, just that she comes off as somewhat less irrational and simply hot-headed with that in mind.
I was just thinking the same thing actually. They were all going to church, so Mary assumes everyone is Christian. Dorothy then makes an insinuation that the Virgin Birth was “made up” which naturally shocks Mary. So then Mary asks her what denomination (is that the right word?) is, and Dorothy replies that she isn’t Christian. Mary is confused and asks why Dorothy is going to church at all.
So far the worst Mary has done is to be frustrated. No need to break out the torches and pitchforks yet.
That doesn’t mesh well with Mary wanting to exclude Dorothy from the “serious discussion” she wanted to have in the prior comic, though. Sierra was obviously flaky, but Dorothy had done nothing to exclude herself by that point, aside from being atheist.
Well, it may be true, for what we know. Basically in the First Council of Nicaea (google it) they choose what was to be part of the religion and what wasn’t. Features and dogmas of a religion can change with time. Until I think the Renaissance the Pope was considered infallible (Papal Infallibility), and that changed with the rise of the power of the Council.
The Catholic church officially believes in the existence of Satan, but I seriously doubt ANY sane individual actually does.
Besides, you can be Christian and not put up with all/some of the dogma bullshit. In truth, IMHO you should NOT put up with some/most of the dogmas.
No they didn’t: they RATIFIED it. This was what had already been agreed for many decades. The Emperor wanted the council to be held to make sure that he understood it all, and to make straight-line Christianity obvious to the rest of the empire.
By the way, and contrary to Dan Brown’s fiction, the Bishop of Rome didn’t attend personally like most of the bishops – but he sent two observors. This Council was an important one because the emperor had called it, so a lot of people there took notes. We have plenty of original records of exactly went on, so all this is plain truth.
BTW, the Infallibility bit: the Pope was declared Infallible only in official pronouncements – and it was only agreed in 1870 – 150 years ago! Though it was totally retrospective, so that the Apostle Peter became infallible, too.
The Council of Nicaea is kinda relevant to the storyline if only because that’s when it was decided that Jews are dumb at determining when to celibrate their own holidays and that from then on Christians would decide on when Passover is.
Hurm.
I feel like Mary is going to get more bongoy in the next comic.
On a sidenote. Is it me? Or is there something more to Sierra than Willis is letting on? Not anything bad but more like the feeling that she might do something badass at some point in the comic.
I was giving Mary a chance since this is different universe and she can be a totally cool character. Sadly, she is still an A-hole in this universe as well.
Mary’s A-hole nature and hypocrisy is a universal constant.
Her very existence and way of life relied on a holier then thou attitude.
Wow Mary, way to make a ton of actual Christians look really bad. Reminds me of when the Pharisees asked Jesus why He spent time with tax collectors and other sinner and Jesus responded “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” I think Mary needs to reread that part of the Bible.
I’m definitely not liking Mary in this universe. Not that I liked her in Roomies, but still, I dislike her more than I disliked her in that universe.
Mary, did you notice that your Bible has its title printed on the back of the book?
You misunderstand. She’s carrying around the manga version.
This makes perfect sense, especially from someone with a Walky icon.
I consider it canon.
Take note, fans. Mary is what Joyce could have been~!
All we need are some beer cans, a few chairs and a studio audience and we’ve got ourselves an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael.
interesting historical note, Caligula believed HE was the Messiah
and A LOT of people thought Sadam was the anti christ because he supposedly wore a “Blue Turban” (never mind the fact that he only ever wore a black beret
HEY my avatar changed?
Sheesh, Mary, you missed a teachable moment. Texts of Isaiah much older than the Common Era still exist, and you should be able to find that verse in them. So unless the fathers of the Church had access to a time machine, they couldn’t have written this in later ‘cos it was written earlier. But it seems you’d rather take offense than teach.
‘s what you get for letting Satan inspire anger and jealousy in your heart, I guess.
Dorothy didn’t say Isaiah was altered. She said maybe the details of Jesus’ life were altered to match Isaiah, which is distinctly possible since the details weren’t written down until decades after Jesus died.
There are severall problem with equivicating Isaiah’s prophecy in chapter 7 with juesus’s emaculate birth. First is that Isaiah use the word “עלמה” wich mean young woman, and not neseserly a virgin. more over is that the prophecy itself talk about how the child wil suffer under the rign of the king of assyria, an empire that lost it’s hold over judia centuries before jessus was born.
The purpose of the prophecy was to warn king ahaz not to ally himself with the king of assyria, because assyria will betray israel after their common enemy will be defeated.
The one absolute rule to social relations:
[If you want to stay friends] never talk about RELIGION or POLITICS
So…she’s implying the Jews are stupid?
…is it common to bring your own Bible to church? Mary’s had that book – or _a_ book, anyway – on her since this mini-arc started. (At first I thought she didn’t have one when she entered the church, and left it with a new-ish Bible… but that’s too unsubtle.)
Why can’t I comment on the comic before this one?