Much less of one, as knowing that you are going against something you stand for rather than ignorantly doing it means that you are empathising with the other side of the argument; seeing it from thier point of view rather than hypocritically ignoring parts of the rule set when you don’t like it.
She loves Becky enough to own her own morality and have a truer relationship with her God because of it, instead of accepting the one she’s been spoon-fed by people who (often) are using religious reasoning to gain secular power. That’s the BEST kind of love.
It’ll be a truer “relationship with her God” if she ends up saying “I believe God wouldn’t condemn homosexuality, so I think that everyone who ever wrote otherwise is wrong” rather than her current phase of trying to find loopholes in scripture, just so she can both pretend to respect scripture and ignore it.
Except He did. Twice. In the same book. And it’s a type of law that stayed constant in spite of Jesus effectively nullifying the binding of ceremonial law, as it were. The most wiggle room there is, is that God hates SIN as opposed to people and it only actually counts if you literally act on the sin.
It’s not really a matter of condemning the people who are homosexuals, but condemning the act of it. What you suggest is incongruous adherence to dogma.
Personally I think it’s all a scam he’s pulling to avoid the death penalty. And to make things worse he’s got his whole “search for redemption” thing mixed into my quest for the Knights of Cybertron!
Hey, Megzy, long time- Not wait, you don’t look like my Megadumb. Oh well, I’m not gonna follow you either :P.
Either way, that what I was doing, making my own rules;
Rule 1; To scrap with the Decepticons, I’m going AWOL.
Rule 2; No more following the A-Hole.
Rule 3; This Minicon Pretender is making his own way out there, having some fun…
I keep two microscopes in my desk. One’s a compound and I keep the 16X oil immersion objective lens loaded. The other’s got a miniature flask as one of the objective lens, and it keeps ME loaded. Name’s Mike Scope. I’m a professional scientist.
I introduced the dame to a friend who’s very close to my heart. A little down and to the left, to be specific.
My friend is a very eloquent speaker. He made three profound arguments while I excused myself from the room. I always leave when the talk gets philosophical.
Dina’s taking the best approach for breaking people out of religious thought: drop some facts, walk away. Let them stew. Eventually they figure it out on their own, or they don’t. You can’t push ’em.
And it’s not exactly unheard of for scientists to modify their results to support their favored conclusion (i.e., the Japanese stem cell breakthrough that wasn’t from earlier this year). Hypocrisy is alive and well on both sides of the science/religion debate (a debate that doesn’t need to be a thing, IMO, but nobody asked my opinion.)
What science/religion debate?
Science is about logic and evidence.
Religion is about unquestioning faith.
Bad science is what happens when scientists claim authority without having evidence to back them up. When people trust people just because they have a Ph.D., science becomes just another cult.
So yeah, some people don the mantle of science while acting like a priesthood — but on the religious side, even the ideal of basing your world-view on experiment and observation doesn’t even exist.
I agree with you, it is bad science. Just trying to point out that confirmation bias isn’t a religion thing, it’s a human thing.
And perhaps I shouldn’t have said “debate”. I’m referring to the idea that a person can’t be simultaneously religious and a scientist and that holding to either science or religion invariably hinders the other, which certainly is something that exists.
I guess you can be religious and be a scientist at the same time, as long as the areas where you are clinging to pre-conceived notions and the areas where you are doing research don’t overlap.
I’m not sure how that would work, though. Being open to evidence in some areas but being dogmatic in others. That makes no sense to me.
To Thomas64:
The only thing you “need” to count as “religious” is a belief in a higher power. As long as you are willing to let that higher power operate by the as-yet-not-quite-completely-discovered laws of the universe and not according to some book some guy passes off as the unquestionable truth, then you can be both scientific and religious.
You would be surprised how well people can compartimentalize. I know this biomedical microbiologist that is currently doing some research with multiresistant bacteria but still refuses to believe in evolution.
Don’t ask me how her brain works. She just says that multiresistant bacteria proves nothing, and evolution is a myth. And fossils are devil’s weapons to take men from God’s Path, but the trilobites she tested some stuff on? Just fine sea bugs.
According to my GF (biomedical researcher), every religious person she ever worked with is like that. That one is just the weirdest one due to being the most, for want of better word, fanatical one.
It’s a bit of a stretch to say that Buddhism rests on an evidence-based worldview. Pretty much the only thing I’ve seen that even remotely suggests that is Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, saying that if his religious concepts were disproven, he would stop holding to them.
I think Eolirin means that, if I recall correctly, it is believed that the Buddha realized the true nature of reality thru observation and deduction, and then suddenly “awakened” from the “sleep of ignorance”.
However I take that, from then on, the followers just believe in what he said is true, and so it is another dogmatic religion anyway.
I must be wrong though. I have little knowledge about Buddhism.
No, they’ve added their own twists. Heck, there’s a doctrine focused on, depending on your cynicism, syncretism or appropriation. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, new evidence does not really enter the list of religious bases.
Or any study that is repeated until the desired results occur. Or one that alters definitions in order to make itself right. Or cuts short because the results are what is wanted right now, but might not be if the study continued.
Actually, that poses an interesting question. Flying things fall under a different section of the kosher law than other animals. The flying pig might be kosher. Lemme check.
*checks* …. why the hell does it need to forbid owls three separate times?
Okay, so having reread, the flying pig MIGHT be forbidden because of it’s a swine, despite being a flying swine. Or it might be forbidden because it doesn’t chew its cud. Or it might be forbidden because it’s a flying creature that goes upon four legs and isn’t a locust, beetle, grasshopper, or bald locust. (But those have 6 legs?) It’s got to be in one of those two categories, and it’s against kosher either way.
So bottom line, it’s a clean animal, because New Covenant and delicious bacon.
Flying creatures are excluded from the kosher list (not kosher if it’s on the list), mammals are included (kosher if they have a cloven hoof and chew cud) so if a flying pig were deemed a bird first instead of a swine with extras, it would be kosher.
I never knew the chew cud thing as being a requirement for something to be kosher. I find that fascinating because, to me, an uninformed non-jewish person, it seems odd to say that something is kosher because it burps up its own food and swallows it again. It seems a weird thing to list in official documentation as a requirement.
I love how I learn new things all the time in DOA’s comment section. This is in stark contrast to many other comment sections. 🙂
The OT kosher rules, as far as I can recall from Jew School, fall into three categories: God says don’t eat that or in that way, your food is potentially full of diseases. As the wandering Jews are a bunch of whiny ex-slaves in a desert, they will try and put anything in their mouths, so NO. The People Over There eat this thing and call it special. God doesn’t want you to be like the People Over There, so don’t eat their special foods and try and be like them. NO. Remember how earlier God called us a bunch of whiny ex-slaves in the desert? He was being generous. We need some strict rules to train us to be ethical human beings to avoid the Lord of the Flies situation that us Jews get into about once or twice EVERY “begatting”, and that extends to how/where/what we eat. so, NO.
Actually, most OT rules fall into these three categories: Practical Rules to keep people safe, Cultural Rules to keep the Jews a distinct culture from the rest of the world, and Ethical Rules that aren’t really about what they allow or forbid but are about how they make you behave.
Rabbis have been debating the details of which laws are which category and how important each one is and where is the wiggle room is pretty much since rabbis were invented.
What animals does that cover? Griffons? Dragons? Flying squirrels maybe(does gliding count?) This rule may only exist to stop jews from eating flying pig.
I believe the leg was part of the initial punishment and he didn’t lose the arm originally, but used that to exchange for his brothers soul at least so he could bind it to the suit
People do that with or without the help of a translation. But translating the Bible is a tricky business. Some of the most popular translations among the biblical literalist set are, interestingly, paraphrase translations, meaning that the translators are trying to capture the sense of the original language, not translate literally. Of course, this means the translation, while more readable, is less accurate.
And there are many passages in the Bible where there are words that no one is quite sure about, so they do their best to fill in the meaning from context. And then the received texts sometimes don’t match ancient manuscripts of the same text that turn up–the Nag Hammadi Scrolls and the Dead Sea Scrolls being two examples of ancient finds that have turned up versions of biblical texts that don’t match the ones that made it into our Bibles.
And then there are influential commentaries that tell people how certain passages are *supposed* to be interpreted. Not necessarily based on contemporary scholarship about the original texts and their cultural context.
If you have any notion of modern techniques of textual analysis at all, Biblical literalism pretty much implodes.
That isn’t to say the Bible is useless as a religious guide–it just has to be used carefully.
Biblical literalism is a 16th century methodology that was very useful for critiquing medieval Roman Catholic practices, but is problematic as a guide to 21st century life.
Here’s a really great description of the Council of Nicea (which determined what books were going to be canonical), retold using the metaphor of nerds arguing which fics are canonical. It is one of my favorite bits of liturgical comedy writing on the internet:
As a theologian and Biblical scholar, I always found the whole ‘Biblical Literalism’ thing quite amusing, because THE BIBLE ITSELF DOESN’T SUPPORT IT. For example: if Genesis 1 is literally true, then Genesis 2 can’t be (and vice versa). Jeremiah 7:4 states that anyone who claims that the written word is exclusively God’s truth is mistaken (and in several places he claims that the words written in Leviticus are a lie – Jeremiah 6:20 and 7:22 being only two such examples – compare with Leviticus 1:9 and 23:27 respectively). Ezekiel chapters 40 – 46 contradictory of the Torah (compare, for example, Ezekiel 46:6 and Numbers 28:11). 2 Kings 10:30 and Hoses 1:4 give EXACTLY OPPOSITE opinions about the Will of God in a specific event (the murder of the Israelite Royal Family by Jehu). In Matthew 19, when talking about divorce laws, Jesus himself tells his disciples that Moses made parts of the Bible up to please the people (and let’s face it, if anyone’s going to know if the Bible is literally true or not, it’s Jesus)
Indeed, if there’s one thing I learned when I started to move on from the ‘scriptural apologetics’ phase, it’s that the biblical writers loved a good argument.
In fact, the single most mind-blowing / world-rearranging lightbulb moment (and one I hope Joyce soon reaches) was the realisation that the Bible wasn’t the Word of God but the preserved words of humans writing about God, and their evolving understanding of his nature.
@Peruhain: Actually, a ‘thought-for-thought’ translation (where the translator is trying to capture the intent and context of the source language) is generally more accurate if you’re aiming for the meaning of the text – which is most of the time. A word-for-word translation is likely to confuse the meaning by bringing in unfamiliar phrasing, idioms and false friends. It would only be more valuable if you’re studying the language itself and how it phrased things. IMHO (but with some translation experience).
IIRC, there are two main branches of biblical translation following from the KJV: those running with the word-for-word /formal approach (NKJV, ESV, RV, Scofield) and those running with the thought-for-thought / functional approach (NRSV, ESV, NLT – my personal preference), with the NIV falling somewhere between but more on the formal side. My general experience has been that conservatives favour the formal versions, while liberals favour the functional versions.
*re-reads*
Ugh, mussed up some of the details there through c&p / rewriting. ESV, NRSV should be on the formal side I think; functional should include NCV and others. The general points still stand though.
Yeah a lot “Suffer Not The Witch To Live” was changed with pretty much every translation most scholars figure it was originally closer to “Suffer not the poisoner to live”. The King James version of the Bible was commissioned to Shakespeare and he was told to reword quit a few things.
BoomWolf, there’s also the issue that a lot of the oldest biblical texts aren’t actually originals in the way we think of originals. They are copies or translations of earlier versions.
Also, they are not all in great shape, so not only do you have to worry about translating words from a language which has greatly shifted over time, you have to worry about trying to read pages that have been damaged by age, physical wear, rodent/insect damage, decay, etc.
And, on top of all of that, punctuation is a fairly modern thing. From what I understand (and any biblical scholars please correct me if I’m wrong), the earliest texts don’t have periods, commas, etc, so a lot of things are open for multiple interpretations. For example:
And he said to his people in the desert go prepare a place for me.
Does that mean his people are in the desert when he talked to them and he wants them to go prepare a space somewhere or does that mean he had a chat with his people somewhere and he wants them to go to the desert and prepare a space for him?
Have courage, Melissa! Once done, you will be glad of it. People who love you, love YOU! Not whichever set of secondary sexual characteristics you find interesting. I encourage you to be you. Define yourself by hiw YOU feel and what YOU think not others.
Prayers for courage and perseverance for you, and for discernment for your loved ones. Note that I’m not praying for you to change your sexuality–that, IMO, is a gift from God, part of how you are created.
The six passages in the Bible that mention (male) same-sex attraction don’t make a rock-solid case against male homosexual relationships if considered carefully, and the Bible never once mentions female same-sex attraction. Most importantly, I think, Jesus never mentioned same-sex attractions at all, and in general we know that he reached out to a lot of people who were considered beyond the pale of God’s love by the society around them.
That’s what it comes down to for me, as a Christian. I have a hard time believing that a guy who is almost universally associated with a message of acceptance and love would want us to to hate LGBTQ folks.
No shame. I pussy out every goddamn time I see my sisters. Now I’m in the weird position of having no idea how many or which of them have actually picked up on it since I joined the Seattle Men’s Chorus.
well, not your first family. your first family is as you recieve it. When you reach a certain life point, however, you can easily alienate yourself and choose others from your community to be your new family
My point is precisely that: you can’t choose even the friends that you make. Most of those are still just a result of the random process of who you meet. Even if you try and find friends of a certain kind, your still unlikely to actually make such friends.
I wish you the best of luck when you do come out. As others have said, if you’re still living with them, then it could be best to wait. I waited to come out as trans* and as a lesbian until I had plans set to move to another state, myself. If you aren’t living at home, then you’ve got your pick of times. I’ll be hoping you get good results when you do come out.
Of course, you know who did use the ‘selected’ dogma of Christianity (and other beliefs) to ‘pick and choose’ items that would fit his political agenda, which was founded on his personal biases?
If I’m parsing what you’re saying correctly, in that you think that NotFred should only respond that way if Yotomoe was really calling her a heathen, I disagree.
Even as a joke, it’s really out of left field because it’s addressing something Joyce didn’t say.
Yotome sarcasm is obvious and funny, as ever, but I can’t connect the uppercase part with the lowcase part. I mean, I might rather understand something like “No Joyce, don’t do that NO ONE IN…”.
See this is what I’m always wondering about. Religions, socieities, communities, and every institution has always had a moral system of some kind. Then for religions, does that make you a true believer to follow the rules of something you disagree with, or a scared follower. Does disregarding something make you a hypocrite, or a moral person?
The system in general would say it makes you a “true believer,” but that’s because they’re The Man.
Personally though (and I say this as a practicing Catholic), I’ve always thought that disregarding something like that makes you a ~more~ moral person, not less, because it means you’re doing the right thing for morality’s sake (as opposed to because you want a reward). Fear of eternal damnation shouldn’t be the only thing keeping you from being a dick to your fellow human beings, you know? Like, if someone says “if you catch this baby you’ll be eternally punished,” a truly moral person would catch the baby anyway.
Which leads to the question, what use is a system that tells you to follow these rules, if everyone, Okay not everyone but a decent amount, will eventually just pick and choose which ones that they want to follow, so long as they agree with them?
Most people in the US who are Jewish or Christian, have pretty much thrown out the rules in Leviticus.
At what point does a system, any system, cease having an effect, and simply becoming a tool for people to justify themselves?
I’d actually argue that the rules and regulations in Leviticus still have an effect, their desired effect, even. The point was not to set down rules of morality as such (although that was often a side effect), but to set apart the Hebrews as different from other groups. For instance, it’s not immoral to wear clothes made of more than one material, but it’s something the Hebrews did not do. In that sense, it’s still working, as anyone who still follows them is instantly recognizable.
In some sense, you could say that this is the point of any set of laws and customs: to differentiate your “tribe” from everybody else.
I think what you’ve hit on is the distinction between religion and religious institutions. I think someone who is religious can and in most cases will still use their own judgment when it comes to morality. This is why I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a good or evil religion. Evil people will use religion to justify doing evil, good people will use it to justify doing good.
Institutions on the other hand (and as you indicated this goes for many institutions not just religious ones) thrive by having people conform to their specific morality. One of the big problems with many religious institutions (more so than other institutions) is that much of the morality was created centuries or even millennia ago, especially when it comes to the holy books. And obviously once a certain type of morality is in place, people who adhere to this morality are most likely to rise to the top, thereby continuing the previous system. However this does not mean all people following the institution will follow the same moral dogma, nor that change is inevitable (just look at the changes Pope Francis has decided to make).
Many forms of traditional religious scholarship believe that personal interpretation *is* the correct way to read holy texts.
There are also some really interesting interpretations that relate to the whole “doing something for the greater good even when you know you will be damned” thing. Some people say Abraham FAILED the test when he agreed to sacrifice Isaac, and there’s a lovely little Judas fandom who think he made the ultimate sacrifice: agreeing to go to hell and be hated for all eternity so that Jesus could get the ending that had been foreseen for him.
Judaism’s had some back and forth on that since it’s much more strictly(-ish) tribal than most Christian sects. So you had the reform movement (“it’s the 18th century, we can still be Jewish without all these ancient laws like kashrut”) and the conservative counter-movement (“change is good, but we’re gonna pick some of those discarded laws back up as long as they aren’t hurting anybody”) but we generally see the other groups as still Jews, even if we think they’re doing it wrong.
Does the Bible even condemn lesbianism? I know it comes down hard on gay men, but I don’t think it technically says women are in trouble for liking women.
Then again, the Bible isn’t exactly kind to women in general, so never mind.
No, actually. I learned this from a Jewish ex-girlfriend. The only reason gay sex is forbidden is because it wastes sperm – the same reason that condoms and masturbation are also technically forbidden. Meanwhile, a female orgasm is a – let me see if I can spell this right – “mihtvsa” – a blessed occurrence. Since women don’t have sperm, and their orgasms are blessed, technically lesbian sex is actually a good thing according to the old testament (and the New Testament doesn’t say anything about gay people either way).
That passage is pretty oblique. What did Paul consider “unnatural” female intercourse? You could guess all kinds of things–lesbian sex, buttsex, horses, kinky positions, or whatever–but basically it allows the reader to define what is natural. Since our study of the natural world has turned up the fact that same-sex sex is quite common among many species, including humans, who is to say that lesbian sex is unnatural?
He didn’t approve of reproduciton either. My understanding of his writings is that he thought that everyone should forgo sex and family because Jesus was about to return Real Soon Now anyway, but that it was “better to marry than to burn”. There is some speculation that he may even have been a eunuch.
I don’t think any phenomena that can occur in accordance with the laws of natural science – discovered or undiscovered – are unnatural. But that’s just me.
Even if you use a more conventional definition of “natural”, humans have lived unnatural lives for thousands of years. Agriculture, food preservation, houses, clothing, cooking and heating fires, medicine, literature, song and dance, etc… Even the ancients’ lives were unnatural as hell. What’s a little non-reproductive recreational sex on top of all that?
Actually, your ex is wrong. A lot of people make that mistake. Onan pulled out spilling his seed instead of getting is deceased brother’s wife pregnant. A lot of people think the Sin of Onan is the spilling of seed. That’s incorrect. The Sin was not fulfilling his family duties by having the family line continue, not getting his sister-in-law pregnant.
Another thing people get wrong is the Sin of Sodom. A lot of people think that the sin which gave its name to sodomy was homosexuality. That’s incorrect. The Sodomites asked to know the Angels. Never has that phrase meant “to have sex with.” What the sin of Sodomy was inhospitality. Hospitality is very important in the Middle-East to this day.
I think that’s why the much-mocked bit about Lot offering his daughters to the crowd is in there as well. The intent is to contrast Lot’s extreme (even considering the time and culture differences, I’m pretty sure that would be extreme) hospitality to the general population’s total lack of same.
Actually, it did. In many languages other than English, including Hebrew, there are two words for “know”, one for people and one for non-people. If you use the non-people word for “know” when taking about a person, it’s generally understood as a euphemism for “I had sex with that person”.
Now, I don’t have my hands on the original Hebrew Bible or the Torah, but I’m pretty sure they used the non-people “know”, hence the English phrasing “to know someone in the Biblical sense”.
@No Name: In Biblical Hebrew the word “la’da’at” (to know) is used as a euphemism for sexual relations. What makes translation tricky is that there is a separate word for rape, which is clearly what the inhabitants of Sodom wished to perform (followed shortly by murder) before the angels blinded them.
The traditional romanization is “mitzvah” but spellings vary when typing Hebrew with roman characters. Like the twenty ways to spell Channukkah/Hanuka.
I don’t think it mentions it. And even on gay men, it really just technically condemns sodomy, as long as you are gay but chaste it doesn’t matter. I think it was just an hygiene issue that got put in there “Don’t put your pecker in another dude’s asshole, crap comes out from there! Ew!” isn’t quite as poetic and godly…
Leviticus 18:22, as I recall. “Man shall not lie with mankind as with womankind, it is abomination.” Translations vary a bit. And, indeed, no mention of girl-on-girl. Indeed, Luke 17:35 says that when Jesus returns, “two women shall be grinding together, and one shall be taken and the other left.” (Yes, I know that’s not what they meant, but I don’t get to make a lot of tribadism jokes, okay?)
Other translations of Leviticus 18:22
LOLcats: “No can has ghey… srsly. srry, but no.”
Silent Voices(Feminist Bible): “You shall not lie with a woman, as with a man. That is detestable.”
Yeah, abomination is a modern translation that wasn’t in the original. A mistranslation of a mistranslation. A guy I know who’s read the bible in 3 different languages says the word in the original Hebrew is closer in meaning to “a ritual uncleansing.” Also, it’s not a general command. It’s in the section of commands to priests. As well, the phrase is very awkward, and is not written properly, so people add their own words to make it translate to mean how they want. This changes the meaning.
Actually, it isn’t. It condemns that which is “unnatural” – which lesbian sex (or any gay sex) is not (see above posts from someone else about homosexuality being extremely common throughout the animal Kingdom). Since there is no definition for what “unnatural” means, Romans 1:26-27 is effectively meaningless. It doesn’t stop people from quoting it, but they are misquoting it since historical experts agree that the phrase did NOT refer to lesbians (or any other form of gay sex).
The dodge about whether same sex sexual relations is a wiggle, and a pretty damned weak one at that. We know quite well what the author meant by the phrase, and claims about other animals or the like come off as absurdities. (FWIW, you can strengthen it by pointing that there are words in that passage which occur nowhere else is *all* of our preserved Greek literature, so it’s not clear what those words mean.)
Better wiggles are to say that it’s not clear what Paul meant by the whole chapter — it doesn’t fit within the flow of the letter at all, and so could equally well be a list of false doctrines Paul was about to comment upon. It could even be a later insertion from another text; we just don’t know. Either way, one can accept the plain meaning of the passage and question its function in context. That’s got the advantage of even fitting within the scope of modern biblical criticism.
Not sure about the wiggle room thing, but then again according to the Bible we’re not supposed to get haircuts. And I don’t know a lot of Christians who resemble Rapunzel, so…
Don’t forget the hats! If you don’t wear a hat, the angels will come down and have sex with you, and if you are a dude, it will be gay sex. Or, the wrong king of hat.
Not true, the issue is only the payot(side locks) and shaving the beard with a razor(electronic razors, scissors, etc are all acceptable). The payot also need not be terribly long; the long, curly payos are mainly a hasidic thing.
A common and quite ignorant claim. Acts 10 (St. Peter’s Dream) frees all Christians from the Levite code.
Notice that Joyce doesn’t mention Leviticus when she answers Mary — she only mentions Romans. That’s because the passage from Leviticus is not binding, and the passage from Timothy obviously must have been misconstrued, and its literal meaning is clearly obscured.
Just because literalism is not literalism — when you get down to the facts, there are always cases like the passage from Timothy which literalists have to dodge by saying that the literal meaning has not yet been revealed — does not mean that its adherents are stupid. They’re not, and making stupid and self-righteous claims about things you haven’t bothered to understand is every bit as bigoted as the kinds of absurdities they spout.
Shut up and listen to Willis here — he’s rejected fundamentalism after learning it thoroughly. He knows what he’s talking about; you don’t.
Is this where Joyce discovers the Bible is so male-centric it doesn’t even bother to state its opinion about women being homosexual as opposed to how it condemns “men who lay with men”?
Joyce is really willing to stand up to God for Becky, to even try to do this. Not sure what will happen if she doesn’t find the answers she needs, but this is a start for her, given her whole belief system.
Also, Sarah keeping up her no-pants streak. That is a belief system I can support without question.
I thought the most reliable path to atheism was “being raised fundamentalist”…
Researching the Bible hasn’t made me atheist, but if I’d been brought up to believe that it’s God’s Literal Words, No Argument, Nuh-Uh, If This Falls Then Everything Falls With It, it might be a different story.
So in another case for the “Willis is nailing this right on the head” file, noticing that my sinner friends weren’t the depraved, damned people the Bible seemed to say they were was the reason I began to fall away from my religion. I read the entire Bible several times, and eventually there was so much I had to ignore to continue believing it that the strain on my faith was too great. The real clincher was the fact that I never had any spiritual experience. Thanks for telling this story Willis, I identify. Oh uh I mean damn you for making me feel feels.
Yeah, it was easy to not think too hard about how most Christians say non-Christians go to hell when all my friends were Christian. After having agnostic and atheist friends, the cognitive dissonance that I had been dealing with became impossible to ignore.
I wanna make an D&D alignment grid with nine of the more notable Joyce faces. This one can be True Neutral.
Actually I may have to de-nerd that one slightly, I’m not sure I could find 3 Joyce faces where she actually looks Evil. So, maybe a Brady Bunch grid of Joyce faces.
Maybe look for strips where she’s talking to Walky. She gives him a few nasty faces. Or perhaps you were thinking of a gleefuly evil face, in which case, I can’t help you.
If you go with Luzahn’s suggestion, though, her “Dorothy’s-an-atheist?” face works well.
It is maddeningly difficult to locate the “It’s Walky” strips where Anti-Joyce appears, but if you can find them, it should give you some “evil Joyce” material.
The problem of theocracy is that any given religious leaders personal preference on anything becomes the word of god on the subject. Traffic rules become subject to theological debate, because there are no laws that aren’t god’s laws. With or without kings, Israel was a theocracy. Also, most people chose to forget that far more rules existed over the color of clothing, than homosexual behavior, and violations had the same penalty.
Yeah, but that’s the thing. Leviticus (for example) reads less like holy scripture and more like the bronze age book of laws for the Israeli people of 1200 BC or whenever this was written. Therefore I treat the bulk of that stuff as interesting historical laws and not religious precepts handed down from on high….cause it doesn’t even LOOK like it was written to be taken that way.
Same here. I’m Jewish and I give respect to the traditions, but I read the Torah as something between an oral history a la The Iliad, and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories like How the Elephant Got its Trunk.
Just-So Stories is in fact exactly the analogy I’m using with my 8yo, to counteract the unexamined nursery rhyme version he tends to pick up from church kids’ groups.
Hey look, it’s that thing I did!
Careful Joyce, once you start digging, you’ll find out this metaphorical house has no foundation. And then you look up and realize it’s been pieced together out of driftwood and the entire second floor is made of nothing but duct tape.
If you thinking of the one I’ve heard of you may be waiting until the end of time … and anyway he’s usually too busy getting nailed to do much carpentry.
It’s her default state, based on her life experiences “the world is going to burn me, regardless of what I do – my only hope is to be vigilant and catch it in the act.”
Ooo there are tons of theories on the gay passage! Or at least one of ’em anyway. The ‘man shall not lie with man’ one has been considered by some to be an anti rape passage, (not in favor of the ladies tho) and some are of the opinion that if it WAS against homosexuality, it was simply put there to remind people to make babies instead of have fun. Population control didn’t seem as big of an issue at the time. Whereas now…man I feel guilty wanting to have kids with the current status of our world!
“Population control” in that period (most of recorded history, in fact) mostly consisted of having as many as you could, because some would die of various diseases and accidents, and you wanted to have enough to fend off the next bunch over when they showed up to kill you and take your stuff – or, even better, enough to spare that you could go kill them and take their stuff.
Nice, simple, effective. Fails in all kinds of nasty ways when you start changing the underlying conditions and assumptions… which is what we’ve done in the last few hundred years. But too many of us are still playing by the old rules, because they’ve always worked up until now…
Many of these recent strips have been particularly powerful. I’m finding Joyce to be an increasingly engaging character – much to my surprise and enjoyment. What a well-executed arc.
I’m a godless heathen and all, but I think it’s worth remembering that that’s the same part of the bible that says you shoud ritually murder the participants when a man and woman have sex when she’s on her period. Whatcha think of that one, Joyce, huh?
Unfortunately, the New Testament does cover lesbians, for example, Romans 1:26, “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
Not to split hairs, but it only specifies what kind of “unnatural relations” were being committed by the men. Doesn’t say anything specific about the women. We can infer it means being gay, but for all we know they were talking about who gets to be on top. Also the Bible generally has nothing good to say about LUST anyway, which begs the question where it stands on loving vs lustful homosexual relationships.
Obligatory response:
Note that it identifies the sin as excessive lust – as I understand it, there was no real conception of non-hetero sexuality at the time and the accepted lens was that it arose from an excess of lust that could not be satisfied with a ‘natural’ partner. (Needless to say, some segments of society are stll clinging hard to that view.)
On ‘unnatural’ acts – again, my understanding only – the reference is to a man willingly assuming the ‘submissive’ role, or a woman the ‘active’ role, both socially taboo at the time. Male-on-male sex was mostly known in the context of the rape of captives or slaves, or pederasty. Once more, no concept of sexuality as in the modern way of thinking.
Wow, do you understand wrong. Wrong like whoa. Protip, the Romans loved themselves some greeks, and greeks loved themselves some dude banging. Plenty of roman men preferred men; if you want to see it humorously, you can go read some of the graffiti uncovered at pompeii (For instance). Seriously, this all just reeks of… wrong.
This is important, because I want to be clear here – the best way to read 1:26 is that, counter to many contemporary thoughts on banging (albeit in agreement with a scattered few others), gay sex is bad (The single nicest reading is that it’s a ‘punishment’)
I’m open to correction if I’m wrong; time to go do some more research, I think. Do you have any particular sources to start with? I’ve not really seen much to suggest that the modern concept of ‘gayness’ as an innate and unchosen aspect of identity existed back then, and Paul’s big on self-control.
Not arguing that Paul’s personal / cultural biases aren’t in play here, and it’s very likely that he did consider all non-hetero sex to be intrinsically off-limits. (This is Paul we’re talking about, after all.) Even if that’s the case and he’s just hatin’ him some gays, it should be considered in light of the whole narrative rather than excerpted as a clobber verse (like anything else in the bible, really).
Still, similar to the Lot example, I’d been given to understand that the situations Paul was likely thinking of had less to do with the same-sexness of the acts themselves than with the power dynamics, consensuality or cultural assumptions surrounding them. Chicken, egg, symptom, cause, all muddled up.
Unnatural can mean many different things. Bestiality for example. The term unnatural just leaves it too open for interpretation. Where they seeking relations with other women? Animals? Were they just becoming dominate? Maybe they started getting multiple husbands, which would certainly throw a wrench in trying to keep your city populated. It’s too vague to actually tell what was meant, a problem much of the bible suffers from.
It’s also Leviticus, which was written for the Levites–in other words, the priestly tribe. Most of its do’s and don’ts have to do with ritual purity, not necessarily morality, though it’s addressed. It’s also in a chapter that deals with clean and unclean practices. Context.
…no. Just no. Leviticus was for the tribes in general – which is why its name in hebrew has nothing to do with ‘levite’. And you just said homosexuality is unclean in spite of that.
Rutee, the name for Leviticus in Hebrew was originally “Torat Kohanim”, which translates into “The Laws for Priests”. While the Levites were not the priesthood (those would be the aforementioned Kohanim) the title “Leviticus” is pretty close.
Wikipedia claims it is currently ויקרא, Vayikra/Wayikra. Some passages do refer to the priests specifically, but the bulk is not addressed to the priesthood.
Well-meanng people find different ways of interpreting this passage, and whether or not they’re valid is beyond my experience. One I heard of was that it really means “don’t treat a man like you would treat a woman,” i.e. badly. But to believe that you have to be able to accept that the Bible is often misogynistic, especially the Old Testament.
Ezekiel 16:49 says Sodom’s sin was pride, gluttony, and a lack of charity.
Leviticus condemns pork, shellfish, foreskins, shaving, and wearing blended fabrics at least as much as it condemns homosexuality. The other rules got ignored as Jewish rules that didn’t apply to gentiles. (with much debate in the early church)
Paul at one point admits that what he has to say about homosexuality isn’t directly from God, he just thinks God would agree with him. Also in Paul’s day, “homosexuality” wasn’t an identity, it was grown men taking young boys as lovers of dubious consent, which he was quite right to call out. Paul speaks against people “denying their nature” sexually, and you could argue that “born that way” wasn’t a theory that existed at the time.
Also, wasn’t the whole point of denying homosexuality because, at the time, everyone needed to reproduce as often as possible to keep the species going? At this point, the species doesn’t require that everyone reproduce. In fact, it’d probably help if a lot of people /stopped/ having kids since overpopulation is becoming a bit of an issue…. or maybe it’s just population density, I don’t know what I’m talking about really. I just like to be involved.
No, not everyone needed to reproduce as often as possible or the consequences were death. Maybe, MAYBE, before recorded history was common, that was a thing. By the time the Jews settled in what is today israel, that wouldn’t have been a concern. That’s not to say population was, by any means, a bad thing, and the modern specter of overpopulation didn’t exist either. But the pressing NEED for every warm body just to continue existing? Naw.
Having more warm bodies than your neighbors – to, if necessary, throw at your neighbors – was, however, kind of important in a setting with limited resources and constant inter-tribal warfare.
Population is a resource, but in that context, not much of one. Population’s use more lies (and lied, even then) in helping make sure you don’t get into that situation in the first place. But more to the point, I didn’t say population wasn’t useful, I said that people weren’t under existential threat for its lack by then.
What people don’t know is that there’s a secret bible written in invisible ink on the back of every page. That bibles totally okay with gay. Get your lemon juice and Ben Franklin goggles everyone!
As long as I wield the Reality infinity Gem; I’m allowed to create paradoxes, and contradictions! Now, I just need the other five, and then Jacob and Rox will become a couple!Maybe I’ll throw a little Sarah and Robin in there just for some flavor.
I don’t like Joyce. But I do like that she is being honest with herself here and facing up to what she’s actually doing. Standing up for her friends beliefs, when she doesn’t believe in it herself is a big step for her.
Sarah has always been good for Joyce, she doesn’t let her wiggle out of her conventions.
She stood up to her parents and stayed friends with Dorothy, an atheist. Then she just sort of swept all that under the rug and kept on as she had been, trying not to think about it. Not exactly honest, but commendable as a step forward.
Now she’s sticking to her friendship with Becky and actually looking for logic on line to support her feelings vs her religion. Huge step.
It has been mentioned here that homosexuality was looked at as a ‘crime’ in many ancient cultures. But not all.
A tribe of very early American Indians graves were recently discovered and while the men and women were buried with different styles in the way they were buried-direction they were laid out in and the jewelry for women and weapons for men: there were a few curious graves. In these the skeletons were definitely men, but were buried as women, except shown respect with weapons and jewelry buried with them. This seemed to show that the men were possiblily and likely homesexual, but were in good standing members of clan, accepted and respected.
Ancient Greeks were not shy about homosexuality, among others.
As also mentioned, homosexuality looked down on by some societies as being non-reproductive members of society, and with high child birth death rates, it was a waste.
As to the Bible: so many ‘interritations” including chapters discovered in the Vatican about 50 years ago that were not included in the Bible available to laymen.
I have always thought that having Priests interpret the writings for me, made as much sense as the jokers on tv that interpret the Presidents speech for me – after I just sat and listened to it.
If anyone has common sense, they will figure things out for themselves.
I like the 10 Commandments as they stand. I don’t need a priest to tell me that Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wife”…really means that it’s okay as long as I don’t get caught.
You go Joyce, you’re getting there. Use that brain of yours.
I agree that Sarah is good for Joyce, but…doesn’t anybody think it’s uncool of Sarah is GUILTING Joyce now? Why’s Sarah gotta bash Joyce for this? Joyce is trying to open up her mind a bit here, and it’s a big step for her.
I know, I know, it’s SARAH; she disapproves of most everyone and everything…it’s just not the support that Joyce could use right now.
You may not find a lot in the original texts, Joyce, but have you considered looking into the various non-canonical Biblical texts — which would be considered “Bible fanfiction” in the modern era?
Sure, the CHURCH may have decreed that these Bible passages weren’t the works of God’s divine inspiration, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a peek in case God changes his mind one day…
Yeah, I had fun trying to explain to my mom that the bible as we know it today is a pretty good case of “history is written by the winners”, the winners in this case being the Catholic church and/or whoever it was that had immediate access to the first printing press. Quite a lot left on the cutting room floor, really.
I think Historical Jesus and Ronald Reagan are dead in the Dumbiverse (due to a lack of scifi elements needed to resurrect them), instead of certain other characters.
Now that I think of who exactly that entails, that might actually be a pretty good deal! Though Blaine devalues it a bit.
Hey so I’m non-religious with a Christian parent and an atheist parent, so maybe I’m getting things totally wrong…but didn’t Jesus command his followers to treat everyone with respect and even love? If you shut out a beggar who needs shelter for the night aren’t you also shutting out Christ or something?
Also, it may just be bitterness and booze talking, but why is it a horrible unforgivable sin up until a family member or close friend comes out to you and you realize that gay people are real and not some abstract monster made up by your youth pastor? :/
People like to ignore that part. I will say that I know some people who take a “hate the sin, not the sinner,” attitude towards it, which, while it’s kind of terrible to apply that philosophy to something that doesn’t hurt anyone, is…preferable.
As for your second question, I think you pretty much answered it yourself. It’s cause people fail to see strangers as real people just like themselves until one is staring them in the face.
At last count there were over FORTY THOUSAND different Christian denominations worldwide – each of them absolutely convinced that they are the one true religion, and each with sometimes wildly different interpretations of what the Bible says.
Oh man, out of context it seems so dirty. Put this down as another thing that would horrify Joyce if she was a bit more aware/saw what others see in what she says.
Or you could just treat the whole thing as a fanfic that was blown astronomically out of proportion and decide for yourself what is honorable behavior. You know, that exact thing you’re doing right now, Joyce?
“An orthodox Jewish man walks up to his rabbi. Hat in hand, he stammers out a question. “Rabbi,” he says, “You know I’m a good Jew. I keep all the laws, I observe the sabbath…” He goes on like this for a while. Rabbi gets impatient, asks him what he really wants to say. The man says, “Rabbi, I’m gay, and I’m in love with a man. What do I do?”
Rabbi pauses, looks up and says to the man: “There are 613 laws to follow for being kosher, right?” The man nods. “Well then,” the rabbi continues, “Work on the other 612, and you’re going to be way ahead of the rest of the people in this synagogue.”
I’m not one to say it’s a sin to be gay, but the message I like drawing from this is that there’s a hell of a lot more to being a good person of faith (let alone a good person!) than one arbitrary law that has no moral grounding in the world as we understand it to be today. Work on the big stuff, and the details and minutia are definitely looked over. And, you know, on a more Jesus-y note, there is that whole grace thing that he talked about a lot. People seem to lose sight of that for some reason. He was a lot harder on the religious right of his day than the outcasts, that’s for sure. Go figure.
That sounds very similar to Joyce attitude about homosexuality and lying (minor sin… which I HATE). I’m pretty sure she is reevaluating that attitude now though.
Joyce is not going to come off religion anytime soon. What she’s going to find out instead, is that people are wont to bend the Bible to support their own prejudices, while others try to find justification for what their conscience tells them is right.
Honestly, I hope Joyce finds what she’s looking for, because honestly I’m Christian, but don’t really believe homosexuality as bad (at all really) enough to constitute a sin. Now if it was done -just- for the lust (which people on both sides of the argument are probably guilty of) and such, yeah that kinda falls in line with a commandment (look upon, lust, adultery at heart, blah blah.)
But if it’s legit love and commitment there can’t be anything wrong with it because love is love. How a person feels is how they feel, and while some do try and succeed in changing that, many cannot and feel misery for the rest of their lives because of people who can’t accept that love doesn’t always know gender. The biggest argument that homosexuality = sin is one of the first things that man is told to do. ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ which is probably not even the original exact text.
You’re reading a composite pieced together and “interpreted” at different times by different people over the course of centuries, even millenia, Joyce. If there was once a perfect testament of right and wrong handed down by god… well… let’s just say your original source is out of reach.
I read that the translation is up for debate, with the “men who lay with men”. Apparently (and this may be as true as the contents of a bull’s behind) the original text was likely closer to “a man will not lie with a man who has been given to the church”. Or “an alter boy” for a distasteful level of irony.
Of course, this was just some thing I read once on the internet, so who knows how true it is? But given that Joyce doesn’t seem to stop going to class or interacting with males while menstruating, I think she’s got bigger issues with literally following her bible.
If God were serious about there being “one true” anything, there wouldn’t be four versions of the basic story of Jesus. There aren’t four versions of the Koran. Think of how confusing four versions of the Book of Mormon would be. Christianity is uniquely set up to be diverse, which can make people cling even more tightly to their chosen interpretation. Insisting on rapture and other modern innovations makes belief fragile rather than strong. Insisting on denying scientific discoveries makes belief fragile.
Insistence on ignoring scientific discoveries is a fairly recent trend in Christianity (like… within the past 100 years), and a depressing one at that (I’m a Christian who believes God created the world through evolution. Not a popular opinion.) Most scientific discoveries — especially about geology and how the earth is formed — were made by clergy. It’s only recently that reason became “the enemy of faith.”
Yeah, it caused a ruckus, but it was mostly because Galileo was kind of a jerk.
I’m serious, read his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The Heliocentrist is even named “Simpleton” (in Italian, of course). Whether or not this was intentional is moot, though, since “Simplicio” held the views of Pope Urban VIII, who was something of a friend until the Dialogue was published. And honestly, people can be jerks without meaning to.
The organized church’s hostile attitude towards heliocentrism wasn’t caused by superstition or fundamentalism though. Tensions were high and rising every year between the great catholic and protestant nations and the church was terrified of anything that could cause them to lose influence. The catholics didn’t try to censor Galileo because they believed he was wrong, but because they knew he was right.
And has far more to do with culture wars than it does with any actual belief system. Anti-intellectualism is a powerful tool for rabble-rousing demagogues of all stripes.
I dunno, I reckon it’s okay to take is as literal schlock. Even treated as a work of complete fiction it’s not very good. Way too wordy, needs a serious going over by a good editor.
There were many, many version of the Koran, since it was passed down orally and then only written down after Muhammad died. At some point any version that was decided to be the “wrong” version was destroyed. That aside it runs across the same problems the Bible has…written text can’t convey the same message once it hits multiple languages and cultures.
It just makes me really sad that there are still people who were/are raised this way, to think that all of their personal opinions and beliefs are harmful and wrong. Like the strip where Dorothy told Joyce to be proud of herself, and she said that she couldn’t, because that was a sin. Because everyone she’s ever come in contact with (before college) places religion above her worth as a human being. It’s just heartbreaking to me.
I’m here, too. I just don’t comment that much. I identify as Catholic, though (like WikiDreamer) my actual beliefs are more unaffiliated. That’s not to say I am an advocate for abortion or something like that, but actually it’s more that I put less emphasis on the authority of the Pope and transubstantiation than other Catholics.
Not at all. Going to St. Bronislava for Mass this afternoon. Holy day of obligation dontchaknow. But Catholics are very diverse in their beliefs. Some are fundies in disguise, while others could pass for neo-pagans. Despite its authoritarian tendencies, the primacy of an individual’s informed conscience is a central tenet. Catholics have believed just about anything and everything, mainly depending upon their culture. Just was reading a guy who was certain that virgin birth meant Jesus transported himself out of Mary with no birth process and that all good Catholics agreed with him. Most would think he was a nut case and hated women. Lots of No True Scotsman type arguments, which are mostly cultural and tribal and sexist. I just ignore them all.
nahhh it’s just that in the usa catholics are only half as common as protestants, and a lot of catholics have a very lax religion in comparison to protestants. i’m not from there and, if it helps, i was raised catholic, like i even attended the church groups at high school (mostly because there was free food), though i currently identify as agnostic in a “it doesn’t really matter” way
Here’s some advice, Joyce: Maybe…just maybe, you should associate with people because you like them and they’re decent human beings, not because a 2000 year old book written by a bunch of dudes playing a literary version of “Telephone” tells you who you can and can’t be friends with.
Even when I was going to Church every week my mind just wouldn’t accept the idea that a Loving Benevolent God would hate someone who liked the same naughty bits they have.
It always seemed more like humans putting their own prejudice into a deity so that didn’t feel like awful people for hating some of Gods Children because “Gay Germs” or something.
And Like Joyce I went to a Non-Denominational church and I still consider people I met there friends but it’ll never stop the fact that one of them said he stopped watching an episode of Glee just because two dudes kissed. It’ll always seem silly to me.
Seriously, Joyce? You don’t need to look into the Hebrew or Greek versions for this one.
Lesbians get all the wiggle room they want because females are basically property. Now they don’t get a go with lifestock. And have to raise a ruckus when getting raped in order not to get stoned afterwards but rather get married to the rapist.
But female-female sex? Nothing worthwhile in the Bible. Whereas male-male earns both a stoning, being one of the, uh, unforgivable? sins.
You got other problems. Like uncovering the source of the monthlies. Most gynecologists would really have to get stoned.
The saving grace for male homosexuals is not that there would be much wiggle room in the Bible for homosexual acts. The saving grace is that a lot of modern life is good for getting a stoning so it seems sort of pointless to harp on homosexuality specifically.
Man, never posted a comment on one of these before, despite having read the comic almost since inception, but today’s kind of hit close to home for me enough to say something.
I was raised pretty hardcore Christian, myself, but a crisis of faith lead me to do a lot of the same research Joyce is talking about. Ever since, I’ve been not nearly as much of a Christian as I used to be.
The English versions of the bible (of which there are like a thousand) are hilariously out of sync with the original Hebrew and Greek. A lot of very important words and phrases are just straight up mistranslated, possibly by design.
For example, the original Hebrew of the Bible doesn’t contain the concept of Hell. When they talk about Hell, they’re talking about “the valley of Gehenna” which is a literal, physical place outside of Jerusalem.
Actually, Gehenna, or Ge Hinnom, “Valley of Hinnom,” was quite scary; the site was known historically to the Hebrew people (and some other residents of the region) as an ancient site for sacrificing children by fire, and became a cursed site as a result. The Tenth Roman Legion also practiced cremation of the dead there. The known and repeated use of the area for immolation spawned associations in the Bible with Gehenna and fire as a vivid symbol of the spiritual pain and suffering one would feel.
Which original language? Ancient Aramaic? Koinoia Greek? Classical literary Greek? Latin? Ancient Hebrew? Something else?
The Bible is an aggregation and a syncretism of texts from a variety of sources, with the oldest parts a recording of an oral tradition in a long extinct Semitic precursor language, and the most recent portions in either trade Greek (most of the new Testament) or classical Greek (those portions usually attributed to Luke) or someotherlanugagebutprobablysomeformofhebrew for portions of the books in the Catholic canon but not in the Protestant canon, to a variety of others for some of the books in the alternative canons like the Syrian Christian Bible.
How old are the “oldest passages”, really? If exodus never actually happened, and the creation story got added on during the Babylonian exile, I gotta wonder if the whole thing is no older than the sixth century BCE.
I`m kinda in a limbo atm where as I`m not 100 percent sure on what I believe at the moment. However I was raised in a very little, and very old fashioned christian (almost cult like) village in upper PA. It consisted of a general store, a bunch of farms, and a few houses with the church as the ruling social factor. Due to this I was a lot like Joyce growing up, then some things happened to give me a reality check.
I always relate to Joyce the most (Though me and Walky are brothers in slackertude) This comic just needed a comment, it isn`t dishonest Joyce. I`m agnsit using/manipulating any type of religion or theology for personnel bias or use, or using a selective reading skill to take only what you want to out of certain words. So I suppose I agree with Joyce but for some one like Joyce this is more then that. This is her questioning it, and there is no dishonesty in that.
It`s good to question and research you`r beliefs. I`m not saying she should turn from god in the hand, hell I`m still of the idea that we will never know what the right path is until are number is punched. However this shows that Joyce is starting to stand on her own two feet and not the crutch of what shes been spoon fed, what ever decision she makes on beliefs from here in out, is her own. She looked down every corner, she mulled it over in restless nights, she looked deep inside herself, and this is a step in becoming her own person.
I hope we see Joyce coming to be her own person in the coming story lines.
Is Robin DeSanto of the ‘dumbingverse’ also a combat veteran? With Carla’s potential backstory and only the combat vets & superheroine of the ‘walkyverse’ having been violent in the story (Is Sarah the exception that proves the rule?) there seems to be that…meta-entertainment of which similarities carry over (Leslie being open to being set up with Robin) and which don’t (Ethan’s self-discovery happening much earlier in life, age adjustments, etc.). So if ‘dumbingverse’ Robin is ‘fast’ that obviously wouldn’t mean her sci-fi levels of being able to process calories nigh at will. But it could mean her unique blend of nigh unconscious speed learning and tendency to chase goals singularly allow a ‘similar’ background. If she ‘left’ her family to join the military and then G.I. billed her way through college (or even just graduated high school at ~16 and ROTC’d her way to the military) she could be just as combat veteran with a ‘surprise’ law degree that you’d never realize from talking to her but see as inevitable once you saw the rest of her life in context as the ‘walkyverse’ Robin.
Secondly, if Carla and Joe aren’t related at all (because ‘walkyverse’ Joe built Ultracar after he graduated with an engineering degree) what about ‘Ultracar’s Mom, Rachel’? Is she one of the Rachels in the ‘dumbingverse’? Are Carla’s parents the typical half her features or was she ‘adopted according to a set of criteria laid out with intent’?
I did learn recently that many American people actually don’t know that the bible wasn’t originally written in english.
The fact Joyce even needs to mention it is terribly baffling to me.
It would be (well, WAS) enormously more dishonest of the people who rewrote and translated that bible to rephrase things, remove sections, add new sections, all to support their own personal biases.
…but if that hadn’t already happened hundreds of times over, there would be no splintered denominations of Christianity, or for that matter, Muslims, who split off to form their own group in the 6th century, largely out of disgust for how Christians kept changing the old traditions to whatever suited them at the time.
Changing “The Holy Word” whenever it becomes inconvenient, or not suiting your political agenda, is the oldest “tradition” Christianity has!
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“It LOOKS like hypocrisy.”
“Sure, I’ll go with that. What’s one more bad decision.”
Hypocrisy: an important part of every religious diet.
HYPOCRISY! Part of a balanced breakfast!
With your daily recommended amount of guilt in every serving!
Good source of Vitamin R-egrets!
It’s hypo-CRISPY!
Hypocrispy, yum 🙂
So…. wait.
Does knowing that you’re being hypocritical, recognizing that fact, and owning it make you MORE of a hypocrite, or less of one?
…..
*brainsplosion*
Mind = Blown
Much less of one, as knowing that you are going against something you stand for rather than ignorantly doing it means that you are empathising with the other side of the argument; seeing it from thier point of view rather than hypocritically ignoring parts of the rule set when you don’t like it.
She loves Becky enough to violate her own moral integrity for her.
THAT’s love.
She loves Becky enough to own her own morality and have a truer relationship with her God because of it, instead of accepting the one she’s been spoon-fed by people who (often) are using religious reasoning to gain secular power. That’s the BEST kind of love.
It’ll be a truer “relationship with her God” if she ends up saying “I believe God wouldn’t condemn homosexuality, so I think that everyone who ever wrote otherwise is wrong” rather than her current phase of trying to find loopholes in scripture, just so she can both pretend to respect scripture and ignore it.
Yet, it’s still QUITE a step forward, from blind belief to investigation.
Soon, she may be able to form her own image of God, as you imply.
Except He did. Twice. In the same book. And it’s a type of law that stayed constant in spite of Jesus effectively nullifying the binding of ceremonial law, as it were. The most wiggle room there is, is that God hates SIN as opposed to people and it only actually counts if you literally act on the sin.
It’s not really a matter of condemning the people who are homosexuals, but condemning the act of it. What you suggest is incongruous adherence to dogma.
I think it’s more a conflict of what she knows with what she believes: she knows Becky is a good person, while her beliefs say that she’s a bad one.
Yes.
The great thing about standards is there’s so many to choose from.
The only honest thing to do is to write the rules yourself.
I had no idea that Calvinball was so popular on Cybertron
Megatron is the law.
I thought that was Judge Dredd.
I’m pretty sure the guy who can step on you without straining himself is the one who makes the rules.
Megatron is a cop, just like Judge Dredd. He’s a living weapon of the establishment.
Well sure he is, now that he’s an Autobot!
?????
Megatron is an Autobot now? CRIKEY!
Personally I think it’s all a scam he’s pulling to avoid the death penalty. And to make things worse he’s got his whole “search for redemption” thing mixed into my quest for the Knights of Cybertron!
Hey, it worked for a bunch of Mesopotamians a few thousand years ago, what’s the worst that could happen?
I thought that they were dead. I thought they crashed their car.
Hey, Megzy, long time- Not wait, you don’t look like my Megadumb. Oh well, I’m not gonna follow you either :P.
Either way, that what I was doing, making my own rules;
Rule 1; To scrap with the Decepticons, I’m going AWOL.
Rule 2; No more following the A-Hole.
Rule 3; This Minicon Pretender is making his own way out there, having some fun…
Joyce is actually using logic and research to find the truth.
Stop it, Joyce. That’s how science happens.
Science and film noirs.
…
Someone combine those two NOW.
Penny Arcade already did with their Automata series (I wish they’d make more of them; much better than that children of the forest thing)
La Jetée: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056119/
(Inspired Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys
I keep two microscopes in my desk. One’s a compound and I keep the 16X oil immersion objective lens loaded. The other’s got a miniature flask as one of the objective lens, and it keeps ME loaded. Name’s Mike Scope. I’m a professional scientist.
This is one of the best comments I’ve ever seen in this comic.
Awwwww, thanks! Admittedly, the basic framework is adapted from Calvin and Hobbes.
I introduced the dame to a friend who’s very close to my heart. A little down and to the left, to be specific.
My friend is a very eloquent speaker. He made three profound arguments while I excused myself from the room. I always leave when the talk gets philosophical.
Next thing you know she’ll be agreeing with Dina on evolution.
And then, cats and dogs living together! MASS HYSTERIA!
Dina’s taking the best approach for breaking people out of religious thought: drop some facts, walk away. Let them stew. Eventually they figure it out on their own, or they don’t. You can’t push ’em.
Science versus religion:
Science: “Here’s the evidence. What conclusions can we draw from it?”
Religion: “Here’s the conclusion. What evidence can we find to support it?”
R
elijun is so burned.
Also you’re right.
Also my wee lil device decided to post just the “R” for me.
Best Quote I have seen in ages.
if only….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudge_factor
And it’s not exactly unheard of for scientists to modify their results to support their favored conclusion (i.e., the Japanese stem cell breakthrough that wasn’t from earlier this year). Hypocrisy is alive and well on both sides of the science/religion debate (a debate that doesn’t need to be a thing, IMO, but nobody asked my opinion.)
What science/religion debate?
Science is about logic and evidence.
Religion is about unquestioning faith.
Bad science is what happens when scientists claim authority without having evidence to back them up. When people trust people just because they have a Ph.D., science becomes just another cult.
So yeah, some people don the mantle of science while acting like a priesthood — but on the religious side, even the ideal of basing your world-view on experiment and observation doesn’t even exist.
I agree with you, it is bad science. Just trying to point out that confirmation bias isn’t a religion thing, it’s a human thing.
And perhaps I shouldn’t have said “debate”. I’m referring to the idea that a person can’t be simultaneously religious and a scientist and that holding to either science or religion invariably hinders the other, which certainly is something that exists.
I guess you can be religious and be a scientist at the same time, as long as the areas where you are clinging to pre-conceived notions and the areas where you are doing research don’t overlap.
I’m not sure how that would work, though. Being open to evidence in some areas but being dogmatic in others. That makes no sense to me.
To Thomas64:
The only thing you “need” to count as “religious” is a belief in a higher power. As long as you are willing to let that higher power operate by the as-yet-not-quite-completely-discovered laws of the universe and not according to some book some guy passes off as the unquestionable truth, then you can be both scientific and religious.
@Thomas64
You would be surprised how well people can compartimentalize. I know this biomedical microbiologist that is currently doing some research with multiresistant bacteria but still refuses to believe in evolution.
@ICSM
*head explodes*
@ICSM
How…just…how?
As Georges Lemaître, the author of the Big Bang theory, knows well 🙂
@Everyone
Don’t ask me how her brain works. She just says that multiresistant bacteria proves nothing, and evolution is a myth. And fossils are devil’s weapons to take men from God’s Path, but the trilobites she tested some stuff on? Just fine sea bugs.
According to my GF (biomedical researcher), every religious person she ever worked with is like that. That one is just the weirdest one due to being the most, for want of better word, fanatical one.
Buddhism is rather about those things, actually.
The Judeo-Christian traditions hardly get to claim the entire religious side of the conversation.
What, Buddhism is about an evidence-based world-view?
You could’ve fooled me. 😀
It’s a bit of a stretch to say that Buddhism rests on an evidence-based worldview. Pretty much the only thing I’ve seen that even remotely suggests that is Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, saying that if his religious concepts were disproven, he would stop holding to them.
What should I do if I meet the Buddha in the road?
Greet him with neither speech nor silence.
This leaves a wide variety of animal noises to choose from.
Thomas64, Rutee:
I think Eolirin means that, if I recall correctly, it is believed that the Buddha realized the true nature of reality thru observation and deduction, and then suddenly “awakened” from the “sleep of ignorance”.
However I take that, from then on, the followers just believe in what he said is true, and so it is another dogmatic religion anyway.
I must be wrong though. I have little knowledge about Buddhism.
No, they’ve added their own twists. Heck, there’s a doctrine focused on, depending on your cynicism, syncretism or appropriation. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, new evidence does not really enter the list of religious bases.
You mean
When Scientists Are Held To The Scientific Method (A la most studies)
VS
When The Scientist Is A Massive Hack (A la autism-vaccine study)
Or any study that is repeated until the desired results occur. Or one that alters definitions in order to make itself right. Or cuts short because the results are what is wanted right now, but might not be if the study continued.
Funny 🙂 I like it.
Sadly them both are not actually true in the real world, but it is a enjoyable phrasing job anyway.
That’s not religion, that’s anti-science. Don’t confuse the two.
It’s also how modern Biblical scholarship works, though not the kind they teach at the seminary Joyce’s pastor went to.
Keep going, Joyce! This is how my job happens!
“Sarah, why is there a pig with wings outside my window?”
Because God made flying bacon to prove his awesomeness?
But bacon is an unclean meat, a flying cow would have been more kosher.
Isn’t that where buffalo wings come from?
Sounds legit to me. ^_^
Actually, that poses an interesting question. Flying things fall under a different section of the kosher law than other animals. The flying pig might be kosher. Lemme check.
*checks* …. why the hell does it need to forbid owls three separate times?
Okay, so having reread, the flying pig MIGHT be forbidden because of it’s a swine, despite being a flying swine. Or it might be forbidden because it doesn’t chew its cud. Or it might be forbidden because it’s a flying creature that goes upon four legs and isn’t a locust, beetle, grasshopper, or bald locust. (But those have 6 legs?) It’s got to be in one of those two categories, and it’s against kosher either way.
So bottom line, it’s a clean animal, because New Covenant and delicious bacon.
Flying creatures are excluded from the kosher list (not kosher if it’s on the list), mammals are included (kosher if they have a cloven hoof and chew cud) so if a flying pig were deemed a bird first instead of a swine with extras, it would be kosher.
I never knew the chew cud thing as being a requirement for something to be kosher. I find that fascinating because, to me, an uninformed non-jewish person, it seems odd to say that something is kosher because it burps up its own food and swallows it again. It seems a weird thing to list in official documentation as a requirement.
I love how I learn new things all the time in DOA’s comment section. This is in stark contrast to many other comment sections. 🙂
It’s called ‘tradition’, Jen. That’s why a lot of stupid rules exist.
OTOH, while a flying pig wouldn’t be kosher, a cud-chewing pig would. Geneticists, get to work!
The OT kosher rules, as far as I can recall from Jew School, fall into three categories: God says don’t eat that or in that way, your food is potentially full of diseases. As the wandering Jews are a bunch of whiny ex-slaves in a desert, they will try and put anything in their mouths, so NO. The People Over There eat this thing and call it special. God doesn’t want you to be like the People Over There, so don’t eat their special foods and try and be like them. NO. Remember how earlier God called us a bunch of whiny ex-slaves in the desert? He was being generous. We need some strict rules to train us to be ethical human beings to avoid the Lord of the Flies situation that us Jews get into about once or twice EVERY “begatting”, and that extends to how/where/what we eat. so, NO.
Actually, most OT rules fall into these three categories: Practical Rules to keep people safe, Cultural Rules to keep the Jews a distinct culture from the rest of the world, and Ethical Rules that aren’t really about what they allow or forbid but are about how they make you behave.
Rabbis have been debating the details of which laws are which category and how important each one is and where is the wiggle room is pretty much since rabbis were invented.
>flying creature with four legs
What animals does that cover? Griffons? Dragons? Flying squirrels maybe(does gliding count?) This rule may only exist to stop jews from eating flying pig.
Anything that has been catapulted at them?
Yea, who would want to eat an owl anyway?
God said, “call nothing that i had made unclean” and we feasted on the products of flying swine
Last time someone tried to find the truth It cost someone their entire body and an arm.
The Truth? I thought the Elric brothers were trying to resurrect their mom? Do I remember that wrong?
Yeah but to do that they had to see beyond the veil ‘n shit. Too much truth kersplodes your limbs and little brothers, everyone knows that.
I believe you are a Leg short in that exchange Cholma
A leg, some reproductive organs, a pair of eyes, this one guy’s brother…
A country or two…
I believe the leg was part of the initial punishment and he didn’t lose the arm originally, but used that to exchange for his brothers soul at least so he could bind it to the suit
I thought Elric and his brother were fighting over his sister Cymoril. 🙂 Well, and the throne.
As opposed to the Blues Brothers, who were on a mission from God.
Don’t even get me started on Potatoman, poor guy. 🙁
They couldn’t handle the truth.
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
OK this is by far the longest thread I have ever started. THANK YOU!
Your welcome!
Don’t feel too bad Joyce. That’s what happened every time a new set of translations were produced, anyway.
Seriously? That happened/happens?
People added stuff or twisted meanings to fit their viewpoints. Stuff like that.
People do that with or without the help of a translation. But translating the Bible is a tricky business. Some of the most popular translations among the biblical literalist set are, interestingly, paraphrase translations, meaning that the translators are trying to capture the sense of the original language, not translate literally. Of course, this means the translation, while more readable, is less accurate.
And there are many passages in the Bible where there are words that no one is quite sure about, so they do their best to fill in the meaning from context. And then the received texts sometimes don’t match ancient manuscripts of the same text that turn up–the Nag Hammadi Scrolls and the Dead Sea Scrolls being two examples of ancient finds that have turned up versions of biblical texts that don’t match the ones that made it into our Bibles.
And then there are influential commentaries that tell people how certain passages are *supposed* to be interpreted. Not necessarily based on contemporary scholarship about the original texts and their cultural context.
If you have any notion of modern techniques of textual analysis at all, Biblical literalism pretty much implodes.
That isn’t to say the Bible is useless as a religious guide–it just has to be used carefully.
Biblical literalism is a 16th century methodology that was very useful for critiquing medieval Roman Catholic practices, but is problematic as a guide to 21st century life.
Here’s a really great description of the Council of Nicea (which determined what books were going to be canonical), retold using the metaphor of nerds arguing which fics are canonical. It is one of my favorite bits of liturgical comedy writing on the internet:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/014838.html
I never thought I’d see the words “liturgical” and “comedy” next to each other.
Neat! And informative! Thanks!
Very nice. A lot I had no idea about to think about now.
As a theologian and Biblical scholar, I always found the whole ‘Biblical Literalism’ thing quite amusing, because THE BIBLE ITSELF DOESN’T SUPPORT IT. For example: if Genesis 1 is literally true, then Genesis 2 can’t be (and vice versa). Jeremiah 7:4 states that anyone who claims that the written word is exclusively God’s truth is mistaken (and in several places he claims that the words written in Leviticus are a lie – Jeremiah 6:20 and 7:22 being only two such examples – compare with Leviticus 1:9 and 23:27 respectively). Ezekiel chapters 40 – 46 contradictory of the Torah (compare, for example, Ezekiel 46:6 and Numbers 28:11). 2 Kings 10:30 and Hoses 1:4 give EXACTLY OPPOSITE opinions about the Will of God in a specific event (the murder of the Israelite Royal Family by Jehu). In Matthew 19, when talking about divorce laws, Jesus himself tells his disciples that Moses made parts of the Bible up to please the people (and let’s face it, if anyone’s going to know if the Bible is literally true or not, it’s Jesus)
Indeed, if there’s one thing I learned when I started to move on from the ‘scriptural apologetics’ phase, it’s that the biblical writers loved a good argument.
In fact, the single most mind-blowing / world-rearranging lightbulb moment (and one I hope Joyce soon reaches) was the realisation that the Bible wasn’t the Word of God but the preserved words of humans writing about God, and their evolving understanding of his nature.
Absolutely.
@Peruhain: Actually, a ‘thought-for-thought’ translation (where the translator is trying to capture the intent and context of the source language) is generally more accurate if you’re aiming for the meaning of the text – which is most of the time. A word-for-word translation is likely to confuse the meaning by bringing in unfamiliar phrasing, idioms and false friends. It would only be more valuable if you’re studying the language itself and how it phrased things. IMHO (but with some translation experience).
IIRC, there are two main branches of biblical translation following from the KJV: those running with the word-for-word /formal approach (NKJV, ESV, RV, Scofield) and those running with the thought-for-thought / functional approach (NRSV, ESV, NLT – my personal preference), with the NIV falling somewhere between but more on the formal side. My general experience has been that conservatives favour the formal versions, while liberals favour the functional versions.
*re-reads*
Ugh, mussed up some of the details there through c&p / rewriting. ESV, NRSV should be on the formal side I think; functional should include NCV and others. The general points still stand though.
Yeah a lot “Suffer Not The Witch To Live” was changed with pretty much every translation most scholars figure it was originally closer to “Suffer not the poisoner to live”. The King James version of the Bible was commissioned to Shakespeare and he was told to reword quit a few things.
Then there’s the New King James Version and the 21st Century King James Version and…
…I wonder if any of them corrected the Lucifer misunderstanding.
Shakespeare had nothing to do with the translation.
BoomWolf, there’s also the issue that a lot of the oldest biblical texts aren’t actually originals in the way we think of originals. They are copies or translations of earlier versions.
Also, they are not all in great shape, so not only do you have to worry about translating words from a language which has greatly shifted over time, you have to worry about trying to read pages that have been damaged by age, physical wear, rodent/insect damage, decay, etc.
And, on top of all of that, punctuation is a fairly modern thing. From what I understand (and any biblical scholars please correct me if I’m wrong), the earliest texts don’t have periods, commas, etc, so a lot of things are open for multiple interpretations. For example:
And he said to his people in the desert go prepare a place for me.
Does that mean his people are in the desert when he talked to them and he wants them to go prepare a space somewhere or does that mean he had a chat with his people somewhere and he wants them to go to the desert and prepare a space for him?
I wish my Christian relatives would do this. :/ Pussied out of coming out this Christmas
Have courage, Melissa! Once done, you will be glad of it. People who love you, love YOU! Not whichever set of secondary sexual characteristics you find interesting. I encourage you to be you. Define yourself by hiw YOU feel and what YOU think not others.
Good luck & Happiest of New Years!
I hope that when you do come out, you’re lucky enough to be one of those folks who’s pleasantly surprised at how accepting their family is. 🙂
I hate to say it, but if you live with your relatives, it may be safer to come out after you’ve moved out. Otherwise, do it when it feels right.
Prayers for courage and perseverance for you, and for discernment for your loved ones. Note that I’m not praying for you to change your sexuality–that, IMO, is a gift from God, part of how you are created.
The six passages in the Bible that mention (male) same-sex attraction don’t make a rock-solid case against male homosexual relationships if considered carefully, and the Bible never once mentions female same-sex attraction. Most importantly, I think, Jesus never mentioned same-sex attractions at all, and in general we know that he reached out to a lot of people who were considered beyond the pale of God’s love by the society around them.
That’s what it comes down to for me, as a Christian. I have a hard time believing that a guy who is almost universally associated with a message of acceptance and love would want us to to hate LGBTQ folks.
No shame. I pussy out every goddamn time I see my sisters. Now I’m in the weird position of having no idea how many or which of them have actually picked up on it since I joined the Seattle Men’s Chorus.
Also remember there is family of blood and genetics, and family of choice. When rejected by family of blood, find your family of choice.
“You don’t choose your family.”
“Of course you do, it just comes with default settings.”
I’mma steal that phrase. 🙂
Be my guest.
But even then, you can’t really choose. You can try and find friends that fit what you want in them, but most of your friends will still not fit that.
well, not your first family. your first family is as you recieve it. When you reach a certain life point, however, you can easily alienate yourself and choose others from your community to be your new family
My point is precisely that: you can’t choose even the friends that you make. Most of those are still just a result of the random process of who you meet. Even if you try and find friends of a certain kind, your still unlikely to actually make such friends.
There’s no shame. best of luck to you whenever you decide to.
I feel bad for you. If they care more about arbitrary rules than about you, you really shouldn’t care about them. Too bad that you still do, though.
I wish you the best of luck when you do come out. As others have said, if you’re still living with them, then it could be best to wait. I waited to come out as trans* and as a lesbian until I had plans set to move to another state, myself. If you aren’t living at home, then you’ve got your pick of times. I’ll be hoping you get good results when you do come out.
I wonder if Joyce gets the true irony in panel 3.
You mean the fact that the current and most accepted Bible text is most likely a contorted and biased version of the original text?
No, because the KGV was written using the “If I’m wrong, send me a sign! No? Cool!” method.
I’m pretty sure that what she says in panel 4
pretty sure she does because of panel 4 but meh you can never tell with joyce
You’re right Joyce. NO ONE IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY HAS USED LOOPHOLES FOR THEIR PERSONAL BIASES. NOT A ONE, YOU HEATHEN.
^
the largest use of sarcasm ever that did not directly involve godwin’s law
Of course, you know who did use the ‘selected’ dogma of Christianity (and other beliefs) to ‘pick and choose’ items that would fit his political agenda, which was founded on his personal biases?
*ahem*
And don’t forget the Deutsche Christen,
who tried to invent an aryan Jesus!
Everybody?
That’s why the idea of an corrupt church is completely impossible
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml8bQDnnkKk
Uh? She said it is dishonest not that it didn’t happen.
…and Poe’s Law is proven wrong once again – the ‘blatant display of humour’ doesn’t help. 😛
I’m half wondering whether NotFred was being sarcastic.
If I’m parsing what you’re saying correctly, in that you think that NotFred should only respond that way if Yotomoe was really calling her a heathen, I disagree.
Even as a joke, it’s really out of left field because it’s addressing something Joyce didn’t say.
That, thanks 🙂
Yotome sarcasm is obvious and funny, as ever, but I can’t connect the uppercase part with the lowcase part. I mean, I might rather understand something like “No Joyce, don’t do that NO ONE IN…”.
But it could be my own limitations 🙂
Heavy words, Joyce. And if I ever needed another reason to like you I’m impressed how honest you are with yourself.
See this is what I’m always wondering about. Religions, socieities, communities, and every institution has always had a moral system of some kind. Then for religions, does that make you a true believer to follow the rules of something you disagree with, or a scared follower. Does disregarding something make you a hypocrite, or a moral person?
The system in general would say it makes you a “true believer,” but that’s because they’re The Man.
Personally though (and I say this as a practicing Catholic), I’ve always thought that disregarding something like that makes you a ~more~ moral person, not less, because it means you’re doing the right thing for morality’s sake (as opposed to because you want a reward). Fear of eternal damnation shouldn’t be the only thing keeping you from being a dick to your fellow human beings, you know? Like, if someone says “if you catch this baby you’ll be eternally punished,” a truly moral person would catch the baby anyway.
Which leads to the question, what use is a system that tells you to follow these rules, if everyone, Okay not everyone but a decent amount, will eventually just pick and choose which ones that they want to follow, so long as they agree with them?
Most people in the US who are Jewish or Christian, have pretty much thrown out the rules in Leviticus.
At what point does a system, any system, cease having an effect, and simply becoming a tool for people to justify themselves?
I’d actually argue that the rules and regulations in Leviticus still have an effect, their desired effect, even. The point was not to set down rules of morality as such (although that was often a side effect), but to set apart the Hebrews as different from other groups. For instance, it’s not immoral to wear clothes made of more than one material, but it’s something the Hebrews did not do. In that sense, it’s still working, as anyone who still follows them is instantly recognizable.
In some sense, you could say that this is the point of any set of laws and customs: to differentiate your “tribe” from everybody else.
I think what you’ve hit on is the distinction between religion and religious institutions. I think someone who is religious can and in most cases will still use their own judgment when it comes to morality. This is why I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a good or evil religion. Evil people will use religion to justify doing evil, good people will use it to justify doing good.
Institutions on the other hand (and as you indicated this goes for many institutions not just religious ones) thrive by having people conform to their specific morality. One of the big problems with many religious institutions (more so than other institutions) is that much of the morality was created centuries or even millennia ago, especially when it comes to the holy books. And obviously once a certain type of morality is in place, people who adhere to this morality are most likely to rise to the top, thereby continuing the previous system. However this does not mean all people following the institution will follow the same moral dogma, nor that change is inevitable (just look at the changes Pope Francis has decided to make).
Many forms of traditional religious scholarship believe that personal interpretation *is* the correct way to read holy texts.
There are also some really interesting interpretations that relate to the whole “doing something for the greater good even when you know you will be damned” thing. Some people say Abraham FAILED the test when he agreed to sacrifice Isaac, and there’s a lovely little Judas fandom who think he made the ultimate sacrifice: agreeing to go to hell and be hated for all eternity so that Jesus could get the ending that had been foreseen for him.
Judaism’s had some back and forth on that since it’s much more strictly(-ish) tribal than most Christian sects. So you had the reform movement (“it’s the 18th century, we can still be Jewish without all these ancient laws like kashrut”) and the conservative counter-movement (“change is good, but we’re gonna pick some of those discarded laws back up as long as they aren’t hurting anybody”) but we generally see the other groups as still Jews, even if we think they’re doing it wrong.
Does the Bible even condemn lesbianism? I know it comes down hard on gay men, but I don’t think it technically says women are in trouble for liking women.
Then again, the Bible isn’t exactly kind to women in general, so never mind.
No, actually. I learned this from a Jewish ex-girlfriend. The only reason gay sex is forbidden is because it wastes sperm – the same reason that condoms and masturbation are also technically forbidden. Meanwhile, a female orgasm is a – let me see if I can spell this right – “mihtvsa” – a blessed occurrence. Since women don’t have sperm, and their orgasms are blessed, technically lesbian sex is actually a good thing according to the old testament (and the New Testament doesn’t say anything about gay people either way).
So you’re saying that every sperm is sacred, every sperm is good, every sperm is needed in your neighbourhood?
GUNS ARE GOOD!!; THE PENIS IS EVIL!!
Unless the seeds are blank!
So much “win” in that reply!!!
That’s it. Medical experiments for you all.
Not only am I saying exactly that, but that is where the song comes from. Monty Python – theologically sound since 1983.
I was waiting for someone to make a Monty Python joke.
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
Wait… Thats a thing?
The Old Testament says nothing about girl-on-girl, nor does Jesus, but Christians get a lot of mileage out of Romans 1:26. Joyce even refers to this: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/dvr/
That passage is pretty oblique. What did Paul consider “unnatural” female intercourse? You could guess all kinds of things–lesbian sex, buttsex, horses, kinky positions, or whatever–but basically it allows the reader to define what is natural. Since our study of the natural world has turned up the fact that same-sex sex is quite common among many species, including humans, who is to say that lesbian sex is unnatural?
Well, it’s Paul… So probably pretty much anything besides basic reproduction.
He didn’t approve of reproduciton either. My understanding of his writings is that he thought that everyone should forgo sex and family because Jesus was about to return Real Soon Now anyway, but that it was “better to marry than to burn”. There is some speculation that he may even have been a eunuch.
I don’t think any phenomena that can occur in accordance with the laws of natural science – discovered or undiscovered – are unnatural. But that’s just me.
That’s like saying PopTarts(tm) are “organic” because they are made of complex molecules of reduced carbon. 🙂
Even if you use a more conventional definition of “natural”, humans have lived unnatural lives for thousands of years. Agriculture, food preservation, houses, clothing, cooking and heating fires, medicine, literature, song and dance, etc… Even the ancients’ lives were unnatural as hell. What’s a little non-reproductive recreational sex on top of all that?
Actually, your ex is wrong. A lot of people make that mistake. Onan pulled out spilling his seed instead of getting is deceased brother’s wife pregnant. A lot of people think the Sin of Onan is the spilling of seed. That’s incorrect. The Sin was not fulfilling his family duties by having the family line continue, not getting his sister-in-law pregnant.
Another thing people get wrong is the Sin of Sodom. A lot of people think that the sin which gave its name to sodomy was homosexuality. That’s incorrect. The Sodomites asked to know the Angels. Never has that phrase meant “to have sex with.” What the sin of Sodomy was inhospitality. Hospitality is very important in the Middle-East to this day.
I think that’s why the much-mocked bit about Lot offering his daughters to the crowd is in there as well. The intent is to contrast Lot’s extreme (even considering the time and culture differences, I’m pretty sure that would be extreme) hospitality to the general population’s total lack of same.
Actually, it did. In many languages other than English, including Hebrew, there are two words for “know”, one for people and one for non-people. If you use the non-people word for “know” when taking about a person, it’s generally understood as a euphemism for “I had sex with that person”.
Now, I don’t have my hands on the original Hebrew Bible or the Torah, but I’m pretty sure they used the non-people “know”, hence the English phrasing “to know someone in the Biblical sense”.
@No Name: In Biblical Hebrew the word “la’da’at” (to know) is used as a euphemism for sexual relations. What makes translation tricky is that there is a separate word for rape, which is clearly what the inhabitants of Sodom wished to perform (followed shortly by murder) before the angels blinded them.
The traditional romanization is “mitzvah” but spellings vary when typing Hebrew with roman characters. Like the twenty ways to spell Channukkah/Hanuka.
I don’t think it mentions it. And even on gay men, it really just technically condemns sodomy, as long as you are gay but chaste it doesn’t matter. I think it was just an hygiene issue that got put in there “Don’t put your pecker in another dude’s asshole, crap comes out from there! Ew!” isn’t quite as poetic and godly…
Leviticus 18:22, as I recall. “Man shall not lie with mankind as with womankind, it is abomination.” Translations vary a bit. And, indeed, no mention of girl-on-girl. Indeed, Luke 17:35 says that when Jesus returns, “two women shall be grinding together, and one shall be taken and the other left.” (Yes, I know that’s not what they meant, but I don’t get to make a lot of tribadism jokes, okay?)
Other translations of Leviticus 18:22
LOLcats: “No can has ghey… srsly. srry, but no.”
Silent Voices(Feminist Bible): “You shall not lie with a woman, as with a man. That is detestable.”
Yeah, abomination is a modern translation that wasn’t in the original. A mistranslation of a mistranslation. A guy I know who’s read the bible in 3 different languages says the word in the original Hebrew is closer in meaning to “a ritual uncleansing.” Also, it’s not a general command. It’s in the section of commands to priests. As well, the phrase is very awkward, and is not written properly, so people add their own words to make it translate to mean how they want. This changes the meaning.
So then no saying to your bro, “It’s six inches, I swear! And of course I’ll respect you in the morning.”
Jesus also supposedly said: “its not what goes in a mans mouth that defiles him”
thus giving a ringing endoresement to oral sex
Yep, the same part of the bible that forbids wearing clothing made from two different materials, eating fruits from a tree planted less than three years ago, eating meat that still has blood in it, cutting your hair in a certain way, and getting tattoos. It does have one very good message to those who hate immigrants, though.
Romans 1:26-27 is pretty gender-neutral in its condemnation of same sex sex.
Actually, it isn’t. It condemns that which is “unnatural” – which lesbian sex (or any gay sex) is not (see above posts from someone else about homosexuality being extremely common throughout the animal Kingdom). Since there is no definition for what “unnatural” means, Romans 1:26-27 is effectively meaningless. It doesn’t stop people from quoting it, but they are misquoting it since historical experts agree that the phrase did NOT refer to lesbians (or any other form of gay sex).
The dodge about whether same sex sexual relations is a wiggle, and a pretty damned weak one at that. We know quite well what the author meant by the phrase, and claims about other animals or the like come off as absurdities. (FWIW, you can strengthen it by pointing that there are words in that passage which occur nowhere else is *all* of our preserved Greek literature, so it’s not clear what those words mean.)
Better wiggles are to say that it’s not clear what Paul meant by the whole chapter — it doesn’t fit within the flow of the letter at all, and so could equally well be a list of false doctrines Paul was about to comment upon. It could even be a later insertion from another text; we just don’t know. Either way, one can accept the plain meaning of the passage and question its function in context. That’s got the advantage of even fitting within the scope of modern biblical criticism.
I wonder if Joyce will have pity sex with Becky.
I would have pity sex with becky…but I don’t have the proper equipment.
A ball gag and suspension rig? Or a frul-size crucifixion kit? THAT would be an interesting porno… “Feelin Closer to Jesus”
A vagina, silly.
Don’t know but I bet Daisy would volunteer. Either way.
Not sure about the wiggle room thing, but then again according to the Bible we’re not supposed to get haircuts. And I don’t know a lot of Christians who resemble Rapunzel, so…
“Marge, have you read this thing? Technically we’re not allowed to go the bathroom.”
Just certain hairs. You are required to cut the others.
There’s also a passage that bans men from having long hair and women from having short hair. >.>
Don’t forget the hats! If you don’t wear a hat, the angels will come down and have sex with you, and if you are a dude, it will be gay sex. Or, the wrong king of hat.
That’s the real reason Becky left college. Her hair. She just made up the gay thing to screw with Joyce.
So to speak.
Not true, the issue is only the payot(side locks) and shaving the beard with a razor(electronic razors, scissors, etc are all acceptable). The payot also need not be terribly long; the long, curly payos are mainly a hasidic thing.
As I said above. And the hats.
A common and quite ignorant claim. Acts 10 (St. Peter’s Dream) frees all Christians from the Levite code.
Notice that Joyce doesn’t mention Leviticus when she answers Mary — she only mentions Romans. That’s because the passage from Leviticus is not binding, and the passage from Timothy obviously must have been misconstrued, and its literal meaning is clearly obscured.
Just because literalism is not literalism — when you get down to the facts, there are always cases like the passage from Timothy which literalists have to dodge by saying that the literal meaning has not yet been revealed — does not mean that its adherents are stupid. They’re not, and making stupid and self-righteous claims about things you haven’t bothered to understand is every bit as bigoted as the kinds of absurdities they spout.
Shut up and listen to Willis here — he’s rejected fundamentalism after learning it thoroughly. He knows what he’s talking about; you don’t.
Is this where Joyce discovers the Bible is so male-centric it doesn’t even bother to state its opinion about women being homosexual as opposed to how it condemns “men who lay with men”?
Yaaaay, painful discoveries about how the thing your worldview is based on is kinda full of holes!
Standing of holes… Standing on Space… the Godhead is Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann? Brb, converting to Spiral Christianity…
If you want to loop hole that try harder cause man was cast from the garden and by dam man did not leave his spouse behind
trade in spouse for partner
No, spouse works. As far as God was concerned, they were as good as married.
Also, one line does not a feminist Bible make.
Oh this should end well…
Olde Testament God, indeed.
Sarah doesnt let Joyce have any delusions about what she’s doing here. A righteous old testament god she is.
I take it that Sarah is asking the (obvious) question.
It’s Joyce that doesn’t let Joyce have any delusions about what she’s doing here.
Joyce might want to check this clip out.
IF ONLY JOYCE HAD HAS ACCES 2 LOLCAT BIBLE
‘Thou canst hath cheeseburger’ -Lolcats 2:14
“They even had ebil ghey secks and stuffs. ” – LOLcat Romans 1:27
And the Lord sayeth “Let there be yarn.” And then there was yarn. And the Lord saw that it was good.
Joyce is really willing to stand up to God for Becky, to even try to do this. Not sure what will happen if she doesn’t find the answers she needs, but this is a start for her, given her whole belief system.
Also, Sarah keeping up her no-pants streak. That is a belief system I can support without question.
Uh oh, Researching the Bible is the first step to Atheism.
I thought the most reliable path to atheism was “being raised fundamentalist”…
Researching the Bible hasn’t made me atheist, but if I’d been brought up to believe that it’s God’s Literal Words, No Argument, Nuh-Uh, If This Falls Then Everything Falls With It, it might be a different story.
So in another case for the “Willis is nailing this right on the head” file, noticing that my sinner friends weren’t the depraved, damned people the Bible seemed to say they were was the reason I began to fall away from my religion. I read the entire Bible several times, and eventually there was so much I had to ignore to continue believing it that the strain on my faith was too great. The real clincher was the fact that I never had any spiritual experience. Thanks for telling this story Willis, I identify. Oh uh I mean damn you for making me feel feels.
Yeah, it was easy to not think too hard about how most Christians say non-Christians go to hell when all my friends were Christian. After having agnostic and atheist friends, the cognitive dissonance that I had been dealing with became impossible to ignore.
PLEASE TELL ME JOYCE FINDS OUT THE ACTUAL APOSTLES THOUGHT PAUL WAS A LYING ASSHOLE.
I wanna make an D&D alignment grid with nine of the more notable Joyce faces. This one can be True Neutral.
Actually I may have to de-nerd that one slightly, I’m not sure I could find 3 Joyce faces where she actually looks Evil. So, maybe a Brady Bunch grid of Joyce faces.
The evil squares are just Joyce being shocked at each particular evil.
Maybe look for strips where she’s talking to Walky. She gives him a few nasty faces. Or perhaps you were thinking of a gleefuly evil face, in which case, I can’t help you.
If you go with Luzahn’s suggestion, though, her “Dorothy’s-an-atheist?” face works well.
You can find one evil face here:
http://walkypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-Joyce
It is maddeningly difficult to locate the “It’s Walky” strips where Anti-Joyce appears, but if you can find them, it should give you some “evil Joyce” material.
I can only think of the “have your whiteboard dong back” face.
The problem of theocracy is that any given religious leaders personal preference on anything becomes the word of god on the subject. Traffic rules become subject to theological debate, because there are no laws that aren’t god’s laws. With or without kings, Israel was a theocracy. Also, most people chose to forget that far more rules existed over the color of clothing, than homosexual behavior, and violations had the same penalty.
Yeah, but that’s the thing. Leviticus (for example) reads less like holy scripture and more like the bronze age book of laws for the Israeli people of 1200 BC or whenever this was written. Therefore I treat the bulk of that stuff as interesting historical laws and not religious precepts handed down from on high….cause it doesn’t even LOOK like it was written to be taken that way.
Same here. I’m Jewish and I give respect to the traditions, but I read the Torah as something between an oral history a la The Iliad, and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories like How the Elephant Got its Trunk.
Just-So Stories is in fact exactly the analogy I’m using with my 8yo, to counteract the unexamined nursery rhyme version he tends to pick up from church kids’ groups.
Hey look, it’s that thing I did!
Careful Joyce, once you start digging, you’ll find out this metaphorical house has no foundation. And then you look up and realize it’s been pieced together out of driftwood and the entire second floor is made of nothing but duct tape.
Someone call for a carpenter.
A historical Jewish carpenter.
If you thinking of the one I’ve heard of you may be waiting until the end of time … and anyway he’s usually too busy getting nailed to do much carpentry.
http://partiallyclips.com/2002/01/27/roofers-3/
And here I was expecting a cross response 😉
That’s definitely my kind of funny, but I’m not sure if I have room for yet another comic in my life …
And I’ve heard he works in a toy store now,
but that’s the other continuity:
The end is nigh!
I find it amusing how Sarah’s eyebrow makes it look like she’s pissed off even when saying “Morning. Last-minute homework?”
Yeah, “looks like”…
Sarah just walks into the first panel looking angry.
Does Sarah ever walk in looking happy?
Can’t she swing for something a little bit more “meh”
Too angry at the world for that.
I think Sarah resents Willis making her appear in the strip. She always comes in pissed off and ducks out as quickly as she can manage.
It’s her default state, based on her life experiences “the world is going to burn me, regardless of what I do – my only hope is to be vigilant and catch it in the act.”
She’s probably not super thrilled about the surprise, indefinite new roommate. I’d approach Joyce grouchy too.
All them extra farts can’t be that good for the air quality in their room, that’s for sure.
Ooo there are tons of theories on the gay passage! Or at least one of ’em anyway. The ‘man shall not lie with man’ one has been considered by some to be an anti rape passage, (not in favor of the ladies tho) and some are of the opinion that if it WAS against homosexuality, it was simply put there to remind people to make babies instead of have fun. Population control didn’t seem as big of an issue at the time. Whereas now…man I feel guilty wanting to have kids with the current status of our world!
“Population control” in that period (most of recorded history, in fact) mostly consisted of having as many as you could, because some would die of various diseases and accidents, and you wanted to have enough to fend off the next bunch over when they showed up to kill you and take your stuff – or, even better, enough to spare that you could go kill them and take their stuff.
Nice, simple, effective. Fails in all kinds of nasty ways when you start changing the underlying conditions and assumptions… which is what we’ve done in the last few hundred years. But too many of us are still playing by the old rules, because they’ve always worked up until now…
Many of these recent strips have been particularly powerful. I’m finding Joyce to be an increasingly engaging character – much to my surprise and enjoyment. What a well-executed arc.
Leviticus 18:22 : Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.
Bible’s pretty straightforward on the whole gay thing, at least according to the New International Version (1978).
I mean, I detest the whole book, but that’s just me.
I’m a godless heathen and all, but I think it’s worth remembering that that’s the same part of the bible that says you shoud ritually murder the participants when a man and woman have sex when she’s on her period. Whatcha think of that one, Joyce, huh?
I would point out that it specifically says “lie with a man” the bible doesn’t say anything about lesbians. So she is totally in the clear here.
Unfortunately, the New Testament does cover lesbians, for example, Romans 1:26, “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
Not to split hairs, but it only specifies what kind of “unnatural relations” were being committed by the men. Doesn’t say anything specific about the women. We can infer it means being gay, but for all we know they were talking about who gets to be on top. Also the Bible generally has nothing good to say about LUST anyway, which begs the question where it stands on loving vs lustful homosexual relationships.
Obligatory response:
Note that it identifies the sin as excessive lust – as I understand it, there was no real conception of non-hetero sexuality at the time and the accepted lens was that it arose from an excess of lust that could not be satisfied with a ‘natural’ partner. (Needless to say, some segments of society are stll clinging hard to that view.)
On ‘unnatural’ acts – again, my understanding only – the reference is to a man willingly assuming the ‘submissive’ role, or a woman the ‘active’ role, both socially taboo at the time. Male-on-male sex was mostly known in the context of the rape of captives or slaves, or pederasty. Once more, no concept of sexuality as in the modern way of thinking.
Wow, do you understand wrong. Wrong like whoa. Protip, the Romans loved themselves some greeks, and greeks loved themselves some dude banging. Plenty of roman men preferred men; if you want to see it humorously, you can go read some of the graffiti uncovered at pompeii (For instance). Seriously, this all just reeks of… wrong.
This is important, because I want to be clear here – the best way to read 1:26 is that, counter to many contemporary thoughts on banging (albeit in agreement with a scattered few others), gay sex is bad (The single nicest reading is that it’s a ‘punishment’)
I’m open to correction if I’m wrong; time to go do some more research, I think. Do you have any particular sources to start with? I’ve not really seen much to suggest that the modern concept of ‘gayness’ as an innate and unchosen aspect of identity existed back then, and Paul’s big on self-control.
Not arguing that Paul’s personal / cultural biases aren’t in play here, and it’s very likely that he did consider all non-hetero sex to be intrinsically off-limits. (This is Paul we’re talking about, after all.) Even if that’s the case and he’s just hatin’ him some gays, it should be considered in light of the whole narrative rather than excerpted as a clobber verse (like anything else in the bible, really).
Still, similar to the Lot example, I’d been given to understand that the situations Paul was likely thinking of had less to do with the same-sexness of the acts themselves than with the power dynamics, consensuality or cultural assumptions surrounding them. Chicken, egg, symptom, cause, all muddled up.
I point people to this book every chance I possibly get: http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Social-Tolerance-Homosexuality-Fourteenth/dp/0226067114
Addendum: (’cause ugg, I hit send before I should have)
The third chapter is all about Rome, homosexuality, and Christians within the context of late Roman society.
Unnatural can mean many different things. Bestiality for example. The term unnatural just leaves it too open for interpretation. Where they seeking relations with other women? Animals? Were they just becoming dominate? Maybe they started getting multiple husbands, which would certainly throw a wrench in trying to keep your city populated. It’s too vague to actually tell what was meant, a problem much of the bible suffers from.
It’s also Leviticus, which was written for the Levites–in other words, the priestly tribe. Most of its do’s and don’ts have to do with ritual purity, not necessarily morality, though it’s addressed. It’s also in a chapter that deals with clean and unclean practices. Context.
…no. Just no. Leviticus was for the tribes in general – which is why its name in hebrew has nothing to do with ‘levite’. And you just said homosexuality is unclean in spite of that.
Rutee, the name for Leviticus in Hebrew was originally “Torat Kohanim”, which translates into “The Laws for Priests”. While the Levites were not the priesthood (those would be the aforementioned Kohanim) the title “Leviticus” is pretty close.
Wikipedia claims it is currently ויקרא, Vayikra/Wayikra. Some passages do refer to the priests specifically, but the bulk is not addressed to the priesthood.
Well-meanng people find different ways of interpreting this passage, and whether or not they’re valid is beyond my experience. One I heard of was that it really means “don’t treat a man like you would treat a woman,” i.e. badly. But to believe that you have to be able to accept that the Bible is often misogynistic, especially the Old Testament.
Why does Sarah look like she’s about to get her judge-face on in that first panel?
“Last-minute homework! Like a SLACKER? THIS IS COLLEGE YOU WHIPPERSNAPPERS.”
“Sarah, you’re only a year older than-!”
“WHIPPERSNAPPER.”
Wait… am I the only one who interprets Sarah’s dialogue in panel 3 as her thinking Joyce just confirmed she’s a lesbian? o.o
Ezekiel 16:49 says Sodom’s sin was pride, gluttony, and a lack of charity.
Leviticus condemns pork, shellfish, foreskins, shaving, and wearing blended fabrics at least as much as it condemns homosexuality. The other rules got ignored as Jewish rules that didn’t apply to gentiles. (with much debate in the early church)
Paul at one point admits that what he has to say about homosexuality isn’t directly from God, he just thinks God would agree with him. Also in Paul’s day, “homosexuality” wasn’t an identity, it was grown men taking young boys as lovers of dubious consent, which he was quite right to call out. Paul speaks against people “denying their nature” sexually, and you could argue that “born that way” wasn’t a theory that existed at the time.
Also, wasn’t the whole point of denying homosexuality because, at the time, everyone needed to reproduce as often as possible to keep the species going? At this point, the species doesn’t require that everyone reproduce. In fact, it’d probably help if a lot of people /stopped/ having kids since overpopulation is becoming a bit of an issue…. or maybe it’s just population density, I don’t know what I’m talking about really. I just like to be involved.
Been there before on the involvement budy. And I can honestly say I regretted it.
No, not everyone needed to reproduce as often as possible or the consequences were death. Maybe, MAYBE, before recorded history was common, that was a thing. By the time the Jews settled in what is today israel, that wouldn’t have been a concern. That’s not to say population was, by any means, a bad thing, and the modern specter of overpopulation didn’t exist either. But the pressing NEED for every warm body just to continue existing? Naw.
Having more warm bodies than your neighbors – to, if necessary, throw at your neighbors – was, however, kind of important in a setting with limited resources and constant inter-tribal warfare.
Population is a resource, but in that context, not much of one. Population’s use more lies (and lied, even then) in helping make sure you don’t get into that situation in the first place. But more to the point, I didn’t say population wasn’t useful, I said that people weren’t under existential threat for its lack by then.
What people don’t know is that there’s a secret bible written in invisible ink on the back of every page. That bibles totally okay with gay. Get your lemon juice and Ben Franklin goggles everyone!
Someone call Nick Cage and tell him it’s time for another shitty sequel.
“(Inter)national treasure: the dead sea scrolls”?
Although didn’t they find, like, the library of Alexandria or something in the first one?
I have no comment to this.
Isn’t that a paradox?
How so?
You comment that you have no comment but that in itself is a comment.
Lol, I see your point; so let the paradox continue!
All commenters are liars.
As long as I wield the Reality infinity Gem; I’m allowed to create paradoxes, and contradictions! Now, I just need the other five, and then Jacob and Rox will become a couple!Maybe I’ll throw a little Sarah and Robin in there just for some flavor.
I don’t like Joyce. But I do like that she is being honest with herself here and facing up to what she’s actually doing. Standing up for her friends beliefs, when she doesn’t believe in it herself is a big step for her.
Sarah has always been good for Joyce, she doesn’t let her wiggle out of her conventions.
She stood up to her parents and stayed friends with Dorothy, an atheist. Then she just sort of swept all that under the rug and kept on as she had been, trying not to think about it. Not exactly honest, but commendable as a step forward.
Now she’s sticking to her friendship with Becky and actually looking for logic on line to support her feelings vs her religion. Huge step.
It has been mentioned here that homosexuality was looked at as a ‘crime’ in many ancient cultures. But not all.
A tribe of very early American Indians graves were recently discovered and while the men and women were buried with different styles in the way they were buried-direction they were laid out in and the jewelry for women and weapons for men: there were a few curious graves. In these the skeletons were definitely men, but were buried as women, except shown respect with weapons and jewelry buried with them. This seemed to show that the men were possiblily and likely homesexual, but were in good standing members of clan, accepted and respected.
Ancient Greeks were not shy about homosexuality, among others.
As also mentioned, homosexuality looked down on by some societies as being non-reproductive members of society, and with high child birth death rates, it was a waste.
As to the Bible: so many ‘interritations” including chapters discovered in the Vatican about 50 years ago that were not included in the Bible available to laymen.
I have always thought that having Priests interpret the writings for me, made as much sense as the jokers on tv that interpret the Presidents speech for me – after I just sat and listened to it.
If anyone has common sense, they will figure things out for themselves.
I like the 10 Commandments as they stand. I don’t need a priest to tell me that Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wife”…really means that it’s okay as long as I don’t get caught.
You go Joyce, you’re getting there. Use that brain of yours.
“I like the 10 Commandments as they stand.” Heh, something you might enjoy.
Personally, I like to think that x100 or so was how the Council at Nicea went…
I agree that Sarah is good for Joyce, but…doesn’t anybody think it’s uncool of Sarah is GUILTING Joyce now? Why’s Sarah gotta bash Joyce for this? Joyce is trying to open up her mind a bit here, and it’s a big step for her.
I know, I know, it’s SARAH; she disapproves of most everyone and everything…it’s just not the support that Joyce could use right now.
You may not find a lot in the original texts, Joyce, but have you considered looking into the various non-canonical Biblical texts — which would be considered “Bible fanfiction” in the modern era?
Sure, the CHURCH may have decreed that these Bible passages weren’t the works of God’s divine inspiration, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a peek in case God changes his mind one day…
Yeah, I had fun trying to explain to my mom that the bible as we know it today is a pretty good case of “history is written by the winners”, the winners in this case being the Catholic church and/or whoever it was that had immediate access to the first printing press. Quite a lot left on the cutting room floor, really.
Pseudepigrapha is lots of fun.
What? Joyce is evolving!…But Joyce doesn’t believe in evolution!
Kidding aside, it’s nice to see her compromise fairly between faith and friends.
So that’s why you cancel it with the B button. The B is for Bible.
+1
“Evolving?
Does your knowledge of human evolution derive entirely from Star Trek: Voyager re-runs?!
It doesn’t work that way!“
Joyce is different from her parents. It does work that way.
Next semester, Joyce takes a Biblical Studies Course. Her professor is … the Historical Jesus.
I think Historical Jesus and Ronald Reagan are dead in the Dumbiverse (due to a lack of scifi elements needed to resurrect them), instead of certain other characters.
Now that I think of who exactly that entails, that might actually be a pretty good deal! Though Blaine devalues it a bit.
Never said anything about fantasy elements though, which still leaves room for Biblical Jesus to return.
Joyce befriends a unicorn, is conflicted when it refuses to hang out with Dorothy
Historical Jesus becomes Jesus the Maintenance Guy!
Joyce may want to consider that many of the people responsible for the interpretation of th bible she was taught did the very thing she’s doing now.
Hey so I’m non-religious with a Christian parent and an atheist parent, so maybe I’m getting things totally wrong…but didn’t Jesus command his followers to treat everyone with respect and even love? If you shut out a beggar who needs shelter for the night aren’t you also shutting out Christ or something?
Also, it may just be bitterness and booze talking, but why is it a horrible unforgivable sin up until a family member or close friend comes out to you and you realize that gay people are real and not some abstract monster made up by your youth pastor? :/
People like to ignore that part. I will say that I know some people who take a “hate the sin, not the sinner,” attitude towards it, which, while it’s kind of terrible to apply that philosophy to something that doesn’t hurt anyone, is…preferable.
As for your second question, I think you pretty much answered it yourself. It’s cause people fail to see strangers as real people just like themselves until one is staring them in the face.
He wasn’t even the first one to say it.
Willis, did you put Becky’s leg over the edge just to drive up her appearances count?
Who’s complaining? I’m not complaining!
I think this is an argument that has legs …
It’s got a firm footing.
Now that it has more than just a toehold it needs to step up and grind all opposition under its heel.
At last count there were over FORTY THOUSAND different Christian denominations worldwide – each of them absolutely convinced that they are the one true religion, and each with sometimes wildly different interpretations of what the Bible says.
Here’s a partial list of just the major denominations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations
Joyce however comes from a Nondenominational group.
See here for proof.
I do like the last panel all by itself:
http://kellyclowers.tumblr.com/post/106690041227/this-out-of-context-panel-could-be-very-useful
Oh man, out of context it seems so dirty. Put this down as another thing that would horrify Joyce if she was a bit more aware/saw what others see in what she says.
I think it would be cool if Joyce found the documentary “Fish Out of Water” and watched that.
Fish Out of Water (excerpt): http://youtu.be/3KSoSGL7YRE
Better brush up on your koine Greek, Joyce.
Or you could just treat the whole thing as a fanfic that was blown astronomically out of proportion and decide for yourself what is honorable behavior. You know, that exact thing you’re doing right now, Joyce?
Joyce needs to take a look at the lego webcomic The Brick Testament. It’s the bible done with lego’s and man it would totally change her views a bit!
http://www.thebricktestament.com/home.html
Old parable from a seminary prof I once had.
“An orthodox Jewish man walks up to his rabbi. Hat in hand, he stammers out a question. “Rabbi,” he says, “You know I’m a good Jew. I keep all the laws, I observe the sabbath…” He goes on like this for a while. Rabbi gets impatient, asks him what he really wants to say. The man says, “Rabbi, I’m gay, and I’m in love with a man. What do I do?”
Rabbi pauses, looks up and says to the man: “There are 613 laws to follow for being kosher, right?” The man nods. “Well then,” the rabbi continues, “Work on the other 612, and you’re going to be way ahead of the rest of the people in this synagogue.”
I’m not one to say it’s a sin to be gay, but the message I like drawing from this is that there’s a hell of a lot more to being a good person of faith (let alone a good person!) than one arbitrary law that has no moral grounding in the world as we understand it to be today. Work on the big stuff, and the details and minutia are definitely looked over. And, you know, on a more Jesus-y note, there is that whole grace thing that he talked about a lot. People seem to lose sight of that for some reason. He was a lot harder on the religious right of his day than the outcasts, that’s for sure. Go figure.
That sounds very similar to Joyce attitude about homosexuality and lying (minor sin… which I HATE). I’m pretty sure she is reevaluating that attitude now though.
Joyce might find some comfort in this website, which reframes the story of Ruth & Naomi as a lesbian relationship, with some good arguments even:
http://www.wouldjesusdiscriminate.org/biblical_evidence/ruth_naomi.html
Joyce is not going to come off religion anytime soon. What she’s going to find out instead, is that people are wont to bend the Bible to support their own prejudices, while others try to find justification for what their conscience tells them is right.
Oh man, it’s going to be a fun comments section today.
*takes Advil*
The answer is Mark 9:40
Honestly, I hope Joyce finds what she’s looking for, because honestly I’m Christian, but don’t really believe homosexuality as bad (at all really) enough to constitute a sin. Now if it was done -just- for the lust (which people on both sides of the argument are probably guilty of) and such, yeah that kinda falls in line with a commandment (look upon, lust, adultery at heart, blah blah.)
But if it’s legit love and commitment there can’t be anything wrong with it because love is love. How a person feels is how they feel, and while some do try and succeed in changing that, many cannot and feel misery for the rest of their lives because of people who can’t accept that love doesn’t always know gender. The biggest argument that homosexuality = sin is one of the first things that man is told to do. ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ which is probably not even the original exact text.
You’re reading a composite pieced together and “interpreted” at different times by different people over the course of centuries, even millenia, Joyce. If there was once a perfect testament of right and wrong handed down by god… well… let’s just say your original source is out of reach.
I read that the translation is up for debate, with the “men who lay with men”. Apparently (and this may be as true as the contents of a bull’s behind) the original text was likely closer to “a man will not lie with a man who has been given to the church”. Or “an alter boy” for a distasteful level of irony.
Of course, this was just some thing I read once on the internet, so who knows how true it is? But given that Joyce doesn’t seem to stop going to class or interacting with males while menstruating, I think she’s got bigger issues with literally following her bible.
Plus, if Joyce manages this she can wear some kick ass polyester blends after as well.
At some point I’m going to have to stop saying that Joyce is being adorable because right now it just seems like Joyce is ALWAYS being adorable.
But not today.
Joyce is adorable.
If Joyce gets serious about this bible scholarship thing, there’s no telling what kinda uncomfortable realizations she may have to face.
If God were serious about there being “one true” anything, there wouldn’t be four versions of the basic story of Jesus. There aren’t four versions of the Koran. Think of how confusing four versions of the Book of Mormon would be. Christianity is uniquely set up to be diverse, which can make people cling even more tightly to their chosen interpretation. Insisting on rapture and other modern innovations makes belief fragile rather than strong. Insisting on denying scientific discoveries makes belief fragile.
Insistence on ignoring scientific discoveries is a fairly recent trend in Christianity (like… within the past 100 years), and a depressing one at that (I’m a Christian who believes God created the world through evolution. Not a popular opinion.) Most scientific discoveries — especially about geology and how the earth is formed — were made by clergy. It’s only recently that reason became “the enemy of faith.”
Depends on the subject.
Heliocentrism caused quite a ruckus. Aristotelian theories were clung to quite vigorously on a variety of phenomena.
Yeah, it caused a ruckus, but it was mostly because Galileo was kind of a jerk.
I’m serious, read his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The Heliocentrist is even named “Simpleton” (in Italian, of course). Whether or not this was intentional is moot, though, since “Simplicio” held the views of Pope Urban VIII, who was something of a friend until the Dialogue was published. And honestly, people can be jerks without meaning to.
The organized church’s hostile attitude towards heliocentrism wasn’t caused by superstition or fundamentalism though. Tensions were high and rising every year between the great catholic and protestant nations and the church was terrified of anything that could cause them to lose influence. The catholics didn’t try to censor Galileo because they believed he was wrong, but because they knew he was right.
And has far more to do with culture wars than it does with any actual belief system. Anti-intellectualism is a powerful tool for rabble-rousing demagogues of all stripes.
(Hi! Similar boat here.)
There are also two conflicting creation stories in Genesis.
Taking “the” Bible as a literal history or literal anything is… foolish.
I dunno, I reckon it’s okay to take is as literal schlock. Even treated as a work of complete fiction it’s not very good. Way too wordy, needs a serious going over by a good editor.
There were many, many version of the Koran, since it was passed down orally and then only written down after Muhammad died. At some point any version that was decided to be the “wrong” version was destroyed. That aside it runs across the same problems the Bible has…written text can’t convey the same message once it hits multiple languages and cultures.
It just makes me really sad that there are still people who were/are raised this way, to think that all of their personal opinions and beliefs are harmful and wrong. Like the strip where Dorothy told Joyce to be proud of herself, and she said that she couldn’t, because that was a sin. Because everyone she’s ever come in contact with (before college) places religion above her worth as a human being. It’s just heartbreaking to me.
This comment section makes me think I’m the only Catholic that reads this comic.
Well, I was raised in Catholic school from Kindergarten to Senior Year HS…currently just Christian with no other affiliation…does that help?
I’m here, too. I just don’t comment that much. I identify as Catholic, though (like WikiDreamer) my actual beliefs are more unaffiliated. That’s not to say I am an advocate for abortion or something like that, but actually it’s more that I put less emphasis on the authority of the Pope and transubstantiation than other Catholics.
Not at all. Going to St. Bronislava for Mass this afternoon. Holy day of obligation dontchaknow. But Catholics are very diverse in their beliefs. Some are fundies in disguise, while others could pass for neo-pagans. Despite its authoritarian tendencies, the primacy of an individual’s informed conscience is a central tenet. Catholics have believed just about anything and everything, mainly depending upon their culture. Just was reading a guy who was certain that virgin birth meant Jesus transported himself out of Mary with no birth process and that all good Catholics agreed with him. Most would think he was a nut case and hated women. Lots of No True Scotsman type arguments, which are mostly cultural and tribal and sexist. I just ignore them all.
Nah, I’m here too. I’m fine staying out of these types of discussions, though.
Catholic, 15 years of Cath education, Religious Studies minor. Catholic views are… catholic. 😉 keeps things interesting at the holiday dinner table.
nahhh it’s just that in the usa catholics are only half as common as protestants, and a lot of catholics have a very lax religion in comparison to protestants. i’m not from there and, if it helps, i was raised catholic, like i even attended the church groups at high school (mostly because there was free food), though i currently identify as agnostic in a “it doesn’t really matter” way
Being gay might be ok, so long as you aren’t left handed as well…
Here’s some advice, Joyce: Maybe…just maybe, you should associate with people because you like them and they’re decent human beings, not because a 2000 year old book written by a bunch of dudes playing a literary version of “Telephone” tells you who you can and can’t be friends with.
Just a suggestion.
Up to a few weeks a ago those two groups were synonymous (as far as she knew).
Even when I was going to Church every week my mind just wouldn’t accept the idea that a Loving Benevolent God would hate someone who liked the same naughty bits they have.
It always seemed more like humans putting their own prejudice into a deity so that didn’t feel like awful people for hating some of Gods Children because “Gay Germs” or something.
And Like Joyce I went to a Non-Denominational church and I still consider people I met there friends but it’ll never stop the fact that one of them said he stopped watching an episode of Glee just because two dudes kissed. It’ll always seem silly to me.
Seriously, Joyce? You don’t need to look into the Hebrew or Greek versions for this one.
Lesbians get all the wiggle room they want because females are basically property. Now they don’t get a go with lifestock. And have to raise a ruckus when getting raped in order not to get stoned afterwards but rather get married to the rapist.
But female-female sex? Nothing worthwhile in the Bible. Whereas male-male earns both a stoning, being one of the, uh, unforgivable? sins.
You got other problems. Like uncovering the source of the monthlies. Most gynecologists would really have to get stoned.
The saving grace for male homosexuals is not that there would be much wiggle room in the Bible for homosexual acts. The saving grace is that a lot of modern life is good for getting a stoning so it seems sort of pointless to harp on homosexuality specifically.
She’s rearranging her mind! 😀
Not yet. But she is starting to inspect the contents of her pre-concined notions box. I suspect that the tube will be moving soon.
Man, never posted a comment on one of these before, despite having read the comic almost since inception, but today’s kind of hit close to home for me enough to say something.
I was raised pretty hardcore Christian, myself, but a crisis of faith lead me to do a lot of the same research Joyce is talking about. Ever since, I’ve been not nearly as much of a Christian as I used to be.
The English versions of the bible (of which there are like a thousand) are hilariously out of sync with the original Hebrew and Greek. A lot of very important words and phrases are just straight up mistranslated, possibly by design.
For example, the original Hebrew of the Bible doesn’t contain the concept of Hell. When they talk about Hell, they’re talking about “the valley of Gehenna” which is a literal, physical place outside of Jerusalem.
That’s not nearly as scary, though. :V
Actually, Gehenna, or Ge Hinnom, “Valley of Hinnom,” was quite scary; the site was known historically to the Hebrew people (and some other residents of the region) as an ancient site for sacrificing children by fire, and became a cursed site as a result. The Tenth Roman Legion also practiced cremation of the dead there. The known and repeated use of the area for immolation spawned associations in the Bible with Gehenna and fire as a vivid symbol of the spiritual pain and suffering one would feel.
In the words of Dr. Zaius, “Don’t look for it, Joyce. You may not like what you find.”
…Naah, go look 🙂
damn, I remember doing this exact same thing when I was 18
me at thirteen “IS MASTURBATING OKAY IN THE BIBLE” *fervent history deletes after every google search*
All I can say is, that must have been one big Bible.
Last panel. Joyce’s face. <3
It’s dishonest to—augh! Augh! AAAAUUUUUUGH!
well at least she’s honest in her dishonesty XD
Just gonna say “God’s Loophole”.
Google it if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
I googled and found this….https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HbaqlcmDCA
I I I just can`t…
your poophole is not a loophole
Having read the whole damn bible multiple times, it NOWHERE mentions relationships between women. Nowhere.
I may add, having read the whole thing in the original language.
It’s kinda impressive the depth and width of knowledge that dwells among the commentators of this comic.
Which original language? Ancient Aramaic? Koinoia Greek? Classical literary Greek? Latin? Ancient Hebrew? Something else?
The Bible is an aggregation and a syncretism of texts from a variety of sources, with the oldest parts a recording of an oral tradition in a long extinct Semitic precursor language, and the most recent portions in either trade Greek (most of the new Testament) or classical Greek (those portions usually attributed to Luke) or someotherlanugagebutprobablysomeformofhebrew for portions of the books in the Catholic canon but not in the Protestant canon, to a variety of others for some of the books in the alternative canons like the Syrian Christian Bible.
How old are the “oldest passages”, really? If exodus never actually happened, and the creation story got added on during the Babylonian exile, I gotta wonder if the whole thing is no older than the sixth century BCE.
I thought about introducing my theory here of Jesus as a polyglot legend here, like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, but, well, meh.
I thought this was an interesting take on the Romans passage…
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unfundamentalistchristians/2013/10/romans-126-27-a-clobber-passage-that-should-lose-its-wallop/
what joyce is forgetting is that if YOUR faith believes homosexuality is a sin, then you can follow that and still not judge OTHERS’ homosexuality
i don’t believe it is a sin, but to each his ownI`m kinda in a limbo atm where as I`m not 100 percent sure on what I believe at the moment. However I was raised in a very little, and very old fashioned christian (almost cult like) village in upper PA. It consisted of a general store, a bunch of farms, and a few houses with the church as the ruling social factor. Due to this I was a lot like Joyce growing up, then some things happened to give me a reality check.
I always relate to Joyce the most (Though me and Walky are brothers in slackertude) This comic just needed a comment, it isn`t dishonest Joyce. I`m agnsit using/manipulating any type of religion or theology for personnel bias or use, or using a selective reading skill to take only what you want to out of certain words. So I suppose I agree with Joyce but for some one like Joyce this is more then that. This is her questioning it, and there is no dishonesty in that.
It`s good to question and research you`r beliefs. I`m not saying she should turn from god in the hand, hell I`m still of the idea that we will never know what the right path is until are number is punched. However this shows that Joyce is starting to stand on her own two feet and not the crutch of what shes been spoon fed, what ever decision she makes on beliefs from here in out, is her own. She looked down every corner, she mulled it over in restless nights, she looked deep inside herself, and this is a step in becoming her own person.
I hope we see Joyce coming to be her own person in the coming story lines.
Apropos of nothing, some questions.
Is Robin DeSanto of the ‘dumbingverse’ also a combat veteran? With Carla’s potential backstory and only the combat vets & superheroine of the ‘walkyverse’ having been violent in the story (Is Sarah the exception that proves the rule?) there seems to be that…meta-entertainment of which similarities carry over (Leslie being open to being set up with Robin) and which don’t (Ethan’s self-discovery happening much earlier in life, age adjustments, etc.). So if ‘dumbingverse’ Robin is ‘fast’ that obviously wouldn’t mean her sci-fi levels of being able to process calories nigh at will. But it could mean her unique blend of nigh unconscious speed learning and tendency to chase goals singularly allow a ‘similar’ background. If she ‘left’ her family to join the military and then G.I. billed her way through college (or even just graduated high school at ~16 and ROTC’d her way to the military) she could be just as combat veteran with a ‘surprise’ law degree that you’d never realize from talking to her but see as inevitable once you saw the rest of her life in context as the ‘walkyverse’ Robin.
Secondly, if Carla and Joe aren’t related at all (because ‘walkyverse’ Joe built Ultracar after he graduated with an engineering degree) what about ‘Ultracar’s Mom, Rachel’? Is she one of the Rachels in the ‘dumbingverse’? Are Carla’s parents the typical half her features or was she ‘adopted according to a set of criteria laid out with intent’?
Eh. Just musings.
According to Walkypedia, one of the Rachels in the dorm is Rachel Jackson, the Dumbiverse counterpart of Ultracar’s mom.
http://walkypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Rachel
So I take it Joyce ain’t a ‘King James’ only’ advocate?
Happy new year!
Sarah greets people by glaring at them.
Wait, isn’t an Autobot the new self-driving car?
🙂
I did learn recently that many American people actually don’t know that the bible wasn’t originally written in english.
The fact Joyce even needs to mention it is terribly baffling to me.
Joyce’s biggest mistake was believing the bible is thecword of god instead of a bunch of stories, poems and letters.
It would be (well, WAS) enormously more dishonest of the people who rewrote and translated that bible to rephrase things, remove sections, add new sections, all to support their own personal biases.
…but if that hadn’t already happened hundreds of times over, there would be no splintered denominations of Christianity, or for that matter, Muslims, who split off to form their own group in the 6th century, largely out of disgust for how Christians kept changing the old traditions to whatever suited them at the time.
Changing “The Holy Word” whenever it becomes inconvenient, or not suiting your political agenda, is the oldest “tradition” Christianity has!