Have you people not learned from the lessons of Goatse, Lemonparty and Tubgirl? Safesearch stays on unless you’re actually looking for porn. And it’s always wise to check Wikipedia or KnowYourMeme before google if the result has the potential to cause psychological harm.
Also, You Do Not Follow Links To TVTropes.
All the same, CoC was funny for about the first 10 minutes, then it descended into a pit of boredom, lame jokes, and taking the core premise waaaaaaaaaaaay too far. :p
“Your Bing SafeSearch setting filters out results that might return adult content”. Of course I’m too computer illiterate to figure out how to change that. Curses.
im not a big church goer and i’d probably worship any god for a klondike bar, but if i was there id punch Walky in the shoulder for such a pointlessly rude and mean comment
And people who worship invisible sky wizards in public should pretty much expect what they…don’t get because they’re at or near a majority. Every other absurd belief is fair game; why not theirs?
i just dont see the point of walky ripping on joyce’s beliefs for
no reason. just because he thinks it is absurd, what actual point
is there in making fun of a single person’s beliefs? he’s not going to
change her mind and even seems to have embarrassed dorothy
its just not very pragmatic.
My comments get structured weirdly on occasion because the rightmost inch or two of my response boxes to any reply seem to be disappearing under a background-colored panel, to my perpetual annoyance. (The deeper the reply, the less I see, unless I stick in temporary carriage returns to bring the line ends into view. And then forget to remove the carriage returns, dammit.
I think Dorothy’s embarrassment lasted about eight seconds tops, thanks to Joyce own more rude and pointless attack on somebody else’s life choices.
But whichever. I personally am often torn – the world would be a better place if more people treated invisible sky wizards as the caustic bullshit they are, but unless a society has reached the saturation point of philosophical maturity to be able to push the crazies* back to the margins, all you get are helpless scattered individuals railing pointlessly against an implacable dominating madness. Which leads a person to throw up their hands and dink into despair for the world.
Still though, one feels they should be doing their part to make their own positions known.
* Look at Joyce and tell me she’s not been made crazy by her religion.
i kinda just think joyce is crazy. i kinda wonder if she wouldnt be similar if she was raised in a different religion but with similar life experiences. there are better ways to let logic and truth into the world other than being rude and pointlessly agressive. i have trouble seeing how lashing out with snark and sarcasm to teach people that you think they’re wrong accomplishes anything. religion can be a good thing to those who want and need it. its too bad that those same people think everybody needs it the same way they do and come on so strongly with it, but you know the same can be said for any ideology and/or philosophy, you just need to be secure enough in your position to not let it bother you or else you turn into somebody like joyce who cant understand how the world functions without adhering to her guidelines
I’m pretty sure based on prior continuities (shame on me for mentioning them! To the corner!) that Joyce’s mental destabilization is pretty much entirely the result of the religious indoctrination she’s been marinating in since birth, since we’ve seen another Joyce go from this unstable to very stable with the addition of proper socialization. Keep in mind she has been subjected to a particularly strong and relatively undiluted dose of it.
Personally I mostly agree that there is nothing that the rational man can do in the face of a culture-wide epidemic of a religion. On the other hand, the first step to breaking a maladjusted cultural mindset is to expose the youth to the fact that it’s mad and wrong, after with it saturates up via exposure and/or the old people getting old. It’s mostly worked for racism, it’s made good progress for sexism, and the gays are trying their hand at it now. The back of socially constrictive religion has been broken in other countries; it’s high time the process got off the ground here.
okay, wait, are you saying that getting in somebody’s face about religion is wrong? or that religion itself is wrong because if that’s what you’re trying to say then i just dont think we’ll come to an understanding. my whole point was just that walky was kind of hostile right at the get go of a conversation and thats no way to bridge any kind of gap. those two could easily be friends if they would jst look past what they think they know about each other. i think the same could be said for a lot of things
-Religion itself is wrong. How wrong varies somewhat by the religion, and which way you’re interpreting the word ‘wrong’ (Joyce’s religion qualifies under several meanings).
-Generally speaking, most indoctrinated people are no more convinceable of the above fact than the racists were convinced of their errors. People don’t like to admit/accept that they’ve spent years being wrong about anything, particularly things that are nice-sounding to them, not restricted to religion.
-Religion makes Joyce a fair-weather friend. As long as you stay within her lines she’s fine; step out of them and she becomes no longer adorable. And/or starts punching you in the face. I’ve got religious friends (in part because it’s that or nothing around here), and you’d be surprised how often you have to tiptoe around subjects or just clam up and let them shout you down, when one of their many buttons gets pushed. It’s a pain in the ass. Walky has other options; he doesn’t have to put up with that. Plus she’s been a jerk to him anyway.
Oh, and I managed to forget the topic sentence of my second point there: And because of this unconvinceability, trying to persuade the religious of anything is usually a complete waste of time. But not wrong.
It can also be cathartic sometimes, not that that necessarily helps.
I totally agree with you. I have always thought that people who think religion is useless and just lies are being just like most religious people. They too think that NOT believing in God is irrational. I do see a problem when religious people try to stick their beliefs through other people throats but blaming ALL of them is just as bad. I’m gay and I still believe in God. If someone tries to use God against me I just think “Ok, maybe you are right, but you CAN’T know and neither can I so, why fight over it?”. I think a lot of atheists should do the same because they are becoming exactly like what they hate when they criticize religious people so harshly.
all religion…is wrong? how do you know…i mean for sure? like 100% irrefutable? that’s the kind of immovable thinking that makes people afraid to tell their friends their beliefs. there are communities out there that have the opposite problem as you, where anybody who has some kind of faith in a religion has to keep it secret to avoid losing their friends. THAT is wrong and so is how the religious people make you keep your athiesm in the closet. the world would be so much better if we all just acknowledged how little we actually know about the universe. we’re learning more every day and we might have found the higgs boson, but we just dont have all of the evidence to make such a bold claim as “Religion is wrong” because we have not conclusively proven it to be wrong. Faith in something greater isnt inherently a bad thing but people use it for bad things the same way science was used in a bad way by people to make atomic bombs.
Of course disbelieving in all gods is rational, in the same way that disbelieving in unicorns and dragons is rational. There’s no evidence for any god, thus skeptical disbelief is the rational default. Show me a unicorn, and persuade me that it’s not a fake, and I’ll believe in it. The same goes for any god.
(Though a lot of gods are more like believing that a dragon built my house, and is presently sleeping in my living room. Extreme scepticism and outright flat disbelief is rational and justified.)
To equate atheism with theistic faith is a common error, which generally smells like an attempt to bring rational disbelief down to faith’s level.
If it weren’t wrong, it wouldn’t be called religion. If it’s ever shown there’s a being who inspired the Biblical LORD, who sent down a son as a human, and was responsible for the creation of our universe… it won’t be religion anymore.
It’s proven not to be true that a human-like entity is the uncaused cause with massive fine control over the universe to the extent anything can be proven not to be true. It simply does not fit with anything we know about the universe and the order in it, nor with the nature of intelligence. It can’t be conclusively proven not to be true that all the laws of motion as we understand them are just a statistical anomaly, and will revert to an Aristotlinean concept at any moment – but it’s still wrong.
All religion is wrong in the sense that it’s granting a theory belief in excess of what is merited by available evidence. Typically, substantially more belief than is merited -and often people know it. The word ‘faith’ exists to give the illusion of justification to this sort of credulity.
Most religions are wrong in the sense that they outright contradict available facts. Lots come with creation stories. Some talk about floods. Some talk about pharaohs drowning in a parted sea. Some talk about days turning to night across the land. Religions that make these claims are as likely to be correct as a person who tells you that they were born on the sun and are made out of fire: 0%.
Some religions are wrong in the sense that they push morally suspicious worldviews and cultural behavior on their adherents and those around them. Misogyny is a common one here, but racism and anti-gay sentiments have been seen as well, and also poor approaches to speech, sex, and contraception. Hatred and war have been the product of some religious expression. This sort of ‘wrong’ is not universal to all religions, but where it appears it is particularly wrong.
okay but you have to keep in mind that a lot of those are just stories to be thought about. there are a lot of christians who take the bible word for word but there are a lot that dont and that can be said for almost any religion. religion isnt meant to be the answer to how but the answer to why. there are some people who take genuine comfort and inspiration from religion and it has lead to some really good things. you have to realize that the bible was written a long time ago long before the scientific method was established so a lot of the science was wrong. as for the anti-gay stuff etc. that is also a product of the times. homosexuality was looked down upon becauseit wasnt helpful to the “be fruitful and multiply strategy” like i said religion is coopted by people a lot and can be harmful but there are people in this world whose lives would feel genuinely empty without it and i dont see how those people feeling empty would make you or i feel any better about anything. cant some people just be allowed to have their beliefs? cant they be happy and contribute to society even if they’re wrong?
I’m not sure how you imagine I’d stop them from having their comforting little lies. I mean, my stated plan for assimilating them is to raise a generation of rational individuals who willingly discard the foolishness. They’re not going to feel empty for the lack of it.
As best I can tell, if you take out all the stories and bad science and poor societal interpretation and co-opted stuff from religion, as you seem to be suggesting, I personally don’t think there’d be anything left. Certainly there’s nothing we can’t live without or get from some other source – morality from empathy is better and more reliable than religion-based ‘morality’ every time, for example.
As for them contributing to society, some of contributions are things like Proposition 8. Religion is poor soil to grow people in, and some of its fruits are rotten.
Oh wow! Look, you guys it’s a smugtheist!
They totally understand the societal and historical aspects of all religions ever and are in no way making broad generalizations of things they don’t actually know jackshit about. Look how smart and mature they are!
I don’t need to test every number greater than ten to say that they’re all greater than seven. Religion is wrong by its very nature as religion, and to convince yourself that what’s patently wrong is foundational to your concept of truth is unhealthy regardless of the specifics.
“Societal and historical aspects” may _explain_, but they don’t _justify_ any more than the societal and historical aspects of (for example) racism or sexism do. I notice that you don’t have an actual argument.
Oh, look, it’s sarcasmodouche, resorting to ridicule because he’s incapable of adressing the issue in any meaningful way. You sure showed those smugtheists!
You lump all religious people into a single stereotype. I believe your reason is because you saw some extreme religious nuts forcing their believe upon you.
But you need to remember that now you act just like them. Now you’re being caustic toward all religions and their followers just like when extreme religious folks insult atheists.
There are great and nice people everywhere, religious or not. Do you really want to judge them from what they believe? I believe a true wo/man will judge others from their personality.
You have become what you hate the most. I hope you’re happy.
“Moderate theists” are deluded. Not only have they convinced themselves that black is white, they’ve convinced themselves that black is not black. They conform better to modern values in the most visible ways, but more insidiously carve into their own faculties of reason. Fundies at least believe what they believe as one believes what one believes; in this way moderates are mad, and this madness is harmful.
That is the problem with religion. You see a deeper problem, which many unjustly blame on religion, and take this as “the bad” of religion, and continue to take the cold comfort of delusion. But that’s a human flaw, for which religion is just an excuse and/or scapegoat, and now it’s become a smokescreen for it, a quibble that the religious can project onto whoever does not entertain their imaginary friends.
So no, no atheist will ever be “just like them,” because that’s never been the problem with religion. Religion deserves all the mockery it can get. If that posited by religion were evidently true, then anyone who shunned it would deserve all the mockery they got. Anyone who has compartmentalized their religion by redefining truth that their beliefs can be cosmically true while manifestly false is a fool twice over, and any such person who then slanders their brethren for seeing at least this clear truth is a fool once more.
Reread. I have not lumped all theists into a single stereotype. I haven’t even lumped all religions into a single stereotype! (See that All/Most/Some post there? Yeah.)
I attack the sin, not the sinner, excepting those who specifically act on their religion in Proposition 8 ways. And you know the sick part? Perfectly nice people get turned to the proposition 8 route by religion. It’s sickening.
Until I start trying to oppress my fellow men I haven’t fallen to the dark side that way; until I start believing things that are false or massively unsubstantiated, I’m not wrong the other two ways. This is another false equivalence.
@begbert2: Do you realize that your mindset is pretty similar to an intolerant fundamentalist Christian? You are convinced that people to be “corrected” in their way of thinking, just because you think they’re wrong (and make no mistake, no matter how certain you are, no matter how little evidence there is for religion and how much there is for science, unless you have gazed into the inner workings of the universe and seen for yourself the absence of God, it will always be “think,” not “know.”) You say that belief in God is a harmful thing. How? And before you say “homophobia/misogyny/intolerance of other religions, etc., be aware that just as morality is not exclusive to religion, neither is immorality. I have met secular examples of most everything people take shots at religion for. There are good people and bad, and that’s it. Good people will be good with or without religion, and bad people will be bad with or without it. So, then, why is a belief in God so harmful?
I have gazed into the inner workings of well-known history and thus know that the christian god, and every other god with a wacky creation myth and miracles that are historically recorded not to have occurred, is a pile of myths and horseshit.
I have gazed at all the other gods, the deist and pantheist and philosopher’s gods, and known that they are powerless and irrelevent. they are gods that don’t do anything! And I gazed a little longer and saw that they’re mostly mentioned by goalpost-moving christians who want to try to bait and switch out the irrelevent gods for their impossible god.
And religion is not the source of all evil, but it enables it, promotes it, and sustains it where it would not otherwise persist. Arguing that it’s harmless because there are other ways to also be bad is like saying that because there are other ways to die, the bubonic plague is harmless.
Saying that things which are absent of any good evidence for their existence should be treated as though they don’t exist is nothing like being an “intolerant fundamentalist Christian”. It’s just basic logic to not agree with any claims which are either not (yet) supported by the facts or, worse yet, are actually in disagreement with the facts.
You don’t have to “know” that all gods don’t exist to reasonably assume that they don’t, the same way that you don’t need to know that winged flying horses don’t actually exist in order to deny the likelihood of their existence. This isn’t religious dogma based on appeals to authority, this is basic logic.
Believing in untrue things and denying basic logic is harmful. It allows people to do things no completely rational person would to. As the saying goes, “Good people do good things and evil people do evil things, but for a good person to do evil, you need religion.” Religion allows, or even requires, you to do illogical things, mostly relying on the logical fallacy of appeal to authority.
In other words, an “intolerant fundamentalist Christian” would say that you’re wrong for illogical reasons. Saying that someone is wrong because they’re being illogical and that being illogical is a bad idea is hardly even the same thing.
The part that bugs me the most about conversations like these, she said wryly, is the way “religion” is used as a synonym for “Christian”. And usually “American fundamentalist Christian,” at that.
A lot of the problems people have with quote-unquote “religion” are specific to Christianity, and especially fundamentalist Christianity (and American fundamentalist Christianity, at that). I’m a very religious person myself, but I’m also a Heathen, who is profoundly scientific. If a belief is contradicted by scientific evidence then it is obviously the belief that is wrong. The beliefs that are contradicted by science were my ancestors’ way of explaining the world as they perceived it several millennia ago; how could they possibly know anything about genes, for example? Or evolution? Or the Big Bang theory?
So I teach my kids, for example, that our ancestors believed that thunder was the sound of Thor chasing after giants in his chariots (which helps them not be afraid of what is after all just a loud noise), but I also tell them that nowadays we know that it’s a sound that is formed in this way blah blah and that gods and goat-pulled chariots are not actually involved.
But I don’t have any problem with also saying that, for example, most of us Heathens end up somewhere in Asgard, Hel, or Niflhelm when we die, because I don’t have any conflicting scientific evidence and from my own personal experiences it’s as valid as any other view.
However, a key thing about being Heathen is that we don’t have a concept of sin, and our “evil”, such as it is, is mainly “that which harms”. If it’s harmful, it’s bad; if it’s beneficial, it’s good.
So we don’t have this thing about saying, for example, that being gay is somehow wrong, because how can it be? No one is being harmed by it so who cares? Whereas murdering babies is inherently wrong, and not just because some invisible sky guy says so; it’s inherently wrong because someone is getting harmed.
The thing that bugs me most about Christianity in particular, though (as opposed to “religion” in general; people can believe whatever whacky things they like in private, I don’t care) is the part where instead of saying “this thing is against my religion so I’m not allowed to do it,” they say “this thing is against my religion therefore YOU’RE not allowed to do it,” and go and try to make laws based on their own highly restricted points of view.
I suspect that if they had Jews protesting the sale of pork in grocery stores, trying to get hot dog stands at ball games shut down because pork=evil or what, or Muslims trying to shut down the horrible, immoral local beer store, they’d get pretty damned indignant about people from these other religions trying to force their views onto people who aren’t followers of it. But I think that that is the basic, fundamental flaw in Christianity: it doesn’t say “this is the right path for us,” it says “this is the ONLY path for EVERYBODY,” and refuses to even acknowledge the existence of other points of view or gods (even in theory– hell, if one god is real then you pretty much have to accept that they all are, right? Even the Ten Commandants say “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” which right there is saying that there are other gods in that world view, and heck, you’r even allowed to follow them too, so long as you remain principally Christian).
So they end up (some of them, anyways; speaking generally as a group here) being able to justify imposing their world view on everyone around them, because, darn it all, they’re right. And they’re right because they say so. And from a Heathen point of view that is wrong, because it harms people.
TL;DR: Don’t confuse “religion” with “Christian;” a lot of the problems with “religion” that get brought up are specific to Christianity (and fundamentalist Christianity at that; I’m looking at you, Westborough Church, you dinks) and just aren’t applicable to Heathens, or American Indian aboriginal traditions, or pretty much most other pagan religions, and by using “religion” as a synonym for “fundamentalist Christian” people like me who are “religious” but aren’t Christian are sort of forced into a weird position of pretty much entirely agreeing with the atheist point of view while still technically belonging to the “religious” camp, but under a banner that doesn’t apply. Like, at all.
There is no reason to think there are any gods at all, and for there to be one would require us to reexamine every facet of at least life on Earth to find how they came into it. An afterlife is profoundly unlikely – we accept that our consciousness can change, on a fundamental level, through our lives, so why can’t it come to nonexistence? The person you were ten years ago is dead, and so will you be in ten years, even if you’re still alive. In a hundred years, the only difference will be that there will be no one else directly filling your shoes. For there to be gods and an afterlife, everything we are learning about these things must be wrong – not as wrong as they would have to be for a literal interpretation of the Bible to be true, but wrong just the same. This is inherent to religion, all religion, by definition.
Even when you say Thor doesn’t cause lightning – why? If you’re going to believe that it’s possible for such a race of beings to exist, why not hold that they cause lightning, even though we now know what it appears to be? More importantly, if you’re going to believe that they coincide at all with the legends of the ancients, known only through second-hand sources, why only believe the ones modern society doesn’t designate as “silly,” arbitrarily through popular scientific understanding? It’s the same problem.
I thought I did a pretty good job of delineating out the different kinds of ‘wrong’ that religions labor under. By your description you only fall under the first definition; the most innocuous and (usually) least harmful. (Not that it takes type 2 wrongness to achieve
type 3 wrongness; your Thor could still be telling you to be a bigot. But it doesn’t seem so.)
The thing I find odd about ‘your type’ is that you treat a worldview like it comes in disassembleable chunks. Thor (like the Abrahamic God) was largely defined by his actions and roles; by the thunder and lightning he wields. If you take that away, on what basis do you call what remains ‘Thor’? If you’ve knowningly cherry-picked the facts you like, how do you convince yourself that you haven’t just made up something that sounds nice and familiar? Wouldn’t it be obvious that you’re just rolling your own fiction?
@Raen: I agree, but, see, the main point I was trying to make is simply that I’m not going around and saying that science is wrong because my religion says it’s Thor and not giant static electrical charges. Heathens don’t go around trying to get the Ginnugagap theory of creation taught as a valid scientific alternative in school, and I wouldn’t dream of insisting that society’s laws be constructed in such a way that my religion’s morals are held paramount over anyone else’s. Frankly, I don’t think religious views should come into play at all in law-making, but there you go.
So, yeah, I can completely agree with you that there’s no scientific evidence for any god whatsoever (certainly nothing that can be reproduced in a lab); but the problem is that the types of experiences that convince people that they have experienced some kind of supernatural phenomena (be it some experience of a god, or psychic phenomena, or a ghost, or whatever) is virtually impossible to measure with today’s technology, but also tend to be very convincing to the person experiencing them. So you end up with this “I’m right because I know I’m right” attitude that of course flies in the face of anything that can actually be proven.
If someone wants to believe that the world will end in December I will side-eye them considerably, but I’m not going to get my panties in a knot about it since I’m pretty sure I’ll be proved right in a few months anyways, but I will question their ability to interpret data if they pull in anything about Mayan prophecies. But hey, believe whatever you want at home so long as you wash your hands when you’re done, you know what I mean? 😉 My problem with “religion” comes in when people use it as an argument to try and refute proven science (which I firmly believe is just idiotic– dude, it’s called “proof” for a reason), and I get very upset when they try to do things like insist on prayer in schools (because I’m sure they’d be just as upset if I was insisting that every school day opened with a blot to Odin, not to mention school shouldn’t have anything to do with religion at all unless world mythologies are being studied– and at that point they should all be treated as stories equally). Don’t even get me started on Intelligent Design.
I just don’t like the way “religion” as a denegrative term is used as a synonym for “fundamentalist Christian” because while, okay, invisible sky fathers aside, I just don’t like being lumped in with these idiots who use a two-thousand-year-old collection of anecdotes written over hundreds of years by a bunch of desert nomads as an excuse to turn their brains off and (too often) to also try and force the rest of us to follow along. 🙂
@begbert2: I have no problem with you not believing in God, and believing that religious people are factually incorrect. It is a belief I happen to share. What I take issue with is your hateful attitude toward a belief system simply because you don’t agree with it. You have another comment on here criticizing Joyce for getting in Dorothy’s face because Dorothy has different beliefs than she does. Please take your own advice. It’s not any better when you do it. That’s what makes you sound like a religious bigot. That and statements like “the bakc of socially constrictive religion has been broken in other countries, it’s high time the process got off the ground here” Your stated desire to raise a “generation of individuals who will willingly discard this foolishness. which you very frighteningly define as “assimilation.”
Your analogy about the bubonic plague is flawed, because the bubonic plague hasn’t ever done a whole lot of good, but religion has. A better analogy would be comparing it to fire. Or a knife. The have the potential to cause harm when used badly, yes. But they can also do a lot of good. So we should keep them around. Just like religion.
@HiEv: See my comment to begbert2 above. I have not problem with him or you believing that religion is factually wrong, or even that it’s illogical. I am myself an atheist. What bothers me is the hate directed at it, this desire to rid the world of it.
Religion may have certain aspects that run counter to logic, but if someone wants to believe that an invisible man lives in the sky, ho’s it really hurting? Yes, it can (and has) cause people to do terrible things when taken to extremes, but the key word there is extremes. These acts are committed by lunatics and hatemongers. Your average, mosty good, run-of-the mill theist is not going to go out and murder someone because he thinks God told him to. People corrupt religion, not the other way around.
I do not believe that religion has done a whole lot of good. I believe that religion has always been a net loss on the goodness scale, because every person it scares into doing good could have been taught actual morals instead and likely be better. That is, of course, assuming that anyone has actually been scared into doing good, as opposed to acting on empathy they learned elsewhere. There’s ample evidence that theists who are inclined to do evil will do so regardless.
One could make a very long and complex argument disputing
the theory that religion has been a net boon to humanity. But I’ve said enough about that. It is well known that nobody can convince anyone of anything on the internet; they can only present their opinion.
As for the tone of my speech, what are my options? Pretend religion isn’t bullshit? That’s called lying. Refrain from stating my opinion that the gradual decline of religion is a good thing? Why should I? Avoid using hyperbole on occasion to deliver my point? What’s the fun in that? Be respectful of the sky fairy? Why do religiophiles require coddling?
Bah. I see evil, I call it evil. You do what you like.
@begbert2: we need more of you. Unfortunately, religion has been around for so long that too many pieces of what we consider a great society have been ingrained into our pop-culture belief of what it is, from the art to the youth role models and soup kitchens. We need not even talk about the actually-addictive part of it. Many people can’t even imagine that one can live a fulfilling, moral, peaceful, purposeful, and accomplished life in a welcoming, helpful community without religion, much less belief. Even intelligent nonbelievers have memorized religious doctrine, wooed members of the opposite sex with it, and created happily-indoctrinated, crazy families, some of which even do well for society with volunteer-work and donations. Mass belief transforms what is ultimately a bizarre idea into commonly-accepted fact, but society just integrates it and keeps on going. While this has a thousand drawbacks, it’s too associated with what people already do. As long as science continues to progress ever more rapidly, and more people gradually see other ways of looking at things, I’ll be happy, but I’m not entirely sure what you wish is possible, as laudable as it may be. Anyway, I like Joyce 🙂
Just because you think a person’s belief is incorrect or weird does not make them crazy, or that they’ve been indoctrinated into some sort of cult. There’s a big difference between mainline Christianity and Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, or Warren Jeffs.
This level of scorn for people simply for believing in God is incredily intolerant. Just let people believe what they believe.
We’re allowed to be scornful of adults who (genuinely) believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and those beliefs are totally harmless. What makes religion different? It’s not more plausible.
Typical, your world view is that someone is either black or white. Not even any grey in there. You always call in the absolute. See someone religion? SCORNSCORNSCORN.
Even when that one guy doing nothing that offend or harm you. Yes, maybe Joyce or some religious extremists make you angry or offended. But you decided that normal nice religious people are also easy targets.
I can imagine you meet someone new and before you know him well but when you see a cross/David Star/Moon and the Star/Buddhist Swastika/other religious symbols hanging on their neck then it’s SCORN TIME!
Yes, that’s what I just said. We don’t wait for the followers of Santa Claus to start sacrificing bad children in coal fires before we start scorning them; we scorn their belief because the belief itself is silly. If a person says that 1+1=5, we don’t have to wait for them to kill someone before scoffing and pointing out their error.
How is religion different? Other than the proponents being more angrily defensive of their hogwash, I mean.
Who said we’re allowed to be scornful of adults who (genuinely) belive in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? If either of those beliefs actually benefit a person, then sign me up.
inb4 religion doesn’t benefit a person – uh, yes it does. Belief, whether it is belief in a Deity or belief there is no deity, has shown to improve lives.
Um, we are scornful of adults who believe silly, false things. We certainly don’t have to stay silent about their falsehood, and saying that santa claus isn’t real would get nowhere near the backdraft that I’m getting here.
Of course, we’re generally not all that critical ofsanta claus believers either, but that’s probably because the santa belief system, is, in fact, harmless. Though silly.
inFter spurious claim that religion is beneficial. I don’t buy it. No credible source I know of (as in, not pushed by a religiophile) has demonstrated that faith is beneficial as compared to the various kinds of widespread harm done in its name.
narmenduke & AckAckAck – “Nice” Christians aren’t really Christians. I know that sounds cruel, but hear me out: in order to be tolerant of women’s rights and children’s rights and homosexuality and in order to be intolerant of slavery, Christians have to flat out ignore large portions of the Bible (both new and old testaments). In other words, they are cherry picking. And if you are already ignoring portions of the Bible in order to adopt a more pro-social sense of morality, why defer to it at all? Particularly in regards to which behaviors you consider to be sinful or wrong? At that point, aren’t you just using a book that you largely disbelieve in order to justify your own small mindedness and intolerance?
Give The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation (both by Sam Harris) a read when you have the time. You won’t regret it.
Nah. Every time Joyce has seen Walky lately, she’s been rude, mean-spirited, insulting–all those things they tell you NOT to be if you want to be a good Christian. Walky was just getting her back.
@Begbet: okay but you have to keep in mind that a lot of those are just stories to be thought about. there are a lot of christians who take the bible word for word but there are a lot that dont and that can be said for almost any religion. religion isnt meant to be the answer to how but the answer to why. there are some people who take genuine comfort and inspiration from religion and it has lead to some really good things. you have to realize that the bible was written a long time ago long before the scientific method was established so a lot of the science was wrong. as for the anti-gay stuff etc. that is also a product of the times. homosexuality was looked down upon becauseit wasnt helpful to the “be fruitful and multiply strategy” like i said religion is coopted by people a lot and can be harmful but there are people in this world whose lives would feel genuinely empty without it and i dont see how those people feeling empty would make you or i feel any better about anything. cant some people just be allowed to have their beliefs? cant they be happy and contribute to society even if they’re wrong?
Alternatively, let’s say that powerful, long-lived beings came to Earth, and these beings had once been revered as gods, and gods among those still worshipped in China or India. Some of their worshippers recognize them and flock to them, now disciples rather than deluded. I would be hard-pressed to consider this religion.
“I mean, my stated plan for assimilating them is to raise a generation of rational individuals who willingly discard the foolishness. They’re not going to feel empty for the lack of it.”
So basically ‘we’ll stop assimilating them to believe in a god by assimilating them to not believe in god’… seems legit.
I don’t normally comment on these things, but this is probably one of the most ridiculous arguments I’ve ever seen. Begbert, I don’t know where you live, but if religion was inherently wrong 100% no question, and should be herded into some anti-church where they’re taught religion is wrong, why would people in the United States be given the legal right to freedom of religion? How is your idea of pushing your athiest beliefs onto others any different from what you’re trying to prevent from religious people? How is the fact that no doubt some people would have to tiptoe around certain beliefs and ideas and things when they talk to people like you any different from your situation with your religious friends? I’m an athiest, yes. But I’m open to people with different beliefs, and hell, one of my best friends is a devout Catholic. Do we always see eye to eye? No, but we don’t attack each other. If your friends are attacking /you/ about your beliefs, then they’re simply not friends and you should get better ones, and allow them to be in the religious clique they’re apparently looking for. I hate to burst your bubble, but the only way to describe someone as pushy, insensitive, and unfaltering as you about the subject is religiously anti-religious, so there you have it: you have a religion, too.
I think you’re misinterpreting, “my stated plan for assimilating them is to raise a generation of rational individuals who willingly discard the foolishness.” I don’t think begbert2 meant we should herd theists “into some anti-church where they’re taught religion is wrong”. I think (s)he just meant that we should have critical thinking and science classes in all schools that teach children to think logically. This is not “pushing atheism”, this is teaching rationality.
Hopefully that teaching will sink in and they’ll reject illogical beliefs.
What bizarre train of thought causes you to equate “pushy, insensitive, and unfaltering” with “religious”? Heck, even I don’t think all religious people are rude; I think they’re just all wrong. (In various ways, as described above.) I mean, it’s fun and somewhat justified to use the word as a pejorative, but it still does have a meaning.
And I don’t really dispute the possibility that my friends who must be tiptoed around to avoid offending their religious sensibilities aren’t true friends, but that would just mean that their religion crippled their ability to be friends with people who disagree with them. That’s sick.
And the extent of my “pushing my atheist beliefs” is me talking about them. That’s what gets people so het up. Oddly, freedom of speech is *also* a right…but I guess I’m not supposed to exercise it, eh? Well, I’m sure we’ll get an amendment soon curtailing it anyway.
It’s pretty disturbing to hear “voicing atheist and rationalist views” being equated with the theists being “herded into some anti-church where they’re taught religion is wrong” – and to hear this sentiment from an atheist, no less. I’m being demonized by my own kind!
Intellectual freedom and the free exchange of information often causes people to become disillusioned with religion. It happened during the Age of Enlightenment, wherein philosophers dreamed up all kinds of godless theories. The most popular was Deism, which is the belief that there is, in fact, a God– but he has nothing to do with us. So it’s still technically a godless theory. According to Deism He made the world and then left. No doubt a supreme being with unlimited power had better things to do than hunch over our planet and watch us like bugs in a jar, say Deists.
Anyway… point is: More information = Less God. At least as far as the average person is concerned. Someone can be highly intelligent and still be deeply invested in religion. Happens all the time. They justify their beliefs though. They sat, and thought, and searched their souls, and came to a definite conclusion about what exactly they believed. Which doesn’t always match up with the tenets of their given religion. Most people don’t do that. They just don’t care enough… or aren’t smart enough. Their parents pass religion down to them and they accept it without question because children believe whatever their parents tell them. The laziness of the average person is a factor that most people don’t consider. In the Age of Enlightenment it essentially became ‘cool’ to be an intellectual. Everyone wanted to be smart. Naturally there was a decline in this trend, but the internet has a similar effect. No, it doesn’t necessarily make people any smarter. Obviously. That’d be crazy. What it does is expose even the laziest person to new ideas. It combines a limitless source of useful, factual information with the biggest wastes of time human beings can possibly engineer. Consequently, lazy/dumb people become a little more cultured. Often without realizing it. Of course, the internet also exposes us to the very worst humanity has to offer. Horrible, horrible things that can never be unseen. Usually involving obscure forms of porn. I like to pretend they don’t exist and that I never learned about them. It’s fun to pretend. I need a drink.
Hear hear. Here a glass of virtual drink. A toast.
It seems like a lot of people prefer to lump stuff together and think it’s a smart thing to do. We need to value people not under various stereotypes/cliches but based on each individuals. Mob mentality are too easy to predict but how about individual mentality?
Some people think that internet elevate us to a completely new era and new perspective. I called it an illusion of grandeur. Internet only elevate what exist in the society and cultures for centuries and connect them all together.
As a guy living in a developing country I can see a lot of aspects missing from this internet era. The most important are the physical interactions and communications.
Boy, this comment section sure is hot. I even inadvertently rise the heat by replying to some people. I think we need to simmer down a bit.
Just because we use internet we are not special. A single EMP bomb or slicing the underwater line cable will render our internet slow or frantic mess or even useless.
I grew up in the transition era. I challenge people to stay in the wilderness without your mobile phones or even a satellite phone.
But college is all about the gay experimenting, showing off your drunken nude pictures and posting them onto facebook so you will never get hired when you go out into the real world.
Don’t forget the drunk driving where you mess up your life and everybody else’s life, or overnight DnD with your college mates wishing you were at the party.
Mine was more being depressed/suffering SAD/having essay assignments ruined by a dyslexic condition without even realising I had it or how to cure/work around/get special dispensation for it … staying up very late and then sleeping in very late as a result (and I didn’t even have 1/ a decent computer, 2/ any kind of laptop, 3/ “home” internet access for the first two years), with 5pm in December being the record … swinging between cooking truly magical and truly awful meals … being cold all the time … HAVING a raging cold all the time … running up an impressive credit card debt and overdraft and learning how to manage one vs the other … attempting to get up some kind of lecture recording and review system that proved to be just the most massive waste of time … getting writer’s cramp … spending mass amounts on printer ink … derping about converting DivXs downloaded at home to VHS, and then to VCD to watch on my VCR and then cheap DVD player … making decorations for my bedroom door … sampling and running in horror from the anime society … living in utter squalor thanks to the depression … wasting huge amounts of time out of my life walking everywhere, particularly after my bicycle was stolen …
Oh and getting outrageously drunk on an incalculable number of occasions (18 minimum drinking age, oh yeah) without it having to be with a fake ID or some kind of dippy keg party … with most of the people off my co-ed dorm / shared house … and having lots of excellent adventures. Yet somehow, after all that, only scoring a 3rd class degree and totally failing to get any further than 3rd base.
I entered the lair of the lustwolves, and promptly fell asleep or had other alcohol and/or depressive related issues, whereupon said wolves gently picked me up in their jaws and deposited me in the hallway, only to be kicked back into consciousness a couple hours later by a sober abstinencefox who demanded I clear up the vomit in the kitchen sink.
That and, at the end of a post-finals celebration night out wherein I received a call telling my my grandfather had died, committing my only act of DUI where I crawled my pokey little 12-year-old hatchback out to a local viewpoint on the utterly deserted roads at about 10mph and sat there reflecting and crying gently then passing out … in the warm. Heater on, engine running. Sure, it might have been April, but it was damned cold for it.
So, yeah.
Facebook? What’s that? < me, graduating in '03
That or tell Joyce to take her medieval principles (specifically, the principle that you’re allowed to loudly and/or violently get in other people’s business just because you have different beliefs) and take them and herself to whichever hell she happens to believe in.
After which Joyce will tell Dorothy into which hell (and possibly which level) Dorothy has just landed herself with such comments, not to mention the hankying and pankying that will certainly happen later, as well as delivering a full hour-long lecture on why Dorothy belongs in that hell. By the time Joyce finishes, Dorothy will have nodded off, Walky will have forgotten that he’s even in a relationship, and someone will have popped popcorn and be waiting for something interesting to happen.
Fun fact: no matter what you believe, if you use that as justification to act like a dick to someone else, you’re doing it wrong. Every time.
I guess that whole “get them back together” thing sorta backfired there on ya, eh, Joyce? It HAS stopped being adorable since she did that and is now trying to tell Dorothy what to do with him.
I sincerely hope you make that the title of the second book so you can begin a series of one-upmanship in terms of titles with Joel “My Heart is a Hate-Filled Pineapple” Watson (more than you already do that is).
Cast your body into crafted shame pit of lust wolves! M4T
CURVY BI MALE WANTS DOMINATION BY SEXUALLY OPEN SHEMALE OTHERKIN NY REGION TO RAVAGE HAIRY ASS
HAVE SELF DIAGNOSED ASPERGERS
MAY NEED HOIST
You can’t use ‘Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves’ as the title of your second book because it’s going to be the title of my next album. Sorry dude, called it.
Given that Dorothy used to date Danny – for a fairly long while, by the looks of it – I wonder if she’s already lost her virginity.
And how Joyce would react to that knowledge.
All Dorothy needs to do is wait for Walky to get back and then pull up his shirt, showing Joyce the abs that are sculpted from caramel. I’m sure Joyce will fully understand at that point.
Joyce may be autobiographical, but you totally made that up. There’s no way the phrase “cragged shame pits of the lust wolves” appears anywhere in the Bible. <_<
I’m not sure Joyce is “average”. Your average Christian does not live such a sheltered life and then get thrown into these kind of situations. She is extreme, and is portrayed as such, largely for comic relief. Her background supports her character in this.
I would say that Sierra is the average Christian. Or so I imagine. I wasn’t raised Average Christian. I was raised “Disney’s Gummi Bears is satanic” Christian, so I have to speculate.
My mother was on a big ‘born again’ kick when I went to secondary. The only redeeming feature of Catholic School was the hot bisexual in year 7 that was in the tutor group next to mine. Sadly I was in year 11 at the time, but she was seriously hot.
Closest thing I did was CCD, and even that was nothing like the horror stories I heard. (Then agien, didn’t get taught by nuns, but rather actual educators XD)
@geheime138: It would be impossible to be tired of how ridiculously silly David is portraying your average Christian, because he isn’t. Joyce can be ridiculously silly, but she isn’t your average Christian.
No one who has read David Willis’ previous work would accuse him of portraying Christians, on average, as ridiculously silly.
Walky and Dorothy are parishoners of the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn. S/HE is Pink because although Invisible, they have faith, and it tells them that their deity, although is unseen and unknowable, is a Unicorn.
Yeah I gotta say hearing Walky or anyone else say what he said in the first panel to my face would hurt. That being said, I wouldn’t have Joyce’s reaction if I heard a friend was having a sleepover with their boyfriend in their room.
dammit people, less theological debates and more butt tacos!
also, i’ll save my opinions on how crazy joyce is in this universe until tomorrow, when i assume dorothy’ll let her know she’s already been cast to the lust-wolves…..i wonder if that’ll be the first walky’s heard of it too……i sense mike is somehow behind all this.
David: “The Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves,” by itself, would be an *OK* title for a book. But to make it a truly *great* title, you’d have to add the full name of the protagonist or another major character at the beginning, like so: “David Willis and the Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves.”
Ah here we see an “Internet Athiest” standing next to somebody that knows that people don’t generally care about what somebody else has to say about their religion unless you ask.
Though I guess Joyce DOES kind of push it on people (see: Last panel)
“The Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves” might be the name of my new band… That, or “Invisible Sky Wizard”. Which would have been better for a prog-rock band in the 70’s.
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Are they topless lust-wolves that whine because you chose a sparkly vampire over them? =p
When will humanity learn that Frankenstein would be the best boyfriend.
Madeline Kahn agrees.
+1 for Young Frankenstein reference. Also done in 1.
I like Anne Rice’s vampires. They can turn me either gay or pedophillic (Lestat and Claudia)
I’m more of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer guy myself.
Like hanging out with an Angel?
Personally, I’m Team Lovecraftian Horror-Beast. So beautiful you’ll lose your sanity and be reduced to a gibbering mess.
Also tentacle jokes.
The party will not start before everyone go coo coo!
I’m sure he/she/it would make a wonderful…mate.
Have fun with your Cthulhu Itfriend
Ahem… TEAM ROCKET
Frankenstein would create a monster that murders you. Bad boyfriend.
Or a threesome.
What? you never asked what kind of universe this Frankenstein guy from.
So much yes. xD
I am liking the amount of Dorothy in this string of comments. It’s like she’s discussing in her head about the lustwolves.
Fire bad! Girlfriend dead in bed!
His monster, however, only wants to love and be loved…
Also vengeance and blind murder-rage. Can’t forget those.
I thought Frankenstein was a female cat, I don’t see that working out as a boyfriend really.
You win the internet for this comment.
That or a vindaloo.
It has got to be a Cow Vindaloo, just avoid standing behind the T-Rex when it eat some of it.
VINDALOOOOOOOO!!!
Do Want.
Do you mean Frankenstein himself, or are you referring to Frankenstein’s Monster?
My brain went immediately to shirtless female wolves, because… stuff. I’m not super-fem-biased! You are! *Ducks under a couch, squeaking softly.*
I think someone has played Corruption of Champions.
Joyce has some splanin to do…
I had no idea what that was, so I looked it up.
Ignorance was bliss.
I GISed ‘Corruption of Champions’ with the safety off, not a good idea.
that first result made me actually laugh out loud, which is a good thing to do at 2 am.
Sorry, but pretty much all of the results are making me laugh. Does that make me a perv?
Have you people not learned from the lessons of Goatse, Lemonparty and Tubgirl? Safesearch stays on unless you’re actually looking for porn. And it’s always wise to check Wikipedia or KnowYourMeme before google if the result has the potential to cause psychological harm.
Also, You Do Not Follow Links To TVTropes.
All the same, CoC was funny for about the first 10 minutes, then it descended into a pit of boredom, lame jokes, and taking the core premise waaaaaaaaaaaay too far. :p
“Your Bing SafeSearch setting filters out results that might return adult content”. Of course I’m too computer illiterate to figure out how to change that. Curses.
Heh heh heh heh…
Nice, you got at least two…
“Let me set up a camera so I know you aren’t being lustful”
“Now you’re just being scary”
Lustwolves? Is this another Twilight reference?
lustwolves are the natural enemy of the abstinence vampires
And both are powerless against blowjob ghosts.
Not to mention anal unicorns.
And all of them bow before penetration dragons.
I’ve apparently been reading all the wrong fantasy novels…
It’s never too late to start reading them 😀
http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14567.phtml
Did someone say sexy fantasy?
[spoiler]Not sexy, but horrible.[/spoiler]
Ahh, good old FATAL…
The Dragonvarld Trilogy by Margaret Weis would be a good place to start if penetration dragons pique your interest.
Yes, all bow before the mighty penetration dragons–
With the exception of the mighty slumbering Cunninglinthulu.
And don’t get me started on the Shaggoths.
I’ve known some goths I wouldn’t have minded shagging.
Though the demisexual gryphons are content to just cuddle and have cake for now.
Damn you, I was reading a review of “Touched by Venom” yesterday and now all I can think of is horror. And draconic venomcocks.
I’m going to go scrub my brain out with steel wool now.
Don’t forget the salt.
Actually, I think it might be a Peter is the Wolf reference. (Warning: webcomic is NSFW.)
Cragged shame pits of the lust-wolves is officially my favorite phrase ever.
So many ways you can word Joyce’s last line, but her face says it all.
Do the lust wolves have tongues that roll out out like carpets and eyes that bug out whenever a hot Tex Avery lady walks by?
That seems the only logical conclusion.
I would expect nothing less.
If not, somebody is going to be very disappointed.
…It’s kinda adorable dorothy
Id agree, but I know people who really act like Joyce and are serious about it. It is very, very unadorable.
Only from where we are sitting, if you were in Dotty’s place, you might not find it so adorable.
agreed
im not a big church goer and i’d probably worship any god for a klondike bar, but if i was there id punch Walky in the shoulder for such a pointlessly rude and mean comment
Punch me instead; I doubtlessly deserve it.
And people who worship invisible sky wizards in public should pretty much expect what they…don’t get because they’re at or near a majority. Every other absurd belief is fair game; why not theirs?
i just dont see the point of walky ripping on joyce’s beliefs for
no reason. just because he thinks it is absurd, what actual point
is there in making fun of a single person’s beliefs? he’s not going to
change her mind and even seems to have embarrassed dorothy
its just not very pragmatic.
that comment is structured weirdly because my computer sucks
My comments get structured weirdly on occasion because the rightmost inch or two of my response boxes to any reply seem to be disappearing under a background-colored panel, to my perpetual annoyance. (The deeper the reply, the less I see, unless I stick in temporary carriage returns to bring the line ends into view. And then forget to remove the carriage returns, dammit.
i think thats what happened to me
I just use a text editor and copy/paste it, unless what I’m typing is short enough that it doesn’t need spellcheck or the like.
No, because the CSS here sucks (sorry Willis, but it is true).
It’s hardly no reason. Joyce and Walky have been adversarial since day one in this universe. This is just more of the same.
I think Dorothy’s embarrassment lasted about eight seconds tops, thanks to Joyce own more rude and pointless attack on somebody else’s life choices.
But whichever. I personally am often torn – the world would be a better place if more people treated invisible sky wizards as the caustic bullshit they are, but unless a society has reached the saturation point of philosophical maturity to be able to push the crazies* back to the margins, all you get are helpless scattered individuals railing pointlessly against an implacable dominating madness. Which leads a person to throw up their hands and dink into despair for the world.
Still though, one feels they should be doing their part to make their own positions known.
* Look at Joyce and tell me she’s not been made crazy by her religion.
i kinda just think joyce is crazy. i kinda wonder if she wouldnt be similar if she was raised in a different religion but with similar life experiences. there are better ways to let logic and truth into the world other than being rude and pointlessly agressive. i have trouble seeing how lashing out with snark and sarcasm to teach people that you think they’re wrong accomplishes anything. religion can be a good thing to those who want and need it. its too bad that those same people think everybody needs it the same way they do and come on so strongly with it, but you know the same can be said for any ideology and/or philosophy, you just need to be secure enough in your position to not let it bother you or else you turn into somebody like joyce who cant understand how the world functions without adhering to her guidelines
I’m pretty sure based on prior continuities (shame on me for mentioning them! To the corner!) that Joyce’s mental destabilization is pretty much entirely the result of the religious indoctrination she’s been marinating in since birth, since we’ve seen another Joyce go from this unstable to very stable with the addition of proper socialization. Keep in mind she has been subjected to a particularly strong and relatively undiluted dose of it.
Personally I mostly agree that there is nothing that the rational man can do in the face of a culture-wide epidemic of a religion. On the other hand, the first step to breaking a maladjusted cultural mindset is to expose the youth to the fact that it’s mad and wrong, after with it saturates up via exposure and/or the old people getting old. It’s mostly worked for racism, it’s made good progress for sexism, and the gays are trying their hand at it now. The back of socially constrictive religion has been broken in other countries; it’s high time the process got off the ground here.
okay, wait, are you saying that getting in somebody’s face about religion is wrong? or that religion itself is wrong because if that’s what you’re trying to say then i just dont think we’ll come to an understanding. my whole point was just that walky was kind of hostile right at the get go of a conversation and thats no way to bridge any kind of gap. those two could easily be friends if they would jst look past what they think they know about each other. i think the same could be said for a lot of things
By points:
-Religion itself is wrong. How wrong varies somewhat by the religion, and which way you’re interpreting the word ‘wrong’ (Joyce’s religion qualifies under several meanings).
-Generally speaking, most indoctrinated people are no more convinceable of the above fact than the racists were convinced of their errors. People don’t like to admit/accept that they’ve spent years being wrong about anything, particularly things that are nice-sounding to them, not restricted to religion.
-Religion makes Joyce a fair-weather friend. As long as you stay within her lines she’s fine; step out of them and she becomes no longer adorable. And/or starts punching you in the face. I’ve got religious friends (in part because it’s that or nothing around here), and you’d be surprised how often you have to tiptoe around subjects or just clam up and let them shout you down, when one of their many buttons gets pushed. It’s a pain in the ass. Walky has other options; he doesn’t have to put up with that. Plus she’s been a jerk to him anyway.
Oh, and I managed to forget the topic sentence of my second point there: And because of this unconvinceability, trying to persuade the religious of anything is usually a complete waste of time. But not wrong.
It can also be cathartic sometimes, not that that necessarily helps.
I totally agree with you. I have always thought that people who think religion is useless and just lies are being just like most religious people. They too think that NOT believing in God is irrational. I do see a problem when religious people try to stick their beliefs through other people throats but blaming ALL of them is just as bad. I’m gay and I still believe in God. If someone tries to use God against me I just think “Ok, maybe you are right, but you CAN’T know and neither can I so, why fight over it?”. I think a lot of atheists should do the same because they are becoming exactly like what they hate when they criticize religious people so harshly.
all religion…is wrong? how do you know…i mean for sure? like 100% irrefutable? that’s the kind of immovable thinking that makes people afraid to tell their friends their beliefs. there are communities out there that have the opposite problem as you, where anybody who has some kind of faith in a religion has to keep it secret to avoid losing their friends. THAT is wrong and so is how the religious people make you keep your athiesm in the closet. the world would be so much better if we all just acknowledged how little we actually know about the universe. we’re learning more every day and we might have found the higgs boson, but we just dont have all of the evidence to make such a bold claim as “Religion is wrong” because we have not conclusively proven it to be wrong. Faith in something greater isnt inherently a bad thing but people use it for bad things the same way science was used in a bad way by people to make atomic bombs.
@Luxlucis:
Of course disbelieving in all gods is rational, in the same way that disbelieving in unicorns and dragons is rational. There’s no evidence for any god, thus skeptical disbelief is the rational default. Show me a unicorn, and persuade me that it’s not a fake, and I’ll believe in it. The same goes for any god.
(Though a lot of gods are more like believing that a dragon built my house, and is presently sleeping in my living room. Extreme scepticism and outright flat disbelief is rational and justified.)
To equate atheism with theistic faith is a common error, which generally smells like an attempt to bring rational disbelief down to faith’s level.
If it weren’t wrong, it wouldn’t be called religion. If it’s ever shown there’s a being who inspired the Biblical LORD, who sent down a son as a human, and was responsible for the creation of our universe… it won’t be religion anymore.
It’s proven not to be true that a human-like entity is the uncaused cause with massive fine control over the universe to the extent anything can be proven not to be true. It simply does not fit with anything we know about the universe and the order in it, nor with the nature of intelligence. It can’t be conclusively proven not to be true that all the laws of motion as we understand them are just a statistical anomaly, and will revert to an Aristotlinean concept at any moment – but it’s still wrong.
@AngryBamboo:
All religion is wrong in the sense that it’s granting a theory belief in excess of what is merited by available evidence. Typically, substantially more belief than is merited -and often people know it. The word ‘faith’ exists to give the illusion of justification to this sort of credulity.
Most religions are wrong in the sense that they outright contradict available facts. Lots come with creation stories. Some talk about floods. Some talk about pharaohs drowning in a parted sea. Some talk about days turning to night across the land. Religions that make these claims are as likely to be correct as a person who tells you that they were born on the sun and are made out of fire: 0%.
Some religions are wrong in the sense that they push morally suspicious worldviews and cultural behavior on their adherents and those around them. Misogyny is a common one here, but racism and anti-gay sentiments have been seen as well, and also poor approaches to speech, sex, and contraception. Hatred and war have been the product of some religious expression. This sort of ‘wrong’ is not universal to all religions, but where it appears it is particularly wrong.
okay but you have to keep in mind that a lot of those are just stories to be thought about. there are a lot of christians who take the bible word for word but there are a lot that dont and that can be said for almost any religion. religion isnt meant to be the answer to how but the answer to why. there are some people who take genuine comfort and inspiration from religion and it has lead to some really good things. you have to realize that the bible was written a long time ago long before the scientific method was established so a lot of the science was wrong. as for the anti-gay stuff etc. that is also a product of the times. homosexuality was looked down upon becauseit wasnt helpful to the “be fruitful and multiply strategy” like i said religion is coopted by people a lot and can be harmful but there are people in this world whose lives would feel genuinely empty without it and i dont see how those people feeling empty would make you or i feel any better about anything. cant some people just be allowed to have their beliefs? cant they be happy and contribute to society even if they’re wrong?
I’m not sure how you imagine I’d stop them from having their comforting little lies. I mean, my stated plan for assimilating them is to raise a generation of rational individuals who willingly discard the foolishness. They’re not going to feel empty for the lack of it.
As best I can tell, if you take out all the stories and bad science and poor societal interpretation and co-opted stuff from religion, as you seem to be suggesting, I personally don’t think there’d be anything left. Certainly there’s nothing we can’t live without or get from some other source – morality from empathy is better and more reliable than religion-based ‘morality’ every time, for example.
As for them contributing to society, some of contributions are things like Proposition 8. Religion is poor soil to grow people in, and some of its fruits are rotten.
Oh wow! Look, you guys it’s a smugtheist!
They totally understand the societal and historical aspects of all religions ever and are in no way making broad generalizations of things they don’t actually know jackshit about. Look how smart and mature they are!
Appropriate avatar is appropriate.
I don’t need to test every number greater than ten to say that they’re all greater than seven. Religion is wrong by its very nature as religion, and to convince yourself that what’s patently wrong is foundational to your concept of truth is unhealthy regardless of the specifics.
“Societal and historical aspects” may _explain_, but they don’t _justify_ any more than the societal and historical aspects of (for example) racism or sexism do. I notice that you don’t have an actual argument.
Oh, look, it’s sarcasmodouche, resorting to ridicule because he’s incapable of adressing the issue in any meaningful way. You sure showed those smugtheists!
I am aware of the irony.
@Begbert2
You lump all religious people into a single stereotype. I believe your reason is because you saw some extreme religious nuts forcing their believe upon you.
But you need to remember that now you act just like them. Now you’re being caustic toward all religions and their followers just like when extreme religious folks insult atheists.
There are great and nice people everywhere, religious or not. Do you really want to judge them from what they believe? I believe a true wo/man will judge others from their personality.
You have become what you hate the most. I hope you’re happy.
“Moderate theists” are deluded. Not only have they convinced themselves that black is white, they’ve convinced themselves that black is not black. They conform better to modern values in the most visible ways, but more insidiously carve into their own faculties of reason. Fundies at least believe what they believe as one believes what one believes; in this way moderates are mad, and this madness is harmful.
That is the problem with religion. You see a deeper problem, which many unjustly blame on religion, and take this as “the bad” of religion, and continue to take the cold comfort of delusion. But that’s a human flaw, for which religion is just an excuse and/or scapegoat, and now it’s become a smokescreen for it, a quibble that the religious can project onto whoever does not entertain their imaginary friends.
So no, no atheist will ever be “just like them,” because that’s never been the problem with religion. Religion deserves all the mockery it can get. If that posited by religion were evidently true, then anyone who shunned it would deserve all the mockery they got. Anyone who has compartmentalized their religion by redefining truth that their beliefs can be cosmically true while manifestly false is a fool twice over, and any such person who then slanders their brethren for seeing at least this clear truth is a fool once more.
Reread. I have not lumped all theists into a single stereotype. I haven’t even lumped all religions into a single stereotype! (See that All/Most/Some post there? Yeah.)
I attack the sin, not the sinner, excepting those who specifically act on their religion in Proposition 8 ways. And you know the sick part? Perfectly nice people get turned to the proposition 8 route by religion. It’s sickening.
Until I start trying to oppress my fellow men I haven’t fallen to the dark side that way; until I start believing things that are false or massively unsubstantiated, I’m not wrong the other two ways. This is another false equivalence.
@begbert2: Do you realize that your mindset is pretty similar to an intolerant fundamentalist Christian? You are convinced that people to be “corrected” in their way of thinking, just because you think they’re wrong (and make no mistake, no matter how certain you are, no matter how little evidence there is for religion and how much there is for science, unless you have gazed into the inner workings of the universe and seen for yourself the absence of God, it will always be “think,” not “know.”) You say that belief in God is a harmful thing. How? And before you say “homophobia/misogyny/intolerance of other religions, etc., be aware that just as morality is not exclusive to religion, neither is immorality. I have met secular examples of most everything people take shots at religion for. There are good people and bad, and that’s it. Good people will be good with or without religion, and bad people will be bad with or without it. So, then, why is a belief in God so harmful?
I have gazed into the inner workings of well-known history and thus know that the christian god, and every other god with a wacky creation myth and miracles that are historically recorded not to have occurred, is a pile of myths and horseshit.
I have gazed at all the other gods, the deist and pantheist and philosopher’s gods, and known that they are powerless and irrelevent. they are gods that don’t do anything! And I gazed a little longer and saw that they’re mostly mentioned by goalpost-moving christians who want to try to bait and switch out the irrelevent gods for their impossible god.
And religion is not the source of all evil, but it enables it, promotes it, and sustains it where it would not otherwise persist. Arguing that it’s harmless because there are other ways to also be bad is like saying that because there are other ways to die, the bubonic plague is harmless.
Uh… no. Just no.
Saying that things which are absent of any good evidence for their existence should be treated as though they don’t exist is nothing like being an “intolerant fundamentalist Christian”. It’s just basic logic to not agree with any claims which are either not (yet) supported by the facts or, worse yet, are actually in disagreement with the facts.
You don’t have to “know” that all gods don’t exist to reasonably assume that they don’t, the same way that you don’t need to know that winged flying horses don’t actually exist in order to deny the likelihood of their existence. This isn’t religious dogma based on appeals to authority, this is basic logic.
Believing in untrue things and denying basic logic is harmful. It allows people to do things no completely rational person would to. As the saying goes, “Good people do good things and evil people do evil things, but for a good person to do evil, you need religion.” Religion allows, or even requires, you to do illogical things, mostly relying on the logical fallacy of appeal to authority.
In other words, an “intolerant fundamentalist Christian” would say that you’re wrong for illogical reasons. Saying that someone is wrong because they’re being illogical and that being illogical is a bad idea is hardly even the same thing.
The part that bugs me the most about conversations like these, she said wryly, is the way “religion” is used as a synonym for “Christian”. And usually “American fundamentalist Christian,” at that.
A lot of the problems people have with quote-unquote “religion” are specific to Christianity, and especially fundamentalist Christianity (and American fundamentalist Christianity, at that). I’m a very religious person myself, but I’m also a Heathen, who is profoundly scientific. If a belief is contradicted by scientific evidence then it is obviously the belief that is wrong. The beliefs that are contradicted by science were my ancestors’ way of explaining the world as they perceived it several millennia ago; how could they possibly know anything about genes, for example? Or evolution? Or the Big Bang theory?
So I teach my kids, for example, that our ancestors believed that thunder was the sound of Thor chasing after giants in his chariots (which helps them not be afraid of what is after all just a loud noise), but I also tell them that nowadays we know that it’s a sound that is formed in this way blah blah and that gods and goat-pulled chariots are not actually involved.
But I don’t have any problem with also saying that, for example, most of us Heathens end up somewhere in Asgard, Hel, or Niflhelm when we die, because I don’t have any conflicting scientific evidence and from my own personal experiences it’s as valid as any other view.
However, a key thing about being Heathen is that we don’t have a concept of sin, and our “evil”, such as it is, is mainly “that which harms”. If it’s harmful, it’s bad; if it’s beneficial, it’s good.
So we don’t have this thing about saying, for example, that being gay is somehow wrong, because how can it be? No one is being harmed by it so who cares? Whereas murdering babies is inherently wrong, and not just because some invisible sky guy says so; it’s inherently wrong because someone is getting harmed.
The thing that bugs me most about Christianity in particular, though (as opposed to “religion” in general; people can believe whatever whacky things they like in private, I don’t care) is the part where instead of saying “this thing is against my religion so I’m not allowed to do it,” they say “this thing is against my religion therefore YOU’RE not allowed to do it,” and go and try to make laws based on their own highly restricted points of view.
I suspect that if they had Jews protesting the sale of pork in grocery stores, trying to get hot dog stands at ball games shut down because pork=evil or what, or Muslims trying to shut down the horrible, immoral local beer store, they’d get pretty damned indignant about people from these other religions trying to force their views onto people who aren’t followers of it. But I think that that is the basic, fundamental flaw in Christianity: it doesn’t say “this is the right path for us,” it says “this is the ONLY path for EVERYBODY,” and refuses to even acknowledge the existence of other points of view or gods (even in theory– hell, if one god is real then you pretty much have to accept that they all are, right? Even the Ten Commandants say “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” which right there is saying that there are other gods in that world view, and heck, you’r even allowed to follow them too, so long as you remain principally Christian).
So they end up (some of them, anyways; speaking generally as a group here) being able to justify imposing their world view on everyone around them, because, darn it all, they’re right. And they’re right because they say so. And from a Heathen point of view that is wrong, because it harms people.
TL;DR: Don’t confuse “religion” with “Christian;” a lot of the problems with “religion” that get brought up are specific to Christianity (and fundamentalist Christianity at that; I’m looking at you, Westborough Church, you dinks) and just aren’t applicable to Heathens, or American Indian aboriginal traditions, or pretty much most other pagan religions, and by using “religion” as a synonym for “fundamentalist Christian” people like me who are “religious” but aren’t Christian are sort of forced into a weird position of pretty much entirely agreeing with the atheist point of view while still technically belonging to the “religious” camp, but under a banner that doesn’t apply. Like, at all.
There is no reason to think there are any gods at all, and for there to be one would require us to reexamine every facet of at least life on Earth to find how they came into it. An afterlife is profoundly unlikely – we accept that our consciousness can change, on a fundamental level, through our lives, so why can’t it come to nonexistence? The person you were ten years ago is dead, and so will you be in ten years, even if you’re still alive. In a hundred years, the only difference will be that there will be no one else directly filling your shoes. For there to be gods and an afterlife, everything we are learning about these things must be wrong – not as wrong as they would have to be for a literal interpretation of the Bible to be true, but wrong just the same. This is inherent to religion, all religion, by definition.
Even when you say Thor doesn’t cause lightning – why? If you’re going to believe that it’s possible for such a race of beings to exist, why not hold that they cause lightning, even though we now know what it appears to be? More importantly, if you’re going to believe that they coincide at all with the legends of the ancients, known only through second-hand sources, why only believe the ones modern society doesn’t designate as “silly,” arbitrarily through popular scientific understanding? It’s the same problem.
@Kryss LaBryn:
I thought I did a pretty good job of delineating out the different kinds of ‘wrong’ that religions labor under. By your description you only fall under the first definition; the most innocuous and (usually) least harmful. (Not that it takes type 2 wrongness to achieve
type 3 wrongness; your Thor could still be telling you to be a bigot. But it doesn’t seem so.)
The thing I find odd about ‘your type’ is that you treat a worldview like it comes in disassembleable chunks. Thor (like the Abrahamic God) was largely defined by his actions and roles; by the thunder and lightning he wields. If you take that away, on what basis do you call what remains ‘Thor’? If you’ve knowningly cherry-picked the facts you like, how do you convince yourself that you haven’t just made up something that sounds nice and familiar? Wouldn’t it be obvious that you’re just rolling your own fiction?
It’s all so odd to me.
@Raen: I agree, but, see, the main point I was trying to make is simply that I’m not going around and saying that science is wrong because my religion says it’s Thor and not giant static electrical charges. Heathens don’t go around trying to get the Ginnugagap theory of creation taught as a valid scientific alternative in school, and I wouldn’t dream of insisting that society’s laws be constructed in such a way that my religion’s morals are held paramount over anyone else’s. Frankly, I don’t think religious views should come into play at all in law-making, but there you go.
So, yeah, I can completely agree with you that there’s no scientific evidence for any god whatsoever (certainly nothing that can be reproduced in a lab); but the problem is that the types of experiences that convince people that they have experienced some kind of supernatural phenomena (be it some experience of a god, or psychic phenomena, or a ghost, or whatever) is virtually impossible to measure with today’s technology, but also tend to be very convincing to the person experiencing them. So you end up with this “I’m right because I know I’m right” attitude that of course flies in the face of anything that can actually be proven.
If someone wants to believe that the world will end in December I will side-eye them considerably, but I’m not going to get my panties in a knot about it since I’m pretty sure I’ll be proved right in a few months anyways, but I will question their ability to interpret data if they pull in anything about Mayan prophecies. But hey, believe whatever you want at home so long as you wash your hands when you’re done, you know what I mean? 😉 My problem with “religion” comes in when people use it as an argument to try and refute proven science (which I firmly believe is just idiotic– dude, it’s called “proof” for a reason), and I get very upset when they try to do things like insist on prayer in schools (because I’m sure they’d be just as upset if I was insisting that every school day opened with a blot to Odin, not to mention school shouldn’t have anything to do with religion at all unless world mythologies are being studied– and at that point they should all be treated as stories equally). Don’t even get me started on Intelligent Design.
I just don’t like the way “religion” as a denegrative term is used as a synonym for “fundamentalist Christian” because while, okay, invisible sky fathers aside, I just don’t like being lumped in with these idiots who use a two-thousand-year-old collection of anecdotes written over hundreds of years by a bunch of desert nomads as an excuse to turn their brains off and (too often) to also try and force the rest of us to follow along. 🙂
@begbert2: I have no problem with you not believing in God, and believing that religious people are factually incorrect. It is a belief I happen to share. What I take issue with is your hateful attitude toward a belief system simply because you don’t agree with it. You have another comment on here criticizing Joyce for getting in Dorothy’s face because Dorothy has different beliefs than she does. Please take your own advice. It’s not any better when you do it. That’s what makes you sound like a religious bigot. That and statements like “the bakc of socially constrictive religion has been broken in other countries, it’s high time the process got off the ground here” Your stated desire to raise a “generation of individuals who will willingly discard this foolishness. which you very frighteningly define as “assimilation.”
Your analogy about the bubonic plague is flawed, because the bubonic plague hasn’t ever done a whole lot of good, but religion has. A better analogy would be comparing it to fire. Or a knife. The have the potential to cause harm when used badly, yes. But they can also do a lot of good. So we should keep them around. Just like religion.
@HiEv: See my comment to begbert2 above. I have not problem with him or you believing that religion is factually wrong, or even that it’s illogical. I am myself an atheist. What bothers me is the hate directed at it, this desire to rid the world of it.
Religion may have certain aspects that run counter to logic, but if someone wants to believe that an invisible man lives in the sky, ho’s it really hurting? Yes, it can (and has) cause people to do terrible things when taken to extremes, but the key word there is extremes. These acts are committed by lunatics and hatemongers. Your average, mosty good, run-of-the mill theist is not going to go out and murder someone because he thinks God told him to. People corrupt religion, not the other way around.
I do not believe that religion has done a whole lot of good. I believe that religion has always been a net loss on the goodness scale, because every person it scares into doing good could have been taught actual morals instead and likely be better. That is, of course, assuming that anyone has actually been scared into doing good, as opposed to acting on empathy they learned elsewhere. There’s ample evidence that theists who are inclined to do evil will do so regardless.
One could make a very long and complex argument disputing
the theory that religion has been a net boon to humanity. But I’ve said enough about that. It is well known that nobody can convince anyone of anything on the internet; they can only present their opinion.
As for the tone of my speech, what are my options? Pretend religion isn’t bullshit? That’s called lying. Refrain from stating my opinion that the gradual decline of religion is a good thing? Why should I? Avoid using hyperbole on occasion to deliver my point? What’s the fun in that? Be respectful of the sky fairy? Why do religiophiles require coddling?
Bah. I see evil, I call it evil. You do what you like.
@begbert2: we need more of you. Unfortunately, religion has been around for so long that too many pieces of what we consider a great society have been ingrained into our pop-culture belief of what it is, from the art to the youth role models and soup kitchens. We need not even talk about the actually-addictive part of it. Many people can’t even imagine that one can live a fulfilling, moral, peaceful, purposeful, and accomplished life in a welcoming, helpful community without religion, much less belief. Even intelligent nonbelievers have memorized religious doctrine, wooed members of the opposite sex with it, and created happily-indoctrinated, crazy families, some of which even do well for society with volunteer-work and donations. Mass belief transforms what is ultimately a bizarre idea into commonly-accepted fact, but society just integrates it and keeps on going. While this has a thousand drawbacks, it’s too associated with what people already do. As long as science continues to progress ever more rapidly, and more people gradually see other ways of looking at things, I’ll be happy, but I’m not entirely sure what you wish is possible, as laudable as it may be. Anyway, I like Joyce 🙂
Just because you think a person’s belief is incorrect or weird does not make them crazy, or that they’ve been indoctrinated into some sort of cult. There’s a big difference between mainline Christianity and Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, or Warren Jeffs.
This level of scorn for people simply for believing in God is incredily intolerant. Just let people believe what they believe.
We’re allowed to be scornful of adults who (genuinely) believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and those beliefs are totally harmless. What makes religion different? It’s not more plausible.
Typical, your world view is that someone is either black or white. Not even any grey in there. You always call in the absolute. See someone religion? SCORNSCORNSCORN.
Even when that one guy doing nothing that offend or harm you. Yes, maybe Joyce or some religious extremists make you angry or offended. But you decided that normal nice religious people are also easy targets.
I can imagine you meet someone new and before you know him well but when you see a cross/David Star/Moon and the Star/Buddhist Swastika/other religious symbols hanging on their neck then it’s SCORN TIME!
Yes, that’s what I just said. We don’t wait for the followers of Santa Claus to start sacrificing bad children in coal fires before we start scorning them; we scorn their belief because the belief itself is silly. If a person says that 1+1=5, we don’t have to wait for them to kill someone before scoffing and pointing out their error.
How is religion different? Other than the proponents being more angrily defensive of their hogwash, I mean.
Who said we’re allowed to be scornful of adults who (genuinely) belive in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? If either of those beliefs actually benefit a person, then sign me up.
inb4 religion doesn’t benefit a person – uh, yes it does. Belief, whether it is belief in a Deity or belief there is no deity, has shown to improve lives.
@ begbert2
” Other than the proponents being more angrily defensive of their hogwash, I mean.”
*pull out a mirror, place it in front of bb2*
There. Sometimes angry people are easy to counter.
Um, we are scornful of adults who believe silly, false things. We certainly don’t have to stay silent about their falsehood, and saying that santa claus isn’t real would get nowhere near the backdraft that I’m getting here.
Of course, we’re generally not all that critical ofsanta claus believers either, but that’s probably because the santa belief system, is, in fact, harmless. Though silly.
inFter spurious claim that religion is beneficial. I don’t buy it. No credible source I know of (as in, not pushed by a religiophile) has demonstrated that faith is beneficial as compared to the various kinds of widespread harm done in its name.
narmenduke & AckAckAck – “Nice” Christians aren’t really Christians. I know that sounds cruel, but hear me out: in order to be tolerant of women’s rights and children’s rights and homosexuality and in order to be intolerant of slavery, Christians have to flat out ignore large portions of the Bible (both new and old testaments). In other words, they are cherry picking. And if you are already ignoring portions of the Bible in order to adopt a more pro-social sense of morality, why defer to it at all? Particularly in regards to which behaviors you consider to be sinful or wrong? At that point, aren’t you just using a book that you largely disbelieve in order to justify your own small mindedness and intolerance?
Give The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation (both by Sam Harris) a read when you have the time. You won’t regret it.
Nah. Every time Joyce has seen Walky lately, she’s been rude, mean-spirited, insulting–all those things they tell you NOT to be if you want to be a good Christian. Walky was just getting her back.
I suppose there is that, she is kinda judgemental towards his outside the boxness
@Begbet: okay but you have to keep in mind that a lot of those are just stories to be thought about. there are a lot of christians who take the bible word for word but there are a lot that dont and that can be said for almost any religion. religion isnt meant to be the answer to how but the answer to why. there are some people who take genuine comfort and inspiration from religion and it has lead to some really good things. you have to realize that the bible was written a long time ago long before the scientific method was established so a lot of the science was wrong. as for the anti-gay stuff etc. that is also a product of the times. homosexuality was looked down upon becauseit wasnt helpful to the “be fruitful and multiply strategy” like i said religion is coopted by people a lot and can be harmful but there are people in this world whose lives would feel genuinely empty without it and i dont see how those people feeling empty would make you or i feel any better about anything. cant some people just be allowed to have their beliefs? cant they be happy and contribute to society even if they’re wrong?
sorry i kinda posted that comment twice my computer didnt show it for a time and i wanted to make sure i said it.
@Raen why wouldnt it be called religion if it weren’t wrong?
I think I just explained.
Alternatively, let’s say that powerful, long-lived beings came to Earth, and these beings had once been revered as gods, and gods among those still worshipped in China or India. Some of their worshippers recognize them and flock to them, now disciples rather than deluded. I would be hard-pressed to consider this religion.
“I mean, my stated plan for assimilating them is to raise a generation of rational individuals who willingly discard the foolishness. They’re not going to feel empty for the lack of it.”
So basically ‘we’ll stop assimilating them to believe in a god by assimilating them to not believe in god’… seems legit.
The power of boring facts and undecorated reality compels you!
Join us! Join us! Join us! Join us! Join us! Join us! Join us! Join us!
I don’t normally comment on these things, but this is probably one of the most ridiculous arguments I’ve ever seen. Begbert, I don’t know where you live, but if religion was inherently wrong 100% no question, and should be herded into some anti-church where they’re taught religion is wrong, why would people in the United States be given the legal right to freedom of religion? How is your idea of pushing your athiest beliefs onto others any different from what you’re trying to prevent from religious people? How is the fact that no doubt some people would have to tiptoe around certain beliefs and ideas and things when they talk to people like you any different from your situation with your religious friends? I’m an athiest, yes. But I’m open to people with different beliefs, and hell, one of my best friends is a devout Catholic. Do we always see eye to eye? No, but we don’t attack each other. If your friends are attacking /you/ about your beliefs, then they’re simply not friends and you should get better ones, and allow them to be in the religious clique they’re apparently looking for. I hate to burst your bubble, but the only way to describe someone as pushy, insensitive, and unfaltering as you about the subject is religiously anti-religious, so there you have it: you have a religion, too.
I think you’re misinterpreting, “my stated plan for assimilating them is to raise a generation of rational individuals who willingly discard the foolishness.” I don’t think begbert2 meant we should herd theists “into some anti-church where they’re taught religion is wrong”. I think (s)he just meant that we should have critical thinking and science classes in all schools that teach children to think logically. This is not “pushing atheism”, this is teaching rationality.
Hopefully that teaching will sink in and they’ll reject illogical beliefs.
That’s my interpretation anyways.
What bizarre train of thought causes you to equate “pushy, insensitive, and unfaltering” with “religious”? Heck, even I don’t think all religious people are rude; I think they’re just all wrong. (In various ways, as described above.) I mean, it’s fun and somewhat justified to use the word as a pejorative, but it still does have a meaning.
And I don’t really dispute the possibility that my friends who must be tiptoed around to avoid offending their religious sensibilities aren’t true friends, but that would just mean that their religion crippled their ability to be friends with people who disagree with them. That’s sick.
And the extent of my “pushing my atheist beliefs” is me talking about them. That’s what gets people so het up. Oddly, freedom of speech is *also* a right…but I guess I’m not supposed to exercise it, eh? Well, I’m sure we’ll get an amendment soon curtailing it anyway.
It’s pretty disturbing to hear “voicing atheist and rationalist views” being equated with the theists being “herded into some anti-church where they’re taught religion is wrong” – and to hear this sentiment from an atheist, no less. I’m being demonized by my own kind!
Lustwolves: They do more than hum your leg.
Sometimes they hump it as well.
Lustwolves. We hump because we care.
Just…not cool, Joyce.
Walky’s attitude towards church seems to mirror my own.
… Stop spying on me, Willis!
It mirrors most of the Internet generation’s.
Not really. I am of this internet generation of which you speak, yet my faith is very important to me and a lot of people I know.
Intellectual freedom and the free exchange of information often causes people to become disillusioned with religion. It happened during the Age of Enlightenment, wherein philosophers dreamed up all kinds of godless theories. The most popular was Deism, which is the belief that there is, in fact, a God– but he has nothing to do with us. So it’s still technically a godless theory. According to Deism He made the world and then left. No doubt a supreme being with unlimited power had better things to do than hunch over our planet and watch us like bugs in a jar, say Deists.
Anyway… point is: More information = Less God. At least as far as the average person is concerned. Someone can be highly intelligent and still be deeply invested in religion. Happens all the time. They justify their beliefs though. They sat, and thought, and searched their souls, and came to a definite conclusion about what exactly they believed. Which doesn’t always match up with the tenets of their given religion. Most people don’t do that. They just don’t care enough… or aren’t smart enough. Their parents pass religion down to them and they accept it without question because children believe whatever their parents tell them. The laziness of the average person is a factor that most people don’t consider. In the Age of Enlightenment it essentially became ‘cool’ to be an intellectual. Everyone wanted to be smart. Naturally there was a decline in this trend, but the internet has a similar effect. No, it doesn’t necessarily make people any smarter. Obviously. That’d be crazy. What it does is expose even the laziest person to new ideas. It combines a limitless source of useful, factual information with the biggest wastes of time human beings can possibly engineer. Consequently, lazy/dumb people become a little more cultured. Often without realizing it. Of course, the internet also exposes us to the very worst humanity has to offer. Horrible, horrible things that can never be unseen. Usually involving obscure forms of porn. I like to pretend they don’t exist and that I never learned about them. It’s fun to pretend. I need a drink.
Hear hear. Here a glass of virtual drink. A toast.
It seems like a lot of people prefer to lump stuff together and think it’s a smart thing to do. We need to value people not under various stereotypes/cliches but based on each individuals. Mob mentality are too easy to predict but how about individual mentality?
Some people think that internet elevate us to a completely new era and new perspective. I called it an illusion of grandeur. Internet only elevate what exist in the society and cultures for centuries and connect them all together.
As a guy living in a developing country I can see a lot of aspects missing from this internet era. The most important are the physical interactions and communications.
Boy, this comment section sure is hot. I even inadvertently rise the heat by replying to some people. I think we need to simmer down a bit.
Probably not most. But a much higher percentage than has historically been the case in America.
Just because we use internet we are not special. A single EMP bomb or slicing the underwater line cable will render our internet slow or frantic mess or even useless.
I grew up in the transition era. I challenge people to stay in the wilderness without your mobile phones or even a satellite phone.
It’s still adorable. On the other hand, that may just be because I’m on the other side of the screen.
I believe Joyce would be a lot scarier to you if you were in Dotty’s place.
Yeah, crazies are like that.
I would know.
I think she’s obnoxious…like if your brother was a jehova’s witness…
Or a Jenova’s witness.
Genosha’s Witnesses just want to be left in peace.
Also, she’s a cartoon. Cartoons make everything adorable.
Especially Fire Lord Ozai. He was such a sweetie!
Burn scars generally don’t leave people looking quite so dashing as Zuko.
Remind me who Dorothy’s roomie is again, and how she convinced her to be out for the night?
I believe her Roomie is Sierra. And that she told her there’s a sale on Not Shoes.
From the maker of not sweater vests.
Joyce hates Not Sweater Vests. They’re so tacky.
She should just calm down with a nice cup of No Tea.
And eating some Not Biscuits with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter as its dressing.
She doesn’t have to be out for the whole night, unless Walky is just that awesome.
Hey, don’t knock the lust wolf pit ’till you’ve tried it.
With that avatar, my mind changed your comment to:
“Hey, don’t knock the lustiraptor pit ’till you’ve tried it.”
With that avatar, my mind changed your comment to:
“Hey, don’t knock the lust snow fox hole ’till you’ve tried it.”
snow hole, eh? O_o
I’d like to see the cover illustration for that book.
Aaaand here it is!
WRONG
Good thing she didn’t say dickwolves. >_>
Beat me to it.
That made me smile
That made me smile
Careful, Willis, at this rate Joyce will require a mind wipe -_-
You mean ‘another mind wipe’. There is a reason nobody remembers the college invasion that happened two pages back.
I thought her name was Joyce, not Vorath?
Glad I’m not the only one who immediately went there…
With your avatar it looks like you just read that Penny Arcade comic for the first time. Well, some of the readers that is.
It doesn’t count as being “raped to sleep” if you actually want it?
Do college students become lustwolves when they see a “full-moon”?
I wish. Would make floor meetings more interesting.
You have a lot of floor meetings where people are seeing bared butts?
Our Campus shares locations with a local bordello.
Yeah, it was interesting at first, but the novelty has worn off by now.
But college is all about the gay experimenting, showing off your drunken nude pictures and posting them onto facebook so you will never get hired when you go out into the real world.
Don’t forget the drunk driving where you mess up your life and everybody else’s life, or overnight DnD with your college mates wishing you were at the party.
Mine was more being depressed/suffering SAD/having essay assignments ruined by a dyslexic condition without even realising I had it or how to cure/work around/get special dispensation for it … staying up very late and then sleeping in very late as a result (and I didn’t even have 1/ a decent computer, 2/ any kind of laptop, 3/ “home” internet access for the first two years), with 5pm in December being the record … swinging between cooking truly magical and truly awful meals … being cold all the time … HAVING a raging cold all the time … running up an impressive credit card debt and overdraft and learning how to manage one vs the other … attempting to get up some kind of lecture recording and review system that proved to be just the most massive waste of time … getting writer’s cramp … spending mass amounts on printer ink … derping about converting DivXs downloaded at home to VHS, and then to VCD to watch on my VCR and then cheap DVD player … making decorations for my bedroom door … sampling and running in horror from the anime society … living in utter squalor thanks to the depression … wasting huge amounts of time out of my life walking everywhere, particularly after my bicycle was stolen …
Oh and getting outrageously drunk on an incalculable number of occasions (18 minimum drinking age, oh yeah) without it having to be with a fake ID or some kind of dippy keg party … with most of the people off my co-ed dorm / shared house … and having lots of excellent adventures. Yet somehow, after all that, only scoring a 3rd class degree and totally failing to get any further than 3rd base.
I entered the lair of the lustwolves, and promptly fell asleep or had other alcohol and/or depressive related issues, whereupon said wolves gently picked me up in their jaws and deposited me in the hallway, only to be kicked back into consciousness a couple hours later by a sober abstinencefox who demanded I clear up the vomit in the kitchen sink.
That and, at the end of a post-finals celebration night out wherein I received a call telling my my grandfather had died, committing my only act of DUI where I crawled my pokey little 12-year-old hatchback out to a local viewpoint on the utterly deserted roads at about 10mph and sat there reflecting and crying gently then passing out … in the warm. Heater on, engine running. Sure, it might have been April, but it was damned cold for it.
So, yeah.
Facebook? What’s that? < me, graduating in '03
I’m amused at how DnD is grouped with drunk driving.
Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night may still become a wolf when the autumn moon is bright…
And the wolfbane blooms…
Ok… I see where this is headed… Dorothy if you want to do anything, do not, I repeat, DO NOT TELL JOYCE unless you don’t want to do it.
That or tell Joyce to take her medieval principles (specifically, the principle that you’re allowed to loudly and/or violently get in other people’s business just because you have different beliefs) and take them and herself to whichever hell she happens to believe in.
After which Joyce will tell Dorothy into which hell (and possibly which level) Dorothy has just landed herself with such comments, not to mention the hankying and pankying that will certainly happen later, as well as delivering a full hour-long lecture on why Dorothy belongs in that hell. By the time Joyce finishes, Dorothy will have nodded off, Walky will have forgotten that he’s even in a relationship, and someone will have popped popcorn and be waiting for something interesting to happen.
Fun fact: no matter what you believe, if you use that as justification to act like a dick to someone else, you’re doing it wrong. Every time.
Hey, now. I believe quite strongly that using my beliefs to act like a dick is my god-given right. Let’s not generalize here.
“Cragged shame pits” is the latest song from up and coming alternative metal band The Lust Wolves
Now being opened by “Lot and all that Rot”
Lustwolves is the name of my Sex Pistols coverband.
And, step back everyone. Once Joyces start they are good for the night.
Dorothy, stop telling lies.
What if this is a misunderstanding and Dorothy and Walky are just going to have a completely chaste slumber party
Seeing as how she’s seen Walky naked if Dorothy is letting him wear jammies then I don’t think it’s a sleepover where sex is involved.
I don’t know if you noticed how quick Walky got out of his jammies upon Dorothy’s request
I guess that whole “get them back together” thing sorta backfired there on ya, eh, Joyce? It HAS stopped being adorable since she did that and is now trying to tell Dorothy what to do with him.
“he’s my walky and i’ll do with him as i please!” -Dorothy
AngryBamboo’s gravatar is Walky’s bedroom face.
and ArkhamTexan’s grav is Sal’s aftersex face.
And during sex-face.
and pre-sex face
It’s also my real during/after sex-face. I change into a woman for that. It REALLY confuses my mate.
@ArkhamTexan: You fell into the Nyannīchuan?
Or Arkham is the most wonderful/terrible Pretenders.ever.
She must be a real cold fish if that’s the case… >_> <_<
You kids today and your references I don’t get!
I sincerely hope you make that the title of the second book so you can begin a series of one-upmanship in terms of titles with Joel “My Heart is a Hate-Filled Pineapple” Watson (more than you already do that is).
WISH GRANTED.
Cragged Shame Pits of the Lust Wolves will be the name of my gay barbarian-hero novel. Yes….
As much as I hate homoerotic novels…I would probably have to at least skim through this.
I think I’d give it a chance as well… Even if normally they are just terribly written slash fic full of OC’s…
If I want to read that I can always open fanfic.net……..
>yes…
Megatron? Is that you?
Megatron writes gay Barbarian Hero novels?
Everyone needs hobby I suppose, can’t be world domination change history all the time.
He writes them for Rubber Ducky. Deep down, Megatron’s just a big softie, yessss…
Darn, I was hoping someone would reference the other Megatron (well, kind of) and say “Here’s a hint!”
I fully plan on using the phrase “cragged shame pits of the lust-wolves” in a sentence within the next month. This isn’t even a joke. It’s fact
I don’t need to plan to use the phrase. I give you “It’s Willis’s Fault.”
…I have some kind of disease of the brain.
Did anyone else read “Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves” as “Craigslist Shame Pits of the Lustwolves”?
Those lust wolves have nothing to be ashmaed about. Craigslist is just a jerk.
Cast your body into crafted shame pit of lust wolves! M4T
CURVY BI MALE WANTS DOMINATION BY SEXUALLY OPEN SHEMALE OTHERKIN NY REGION TO RAVAGE HAIRY ASS
HAVE SELF DIAGNOSED ASPERGERS
MAY NEED HOIST
The second book? I thought that was The New Testament. Or The Book of Mormon, depending on your perspective.
If you’re going to go that route, the second book is Exodus.
Joyce: Jumps sharks with rocket-powered motocycles that transform.
And friggin’ laser beams on their heads?
FYI – your “Next” button is broken on the last two strips.
DAMNIT JOYCE QUIT BEING A COCK BLOCK.
Yep, Dorothy shut Walky’s mouth good. Good job Dorothy!
Also lust-wolves? why not lust-honey badgers?
Honey badgers don’t give a fuck.
Lust Wolves give a fuck whether you want one or not.
Pretty sure “The Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves” is the title of a heavy metal album.
If it isn’t, then it should be.
Webcomics, inspiring people to create their own band since…. 2008 (perhaps).
Barrel of shame!
Barrel Roll of shame!
Numfox! Do the Barrel Roll of Shame!
This is the best thing in the comic so far. CRAGGED SHAME PITS OF THE LUSTWOLVES. I am appropriating it as my battle call.
You can’t use ‘Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves’ as the title of your second book because it’s going to be the title of my next album. Sorry dude, called it.
Dorothy’s comment in the last panel is exactly what I’ve been thinking for a while now.
Given that Dorothy used to date Danny – for a fairly long while, by the looks of it – I wonder if she’s already lost her virginity.
And how Joyce would react to that knowledge.
She has, and has said as much in a previous comic I am too lazy to track down.
You cannot fight the lustwolves Joyce!
you know you want to join them!
You cannot resist the power of the lustwolves, Joyce!
I don’t see how the book can be named anything else now.
Also I’m totally using that line on my wife tonight. Just without the word ‘don’t’.
Agreed. That title is amazing.
OK Willis, fess up – did you get help with Joyce’s dialogue from the Penny Arcade guys?
I can see “Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves” being a future DLC pack for On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness…
Make it a new sequel!
I suspect it’s more having been exposed to the same kind of blood-and-hellfire style of preaching….
All Dorothy needs to do is wait for Walky to get back and then pull up his shirt, showing Joyce the abs that are sculpted from caramel. I’m sure Joyce will fully understand at that point.
I don’t like either Walky’s comments in the first panel or Joyce’s reaction in the last panel. Both are a bit too high and mighty for my taste.
I’m guessing that’s the point- panel 1, atheist being obnoxious; panel 4, Christian being obnoxious. Both need to cool it.
He’s an invisible sky dad, Walky. Get it right. Dude hates wizards.
Are Lustwolves any relation to the Dickwolves of Penny Arcade fame? I hear they regularly have to compete for territory.
Is it just me or is anyone else kind of tired of how ridiculously silly David is portraying your average Christian?
Joyce is autobiographical.
(I always have that on my clipboard for easy Ctrl-P.)
You are a girl?!?!?!!?
(runs away)
So hot.
Makes me wonder how autobiographical she’ll be. Will she start working on the Dumbiverse equivilant of Roomies soon?
Actually… I’ll second this – it would be very interesting to see – through Joyce – your journey from _that_ to the person you are today.
Joyce may be autobiographical, but you totally made that up. There’s no way the phrase “cragged shame pits of the lust wolves” appears anywhere in the Bible. <_<
I’m not sure Joyce is “average”. Your average Christian does not live such a sheltered life and then get thrown into these kind of situations. She is extreme, and is portrayed as such, largely for comic relief. Her background supports her character in this.
I would say that Sierra is the average Christian. Or so I imagine. I wasn’t raised Average Christian. I was raised “Disney’s Gummi Bears is satanic” Christian, so I have to speculate.
I was raised as an atheist in an average Christian household; you are mostly correct about Sierra.
Why would christians raise you as an athiest?
You have my condolences. Congratulations on breaking free of the brainwashing.
Catholic. Roman Catholic. I’ll let that sink in.
So was I. XD
Though, to be honest, I was never brianwashed in any way. Then agien, my dad’s agnostic, so he could’ve tampered it down. XD
My mother was on a big ‘born again’ kick when I went to secondary. The only redeeming feature of Catholic School was the hot bisexual in year 7 that was in the tutor group next to mine. Sadly I was in year 11 at the time, but she was seriously hot.
Thirteen from House hot.
Born Again….Catholic?
That doesn’t…what?
(FTR, also raised Catholic.)
I don’t even know and I lived it.
Another repreave. It was public school for me. XD
Closest thing I did was CCD, and even that was nothing like the horror stories I heard. (Then agien, didn’t get taught by nuns, but rather actual educators XD)
No, but I could quickly tire of ridiculously silly comments that refer to Joyce as “your average Christian.”
Did you just, sort’f, pass over the part where it was said that Sierra is the average Christian in the strip?
No, he didn’t. He was replying to geheime138.
Ah.
@geheime138: It would be impossible to be tired of how ridiculously silly David is portraying your average Christian, because he isn’t. Joyce can be ridiculously silly, but she isn’t your average Christian.
No one who has read David Willis’ previous work would accuse him of portraying Christians, on average, as ridiculously silly.
Walky and Dorothy are parishoners of the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn. S/HE is Pink because although Invisible, they have faith, and it tells them that their deity, although is unseen and unknowable, is a Unicorn.
Yeah I gotta say hearing Walky or anyone else say what he said in the first panel to my face would hurt. That being said, I wouldn’t have Joyce’s reaction if I heard a friend was having a sleepover with their boyfriend in their room.
So many ways you can word Joyce’s last line, but her face says it all. lol
The Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves? I lived there through most of the 1980s.
Housing is surprisingly affordable here.
I should probably look into it.
I might give it a try after I graduate.
Like the Snowy Pride-Mountains of the Chastity-Bobcats is any better. You can’t even do it for the sake reproducing.
Like the Snowy Pride-Mountains of the Chastity-Bobcats is any better. You can’t even do it for the sake of reproducing.
Well, it’s no “Premarital Hanky-Panky”.
She doesn’t want the word marital and Walky to associate in Dorothy’s brain.
your 2nd. Book title should be “Jammie Jeans and The Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves” .
“Cragged shame pits of the lust-wolves” sounds like the cover band for Dingos Ate my Baby.
And considering Oz’s alternate form and him getting it on with Willow, somewhat ironic.
My God. Someone call Seth Green and give him this idea!
I’m cold and there are Lustwolves after me.
Nothing wrong with a bit of… Lustwolving… wolflusting… lust… Hanky-Panky
dammit people, less theological debates and more butt tacos!
also, i’ll save my opinions on how crazy joyce is in this universe until tomorrow, when i assume dorothy’ll let her know she’s already been cast to the lust-wolves…..i wonder if that’ll be the first walky’s heard of it too……i sense mike is somehow behind all this.
“The Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves” would make a great band name.
Pretty sure there’s a black metal song called that.
It’s your own fault Joyce, you got them back together.
Do his jammies look like jeans, by chance?
Walkie is staying the night? But isn’t it still morning? Boy, he has some serious endurance.
It’s not premarital if you never marry.
I do say you seem to have found a magic loophole in the brickwall that is religious logic good show old boy
David: “The Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves,” by itself, would be an *OK* title for a book. But to make it a truly *great* title, you’d have to add the full name of the protagonist or another major character at the beginning, like so: “David Willis and the Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves.”
I feel a sudden urge to write an eighth Harry Potter book.
silly Dorothy…It was “NEVER” adorable!!!
I don’t feel welcome here anymore.
Don’t worry, Joyce will make a pest of herself for a short while longer, and then it’ll all be Billie and Ruth making out again.
I wasn’t aware that it was EVER adorable.
I would buy the hell out of a DoA book titled “The Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves.”
Ah here we see an “Internet Athiest” standing next to somebody that knows that people don’t generally care about what somebody else has to say about their religion unless you ask.
Though I guess Joyce DOES kind of push it on people (see: Last panel)
Careful now. Remember what happened to PA and the dickwolves.
Yes, I remember that. It was . . . interesting.
I see I’m late to the party
“The Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves” might be the name of my new band… That, or “Invisible Sky Wizard”. Which would have been better for a prog-rock band in the 70’s.
Is that a lustwolf in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Willis is having far too much fun drawing DOA!Joyce’s facial expressions
It was! It was the title of the book!
I wonder how many people think that “invisible sky wizard” counts as a straw man.