I am not sure what exactly Joyce believes, since, as she’s nondenominational, we don’t know any of the details unless she tells us. But she did describe earlier the sorting of people into Heaven and Hell as occurring after the end of time, which is also Catholic doctrine. So it wouldn’t be unreasonable for her to believe the Catholic definition of heaven as well, which is that you don’t need your friends and family in heaven. God fills that hole in you that on Earth is caused by needing literally everything.
I’m going to post a snippet from yesterday’s conversation so that no one has to go searching through it to figure out what I’m talking about:
Crazy Dina
… Now that I think about it, has Joyce come across a single person who wasn’t either a jerk or someone she thought was probably damned?
Mike: Jerk (Mike)
Walkie: Damnation status unknown, can be considered a jerk
Dorothy: damned (atheist)
Becky: Now damned (lesbian)
Billie: Possibly damned (from lesbian experiences, status changing)
Glasso: Definitely a jerk
Parents: JERKS (written off by Joyce. Reason: Parents)
Mary: Jerk (Unknown by Joyce)
Ruth: Jerk
Dina: Damned (probably an atheist, definitely not Christian)
Forgot Ethan: Damned (gay)
Bagge
That’s very true and a large source of underlying stress for Joyce. Both because she fears for hear friends and because she fears for herself. She said as much to Dorothy at one point – finding out that people who she has been taught her whole life is bad for her is actually good people, is exactly what she’s been told her whole life to be afraid of.
Sarah – does nasty thing with a toy. Not necessarily damned but at risk. A bit of a jerk.
Sal – too cool not to be damned.
Roz – Very damned.
Joe – Very damned, very jerk.
Crazy Dina
Worse: she has no rock – no one she’s allowed to get close to. And in that, if she does go to heaven, she’ll be alone while her friends end up together in hell (which is why I DON’T want to go, and would easily explain Willis’ desire to be damned). If you ask me, THAT’S the part that would create the most stress, why she’s so upset at Becky’s changes and why she might want to convert Ethan from gay-itude – she doesn’t want to be alone for eternity.
You can add scroll bars using the CSS overflow property, and you can add that in the style of an HTML element, although I’m not 100% confident it’ll work here. Let’s try!
Oh darn it! Someone just hug Joyce and tell her that everything is okay and that she won’t be alone for all eternity! Someone let her know she’s okay, and tell her that Heaven is a choice she can make when the time comes based on where her friends have to go, and tell her that Hell can’t be that bad as long as her friends are there to protect her, and that Sarah, Dorothy, Walky, Amber, Dina, and even Mike will make sure she’s okay even if she does have to choose Hell so as not to be alone!
Someone tell her that the Devil can’t be as bad as depicted, he never discriminate against who he allows in, and that if worst comes to worst, that worst will mean that Hell is full of good people too, and that there is nothing to fear! D;
Its ok. Its ok. You won’t be alone in an afterlife.
Either there is an afterlife, and you don’t be alone in it (the whole concept seems to be about sorting you with people you’re likely to get along with). Or, there isn’t an afterlife and so you won’t exist to be alone in it.
It’s not just being alone that scares me. It’s the jerks I might wind up with by being a(n overall, I am calling these people jerks, after all) good person.
That reminds me of a comedic news item I heard a while ago, about how Hell now hosts one of the most vibrant gay communities in the world, and how awesome it is, and how open and accepting. It ended with “Heaven, meanwhile, remains as bigoted as ever.”
*reads “Dina: Damned (probably an atheist, definitely not Christian)“* You know, just for future reference, not all Christians debate evolution vs. creation. There are a lot who actually just think of a middle ground between the two, they’re just not as loud or good news coverage.
I dare say the majority of Christians would say this entire list is silly, but that doesn’t matter right now. This is only about the Christianity Joyce was taught, or more to the point, how she herself interprets it right now.
Yeah, I remember reading that the original theory of evolution was proposed by a member of the church. The Big Bang too, I believe, due to its similarities to how God created the universe.
Actually, the Big Bang (Fred Hoyle’s derisive term for the theory,
which ironically stuck) was first proposed by Georges Lemaitre,
a cosmologist and Jesuit priest, when he realized Einstein’s
theory couldn’t describe a static universe. Interestingly, Lemaitre
fought against any religious implications of the theory, saying it was
purely a scientific realization.
I always thought poor Lamarck got a bit of bad press. He was wrong about the mechanism but he had the general idea right 50 years before Darwin (who of course also was deeply religious).
If one wants to be snarky about it one could always bring up the great Atheist biologist Lysenko…
Actually, the history of Lamarckism is a sad story. Lamarck wrote before Darwin, and his work was not truly repudiated until the emergence of the statistical tools behind population genetics in the 1920’s. Most of what we consider Lamarckism, in fact, was the work of cranks and frauds, either motivated by eugenics or political pressure.
That’s not to say that Lamarck was in any way right — he wasn’t! — but it is to say that the blame he usually gets is not really deserved.
(Apologies for incoming pedantic mode – this is kinda my thing.)
Modern work on epigenetics is actually starting to make it look like Lamarck was onto something. Turns out some acquired traits really are heritable!
What Lamarck was really missing was the idea of existing variation within a species. He had the basic notion of descent with modification, but he was thinking in terms of one platonic ideal of a species evolving into a different platonic ideal. Darwin’s big breakthrough was the idea that variation within a species is the norm, not an unfortunate deviation from an ideal form, and that variation allows for differential reproductive success of individuals — natural selection.
Poor Lamarck really was pretty close. And even Darwin was still missing several important mechanisms, since it would be another century before we were pretty sure what DNA was and roughly how it works. They both get a lot of undeserved blame and/or credit based on work done by later “Lamarckian” or “Darwinian” researchers.
You seemed to be missing my point: JOYCE perceives this to be the case, not necessarily being true or false in the perception of any others or in reality. Although technically, I could put Dina down as “a little jerkish” due to her interactions with Joyce, but I don’t think I’m going to. I’m going to hold the opinion that Dina is probably more damned due to her beliefs (In Joyce’s perspective) than she is a jerk (which Joyce probably views as exactly how we view her, completely misinformed from the start of her life).
As a Christian it is my belief that many of the things in the bible that dont contridict itself in another part is true but as far as the origins of the world if God is all powerful he could have done creation in 7 days and decided that he would make it seem like that time had been going on longer than it had its one of the perks of being all-powerful
I can’t actually think of where it’s written, but it was pretty generally accepted in the community at my church that there were some sort of one way visitation rights in the afterlife. So if you got into heaven you could go hang out with your friends in hell, but they couldn’t come hang out with you in heaven.
Though I guess that’d mesh weirdly with interpretations of the afterlife that include like nasty hellfire burning torture sort of hell, because why would you want to go hang out with your friends in a place like that?
Maybe you take a protective film with you when you go? OR maybe those sentenced to heaven get sort of a protective bubble, so those who are sentenced to hell, but have lots of friends in heaven can get their sentences laxed by convincing those friends to come visit often?
> so those who are sentenced to hell, but have lots of friends in heaven can get their sentences laxed by convincing those friends to come visit often?
I think mormonism has the idea that if your offspring eventually find the right path, then they can choose to accept God for you and free you of hell.
So, yes, this idea is believed in, of having good friends and family to lessen the pain of hell.
Actually, we can only perform ceremonies like baptism and marriages for the dead. It’s still up to the individual in question whether they want to accept God.
Mormon afterlife is a bit weirdly structured in that way. It’s assumed that there will still be atheists and people of other faiths in there. If I recall one of the tiers of heavens is just an eternity of missionary work, spreading the good word to other dead people. These missionaries will have to have successfully converted your dead relative before you perform their baptism or they won’t accept it and it’ll mean nothing.
Technically it’s not supposed to be about dead relatives exclusively, but also it’s a total bongo to track down some ancient greek peasant’s information so you gotta start somewhere.
No, always bet on Joyce’s compassion. She’s proven again and again that she’ll always side with the people she loves. She just takes time to adjust her thinking for how she’ll deal with it.
Joyce has a big heart and a powerful sense of family. Before college, that was applied to her flock, so to speak, but her notions of what family is have changed a lot, between Dorothy, “Big Sister” Sarah, Ethan, Billie, and even Walky to butt heads with. She cares about her friends tremendously, and that is hard to reconcile when her flock had her believing that many of these people would have been lost causes or unrighteous, things she has seen to be false.
It’s worth remembering she’s 17 or 18 right now. She has a LOT of contradictions she needs to face. We all did.
Agreed. On the surface, it may look like a kinda ratty thing to do, to try and see if the bible REALLY says homosexuality is a sin, but look at the larger picture. She just challenged her own faith because it seemed wrong to her. That’s not Thats not easy for someone like her.
I guess I don’t understand why Joyce looking up things in the Bible is a bad thing? Like she is very religious and wanted to see alternate viewpoints. I am not seeing how this is a terrible thing to do at all. (If someone wants to actually explain that’ll be cool)
Because she told Becky that she mattered to her more than anything, but then had to double check to make sure that God gave her the A-OK, instead of just going for it because she loves Becky.
Although I doubt it was questioning Becky as having to deal with what she had saying “no” but she desperately wanted a “yes”, so she did the research in hope of being less conflicted about Becky’s situation (I.E. being damned)
IDK I think that’s really unfair. I mean I understand why Becky herself is upset. She’s in a really vulnerable place and isn’t really in a position to be fair but I don’t think the audience has to agree with her. Joyce is still entitled to her religion. It can be argued that maybe Joyce shouldn’t have mentioned it today, but Joyce didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not wrong to make one’s religious beliefs a priority in your life.
Ummm…speaking as a Christian-type-religious-type, what Joyce did was wrong: she tried to rescue Becky from damnation as read in the Bible. What she should have done was accept the revelation that Becky, who is clearly a good person and not damned, was lesbian — and worked to save the Bible from that.
The effect on Joyce’s understanding of the ambiguity of the text might have been the same. The effect on Joyce would have been completely different: the one we see leads to claiming that Becky should be grateful to Joyce for salvaging her. The one we didn’t see would lead to Joyce realizing that she found a potential way to save (in the Cristian sense) her old pastor and perhaps Becky’s father. Big, big difference.
But she thinks Dorothy is damned, and she’s her best friend there. Knowing that, I don’t think she could view Becky as “Clearly not damned”. Of course, this is coming from someone who believes that the religous version of heaven is full of jerks, so there may be a hint of bais.
No matter what you think of heaven or anything else, you should recognize that there’s a huge difference between shoehorning the fact that your friend is OK into your beliefs and figuring out your beliefs were wrong because they say your friend isn’t OK, and, as result, having the humility to fix yourself.
Only the second truly reflects the willingness to realize that you’ve been deeply wrong. If Joyce had been there, she’d have been able to say tell Sarah “The difference is between trying to find wiggle room and trying to understand the truth and figure out where I went wrong.”
Anyone who doesn’t change the viewpoints they’ve practically been indoctrinated with since childhood overnight are a lost cause. If they can’t do a complete 180 without a single mistake in less than 12 hours, all hope is lost. Or so I assume, because I don’t get it either.
I’ve done and said stupid things myself, but I learned from the consequences and in some cases, regretfully, I might not have changed for the better if I hadn’t witnessed how my actions hurt other people.
TrollDrool, I think your sarcastic comment was a little out of line. Becky grew up in the same situation, and she does have PLENTY of cause to be hurt (although I didn’t get it at first either, I had to read a few comments before it clicked). It doesn’t make that much sense from the outside looking in, but Joyce’s actions wouldn’t make a lot of sense from Becky on the inside looking out. (Try reading some of the other comments, I’m not great at explaining it)
I probably could have picked my words better if I gave the impression that Becky didn’t have a reason to feel offended. The sarcasm was more a reaction towards commenters complaining about how insensitive Joyce is behaving in their eyes. But you’re right, looking over the comments, it’s pretty clear why Joyce needing reassurance from the Bible rather than just trust Becky as she said she would can be hurtful.
I think it’s better to withhold judgement of Joyce for now. As others have pointed out, she’s in the middle of a learning experience and her previous beliefs have been severely challenged. Again, though, others have pointed out her big heart and loyalty. I’m pretty sure she’ll get it right in the end, but it will be rough for a time.
To be fair, those are kind of two very different schools of thought on faith. It sounds like Becky believes in a sort of informal spirituality where you project the specifics based on an abstract idea of what you believe God to be. As in “Well, our God is a benevolent and loving god, so obviously he wouldn’t ban people to eternal damnation over something like this. That’d be pretty extreme.”
Where Joyce believes in a more formal, scripturally based faith, where if you want to know what God’s thoughts on an issue are you study the words he’s put out for that purpose.
Joyce’s school of thought is probably more true to their upbringing, where Becky I’m imagining has been driven to pursue faith in a way more applicable to her own circumstances.
See, my read on it was different. I see one valid way to be religious (Becky’s) and one… less valid way (Joyce). Joyce’s way is based on dogma, “If it says it in this book it must be true NO MATTER WHAT. No matter how much evidence exists to the contrary.” I don’t see that as valid for a whole host of reasons, a major one of which was touched on in a recent strip with Sarah. That whole “The word of God is immutable, except the parts that kind of are” bit.
When you base your faith on “the book is right no matter what” you’re opening yourself up to a world of problems. What about the parts that contradict each other? What about the parts that made sense when the book was written but seem like insane troll logic in modern society? Always dogmatists have to cherry pick which parts are to be taken literally and which parts are allegory, undermining the whole point of following the book. Or they can go all in and join the ranks of the truly insane who believe that dinosaurs were all killed during Noah’s Flood.
My read on this is that Gangler’s two methods are being deliberately contrasted here and that the comic is setting up for Joyce’s belief system to shift farther towards Becky’s point of view due to the dogmatic kind of faith that she was brought up in being bonkers to the max.
“God has made his will known to us, all we have to do is understand it” is for me an honest approach to faith. It leaves room to acknowledge that yes, the bible was written in a different language in a different times and edited and translated and modified at several other times, but if we can just sift it and distill it enough it is there.
I mean, you can be just as dismissive about Becky’s approach to faith. It can be used to justify anything.
Okay, but at what point does it cross over from “not dogmatic” to “let’s just try not to think too hard about it”?
With Joyce’s way, she actually *cares* about whether Christianity is Factually Correct or not, and she has a scope to change her mind about it.
With Becky…Christianity isn’t a factual question to begin with. Becky still considers Christianity as more valid than Atheism, so it’s not that she’s thought about the question and realized Faith isn’t about Facts or somethng enlightened like that…it is simply that Becky doesn’t think too hard about Faith, and so doesn’t have to bother with these pesky questions the way Joyce is forced to.
Joyce is *wrong*, but she’s intellectually wrong. Becky isn’t using intellect to begin with, she’s perfectly comfortable with inconsistency.
@Gangler: Tell me, what sounds more like the definition of “faith” to you?
“It’s okay, you’ll be fine. I had to go double check to make sure, but it proved that you’ll be fine!”
“I’ve known this person all my life. She is not damned.”
Last I checked, faith meant to believe in something. Faith in God is believing in both his existence, and in his actions. Having to prove to yourself everything does not sound like any form of the word “faith” I’ve ever heard, except in misuse. I’ve also heard the word “addicted” used towards many things, when the word “obsessed” was the actual word that should have been used. The problem is that the word, even if incorrect, has become so commonly used in that form, that people consider it to be another correct way of using it. So, yes, what you say is correct by modern definition…but that doesn’t make it any less of a safety blanket used by those who are actually lacking in faith in order to save face.
Having faith in God is different from having faith in your own human intuitions and feelings. Joyce knows very well that the latter are fallible – her feelings drive her toward pre-marital hanky-panky, which is a sin against God.
She thought Becky would be pleased to hear that being a lesbian might be non-sinful, Biblically, but it seems Becky has already discarded Biblical faith in favor of deciding that God would agree with her even if the Bible said otherwise. Putting your own intuitions above the Word of God may involve some kind of faith, but it’s sure not Joyce’s kind.
Many definitions of faith have one specific part: that the belief in whatever is *without proof*. Believing in something where that belief is supported by proof and evidence isn’t faith, it’s understanding.
There’s some faith needed just to accept the initial premise that there is a god, and that this god has made his will known to us through his writings.
Be real, it’s not like Joyce is going full blown scientific method on this problem demanding any sort of definitive proof.
There are words for these two schools of doctrine. Joyce’s church subscribes to a doctrine referred to as “Biblical inerrancy” — that is, the Bible is correct in all aspects. The other doctrine is referred to as “Biblical inherency” — the Bible is a text which is correct, but which was written and is read by people who “see as through a glass, darkly.”
Given what we’ve seen of her dad in the Walkyverse, no, forgiveness is not in the cards. He’s not as bad as Amber’s dad, but he’s shooting for second place
It’s pretty likely that when Ross finally comes for Becky (and most likely accompanied by the Browns) and seeing people she loved and respected treating Becky so terribly will be the catalyst for Joyce’s 180 flip on homosexuality. No more research, no more making sure. She picks a side.
Given what “fixing the gay” sometimes entails, I’m not sure that he’s even second to Blaine. If he’s one of those who goes beyond “pray away the gay” into “rape away the gay” – and from what Willis showed us of him in the Walkyverse, I wouldn’t put it past him – he’s got a solid lock on “worst dad” and is fighting it out with Roofie Rapist Ryan for “worst character”.
Brent Girouex, ladies and gentlemen. Apparently we live in a world where religion can even get a convicted child rapist a reduced sentence (including not serving a single day in jail) instead of a bullet in the back of the head.
Atheism is troublesome for a lot of people because without the “certainty” that religion offers, you realise that things like justice and karma are not guaranteed and that idea terrifies the fuck out of a lot of people, hence why even believing in the “wrong” religion makes more sense to those people than believing in nothing.
My only problem with atheism centers on that certain breed of (dare I say Evangelesque?) atheists that insists in getting up everyone else’s face about their religion. Not even to discuss the topic, mind you, but mostly just to scream and attack people.
I remember one dude who responded to a Buddhist’s statement that he’s always eager to discuss religious differences with a shouted “Well, how am I supposed to do that when I think that you are completely INSANE.” That’s not having a conversation, that’s attempting to drown out the other person and shame them into silence.
My bottom line is this. Be ye Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, or anything else realize there are plenty of intelligent, observant people out there who believe something you do not. This is not a sign that they are stupid, merely that they have reached different conclusions from your own. Try not to assume there is anything wrong with them from the start- your position does not make you superior. Ever. There are also plenty of dogmatic assholes who assume they are awesome and always right. Avoid these people, and do not become one.
I think you’re misrepresenting us here. We aren’t centred on our vocal minority, those assholes are focused on everyone else. Thus, everyone else focuses on them. Too many people are atheists because it gives them a sense of smug superiority over others. I’m an atheist because I can have a sense of smug superiority over the atheists that have a sense of smug superiority and exhibit it. I also feel smugly superior to everyone else, but I just cackle maniacally in my supervillain lair instead of shouting at people about it.
I wonder if the guy who said that to the Buddhist would have said the same thing to the reverend Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi–two of the most influential social figures of the 20th century, and both, in their own ways, very religious men. Probably.
I know we’re not going to see reasonable believers in DUMBING OF AGE, since this is Willis’ college years retold and in some cases (like Joyce’s) sex-reversed, (and of course that’s Willis’ right and duty, to tell the story HE needs to tell) but it’s a shame that people like King, Gandhi, John Polkinghorne or George F.R. Ellis (the latter both making a good case for their religous beliefs buttressed by their own scientific views–Ellis has co-written with Hawking) can be dismissed by the “you are completely INSANE” types like you described above.
Oh, for Heaven’s sake. I have yet to meet an atheist who’s busily trying to convert me. Frankly, most of them simply look at me and say “OK, if you want to waste your time or it makes you happy, I’m not going to get in your way on Sunday morning as long as you don’t make me do anything.” Even the more aggressive ones I know make fun of me — and my answer is “OK, if want to waste your time making fun of me, I’m not going to waste my time on you. Just don’t prevent me from going to Church on Sunday.”
This subthread is an interesting (if potentially less than ideal) place to have a conversation about demographics and non-belief.
Atheism is one of the smallest ideological identities in the US. Only 2% of the population identifies as atheist, 3% identify as agnostic, and 13% identify as “nothing in particular,” frequently called “nones” by scholars.
One of the frustrations people often have in this dialogue is the assumption that atheism is the natural alternative to a lack of faith, when data implies that is not the case. When people are given the ability to express their identities in more nuanced ways, a fairly small number choose to identify as atheist. There’s nothing wrong with doing so, but it’s not the only way to be non-religous, and in fact is the least common way to be non-religious.
Because many outspoken atheists think they should be able to count that 13% who do not identify as atheist in their figures, it leads to these reductive categorizations that are actively harmful to discourse. The idea that religions are all about “certainty” is false and VERY conservative-christianity-centric. In mainstream Judaism, personal interpretation and uncertainty are a fairly large part of religious practice; the same can be said for Unitarianism, or liberal mainline Christianity.
The suggestion that atheism is the main form of non-religion and evangelical Christianity is indicative of all other forms of religion is statistically invalid and very problematic.
Yea, we had part of this conversation WRT Judaism downthread and it can be extended to most any non-christian religion. I’d love to see a conversation about say Judaism, Islam, or Zoroastrianism happen in the strip.
Hurray, a nuanced view! I’m so glad that someone here brought up that non-religious is not the same as atheist and that there is a lot of complexity in the matter.
Rational thought, science, technology, and public hygiene? You know, sewers and sewage treatment plants and water purification and distribution, and vaccines because germ theory, and evolution. Nevermind that most of that came from liberal Christians who did not let religious dogma cloud their thoughts… Science as an atheist plot is entirely a 20th century meme.
Okay, crazy thought, but she might consider trying to set Ethan up with Becky. It would mean giving up her own relationship with Ethan, but it would kinda kill two birds with one stone from her point of view.
Actually I though it would be cool of Becky and Ethan hit it off and had a brief Heterosexual Viagrohol fueled fling , just to get it out of their system for goods.
Yeah, I know she’s a lesbian and hes gay. I’m not trying to turn them straight, just think it would be interesting if they explored the boundaries of their attractions.
Although I kind of like how it would screw with the other characters heads and social expectations of queer sexuality.
“While I do see your point of view that the bible’s literal approval is important, you have to realize that it is insulting for me to have the acceptance of my identity reduced to a debate about ancient Greek translation.”
“While I do recognize that passion and in no way will ever cast doubt on your worth and right to be your own person, you have to realize that I still believe what we have been taught about God’s will as the ultimate yard stick of what is right and wrong, and that it is important for me in times of change to update my understanding of said will.”
“Let me take this moment to reassure you that our friendship has never been in doubt”
Now I really want to read a coming of age drama with loads and loads of characters in which all problems are solved by calm, intelligent, reasonable discussions, like a narrative version of /r/eyebleach.
I’ve read a few short parodies like that, mainly of Romeo and Juliette for some reason, but I agree – it would be awesome to read a whole book that doesn’t make a parody of the concept but uses it straight up.
What’s /r/eyebleach? I have this nagging feeling that I would regret it if I google a name like that.
It’s a subreddit dedicated to calming, soothing images for people to look at after encountering something exceedingly disturbing on the internet. Mostly cute animals, but nature images and very tasteful sexiness are mixed in as well.
“Becky, it’s not that! But if you go ahead and do this and got yourself damned, then that means you’ll go to Hell and I’ll never see you again! Becky, I want you in my life, even after Judgement Day! It seems to me that all of my friends here might be going to hell, and I don’t want to add you to the list! Please, Becky, don’t get yourself damned and leave me for eternity!”
#BreakdownOfAge
Becky’s not an idiot – anyone who be upset if their best friend instantly jumped into the bible to check if what they were doing with their life was okay despite saying it was okay regardless.
To Joyce, it was to comfort herself, to Becky it’s more like ‘I can’t fully be okay with myself supporting you without knowing for sure what this really old book from our religion says on the matter.’
It’s unfair of Becky to demand of Joyce that she effectively give up her own religion all in one go, when even Becky herself hasn’t pronounced herself a non-Christian.
Both Joyce and Becky are afraid to consider the case of Christianity really being super-against them on this, because it would really mean having to make a choice between their consciences and their Christianity. I’m not sure who is actually more afraid: the one who desperately tried to find loopholes in Christian scripture, or the ones who goes “Christianity is on my side, no matter what scripture says”.
As an atheist nowadays I don’t have that dilemma anymore, but it *was* my supportive view of homosexuality that led me from “I’m a Christian” to “I’m a Christian but I don’t believe everything the Church says” and from there it was a relatively short path to “I don’t believe most of what the Church says” and finally “I’m an agnostic”, “I’m an atheist-leaning agnostic” and lastly to “I’m an atheist”. So it’s a big thing and a big step. Nobody should expect anyone to do it in a single day.
Yeah, I’m waiting for that bomb to go off. I’m holding out hope that she’ll never find out…but that’s like saying that I’m holding out hope that Amber will get over her issues by tomorrow’s strip. Possible, but not likely in the extreme. I just hope Becky and Joyce’s friendship can survive it.
Not to sound bleak or anything, but she kind of has to survive it, she has no where else to go, for now she just needs to hold on to the fact that Joyce wants her around and accepts her.
I wish Becky herself seemed to be keeping this in mind, instead of harassing Joyce specifically to see traumatized/upset expressions on her face (risking making your best friend cry is just the FUNNIEST, right?) and picking fights over stands that Joyce has already taken and committed to.
Just remember two things 1) Joyce is seriously messed up when it comes to any kind of sexuality, including her own, let alone homosexuality. 2) Joyce’s beliefs have been a source of stability and comfort for her, accepting that they’re wrong is going to be life shattering so she’s going to be looking and clinging to loopholes for quite a while.
I know and remember all these things. Doesn’t change the way I feel about her, which is frustated. I *know* all these things. But still, every time she says something like this, it pisses me the effing eff off and I just can’t help it. Sometimes a tragic back story and ‘explanations’ for why someone behaves like a douchecanoe doesn’t make me feel any less angry and frustrated of the actual douchecanoe-ness. Y’know?
But does it lead to a better mix of emotions? I’ve come to believe that if we can old two conflicting ideas and emotion-sets in our heads per situation, and bring them to the point where they are NOT conflicting, we might be able to understand each-other better. But first, we have to learn to accept both the wrongs they do and the rights they do them for at the same time.
I’m not saying I don’t understand her or accept her and hey, I am rooting for her, totally, I am invested in her well-being and happiness. But I *just* can’t help it sometimes.
My very favorite person in the world could say something shitty and I’d be mad, too. And I love them. Joyce says shitty things a lot. So I get mad a lot. But of course you’re right in that I also have a whole other assortment of emotions about her and everyone else in this comic.
If you do something you know is wrong, you’ll justify it. God is always the ultimate right, people always do what they believe is right or necessary at the time.
‘Checking’
checking checking checking…
I once told a devout Christian that I had faith in the conscience God had given me and therefore didn’t need to memorize the Bible and he promptly told me that was the Devil whispering to me and how could I possibly know the difference between the two.
No, because back in that day, the only ones who could read the book were beyond corruption and would have seen through any such lies as the Devil put in.
You’d be surprised how many people back in the day couldn’t read the bible. Before Martin Luther and Steve Gutenberg translated the Bible into german (since before then it was exclusively latin), a lot of young priests only relied on a couple of anecdotes and their own intuition when instructing farmers to pay penance. Why? Because they didn’t understand a word of latin themselves and couldn’t read the Bible.
That and the fact that before the printing press, a whole Bible was monstrously expensive to make. Sometimes a parish church might only have the Gospels, because that’s all the community could afford.
That seems like a falty assumption – if the devil only had to corrupt a handful of people, why bother with the rest of the population? After all, no mortal should be able to fight back quite THAT hard.
I remember quite a few lessons about all the ideas I would be encountering out there in the world…evolution, for instance, or that a lot of the Bible doesn’t really apply anymore (or ever), or the idea that people who are essentially good will not be eternally punished. Ironically, I think those lessons were the first ones to introduce me to those ideas, and now I subscribe to all of them.
I think tyersome was responding to me (and I am a girl). I don’t think it ever occurred to me that Plasma might not be a girl, but come to think of it, they didn’t ever say so.
Never assume the gender purely on the basis of the avatar mainly because people often like to use pictures of what they like rather use pictures of themselves.
… or in my case, I have embraced the random gravatar assigned to me by fate … after all, part of the beauty of anonymity is confronting the near total irrelevance (particularly online) of things like gender, ‘race’, orientation, age or for all anyone really knows in my case species …
Plasma, your name doesn’t exactly state it either. Or your Tumbler profile. Seriously, what am I to base my pronouns on? Why does the English language not have third person singular neutral pronouns? Why must we separate things by gender?
Tyersome, you have no idea how many emails I’ve generated for that purpose alone. All.Hail.Dina@gmail.com was one of them, but then I put in an interesting vacation responder. ALL HAIL DINA! (And anonymity. Hail that too, cause ETHOS BE DAMNED!)
Sabbath School sounds awesome! Tony is like, “here kids, this is where the SG plugs into the amp stack,” Geezer tutors students on lyric writing, and Ozzy shows you how to… do the things he’s good at like… like… okay, Ozzy probably just hangs out and gets stoned.
Or is this some sort of other, less awesome Sabbath School?
It did indeed have its occasional moments like when they show movies where they envision the End Times with the Mark of the Beast or discuss the possibility that the last of dinosaurs might have been wiped out by medieval knights eager to slay ‘dragons’.
The primacy of an informed conscience is basic Catholic doctrine. Not always (rarely) honored by those in authority, but at the core. You can’t just follow rules and authorities. They will order you into wars, torture, etc. You cant rely on your culture’s values, because they will be messed up. You are responsible for your actions, not political or religious leaders. So there are pro-gay and pro-choice Catholic groups who are certain of their beliefs and have no intent of being chased out of their church. But an informed conscience might well check out Greek originals of the Gospels and be aware which epistles are later forgeries.
The Bible alone is often a screen on which to project current cultural values. What kind of religion has four different origin stories. I know that Wolverine has more, but really. You can believe just about anything and find support in the Bible. Thus the primacy of an informed conscience. But it feels much safer to text proof and follow rules.
Well, it is worth noting that Christian /= Catholic. I used to be Catholic, and many a Christian (of denominations I shall not name) seemed to be under the impression that we were as bad as pagans.
Who’s a teenager? Not me by a long-shot, while I do often think of my mental self as a teenager, the sad reality is that well and truly middle-aged but with all the creaks and health issues that you would expect of an elderly person.
Becky’s nowhere near aggressive enough to drive away everybody. She might not fit in with Joyce’s circle but it’s a big world, and I could see Daisy, for one, responding quite positively to Becky’s type of behavior, at least for a while.
My best friend from high school is a bit like Joyce is being here– though her development has been in the opposite direction, becoming more Joyce-like since starting college.
…Would Joyce’s 2-girl-threesome pluralization of ‘premarital hanky panky’ also apply to lesbians? Or is the plural just because it’s a threesome and doesn’t apply?
Multiple participants of any sex is “premarital hankies-panky”. Multiple instances is “premarital hanky-pankies”. Multiple instances of multiple participants would be “premarital hankies-pankies”. Two ladies is just “girl-on-girl hanky-panky“.
If that’s a Nietzsche reference: God might be awesome enough to get killed and be dead without dying. Being awesome beyond imagination is kinda part of the definition of god.
Whoever clicks it first has to say what youtube video plays, and describe it as much as tasteful. (No, I didn’t click it, it displays the URL when you hover over it)
Look, that’s not how it works. The person with the worst problems always wins king-(or queen)-of-the-mountain-of-problems and gets to ignore everyone else’s problems while demanding attention for their own. Becky fairly clearly wins for worst problems right now, so no one else’s problems matter at all and Becky can contemptuously dismiss their issues as she sees fit. It’s only fair!
I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
We have the technology, we can build around and through that mountain! That will never happen until we are willing to be understanding of how the problem affects everyone.Becky has the mountain, and Joyce has the dynamite…. Yet, Joyce still has to come to terms with the feat placed before her and has to find a place to start building.
This is disappointing. I really thought Joyce had turned a hard corner, that her new focus would be on (intensely) protecting Becky from the judgment of others. This feels more like she’s backsliding.
Ah, well, the Willis giveth and the Willis taketh away.
Change is hard! One’s beliefs, attitudes, and habits can be so interconnected that every change, no matter how seemingly obvious to outsiders, can become a very long-drawn-out sequence of steps. For someone with such an elaborate belief system to just have a sudden flash of insight and do a 180° on a major issue, without becoming seriously unbalanced, wouldn’t be believable. What Joyce is shown to do here seems a lot more realistic to me. Major u-turns tend to take months or years in the real world.
You really think a snap decisions she had to make in five seconds the night before was going to drastically change her? She made the right decision but she’s not ready to accept that the Bible and everything she’s spent her life being drilled into her head is wrong. Remember, Joyce was taught that the Bible is the literal word of god, that it’s all 100% true so if she accepts that one thing in it is wrong the whole illusion shatters and the whole thing comes under doubt. She can’t handle that right now.
Especially since part of her reason for being so glad to see Becky in the first place was that she felt overwhelmed already and needed someone to confide in. Someone to help her.
Now that Becky has been identified as someone who needs Joyce’s help, Joyce is not only not going to get the support she needs but has added more depth to her overwhelmed-ness. And will do her best to keep trucking along under the pressure, not wanting to disappoint anyone or be a bad friend.
I know Joyce is adorable as a comic strip character, and endearing and etc. etc. but if you make her a real flesh and blood person, she’s absolutely unbearable and she’s the type of person that hurts a lot of people and then gets away with BECAUSE she’s ‘adorable’.
I don’t really see Joyce getting away with much of anything in universe. This very strip is about her not getting away with her “has to make sure”-attitude about Becky’s sexuality.
Walky’s still freaking out. Poor Walky, I know these last two-three strips have only been a few minutes in universe, but man, you need to go find Dorothy stat. She’ll help you out (and not show too much shadenfreude. Probably).
No, Joyce really didn’t answer Becky’s question. But there are plenty of opportunities for her to find more loopholes, I’m sure. Not that I can blame her; I can’t embrace any form of organized religion simply because of all the inherent hypocrisy. I tried. I really did. But I just can’t do it. Embracing organized religion just did not help me in any way or make me feel happy.
I can understand someone like Joyce being conflicted though; given her upbringing, she is torn between helping her friend and “keeping the faith”, and in that regard I feel sorry for her.
Maybe this is weird of me but…part of me wonders if a nice conversation with a Chabad rabbi would help Joyce, even though she’s Christian and all that jazz. Just because I think getting a perspective from someone who’s deeply religious but also whose work is predicated on being open to people at a all levels of religiosity(and from many religious traditions, for that matter) and from all walks of life and not expecting to change them into something else might do her a world of good.
The tl;dr is that while judaism does prohibit specific male-on-male homosexual acts, it also prohibits bigotry, and that community is important, and that a jew should not be ostracized by a fellow jew (which I’m sure can be extrapolated to this situation). So are gay relationships illegal? certain aspects, on a technicality, yes, however, community and interpersonal relationships are more important.
(jewish biblical law is very very weird by modern standards, and I’m not talking about the leviticus bullshit that everybody always brings up, ie mixing clothings, selling women into slavery, etc, because even though those are what the words literally say, the important part is not the words but the rabbinic interpretation, and it can get very weird if you’re coming from a modern, western world viewpoint)
Well, Leviticus bullshit makes a lot more sense if you are familiar with other ANE law codes and ritual purity codes-there’s a famous law about damages to women who lose unborn children that was baffling to just about everyone until a rather similar Hittite law turned up.
Also I feel like the other TL;DR is “Judaism, like pretty much every religion that isn’t Protestant Christianity, does not work like Protestant Christianity and everyone would be less confused if they kept that in mind”.
In fact, Protestant Christianity often doesn’t work like Protestant Christianity, since Protestant Christianity isn’t a single religion but a catch-all term (at least in common use, IIRC) for ‘Christian but not Catholic’ which encompasses I don’t know how many different religions.
Now I think I’m going to go watch Babylon 5, because I have religion on the brain.
Yea that was more a swipe at how a lot of the study of religions implicitly takes American protestantism as a model and goes about looking for a creed and a scripture it can zero in on even when that approach doesn’t work. The difference between Reform and Orthodox Judaism and the emergence of the former in 19th century Germany and America is a very good example of this.
I don’t think that’s what a good Comp Rel course is about. Rel 101 is about comparative systems of belief, many of which aren’t officially called religions yet serve all the same purpose.
The US, for instance, has a unique religious system, practice of which is utterly demanded if one is not to be starved and marginalized. It’s a textual religion based on a mandatory code and an extensive self-referential commentary upon it. The commenters taken from a very selective caste led by a set of high priests who perform a set of unique rituals. Participants in this religion venerate the words and relics of a set of saints.
I’m writing, of course, about the American Constitutional Democracy, which is in every sense a church. There are a set of core beliefs to which all must subscribe. There are a set of rituals which all adherents must perform. (Try not standing during the national anthem at a football game if you don’t believe me.) There are even purification rituals, like paying your speeding tickets. There are defined roles. There is a priesthood. It is a religion.
And yet, like water to a fish, no American would think of themselves as participating in mandatory religious observance. The purpose of Rel 101 is to make bored Freshmen pay attention to that kind of thing and recognize it when they’re a part of it.
I don’t mean as far as “official statement of belief” goes(“It’s a sin, but so is grilling pork on Shabbos and frankly the second one is rather more concerning to us” might be appropriate here). I mean more that Joyce would benefit enormously from absorbing something of the way Chabad tends to approach outreach to less-religious Jews* and the kinds of attitudes that cultivates. Also I kind of want to see her reaction to being told basically “If you want to follow G-d’s law, fear of eternal punishment is a terrible reason to do it”(complete with the passage in Maimonides that essentially describes rewards and punishment in the herafter as G-d’s equivalent of giving a kid candy for doing their schoolwork).
*meet people on their level, make people feel welcome and don’t make them feel weird if they come in and don’t know what’s going on, encourage non-Jews to learn about Judaism but don’t demand or expect that they convert)
I feel compelled to note from personal experience, in case anyone is inspired to try this, that not all rabbis–Chabad or otherwise–are created equal. If you happen to encounter a meh rabbi, keep looking.
That’s not Smitten Face, that’s Failed A Math Quiz I Didn’t Know That Was Possible Face. They have similar symptoms – freaked out expression and papyrophagia – but you can tell the difference by the fact that Walky hasn’t thrown a toy at anyone’s head.
First off, lemme just say, Willis, I am amazed by the panel layout. I LOVE how you did it, with panels 2 and 4’s facial expressions really standing out because the other 3 panels “float” on top of them. It really screams Joyce VERSUS Becky, which I think is amazing. Super kudos for the thoughts behind the design.
Poor Walky, world still shattered because he recieved whats probably his first ever failing mark. His high school experience told him he was smart and didn’t need to try to do well, and it turns out college has completely different expectations and requirements, and its really hitting him and hurting him. While I don’t think I ate my failed quizzes/tests, I do remember having that exact same facial expression for my first few months as a college student.
As for Becky and Joyce’s argument, Joyce evidenced very clearly the previous night that she loves Becky dearly, if non-sexually, and would do everything she could to do right by her. She’s also dealing with her upbringing, and the horrible horrible guilt she’s feeling for supposedly going against the word of God. But she’ll do almost anything for Becky, religion be damned. (pardon the pun, if you will)
Becky is feeling hurt, because it seems to me that she sees this as a “becky or bible” choice, and by Joyce going through the bible and trying to find loopholes that’ll make becky’s “sin” less horrible, like joyce is selling out and trying to replace her real, self-determined moral choices with the externally-determined biblically-moral choices. My heart goes out to these two poor young ladies. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment, as always.
Unlike Becky, I’m not mad that Joyce looked it up. All her life, she was raised to believe that God was against being gay. So of course she was going to try and see if perhaps her leaders had misinterpreted or warped what was actually written. Certainly, Becky has a point, and I see where her anger stems from.
I think that if Joyce had decided that Becky was really in the wrong, she would still have cared and tolerated Becky. But, she would be worried about Becky’s soul, and would probably pray night and day for Becky.
Considering a very old book (and not even a particularly well-written one) more important than your oldest friend, who has never tried to hurt you? Seems pretty bad to me.
Were you raised to have your entire life and everything you believed based on that book? Joyce isn’t a bad person, she’s just hardcore brainwashed. She’ll break free eventually the comic just moves so slowly we keep expecting her to be more developed than she can be.
Is it strange that I tend to near-obsessively tend to reexamine my worldview constantly, even though there hasn’t been anything to provoke me into doing so? I’ve been doing so since I was twelve.
On the one hand, a lifelong friend whose life has been ruined and has nowhere else to turn. On the other, a book of unverified and unverifiable authorship which contains prohibitions against same-sex relations in the sections that have to do with a) the laws of a society which also practiced slavery and b) the rantings of a man who claimed to know what Jesus wanted more than the people who actually knew him. The choice is clear!
You’re all assuming to know why I dislike what Joyce is doing. She’s essentially saying: Becky > God. Her best friend is more important than the omnipotent, omniscient, savior of mankind. That’s what she’s saying when she says she wanted to see if God “was on the right side.” I don’t care that she looked to see what the Bible had to say. If you’re going to center your life on the words of a book, you should make sure you know what it says, rather than just accepting what everybody else says about it. In short, Joyce is being a hypocrite. She needs to fall on one side or the other and stop sitting on the fence.
I don’t know what your problem is, but you need to relax. Putting God first doesn’t mean that you love anyone else any less. But if one believes in God as described in the Bible, they cannot put people over God. If God can be wrong, then He is flawed, He is a liar, and He is not worthy to be worshiped. That’s why I have a problem with what Joyce said. To say “I just wanted to make sure God was on the right side” is just ridiculous.
To be clear, I do not believe in the God of the Bible any more. Without God in the picture, I can put my friends at any order of the totem pole that I want, but Christians do not have that option. It’s all or nothing, but some try to get the best of both worlds, living like atheists, but hoping to get into Heaven when try die. That I find hypocritical. Jesus Himself said he hated that kind of thinking. He called it being lukewarm.
There is no single “God described in the Bible.” That is a doctrinal dead end, if you’re intellectually honest. The Bible was written by bunches of dudes across a thousand years, each describing the idea of God differently. Today, some choose to follow verses that describe one of the meaner versions, some chose the descriptions that fall on the nicer end of the spectrum. Some choose to follow the god they know in their heart, regardless of what the Bible itself says. All of these kinds of people are Christians. Joyce can put her friend first while still being a Christian. It just means she’s a different kind of Christian.
If you truly don’t believe the Bible is the Word of God anymore, you should be applauding Joyce for making the right decision by putting her friend first.
The Bible may be written by a bunch of diffrent guys and even some of the lessons may even contridict each other The bible was written by men i dont claim to know every word in it i dont claim to care but there is God described in the bible is one God the God of your for fathers Adam and Noah etc. of the parts that i do believe God does demand that you put him first before anyone else and it is because through him all things are done. my mind starting to get hazy on that subject so on to the next friends
i treasure friends and i struggle with the word because the word represents feelings but if you my friend ill prioritize you how ever i please just trust my decision the same way i trust yours. ill admit recently i havent been good to my friends but thats because im not in a good place and dont want to inconvience them.
Yes, there are parts of the Bible where it’s insisted that God be put first. There are also parts of the Bible where it’s insisted that a rapist purchase the attacked person from their family to make up for any loss of property value. Now, Joyce can either help Becky, or she can give Becky up to her father and then go get married to Ryan while her parents are paid a dowry.
I would prefer the old laws mid evil times to be more precise but as Willis writes so it shall be and i will continue to read and observe. also im sure that is a law of man not of God.
Deuteronomy chapter 22 is part of the covenant established between Israel and God, specifically a list of stuff Israelites have to do in order to continue deserving the land of Canaan as their own, and to continue being God’s chosen people. These were not intended to be laws from men, but laws from God. Their government was a theocracy — there were no laws of men.
I don’t think she’s been sitting on the fence though. I think she was far on one side, but is now starting to peak at the other. Seriously, give her some fence time before she chooses to transition!
Actually, I’m impressed that Joyce is doing this well, after a lifetime of indoctrination into this sort of rigid fundamentalist belief. In fact, her doing research is arguably a good sign, since it means she’s trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance she’s now suffering from. In short, “gay is bad” and “my best friend is good” just don’t get along. She was looking for indications that “gay is bad” was a wrong belief, or at least a misunderstood one, and even if she hadn’t found them, she would still have sided with “my best friend is good”.
However, that doesn’t make the rest of her rigid Christian upbringing go away (including her tendency to look to the Bible for answers), and Becky will hopefully realize that and be patient with her.
Both Becky and Joyce come from the same home schooled community.
Both are going to interpret the Bible in the same way, more or less, based on what they’ve been taught from that community. Right? Wrong.
Now I know the Bible has been interpreted by every church, group, etc. out there to mean exactly what they want it to mean.
So, no reason that Becky and Joyce can’t look at the same situation and bend their teachings to match what they what it to match I guess.
Joyce is never going to change. She is just going to go on trying to bend the Word to match her changing ideas.
She’s gone from Gay sends you to Hell to Gay is maybe not a major Sin.
So to salve her conscience she comes up with a good old solid standby to reaffirm her faith…’no hanky panky before marrige’.
Joyce is not going to stop trying to ‘straighten’ Becky out, and Becky is going to let it happen. And she just may not take to the preaching to kindly, she has had enough of it at this point.
While she doesn’t like the Gay is bad, my friend is good conflict as Jaimehlers points out….Becky is going to get sick of putting up with that conflict I think. And I for one don’t blame her.
It’s hard to stay friends with someone who is constantly looking down on you for your life choices.
I think Joyce will change eventually, just like David Willis himself did. After all, he had her beliefs when he started college and now look at him! The only problem is that since one week in strip time is approximately one year in real time, it’ll be decades before the change is complete.
Joyce will definitely change. Becky is the type that will just go right on being a Christian anyway after everything, but the fact that she identifies as Christian will change very little about how she livesher life
Joyce is wrong, but self-consistency is important to her. She’ll keep bending the word, until the evidence is just overwhelming and she can’t bend it anymore, at which point she will change her mind.
I’ve seen the Joyce/Becky dichotomy in valuing consistency way too many times in real life. Beckys stay moderate Christians forever. Joyces end up either stay staunch Christians, or turn atheist.
As for “God being on the right side”. I have never been able to understand how so called intelligent beings could possibly think that God cares enough about petty conflicts of any kind to involve himself/herself with them.
2 solders running across a battlefield, each shouting “God is on my side’…as a tank runs over ’em. Yeah, Right.
What happens when Becky and Joyce realize that both of them are on opposite sides of the same question?
Joyce knows being gay is wrong (but not a ‘major sin’ the research proved it
), and knows God is on the right side.
But Becky knows being gay is not wrong, didn’t need research to prove it, and knows God is on the right side.
They are going to come up against a wall in this situation: and either climb over it, or go their separate ways. I don’t see how they can reconcile their views.
When I was a youth leader, I pointed out God is like Cthulhu in he thinks in cosmic terms. Two guys killing each other means pretty little when this is all just a prepping for your eternal existence afterward. I wonder why they stopped inviting me to lecture. 🙂
I think that Joyce has probably forgotten about this piece, or would just be alright with a wedding, even if the marriage isn’t recognized by the government. Gay weddings aren’t illegal after all.
60 years from now, while they are all getting hyped up for midterms, Carla is gonna come floating along in her anti-grav boots while Joe tries to drag Danny – who was dumped by Amazi-Girl so she could join the cyber collective – to pick up some fine gynoids in his floating car.
With no federal protections that could cease to be true in the middle of any story arc. Pretty sure it wouldn’t be the only state that’s flipped back and forth, legal today, illegal tomorrow. Though obviously that only has to translate into the Doaverse as much as you want it to.
Only if we only accept marriages done by the state as valid. Many people also value marriages conducted by priests, rabbis, personal pledges, etc. It would not be hard for Becky to find someone willing to officiate at her wedding. She just wouldn’t get any tax benefits as a result.
I’m guessing from Becky’s reaction that she is very self-assured. Either she always believed contrary to her church’s doctrine — unlikely, considering her dad’s stance — or, as soon as she realized she liked girls, she decided liking girls was morally acceptable, discarding her childhood teachings as no longer relevant — both regarding homosexuality and hanky-panky, I guess.
On that note, I’m surprised that she gets angry in the THIRD panel, not the first: she doesn’t seem to mind that Joyce did research until Joyce tries to put a Spiritual Stop to Sexy Times.
Joyce, on the other hand, relies on the Bible as her entire world-view. She is compassionate, and she seems to really think that she could have chosen Becky over her faith. (She did choose Dorothy over faith, so I’m guessing yes.) On the other hand, if she, like Becky, had accepted experience as authority stronger than the Bible, then that would have meant accepting her OWN experiences, too — lust wolves and trauma and heartbreak, oh my. Policing Becky is a way of keeping some sort of order to her life, but it’s not gonna last.
tl;dr: These kiddos have very different responses to faith. Joyce’s world is going to slowly collapse until she breaks and I am so worried about her.
Well gee Becky, I know I was raised to believe homosexuals were damned/evil and I’m pretty sure you were too. So my first thought was, “My best friend can’t be damned/evil. I know her, I grew up with her. If that’s true though, and I know God isn’t wrong, then maybe my parents and church leaders are wrong or outright lying. Better look this one up to find out if I’ve been lied to all my life!”
Sadly, I don’t think sarcasm in the face of life changing revelation is one of Joyce’s skills.
Things were so much easier in medieval times. The paradox of God’s benevolence didn’t exist back then. Mainly because the church brainwashed everyone into accepting that humanity as a whole was a filthy, sinful, cretin. Really, the mere fact that God didn’t wipe them all off the planet was proof of God’s mercy and benevolent nature.
Then some guy got it into his head that humanity for some reason deserved to have good things happen to them and that if God didn’t let good things come to good people, then God couldn’t be good.
Or maybe it’s how a calvinist friend of mine said it, as Calvinists apparently have no problem with the idea of God being a hypocritical asshole that’s demanding our worship at gunpoint. Really, things only get difficult when God has to be good at the same time that humanity deserves good things. Cross out one and suddenly there’s no problem.
Medieval Christianity evolved rapidly and was very heterogeneous. There were plenty of debate about how Christian dogma should be interpenetrated, and worry when it didn’t follow society norms – just like today.
Some of the favorite questions included how to sync the world of Jesus with the world of Aristotle, proving God’s existence with reasoning, why bad things happen to good people, why God would allow a bad king to be in power and the problem with people on other continents who never had the chance to hear the world of God.
Some questions seem quaint to us now, as why nuns kept being pregnant (there are several accounts of verified virgin birth in nunneries), but it was just as important for the scholars back then as things like gay marriage is now. It’s all about matching dogma and norms.
I wonder… Willis has said that Joyce kind of represents what he was like growing up, so has he had a similar conversation with a gay friend in real life?
I remember having read in the comments that his highschool girlfriend was (or turned out to be) lesbian – might be Alex Stritar’s comment in this thread.
All of that is true when we go into the higher social classes that consisted of the exclusive minority of medieval society, the ones who could afford an education. For well over 80% of the population, this was not an option. God said what the Bible said and the Bible said what the local priest told them it said as very few of them could read and none of them could read latin.
Socrates, Plato, Aristoteles, great names, but it’s easy to forget that all of them belonged to the top of the ruling elite of their city states. The reason they were allowed the luxury of pondering on ethics, the nature of man’s knowledge and early natural science with Aristoteles was because they didn’t need to spend time on manual labour, which was done by an abundance of (in the eyes of Athens) barbarian slaves. Philosophers were literally people with too much free time and things had only changed slightly in Thomas Aquinas days.
My point stand that while questions were certainly asked among philosophers and theologists, the church at the time systematically did what they could to keep the peasant population in check through perpetual reminders of their own sinful nature and the mercy of God who allowed them to live and was even willing to forgive their sins in exchange for complete obedience and worship. The paradox of God’s goodness wasn’t present because they were constantly reminded that they didn’t deserve it.
Eh, ‘progress’ isn’t linear. Education was probably more widely distributed, at least among males (medieval nunneries helped educate women), in Aristotle’s time than in Aquinas’s time. Romans (a bit later) were literate enough to leave us a whole lot of lower-class graffiti, not to mention military letters (granted, scribes could help with those, but handwriting might indicate that.)
Education in Aristoteles time wasn’t like it is today. There weren’t public schools, instead teachers were hired to educate families separately. If a teacher of philosopher decided to educate classes, it would’ve been with their own money and it would be very rare. Beyond that, even Aristoteles argued against educating the masses, recommending instead that resources be spent on paying teachers for the ruling elite. As for medieval education, I grant you, it could vary between city states or nations. So maybe I exaggerated that, but it could still be bad enough that there were cases where young priests all the way into the 15th century couldn’t read the Bible because they didn’t understand latin.
You got a good point, and you are certainly right that religion was used to keep people down.
So what I’m saying now does not contradict that – it just adds a bit more flavor to medieval Christianity.
Religion was many things, then as now. It was a source of identity, a promise of salvation, a threat of damnation, an explanation for the world and society. It was also inspiration for artists and thinkers. We only know about theological philosophers from the upper class, true, but we only know about the upper class about almost everything from those times. I’m willing to bet anything that there were Joyces and Maries and Beckys in those times too, who were just as anxious to explore their religion.
My favorite is Menocchio who admittedly lived a bit into Renascence. He was a miller and came up with a fantastic cosmology that described the universe in terms of rotting cheese, maggots and fermentation. He was brought in by the inquisition who thought long and hard and dismissed him as a heretic but ultimately harmless. They sent him home with a slap on the wrist and told him to focus on millering in the future.
The moral of the story – wherever there are people there are philosophers.
Other occassions that convinced Joyce that it is right to believe in doctrin:
1) Ethan is gay, but apparently not bad. He could be convinced to try to “resist his temptation”.
2) Dorothy is atheist, but could be convinced to go to a church with her. Her traumatic near-rape incident was the reason for this, so what seemed to be a punishment for her sin (going to a party) turned out to be a sacrifice that became an option to bring a heathen closer to Christ.
3) Her best friend Becky is lesbian, but her research “revealed” that this is OK with the bible. So another time where relying on the word of god (with some “wiggle room”) was successful.
Joyce’s believe in the bible being the inerrant word of god has been struggled, but so far every test revealed that it was the right decision to keep her believe.
The practical reason sex before marriage was bad was because of property rights basically. A virgin daughter could command a much higher price when you sold her to another family than one who wasn’t, having sex with a man’s daughter without marrying her was tantamount to damaging his property. That’s why the biblical punishment for rape is a fine and then marrying the victim, to pay back the father and then take the damaged goods off his hands. Of course I don’t see how this is an argument against lesbian sex, since there are a lot of things girls can do to each other without breaking the hymen. Of course a lot of the laws in MANY religions exist to prevent the general populace from achieving happiness in life. Keep the peons miserable and working hard to support the church by promising them they can be happy in the afterlife.
Could of course also be the good old “If she hasn’t had sex with anyone else, it doesn’t matter how bad I am, I’m still the best she’s ever had.” mentality.
Of course, the Hymen doesn’t actually work like that. It doesn’t “break,” the pain and bleeding is caused by a lack of proper lubrication, which in turn is caused by the lady not being properly comfortable and aroused in order to properly produce such lubrication. It’s literally her inner walls tearing to friction.
So there’s plenty a man and a woman can do to not break the hypothetical hymen as well.
C’mon, Joyce, I know this is all happening fast, but get yer head outta yer ass.
Also, has no one in the comic noticed Walky’s in the middle of a huge Blue Screen of Death moment? I keep expecting him to burst into like, Valjean’s Soliloquy or something.
Well Joyce doesn’t like Walky so she mostly ignores him. Sal’s bathing in the afterglow of great grades and telling Jason off. Billie’s still focussed on Ruth. Mike doesn’t care.
and Becky continues to be… very 18.
(me me me me me me me)
You know how some people hate on Danny, even though/because he’s young and stupid? yeah, that’s me and Becky.
My hope is that they’ll both grow out of it.
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Like I said before, scared to be alone.
Yup, I buy into that reading.
And I just remembered that that’s the original depiction of hell – being alone. So Joyce might be living “Hell on Earth” right now! (YIKES!)
What? I thought hell was other people!
Well played.
No, Hell is for Children.
Not exclusively. That’d be Limbo of infants.
Do we have a precise definition on infant? I mean, where are we drawing the line here?
I am not sure what exactly Joyce believes, since, as she’s nondenominational, we don’t know any of the details unless she tells us. But she did describe earlier the sorting of people into Heaven and Hell as occurring after the end of time, which is also Catholic doctrine. So it wouldn’t be unreasonable for her to believe the Catholic definition of heaven as well, which is that you don’t need your friends and family in heaven. God fills that hole in you that on Earth is caused by needing literally everything.
Roomies from Hell?
I’m going to post a snippet from yesterday’s conversation so that no one has to go searching through it to figure out what I’m talking about:
Crazy Dina
… Now that I think about it, has Joyce come across a single person who wasn’t either a jerk or someone she thought was probably damned?
Mike: Jerk (Mike)
Walkie: Damnation status unknown, can be considered a jerk
Dorothy: damned (atheist)
Becky: Now damned (lesbian)
Billie: Possibly damned (from lesbian experiences, status changing)
Glasso: Definitely a jerk
Parents: JERKS (written off by Joyce. Reason: Parents)
Mary: Jerk (Unknown by Joyce)
Ruth: Jerk
Dina: Damned (probably an atheist, definitely not Christian)
Forgot Ethan: Damned (gay)
Bagge
That’s very true and a large source of underlying stress for Joyce. Both because she fears for hear friends and because she fears for herself. She said as much to Dorothy at one point – finding out that people who she has been taught her whole life is bad for her is actually good people, is exactly what she’s been told her whole life to be afraid of.
Sarah – does nasty thing with a toy. Not necessarily damned but at risk. A bit of a jerk.
Sal – too cool not to be damned.
Roz – Very damned.
Joe – Very damned, very jerk.
Crazy Dina
Worse: she has no rock – no one she’s allowed to get close to. And in that, if she does go to heaven, she’ll be alone while her friends end up together in hell (which is why I DON’T want to go, and would easily explain Willis’ desire to be damned). If you ask me, THAT’S the part that would create the most stress, why she’s so upset at Becky’s changes and why she might want to convert Ethan from gay-itude – she doesn’t want to be alone for eternity.
Okay, if anyone knows HTML code for a box with scroll bars, can they PLEASE post it here?
Not part of the allowed sub-set of HTML for the comments.
Oh… Willis, can we please have them? I kinda blew up the comment section with one post… again. 🙁
Willis was curiously excluded from the damnings
Given his trolling Shortpacked! related tweet from 7 hrs ago, I am quite willing to say “Damn you, Willis!” 🙂
DAMN YOU WILLLLLLIIIIIISSSSSSSSSS
You have to do it right.
DAMN YOU WILLIS.
There, that’s how it’s done.
No, you’re all wrong. You have to say it like a logo!
Which I don’t know HTML formatting for…
Only people with special permission can post images to this comment section.
The only one with that permission is David Willis and he ain’t sharing.
Damn him.
Okay, fine. Willis, post it… Like a Logo!
No problem, our browser windows do have scroll bars. That’ll have to do.
You can add scroll bars using the CSS overflow property, and you can add that in the style of an HTML element, although I’m not 100% confident it’ll work here. Let’s try!
Hello world!
Nope, sorry. Doesn’t work. 🙁
Why do I have the feeling that’s going to lead to more exploded posts in the future?
Oh darn it! Someone just hug Joyce and tell her that everything is okay and that she won’t be alone for all eternity! Someone let her know she’s okay, and tell her that Heaven is a choice she can make when the time comes based on where her friends have to go, and tell her that Hell can’t be that bad as long as her friends are there to protect her, and that Sarah, Dorothy, Walky, Amber, Dina, and even Mike will make sure she’s okay even if she does have to choose Hell so as not to be alone!
Someone tell her that the Devil can’t be as bad as depicted, he never discriminate against who he allows in, and that if worst comes to worst, that worst will mean that Hell is full of good people too, and that there is nothing to fear! D;
Darn, it! Someone tell ME that! D;
I’m of the mindset that too many people are too caught up in their afterlife that their forgetting to LIVE their current life.
Which is longer?
The one that definitively exists.
I’m not generally like that, but then I hit something that strikes that nerve. Needless to say, existential freakouts ensue.
Its ok. Its ok. You won’t be alone in an afterlife.
Either there is an afterlife, and you don’t be alone in it (the whole concept seems to be about sorting you with people you’re likely to get along with). Or, there isn’t an afterlife and so you won’t exist to be alone in it.
It is okay. It will be okay. You won’t be alone.
It’s not just being alone that scares me. It’s the jerks I might wind up with by being a(n overall, I am calling these people jerks, after all) good person.
That reminds me of a comedic news item I heard a while ago, about how Hell now hosts one of the most vibrant gay communities in the world, and how awesome it is, and how open and accepting. It ended with “Heaven, meanwhile, remains as bigoted as ever.”
It was pretty funny.
*reads “Dina: Damned (probably an atheist, definitely not Christian)“* You know, just for future reference, not all Christians debate evolution vs. creation. There are a lot who actually just think of a middle ground between the two, they’re just not as loud or good news coverage.
[sarcasm]
Ah, but so-called “Christians” who accept evolution aren’t really Christians, they just think they are.
[/sarcasm]
(Does anyone know how to make angle brackets appear in the text without them being interpreted as HTML tags?)
Let’s see…
< = <
> = >
<success>Yay, it worked!</success>
I dare say the majority of Christians would say this entire list is silly, but that doesn’t matter right now. This is only about the Christianity Joyce was taught, or more to the point, how she herself interprets it right now.
Yeah, I remember reading that the original theory of evolution was proposed by a member of the church. The Big Bang too, I believe, due to its similarities to how God created the universe.
Actually, the Big Bang (Fred Hoyle’s derisive term for the theory,
which ironically stuck) was first proposed by Georges Lemaitre,
a cosmologist and Jesuit priest, when he realized Einstein’s
theory couldn’t describe a static universe. Interestingly, Lemaitre
fought against any religious implications of the theory, saying it was
purely a scientific realization.
Ah, yes, Lamarck. To bad his theory had a small error (namely, acquired traits could be passed down). We also can’t forget Mendel and his peas.
I always thought poor Lamarck got a bit of bad press. He was wrong about the mechanism but he had the general idea right 50 years before Darwin (who of course also was deeply religious).
If one wants to be snarky about it one could always bring up the great Atheist biologist Lysenko…
Please bring him up. On charges.
Positive or negative?
#electrons
Actually, the history of Lamarckism is a sad story. Lamarck wrote before Darwin, and his work was not truly repudiated until the emergence of the statistical tools behind population genetics in the 1920’s. Most of what we consider Lamarckism, in fact, was the work of cranks and frauds, either motivated by eugenics or political pressure.
That’s not to say that Lamarck was in any way right — he wasn’t! — but it is to say that the blame he usually gets is not really deserved.
(Apologies for incoming pedantic mode – this is kinda my thing.)
Modern work on epigenetics is actually starting to make it look like Lamarck was onto something. Turns out some acquired traits really are heritable!
What Lamarck was really missing was the idea of existing variation within a species. He had the basic notion of descent with modification, but he was thinking in terms of one platonic ideal of a species evolving into a different platonic ideal. Darwin’s big breakthrough was the idea that variation within a species is the norm, not an unfortunate deviation from an ideal form, and that variation allows for differential reproductive success of individuals — natural selection.
Poor Lamarck really was pretty close. And even Darwin was still missing several important mechanisms, since it would be another century before we were pretty sure what DNA was and roughly how it works. They both get a lot of undeserved blame and/or credit based on work done by later “Lamarckian” or “Darwinian” researchers.
You seemed to be missing my point: JOYCE perceives this to be the case, not necessarily being true or false in the perception of any others or in reality. Although technically, I could put Dina down as “a little jerkish” due to her interactions with Joyce, but I don’t think I’m going to. I’m going to hold the opinion that Dina is probably more damned due to her beliefs (In Joyce’s perspective) than she is a jerk (which Joyce probably views as exactly how we view her, completely misinformed from the start of her life).
As a Christian it is my belief that many of the things in the bible that dont contridict itself in another part is true but as far as the origins of the world if God is all powerful he could have done creation in 7 days and decided that he would make it seem like that time had been going on longer than it had its one of the perks of being all-powerful
Holy run-on sentence Batman!
all the better to finish the race first my dear
Is reposting a tl;dr going to get it read this time?
It wasn’t reposed because of tl;drs but because of how it would be difficult to connect due to the locations of the text.
I can’t actually think of where it’s written, but it was pretty generally accepted in the community at my church that there were some sort of one way visitation rights in the afterlife. So if you got into heaven you could go hang out with your friends in hell, but they couldn’t come hang out with you in heaven.
Though I guess that’d mesh weirdly with interpretations of the afterlife that include like nasty hellfire burning torture sort of hell, because why would you want to go hang out with your friends in a place like that?
Maybe you take a protective film with you when you go? OR maybe those sentenced to heaven get sort of a protective bubble, so those who are sentenced to hell, but have lots of friends in heaven can get their sentences laxed by convincing those friends to come visit often?
Yeah, wishful thinking.
> so those who are sentenced to hell, but have lots of friends in heaven can get their sentences laxed by convincing those friends to come visit often?
I think mormonism has the idea that if your offspring eventually find the right path, then they can choose to accept God for you and free you of hell.
So, yes, this idea is believed in, of having good friends and family to lessen the pain of hell.
Actually, we can only perform ceremonies like baptism and marriages for the dead. It’s still up to the individual in question whether they want to accept God.
Mormon afterlife is a bit weirdly structured in that way. It’s assumed that there will still be atheists and people of other faiths in there. If I recall one of the tiers of heavens is just an eternity of missionary work, spreading the good word to other dead people. These missionaries will have to have successfully converted your dead relative before you perform their baptism or they won’t accept it and it’ll mean nothing.
Technically it’s not supposed to be about dead relatives exclusively, but also it’s a total bongo to track down some ancient greek peasant’s information so you gotta start somewhere.
Goddamn it, Joyce, I believed in you!
Baby steps, man. Baby steps up a down elevator.
“What about Booooooooooooooooooooob?”
see…that was your first mistake
No, always bet on Joyce’s compassion. She’s proven again and again that she’ll always side with the people she loves. She just takes time to adjust her thinking for how she’ll deal with it.
Joyce has a big heart and a powerful sense of family. Before college, that was applied to her flock, so to speak, but her notions of what family is have changed a lot, between Dorothy, “Big Sister” Sarah, Ethan, Billie, and even Walky to butt heads with. She cares about her friends tremendously, and that is hard to reconcile when her flock had her believing that many of these people would have been lost causes or unrighteous, things she has seen to be false.
It’s worth remembering she’s 17 or 18 right now. She has a LOT of contradictions she needs to face. We all did.
I wonder what contradictions I’ll need to face… Is there a test to see them ahead of time?
If you want to improve the way you think, I’d recommend reading some of the stuff on this website: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind The “How to Actually Change your Mind” is a good sequence to start with.
O.O maybe later. Like tomorrow, or next time I’m procrastinating. Yikes, that’s long.
There’s not any preview, really. Have fun!
Gah frell. I don’t have any of the standard stuff (that I know of), so I REALLY have no clue.
There’s also a Harry Potter fan fiction by this guy if you find the sequences too boring: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality
Agreed. On the surface, it may look like a kinda ratty thing to do, to try and see if the bible REALLY says homosexuality is a sin, but look at the larger picture. She just challenged her own faith because it seemed wrong to her. That’s not Thats not easy for someone like her.
I guess I don’t understand why Joyce looking up things in the Bible is a bad thing? Like she is very religious and wanted to see alternate viewpoints. I am not seeing how this is a terrible thing to do at all. (If someone wants to actually explain that’ll be cool)
Because she told Becky that she mattered to her more than anything, but then had to double check to make sure that God gave her the A-OK, instead of just going for it because she loves Becky.
Although I doubt it was questioning Becky as having to deal with what she had saying “no” but she desperately wanted a “yes”, so she did the research in hope of being less conflicted about Becky’s situation (I.E. being damned)
IDK I think that’s really unfair. I mean I understand why Becky herself is upset. She’s in a really vulnerable place and isn’t really in a position to be fair but I don’t think the audience has to agree with her. Joyce is still entitled to her religion. It can be argued that maybe Joyce shouldn’t have mentioned it today, but Joyce didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not wrong to make one’s religious beliefs a priority in your life.
It is unfair, but the comic isn’t named Dumbing of Age for nothing.
Ummm…speaking as a Christian-type-religious-type, what Joyce did was wrong: she tried to rescue Becky from damnation as read in the Bible. What she should have done was accept the revelation that Becky, who is clearly a good person and not damned, was lesbian — and worked to save the Bible from that.
The effect on Joyce’s understanding of the ambiguity of the text might have been the same. The effect on Joyce would have been completely different: the one we see leads to claiming that Becky should be grateful to Joyce for salvaging her. The one we didn’t see would lead to Joyce realizing that she found a potential way to save (in the Cristian sense) her old pastor and perhaps Becky’s father. Big, big difference.
But she thinks Dorothy is damned, and she’s her best friend there. Knowing that, I don’t think she could view Becky as “Clearly not damned”. Of course, this is coming from someone who believes that the religous version of heaven is full of jerks, so there may be a hint of bais.
No matter what you think of heaven or anything else, you should recognize that there’s a huge difference between shoehorning the fact that your friend is OK into your beliefs and figuring out your beliefs were wrong because they say your friend isn’t OK, and, as result, having the humility to fix yourself.
Only the second truly reflects the willingness to realize that you’ve been deeply wrong. If Joyce had been there, she’d have been able to say tell Sarah “The difference is between trying to find wiggle room and trying to understand the truth and figure out where I went wrong.”
If you guys didn’t realize, Joyce is running up against Euthyphro’s Dilemma, except Socrates is being played by Reality.
She’s no longer saying God is the source of right. She’s saying God would be on the right side. This is a big deal.
I wouldn’t blame her if that really did change – remember this? http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/avoid/
Mary is OBVIOUSLY Christian, so she believes in God, but she also was a jerk. So my guess is THAT is when her attitude about it began to change.
And I just now noticed Mary’s facial expression in that third panel… What’s your secret Mary?
Anyone who doesn’t change the viewpoints they’ve practically been indoctrinated with since childhood overnight are a lost cause. If they can’t do a complete 180 without a single mistake in less than 12 hours, all hope is lost. Or so I assume, because I don’t get it either.
I’ve done and said stupid things myself, but I learned from the consequences and in some cases, regretfully, I might not have changed for the better if I hadn’t witnessed how my actions hurt other people.
TrollDrool, I think your sarcastic comment was a little out of line. Becky grew up in the same situation, and she does have PLENTY of cause to be hurt (although I didn’t get it at first either, I had to read a few comments before it clicked). It doesn’t make that much sense from the outside looking in, but Joyce’s actions wouldn’t make a lot of sense from Becky on the inside looking out. (Try reading some of the other comments, I’m not great at explaining it)
I probably could have picked my words better if I gave the impression that Becky didn’t have a reason to feel offended. The sarcasm was more a reaction towards commenters complaining about how insensitive Joyce is behaving in their eyes. But you’re right, looking over the comments, it’s pretty clear why Joyce needing reassurance from the Bible rather than just trust Becky as she said she would can be hurtful.
I think it’s better to withhold judgement of Joyce for now. As others have pointed out, she’s in the middle of a learning experience and her previous beliefs have been severely challenged. Again, though, others have pointed out her big heart and loyalty. I’m pretty sure she’ll get it right in the end, but it will be rough for a time.
You see, Joyce, this is why studying is eeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil. 😛
NO MORE STUDYING! NO MORE NOTE TAKING! NO MORE TEXTBOOKS!
Re: Becky’s last word bubble. …I never thought of it that way.
To be fair, those are kind of two very different schools of thought on faith. It sounds like Becky believes in a sort of informal spirituality where you project the specifics based on an abstract idea of what you believe God to be. As in “Well, our God is a benevolent and loving god, so obviously he wouldn’t ban people to eternal damnation over something like this. That’d be pretty extreme.”
Where Joyce believes in a more formal, scripturally based faith, where if you want to know what God’s thoughts on an issue are you study the words he’s put out for that purpose.
Joyce’s school of thought is probably more true to their upbringing, where Becky I’m imagining has been driven to pursue faith in a way more applicable to her own circumstances.
+1
I like this strip because it shows two very real, and in my opinion very valid ways to be religious, much like you explained.
See, my read on it was different. I see one valid way to be religious (Becky’s) and one… less valid way (Joyce). Joyce’s way is based on dogma, “If it says it in this book it must be true NO MATTER WHAT. No matter how much evidence exists to the contrary.” I don’t see that as valid for a whole host of reasons, a major one of which was touched on in a recent strip with Sarah. That whole “The word of God is immutable, except the parts that kind of are” bit.
When you base your faith on “the book is right no matter what” you’re opening yourself up to a world of problems. What about the parts that contradict each other? What about the parts that made sense when the book was written but seem like insane troll logic in modern society? Always dogmatists have to cherry pick which parts are to be taken literally and which parts are allegory, undermining the whole point of following the book. Or they can go all in and join the ranks of the truly insane who believe that dinosaurs were all killed during Noah’s Flood.
My read on this is that Gangler’s two methods are being deliberately contrasted here and that the comic is setting up for Joyce’s belief system to shift farther towards Becky’s point of view due to the dogmatic kind of faith that she was brought up in being bonkers to the max.
“God has made his will known to us, all we have to do is understand it” is for me an honest approach to faith. It leaves room to acknowledge that yes, the bible was written in a different language in a different times and edited and translated and modified at several other times, but if we can just sift it and distill it enough it is there.
I mean, you can be just as dismissive about Becky’s approach to faith. It can be used to justify anything.
Okay, but at what point does it cross over from “not dogmatic” to “let’s just try not to think too hard about it”?
With Joyce’s way, she actually *cares* about whether Christianity is Factually Correct or not, and she has a scope to change her mind about it.
With Becky…Christianity isn’t a factual question to begin with. Becky still considers Christianity as more valid than Atheism, so it’s not that she’s thought about the question and realized Faith isn’t about Facts or somethng enlightened like that…it is simply that Becky doesn’t think too hard about Faith, and so doesn’t have to bother with these pesky questions the way Joyce is forced to.
Joyce is *wrong*, but she’s intellectually wrong. Becky isn’t using intellect to begin with, she’s perfectly comfortable with inconsistency.
@Gangler: Tell me, what sounds more like the definition of “faith” to you?
“It’s okay, you’ll be fine. I had to go double check to make sure, but it proved that you’ll be fine!”
“I’ve known this person all my life. She is not damned.”
Last I checked, faith meant to believe in something. Faith in God is believing in both his existence, and in his actions. Having to prove to yourself everything does not sound like any form of the word “faith” I’ve ever heard, except in misuse. I’ve also heard the word “addicted” used towards many things, when the word “obsessed” was the actual word that should have been used. The problem is that the word, even if incorrect, has become so commonly used in that form, that people consider it to be another correct way of using it. So, yes, what you say is correct by modern definition…but that doesn’t make it any less of a safety blanket used by those who are actually lacking in faith in order to save face.
Having faith in God is different from having faith in your own human intuitions and feelings. Joyce knows very well that the latter are fallible – her feelings drive her toward pre-marital hanky-panky, which is a sin against God.
She thought Becky would be pleased to hear that being a lesbian might be non-sinful, Biblically, but it seems Becky has already discarded Biblical faith in favor of deciding that God would agree with her even if the Bible said otherwise. Putting your own intuitions above the Word of God may involve some kind of faith, but it’s sure not Joyce’s kind.
Many definitions of faith have one specific part: that the belief in whatever is *without proof*. Believing in something where that belief is supported by proof and evidence isn’t faith, it’s understanding.
There’s some faith needed just to accept the initial premise that there is a god, and that this god has made his will known to us through his writings.
Be real, it’s not like Joyce is going full blown scientific method on this problem demanding any sort of definitive proof.
There are words for these two schools of doctrine. Joyce’s church subscribes to a doctrine referred to as “Biblical inerrancy” — that is, the Bible is correct in all aspects. The other doctrine is referred to as “Biblical inherency” — the Bible is a text which is correct, but which was written and is read by people who “see as through a glass, darkly.”
So when Becky’s dad comes to campus, either everything will be horrible, or super awesome with everyone being forgiving
I’m thinking her dad doesn’t know she’s there.
She knows she can’t stay there though.
She can’t stay in Joyce’s room forever, no. But she could put apply to IU and put together a financial aid package and be there next semester. (Or possibly even this semester, if IU has classes that start in the second half of the semester, as implied by this calendar.)
Oh, that assbag will never accept Joyce’s idea, I am sure of that.
Given what we’ve seen of her dad in the Walkyverse, no, forgiveness is not in the cards. He’s not as bad as Amber’s dad, but he’s shooting for second place
It’s pretty likely that when Ross finally comes for Becky (and most likely accompanied by the Browns) and seeing people she loved and respected treating Becky so terribly will be the catalyst for Joyce’s 180 flip on homosexuality. No more research, no more making sure. She picks a side.
Given what “fixing the gay” sometimes entails, I’m not sure that he’s even second to Blaine. If he’s one of those who goes beyond “pray away the gay” into “rape away the gay” – and from what Willis showed us of him in the Walkyverse, I wouldn’t put it past him – he’s got a solid lock on “worst dad” and is fighting it out with Roofie Rapist Ryan for “worst character”.
“Corrective Rape” is a scary euphemism considering that a euphemism’s job is to attempt to make something seem less scary/more appealing.
It’s not a euphemism. It’s exactly what it says on the tin.
Wait, I’m sorry.
This exists? Are you $#&@ing kidding me?
Turns out it does.
*barf*
Brent Girouex, ladies and gentlemen. Apparently we live in a world where religion can even get a convicted child rapist a reduced sentence (including not serving a single day in jail) instead of a bullet in the back of the head.
Yaaaaaay religion!
You forgot your <sarcasm> and </sarcasm>
Also,
<sarcasm> clap clap clap </sarcasm>
“He’s not as bad as Amber’s dad” is about as informative as saying “It’s not quite as deep as the Mariana trench” or “Not quite as cool as Sal”
Do you think Joyce is actually going to tell him? I figured Becky’s statement was rhetorical, but maybe Joyce will take it seriously.
It will be horrible.
So he’s kinda like Schroedinger’s Dad?
Frell no! God is clearly a cat – he plays with his food, transitions between good and evil, and attacks the hand rubbing his belly. ^.^
I just remembered a scene from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Book or Movie? Actually, I don’t think the reasturaunt was even in the movie…
It was in the TV miniseries from the Eighties.
Research, after all, is the tool of the devil. Or something like that.
Man, I’m too tired to come up with a good quip.
Devil in the details?
+1. The currency for that +1 is internets, by the way. Exchangeable at any airport.
After all it might lead to atheism you know and what happens then?
I dunno, orgies?*
* if so I have been missing out somehow
IME, paganism is better for that.
Atheism is troublesome for a lot of people because without the “certainty” that religion offers, you realise that things like justice and karma are not guaranteed and that idea terrifies the fuck out of a lot of people, hence why even believing in the “wrong” religion makes more sense to those people than believing in nothing.
My only problem with atheism centers on that certain breed of (dare I say Evangelesque?) atheists that insists in getting up everyone else’s face about their religion. Not even to discuss the topic, mind you, but mostly just to scream and attack people.
I remember one dude who responded to a Buddhist’s statement that he’s always eager to discuss religious differences with a shouted “Well, how am I supposed to do that when I think that you are completely INSANE.” That’s not having a conversation, that’s attempting to drown out the other person and shame them into silence.
My bottom line is this. Be ye Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, or anything else realize there are plenty of intelligent, observant people out there who believe something you do not. This is not a sign that they are stupid, merely that they have reached different conclusions from your own. Try not to assume there is anything wrong with them from the start- your position does not make you superior. Ever. There are also plenty of dogmatic assholes who assume they are awesome and always right. Avoid these people, and do not become one.
Thank you. Here’s your soapbox back.
I think you’re misrepresenting us here. We aren’t centred on our vocal minority, those assholes are focused on everyone else. Thus, everyone else focuses on them. Too many people are atheists because it gives them a sense of smug superiority over others. I’m an atheist because I can have a sense of smug superiority over the atheists that have a sense of smug superiority and exhibit it. I also feel smugly superior to everyone else, but I just cackle maniacally in my supervillain lair instead of shouting at people about it.
I wonder if the guy who said that to the Buddhist would have said the same thing to the reverend Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi–two of the most influential social figures of the 20th century, and both, in their own ways, very religious men. Probably.
I know we’re not going to see reasonable believers in DUMBING OF AGE, since this is Willis’ college years retold and in some cases (like Joyce’s) sex-reversed, (and of course that’s Willis’ right and duty, to tell the story HE needs to tell) but it’s a shame that people like King, Gandhi, John Polkinghorne or George F.R. Ellis (the latter both making a good case for their religous beliefs buttressed by their own scientific views–Ellis has co-written with Hawking) can be dismissed by the “you are completely INSANE” types like you described above.
I was standing on the couch earlier. This position made me definitely superior. (=
LOL! PERFECT gravitar for that post.
Oh, for Heaven’s sake. I have yet to meet an atheist who’s busily trying to convert me. Frankly, most of them simply look at me and say “OK, if you want to waste your time or it makes you happy, I’m not going to get in your way on Sunday morning as long as you don’t make me do anything.” Even the more aggressive ones I know make fun of me — and my answer is “OK, if want to waste your time making fun of me, I’m not going to waste my time on you. Just don’t prevent me from going to Church on Sunday.”
This subthread is an interesting (if potentially less than ideal) place to have a conversation about demographics and non-belief.
Atheism is one of the smallest ideological identities in the US. Only 2% of the population identifies as atheist, 3% identify as agnostic, and 13% identify as “nothing in particular,” frequently called “nones” by scholars.
One of the frustrations people often have in this dialogue is the assumption that atheism is the natural alternative to a lack of faith, when data implies that is not the case. When people are given the ability to express their identities in more nuanced ways, a fairly small number choose to identify as atheist. There’s nothing wrong with doing so, but it’s not the only way to be non-religous, and in fact is the least common way to be non-religious.
Because many outspoken atheists think they should be able to count that 13% who do not identify as atheist in their figures, it leads to these reductive categorizations that are actively harmful to discourse. The idea that religions are all about “certainty” is false and VERY conservative-christianity-centric. In mainstream Judaism, personal interpretation and uncertainty are a fairly large part of religious practice; the same can be said for Unitarianism, or liberal mainline Christianity.
The suggestion that atheism is the main form of non-religion and evangelical Christianity is indicative of all other forms of religion is statistically invalid and very problematic.
Yea, we had part of this conversation WRT Judaism downthread and it can be extended to most any non-christian religion. I’d love to see a conversation about say Judaism, Islam, or Zoroastrianism happen in the strip.
Hurray, a nuanced view! I’m so glad that someone here brought up that non-religious is not the same as atheist and that there is a lot of complexity in the matter.
Rational thought, science, technology, and public hygiene? You know, sewers and sewage treatment plants and water purification and distribution, and vaccines because germ theory, and evolution. Nevermind that most of that came from liberal Christians who did not let religious dogma cloud their thoughts… Science as an atheist plot is entirely a 20th century meme.
I bet she would have tried to fix Becky the way she was hoping to fix Ethan.
“So help me, if I have to date every gay person here, I’m going to!”
I bet there is already a term for someone like that…
Nah, dating Becky would just make her more of a lesbian.
I guess that counts as a bit of a flaw in that plan.
Okay, crazy thought, but she might consider trying to set Ethan up with Becky. It would mean giving up her own relationship with Ethan, but it would kinda kill two birds with one stone from her point of view.
Obviously, though, Becky for one would never agree to that.
Actually I though it would be cool of Becky and Ethan hit it off and had a brief Heterosexual Viagrohol fueled fling , just to get it out of their system for goods.
Yeah, I know she’s a lesbian and hes gay. I’m not trying to turn them straight, just think it would be interesting if they explored the boundaries of their attractions.
Although I kind of like how it would screw with the other characters heads and social expectations of queer sexuality.
Oh man, if or when Becky finds out about Ethan, Joyce is in for a whole mess of trouble.
Good, they’re talking, they need to set aside a few hours and talk this out.
Yes, that would make sense.
Which is why it probably won’t happen, unfortunately.
Well, that’s what happens when you have your big confessional in the middle of the night when there’s class the nest day.
Joyce’s next class is Gender Studies! This makes me hopeful.
Leslie and Dorothy in the same room, always a good time.
“While I do see your point of view that the bible’s literal approval is important, you have to realize that it is insulting for me to have the acceptance of my identity reduced to a debate about ancient Greek translation.”
“While I do recognize that passion and in no way will ever cast doubt on your worth and right to be your own person, you have to realize that I still believe what we have been taught about God’s will as the ultimate yard stick of what is right and wrong, and that it is important for me in times of change to update my understanding of said will.”
“Let me take this moment to reassure you that our friendship has never been in doubt”
“Indeed”
#CommunicationOfAge
Oh wow, so beautiful! I’m tearing up.
Now I really want to read a coming of age drama with loads and loads of characters in which all problems are solved by calm, intelligent, reasonable discussions, like a narrative version of /r/eyebleach.
I’ve read a few short parodies like that, mainly of Romeo and Juliette for some reason, but I agree – it would be awesome to read a whole book that doesn’t make a parody of the concept but uses it straight up.
What’s /r/eyebleach? I have this nagging feeling that I would regret it if I google a name like that.
It’s a subreddit dedicated to calming, soothing images for people to look at after encountering something exceedingly disturbing on the internet. Mostly cute animals, but nature images and very tasteful sexiness are mixed in as well.
That’s actually the opposite of what I figured. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Probably “/r/eyewash” would have been a better name, yeah. Bleach gets things clean and white, sure, but it doesn’t do it gently.
Oh. I’m going to bookmark that then. I could have used it a couple times.
Read Fire Logic, by Laurie Marks.
Suddenly, Joyce and Becky are British, sitting in comfy chairs in a library, and sipping brandy.
….Are there any fanartists in the house? Because that image is fudgin’ adorable.
YOTOMOE! USE YOUR POWERS FOR GOOD HERE!
“Becky, it’s not that! But if you go ahead and do this and got yourself damned, then that means you’ll go to Hell and I’ll never see you again! Becky, I want you in my life, even after Judgement Day! It seems to me that all of my friends here might be going to hell, and I don’t want to add you to the list! Please, Becky, don’t get yourself damned and leave me for eternity!”
#BreakdownOfAge
Becky, you’re an idiot
Becky’s not an idiot – anyone who be upset if their best friend instantly jumped into the bible to check if what they were doing with their life was okay despite saying it was okay regardless.
To Joyce, it was to comfort herself, to Becky it’s more like ‘I can’t fully be okay with myself supporting you without knowing for sure what this really old book from our religion says on the matter.’
+1
It’s unfair of Becky to demand of Joyce that she effectively give up her own religion all in one go, when even Becky herself hasn’t pronounced herself a non-Christian.
Both Joyce and Becky are afraid to consider the case of Christianity really being super-against them on this, because it would really mean having to make a choice between their consciences and their Christianity. I’m not sure who is actually more afraid: the one who desperately tried to find loopholes in Christian scripture, or the ones who goes “Christianity is on my side, no matter what scripture says”.
As an atheist nowadays I don’t have that dilemma anymore, but it *was* my supportive view of homosexuality that led me from “I’m a Christian” to “I’m a Christian but I don’t believe everything the Church says” and from there it was a relatively short path to “I don’t believe most of what the Church says” and finally “I’m an agnostic”, “I’m an atheist-leaning agnostic” and lastly to “I’m an atheist”. So it’s a big thing and a big step. Nobody should expect anyone to do it in a single day.
Joyce is trying, but there’s so much baggage blocking her path to adulthood and being the person she can be.
Becky will not respond well if she finds out about Ethan.
Hopefully Joyce will realize that she should break up with Ethan and start dating Becky.
Because pretending to eb straight is damaging but forcing herself to be gay will be totally healthy.
Yeah, I’m waiting for that bomb to go off. I’m holding out hope that she’ll never find out…but that’s like saying that I’m holding out hope that Amber will get over her issues by tomorrow’s strip. Possible, but not likely in the extreme. I just hope Becky and Joyce’s friendship can survive it.
Not to sound bleak or anything, but she kind of has to survive it, she has no where else to go, for now she just needs to hold on to the fact that Joyce wants her around and accepts her.
I wish Becky herself seemed to be keeping this in mind, instead of harassing Joyce specifically to see traumatized/upset expressions on her face (risking making your best friend cry is just the FUNNIEST, right?) and picking fights over stands that Joyce has already taken and committed to.
On strips like these my frustration levels re: Joyce always reach critical mass.
Just remember two things 1) Joyce is seriously messed up when it comes to any kind of sexuality, including her own, let alone homosexuality. 2) Joyce’s beliefs have been a source of stability and comfort for her, accepting that they’re wrong is going to be life shattering so she’s going to be looking and clinging to loopholes for quite a while.
I know and remember all these things. Doesn’t change the way I feel about her, which is frustated. I *know* all these things. But still, every time she says something like this, it pisses me the effing eff off and I just can’t help it. Sometimes a tragic back story and ‘explanations’ for why someone behaves like a douchecanoe doesn’t make me feel any less angry and frustrated of the actual douchecanoe-ness. Y’know?
But does it lead to a better mix of emotions? I’ve come to believe that if we can old two conflicting ideas and emotion-sets in our heads per situation, and bring them to the point where they are NOT conflicting, we might be able to understand each-other better. But first, we have to learn to accept both the wrongs they do and the rights they do them for at the same time.
I’m not saying I don’t understand her or accept her and hey, I am rooting for her, totally, I am invested in her well-being and happiness. But I *just* can’t help it sometimes.
My very favorite person in the world could say something shitty and I’d be mad, too. And I love them. Joyce says shitty things a lot. So I get mad a lot. But of course you’re right in that I also have a whole other assortment of emotions about her and everyone else in this comic.
That Joyce face in panel two. Please tell me there’s a bigger version of it.
There is, on Patreon.
If you do something you know is wrong, you’ll justify it. God is always the ultimate right, people always do what they believe is right or necessary at the time.
‘Checking’
checking checking checking…
Inb4 the new slipshine is between Becky, Billy, and Ruth.
I once told a devout Christian that I had faith in the conscience God had given me and therefore didn’t need to memorize the Bible and he promptly told me that was the Devil whispering to me and how could I possibly know the difference between the two.
Wow that was quite the run-on sentence. My apologies.
But the bible wasn’t even readable by normal people for years… wouldn’t the devil infect more people by infecting the book?
No, because back in that day, the only ones who could read the book were beyond corruption and would have seen through any such lies as the Devil put in.
You’d be surprised how many people back in the day couldn’t read the bible. Before Martin Luther and Steve Gutenberg translated the Bible into german (since before then it was exclusively latin), a lot of young priests only relied on a couple of anecdotes and their own intuition when instructing farmers to pay penance. Why? Because they didn’t understand a word of latin themselves and couldn’t read the Bible.
That and the fact that before the printing press, a whole Bible was monstrously expensive to make. Sometimes a parish church might only have the Gospels, because that’s all the community could afford.
That seems like a falty assumption – if the devil only had to corrupt a handful of people, why bother with the rest of the population? After all, no mortal should be able to fight back quite THAT hard.
Amen?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banquet_of_Chestnuts
I recall way back in Sabbath School that you have to avoid engaging in “DIY Christianity”.
I remember quite a few lessons about all the ideas I would be encountering out there in the world…evolution, for instance, or that a lot of the Bible doesn’t really apply anymore (or ever), or the idea that people who are essentially good will not be eternally punished. Ironically, I think those lessons were the first ones to introduce me to those ideas, and now I subscribe to all of them.
I myself lean heavily towards atheism but a small part of me still wants to believe that some kind of supernatural order exists.
Baaaad little sheep, your barberous behavior has sheared you from your flock. How will the poor shepherd ever fleece you now?
He won’t. She’ll keep her fleece. (Plasma is a girl, right? I usually see her with a female Gravitar, so I THINK she’s a girl…)
I think tyersome was responding to me (and I am a girl). I don’t think it ever occurred to me that Plasma might not be a girl, but come to think of it, they didn’t ever say so.
Appearances can be deceiving …
Plasma is apparently male.
Good to note, I think.
…
No, the female gravitars aren’t helping.
Never assume the gender purely on the basis of the avatar mainly because people often like to use pictures of what they like rather use pictures of themselves.
… or in my case, I have embraced the random gravatar assigned to me by fate … after all, part of the beauty of anonymity is confronting the near total irrelevance (particularly online) of things like gender, ‘race’, orientation, age or for all anyone really knows in my case species …
Plasma, your name doesn’t exactly state it either. Or your Tumbler profile. Seriously, what am I to base my pronouns on? Why does the English language not have third person singular neutral pronouns? Why must we separate things by gender?
Tyersome, you have no idea how many emails I’ve generated for that purpose alone. All.Hail.Dina@gmail.com was one of them, but then I put in an interesting vacation responder. ALL HAIL DINA! (And anonymity. Hail that too, cause ETHOS BE DAMNED!)
Plasma’s said he’s a guy.
Sabbath School sounds awesome! Tony is like, “here kids, this is where the SG plugs into the amp stack,” Geezer tutors students on lyric writing, and Ozzy shows you how to… do the things he’s good at like… like… okay, Ozzy probably just hangs out and gets stoned.
Or is this some sort of other, less awesome Sabbath School?
It did indeed have its occasional moments like when they show movies where they envision the End Times with the Mark of the Beast or discuss the possibility that the last of dinosaurs might have been wiped out by medieval knights eager to slay ‘dragons’.
[INDEPENDENT THOUGHT ALARM]
So are these the same people who always claim to be listening to what God is telling them?
The primacy of an informed conscience is basic Catholic doctrine. Not always (rarely) honored by those in authority, but at the core. You can’t just follow rules and authorities. They will order you into wars, torture, etc. You cant rely on your culture’s values, because they will be messed up. You are responsible for your actions, not political or religious leaders. So there are pro-gay and pro-choice Catholic groups who are certain of their beliefs and have no intent of being chased out of their church. But an informed conscience might well check out Greek originals of the Gospels and be aware which epistles are later forgeries.
The Bible alone is often a screen on which to project current cultural values. What kind of religion has four different origin stories. I know that Wolverine has more, but really. You can believe just about anything and find support in the Bible. Thus the primacy of an informed conscience. But it feels much safer to text proof and follow rules.
Well, it is worth noting that Christian /= Catholic. I used to be Catholic, and many a Christian (of denominations I shall not name) seemed to be under the impression that we were as bad as pagans.
No one tells Becky to wait for Hanky Panky. Not God, Not Joyce, No One. THERE WILL BE GIBLETS!!!
Wait till she realises she’s become so obnoxious about it no woman wants to touch her.
Calling them giblets would be a bit of a turn off in of itself.
Jeez Plasma, you’re not turning chicken on us are you? I mean what kind of teenager is turned off by a poultry bit of disgusting?
Who’s a teenager? Not me by a long-shot, while I do often think of my mental self as a teenager, the sad reality is that well and truly middle-aged but with all the creaks and health issues that you would expect of an elderly person.
Yeah, semi-old fart myself actually … I just couldn’t hold back on the foul puns … :-s
I should have seen that coming home to roost.
I can tell you’re going to be haunted by missing out on the poultry-geist ….
These are not rare poultry puns.
It can be tricky to keep abreast of everyone’s given details.
I wonder if she could be too annoying even for Daisy.
Becky’s nowhere near aggressive enough to drive away everybody. She might not fit in with Joyce’s circle but it’s a big world, and I could see Daisy, for one, responding quite positively to Becky’s type of behavior, at least for a while.
Definitely, Desperation brand goggles are even more effective than the ones made by daBeers …
My best friend from high school is a bit like Joyce is being here– though her development has been in the opposite direction, becoming more Joyce-like since starting college.
…Would Joyce’s 2-girl-threesome pluralization of ‘premarital hanky panky’ also apply to lesbians? Or is the plural just because it’s a threesome and doesn’t apply?
Multiple participants of any sex is “premarital hankies-panky”. Multiple instances is “premarital hanky-pankies”. Multiple instances of multiple participants would be “premarital hankies-pankies”. Two ladies is just “girl-on-girl hanky-panky“.
Are you pulling that out of your butt (Darn you Inuendo!) or is that really a thing?
The lattermost is, as the link shows, canon, as is the first. The others are simple extrapolation.
“Trust, but verify”?
So Joyce is Reagan and her God is the Soviet Union?
…I can’t decide if you just ruined the cold war for me or made it more awesome.
Does that mean that God ‘died’ back in 1989?
If so it was a least the second dying …
If that’s a Nietzsche reference: God might be awesome enough to get killed and be dead without dying. Being awesome beyond imagination is kinda part of the definition of god.
So god is Baron Munchhausen?
God is Amy Pond’s husband.
Now now, Becky. Don’t be getting angry with Joyce. If she kicks you out, you won’t have anywhere else to go.
And Walky is still sad-eyed. It’s not been a very good day so far.
Exception being Dina’s new breakfast choice.
DAMN! Now I want to click your name!
Me too! I want to click that name so bad! Ugh, so hard to resist.
Whoever clicks it first has to say what youtube video plays, and describe it as much as tasteful. (No, I didn’t click it, it displays the URL when you hover over it)
It’s an audio-only Skrillex/Katy Perry mashup, apparently. *shrugs*
NOT ENOUGH DETAILS! I SAID DESCRIBE DARN IT! (Although I did say “as much as tasteful”, so don’t make me go needing /r/eyebleach)
It’s happy cows, trust me
GAH! I WANNA CLICK IT SO BAD!!!
I lost. See tomorrow’s comments.
It always Back and forth with Joyce, Back and forth.
That’s because in and out, in and out is PMHP.
Because it’s only been a month. Nobody changes their entire personality and lifelong beliefs in a month.
Oooooooooh, shots fiyaed!
God dammit Becky, you still need to be understanding of Joyce here! You’re not the only one who is affected by this.
Look, that’s not how it works. The person with the worst problems always wins king-(or queen)-of-the-mountain-of-problems and gets to ignore everyone else’s problems while demanding attention for their own. Becky fairly clearly wins for worst problems right now, so no one else’s problems matter at all and Becky can contemptuously dismiss their issues as she sees fit. It’s only fair!
Ummm… no. That’s not how it works. Otherwise, bad grades wouldn’t matter in this world because of third world nations.
Sniff, the ‘third world’ has no basis for complaint … they aren’t extinct … I can’t believe I need to tell YOU that!
I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
If we were lucky!
But tell that to kids these days…
Are you saying Dinosaurs have it worse off than people in third world nations?
Wouldn’t you feel pretty hard done by if almost all of your relatives had been killed off and all that were left were a few, flighty and bird-brained?
Well, and sharks. Sharks kind of make it better. So do Raptors.
Don’t forget the corvids, though. They are awesome.
We have the technology, we can build around and through that mountain! That will never happen until we are willing to be understanding of how the problem affects everyone.Becky has the mountain, and Joyce has the dynamite…. Yet, Joyce still has to come to terms with the feat placed before her and has to find a place to start building.
And I’m all over the place with this.
Joyce has the dynamite? She was asking for a size 6 strap-on I think it was earlier…
I didn’t say giving her the dynamite was a smart move, I just said she has it.
This is disappointing. I really thought Joyce had turned a hard corner, that her new focus would be on (intensely) protecting Becky from the judgment of others. This feels more like she’s backsliding.
Ah, well, the Willis giveth and the Willis taketh away.
Change is hard! One’s beliefs, attitudes, and habits can be so interconnected that every change, no matter how seemingly obvious to outsiders, can become a very long-drawn-out sequence of steps. For someone with such an elaborate belief system to just have a sudden flash of insight and do a 180° on a major issue, without becoming seriously unbalanced, wouldn’t be believable. What Joyce is shown to do here seems a lot more realistic to me. Major u-turns tend to take months or years in the real world.
You really think a snap decisions she had to make in five seconds the night before was going to drastically change her? She made the right decision but she’s not ready to accept that the Bible and everything she’s spent her life being drilled into her head is wrong. Remember, Joyce was taught that the Bible is the literal word of god, that it’s all 100% true so if she accepts that one thing in it is wrong the whole illusion shatters and the whole thing comes under doubt. She can’t handle that right now.
Especially since part of her reason for being so glad to see Becky in the first place was that she felt overwhelmed already and needed someone to confide in. Someone to help her.
Now that Becky has been identified as someone who needs Joyce’s help, Joyce is not only not going to get the support she needs but has added more depth to her overwhelmed-ness. And will do her best to keep trucking along under the pressure, not wanting to disappoint anyone or be a bad friend.
Pretty sure Becky answered her question in yesterday’s strip.
I know Joyce is adorable as a comic strip character, and endearing and etc. etc. but if you make her a real flesh and blood person, she’s absolutely unbearable and she’s the type of person that hurts a lot of people and then gets away with BECAUSE she’s ‘adorable’.
I don’t really see Joyce getting away with much of anything in universe. This very strip is about her not getting away with her “has to make sure”-attitude about Becky’s sexuality.
I don’t think it was “has to make sure” as much as it was “Has to keep Becky with her for eternity” attitude.
Yeah, you are right. I phrased that badly.
Which actirs could play Joyce, Becky, Walky and all the rest?
I say Elle Fanning as Joyce.
Danny DeVito for Joe, because it would be funny.
That first panel…I think Walky can see us.
Walky’s still freaking out. Poor Walky, I know these last two-three strips have only been a few minutes in universe, but man, you need to go find Dorothy stat. She’ll help you out (and not show too much shadenfreude. Probably).
No, Joyce really didn’t answer Becky’s question. But there are plenty of opportunities for her to find more loopholes, I’m sure. Not that I can blame her; I can’t embrace any form of organized religion simply because of all the inherent hypocrisy. I tried. I really did. But I just can’t do it. Embracing organized religion just did not help me in any way or make me feel happy.
I can understand someone like Joyce being conflicted though; given her upbringing, she is torn between helping her friend and “keeping the faith”, and in that regard I feel sorry for her.
Maybe this is weird of me but…part of me wonders if a nice conversation with a Chabad rabbi would help Joyce, even though she’s Christian and all that jazz. Just because I think getting a perspective from someone who’s deeply religious but also whose work is predicated on being open to people at a all levels of religiosity(and from many religious traditions, for that matter) and from all walks of life and not expecting to change them into something else might do her a world of good.
Chabad is OK with ‘mos?
Thats news to me. Arent they um Hasidic?
Walmart-Hasidic, but still.
I feel like this will answer your question: http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/663504/jewish/Do-Homosexuals-Fit-into-the-Jewish-Community.htm
The tl;dr is that while judaism does prohibit specific male-on-male homosexual acts, it also prohibits bigotry, and that community is important, and that a jew should not be ostracized by a fellow jew (which I’m sure can be extrapolated to this situation). So are gay relationships illegal? certain aspects, on a technicality, yes, however, community and interpersonal relationships are more important.
(jewish biblical law is very very weird by modern standards, and I’m not talking about the leviticus bullshit that everybody always brings up, ie mixing clothings, selling women into slavery, etc, because even though those are what the words literally say, the important part is not the words but the rabbinic interpretation, and it can get very weird if you’re coming from a modern, western world viewpoint)
Well, Leviticus bullshit makes a lot more sense if you are familiar with other ANE law codes and ritual purity codes-there’s a famous law about damages to women who lose unborn children that was baffling to just about everyone until a rather similar Hittite law turned up.
Also I feel like the other TL;DR is “Judaism, like pretty much every religion that isn’t Protestant Christianity, does not work like Protestant Christianity and everyone would be less confused if they kept that in mind”.
In fact, Protestant Christianity often doesn’t work like Protestant Christianity, since Protestant Christianity isn’t a single religion but a catch-all term (at least in common use, IIRC) for ‘Christian but not Catholic’ which encompasses I don’t know how many different religions.
Now I think I’m going to go watch Babylon 5, because I have religion on the brain.
Babylon 5 is always the right choice. Enjoy Parliament of Dreams!
Yea that was more a swipe at how a lot of the study of religions implicitly takes American protestantism as a model and goes about looking for a creed and a scripture it can zero in on even when that approach doesn’t work. The difference between Reform and Orthodox Judaism and the emergence of the former in 19th century Germany and America is a very good example of this.
I don’t think that’s what a good Comp Rel course is about. Rel 101 is about comparative systems of belief, many of which aren’t officially called religions yet serve all the same purpose.
The US, for instance, has a unique religious system, practice of which is utterly demanded if one is not to be starved and marginalized. It’s a textual religion based on a mandatory code and an extensive self-referential commentary upon it. The commenters taken from a very selective caste led by a set of high priests who perform a set of unique rituals. Participants in this religion venerate the words and relics of a set of saints.
I’m writing, of course, about the American Constitutional Democracy, which is in every sense a church. There are a set of core beliefs to which all must subscribe. There are a set of rituals which all adherents must perform. (Try not standing during the national anthem at a football game if you don’t believe me.) There are even purification rituals, like paying your speeding tickets. There are defined roles. There is a priesthood. It is a religion.
And yet, like water to a fish, no American would think of themselves as participating in mandatory religious observance. The purpose of Rel 101 is to make bored Freshmen pay attention to that kind of thing and recognize it when they’re a part of it.
I don’t mean as far as “official statement of belief” goes(“It’s a sin, but so is grilling pork on Shabbos and frankly the second one is rather more concerning to us” might be appropriate here). I mean more that Joyce would benefit enormously from absorbing something of the way Chabad tends to approach outreach to less-religious Jews* and the kinds of attitudes that cultivates. Also I kind of want to see her reaction to being told basically “If you want to follow G-d’s law, fear of eternal punishment is a terrible reason to do it”(complete with the passage in Maimonides that essentially describes rewards and punishment in the herafter as G-d’s equivalent of giving a kid candy for doing their schoolwork).
*meet people on their level, make people feel welcome and don’t make them feel weird if they come in and don’t know what’s going on, encourage non-Jews to learn about Judaism but don’t demand or expect that they convert)
I feel compelled to note from personal experience, in case anyone is inspired to try this, that not all rabbis–Chabad or otherwise–are created equal. If you happen to encounter a meh rabbi, keep looking.
Yea I have generally had good luck on this score(my worst experience was pretty much ‘solemnent and kind of milquetoast’) but YMMV.
If you have to make a qualifier like that, it doesn’t sound like Rabbis are all that reliable.
There are a lot of rabbis, they all have different personalities, and they tend to disagree because of this.
WHOA! Walky has “Smitten Face” … AND NO one has commented on it, yet
uh-oh!
it started here : http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/lecture/
IF Dorothy wants a 3-some he will go for it!
I think it might be his “Holy crap I have FAILED a test for the first time in my life” face.
That’s not Smitten Face, that’s Failed A Math Quiz I Didn’t Know That Was Possible Face. They have similar symptoms – freaked out expression and papyrophagia – but you can tell the difference by the fact that Walky hasn’t thrown a toy at anyone’s head.
Could be he’s moved on from that, and now his mind’s wandered to the 1on1 study sessions with Dorothy he can look forward to.
Maybe his recent failure has left him resmitten with Dorothy all over again, seeing the studious side of her in a whole new light.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/badscore/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/lecture/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/divert/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/02-uphill-from-here/dexter/
All the same face. But…I feel like there is a definite difference in what his faces mean.
…you could also be trolling. in which case, i am playing into your hands quite nicely.
Boy’s in shock still.
Come on, Becky, she believes with her heart. She just has to convince her head.
Look at poor Walky there in panel one, still worked up over his calculus quiz. I daresay he’s at his… limit.
he s got smitten face. You were almost the fist person to mention it ( by 2 minutes )
It’s just his WHOA HOLY SHIT face.
Please don’t take this conversation off on a tangent.
I secant that request.
The responses so far are a sine of bad things to come…
Walky will be fine once he integrates this experience into his self-image.
I don’t think that will solve his problem.
If theological differences can get uncomfortable at a person to person level…
First off, lemme just say, Willis, I am amazed by the panel layout. I LOVE how you did it, with panels 2 and 4’s facial expressions really standing out because the other 3 panels “float” on top of them. It really screams Joyce VERSUS Becky, which I think is amazing. Super kudos for the thoughts behind the design.
Poor Walky, world still shattered because he recieved whats probably his first ever failing mark. His high school experience told him he was smart and didn’t need to try to do well, and it turns out college has completely different expectations and requirements, and its really hitting him and hurting him. While I don’t think I ate my failed quizzes/tests, I do remember having that exact same facial expression for my first few months as a college student.
As for Becky and Joyce’s argument, Joyce evidenced very clearly the previous night that she loves Becky dearly, if non-sexually, and would do everything she could to do right by her. She’s also dealing with her upbringing, and the horrible horrible guilt she’s feeling for supposedly going against the word of God. But she’ll do almost anything for Becky, religion be damned. (pardon the pun, if you will)
Becky is feeling hurt, because it seems to me that she sees this as a “becky or bible” choice, and by Joyce going through the bible and trying to find loopholes that’ll make becky’s “sin” less horrible, like joyce is selling out and trying to replace her real, self-determined moral choices with the externally-determined biblically-moral choices. My heart goes out to these two poor young ladies. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment, as always.
Didn’t think of the panel layout at first, but now when you pointed it out to me I agree – it’s great!
Nice catch, didn’t notice that!
Looks like the zombie Walky is back
she’s got you there joyce
Unlike Becky, I’m not mad that Joyce looked it up. All her life, she was raised to believe that God was against being gay. So of course she was going to try and see if perhaps her leaders had misinterpreted or warped what was actually written. Certainly, Becky has a point, and I see where her anger stems from.
I think that if Joyce had decided that Becky was really in the wrong, she would still have cared and tolerated Becky. But, she would be worried about Becky’s soul, and would probably pray night and day for Becky.
Okay. I’m finally joining the club. I don’t like Joyce any more.
Yeah, religous people checking things in their book? Only a monster would do that.
Considering a very old book (and not even a particularly well-written one) more important than your oldest friend, who has never tried to hurt you? Seems pretty bad to me.
Were you raised to have your entire life and everything you believed based on that book? Joyce isn’t a bad person, she’s just hardcore brainwashed. She’ll break free eventually the comic just moves so slowly we keep expecting her to be more developed than she can be.
Is it strange that I tend to near-obsessively tend to reexamine my worldview constantly, even though there hasn’t been anything to provoke me into doing so? I’ve been doing so since I was twelve.
On the one hand, a lifelong friend whose life has been ruined and has nowhere else to turn. On the other, a book of unverified and unverifiable authorship which contains prohibitions against same-sex relations in the sections that have to do with a) the laws of a society which also practiced slavery and b) the rantings of a man who claimed to know what Jesus wanted more than the people who actually knew him. The choice is clear!
You’re all assuming to know why I dislike what Joyce is doing. She’s essentially saying: Becky > God. Her best friend is more important than the omnipotent, omniscient, savior of mankind. That’s what she’s saying when she says she wanted to see if God “was on the right side.” I don’t care that she looked to see what the Bible had to say. If you’re going to center your life on the words of a book, you should make sure you know what it says, rather than just accepting what everybody else says about it. In short, Joyce is being a hypocrite. She needs to fall on one side or the other and stop sitting on the fence.
Well, after this post, I bet everyone else is now assuming you’re a terrible friend.
Because I realize how illogical it is to say that my friend is more important than God? For a Christian, Joyce’s priorities are messed up.
Man, your god’s a jerk if that’s what it demands. I’d recommend finding another.
I don’t know what your problem is, but you need to relax. Putting God first doesn’t mean that you love anyone else any less. But if one believes in God as described in the Bible, they cannot put people over God. If God can be wrong, then He is flawed, He is a liar, and He is not worthy to be worshiped. That’s why I have a problem with what Joyce said. To say “I just wanted to make sure God was on the right side” is just ridiculous.
To be clear, I do not believe in the God of the Bible any more. Without God in the picture, I can put my friends at any order of the totem pole that I want, but Christians do not have that option. It’s all or nothing, but some try to get the best of both worlds, living like atheists, but hoping to get into Heaven when try die. That I find hypocritical. Jesus Himself said he hated that kind of thinking. He called it being lukewarm.
There is no single “God described in the Bible.” That is a doctrinal dead end, if you’re intellectually honest. The Bible was written by bunches of dudes across a thousand years, each describing the idea of God differently. Today, some choose to follow verses that describe one of the meaner versions, some chose the descriptions that fall on the nicer end of the spectrum. Some choose to follow the god they know in their heart, regardless of what the Bible itself says. All of these kinds of people are Christians. Joyce can put her friend first while still being a Christian. It just means she’s a different kind of Christian.
If you truly don’t believe the Bible is the Word of God anymore, you should be applauding Joyce for making the right decision by putting her friend first.
The Bible may be written by a bunch of diffrent guys and even some of the lessons may even contridict each other The bible was written by men i dont claim to know every word in it i dont claim to care but there is God described in the bible is one God the God of your for fathers Adam and Noah etc. of the parts that i do believe God does demand that you put him first before anyone else and it is because through him all things are done. my mind starting to get hazy on that subject so on to the next friends
i treasure friends and i struggle with the word because the word represents feelings but if you my friend ill prioritize you how ever i please just trust my decision the same way i trust yours. ill admit recently i havent been good to my friends but thats because im not in a good place and dont want to inconvience them.
Yes, there are parts of the Bible where it’s insisted that God be put first. There are also parts of the Bible where it’s insisted that a rapist purchase the attacked person from their family to make up for any loss of property value. Now, Joyce can either help Becky, or she can give Becky up to her father and then go get married to Ryan while her parents are paid a dowry.
I would prefer the old laws mid evil times to be more precise but as Willis writes so it shall be and i will continue to read and observe. also im sure that is a law of man not of God.
Deuteronomy chapter 22 is part of the covenant established between Israel and God, specifically a list of stuff Israelites have to do in order to continue deserving the land of Canaan as their own, and to continue being God’s chosen people. These were not intended to be laws from men, but laws from God. Their government was a theocracy — there were no laws of men.
I don’t think she’s been sitting on the fence though. I think she was far on one side, but is now starting to peak at the other. Seriously, give her some fence time before she chooses to transition!
oof, aw shit, didn’t expect this to come up this quickly
Actually, I’m impressed that Joyce is doing this well, after a lifetime of indoctrination into this sort of rigid fundamentalist belief. In fact, her doing research is arguably a good sign, since it means she’s trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance she’s now suffering from. In short, “gay is bad” and “my best friend is good” just don’t get along. She was looking for indications that “gay is bad” was a wrong belief, or at least a misunderstood one, and even if she hadn’t found them, she would still have sided with “my best friend is good”.
However, that doesn’t make the rest of her rigid Christian upbringing go away (including her tendency to look to the Bible for answers), and Becky will hopefully realize that and be patient with her.
…this is pretty much why I don’t like looking up things to justify my own beliefs.
I can understand Becky but also Joyce. Interesting friendship. Becky seems to be more of a rebel (who put on a mask to hide it), Joyce a family girl.
Ah well, I have to say I like the storyline. It would break my suspension of disbelief if Joyce wouldn´t have troubles adjusting to this whole thing.
Quick Joyce! Just say you did it to justify it to… everyone else???
Something here doesn’t compute.
Both Becky and Joyce come from the same home schooled community.
Both are going to interpret the Bible in the same way, more or less, based on what they’ve been taught from that community. Right? Wrong.
Now I know the Bible has been interpreted by every church, group, etc. out there to mean exactly what they want it to mean.
So, no reason that Becky and Joyce can’t look at the same situation and bend their teachings to match what they what it to match I guess.
Joyce is never going to change. She is just going to go on trying to bend the Word to match her changing ideas.
She’s gone from Gay sends you to Hell to Gay is maybe not a major Sin.
So to salve her conscience she comes up with a good old solid standby to reaffirm her faith…’no hanky panky before marrige’.
Joyce is not going to stop trying to ‘straighten’ Becky out, and Becky is going to let it happen. And she just may not take to the preaching to kindly, she has had enough of it at this point.
While she doesn’t like the Gay is bad, my friend is good conflict as Jaimehlers points out….Becky is going to get sick of putting up with that conflict I think. And I for one don’t blame her.
It’s hard to stay friends with someone who is constantly looking down on you for your life choices.
I think Joyce will change eventually, just like David Willis himself did. After all, he had her beliefs when he started college and now look at him! The only problem is that since one week in strip time is approximately one year in real time, it’ll be decades before the change is complete.
Joyce will definitely change. Becky is the type that will just go right on being a Christian anyway after everything, but the fact that she identifies as Christian will change very little about how she livesher life
Joyce is wrong, but self-consistency is important to her. She’ll keep bending the word, until the evidence is just overwhelming and she can’t bend it anymore, at which point she will change her mind.
I’ve seen the Joyce/Becky dichotomy in valuing consistency way too many times in real life. Beckys stay moderate Christians forever. Joyces end up either stay staunch Christians, or turn atheist.
As for “God being on the right side”. I have never been able to understand how so called intelligent beings could possibly think that God cares enough about petty conflicts of any kind to involve himself/herself with them.
2 solders running across a battlefield, each shouting “God is on my side’…as a tank runs over ’em. Yeah, Right.
What happens when Becky and Joyce realize that both of them are on opposite sides of the same question?
Joyce knows being gay is wrong (but not a ‘major sin’ the research proved it
), and knows God is on the right side.
But Becky knows being gay is not wrong, didn’t need research to prove it, and knows God is on the right side.
They are going to come up against a wall in this situation: and either climb over it, or go their separate ways. I don’t see how they can reconcile their views.
When I was a youth leader, I pointed out God is like Cthulhu in he thinks in cosmic terms. Two guys killing each other means pretty little when this is all just a prepping for your eternal existence afterward. I wonder why they stopped inviting me to lecture. 🙂
The whole ‘wait for marriage’ kinda runs into a roadblock when the marriage part can be illegal where you live, actually.
I think that Joyce has probably forgotten about this piece, or would just be alright with a wedding, even if the marriage isn’t recognized by the government. Gay weddings aren’t illegal after all.
It’s legal in Indiana, though, which is what’s pertinent.
As of late 2014, and definitely not in 2010 when the comic started. Is the comic in floating time?
It is. See http://www.dumbingofage.com/about/ item #7.
60 years from now, while they are all getting hyped up for midterms, Carla is gonna come floating along in her anti-grav boots while Joe tries to drag Danny – who was dumped by Amazi-Girl so she could join the cyber collective – to pick up some fine gynoids in his floating car.
But we are already in 2015.
This officially is the future!
We are entitled to hoverboards and flying cars!
Apparently, that particular timeline stopped existing after BttF3…
I dunno, the Roberts court might try putting this genie back into the bottle.
With no federal protections that could cease to be true in the middle of any story arc. Pretty sure it wouldn’t be the only state that’s flipped back and forth, legal today, illegal tomorrow. Though obviously that only has to translate into the Doaverse as much as you want it to.
Only if we only accept marriages done by the state as valid. Many people also value marriages conducted by priests, rabbis, personal pledges, etc. It would not be hard for Becky to find someone willing to officiate at her wedding. She just wouldn’t get any tax benefits as a result.
Or apparently she would. Looks like I’m not up on Indiana law. Woops.
I’m guessing from Becky’s reaction that she is very self-assured. Either she always believed contrary to her church’s doctrine — unlikely, considering her dad’s stance — or, as soon as she realized she liked girls, she decided liking girls was morally acceptable, discarding her childhood teachings as no longer relevant — both regarding homosexuality and hanky-panky, I guess.
On that note, I’m surprised that she gets angry in the THIRD panel, not the first: she doesn’t seem to mind that Joyce did research until Joyce tries to put a Spiritual Stop to Sexy Times.
Joyce, on the other hand, relies on the Bible as her entire world-view. She is compassionate, and she seems to really think that she could have chosen Becky over her faith. (She did choose Dorothy over faith, so I’m guessing yes.) On the other hand, if she, like Becky, had accepted experience as authority stronger than the Bible, then that would have meant accepting her OWN experiences, too — lust wolves and trauma and heartbreak, oh my. Policing Becky is a way of keeping some sort of order to her life, but it’s not gonna last.
tl;dr: These kiddos have very different responses to faith. Joyce’s world is going to slowly collapse until she breaks and I am so worried about her.
Walky’s face in that panel. He saw the stupid phrasing coming
Nah. Walky’s still panicking over his 28 score on the test.
Walky’s still in shock. Poor guy.
Well gee Becky, I know I was raised to believe homosexuals were damned/evil and I’m pretty sure you were too. So my first thought was, “My best friend can’t be damned/evil. I know her, I grew up with her. If that’s true though, and I know God isn’t wrong, then maybe my parents and church leaders are wrong or outright lying. Better look this one up to find out if I’ve been lied to all my life!”
Sadly, I don’t think sarcasm in the face of life changing revelation is one of Joyce’s skills.
Things were so much easier in medieval times. The paradox of God’s benevolence didn’t exist back then. Mainly because the church brainwashed everyone into accepting that humanity as a whole was a filthy, sinful, cretin. Really, the mere fact that God didn’t wipe them all off the planet was proof of God’s mercy and benevolent nature.
Then some guy got it into his head that humanity for some reason deserved to have good things happen to them and that if God didn’t let good things come to good people, then God couldn’t be good.
Or maybe it’s how a calvinist friend of mine said it, as Calvinists apparently have no problem with the idea of God being a hypocritical asshole that’s demanding our worship at gunpoint. Really, things only get difficult when God has to be good at the same time that humanity deserves good things. Cross out one and suddenly there’s no problem.
Medieval Christianity evolved rapidly and was very heterogeneous. There were plenty of debate about how Christian dogma should be interpenetrated, and worry when it didn’t follow society norms – just like today.
Some of the favorite questions included how to sync the world of Jesus with the world of Aristotle, proving God’s existence with reasoning, why bad things happen to good people, why God would allow a bad king to be in power and the problem with people on other continents who never had the chance to hear the world of God.
Some questions seem quaint to us now, as why nuns kept being pregnant (there are several accounts of verified virgin birth in nunneries), but it was just as important for the scholars back then as things like gay marriage is now. It’s all about matching dogma and norms.
“how Christian dogma should be interpenetrated”
Of course with a size six strapon!
That began as a typo – now it is HEADCANON
I wonder… Willis has said that Joyce kind of represents what he was like growing up, so has he had a similar conversation with a gay friend in real life?
I remember having read in the comments that his highschool girlfriend was (or turned out to be) lesbian – might be Alex Stritar’s comment in this thread.
Willis’ comment on actually confirms it (but unclear how much of a fundi he was at that time).
Should have been “Willis’ comment on the comic“.
Confused highschool girlfriend with college girlfriend!
sigh…..
—->enter generic “Christians r stoopid” comment here<—–
#Notallchristians
You must be new here. Welcome aboard!
All of that is true when we go into the higher social classes that consisted of the exclusive minority of medieval society, the ones who could afford an education. For well over 80% of the population, this was not an option. God said what the Bible said and the Bible said what the local priest told them it said as very few of them could read and none of them could read latin.
Socrates, Plato, Aristoteles, great names, but it’s easy to forget that all of them belonged to the top of the ruling elite of their city states. The reason they were allowed the luxury of pondering on ethics, the nature of man’s knowledge and early natural science with Aristoteles was because they didn’t need to spend time on manual labour, which was done by an abundance of (in the eyes of Athens) barbarian slaves. Philosophers were literally people with too much free time and things had only changed slightly in Thomas Aquinas days.
My point stand that while questions were certainly asked among philosophers and theologists, the church at the time systematically did what they could to keep the peasant population in check through perpetual reminders of their own sinful nature and the mercy of God who allowed them to live and was even willing to forgive their sins in exchange for complete obedience and worship. The paradox of God’s goodness wasn’t present because they were constantly reminded that they didn’t deserve it.
Ugh, I hate that I can’t edit posts here. This was meant as a reply to Bagge.
Eh, ‘progress’ isn’t linear. Education was probably more widely distributed, at least among males (medieval nunneries helped educate women), in Aristotle’s time than in Aquinas’s time. Romans (a bit later) were literate enough to leave us a whole lot of lower-class graffiti, not to mention military letters (granted, scribes could help with those, but handwriting might indicate that.)
Education in Aristoteles time wasn’t like it is today. There weren’t public schools, instead teachers were hired to educate families separately. If a teacher of philosopher decided to educate classes, it would’ve been with their own money and it would be very rare. Beyond that, even Aristoteles argued against educating the masses, recommending instead that resources be spent on paying teachers for the ruling elite. As for medieval education, I grant you, it could vary between city states or nations. So maybe I exaggerated that, but it could still be bad enough that there were cases where young priests all the way into the 15th century couldn’t read the Bible because they didn’t understand latin.
You got a good point, and you are certainly right that religion was used to keep people down.
So what I’m saying now does not contradict that – it just adds a bit more flavor to medieval Christianity.
Religion was many things, then as now. It was a source of identity, a promise of salvation, a threat of damnation, an explanation for the world and society. It was also inspiration for artists and thinkers. We only know about theological philosophers from the upper class, true, but we only know about the upper class about almost everything from those times. I’m willing to bet anything that there were Joyces and Maries and Beckys in those times too, who were just as anxious to explore their religion.
My favorite is Menocchio who admittedly lived a bit into Renascence. He was a miller and came up with a fantastic cosmology that described the universe in terms of rotting cheese, maggots and fermentation. He was brought in by the inquisition who thought long and hard and dismissed him as a heretic but ultimately harmless. They sent him home with a slap on the wrist and told him to focus on millering in the future.
The moral of the story – wherever there are people there are philosophers.
to be fair doing research to rub it in radical homophobic christians faces is an excellent reason for studying the bible
For non-Christians maybe. Most people do it to reaffirm their faith and reinforce their worldview.
That Joyce discovering the New Testament isn’t as clear cut as she was led to believe is more of a shot at her parents/priest/etc. than her religion.
And that exactly is the reason why Joyce is doing it: Relying on the words of god (as written in the bible) – even when dealing with fundamentalist christians – has worked so far.
Other occassions that convinced Joyce that it is right to believe in doctrin:
1) Ethan is gay, but apparently not bad. He could be convinced to try to “resist his temptation”.
2) Dorothy is atheist, but could be convinced to go to a church with her. Her traumatic near-rape incident was the reason for this, so what seemed to be a punishment for her sin (going to a party) turned out to be a sacrifice that became an option to bring a heathen closer to Christ.
3) Her best friend Becky is lesbian, but her research “revealed” that this is OK with the bible. So another time where relying on the word of god (with some “wiggle room”) was successful.
Joyce’s believe in the bible being the inerrant word of god has been struggled, but so far every test revealed that it was the right decision to keep her believe.
The practical reason sex before marriage was bad was because of property rights basically. A virgin daughter could command a much higher price when you sold her to another family than one who wasn’t, having sex with a man’s daughter without marrying her was tantamount to damaging his property. That’s why the biblical punishment for rape is a fine and then marrying the victim, to pay back the father and then take the damaged goods off his hands. Of course I don’t see how this is an argument against lesbian sex, since there are a lot of things girls can do to each other without breaking the hymen. Of course a lot of the laws in MANY religions exist to prevent the general populace from achieving happiness in life. Keep the peons miserable and working hard to support the church by promising them they can be happy in the afterlife.
Could of course also be the good old “If she hasn’t had sex with anyone else, it doesn’t matter how bad I am, I’m still the best she’s ever had.” mentality.
Of course, the Hymen doesn’t actually work like that. It doesn’t “break,” the pain and bleeding is caused by a lack of proper lubrication, which in turn is caused by the lady not being properly comfortable and aroused in order to properly produce such lubrication. It’s literally her inner walls tearing to friction.
So there’s plenty a man and a woman can do to not break the hypothetical hymen as well.
C’mon, Joyce, I know this is all happening fast, but get yer head outta yer ass.
Also, has no one in the comic noticed Walky’s in the middle of a huge Blue Screen of Death moment? I keep expecting him to burst into like, Valjean’s Soliloquy or something.
Well Joyce doesn’t like Walky so she mostly ignores him. Sal’s bathing in the afterglow of great grades and telling Jason off. Billie’s still focussed on Ruth. Mike doesn’t care.
Beckys by now is focused and Joyce and probably just assumed that was normal for Walky before.
and Becky continues to be… very 18.
(me me me me me me me)
You know how some people hate on Danny, even though/because he’s young and stupid? yeah, that’s me and Becky.
My hope is that they’ll both grow out of it.
Sick burn, Becky.
Helps that it rings true.
Oo… Ouch… Serious burn.
I know this is a delayed reaction, but damn it Joyce!
Boom! Faithslapped!
Yes, because God is basically the believer’s values and ideals projected onto the universe.