They don’t, but it worries me a bit when they say that everyone does.
Before they come to the epiphany that Joyce describes in this strip, people who suppose that fear of divine punishment is the only reason not to do bad things presumably reckon that I am a very dangerous man to be around.
The part that worries me is that if you think you need God telling you what to do then you’re using things other than common sense, empathy, and science to figure out how to treat people you might end up using things that are against common sense or empathy, for instance much of most scripture I know of.
2 cents, but I’ve airways assumed religious people like this assume that their empathy derives from their faith. Most of them have never had a point they remember where they didn’t believe to go off of for comparison.
Cast in Point, Jordan Peterson saying that Matt Dillahunty isn’t a “real Athiest” because if he were he’d be like Raskolnikov in The Brothers Karamazov and have no empathy, but since he does have empathy, he believes in G-d even if he doesn’t think he believes in G-d.
This is the real issue with the religious life. These people *want* to be good, but because they’re so focused on this other thing, they can’t see what it takes to be good.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter if there really is eternal punishment or not, What matters most is whether you’ve developed this sense of consequence by the time you have a crisis of faith, and doubt the eternal punishment for just a bit. Every religious person has these doubts, and it’s something that they all know about and talk about.
In short, I don’t think it’s possible to be good if you’re only doing it to avoid something that you won’t ever have any evidence of until it’s too late.
Did Peterson talk about empathy in that exchange or does he just talk about behavior? Can’t remember and can’t really stomach watching any more JP these days.
I think this is the case. Cuz my ex-husband was Convinced he would become abusive and hit or rape me if he wasn’t a Christian. And then he left Christianity and, spoiler alert, he did not. He was the same person, just a little less stressed out with shame and guilt over never being Holy.
Having grown up in an environment very similar to Joyce’s upbringing (and David’s, since we all know Joyce has a lot of autobio stuff in her)… yeah pretty much, for evangelical christians. It’s kind of misleading to say “religious people” because there are plenty of religions out there that don’t include this kind of logic. But the point is that you do good (whatever your parse that to mean) both because god wants you to and because you have god and the holy spirit guiding you and providing the DRIVE and DESIRE to do good. Sometimes non-Christians will do good things, but that’s either god working through them (so they really had no say in the matter, in a way), or it was really driven by selfishness.
I don’t think they came up with it either. I suspect the genesis goes much farther back – probably at least to the original hierarchical city-states. We see plenty of it even in the older parts of the Old Testament and that ethos is certainly drawn from older roots.
In a way it’s just an extension of parental/child models to a societal scale. Ideally of course the parents will be trying to teach their kids to access their empathy and understand why things are wrong, but for young children the direct effect of parental punishment or even disapproval is the main factor.
The big “advantage” of using God is that you can use it to bypass and override common sense and empathy. How else are you going to convince the masses that those people over there are bad and inferior while you deserve their loyalty as their divinely appointed overlord?
That’s the force that has always countered empathy – the ‘othering’ tendency, our tendency to save on mental storage space by reducing our image of certain people to simple stereotypes and caricatures, and think of them as less than human beings.
My experience with “religious” people is that most (not all of them; I can think of two exceptions within my own circle of people) of them are looking for someone to blame. “I’m not judging you. God is.” — said with a certain amount of smug satisfaction that they will, nonetheless, enjoy watching the verdict handed down.
I’m guessing this is Joyce’s first time really thinking about hurting someone not in terms of the I Have Sinned angle at all, but purely on the I have hurt someone I care about and I feel bad one. (Given how young she is and how generally Joyce, I suspect she’s never really realized how much things like her constant boundary-violating actually upset people and this is the first time it’s really impacted her like this. At least compared to the more menial – but still freakout-worthy – sins she’s usually aware of.)
I mean, in fairness, most actual scriptural bits about Hell indicate that it’s just… Not being around God. Which for the faithful is punishment enough, and for the non-faithful is… well, kinda what they wanted anyway?
I’m pretty sure it’s mostly just a lack of nuance that has made it balloon up into fire and brimstone and yadda yadda.
And yes, I know, lake of fire, blah blah blah. To that I always say: Do you think Jesus will have a sword coming out of his gullet too? 😛
The lake of fire and whatnot is, I think, mostly Dante, and I’m pretty sure he was excommunicated well before he wrote it. It’s funny how a church outcast’s fanfiction has become effectively cannon.
Same with Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” at least in the sympathetic-devil angle. From what I heard, Satan had been depicted as an ugly, one-dimensional creature up until that book was published.
I’ve been very church-free for going on ten years now, but last I checked any sympathetic ideas about Satan are very pop culture and very much not be taken theologically. He appears attractive but he’s still the devil and you Do Not Trust Him.
Actually, the lake of fire idea comes from the Book of Revelation, so still very weird but canon. And also I’m pretty sure Dante was not excommunicated, just exiled for being part of the Emperor’s faction against the Pope
This is true. The Bible constantly uses fire as a symbol of ultimate obliteration. The book of Revelations goes further to clarify this by calling the symbolic lake of fire, the “second death” which seems cogent to me with the idea of a just God: You believed that there was no God, thus no afterlife? That’s exactly what you get.
However, the mere cessation of existence was never a “sexy” enough threat to scare people into religion, hence the fanfiction about horrible, endless torture and the such.
That stuff does predate Dante; it may not be biblical, but there are a lot of early Christians who delight in describing how their opponents will be tortured.
Meanwhile Dante does also have a nice part of hell, which is just not being around God. It’s where the Dorothys – people who are good but not Christian – would go.
(Actually, probably only the pre-Christianity Dorothys, ones who were never given the option to follow Christ. I’m sure any Christian from his century would tell you a good person could never reject his message given the chance.)
Actually, even ‘modern’ pagans and heathens can get into the ‘good Hell’, provided they were never part of the faithful. It’s the former Christians who get dropped several levels down. Heretics get much more derision, because they pose a much bigger actual threat than people outside the flock ever could
Of course, if we’re still talking Dante, it’s mostly just people he admired and wanted to not condemn. Much like he condemned political enemies to deep circles of hell.
If I recall correctly, most of the ideas on hell being a flaming pit actually come from Mark 9:43 where Jesus himself describes it as an “Unquenchable Flame” and goes on to use the ever popular “Where the flame is not quenched and the worm dieth not.” I also believe there were some references to a garbage pit near Jerusalem where fires burned all the time, but I don’t have a direct pointer. So, there is evidence for a fiery hell in Christianity from the most credible source. That being said, Joyce is expressing sentiments here I have heard other disillusioned religious people express. Her statement about believing in a Straw man is particularly potent, though a little on the nose.
Yep, the Valley of Hinom, which is referenced in Revelations by calling the lake of fire “Gehenna”. Another clear indication that the lake of fire is merely a symbol for final death, not torture.
Mark 9:43-48 do talk about that. But Jesus doesn’t actually *say* that the place exists, just that it’s better to remove the part of you that causes you to sin than it would be to go to such a place whole.
I found the part of me that caused me to sin: it’s the part that believed that there were no consequences except the eternal damnation bit. I found I needed to also excise a healthy margin around that to really be safe.
That said, I’m not sure it was soon enough. I’ve looked around at the world and seen the suffering here. Where is God? This could already be hell.
I think she’s getting that – just she needed to actually majorly stuff up first, and realise that she’s perfectly capable of feeling guilt and shame and remorse because she did a bad and hurt people and not because a higher being judges her as flawed.
Also, incidentally, the whole “people are sinners” shtick really bugs me. Somebody who can look on a newborn and go “yup, clearly tainted by evil” and think it actually needs to be ceremonially cleansed with magic water because of that (rather than as part of a ceremony and welcome into a community, which, fair enough) has a disturbing outlook on life.
But if you’ve grown up being told it’s only your faith in a higher power that allows you to make good choices and be a good person, and then you start questioning that faith, trying out being a bad person kinda seems logical? And it sounds like this was literally Joyce’s first active attempt at rebellion for rebellion’s sake… (Wrestling with the creed she was raised with and self-evident truths in front of her – Dotty is a kind, moral person; Becky is still family and a good person regardless of her sexuality; trying to make Ethan be somebody he’s not (even if he is cute and non-threatening which is what she was looking for in a boyfriend/potential future spouse) is wrong and unfair; standing up to her parents to defend her friends because they were being unreasonable – may have seemed like rebellion, particularly to her mother, but were really about self-growth and expanding her world view.)
You think prison isn’t eternal punishment? Have you asked some of the folks incarcerated as teens and still there decades later, for literally no reason other than “they black”?
Yes, this!
I also grew up being taught that i can not be a good person without believing in God. Turned out that i met awesome atheists with way better moral compass than the christian people i grew up around. That was when i could finally let go of that belief.
In my opinion, any Christian motivated to be good by the threat of hell has missed the point twice over. First, for the reasons everyone else is noting: empathy is a thing that doesn’t require awareness of God (or, at least, conscious awareness). But also, the threat of hell is supposed to be averted the moment you accept Christ’s forgiveness. Starting from that point, every good deed you do is not and CANNOT be to “save yourself from hell” because that’s already covered. So the only reason to do it is because you want to benefit someone else.
And that’s how Joyce dedicated herself to eradicating Feelings, and became a Care Bears villain.
(Try as I might, I cannot imagine any version of Joyce capable of evil greater than would be appropriate on Care Bears. Maybe with effort she could menace the Smurfs.)
Honestly, can you see her being a care bear villain ending any other way than her cuddling a bunch of care bears and crying while promising to do better in future?
Maybe she would be an enemy to the Care Bears like Elmyra was an enemy to the Tiny Toons? She just wants to hug them and squeeze them so much that she’s dangerous.
I wonder if Joyce was allowed to watch Care Bears growing up (one of the modern incarnations – she certainly wouldn’t give a hoot about the version I grew up with). Sure, it’s about love and feelings, but it’s also about supernatural creatures who live in a heaven-like realm while being completely secular, and wield magical powers.
Weird to think that the freaking Care Bears was probably considered a negative influence on her.
Pretty certain that other than Grumpy all Care Bears are infinitely cuddlable and cannot be over-squished?
Given how restricted her TV and film-watching experiences were before she went to college… Dang, yep, they were probably considered some sort of gateway to something bad… Unless it’s possible to argue they’re angels appearing in a child-friendly form and their Stare is divine light shining out of them and casting out evil from the world?
But rainbows are biblical – a promise made at the end of the Noah story that the world won’t be destroyed by flood again… So this could be seen as rainbows in their correct context, symbolising the power of the divine?
(I mean personally rainbows in all contexts are great and I love that Pride is celebrated in technicolour coz if you’re going to bust out of the closet nuking it Becky-style on your way out is an awesome way to go, and people should most definitely not be ashamed of their sexuality etc)
Yikes! Hope that goes well. I had some very tense conversations with mine a few decades ago, even though she knew going in. I think she’s drifted into near-agreement with me by now, though I’ve never pushed it. She had used faith to deal with some abuse, and it hurt her to encounter skepticism.
On a lighter note, I did indulge in some of that (fortunately) consequenceless debauchery, and it was great fun and I wouldn’t want to have missed it. But I did get lucky.
I said it in email form, like the conflict averse person I am, but I don’t think it’ll go too badly. My spouse is one of those very progressive Christians who’s primarily a humanist, so we share our important values (human rights and all that jazz) in common, so I don’t think this will change much of anything between us in the long run. Still… conflict averse, as a result of a very controlling religious upbringing. So your nice words mean a lot. ^_^
Update: all is well. I quote, “you act like you weren’t blatantly hinting at it already.” It’s probably gonna be one of those things where we just don’t talk about it much, on either end, but we’re good. Phew…
Not gonna lie, don’t see how you decided you knew enough about each other to be married without her knowing you are an atheist unless this is a recent decision. I know I specifically asked my partner about that and a good many other things before decisions were made.
This is not meant as a criticism or disparagement, you do you. It just seems like something that would come up in a deep relationship like that, and I can’t understand how it wouldn’t. I mean, I dated a guy for two weeks during which he claimed he was catholic (it came up for some reason.). The first time I walked into his house, I gave him a funny look and said “I thought you said you were catholic?” He said “I am.” I pointed to a particular arrangement of objects and asked “Then why does that look like a Wiccan Altar?” At which point he freaked out and admitted that he maintains an illusion of Catholicism for his parents, but was actually Wicca. I was more worried about the lying than anything.
Glad to hear it went well and I hope it continues, but this tends to be one of those things that comes up later. Mainly as children enter the picture and questions of how to raise them start coming up. So as simple friendly advice from one stranger on the internet to another, don’t let it go too long without talking about it.
It is entirely possible that they only recently realized they were an athiest/became an atheist.
This is rather different, but when my platonic partner and I got married, I didn’t know I was ace (nor did she know/realize she was gay. That wound up working well because I exist at a VERY weird point on probability curves). When we realized these things (neaarrr simultaneously), there was a lot of anxiety about how to tell the other. People’s self-knowledge can change.
(We’re still legally married and very close, it’s just a platonic relationship now!)
Two weeks is easily understandable, in my mind. Especially for something they feel they need to keep from their family. Possibly with very good reason. Like any other major thing you need to keep secret from part of your life, it’s risky to reveal it casually.
Granted, as some flavor of atheist/agnostic, I probably wouldn’t have even mentioned religion two weeks in unless specifically asked about it or it came up in some other conversation. Not being religious isn’t a big focus of my life.
Agnostic Jew married to a Christian here… My relationship to religion is complicated in that it’s part of my identity, has shaped who I am etc, but it’s more the cultural side than the religious one that resonates with me… His faith seems a lot less complicated… But at the same time although it’s important to him and something he believes in, he also believes in scientific theory and isn’t hugely judgey mcjudgey about it so e.g. pretty certain he doesn’t think I’m a sinner who’ll burn in eternal hell fire because of my evil ways… Does think my parents can be overbearing and controlling, and prone to histrionics, but that’s based in reality (they’re loving and mean well, but they very much believe that their way is the right way, and won’t necessarily listen to any arguments or additional facts that might contradict this)…
Walkyjoyce made conscious decisions to wipe her own memory when confronted with uncomfortable truths. If she had been able to bear them, there’s every chance she would have reached this stage of development on her own.
I’d like to think that Dumbjoyce, at this point of her life, would not make the same mistake if presented with the opportunity to make it all go away… but I’m a little doubtful.
I’m certain enough I would bet on it. Like, for a chocolate bar, or something of similar value, but I would.
Because if she wiped her memory, she would hurt Becky with her old behaviours and beliefs (like she unwittingly did before she became aware of the whole situation), and I just can’t see her decide to go back to that.
I can say I relate to this, I did grow up christian and was very into it as a kid. By the time I realized I didn’t believe anymore(15-16), I definitely had an ethics dilemma for quite a while.
I really like Joyce and Dorothy’s friendship when Joyce isn’t being weird about it. They can get into stuff real deep stuff because there is a mutual respect there.
Not that Becky and her don’t respect each other, obviously they do, but Becky’s got her own particular relationship to religion, so she can’t go to her about it, and Joyce’s also interesting friendship with Joe is, uhh, sort of in a weird place right now. I guess she could talk about this with Sarah, but I don’t think Sarah would get it in the same way Dorothy might. Guess it remains to be seen how Dorothy’s going to react, after all.
I’ve met this thinking with religious people a few times. You don’t believe in God, so you have no morals and must be a bad person who does whatever she feels like.
It seems to be surprising for some people that being a good person doesn’t require that all-seeing being who’ll punish you if you aren’t. I’m actually not sure if being a good person out of fear is that much better than being a good person because you genuinely believe it’s the right thing to do.
I believe if you do something good because you know it’s right, it’s a lot harder to get morally knocked down than if you were just doing it out of fear.
I would say behaving well out of fear is less moral than doing so out of consideration for the needs/wants/rights of others. It is certainly less thoughtful.
I would go further . . . to behave well for fear of punishment is fundamentally selfish. Avoiding punishment is about oneself. Treating others well requires paying attention to them.
Even behaving well for the sake of others is inherently selfish, since it makes you feel good when you adhere to your own sense of morality. Even if no one else knows of something positive you did, you yourself still know and still gain the pleasure from knowing you were “doing the right thing”. You may not even realize it at the time, but that pleasure will be rewarded for good acts all the same. If there even is such a thing as truly selfless action, there is no human capable of it.
That said, doing good because it feels good to do good is precisely what people should strive for. It is the purest form of moral action we are capable of, so it is still an extremely admirable trait.
At that point, the matter is purely academic. If you do good because you’re afraid of the consequences or to boost your own ego, what happens if you ever decide that *bad* things will do the same thing just as well? For example, if you’re some medieval knight who only does good to avoid hell, what happens if the Pope announces free absolutions for the latest Crusade?
If you do good because you truly enjoy being a benefit to others, then you can be trusted to *continue* doing good even if circumstances change. Whether that’s in some way still “selfish” is something for philosophers to discuss; by any *practical* definition, you’re a selfless person.
I’m a good person cuz I like when people like me, and also not going to jail. Not going to jail is a big part of it. I’d argue, in a matter of speaking, I guess it is our own hell on earth. The punishment for being bad being unending suffering that is.
Well, making sure to not go to prison does not necessarily make you a good person. There’s a lot of bad stuff you can do that’s not a crime. Take Mike for example.
I think there are generally three main reasons people do right by others. They care about other’s, they want to be good people, or they expect some external reward.
Wanting an external reward is generally agreed upon as the least morally good reason to do right by others. Its still better than not doing right by others.
Of the other two I’m actually not sure which is better.
I’m … torn. I’m proud of Joyce, but I’m torn. Because what she did WAS wrong, and she’s right to feel guilty. But I hope she doesn’t let this become something greater than the sum of its parts, if that makes sense.
That new look (unattended hair? is that what it’s called?) is very becoming. Or I hope she’s relaxing a bit on the inside the way her hair is on the outside.
Malaya and Ruth both got haircuts. Leslie’s hair appears to be in its more fussed-up state longterm now, as well. I think there’s another one or two but I don’t remember offhand.
I think Willis said a while back that he was hesitant to do haircuts (since, given the timescale, they’re permanent changes) unless they’re something he likes drawing more than the previous one. But he’s also mentioned since the latest wave of hairdos that most of the simple, close to the head styles he used to draw a lot have been changed. (Hence, Dorothy, Leslie, Ethan.) And the ones that had the same ‘vaguely loose short-medium hair’ that Joyce has are also changed up, too. (Remember Becky’s original hair now? I basically don’t.)
I think I have felt like Joyce, but after years of being an atheist/agnostic/pagan, I can confirm these truths: good and evil exist independently of religion, but morality is more complex and works in shades of gray (except in cases like mass murder and rape); realizing that maybe the afterlife isn’t real makes you the fear of being erased from existence; this is the only life you have, so if you mess up you messed up for the rest of your life, so don’t go around doing things you will regret, like having sex with strangers and punching innocent people; being an atheist doesn’t make you superior, and many atheists online can be douchebags that do and say stuff that is racist, misogynistic and/or transphobic (as for paganism, some groups are liberal, while others embrace racial bias because of some twisted sense of ethnic pride).
I don’t see how having sex with strangers is like punching people. Punching people hurts them. Having sex with them makes them feel good. It also makes me feel good. What’s the problem.
Punching strangers can also be a person’s way of making friends, if the person they punch has a similar mindset. Let’s not entirely write off that sort of thing.
I was thinking more along the lines of Dragon Ball, but I guess technically I do read a lot of Avengers-adjacent comics. Mostly Spidey, Kamala, Carol, and Sleepwalker.
Naw, I’m agnostic and let me tell you. I live life completely consequence free. The only downside is that I may or may not go to heaven perhaps if it does or doesn’t exist maybe. My money’s on the afterlife being some obscure concept that no organized religion has touched on or can wrap their mind around, cuz I don’t know why it’d be anything quantifiable.
“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.” — Edward Abbey
Its ok, Joyce. Grass is always greener, and all that jazz. There are a lot of atheists and agnostics I know who remember being less stressed when they had the social safety net of religion to fall back on.
Having grown up with a Hispanic Catholic background, church and all that was just the norm for me. But; as I got older, I just didn’t really believe in it anymore. I saw a lot of my friends and family (of various orientations and lifestyles) mistreated by the so-called morally righteous people who told me how to live my life, and walked away from it all.
The only real downsides is having to learn to cope with being small amounts of space dust in a cold uncaring universe that has been; and will continue to be, with or without us. . . its kind of like learning that Santa isn’t just not a real guy; but also a void that will slowly lead the universe to a heat death.
But hey; at least its better than believing some jerk is up there throwing abused gay kids into the fire for eternity.
I don’t know, I kinda like believing I’m made of stars and dinosaurs, volcanoes and trees, a bit like lego in that my molecules are currently assembled to make me, but in a million years they’ll be in other things (potentially including lego)…
o3o outta curiosity when and how did anyone else come to be agnostic/athiest. I guess I was never overtly religious in the way that I believed in God about as much as Santa Claus or ghost stories. As I got older I just got to a point where I was going through the motions and thought “I’m not doing this cuz I believe it, I’m just doing it cuz everyone else is.” I just didn’t want to admit it cuz the alternative is nothing happens when I die, which is terrifying for me. Honestly I’m probably agnostic, both due to my belief that just because I don’t believe in any pre-established religion doesn’t both deny them from being true nor does it mean that some non-established concept can be true, and just…a blind hope that maybe I can go SOMEWHERE when I die. (Personally I’m hoping I can be a ghost so I can keep watching cartoons)
Statistically, this is all a simulation and the only one you can be sure is real is yourself. So I take heart in knowing that, even if I’m wrong about their being an afterlife or any of that, statistically speaking?
I’ll wake up and go, “…Oook that simulation messed me up some”
It’s Descartes’s voice that stays commenting things when all the rest is doubtful, though. I try to take fourth wallism in any work as the author trying to be sure it exists.
Descartes forgot that he needed a brain (and therefore a body) to think with.
I think forgetting about the body is the mayor fault of modern philosophy.
I don’t know about what happens after death. I know some people watch videos about people with near death experiences on YouTube to get a feeling that there is something after, as accounts have certain things in common.
I don’t know. It would be great to get another chance to live and do things better than this time. But for all practical purposes, I act like this one is the only chance I have.
Oh, and BTW, I do believe that spirituality and religion exist because it’s a human need to feel a connection not only to other people but to something beyond. Because the world is a scary place. As this need exists, different practices to meet the need came up. Some people realized how perfectly exploitable that need is, and there you get religious cults manipulating lots and lots of people.
And I sometimes suspect that extreme political views somehow speak to the same need. Which is why people who don’t meet that need in other ways are easy prey for those.
Well, maybe you don’t need a brain. I mean, that’s what the scientific evidence suggests, but that’s all sensory data and could be fake.
“I think therefore I am” is really all we can be completely sure of. “There is something thinking these thoughts.” Everything else is derived.
Agreed, it’s weird to comprehend, but self is probably closer to an interneural conglomerate illusion than a definite, coherent thing. “Who or what is tricked into seeing the illusion then?” “The collective illusion of the neurons!”
I personally hope there is some kind of permanent death eventually. Because eternity is really, really, REALLY long. Eventually, our sun will die and earth along with it, and after that, we’d still have more than 99,999% of eternity ahead of us. I don’t really want to stick around that long. That sounds really boring.
I personally want the kind of immortality that can eventually let me go, “ight, I’ve seen everything I want to, I’m ready for that final sleep, the one where I cease to be. BRING IT ON!”
Or reincarnation since then it’s not getting old as you keep at most hints of your past life
I dunno I feel like there’d always be something to keep us entertained. I mean keep in mind, time as a concept is just a constraint of our own mortal beings. In any given afterlife time may not have any meaning. Eternity might be forever. You might not be living moment to moment but experiencing all moments, all opportunity, all of everything forever or never. You would never grow old, grow tired, grow bored, or have any concept of objectivity because you, too, would be eternity. Meaning you yourself would be the concept of forever.
I was raised Catholic by my parents but I was never baptized or made to go to church. They’re both believers, my mum moreso since she goes to church at least once a week and prays every night, but they’re not by any stretch fundamentalists. When I was little, I used to read the Bible for Kids, but it wasn’t something that was forced on me or anything. I just liked all the pictures and basically treated it as any other storybook.
I never thought about my beliefs too much, whether it was all real or just fiction or whether I really believed that Jesus was my saviour, but when I was in 4th grade, I had a pretty strong religious crisis. I just couldn’t understand how God was supposed to be benevolent, omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient and still allow Evil to exist in the world? If God knew everything about everyone and could do anything about everything and if He really wanted the best for all of us, then why were people suffering? Why did he allow sinners to exist at all? Why allow certain people to be born a certain way if said manner of existence was an immediate ticket to Hell? It didn’t matter how many times my religion teacher or other adults tried to explain the concept of Free Will to me. It just didn’t make sense. And because it didn’t make sense, I decided God couldn’t be real.
I was an atheist until I was like 17 and because I was a know-it-all teenager, I was the edgy “what kind of idiot could believe in a magic man in the sky?” sort. I’m not sure what changed in me because I don’t remember any kind of important event that might’ve lead to this realization, but one day I thought “you know, maybe there is a higher being.” Since then I’ve been stuck in the “maybe there is, maybe there isn’t” camp and calling myself agnostic.
Was raised in a near-fundamentalist household but never felt it. I was “born again” twice and after the second didn’t stick I just shucked the entire facade. One memory that really stings was lying in bed almost in tears begging Yahweh to make the change in me, and he didn’t say a damn thing.
I used to be a very live-and-let-live atheist, but after the last four years I think religion is just poison for an educated society. I get the desire to know the origins of the universe, but if your “theory” has no basis in observable reality, if you can’t disprove the trash you’re selling, you can fuck right off.
I was raised atheist, because my family has been for about four generations (in France, if you were on the side of the Republic anytime before 1930, you were pretty much against the Church).
Turns out if you are never taught that a religion is true, all religions seem extremely weird and exotic and frankly ridiculous. All shades of Christianity still boils down to “some rabbi with a cult got offed 2000 years ago and people still believe he will come back”, which is fun but no less weird than Greek mythology shenanigans.
By the time I was a teenager I felt close to neo-paganism, but never believing that gods actually exist, more that they are a good shorthand for fundamental concepts in ourselves and the universe. Right now I heavily call on Lugh to get me through a particularly difficult of exams, because as Samildanach he is a figure of the kind of brilliance and polyvalence and leadership that I need to demonstrate. Thinking of it in terms of a deity also helps build humility in the face of the importance and difficulty of the task I’ve set myself.
TL;DR: when you aren’t raised in them, all religions are weird enough that it’s hard to take them seriously.
I was thinking about the “exotic-Ness” of religions and had a micro-epiohany: If there are alien civilizations, their religions will be as exotic and varied as the thousands of living and dead religions on Earth. But their atheists will believe substantially similar to the atheists of all other civilizations. (Agreeing there isn’t god/s, chemistry and physics, info theory, the speed of light).
You know, from the outside, it’s always been some kind of weird/entertaining (as in an entertainment you can learn from by confronting to soem reality you haven’t access to), having been raised an atheist, by atheists, meeting only agnostics or atheists for a great part of life, being taught at school, received at the city hall, bussed in restaurants, cahiered in shops, by what I assumed were atheists. The few people going to catechism (the catholic afterschool ed) were doing it exactly in the same mind as some do the military: to get a social status. I only met obnoxious religious people then, fundies that were saying to me that the simple fact I wasn’t believing would make me go to a hell I laughed off – so incommunicability. It took me several years after going into my 20’s to actually meet religious people you could communicate with (and to get that some religious people wouldn’t bother telling it to you) – muslims mainly, a few jews, a few pagans. So in this island of absence of faith, it always is so strange to me to see the american stuff we see overall as universal culture consider it being a pilar or the most common thing, so far that even most amercian ultra-leftists feel like there quoting the bible or preaching when they speak about Lenin or Kropotkin (quoting is like a whole religion in itself, no?).
I guess I didn’t answered your question Yotomoe, because in fact I can’t. To me it’s always: how did you come to thinking any kind of religion?
I was raised Catholic and I lost my religious beliefs when I went to a Catholic Middle School and got bullied to the point of hating school and wanting to end it all. I spent my high school years being an insufferable atheist, and my early-to-mid 20s chilling out, and now I found Christ again in another religion (also my fiancee is part of a religion that doesn’t allow marriage outside the faith and I thought ‘hey, the religion doesn’t really go against my morals or ethics so what the hell’ and converted to marry her).
So, lost Jesus, swore about it, got over myself, found Jesus again. He was in my heart the whole time!
And by insufferable atheist, I’m not calling atheists in general insufferable. I was a shit, I regularly antagonized my family who are staunch Catholics, I thought the Amazing Atheist was cool, I thought being an in-your-face edgy smug POS who thought himself intelligent because I was atheist was rebellion against the religious machine, when in reality I was just an asshole who was hurting so much that I committed myself to hurting others.
And all of this isn’t to say that I didn’t take a good hard look at religion in general. I soul searched really deep, I did look at other religions and used my own judgment to come to my own conclusions. I never had an issue with science as a Catholic, nor did I have an issue with Evolution. But as a teen, I used all of that as a weapon to make my family feel bad when they weren’t at fault for what I went through.
To be very honest, I never had a problem with religion or churches, I had a problem with a god that let me suffer how I suffered with no recompense and no real consequence to the bullies. But over time I’ve reconciled and forgiven myself and my bullies, I grew out of my shitty attitude and acknowledged that I was missing something spiritual in my life. I came back to God in a different religion and found the love of my life, so things really turned out well for me.
Just wanna say I feel you. Same situation, lost my faith because of Catholicism, spent almost 20 years agnostic and super into evolution/anthropology, recently started going back to church with my spouse after finding a faith and a community that allows for non-literalist Jesus-believing. Still putting together this weird cobble of science and God that I can’t find anywhere except my own mind and belief system.
Raised Catholic and almost always experienced paranoia, terror, or despair from its teachings. Eventually, said emotions warped into anger. Left over something relatively petty in high school- a real straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back sort of situation. Looked at other religions for a time and just found more of the same. Have since come to look at religions like I imagine a recovering alcoholic several years in recovery looks at booze.
I know the paranoia, terror, despair thing too well. I started having doubts when I was seven, but it was easy to believe in the angry, violent father who would punish you horribly for small transgressions, because I had one of those at home. What finally tore it for me was when I read Ayn Rand’s disproof of the argument from first cause. I thought about it for a month, realized she was right, and went from Catholic to agnostic to atheist in a week.
My parents are a former, disillusioned Christian and a Jewish atheist. Mom, the Jewish atheist, wanted me raised in the culture and so sent me to JCC after school, where I got told all the Torah stories. Somewhere around 8 or so I started distinguishing between obvious, fictional fairy tales (red riding hood, Aesop’s’ talking animals, etc), Star Wars, etc, versus things that looked like the real world. The Torah stories went into the not-real-world bin, just on a gut-check which-is-this-more-like basis.
I would revisit the religion question from different angles and different degrees of sophistication. Could I completely, logically disprove it, and if not wouldn’t that make me an agnostic? What if I’m interpreting the wording or definitions a bit off, is there another way where it’s plausible that I’m overlooking? But the closest I ever came to believing was as a child in a kinda-but-kinda-not religious after-school program. And atheist-talking-point cliche though it might sound, I grew out of religion literally because I learned to distinguish fantasy from reality. That’s not me trying to score debate points or take cheap shots, that was literally the moment in childhood development that got me out.
Someone handed me a Christian thing to read just yesterday. It started off nice about how God wants to be your friend. But then quickly turned around to ‘admit you are a sinner and God’s son died for you’. I’m not admitting to being born a bad person committing ethical crimes by existing, I was born a baby, and I work hard to be a good person as best I can. These kinds of toxic practices by Christianity are really what seal it for me as something I want no part in and can’t believe in. Other religions just don’t click for me even when I don’t have issues with them. I just can’t believe in them or commit to certain rules that would require me to do extra work. I don’t need the structure of a religion or spiritual belief in my life, I’m too chaotic a person to commit to that kind of thing and just like to do my own thing, not hurting anyone else in the process.
I would like if there was an afterlife, reincarnation or even ghosts, but, it seems illogical to me, even if it would be a comfort.
I work at a Wendy’s and I read each of these that I’m handed, JUST in case one of them finally *clicks*. (that and it’s important to stay informed). Basically exactly what you said, but my favorite one referred to Jesus as “The god-man” and I absolutely love that.
I was brought up religious. Wound up getting kicked out of Sunday school for being upset at God for murdering babies at Soddom and Gammorah around 5. At that point realized that if God mass murders on a whim he’s neither all merciful nor just. Shortly thereafter started noticing other inconsistencies. Spent a while going along with it until I was about 12 or so on the idea that adults around me seem to get it and they know more.
Then my father quit going to church (turns out he’s been an atheist since before I was born but agreed to raise us kids religious to appease my mother and the religious conservatives of the extended family. Shortly after I quit going, too.
But I have never had the capacity to take something on faith. I don’t feel what religious people feel when they talk about faith. To me they may as well be talking about a bandersnatch attack for how much I relate.
So like stories of someone losing their religion, I have a hard time relating to. I never had religion as far as I can tell.
Loosing connection with religious relatives in a deeply bigoted religious conservative subculture because those beliefs don’t align with your morality and you can’t pretend otherwise anymore? Hell yeah and that’s why I relate so hard to Joyce and Becky. I see a lot of my experiences with my mother and her side of the family in them.
Other note: I am Autistic and part of that means I am completely disconnected in “team building/trust building /etc exercises that religions and sports teams, militaries etc use to build a sense of camaraderie and shared experiences. So like chanting the same thing with everyone else, etc? I feel separate, like a a lone drowning person in a raging ocean.
I have often wondered if that’s why I can’t seem to Do Religion the way most people seem able to.
I was raised Catholic, and went to a borderline fanatic Catholic school grades 1-9, and was while I was never a crazed asshole Catholic, I was pretty strong in my beliefs until I transferred to a public school. Then I started learning more about the world and was exposed to other beliefs that began to make me question my own. Also helped that my dad, who at one point taught Bible History, told me that the Bible is one of the best pieces of historic fiction you can read. Nowadays, I have not abandoned belief, I fall into the Diest category, with a fair amount of crossover with Taoism in my personal beliefs.
I am very much a live and let live sort of person about this. So long as you’re not crazy about beliefs or use them as a justification to be horrible or hurtful to yourself and others. We’re all just trying to make it through life on this dumpster fire of a planet together, I can’t see a reason to make things harder for myself and others just because we have different beliefs on things.
My dad’s an ex-Catholic atheist, my mom’s basically a Mennonite. My brother and I were raised going to her church but (because Anabaptists) never baptized, and allowed to make up our minds on whether we wanted it. Both my parents were pretty socially liberal and non-pushy growing up (and have gotten more liberal since – my mom still has faith but has essentially joined the sect of people who are distanced from the main church due to its refusal to allow LGBT people to exist, and the church is teetering on a schism,) but I absorbed SO MUCH toxic bullshit from the world around me that fed right into my anxiety. For a period of about three years or so? I was basically praying in my head constantly as a reflexive, obsessive fear thing because I couldn’t stop it and was terrified of dying. Eventually I started taking pre-baptism classes and then came to the conclusion what I had wasn’t faith so much as an unhealthy anxiety response and terror of hell. I was about twelve or thirteen then. Took a few years to come to terms with it fully (A couple times my brain has gotten back into that compulsive thought pattern for a brief period, though I can snap out of it now,) and longer to be able to express in some way how deeply fucked my brain had gotten through no one’s active fault. These days I say any god who’s worth paying attention to would’ve heard those three years of compulsive, constant terror and understands my lack of faith is a necessary mental health thing as well.
(The realization, in tandem but still a few years down the line, that I’m a gay ace and my eventual general ‘hey a lot of organized Christianity really fucks people up’ attitude have both kept me in the firmly agnostic category. My mental health’s managed enough that I MIGHT be able to have a healthy relationship with a higher power, but frankly I’d rather not risk it. Not worth it to me.)
I became an atheist by reading the Bible. I’d been raised Baptist, but I hadn’t really delved into it properly despite occasional stints in Sunday School. By my teens I was getting more politically conscious and the holes in my knowledge were rearing their heads. Everybody was going on about stuff like abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage, and I was hearing a lot of conflicting information about morality and what the Bible had to say on those topics. I finally knuckled down to start reading it with the intent of going cover-to-cover so that I’d know for myself. I didn’t even make it through Genesis before quitting in disgust.
The creation myth wasn’t the issue. I was willing to treat Genesis as symbolic, but it was still supposed to have those kernels of truth, you know? You’re supposed to be able to look at something like that and say, “This might not be how things literally went down, but it shows how God thinks and how he wants people to behave.” But I couldn’t believe that it was doing that, because it conflicted with the idea that God isn’t a fucking shit-stain on the universe. The specific things that stuck out were the prank with Abraham’s kid, the Flood, treating Cain like shit for not wanting to be wasteful (though the murder was obviously unwarranted), and that bit where Noah cursed a bunch of his grandkids for umpty-many generations as punishment for his son accidentally walking in on him while he was naked after getting drunk and passing out (and/or for raping him while he was unconscious, depending whether you buy the “it’s a euphemism” thing; but that doesn’t change the fundamental issue of punishing a huge swath of innocent people). Also, the suppression-of-knowledge theme back in the Garden was something I’d always found fundamentally repugnant.
And that’s all just in whatever fraction of Genesis I managed to read before giving up. I still haven’t read the Bible cover to cover, but I know there’s a lot more nasty in there. In particular, I’ve since learned of Numbers 31, wherein Moses takes 32,000 girls as sex slaves after slaughtering the entire rest of their society, and God himself pops in to personally advise Moses on how to divvy them up among the people.
So yeah. I noped the fuck out of that hot mess. The knowledge that over half of humanity still buys into it despite the obvious evilness is more than a little unsettling. (I’m lumping together all the Abrahamic religions here, since they share much of the objectionable stuff despite their sometimes significant differences further down the line.)
I couldn’t think of a better way, than today’s strip, to encapsulate Joyce’s character development up to this point. It’s also a fine rebuttal to the common argument that without belief in divine judgement there’s no basis for ethical behaviour.
I really like that her Jacob disaster tied directly to her churchless Sunday. I did not expect that (maybe because my life is different enough from Joyce’s?), but it seems obvious in hindsight
Maybe that, too! But I meant that she has started making decisions she used to think of as sins, and if she can skip church, well, why can’t she mack on someone else’s boyfriend? Why can’t she tell lies? She actually knows the answer to that now, and honestly she knew it then, too, but really facing that meant making the admissions she’s making here.
We analyzed the shit out of that whole sequence for days and I don’t think this angle ever came up and now Willis brings it up without even making it explicit and it just fits and explains much of what Joyce was thinking. So much of this comic is going on beneath the surface – not spelled out to us, with the connections made later if at all.
I don’t think it would have hit this quickly or strongly, but it would at the very least prick her whenever she saw Sarah and seeing Joyce and Jacob together would absolutely set off a confrontation with Raidah, with all the fallout implied from that.
Honestly, I was satisfied when Jacob told her it wasn’t gonna work out.
On a narrative level, I’m happy with this – this is quality character development. My fangirl heart aches for her because she’s sad though. I can do both, don’t @ me. 😛
Joyce shouldn’t feel too bad after she notices some of her fellow students abusing completely secular codes of morality and philosophical trends in order to feel superior to others. It’s not a Christian thing; just a human one.
Joyce is realizing that her fundangelical upbringing gave her a straw-man version of what godless people are like.
I look forward to hear realizing that they also gave her a straw-man version of what evolution is, and what liberals are like, and what democrats are like, and what progressives are like, and what liberal christianity is, and what catholicism is, and what islam is like and what other religions are like and and what scientists are like and what the scientific method is and what methodological naturalism is and …and..and…and…and… ….
There’s a reason fundagelicals raise their kids in a bubble ya know. When you lie about others all the time, contact with those others will undermine your indoctrination.
There are elements of this realization in Billie’s and Joe’s stories, too, despite the very different relationships with religion. I think that’s neat.
Seriously, I so want to share this strip on all social media right now (how do I do it, guys?). Because it’s a beautiful explanation why the conservative notion of “Without religion, people would have no morality” is just idiotic.
Well Willis has made it pretty clear that Joyce is autobiographical, so it’s not a stretch to imagine that this is pretty close to what he went through after/while escaping religion
Shame for what exactly? So far you’ve looked at porn, dated a gay guy, used a few swears, and kissed a dude who already had a girlfriend. That’s kinda low on the debauchery levels.
She is realising that she had this strawman that X, Y and Z people have no morals or qualms with doing bad things and that in trying to be that kind of person herself, she has realised she is wrong. You don’t have to fear judgement at death to feel shame for doing the wrong thing and hurting people’s feelings. She feels bad for hurting Jacob regardless. Her morals and ethics didn’t go away. The shame for doing the wrong thing didn’t go away.
I think it’s basically a case of a total lack of nuance and this is why her parents and Ross’s behaviour shocked her so badly. All people in her particular sect are pure and good and all people outside are vile and bad. She hasn’t been raised to understand that things aren’t that simple and that there are shades to behaviour in most people’s lives.
Well, yes. Essentially, that is what it is. And it is just finally hitting home for her that the absence of religion, does not mean the absence of morality or values or ethics or shame or regret or care. That she can’t just switch off her ability to care and go wild and face no consequences for it.
When she believed, she was ashamed for *wanting* the debauched life of an agnostic/atheist/heathen. Now, although she knows that was a strawman, the shame remains.
Her emotions have not caught up to her intellect.
not to undermine the message of this comic, but “the shame exists regardless” is such a good summary of how my brain works after 30 years of untamed anxiety that i kinda want it as a shirt or a tattoo or something
No, not a prediction; I’m just going to tell you what feeling I’m getting from the momentum and direction of this conversation. Dorothy is going to try to comfort Joyce and they’re going to end up hugging or something similar. Becky will see and draw her own conclusions and things will start getting messy.
I can see a scenario where Joyce wakes up next to Dorothy the next day and the two of them being in a position where they have to work out if it was a mistake or whether they want to try to make this work.
I’m 100% behind whatever scenario you’re brewing up in that noggin. Even if the “this” they’re gonna make work is just their friendship, and the bed-sharing was out of convenience and mutual comfort.
… and I really hope I’m wrong about that. Your idea sounds absolutely awesome and I would be 100% behind it if I didn’t think it was completely out of character for Dorothy and goes against certain elements of Word of Willis. But yeah, if I get proven wrong, I will raise a glass in celebration of being wrong.
Okay, this is probably the best Dumbing of Age strip ever. Thank you Willis for articulating that particular epiphany so eloquently. It must have come from the heart.
Personally I like the Original Sin strip better, mostly because of the visuals, but this strip is a great continuation of Joyce trying to process that everything everything, EV-ER-Y-THING she has ever known, everything she has ever been taugt is a goddamned… a goddamned lie.
I like this one particularly because it recontextualizes the whole Joyce pretends to be Jacob’s girlfriend arc. I love the original sin one, but it didn’t really reveal anything to me – though it clarified her take on the science/religion conflict.
The other strip that really did the same thing as this one was where Toedad went off about Becky’s hair and suddenly blowing $20 on a haircut was much more significant than the waste so many had painted it as.
Those are very good perspectives. I suppose some of Ruths and Billie’s worse traits come into that light as well, when viewed from the lens of alchoholism/depression.
Yeah, not at all sure that’s happening. At least not yet.
She’s losing the connection she had with God and fooled around with trying out her stereotype of ungodly behavior and found it wasn’t as fun and consequence free as she’d been taught. We’ll see where she goes from here.
That’s a rough place to be, but I’m really glad Joyce is there right now. Such character growth almost makes that whole thing that just happened with Jacob worth it.
The real struggle of agnosticism is the decision to still be moral and live by a set of selfless principles. Even when there’s no reward, no glorious eternal afterlife or redemption from condemnation, even if in the grand scheme of it all your efforts to be a good person don’t mean anything– to decide to do it anyway.
I didn’t grow up with religion. And I had a very terrible life growing up. I’m bitter and jaded and mentally disturbed in so many ways but the way I see it, if life is full of pointless suffering then the least I can do what I can to ease the pain of the people and animals around me and to not add to any of the collective sufferings that burdens us.
This one seems pretty easy to me. I’d rather live in and create for future generations a world that is Starfleet than a world that is Mad Max: Fury Road. Education and Healthcare are better than slavery and backstabbing for everyone. Personal effort and surviving difficulty can feel meaningful when they are in pursuit of that better life for everybody – moreso than buying a sixth car or hedonism, which tend to feel empty. That sense of meaning and purpose don’t require a reward from a spirit entity. (some heavens just promise hedonism–dozens of virgins??)
I was the Dorothy at a Catholic school full of Joyces. Oddly my catholic school was more Lutheran/Jesuit and although classes in Catholicism were mandatory until senior year, you could get into world religions. Thus the senior class ended up mostly straight up agnostic humanist, Buddhist or a strong leaning towards Muslim. It was a very strange place.
Nihilism is also incredibly freeing. But it’s a lot of work. If you want to keep your self respect, you need moral and ethical structures. And if you don’t want to adopt someone else’s, you have to construct your own — from scratch.
How can I be a good person? How can I do the right thing? Great thinkers over the centuries have wrestled with this and we are far from answers that satisfy everyone.
Despite 40+ years of being an Atheist and having the morality conversation with Believers many times, I have never had Atheist morality explained so perfectly.
Thank you, Mr. Willis. I will be stealing this mercilessly (and giving credit when I can).
So is Sarah hearing this too? I couldn’t tell if the door was closed when Dina walked out, and she looked a bit occupied with her social communication list to close it behind her. I can’t really tell…
I feel bad for Joyce and was hoping she’d keep her faith just because losing it is so crappy. I’ve had crises of faith in the past and bounced back but know the feeling of desolation.
There’s more to faith than shame. There’s more to life than sticks. There are carrots, too, regardless of whether it’s god offering them, or fate, or community, or yourself.
I’m oft baffled by those who argue that athiests don’t believe in anything.
It’s in their name: they don’t believe in the existence of gods.
This says nothing about their ethical beliefs, except that it’s perhaps less likely they make moral arguments from command theory.
I think it’s genuine outrage. With some ass-covering drawing a clear line in the sand so that if/when it comes to it the U can point at it and say “there’s the line, it was crossed, this isn’t bowing to a Twitter mob, he done $%^&ed up his duties to the students and the University.”
That statement did not read like an “ass-cover” statement.
Such a concise and well-worded description of the moment when one changes from a life of blind belief of a certain Christian story – that life outside of your faith is flawed in an oversimplified way. This is the moment when you realize that it’s not true, that life is more subtle and complex for everyone than you’d been led to believe, and that there are reasons to be moral and ethical that have nothing to do with God or faith or whatever… that humans have feelings and you still love and care for them regardless.
Willis, you’ve said that Joyce is autobiographical. This speaks volumes about how much thought and emotional energy you’ve put into making the shift away from blind-faith Christianity to… something more profound and considered.
Loading ...
☝️😮
✊😐
Joyce, the only difference is us atheists don’t need the threat of eternal punishment to know why not to do bad things
(yeah, doin’ this schtick again)
Most religious people don’t need that either.
They don’t, but it worries me a bit when they say that everyone does.
Before they come to the epiphany that Joyce describes in this strip, people who suppose that fear of divine punishment is the only reason not to do bad things presumably reckon that I am a very dangerous man to be around.
And Joyce’s parents did express this (about her being friends with Dorothy)
The part that worries me is that if you think you need God telling you what to do then you’re using things other than common sense, empathy, and science to figure out how to treat people you might end up using things that are against common sense or empathy, for instance much of most scripture I know of.
2 cents, but I’ve airways assumed religious people like this assume that their empathy derives from their faith. Most of them have never had a point they remember where they didn’t believe to go off of for comparison.
Cast in Point, Jordan Peterson saying that Matt Dillahunty isn’t a “real Athiest” because if he were he’d be like Raskolnikov in The Brothers Karamazov and have no empathy, but since he does have empathy, he believes in G-d even if he doesn’t think he believes in G-d.
Ironically, Jordan Peterson wouldn’t know empathy if it bit him on the ass.
Unfortunately, this is not irony.
This is the real issue with the religious life. These people *want* to be good, but because they’re so focused on this other thing, they can’t see what it takes to be good.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter if there really is eternal punishment or not, What matters most is whether you’ve developed this sense of consequence by the time you have a crisis of faith, and doubt the eternal punishment for just a bit. Every religious person has these doubts, and it’s something that they all know about and talk about.
In short, I don’t think it’s possible to be good if you’re only doing it to avoid something that you won’t ever have any evidence of until it’s too late.
I think these three words do very well on their own:
“Ironically, Jordan Peterson.”
Did Peterson talk about empathy in that exchange or does he just talk about behavior? Can’t remember and can’t really stomach watching any more JP these days.
I think it was technically a “sense of morality” or something of that sort.
But he probably means something entirely different by that than we think he does.
I think this is the case. Cuz my ex-husband was Convinced he would become abusive and hit or rape me if he wasn’t a Christian. And then he left Christianity and, spoiler alert, he did not. He was the same person, just a little less stressed out with shame and guilt over never being Holy.
Having grown up in an environment very similar to Joyce’s upbringing (and David’s, since we all know Joyce has a lot of autobio stuff in her)… yeah pretty much, for evangelical christians. It’s kind of misleading to say “religious people” because there are plenty of religions out there that don’t include this kind of logic. But the point is that you do good (whatever your parse that to mean) both because god wants you to and because you have god and the holy spirit guiding you and providing the DRIVE and DESIRE to do good. Sometimes non-Christians will do good things, but that’s either god working through them (so they really had no say in the matter, in a way), or it was really driven by selfishness.
I mean, you say that as if they came up with it on their own.
They didn’t. These people aren’t that creative. That idea was invented by people who were living in what we literally call The Dark Ages.
I don’t think they came up with it either. I suspect the genesis goes much farther back – probably at least to the original hierarchical city-states. We see plenty of it even in the older parts of the Old Testament and that ethos is certainly drawn from older roots.
In a way it’s just an extension of parental/child models to a societal scale. Ideally of course the parents will be trying to teach their kids to access their empathy and understand why things are wrong, but for young children the direct effect of parental punishment or even disapproval is the main factor.
The big “advantage” of using God is that you can use it to bypass and override common sense and empathy. How else are you going to convince the masses that those people over there are bad and inferior while you deserve their loyalty as their divinely appointed overlord?
That’s the force that has always countered empathy – the ‘othering’ tendency, our tendency to save on mental storage space by reducing our image of certain people to simple stereotypes and caricatures, and think of them as less than human beings.
That is inaccurate. Because it predates the Dark Ages by about a 1000 years and if you count previous religions….well, more like 8000 years.
My experience with “religious” people is that most (not all of them; I can think of two exceptions within my own circle of people) of them are looking for someone to blame. “I’m not judging you. God is.” — said with a certain amount of smug satisfaction that they will, nonetheless, enjoy watching the verdict handed down.
Hate based religion has no benefit. Only love based.
I’m guessing this is Joyce’s first time really thinking about hurting someone not in terms of the I Have Sinned angle at all, but purely on the I have hurt someone I care about and I feel bad one. (Given how young she is and how generally Joyce, I suspect she’s never really realized how much things like her constant boundary-violating actually upset people and this is the first time it’s really impacted her like this. At least compared to the more menial – but still freakout-worthy – sins she’s usually aware of.)
But I bet that’s Dorothy’s next strip, too.
I mean, in fairness, most actual scriptural bits about Hell indicate that it’s just… Not being around God. Which for the faithful is punishment enough, and for the non-faithful is… well, kinda what they wanted anyway?
I’m pretty sure it’s mostly just a lack of nuance that has made it balloon up into fire and brimstone and yadda yadda.
And yes, I know, lake of fire, blah blah blah. To that I always say: Do you think Jesus will have a sword coming out of his gullet too? 😛
The lake of fire and whatnot is, I think, mostly Dante, and I’m pretty sure he was excommunicated well before he wrote it. It’s funny how a church outcast’s fanfiction has become effectively cannon.
Same with Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” at least in the sympathetic-devil angle. From what I heard, Satan had been depicted as an ugly, one-dimensional creature up until that book was published.
I’ve been very church-free for going on ten years now, but last I checked any sympathetic ideas about Satan are very pop culture and very much not be taken theologically. He appears attractive but he’s still the devil and you Do Not Trust Him.
Actually, it’s more due to the fact Satan works for God in Judaism.
The idea of him as a fallen enemy of mankind is a read of the Book of Revelations.
Actually, the lake of fire idea comes from the Book of Revelation, so still very weird but canon. And also I’m pretty sure Dante was not excommunicated, just exiled for being part of the Emperor’s faction against the Pope
This is true. The Bible constantly uses fire as a symbol of ultimate obliteration. The book of Revelations goes further to clarify this by calling the symbolic lake of fire, the “second death” which seems cogent to me with the idea of a just God: You believed that there was no God, thus no afterlife? That’s exactly what you get.
However, the mere cessation of existence was never a “sexy” enough threat to scare people into religion, hence the fanfiction about horrible, endless torture and the such.
That stuff does predate Dante; it may not be biblical, but there are a lot of early Christians who delight in describing how their opponents will be tortured.
Meanwhile Dante does also have a nice part of hell, which is just not being around God. It’s where the Dorothys – people who are good but not Christian – would go.
(Actually, probably only the pre-Christianity Dorothys, ones who were never given the option to follow Christ. I’m sure any Christian from his century would tell you a good person could never reject his message given the chance.)
Actually, even ‘modern’ pagans and heathens can get into the ‘good Hell’, provided they were never part of the faithful. It’s the former Christians who get dropped several levels down. Heretics get much more derision, because they pose a much bigger actual threat than people outside the flock ever could
The idea of all sinners going to hell is also a very fundamentalist read.
It’s a common one but not a complete one.
I think Saladin got into the Pleasent but Dull outer ring of hell.
He was Muslim but widely respected as an honorable man in Christiandom
Thank you two! It’s been a while and I apparently did not remember properly.
Yeah, this is also where most of the famous Greek philosophers were, and I think also unbaptised babies.
Seeing as the religion in question didn’t exist when they were alive (or they weren’t quite sentient) this seems like a pretty raw deal regardless!
Of course, if we’re still talking Dante, it’s mostly just people he admired and wanted to not condemn. Much like he condemned political enemies to deep circles of hell.
There’s hardly any scripture on Hell, especially in the Gospels. Jesus promises resurrection and eternal life if you follow him. No follow, no life.
If I recall correctly, most of the ideas on hell being a flaming pit actually come from Mark 9:43 where Jesus himself describes it as an “Unquenchable Flame” and goes on to use the ever popular “Where the flame is not quenched and the worm dieth not.” I also believe there were some references to a garbage pit near Jerusalem where fires burned all the time, but I don’t have a direct pointer. So, there is evidence for a fiery hell in Christianity from the most credible source. That being said, Joyce is expressing sentiments here I have heard other disillusioned religious people express. Her statement about believing in a Straw man is particularly potent, though a little on the nose.
Yep, the Valley of Hinom, which is referenced in Revelations by calling the lake of fire “Gehenna”. Another clear indication that the lake of fire is merely a symbol for final death, not torture.
Gehenna. Final death?
My Vampire: The Masquerade sense is tingling!
Mark 9:43-48 do talk about that. But Jesus doesn’t actually *say* that the place exists, just that it’s better to remove the part of you that causes you to sin than it would be to go to such a place whole.
I found the part of me that caused me to sin: it’s the part that believed that there were no consequences except the eternal damnation bit. I found I needed to also excise a healthy margin around that to really be safe.
That said, I’m not sure it was soon enough. I’ve looked around at the world and seen the suffering here. Where is God? This could already be hell.
I think she’s getting that – just she needed to actually majorly stuff up first, and realise that she’s perfectly capable of feeling guilt and shame and remorse because she did a bad and hurt people and not because a higher being judges her as flawed.
Also, incidentally, the whole “people are sinners” shtick really bugs me. Somebody who can look on a newborn and go “yup, clearly tainted by evil” and think it actually needs to be ceremonially cleansed with magic water because of that (rather than as part of a ceremony and welcome into a community, which, fair enough) has a disturbing outlook on life.
But if you’ve grown up being told it’s only your faith in a higher power that allows you to make good choices and be a good person, and then you start questioning that faith, trying out being a bad person kinda seems logical? And it sounds like this was literally Joyce’s first active attempt at rebellion for rebellion’s sake… (Wrestling with the creed she was raised with and self-evident truths in front of her – Dotty is a kind, moral person; Becky is still family and a good person regardless of her sexuality; trying to make Ethan be somebody he’s not (even if he is cute and non-threatening which is what she was looking for in a boyfriend/potential future spouse) is wrong and unfair; standing up to her parents to defend her friends because they were being unreasonable – may have seemed like rebellion, particularly to her mother, but were really about self-growth and expanding her world view.)
Unless you count going to prison I guess.
You think prison isn’t eternal punishment? Have you asked some of the folks incarcerated as teens and still there decades later, for literally no reason other than “they black”?
Whoops, wrong account again 😬
Eh, fuck it, embrace the Sarah fan art
Anyway prison is an ADDITIONAL disincentive but not the ONLY reason not to do bad things
Yes, this!
I also grew up being taught that i can not be a good person without believing in God. Turned out that i met awesome atheists with way better moral compass than the christian people i grew up around. That was when i could finally let go of that belief.
In my opinion, any Christian motivated to be good by the threat of hell has missed the point twice over. First, for the reasons everyone else is noting: empathy is a thing that doesn’t require awareness of God (or, at least, conscious awareness). But also, the threat of hell is supposed to be averted the moment you accept Christ’s forgiveness. Starting from that point, every good deed you do is not and CANNOT be to “save yourself from hell” because that’s already covered. So the only reason to do it is because you want to benefit someone else.
And that’s how Joyce dedicated herself to eradicating Feelings, and became a Care Bears villain.
(Try as I might, I cannot imagine any version of Joyce capable of evil greater than would be appropriate on Care Bears. Maybe with effort she could menace the Smurfs.)
Honestly, can you see her being a care bear villain ending any other way than her cuddling a bunch of care bears and crying while promising to do better in future?
Maybe she would be an enemy to the Care Bears like Elmyra was an enemy to the Tiny Toons? She just wants to hug them and squeeze them so much that she’s dangerous.
I wonder if Joyce was allowed to watch Care Bears growing up (one of the modern incarnations – she certainly wouldn’t give a hoot about the version I grew up with). Sure, it’s about love and feelings, but it’s also about supernatural creatures who live in a heaven-like realm while being completely secular, and wield magical powers.
Weird to think that the freaking Care Bears was probably considered a negative influence on her.
Pretty certain that other than Grumpy all Care Bears are infinitely cuddlable and cannot be over-squished?
Given how restricted her TV and film-watching experiences were before she went to college… Dang, yep, they were probably considered some sort of gateway to something bad… Unless it’s possible to argue they’re angels appearing in a child-friendly form and their Stare is divine light shining out of them and casting out evil from the world?
I’m not Christian and know almost nothing about Care Bears, but that sounds about right.
Aren’t they all the colors of the rainbow? I mean that’s a big red flag, er, rainbow flag right there.
But rainbows are biblical – a promise made at the end of the Noah story that the world won’t be destroyed by flood again… So this could be seen as rainbows in their correct context, symbolising the power of the divine?
(I mean personally rainbows in all contexts are great and I love that Pride is celebrated in technicolour coz if you’re going to bust out of the closet nuking it Becky-style on your way out is an awesome way to go, and people should most definitely not be ashamed of their sexuality etc)
It took me years to realize Care Bears were angels.
This feels very real.
I suspect Joyce is speaking more for Willis than usual tonight.
Joyce tomorrow: “And another thing, can you believe what Wilbur’s up to in today’s Mary Worth?!”
I kid, this is pretty heavy.
(And so is Wilbur)
Has Joyllis given up on Wonky Cancerbean?
Great timing, I literally just told my spouse I’m an atheist. And also this is relatable af as usual.
Yikes! Hope that goes well. I had some very tense conversations with mine a few decades ago, even though she knew going in. I think she’s drifted into near-agreement with me by now, though I’ve never pushed it. She had used faith to deal with some abuse, and it hurt her to encounter skepticism.
On a lighter note, I did indulge in some of that (fortunately) consequenceless debauchery, and it was great fun and I wouldn’t want to have missed it. But I did get lucky.
I said it in email form, like the conflict averse person I am, but I don’t think it’ll go too badly. My spouse is one of those very progressive Christians who’s primarily a humanist, so we share our important values (human rights and all that jazz) in common, so I don’t think this will change much of anything between us in the long run. Still… conflict averse, as a result of a very controlling religious upbringing. So your nice words mean a lot. ^_^
Update: all is well. I quote, “you act like you weren’t blatantly hinting at it already.” It’s probably gonna be one of those things where we just don’t talk about it much, on either end, but we’re good. Phew…
Phew 🙂 Glad it went well!
Not gonna lie, don’t see how you decided you knew enough about each other to be married without her knowing you are an atheist unless this is a recent decision. I know I specifically asked my partner about that and a good many other things before decisions were made.
This is not meant as a criticism or disparagement, you do you. It just seems like something that would come up in a deep relationship like that, and I can’t understand how it wouldn’t. I mean, I dated a guy for two weeks during which he claimed he was catholic (it came up for some reason.). The first time I walked into his house, I gave him a funny look and said “I thought you said you were catholic?” He said “I am.” I pointed to a particular arrangement of objects and asked “Then why does that look like a Wiccan Altar?” At which point he freaked out and admitted that he maintains an illusion of Catholicism for his parents, but was actually Wicca. I was more worried about the lying than anything.
Glad to hear it went well and I hope it continues, but this tends to be one of those things that comes up later. Mainly as children enter the picture and questions of how to raise them start coming up. So as simple friendly advice from one stranger on the internet to another, don’t let it go too long without talking about it.
It is entirely possible that they only recently realized they were an athiest/became an atheist.
This is rather different, but when my platonic partner and I got married, I didn’t know I was ace (nor did she know/realize she was gay. That wound up working well because I exist at a VERY weird point on probability curves). When we realized these things (neaarrr simultaneously), there was a lot of anxiety about how to tell the other. People’s self-knowledge can change.
(We’re still legally married and very close, it’s just a platonic relationship now!)
Two weeks is easily understandable, in my mind. Especially for something they feel they need to keep from their family. Possibly with very good reason. Like any other major thing you need to keep secret from part of your life, it’s risky to reveal it casually.
Granted, as some flavor of atheist/agnostic, I probably wouldn’t have even mentioned religion two weeks in unless specifically asked about it or it came up in some other conversation. Not being religious isn’t a big focus of my life.
Yay! My husband’s an atheist and I’m loosely Christian/spiritual/theist. It’s a complete nonissue in our lives. 👍
Agnostic Jew married to a Christian here… My relationship to religion is complicated in that it’s part of my identity, has shaped who I am etc, but it’s more the cultural side than the religious one that resonates with me… His faith seems a lot less complicated… But at the same time although it’s important to him and something he believes in, he also believes in scientific theory and isn’t hugely judgey mcjudgey about it so e.g. pretty certain he doesn’t think I’m a sinner who’ll burn in eternal hell fire because of my evil ways… Does think my parents can be overbearing and controlling, and prone to histrionics, but that’s based in reality (they’re loving and mean well, but they very much believe that their way is the right way, and won’t necessarily listen to any arguments or additional facts that might contradict this)…
The fact that Joyce is autobiographical hits hard tonight
Dumbijoyce is so much deeper than I remember Walkyjoyce being.
Walkyjoyce made conscious decisions to wipe her own memory when confronted with uncomfortable truths. If she had been able to bear them, there’s every chance she would have reached this stage of development on her own.
I’d like to think that Dumbjoyce, at this point of her life, would not make the same mistake if presented with the opportunity to make it all go away… but I’m a little doubtful.
I’m certain enough I would bet on it. Like, for a chocolate bar, or something of similar value, but I would.
Because if she wiped her memory, she would hurt Becky with her old behaviours and beliefs (like she unwittingly did before she became aware of the whole situation), and I just can’t see her decide to go back to that.
That, or Dumbyjoyce will try to erase the memory with [s]a mindwiper[/s] alcohol.
… probably not, just felt like putting the analogy out there.
Oh damn, here we go
*plays “Nowhere Is Their Freedom” on the stereo*
You’re allowed to enjoy it, just a less deceit-based approach clears the way is all.
Still it was just a little fib. Let the dust settle, maybe start over.
The other shoe from this arc drops.
Yep. Poor Joyce, debugging religious abuse-based anxiety is NOT an easy task.
Well spotted.
Poor Joyce 🙁
I can say I relate to this, I did grow up christian and was very into it as a kid. By the time I realized I didn’t believe anymore(15-16), I definitely had an ethics dilemma for quite a while.
I really like Joyce and Dorothy’s friendship when Joyce isn’t being weird about it. They can get into stuff real deep stuff because there is a mutual respect there.
Not that Becky and her don’t respect each other, obviously they do, but Becky’s got her own particular relationship to religion, so she can’t go to her about it, and Joyce’s also interesting friendship with Joe is, uhh, sort of in a weird place right now. I guess she could talk about this with Sarah, but I don’t think Sarah would get it in the same way Dorothy might. Guess it remains to be seen how Dorothy’s going to react, after all.
I’ve met this thinking with religious people a few times. You don’t believe in God, so you have no morals and must be a bad person who does whatever she feels like.
It seems to be surprising for some people that being a good person doesn’t require that all-seeing being who’ll punish you if you aren’t. I’m actually not sure if being a good person out of fear is that much better than being a good person because you genuinely believe it’s the right thing to do.
I believe if you do something good because you know it’s right, it’s a lot harder to get morally knocked down than if you were just doing it out of fear.
I would say behaving well out of fear is less moral than doing so out of consideration for the needs/wants/rights of others. It is certainly less thoughtful.
I would go further . . . to behave well for fear of punishment is fundamentally selfish. Avoiding punishment is about oneself. Treating others well requires paying attention to them.
Even behaving well for the sake of others is inherently selfish, since it makes you feel good when you adhere to your own sense of morality. Even if no one else knows of something positive you did, you yourself still know and still gain the pleasure from knowing you were “doing the right thing”. You may not even realize it at the time, but that pleasure will be rewarded for good acts all the same. If there even is such a thing as truly selfless action, there is no human capable of it.
That said, doing good because it feels good to do good is precisely what people should strive for. It is the purest form of moral action we are capable of, so it is still an extremely admirable trait.
At that point, the matter is purely academic. If you do good because you’re afraid of the consequences or to boost your own ego, what happens if you ever decide that *bad* things will do the same thing just as well? For example, if you’re some medieval knight who only does good to avoid hell, what happens if the Pope announces free absolutions for the latest Crusade?
If you do good because you truly enjoy being a benefit to others, then you can be trusted to *continue* doing good even if circumstances change. Whether that’s in some way still “selfish” is something for philosophers to discuss; by any *practical* definition, you’re a selfless person.
In a way it’s the same question though? What if you enjoy being a benefit to others, but are wrong about what that means?
Which is often the same problem that religion has: Defining behavior as good that isn’t. Or more commonly perfectly fine behavior as evil.
I’m a good person cuz I like when people like me, and also not going to jail. Not going to jail is a big part of it. I’d argue, in a matter of speaking, I guess it is our own hell on earth. The punishment for being bad being unending suffering that is.
Well, making sure to not go to prison does not necessarily make you a good person. There’s a lot of bad stuff you can do that’s not a crime. Take Mike for example.
There’s also a lot of stuff that is “subjectively immoral” that is a crime.
Or stuff that’s at least subjectively moral that is a crime. Often seen when things are legal in one area, but not another.
I think there are generally three main reasons people do right by others. They care about other’s, they want to be good people, or they expect some external reward.
Wanting an external reward is generally agreed upon as the least morally good reason to do right by others. Its still better than not doing right by others.
Of the other two I’m actually not sure which is better.
You forget about Stirner’s consideration of doing right as way to enforce the best condition for self. Or Kant’s imperatives.
I definitely think it’s better to be a good person because it’s the right thing to do, not just out of fear.
This … actually explains a lot of behavior I saw from my conservative-raised-turned-athiest friends in college. Oooof
Mmm, yep.
I’m … torn. I’m proud of Joyce, but I’m torn. Because what she did WAS wrong, and she’s right to feel guilty. But I hope she doesn’t let this become something greater than the sum of its parts, if that makes sense.
Redemption is real, ideally this would be a learning experience rather than how she defines herself for evermore?
Exactly!
Sorry, Joyce, your church lied about atheists having ‘get out of morality free’ card, as they did with so much else.
The only thing I wish for in this marvelous comic is a panel showing Dorothy’s face
That new look (unattended hair? is that what it’s called?) is very becoming. Or I hope she’s relaxing a bit on the inside the way her hair is on the outside.
All the girls’ hairstyles are growing and I love it. Becky’s giant-ass lava-waterfall down the side of her face? Excellance.
Aside from those two, and Ethan, has anyone else gotten a haircut? It’s been about two months.
Malaya and Ruth both got haircuts. Leslie’s hair appears to be in its more fussed-up state longterm now, as well. I think there’s another one or two but I don’t remember offhand.
I think Willis said a while back that he was hesitant to do haircuts (since, given the timescale, they’re permanent changes) unless they’re something he likes drawing more than the previous one. But he’s also mentioned since the latest wave of hairdos that most of the simple, close to the head styles he used to draw a lot have been changed. (Hence, Dorothy, Leslie, Ethan.) And the ones that had the same ‘vaguely loose short-medium hair’ that Joyce has are also changed up, too. (Remember Becky’s original hair now? I basically don’t.)
There’s also a difference between a haircut and a hair style change. Most people get fairly regular haircuts, but keep the same basic hairstyle.
In this art style, it’s only really visible if someone gets a major change, not a trim.
I think I have felt like Joyce, but after years of being an atheist/agnostic/pagan, I can confirm these truths: good and evil exist independently of religion, but morality is more complex and works in shades of gray (except in cases like mass murder and rape); realizing that maybe the afterlife isn’t real makes you the fear of being erased from existence; this is the only life you have, so if you mess up you messed up for the rest of your life, so don’t go around doing things you will regret, like having sex with strangers and punching innocent people; being an atheist doesn’t make you superior, and many atheists online can be douchebags that do and say stuff that is racist, misogynistic and/or transphobic (as for paganism, some groups are liberal, while others embrace racial bias because of some twisted sense of ethnic pride).
I don’t see how having sex with strangers is like punching people. Punching people hurts them. Having sex with them makes them feel good. It also makes me feel good. What’s the problem.
Punching strangers can also be a person’s way of making friends, if the person they punch has a similar mindset. Let’s not entirely write off that sort of thing.
You read a bunch of Avengers comics too?
I was thinking more along the lines of Dragon Ball, but I guess technically I do read a lot of Avengers-adjacent comics. Mostly Spidey, Kamala, Carol, and Sleepwalker.
Another way of making friends is shooting lasers at people. See: Touhou Project, Lyrical Nanoha.
They’re not necessarily the same, but both can lead to regrets.
Well, you have to use protection.
Naw, I’m agnostic and let me tell you. I live life completely consequence free. The only downside is that I may or may not go to heaven perhaps if it does or doesn’t exist maybe. My money’s on the afterlife being some obscure concept that no organized religion has touched on or can wrap their mind around, cuz I don’t know why it’d be anything quantifiable.
I’m looking forward being reincarnated into a tree or something
“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.” — Edward Abbey
“Naw fuck that, I’m gonna miss all the new cartoons” -Yo Tomoe
The afterlife is non-euclidean!
Oh Joyce :(((((((
*pat pats Joyce from afar*
Its ok, Joyce. Grass is always greener, and all that jazz. There are a lot of atheists and agnostics I know who remember being less stressed when they had the social safety net of religion to fall back on.
Having grown up with a Hispanic Catholic background, church and all that was just the norm for me. But; as I got older, I just didn’t really believe in it anymore. I saw a lot of my friends and family (of various orientations and lifestyles) mistreated by the so-called morally righteous people who told me how to live my life, and walked away from it all.
The only real downsides is having to learn to cope with being small amounts of space dust in a cold uncaring universe that has been; and will continue to be, with or without us. . . its kind of like learning that Santa isn’t just not a real guy; but also a void that will slowly lead the universe to a heat death.
But hey; at least its better than believing some jerk is up there throwing abused gay kids into the fire for eternity.
I don’t know, I kinda like believing I’m made of stars and dinosaurs, volcanoes and trees, a bit like lego in that my molecules are currently assembled to make me, but in a million years they’ll be in other things (potentially including lego)…
o3o outta curiosity when and how did anyone else come to be agnostic/athiest. I guess I was never overtly religious in the way that I believed in God about as much as Santa Claus or ghost stories. As I got older I just got to a point where I was going through the motions and thought “I’m not doing this cuz I believe it, I’m just doing it cuz everyone else is.” I just didn’t want to admit it cuz the alternative is nothing happens when I die, which is terrifying for me. Honestly I’m probably agnostic, both due to my belief that just because I don’t believe in any pre-established religion doesn’t both deny them from being true nor does it mean that some non-established concept can be true, and just…a blind hope that maybe I can go SOMEWHERE when I die. (Personally I’m hoping I can be a ghost so I can keep watching cartoons)
Statistically, this is all a simulation and the only one you can be sure is real is yourself. So I take heart in knowing that, even if I’m wrong about their being an afterlife or any of that, statistically speaking?
I’ll wake up and go, “…Oook that simulation messed me up some”
Bold you are, to assume that even you yourself can be accounted for.
True, but hey, the only perspective one has is their own
It’s Descartes’s voice that stays commenting things when all the rest is doubtful, though. I try to take fourth wallism in any work as the author trying to be sure it exists.
Descartes forgot that he needed a brain (and therefore a body) to think with.
I think forgetting about the body is the mayor fault of modern philosophy.
I don’t know about what happens after death. I know some people watch videos about people with near death experiences on YouTube to get a feeling that there is something after, as accounts have certain things in common.
I don’t know. It would be great to get another chance to live and do things better than this time. But for all practical purposes, I act like this one is the only chance I have.
Oh, and BTW, I do believe that spirituality and religion exist because it’s a human need to feel a connection not only to other people but to something beyond. Because the world is a scary place. As this need exists, different practices to meet the need came up. Some people realized how perfectly exploitable that need is, and there you get religious cults manipulating lots and lots of people.
And I sometimes suspect that extreme political views somehow speak to the same need. Which is why people who don’t meet that need in other ways are easy prey for those.
Well, maybe you don’t need a brain. I mean, that’s what the scientific evidence suggests, but that’s all sensory data and could be fake.
“I think therefore I am” is really all we can be completely sure of. “There is something thinking these thoughts.” Everything else is derived.
Agreed, it’s weird to comprehend, but self is probably closer to an interneural conglomerate illusion than a definite, coherent thing. “Who or what is tricked into seeing the illusion then?” “The collective illusion of the neurons!”
I personally hope there is some kind of permanent death eventually. Because eternity is really, really, REALLY long. Eventually, our sun will die and earth along with it, and after that, we’d still have more than 99,999% of eternity ahead of us. I don’t really want to stick around that long. That sounds really boring.
I personally want the kind of immortality that can eventually let me go, “ight, I’ve seen everything I want to, I’m ready for that final sleep, the one where I cease to be. BRING IT ON!”
Or reincarnation since then it’s not getting old as you keep at most hints of your past life
I dunno I feel like there’d always be something to keep us entertained. I mean keep in mind, time as a concept is just a constraint of our own mortal beings. In any given afterlife time may not have any meaning. Eternity might be forever. You might not be living moment to moment but experiencing all moments, all opportunity, all of everything forever or never. You would never grow old, grow tired, grow bored, or have any concept of objectivity because you, too, would be eternity. Meaning you yourself would be the concept of forever.
It does sound boring, but I like to think that if I had infinite time I’d figure out a way to get past that?
Plus, you know, God. With infinite power and infinite time, He should be able to find a way to make it not boring.
Good memory wiping and and rogue like game generators could keep it interesting. Which for all we know is what this life is.
I was raised Catholic by my parents but I was never baptized or made to go to church. They’re both believers, my mum moreso since she goes to church at least once a week and prays every night, but they’re not by any stretch fundamentalists. When I was little, I used to read the Bible for Kids, but it wasn’t something that was forced on me or anything. I just liked all the pictures and basically treated it as any other storybook.
I never thought about my beliefs too much, whether it was all real or just fiction or whether I really believed that Jesus was my saviour, but when I was in 4th grade, I had a pretty strong religious crisis. I just couldn’t understand how God was supposed to be benevolent, omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient and still allow Evil to exist in the world? If God knew everything about everyone and could do anything about everything and if He really wanted the best for all of us, then why were people suffering? Why did he allow sinners to exist at all? Why allow certain people to be born a certain way if said manner of existence was an immediate ticket to Hell? It didn’t matter how many times my religion teacher or other adults tried to explain the concept of Free Will to me. It just didn’t make sense. And because it didn’t make sense, I decided God couldn’t be real.
I was an atheist until I was like 17 and because I was a know-it-all teenager, I was the edgy “what kind of idiot could believe in a magic man in the sky?” sort. I’m not sure what changed in me because I don’t remember any kind of important event that might’ve lead to this realization, but one day I thought “you know, maybe there is a higher being.” Since then I’ve been stuck in the “maybe there is, maybe there isn’t” camp and calling myself agnostic.
Was raised in a near-fundamentalist household but never felt it. I was “born again” twice and after the second didn’t stick I just shucked the entire facade. One memory that really stings was lying in bed almost in tears begging Yahweh to make the change in me, and he didn’t say a damn thing.
I used to be a very live-and-let-live atheist, but after the last four years I think religion is just poison for an educated society. I get the desire to know the origins of the universe, but if your “theory” has no basis in observable reality, if you can’t disprove the trash you’re selling, you can fuck right off.
I was raised atheist, because my family has been for about four generations (in France, if you were on the side of the Republic anytime before 1930, you were pretty much against the Church).
Turns out if you are never taught that a religion is true, all religions seem extremely weird and exotic and frankly ridiculous. All shades of Christianity still boils down to “some rabbi with a cult got offed 2000 years ago and people still believe he will come back”, which is fun but no less weird than Greek mythology shenanigans.
By the time I was a teenager I felt close to neo-paganism, but never believing that gods actually exist, more that they are a good shorthand for fundamental concepts in ourselves and the universe. Right now I heavily call on Lugh to get me through a particularly difficult of exams, because as Samildanach he is a figure of the kind of brilliance and polyvalence and leadership that I need to demonstrate. Thinking of it in terms of a deity also helps build humility in the face of the importance and difficulty of the task I’ve set myself.
TL;DR: when you aren’t raised in them, all religions are weird enough that it’s hard to take them seriously.
I was thinking about the “exotic-Ness” of religions and had a micro-epiohany: If there are alien civilizations, their religions will be as exotic and varied as the thousands of living and dead religions on Earth. But their atheists will believe substantially similar to the atheists of all other civilizations. (Agreeing there isn’t god/s, chemistry and physics, info theory, the speed of light).
You know, from the outside, it’s always been some kind of weird/entertaining (as in an entertainment you can learn from by confronting to soem reality you haven’t access to), having been raised an atheist, by atheists, meeting only agnostics or atheists for a great part of life, being taught at school, received at the city hall, bussed in restaurants, cahiered in shops, by what I assumed were atheists. The few people going to catechism (the catholic afterschool ed) were doing it exactly in the same mind as some do the military: to get a social status. I only met obnoxious religious people then, fundies that were saying to me that the simple fact I wasn’t believing would make me go to a hell I laughed off – so incommunicability. It took me several years after going into my 20’s to actually meet religious people you could communicate with (and to get that some religious people wouldn’t bother telling it to you) – muslims mainly, a few jews, a few pagans. So in this island of absence of faith, it always is so strange to me to see the american stuff we see overall as universal culture consider it being a pilar or the most common thing, so far that even most amercian ultra-leftists feel like there quoting the bible or preaching when they speak about Lenin or Kropotkin (quoting is like a whole religion in itself, no?).
I guess I didn’t answered your question Yotomoe, because in fact I can’t. To me it’s always: how did you come to thinking any kind of religion?
I was raised Catholic and I lost my religious beliefs when I went to a Catholic Middle School and got bullied to the point of hating school and wanting to end it all. I spent my high school years being an insufferable atheist, and my early-to-mid 20s chilling out, and now I found Christ again in another religion (also my fiancee is part of a religion that doesn’t allow marriage outside the faith and I thought ‘hey, the religion doesn’t really go against my morals or ethics so what the hell’ and converted to marry her).
So, lost Jesus, swore about it, got over myself, found Jesus again. He was in my heart the whole time!
And by insufferable atheist, I’m not calling atheists in general insufferable. I was a shit, I regularly antagonized my family who are staunch Catholics, I thought the Amazing Atheist was cool, I thought being an in-your-face edgy smug POS who thought himself intelligent because I was atheist was rebellion against the religious machine, when in reality I was just an asshole who was hurting so much that I committed myself to hurting others.
And all of this isn’t to say that I didn’t take a good hard look at religion in general. I soul searched really deep, I did look at other religions and used my own judgment to come to my own conclusions. I never had an issue with science as a Catholic, nor did I have an issue with Evolution. But as a teen, I used all of that as a weapon to make my family feel bad when they weren’t at fault for what I went through.
To be very honest, I never had a problem with religion or churches, I had a problem with a god that let me suffer how I suffered with no recompense and no real consequence to the bullies. But over time I’ve reconciled and forgiven myself and my bullies, I grew out of my shitty attitude and acknowledged that I was missing something spiritual in my life. I came back to God in a different religion and found the love of my life, so things really turned out well for me.
But I seem to be in the minority, haha.
Just wanna say I feel you. Same situation, lost my faith because of Catholicism, spent almost 20 years agnostic and super into evolution/anthropology, recently started going back to church with my spouse after finding a faith and a community that allows for non-literalist Jesus-believing. Still putting together this weird cobble of science and God that I can’t find anywhere except my own mind and belief system.
Raised Catholic and almost always experienced paranoia, terror, or despair from its teachings. Eventually, said emotions warped into anger. Left over something relatively petty in high school- a real straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back sort of situation. Looked at other religions for a time and just found more of the same. Have since come to look at religions like I imagine a recovering alcoholic several years in recovery looks at booze.
I know the paranoia, terror, despair thing too well. I started having doubts when I was seven, but it was easy to believe in the angry, violent father who would punish you horribly for small transgressions, because I had one of those at home. What finally tore it for me was when I read Ayn Rand’s disproof of the argument from first cause. I thought about it for a month, realized she was right, and went from Catholic to agnostic to atheist in a week.
I’m not really sure I actually believed.
My parents are a former, disillusioned Christian and a Jewish atheist. Mom, the Jewish atheist, wanted me raised in the culture and so sent me to JCC after school, where I got told all the Torah stories. Somewhere around 8 or so I started distinguishing between obvious, fictional fairy tales (red riding hood, Aesop’s’ talking animals, etc), Star Wars, etc, versus things that looked like the real world. The Torah stories went into the not-real-world bin, just on a gut-check which-is-this-more-like basis.
I would revisit the religion question from different angles and different degrees of sophistication. Could I completely, logically disprove it, and if not wouldn’t that make me an agnostic? What if I’m interpreting the wording or definitions a bit off, is there another way where it’s plausible that I’m overlooking? But the closest I ever came to believing was as a child in a kinda-but-kinda-not religious after-school program. And atheist-talking-point cliche though it might sound, I grew out of religion literally because I learned to distinguish fantasy from reality. That’s not me trying to score debate points or take cheap shots, that was literally the moment in childhood development that got me out.
Someone handed me a Christian thing to read just yesterday. It started off nice about how God wants to be your friend. But then quickly turned around to ‘admit you are a sinner and God’s son died for you’. I’m not admitting to being born a bad person committing ethical crimes by existing, I was born a baby, and I work hard to be a good person as best I can. These kinds of toxic practices by Christianity are really what seal it for me as something I want no part in and can’t believe in. Other religions just don’t click for me even when I don’t have issues with them. I just can’t believe in them or commit to certain rules that would require me to do extra work. I don’t need the structure of a religion or spiritual belief in my life, I’m too chaotic a person to commit to that kind of thing and just like to do my own thing, not hurting anyone else in the process.
I would like if there was an afterlife, reincarnation or even ghosts, but, it seems illogical to me, even if it would be a comfort.
I work at a Wendy’s and I read each of these that I’m handed, JUST in case one of them finally *clicks*. (that and it’s important to stay informed). Basically exactly what you said, but my favorite one referred to Jesus as “The god-man” and I absolutely love that.
Are people still passing out Chick tracts or are these all different pamphlets?
To me, it just never “clicked”.
I was brought up religious. Wound up getting kicked out of Sunday school for being upset at God for murdering babies at Soddom and Gammorah around 5. At that point realized that if God mass murders on a whim he’s neither all merciful nor just. Shortly thereafter started noticing other inconsistencies. Spent a while going along with it until I was about 12 or so on the idea that adults around me seem to get it and they know more.
Then my father quit going to church (turns out he’s been an atheist since before I was born but agreed to raise us kids religious to appease my mother and the religious conservatives of the extended family. Shortly after I quit going, too.
But I have never had the capacity to take something on faith. I don’t feel what religious people feel when they talk about faith. To me they may as well be talking about a bandersnatch attack for how much I relate.
So like stories of someone losing their religion, I have a hard time relating to. I never had religion as far as I can tell.
Loosing connection with religious relatives in a deeply bigoted religious conservative subculture because those beliefs don’t align with your morality and you can’t pretend otherwise anymore? Hell yeah and that’s why I relate so hard to Joyce and Becky. I see a lot of my experiences with my mother and her side of the family in them.
Other note: I am Autistic and part of that means I am completely disconnected in “team building/trust building /etc exercises that religions and sports teams, militaries etc use to build a sense of camaraderie and shared experiences. So like chanting the same thing with everyone else, etc? I feel separate, like a a lone drowning person in a raging ocean.
I have often wondered if that’s why I can’t seem to Do Religion the way most people seem able to.
I was raised Catholic, and went to a borderline fanatic Catholic school grades 1-9, and was while I was never a crazed asshole Catholic, I was pretty strong in my beliefs until I transferred to a public school. Then I started learning more about the world and was exposed to other beliefs that began to make me question my own. Also helped that my dad, who at one point taught Bible History, told me that the Bible is one of the best pieces of historic fiction you can read. Nowadays, I have not abandoned belief, I fall into the Diest category, with a fair amount of crossover with Taoism in my personal beliefs.
I am very much a live and let live sort of person about this. So long as you’re not crazy about beliefs or use them as a justification to be horrible or hurtful to yourself and others. We’re all just trying to make it through life on this dumpster fire of a planet together, I can’t see a reason to make things harder for myself and others just because we have different beliefs on things.
My dad’s an ex-Catholic atheist, my mom’s basically a Mennonite. My brother and I were raised going to her church but (because Anabaptists) never baptized, and allowed to make up our minds on whether we wanted it. Both my parents were pretty socially liberal and non-pushy growing up (and have gotten more liberal since – my mom still has faith but has essentially joined the sect of people who are distanced from the main church due to its refusal to allow LGBT people to exist, and the church is teetering on a schism,) but I absorbed SO MUCH toxic bullshit from the world around me that fed right into my anxiety. For a period of about three years or so? I was basically praying in my head constantly as a reflexive, obsessive fear thing because I couldn’t stop it and was terrified of dying. Eventually I started taking pre-baptism classes and then came to the conclusion what I had wasn’t faith so much as an unhealthy anxiety response and terror of hell. I was about twelve or thirteen then. Took a few years to come to terms with it fully (A couple times my brain has gotten back into that compulsive thought pattern for a brief period, though I can snap out of it now,) and longer to be able to express in some way how deeply fucked my brain had gotten through no one’s active fault. These days I say any god who’s worth paying attention to would’ve heard those three years of compulsive, constant terror and understands my lack of faith is a necessary mental health thing as well.
(The realization, in tandem but still a few years down the line, that I’m a gay ace and my eventual general ‘hey a lot of organized Christianity really fucks people up’ attitude have both kept me in the firmly agnostic category. My mental health’s managed enough that I MIGHT be able to have a healthy relationship with a higher power, but frankly I’d rather not risk it. Not worth it to me.)
I became an atheist by reading the Bible. I’d been raised Baptist, but I hadn’t really delved into it properly despite occasional stints in Sunday School. By my teens I was getting more politically conscious and the holes in my knowledge were rearing their heads. Everybody was going on about stuff like abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage, and I was hearing a lot of conflicting information about morality and what the Bible had to say on those topics. I finally knuckled down to start reading it with the intent of going cover-to-cover so that I’d know for myself. I didn’t even make it through Genesis before quitting in disgust.
The creation myth wasn’t the issue. I was willing to treat Genesis as symbolic, but it was still supposed to have those kernels of truth, you know? You’re supposed to be able to look at something like that and say, “This might not be how things literally went down, but it shows how God thinks and how he wants people to behave.” But I couldn’t believe that it was doing that, because it conflicted with the idea that God isn’t a fucking shit-stain on the universe. The specific things that stuck out were the prank with Abraham’s kid, the Flood, treating Cain like shit for not wanting to be wasteful (though the murder was obviously unwarranted), and that bit where Noah cursed a bunch of his grandkids for umpty-many generations as punishment for his son accidentally walking in on him while he was naked after getting drunk and passing out (and/or for raping him while he was unconscious, depending whether you buy the “it’s a euphemism” thing; but that doesn’t change the fundamental issue of punishing a huge swath of innocent people). Also, the suppression-of-knowledge theme back in the Garden was something I’d always found fundamentally repugnant.
And that’s all just in whatever fraction of Genesis I managed to read before giving up. I still haven’t read the Bible cover to cover, but I know there’s a lot more nasty in there. In particular, I’ve since learned of Numbers 31, wherein Moses takes 32,000 girls as sex slaves after slaughtering the entire rest of their society, and God himself pops in to personally advise Moses on how to divvy them up among the people.
So yeah. I noped the fuck out of that hot mess. The knowledge that over half of humanity still buys into it despite the obvious evilness is more than a little unsettling. (I’m lumping together all the Abrahamic religions here, since they share much of the objectionable stuff despite their sometimes significant differences further down the line.)
I couldn’t think of a better way, than today’s strip, to encapsulate Joyce’s character development up to this point. It’s also a fine rebuttal to the common argument that without belief in divine judgement there’s no basis for ethical behaviour.
Soooo I take it the folks who were baying for Joyce to feel the consequences of her sitcom shenanigans are satisfied now?
Not being flippant, this genuinely seems to have been what people wanted and it’s solid character development.
Very glad
I really like that her Jacob disaster tied directly to her churchless Sunday. I did not expect that (maybe because my life is different enough from Joyce’s?), but it seems obvious in hindsight
She missed her fix and now the withdrawal hits?
Maybe that, too! But I meant that she has started making decisions she used to think of as sins, and if she can skip church, well, why can’t she mack on someone else’s boyfriend? Why can’t she tell lies? She actually knows the answer to that now, and honestly she knew it then, too, but really facing that meant making the admissions she’s making here.
Yeah, this is why I love this comic.
We analyzed the shit out of that whole sequence for days and I don’t think this angle ever came up and now Willis brings it up without even making it explicit and it just fits and explains much of what Joyce was thinking. So much of this comic is going on beneath the surface – not spelled out to us, with the connections made later if at all.
That’s a very good description of her perspective.
I’m glad she’s self-reflecting, but if her ploy did work, I’m not sure she would still be having such guilt.
She’s only learning from this because Jacob, thankfully, didn’t go through with it in the end.
I don’t think it would have hit this quickly or strongly, but it would at the very least prick her whenever she saw Sarah and seeing Joyce and Jacob together would absolutely set off a confrontation with Raidah, with all the fallout implied from that.
I am! This is a great strip and some good growth.
Absolutely! Everything I wanted and then some.
Honestly, I was satisfied when Jacob told her it wasn’t gonna work out.
On a narrative level, I’m happy with this – this is quality character development. My fangirl heart aches for her because she’s sad though. I can do both, don’t @ me. 😛
I am too sober for this conversation. Someone pass out jello shots ffs
Joyce shouldn’t feel too bad after she notices some of her fellow students abusing completely secular codes of morality and philosophical trends in order to feel superior to others. It’s not a Christian thing; just a human one.
Joyce is realizing that her fundangelical upbringing gave her a straw-man version of what godless people are like.
I look forward to hear realizing that they also gave her a straw-man version of what evolution is, and what liberals are like, and what democrats are like, and what progressives are like, and what liberal christianity is, and what catholicism is, and what islam is like and what other religions are like and and what scientists are like and what the scientific method is and what methodological naturalism is and …and..and…and…and… ….
There’s a reason fundagelicals raise their kids in a bubble ya know. When you lie about others all the time, contact with those others will undermine your indoctrination.
Exactly. It’s what everyone spent eighteen years teaching her to fear
Glad to see Joyce realize that you don’t need religion to be a moral person.
There are elements of this realization in Billie’s and Joe’s stories, too, despite the very different relationships with religion. I think that’s neat.
This is the best Dumbing of Age strip ever written.
There was a time for everything.
This time, mine will be allotted to muttering “stupid pantheism”
well… Damn!
Wow. That’s… wow.
Seriously, I so want to share this strip on all social media right now (how do I do it, guys?). Because it’s a beautiful explanation why the conservative notion of “Without religion, people would have no morality” is just idiotic.
Thank you, Willis.
Just include a link to the comic, probably a permalink.
And if it makes it any easier for you, here’s the permalink:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/freeing/
Thanks!
THE EMEROR OF INTERNET GIVETH!
Book 10 – The Shame Exists Regardless
I really only have two things to say here:
1) I think that Willis may have had this monologue written out for a long time as this represents a major fulcrum of the Joyce character arc;
2) I also think that Willis is speaking through Joyce here – That this is something that happened to him.
Well Willis has made it pretty clear that Joyce is autobiographical, so it’s not a stretch to imagine that this is pretty close to what he went through after/while escaping religion
The end of today’s strip is what the next book’s title should be…
Shame for what exactly? So far you’ve looked at porn, dated a gay guy, used a few swears, and kissed a dude who already had a girlfriend. That’s kinda low on the debauchery levels.
Especially the way to kissing the guy with the girlfriend has half of the forum riled up as if it were as bad as murder though.
No need to exaggerate. Her actions, in regards to the Jacob situation at least, were shitty and people rightfully called out the shitty behavior.
Everybody knows that nuance is fake.
And everybody knows you can’t still think something is shitty if there’s nuance.
She is realising that she had this strawman that X, Y and Z people have no morals or qualms with doing bad things and that in trying to be that kind of person herself, she has realised she is wrong. You don’t have to fear judgement at death to feel shame for doing the wrong thing and hurting people’s feelings. She feels bad for hurting Jacob regardless. Her morals and ethics didn’t go away. The shame for doing the wrong thing didn’t go away.
I think it’s basically a case of a total lack of nuance and this is why her parents and Ross’s behaviour shocked her so badly. All people in her particular sect are pure and good and all people outside are vile and bad. She hasn’t been raised to understand that things aren’t that simple and that there are shades to behaviour in most people’s lives.
Well, yes. Essentially, that is what it is. And it is just finally hitting home for her that the absence of religion, does not mean the absence of morality or values or ethics or shame or regret or care. That she can’t just switch off her ability to care and go wild and face no consequences for it.
Which isn’t just abstract, but ties into why she did what she did with Jacob. Which we mostly ignored while it was happening.
And are even mostly ignoring here.
Bingo.
When she believed, she was ashamed for *wanting* the debauched life of an agnostic/atheist/heathen. Now, although she knows that was a strawman, the shame remains.
Her emotions have not caught up to her intellect.
not to undermine the message of this comic, but “the shame exists regardless” is such a good summary of how my brain works after 30 years of untamed anxiety that i kinda want it as a shirt or a tattoo or something
The shame is also fake. Plenty of people hurt others without problems or consequences. In the end, it all depends of how we were raised.
I’m going to make a prediction here…
No, not a prediction; I’m just going to tell you what feeling I’m getting from the momentum and direction of this conversation. Dorothy is going to try to comfort Joyce and they’re going to end up hugging or something similar. Becky will see and draw her own conclusions and things will start getting messy.
I can see a scenario where Joyce wakes up next to Dorothy the next day and the two of them being in a position where they have to work out if it was a mistake or whether they want to try to make this work.
I’m 100% behind whatever scenario you’re brewing up in that noggin. Even if the “this” they’re gonna make work is just their friendship, and the bed-sharing was out of convenience and mutual comfort.
I really don’t think that’s gonna happen…
… and I really hope I’m wrong about that. Your idea sounds absolutely awesome and I would be 100% behind it if I didn’t think it was completely out of character for Dorothy and goes against certain elements of Word of Willis. But yeah, if I get proven wrong, I will raise a glass in celebration of being wrong.
THANK YOU Willis. This is amazing on so many levels.
There isn’t a facepalm deep enough to describe how I feel when someone argues for morality based on divine brutality.
Will be sharing this.
Yep. This is one of the funniest things of the life.
There are times I swear Willis is reading my journal…
Okay, this is probably the best Dumbing of Age strip ever. Thank you Willis for articulating that particular epiphany so eloquently. It must have come from the heart.
Agreed. I’m really impressed by the eloquence of this.
Ditto.
Likewise.
Personally I like the Original Sin strip better, mostly because of the visuals, but this strip is a great continuation of Joyce trying to process that everything everything, EV-ER-Y-THING she has ever known, everything she has ever been taugt is a goddamned… a goddamned lie.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/originalsin/
I like this one particularly because it recontextualizes the whole Joyce pretends to be Jacob’s girlfriend arc. I love the original sin one, but it didn’t really reveal anything to me – though it clarified her take on the science/religion conflict.
The other strip that really did the same thing as this one was where Toedad went off about Becky’s hair and suddenly blowing $20 on a haircut was much more significant than the waste so many had painted it as.
Those are very good perspectives. I suppose some of Ruths and Billie’s worse traits come into that light as well, when viewed from the lens of alchoholism/depression.
I agree, this strip is brilliant. Even stronger, to me, was the one at the end of the Rich Mullins sequence, where Joyce woke up staring into the void.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/03-sometimes-the-sky-was-so-far-away/ultimately/
So she’s going full atheist.
Can’t pretend I’m not disappointed.
She might be, or this might just be the period where she abandons her old beliefs and forms her own relationship with god. It could go either way.
Yeah, not at all sure that’s happening. At least not yet.
She’s losing the connection she had with God and fooled around with trying out her stereotype of ungodly behavior and found it wasn’t as fun and consequence free as she’d been taught. We’ll see where she goes from here.
That’s a rough place to be, but I’m really glad Joyce is there right now. Such character growth almost makes that whole thing that just happened with Jacob worth it.
The real struggle of agnosticism is the decision to still be moral and live by a set of selfless principles. Even when there’s no reward, no glorious eternal afterlife or redemption from condemnation, even if in the grand scheme of it all your efforts to be a good person don’t mean anything– to decide to do it anyway.
I didn’t grow up with religion. And I had a very terrible life growing up. I’m bitter and jaded and mentally disturbed in so many ways but the way I see it, if life is full of pointless suffering then the least I can do what I can to ease the pain of the people and animals around me and to not add to any of the collective sufferings that burdens us.
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”
This one seems pretty easy to me. I’d rather live in and create for future generations a world that is Starfleet than a world that is Mad Max: Fury Road. Education and Healthcare are better than slavery and backstabbing for everyone. Personal effort and surviving difficulty can feel meaningful when they are in pursuit of that better life for everybody – moreso than buying a sixth car or hedonism, which tend to feel empty. That sense of meaning and purpose don’t require a reward from a spirit entity. (some heavens just promise hedonism–dozens of virgins??)
Ah, those wonderful identity crises formed at a college birthday party. What a time to be alive!
I was the Dorothy at a Catholic school full of Joyces. Oddly my catholic school was more Lutheran/Jesuit and although classes in Catholicism were mandatory until senior year, you could get into world religions. Thus the senior class ended up mostly straight up agnostic humanist, Buddhist or a strong leaning towards Muslim. It was a very strange place.
Nihilism is also incredibly freeing. But it’s a lot of work. If you want to keep your self respect, you need moral and ethical structures. And if you don’t want to adopt someone else’s, you have to construct your own — from scratch.
How can I be a good person? How can I do the right thing? Great thinkers over the centuries have wrestled with this and we are far from answers that satisfy everyone.
You can’t blame Dorothy for not warning you about this one, Joyce.
atheist do not believe in nothing. They believe in other people, of their choosing. People still have feelings for you to respect.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/hug-2/
heh, a sense of shame and morality exists completely independent of any religious values, who would have thought?
Da-a-a-mn … that’s a pretty formidable vocabulary for a home-schooled kid.
She can probably write as well – if not better – than sibling Josh.
Sibling Jocelyne.
Despite 40+ years of being an Atheist and having the morality conversation with Believers many times, I have never had Atheist morality explained so perfectly.
Thank you, Mr. Willis. I will be stealing this mercilessly (and giving credit when I can).
So is Sarah hearing this too? I couldn’t tell if the door was closed when Dina walked out, and she looked a bit occupied with her social communication list to close it behind her. I can’t really tell…
Ok, “The Shame Exists Regardless” is the best possible book title.
Joice… Oh, honey…
Dorothy you hug Joyce. You hug Joyce RIGHT NOW.
Ow, that’s some powerful bullshit there, Joyce.
Legit wondering if this IU misogynist and white supremacist professor is going to show up in the story.
(I won’t be mad if he doesn’t, I’m just genuinely wondering, given how much ties in to Toedad et al.)
I feel bad for Joyce and was hoping she’d keep her faith just because losing it is so crappy. I’ve had crises of faith in the past and bounced back but know the feeling of desolation.
There’s more to faith than shame. There’s more to life than sticks. There are carrots, too, regardless of whether it’s god offering them, or fate, or community, or yourself.
I’m oft baffled by those who argue that athiests don’t believe in anything.
It’s in their name: they don’t believe in the existence of gods.
This says nothing about their ethical beliefs, except that it’s perhaps less likely they make moral arguments from command theory.
I’m curious whether DofA fans have heard about the real-life glory going down at Indiana University Bloomington this week: https://twitter.com/tressiemcphd/status/1197615030331740160
Now I have. I’m not entirely sure to what degree this statement is genuine moral outrage, or political ass-covering.
She seems to be saying they need a complaint from a student before they can fire him. If so, I expect one will be forthcoming shortly.
I think it’s genuine outrage. With some ass-covering drawing a clear line in the sand so that if/when it comes to it the U can point at it and say “there’s the line, it was crossed, this isn’t bowing to a Twitter mob, he done $%^&ed up his duties to the students and the University.”
That statement did not read like an “ass-cover” statement.
This page is actually brilliant.
Such a concise and well-worded description of the moment when one changes from a life of blind belief of a certain Christian story – that life outside of your faith is flawed in an oversimplified way. This is the moment when you realize that it’s not true, that life is more subtle and complex for everyone than you’d been led to believe, and that there are reasons to be moral and ethical that have nothing to do with God or faith or whatever… that humans have feelings and you still love and care for them regardless.
Willis, you’ve said that Joyce is autobiographical. This speaks volumes about how much thought and emotional energy you’ve put into making the shift away from blind-faith Christianity to… something more profound and considered.
It’s not an easy thing to do. Well done sir.
How boring.
OK, fundie.