Well, people have spent centuries perfecting the art of construing the books of the Bible to support whatever they damn well want them to support. Of course, it does help that the books themselves have contradictory teachings.
Evangelical Christians have come up with the solution for that. It’s called “Bible Study” which, as you might expect is less studying the bible and more about indoctrinating people on the “proper” way to interpret it.
To be fair, that’s basically what all churches do. No one just sits kids down with the Bible and says “Just figure it out”. Some may try for a less heavy-handed approach, but in the end they’re still using the Bible to teach their own doctrine, their own interpretation.
I’m not trying to disagree with you–my experience is that is what is done.
But I am someone who leads Bible studies for adults. I ask people to confront their own assumptions and biases, ignore official doctrine and see if the text agrees or disagrees with it, and consider other interpretations. And this is done without judgment. People are surprisingly un-indoctrinated when you let them speak their own thoughts.
The idea of Bible study as indoctrination is probably why there are some people at my church not very happy with my studies. Luckily there’s almost nobody who wants to teach Religious Ed, so I’ll probably be corrupting the children sometime soon.
Don’t know about churches, but in synagogues the rabbi will try to get everyone to disagree with each other and find multiple ways to interpret each reading. I’ve had my rabbi get into arguments with himself just because everyone was quietly going along with his interpretation, and you’re not participating if you don’t disagree with anyone.
Worth noting that there’s not really any such thing as a Quaker priesthood. There is essentially no organized institution that needs to maintain power over its membership to persist – it’s among the most decentralized versions of Christianity out there.
To a lesser extent, the same can be said of Judaism – there have been no Jewish priests for several thousand years. Rabbis are explicitly NOT priests – the word means ‘teacher – though some branches of Judaism blur the distinction more than others.
Doesn’t help that most translations are kind of garbage. KJV in particular is a dumpster fire. Comparing it to Vulgate makes it clear that the translators didn’t actually know Latin. Not that Vulgate is great to begin with. So if you don’t like implications of translation of one passage, you can probably find another passage that makes completely different kind of sense, because who ever heard of keeping things consistent?
I think people hold on to KJV for the same reason there was so much resistance to translating into common languages. If it’s not everyday language, it feels holier.
I’m pretty sure it’s KJV that mangled the proverb we know as “train up a child in the way that he should go and he will not turn from it”, and even though modern translators know it’s more like “if you let a child do whatever they want, when they grow up nobody will be able to control them”, but many feel they have to leave the bad translation meaning because it’s so well known that people would treat them like the Wicked Bible (forgot the “not” in “thou shalt not commit adultery”) if they used a more accurate meaning.
You mean, “[You should] spare the rod and spoil the child”? That one? XD
I know it’s more usually taken to mean “[If you] spare the rod [then you will] […] spoil the child,” but I would like to point out that the latter reading, rather than simply assuming that one understands that the statement is a direct command, instead forces one to lose or change the “and” in order to force that interpretation to make grammatical sense.
It’s obviously been grievously misinterpreted for a long while. 😉
Plus, while it’s lousy as a translation, in many places it’s really beautiful as writing.
There are good modern translations out there though, that work from current scholarship. There is that streak of fundamentalist churches that cling to the KJV though.
I am skeptical of “didn’t actually know Latin”, given the important of Latin in Europe.
“Didn’t know Greek and Hebrew well” is both more plausible and more relevant, since the KJV committees went to the Greek and Hebrew sources, rather than translating the Vulgate into English.
That’s exactly what happened to me. I read the bible start-to-finish on a 9h flight from Washington to Rome back in 2004 and I remember exclaiming “man what a load of rubbish” out loud when I finished, sending the 60 year old white protestant lady sitting next to me straight into pearl clutching mode… Good times.
TRIGGERED VEGAN WARNING
Arioch, have you never tasted arugula? It’s yummy. I have put it in tacos and in burgers. I have eaten it by the handfuls out of the container. Maybe you’re a supertaster, which means a lot of things taste way more bitter to you than to most people. Can you eat brocolli? If you’re a supertaster that stuff will be VILE.
Seriously, what’s the deal with kale hate as well? I hate to prep it, but I think it’s tasty. Hate how it gets between my teeth though.
Kale got the same treatment as brussel sprouts, where lots of people were fed improperly prepared variants and decided it was terrible evermore.
Sliced thick on salad it’s too thick to chew, put too much into a shake and its too pulpy. Sliced and sauteed in butter, or dried with olive oil and salt however, it’s great.
For arugula, it’s an entirely different problem: the american vegetables for the non-vegetarian have been aimed at providing the least flavor possible for so long that people take a bite, go “it’s bitter and tastes like pepper” when they’re expecting iceburg lettuce.
My German dad taught us a fantastic way to prepare kale. You start with I guess about a can of kale (you can make it from fresh or frozen too if you prefer, but then I have no idea of the amounts to use but you will need to cook it until it’s tender and probably also add salt), drain it, and add it to a big stewpot. Add a rasher or two of bacon, chopped already-boiled potatoes (great way to use up leftovers from the night before; Dad would make extra just for the kale the next day), and one to two farmer’s sausages per person. You can put the sausages in whole, but I like to slice them up so they distribute more evenly.
Heat the whole thing up (you may need to add some salt) and let it simmer a little bit until the sausages are warmed through, and serve it up in a big bowl. Absolutely delicious, just a big warm sausage-and-bacony bowl of savoury goodness, and the perfect thing for a cold day. Also it reheats well–assuming you have any left over.
And now I wish I could actually get canned kale and farmer’s sausage here in Nova Scotia, because I’ve made myself hungry. 🙁 You can substitute kielbasa in a pinch but it really isn’t the same, and I can’t find the canned stuff here, either. 🙁 Unfortunately you only really have ready access to German ingredients in Western Canada. *cries in German*
That sounds like the way my Mom prepared spinach, only without the meat. Rinse it, boil the piss out of it, and serve it as a side dish instead of green beans, peas, or whole-kernel corn.
Kale with meat and potatoes is a traditional dish in North Germany. Just google “Grünkohlessen” (substitute the ü with ue in case you’re lacking umlauts).
As a German i might add…while we have a few kale dishes.
There are alot of Germans who actually hate that stuff.
Same goes for “Sauerkraut”
– that all germans eat that stuff is actually a myth.
I prefer to steam it, without meat. And then it’s tasty. But ofc, like all vegetables and fruits, the taste clearly depends of where and how it grew.
Like tomatoes.
I can’t eat a supermarket tomato since I’ve eaten the good ones, the one that doesn’t taste like – fridge.
I really like it raw in salads. Like, cut it finely and leave it for a couple of hours with a bit of sugar and salt and then mix with, for example, thin apple slices, dry cranberries, and cut hazel nuts.
Put the kale on a pot with water, a kangaroo tail, pimiento, sweet paprika, garlic, long pepper, and a stock cube. Cover with a sheet of slate, and stew gently until the slat is soft.
I feel as though Joyce hasn’t actually learned much about atheism or her other alternatives, despite all the time she has had to do so. Which also makes me wonder, what were people’s assumptions about atheism/agnosticism/other before you really learned about?
“Agnostics are just lazy atheists”- a community reference I took to believe as fact as a child.
Also, that atheists had moral objections to the bible or god’s various acts of destruction (which I totally got at age 5) instead of not believing in the afterlife (which I didn’t get, because so bleak)- I sorta conflated it with Antitheism
I still have moral objections to a lot of the Bible. I’m actually in a lengthy (and respectful, yay!) combox discussion about that now. That’s in addition to not believing it’s real.
Most Christians I meet are actually decent people, so the OT atrocities bother them.
Abraham and Isaac and the fake-out sacrifice is the moral event horizon for me. Genocide, sure, whatever, the flood’s a metaphor. “Obedience is more important than your own moral judgment”? Yeah, that makes me have to take a day to cool off after I read it.
And yeah, it’s something that religious folk need to come to terms with regarding the Bible (and other such religious texts): They were written and edited by people to address the issues *of the time*. If you strip it of that context, the stories lose their original meanings.
My personal favorite is the parable of the Good Samaritan. These days it’s a simple “it’s awesome to help people out” thing. But in the original context, Samaritans were a rival religious offshoot of Judaism, and hated by the people that Jesus was talking to. The parable’s really about contrasting two purportedly upstanding individuals who ignored the man in need of help, and the “hated enemy” who does the kind thing… and that’s a factor that’s easy to lose when, these days, “Samaritan” hardly needs the “Good” said anymore to imply it.
Yeah, that’s one of the things about a lot of the Bible, especially the Old Testament: It makes far more sense read as a history of the cultural evolution of the people and the religion than it does as the unchanging Word of a perfect moral being.
“Here is a fable about why we don’t do human sacrifice, unlike those other religions” vs “It would absolutely be right to murder your children if God wanted it like He used to, but luckily he doesn’t anymore.”
See, if the point is “don’t sacrifice your kids to God”, then the way you show that is either by having Abraham punished for trying or by having him rewarded for refusing.
“Sacrifice your kids to me” “Okay” “Psych, but since you listened, here’s a reward, never actually sacrifice your kids” doesn’t actually convey “don’t sacrifice kids”, it conveys “do whatever God says, anything he tells you to do will work out fine in the end”.
The whole thing was a political document, designed to maintain power. Absolute obedience was clearly a goal of the authors. Avoiding human sacrifice would have only been a tiny side goal vs being the people who could interpret the word of their god for the people they were trying to control.
(Yes, I’m actually convinced that the authors of the vast majority of religious texts were in fact atheists, very much aware that they were writing documents to give themselves control of the uncritical masses, with the remaining few being under the influence of hallucinogens or schizophrenics.)
Whether you buy it or not, I think you should take into account that the storyline is a book of folklore. Ascribing a kind of Illuminati-esque supervillain teaching obedience over it is about as valid as saying “The Deep State is behind it.” Whatever people take from it, the story has God substitute a lamb (literal one, not Jesus) for Isaac and establishes this is not cool.
While simultaneously this is very cool in every other culture around us, including the ones we regularly war with.
Yeah I’d argue that authorial intent needs to be studied in cultural context- I’m sure the bible was a political work (literally any work is political) but the specific aims can vary wildly. In modern contexts it’s held up by cultural conservatives; but in ancient contexts what conservatism *itself* was is different. (Not to mention jesus being a commie and the new testiment arguably being written at first around an illegal/frowned on upstart religion).
Like to be clear, the bible is definitely used as a tool for a ton of authoritarians; but I don’t think everyone who’s wielded it in the past has been
(And finally: I’m honestly pretty sure religious people do write religious texts; both because someone can do awful cynical things in the name of their beliefs and because there are definitely for sure people who consider themselves legitimately inspired- like I’m not an atheist so much as a “meh”, so naturally this would color my view but even if it is all fake that doesn’t mean a vast majority of folk involved would have known it was)
To some extent. On the other hand, there likely wasn’t an “author” in the traditional modern sense, but editors and compilers working with stories out of oral tradition.
They can change those stories, but only so far before the populace rejects them as not being the ones they know.
Don’t forget the flood. “This small group of people are bad, so I am going to drown everything and start over.” So fuck all the people who have never heard of the Christian religion, along will all the innocent animals and plants.
Even within the story, the Flood long pre-dates Judaism, let alone Christianity. There are also Mesopotamian (probably the original) and Greek versions.
Misotheism is where you believe god exists but you hate him.
Kevin Sorbo’s professor in “God’s not dead” is a misotheist, not an atheist. That’s right, christian anti-atheist propaganda is so off base that they can’t even get it right when one of their main characters is an atheist.
I really liked the Rose of the Prophet trilogy bc the highly religious people would thank their God(dess) for the good things BUT ALSO curse them for the bad things. None of this, “yeah ok if it was bad then it’s God’s will” stuff.
As was also pointed out to me, sports all players will thank Jesus for good plays but kick themselves for messing up; no one says, “Jesus made me miss that pass!” even though that would be contextually reasonable to believe
Me: “Knock knock.”
You: “Who’s there?”
Me: “Miso.”
You, expecting a pun about soup and/or a bedroom joke: “Miso who?”
Me, rebelling against God: “Misotheism.”
Ohhh!!!!!! It’s mal-theism, I read it as malt-theism and thought it was the worship of Beer, and I was gonna tell you off, that Bacchus already had thst sewn up. 4am is too sleepy to respond to comments.
Yeah. My mother de-converted thirteen years before I was born, and I don’t think my father’s family had been religious since George IV. Except for building churches so they could sit in the front pew.
Yeah, I was raised without religion as well – though I don’t really remember learning anything about atheism or agnosticism until fairly late. We just didn’t do religion. It didn’t really come up much.
I do remember somewhere in early elementary school doing a go round the circle introduction/icebreaker thing where one of the things we were supposed to tell the class was what church we went to. I was much confused and responded with something like “I think my grandmother’s Congregationalist?”
I was, however, surprised by other people’s surprise at my being atheist. Don’t recall details. Was also surprised by the middle school bus mostly not knowing ‘agnostic’.
“You mean there’s a word for not believing in God?”
Followed a few years later by:
“You mean there’s a word for not being sure one way or the other and/or not caring?”
Bits of the Bible were a great read, but it was so similar to other mythologies–like, say, the Greeks, Romans, Sumerians, etc. And no one had the forethought to tell me those were other religions, but instead that they were all fiction. And, well, 9-10 year old me found it a bit odd that some of these stories were fiction but the ones in the Bible weren’t. Aaaand no one could explain that one to me, either. A neighbor giving me Silmarillion as a 10-year-old after finding out I’d read The Hobbit was the clincher. “This is basically the Bible meets Greek stuff.”
One of the reasons I couldn’t get into the Silmarillion was because I had forced my way through the bible and refused to do it again, even if there were elves this time.
My mom was convinced atheism is a phase. All the atheists I came into contact with before leaving the LDS church were newly-adult militant ex-Mormons. I was ashamed of having something in common with them. Later I realized defying your parents and experiencing anger isn’t all that shameful – although most new ex-Mormons are still a bit more in-your-face than I’d prefer.
I always figured agnosticism had something to do with Gnosticism, but I didn’t really understand the difference until I spent some actual time learning about Gnosticism.
I also always figured atheism was pretty benign until I met atheists on the internet. Anyone else remember the people who called themselves “Brights”?
Joyce didnt seem all that tramatized, most of the characters didnt. Joyce was mostly just pissed off about the situation and did her best to protect her friend. While it probably had a huge impact on her current religous choices, it wasnt really a month of Hell for her as much as it was a Month of learning that her mother is horrible and so is her church, which lead her to questioning her religion and really thinking things through over that break.
Im pretty sure the only part of that month that effected her long term is maybe if her parents got a divorce.
Joyce is aware of good Christians. It’s just that for Becky, the church was the evil that she turned to her faith to fight. For Joyce, her church was the only reason she believed in the first place. The structure was what was important.
I think it was more like two months before the timeskip, but apart from ‘I will die for you’ as an explicit trigger, a lot of her loss of faith had less to do with the trauma and more to do with meeting people with different viewpoints, discovering they are perfectly decent people, and getting more and more alienated from the church she grew up in with its insistence those people are Different and therefore Bad. (Most particularly, seeing they didn’t have Becky’s back, but Dorothy, Joe, Ethan, Dina, and Sierra and Agatha and other devout but Different Christians were influential in this as well.) Ryan doesn’t shake her faith in God, though the incident does probably teach her that quoting Scripture isn’t a guarantee of moral goodness. (In hindsight, that is pretty big.) It’s realizing the Good Christian in her hall (Mary) is terrible, and that even when they conflict she has more respect for Roz. It’s Dina’s insistence in scientific evidence that slowly begins cracking through Joyce’s walls (even if she’s not on the same ground as Becky, the all or nothing approach to faith Joyce had means she’s probably more open to evolution now because she no longer believes in original sin, really.) It’s Dorothy being kind and nonjudgmental when Joyce is starting to reveal her hangups about sexuality, and demonstrating she does have morals without needing to believe in God.
Becky coming out and her treatment by the community was, I think, the thing that burst the floodgates open, but it wasn’t the trauma that did it. It was realizing she loved Becky, as she was, and if God said there was something wrong with Becky then God had to be wrong. That’s the point from which she was willing to recognize ‘I would die for you because I know best’ as a fucked-up perspective, and from there to start reassessing whether the things she’d been taught were healthy.
Stephen, you don’t ‘repair’ a hacked system; hacked systems, by definition, aren’t working the way they’re supposed to. You simply hack them some more.
She might or not might change her position on socialism but the blue sash is staying, here and and on all the universes.
Considering Robin has the same position… maybe she should consider campaign based on that 😛
I think it’s actually quite understandable. Joyce tied up her Christian identity in a strict social structure that appeals to her (perhaps related to her being on the spectrum – note I am on it myself) while Becky’s Christian identity is related to her personal relationship to the faith.
I also think Joyce has a warped view of socialism, much like the view of atheism she’s showing here. If you told her any given POSITION socialists support, absent fearmongering and away from whatever words were loaded with that fearmongering… well, of COURSE Joyce thinks everyone should have safe housing and access to food and medicine when they need it! If Joyce saw what Becky had been paid at Galasso’s and then tried to go shopping on it, she’d recognize that yeah, this is abysmally low. And I suspect once it was explained to her that, say, uninsured people not being able to go to the doctor until it’s ER levels also costs more than guaranteed healthcare, she’d be even more confused and downright outraged. Obviously you should do this because it’s morally right, but why aren’t you doing it when it makes more sense anyway?
But if you told her all those positions made her a socialist, she’d have the exact same freakout as she’s having here. Joyce only recognizes socialism as a Scary Other still, so she’s vehemently not that. And Joyce hasn’t been homeless and employed in a sub-minimum wage job firsthand, so she doesn’t have quite the same experience to go ‘universal basic income all the way’ yet the way Becky did.
Panel 2: there is so much to unpack I am just gonna say I know several atheist folks who like chicken fingers and several religious folks who are vegetarians, or vegan. As an Agnostic/Jewish (when my mom asks) I enjoy pulled pork and chicken fingers on my kale salad.
Will this prompt Willis to bring back the Terrifying Psalty Image they used as a Tumblr background for a while? I do of course appreciate Blowjob Cat, but people need the Horror of Psalty returned to their lives.
By which I mean, if he’s haunting my dreams, he’s damn well haunting yours, too.
Joyce, I was raised a Catholic, but didn’t question my faith until high school. Not all atheists follow the stereotypes you think about: some are friendly people that care about other people, and some are horrible people that use scientific facts to try to justify racism and transphobia.
Also, not believing in gods doesn’t make a you leftist by default. Objectivists dislike both God and democracy.
I went Pagan instead of atheist after getting told the batshit fundies wanted to reduce the Earth to a smoking cinder so that Jesus would come back. I think having had the previous Near Death experience led me to think that there had to be something out there beyond what we know from our lives, but Yaweh was an asshole. Especially if He wanted our home to be in ruins before taking us back to Paradise. That struck me as something a loving deity would not do.
Besides the revels after the sabbats were a heck of a lot better than the pot luck socials after Sunday Services.
Something is bothering me about the way you’re using a Jewish name for God while decrying a Death-Cult philosophy that is specifically Christian in nature—and a fairly antisemitic branch of Christianity, to boot. You generally seem like a pretty cool person, so could you please reconsider?
I think it’s done to identify the root Abrahamic god, as distinct from say, Zeus or Ghanesh or Ra or Odin. When you don’t believe in any dieties, it’s equally weird to refer to a particular sect’s god as God, since you don’t believe that particular one is correct either.
@RT Do you have something that is a more convenient reference to the Jesus faiths’ based god than, “the christian god” since it seems otherwise to not have a name?
“Jesus” isn’t helpful since it is also necessary to use that label to refer to the character in the bible distinct from the entity that supposedly spawned him and yet also was him. Which is I sulpose how the holy moly gets into the mix?
“Jehovah” is essentially the same as Yahweh, but a Latinized version that would thus appear only in Christianity, not Judaism.
In recent decades though it’s seen less usage in Christianity and Yahweh has seen more.
Uh oh. References to TikTok and European-style socialism. The Dumbing world is not immune to these things.
*cut to Amber and Dina watching TikTok* *cut away again for two arcs of story with other characters* *cut back to Amber and Dina, still watching TikTok*
(I love how Joyce’s idea of not believing in a god still revolves around a group of people that meet regularly and eat certain foods)
(For clarity, the joking “uh oh” is at the references to socialism not to socialism itself or any policies that could be considered socialist)
Well, it’s not like chicken nuggets are shaped like chickens.
Here we’re talking about nuggets made of dinosaur and shaped like dinosaurs, as opposed to nuggets made of dinosaur but just shaped like little blobs.
Someone needs to tell Joyce she can still enjoy and do all of that stuff and still be an atheist. It’s not an exclusive club of leftist hipster vegans or whatever she thinks it is.
Hey so this is going to be a long post and it has nothing to do with what everyone was talking about. About three years ago I was struggling with serious depression, which was later diagnosed as bipolar 1. I posted on this comments section about how I was struggling and how I was worried about telling my dad. I don’t expect anyone to remember, but going back to that page and looking at the comments I got, and all the support I got helped me past some bad times. I re-read those comments and knowing that people were rooting for me and wanted me to get better gave me hope. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/lights/#comment
This was the page. To anyone who might remember me, I am much healthier now. I ended up dropping out of college and I am doing a lot better without the stress of grades. Now, I’m living with a roommate, working a proper job and mostly succeeding in taking care of myself. I want to say thank you. This comic, and the amazing people who comment on it have done a lot for me. So, thank you.
Good for you, Cap! I’m glad leaving college helped; it helped me, too, in a somewhat similar situation. Mostly succeeding at taking care of yourself is awesome; go you!
Has Joyce just never interacted with atheist dudebros? At all? She has a twitter where she’s posted bible verses, I’m surprised she’s never had one try to “educate” her about how backwards she is while also trying to get her to send nudes.
Sarah should introduce Joyce to the concept of conservative atheists. It’s cute that she thinks all atheists are like Dorothy, but that’s just factually incorrect
Is it wrong I’m now envisioning Mike to be out of his coma SOLELY to show Joyce that bad atheists [like him] exist? Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike adopts religions to annoy people at will.
Have we seen Dorothy not eat Chicken fingers (well, maybe she’s too adult for that) but kale instead (which is quite a recent fad and I don’t see Dorothy running after food fads)?
I’m glad Joyce has Sarah, someone she can trust enough to open up like this. Sarah and her curmudgeonly sarcasm somehow fits perfectly with Joyce’s self-deprecating humor so Joyce can share things she wouldn’t dare with anyone else.
It’s okay. Since we don’t believe in God, we don’t believe in rules, especially rules like “don’t eat chicken fingers.” Use Joyce’s beliefs against her!
Honestly, the tiktok thing is the only one that really strikes me as particularly unusual for an atheist, unless they were talking about how they used to think Jesus should be drawn.
Then again, I can think of plenty of former Christians who still haven’t let go of old theological disagreements, and still hold particular disdain for their old rivals, so I guess it’s not that outlandish, just… A rather odd detail to end up fixated on, in my opinion.
It’s based on the very real Psalty the Songbook which, yes, you can find on Youtube.
(Note: Reltzik is not culpable for any brain damage suffered by individuals who will probably watch said show once. It’s the internet, so you should know to click responsibly.)
Having helped others down from the existential precipice Joyce has placed herself on I get why she’s having this reaction, but I’ve personally never experienced it internally. I’ve been certain for many years (at least around 20) that all discourse on the existence or nature of any deities is a meaningless distraction regardless what one chooses to believe in that regard.
Faith is a personal matter. It doesn’t matter to anybody else if you have it or not.
Even as a Catholic, I firmly believe that other people’s beliefs are none of my business. If God has a problem with them, He will let them know when their time comes. It doesn’t involve me.
Faith is a personal matter until large bodies of religious extremists decide they can use it and their numbers to ruin the world and make your life hell because God.
Oh, look, that’s where we’ve been at for the past four evers.
Also, Joyce, lots of atheists come from similarly intense Christian background. They’re probably the ones most vocal about being atheist. There might even be a campus club, “Secular Society” if not “American Atheists” or something. (I knew an IU undergrad who started a Secular or Freethinkers or Rationalists club, though I don’t know if it survived his time.)
You’ve got to watch out for those though. Some of those Freethinkers and Rationalists groups are pretty damn toxic in their own right. That whole branch of dudebro atheism that decided they were so brilliant at being skeptical about religion they decided to apply that same skepticism to attacking feminists and SJWs.
To be fair, that may be a little outdated. Most of them may have either given up or moved on to being openly Nazi now.
Here we got all these atheists so hung up on being against islam they became catholics -out of spite? I don’t know I can’t even begin to understand how it’s not just plain racism?
Yeah, you’ve gotta be careful about those white male atheists that have a pile of privilege to stand on and don’t believe ‘because it is stupid’ and are all about how intellectual they are.
I’d be wary of anyone that calls themselves a ‘freethinker’ or ‘rationalist’ until you know specifically what they mean personally by using that word. There is a world of difference between thinking you are a freethinker because your community acts like a cult that has never had an original idea in 30 years and just expects you to go along with their religious beliefs because they say so vs thinking you are a freethinker for insulting anyone that is religious especially by implying they are unintelligent/lesser.
Well that wasn’t really the case here (almost atheist country with law based on freethinking and communities not really being a thing then – so that was rather a conservative/far right outing through this occasion to give racism a free ticket) but I believe you about this in the US.
At first I wished atheism had more cultural identity but I’m ok with it now. my kids spouse and I made our own atheistic religion of symbolically worshiping the goddesses of Hylia.
Exactly. Joyce has never been focused on theology or doctrine – though she’s picked up the hot button issues, but on the emotional experience. Which is something she’s not really going to get from atheism. She probably could from what she’d call a hippy church, if it had the right kind of music (and most importantly portrayed Jesus properly in a blue sash).
There is a Unitarian Universalist church in Bloomington, though it’s on the far north side of town, so Joyce would need a car ride or a bike. I went a couple times. UUs are probably too wishy-washy for Joyce, though.
(I have limited direct experience, but the UUs in San Francisco seemed relatively theistic. I was told “the Midwest is a hotbed of humanism” for the UU — I suspect that where Christianity is more culturally dominant, the UUs function as a refuge and support for many atheists, whereas in SF they don’t need it so UU was more for very liberal theists.
Bloomington is in the Midwest but is a liberal college town, so I dunno what to expect there, and I didn’t go enough to get a feel.)
Atheism is lack of a belief in god, not the certainty that there is none.
Most atheists I know are agnostic atheists. We don’t believe because there’s no evidence, but we cannot state as fact that there isn’t one, somewhere in the universe. Cannot prove a negative, etc.
For some people it’s reeeaally important to distinguish between “lack of belief” and “belief there is none”. I dunno. 🤷♂️ Seems in effect the same to me but what do I know.
Practically it is the same, but some people are into philosophical questions of epistemology and certainty. This goes back to the very guy who coined ‘agnosticism’ for himself, TH Huxley:
> I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel. I cannot see one shadow or tittle of evidence that the great unknown underlying the phenomenon of the universe stands to us in the relation of a Father [who] loves us and cares for us as Christianity asserts.
He’s saying he’s basically an atheist, but he doesn’t like other atheists, and (in another wikipedia quote) says “they” were sure they had achieved gnosis, solved the problem of existence. Whether he was accurately describing the atheists he knew, I beg leave to doubt.
Bertrand Russell had
> As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
Like most people not involved in internet pie fights over atheism, no particular definition, just a broad “doesn’t believe in God” like we use for lack of belief in everything else.
Folks seem to want to be putting her in a defined box, be it Athiest, Agnostic, or Christian-just-questioning, when where she’s really at is a giant question mark, one that *she* needs to solve, not have solved for her.
Now, her friends pushing her a bit, if done in a supportive way, isn’t a bad thing. But folks need to stop assuming that her new mindstate is entirely coherent.
Her mindstate certainly isn’t coherent – see her imagination on what being an atheist is about.
But focusing on the details of exactly how much she doesn’t believe in God is missing the point and wouldn’t help her struggle here at all. She’s lost her faith and she’s struggling to accept that. A nuanced debate about the finer details of agnosticism vs atheism won’t change the fact that she no longer believes in God.
There isn’t that option, though. I mean, if you really are uncertain, yeah but again it isn’t optional. If you are honest, your belief and level of certainty is something you can’t just decide on.
I could say I allow for the possible existence of god but that would be a lie. Best I can say is “If it turns out there is a god, I’ll have to admit I was wrong. But I just don’t see it.”
Atheist Vegans of Marx, coming to a town near you!
For real tho, I can think of way too many atheist capitalist supporters. And you ain’t enjoyed kale until you served it on a burger. (A thick one, though, not the thin fast-food kind)
“I eat chicken fingers, not kale”
Same, fuck kale
“I have a closet full of stuffed Veggietales”
I don’t have LarryBoy anymore but it’s not because I wanted to lose him
“I do Tiktoks-”
Are we sure Joyce is an atheist and not a devil worshipper now? That’s, like, beyond demented.
Just heard an online presentation from David Dylan Thomas on Cognitive bias yesterday. The shortcut Joyce’s brain takes: atheism = Health food, socialism (this means wanting health insurance, right?) and not being on social media are quite breathtaking.
Ugh, not me. One of the greatest things about being an atheist is not having to get up on Sunday mornings and listen to some asshole blather on about some god.
I don’t have any desire to replace that.
(I’ve been an atheist since I was six. Got dragged to church until I was about 11 and explained to my parents that I wasn’t ever going again, and if they forced me I would make a massive and very unpleasant scene by very loudly calling the preacher a liar every time he opened his mouth.)
While I’m all in favor of European-style socialism, I’ve long since given up on the idea that our congresspeople would give us that if we asked them for it. Also, this atheist definitely prefers chicken fingers over kale.
Honestly this term is rather misleading. Europe doesn’t have Socialism, Europe has Social Policies. The countries are still very much Capitalist Democracies.
As a European, I’m always astonished to read that there is socialism in Europe somewhere. Having mandatory health insurance is not socialism.
Following a concept of ‘ it keeps the peace within a nation to not let the gap between the rich and the poor become ridiculously large’ still isn’t socialism.
Yeah, it takes a while to have your entire lifestyle catch up with your atheism. Just because you stop believing in God doesn’t mean you’ll instantly start cussing, smoking, drinking, fucking, engaging in “New Age” tomfoolery. I wouldn’t be surprised if Joyce was drawn to Ayn Rand briefly. It wouldn’t stick permanently though. Joyce has too much love for people to be objectivist.
Burying the lede here. I want to see Joyce’s TikTok. I wonder how many strips would have been dedicated to it if TikTok had existed when the comic started.
I grew up on it. In Germany there’s a whole winter festival around Kale. GruenKohl und Pinkle is yum! Basically Kale mixed with sausage or any kind of meat (i usually use bacon) and sometimes potatoes as well. Really nummy.
There we have it: Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics as the Red Tribe and atheism, homosexuality, and progressive politics as the Blue Tribe. It’s one thing to have Blue Tribe friends like gay people and atheists, but becoming an atheist herself means Joyce is leaving her tribe and joining the enemy tribe.
How much it actually works like this and how much people only think it works like this can get very blurry.
I envy Joyce her lack of knowledge that there are some fringes of the New Atheism movement who make the religious right look like cuddly left-of-centre moderates.
Joyce plans to go to her first coven ceremony with what she thinks is appropriate; organic sea salt, a box cutter, box of birthday candles, the jingle bell from a cat toy, Bottle of Evian, jar with aroma therapy sticks, paper dessert plate, a blue essay book with a purple felt tip pen.
Sarah: Joyce, What is all this…?
Joyce: I’ve been invited to join a Coven!
Sarah: That’s insulting, that’s wholly … No, you know what? …..ugh, Just never mind.
Haha, this is such an interesting way to take Joyce’s character. She’s lost her faith in god but still normalized the politics of her conservative christian upbringing.
I cant help but think about the old strip where Joyce and Dorothy are watching Hymmel, and Walky drops in … that young actress wearing the chastity lock in the video is probably in her upper 20s now with three kids, five teeth, and living in a trailer park.
Show biz will do that to you.
Like I said yesterday, decades of Cold War propaganda programmed generations of Americans to reflexively reject any “ism” (except capitalism) as an evil virus of Satan. Even while they enjoy infrastructure and services built by the federal government.
So relatable. I went through a long period of denial and disengagement; it was painful and grief was proportionate to what I’d invested in Christianity.
To this day it really bugs me when people think atheists could just choose not to believe for reasons.
For the most part, that is a defense mechanism that Christians employ so that they don’t actually have to think about the fact that they never chose to believe either. Most Christians were never given an option, they were just brought up in some variation of Christianity and never gave it much serious thought because their parents pressured them into it.
I think you choose to believe or not. It’s just whether you want to make that choice. Because if you don’t FEEL faith and choose to believe, you’ve chosen.
Plenty of people have done that in RL.
It’s not a moral stance but a way of living your life.
The choice is made based on a mix of perceived evidence and conscience (same with religion, I guess). You don’t get much more freedom of will than that.
I’m sorry, but this is a false dichotomy. Just because she no longer sees herself as an Evangelical, does not make her an Atheist. There are several denominations of Christianity, which are more open and tolerant. One only need to look at Sierra and Jacob to realize that. Yes, in the end, she could decide to be Atheist, or she could choose to be Agnostic, or the many other hundreds of other Christian based Faiths. Just please, do not make this a, “you are either A or B”, scenario.
No, but the not believing in God part does make her an atheist. She hasn’t just decided she doesn’t agree with her former churches intolerance. She has lost her faith in God altogether.
She’s just having trouble thinking of herself as atheist, because she still has all these weird assumptions about what it means.
More, she’s not “choosing”. Which is pretty common among both theists and atheists – we don’t choose to believe or disbelieve, we just do or don’t. And then sometimes live in denial or fake it for awhile.
Joyce doesn’t believe in God. In any Gods or higher beings of any kind. That makes her an atheist.
This isn’t a dichotomy where Willis is saying you are X or you are Y. It is Willis saying that for Joyce personally, the option was X, or it was Y, and now she is Y but struggling to accept it.
As some people have said in the comments in the last few comics, in an extreme branch, once one strand unravels, the whole thing tends to fall apart. If I were to make a comparison, it is like cutting off the base of a branch on a tree. Some might just prune off small twigs and rotten parts – this was how Becky approached it despite being from the same extreme environment, she pruned out the worst parts and believed the faith itself was fine. But for Joyce, the whole branch is diseased and has got to go. Not because she wanted it be, but when she pruned, all she kept finding was more rotten parts of the branch that needed to be removed until she gave up on trying to save the branch. The branch for her rotted entirely and couldn’t be saved.
Joyce’s faith didn’t shatter at a point where another branch, community, church or religion could fix it. It shattered at the point of God existing at all as a concept. You can’t magic up a belief in God, or in any religious figure, that you just don’t have or feel no connection to. Joyce isn’t uncertain about it either, she just plain doesn’t believe in any form of God at all. That is called being an atheist.
Could events occur that bring back enough faith to make her uncertain? Yes, but right now, that’s not where she is. She is at 0% faith. She is at faith gone. She is at No God Or Higher Being Club. And she’s not comfortable with it yet because being a Christian was a large part of her identity for a large part of her life and she still holds a lot of false assumptions about atheists.
All of this! Joyce thinks she can’t be an atheist because Obviously Atheists Are X, Y, and Z, and Joyce is not. But the core factor – Joyce does not believe in God, does not feel God when she prays, and in the dream that most directly addressed the subject and seemed to have spurred the Jacob Debacle a few days later talks to a clear God analogue/metaphor and asks ‘But you’re not here at all, are you? You never were.’ The stuff here is deflection from the most important point, and the one she can’t refute: She doesn’t believe in God, because she cannot reconcile every other thing the congregation taught her being wrong and this thing alone being true. She cannot accept the concept of ‘We’re all imperfect. Except for Jesus Christ.’ as a thing she takes comfort in, because the subsequent ‘Jesus died for us because he is perfect and we are sinful’ reminds her – and by that I mean ‘actively triggers her’ – to Ross saying the same thing while pointing a gun at her and Becky and Carol saying it to justify his actions. Joyce is not in a place where she will be Christian again any time soon, because the entire framework was unsalvageable to Joyce, personally.
Exactly. I see this a lot in the atheist community when somebody first becomes an atheist. Or when religious people try to look into our community and are scratching their heads to try to figure out what’s going on.
I have a very simple metaphor I use to help teach new people what being an atheist is like. Being an atheist is a lot like being a non-smoker. In each case, there is something that you have identified as extremely harmful and not for you period so you don’t do it. just knowing that somebody is a non-smoker doesn’t tell you about what they eat and drink, how they vote, or anything else in their life except the fact that they don’t smoke. and the same applies to being an atheist. It doesn’t tell you anything else about that person except that they just don’t believe in a god. If you want to actually know about a person, you should interact with them and find out for yourself instead of trying to just apply a single label and assume that it is accurate.
Sorry, ziggy. But it really is a binary proposition. you are either a theist or an atheist period just like you are either a smoker or a non-smoker. There is no middle ground between the two. And no, agnosticism is not a third option. Gnosticism and agnosticism address knowledge. Not belief. and there are not mutually exclusive. There is such a thing as a gnostic atheist, who claims to know that there is no god. there is also the agnosticate atheist who does not believe that a God exists but isn’t willing to stake their reputation on it, being open to being proved wrong. There’s the Gnostic theist who claims to know with absolute certainty that a god exists. And the agnostic theists who believe that a God exists but claims that they don’t really know anything about it.
But atheism at its most basic is a very simple proposition. If you do not actively believe in at least one god, you are an atheist. Full stop. If you do actively believe in at least one god, you are some variety of theists and we can ask more questions to parse out exactly which flavor you might happen to be.
note “actively believe”, a good and telling qualification. i doubt that it’s meaningfully possible to identify with athiesm without coming to believe that there is no god. i think there is a meaningful stratum between that and “active belief” in one or more deities. also think the term agnostic can usefully be applied to the position of finding a deity _plausible_ while at the same time having never heard a credible account of its nature and behavior.
I am not buying it, not one iota. There is no binary, for sexual/gender identity, we can agree on that. There is no binary on the political spectrum, again, something we can wrap our heads around. When it comes to most aspects of identity, there is no simple binary, we hear it all the time. So when it comes to religious belief, you are now suddenly, “nope there are only two choices”? No, Uh uh. Nope. Never, ever. I am not saying that she cannot be, I am only against that is her only other option.
There are plenty of choices, but they arrange like a flow chart. The first choice on that chart is a simple a/b choice. If you pick a, you’re done. Atheist. End of line. If you pick b, then you can go down the list and figure out exactly what variety of b you are.
But being an atheist isn’t an important part of a person’s identity. Any more than being a non-smoker is. This is why I use the non-smoking metaphor quite a bit. See smokers will argue over which brand is better. and if you can get them to agree on a brand then they’re going to argue about whether to use filtered or unfiltered. Menthol or no menthol. Shorts, regulars, or hundreds. But if you are a non-smoker, or an atheist, none of that matters. Full stop. None of it is important to you. As I often say. *”I don’t care if you’re offering me unfiltered fundamentalism or heavily filtered reformed. I don’t care if you mix spiritual menthol in or if you’re straight from the book purist. I especially don’t care if your hand rolled homegrown ‘spiritual but not religious* beliefs will toootally open my mind, maaaaannn….. I’m an atheist. And I don’t want any of whatever you’re smoking.”*
Speaking as an atheist, I see this exact same situation a lot. people who have just had their faith shaken or destroyed, who have just left the religion their parents brought them up in, and who have a lot of ridiculous misconceptions about how to be an atheist. Many of them expect to trade one color of robes or hat for another. Silly, I know, but that’s just the way things are.
Alright willis, I cant get mad at this one this time. Thats me there in the coroner. 🙁 Christianity made me an athiest. is that a hashtag? are those things? I dunno, I dont tweet.
Joyce gives out a lot of talking points that I love to get from theists when discussing atheism. Atheism, by itself – a rejection of claims of the existence of gods, is very hard to argue against so they try to link it to evolution, socialism, satanism, etc. which they have an easier time criticizing – partly because people don’t understand what those words actually mean but still have negative feelings about. Connect atheism to them around people conditioned to view them negatively, and atheism automatically becomes evil.
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“I was now years old when I realised Christianity made me atheist”
Dumbing of Age Book 11: Atheist Coven
“Actually reading the Bible” is a common reason given for turning atheist.
Really? Because I would think that doing so would nicely kill a lot of the Prosperity Gospel racism that has no place in it.
Well, people have spent centuries perfecting the art of construing the books of the Bible to support whatever they damn well want them to support. Of course, it does help that the books themselves have contradictory teachings.
Very true. I remember when I pointed out Jesus hated wealthy people and a guy I knew freaked the hell out about it.
Yeah I know a lot of wealthy christians who go through mental gymnastics about the camel through the eye of the needle bit
Evangelical Christians have come up with the solution for that. It’s called “Bible Study” which, as you might expect is less studying the bible and more about indoctrinating people on the “proper” way to interpret it.
To be fair, that’s basically what all churches do. No one just sits kids down with the Bible and says “Just figure it out”. Some may try for a less heavy-handed approach, but in the end they’re still using the Bible to teach their own doctrine, their own interpretation.
I’m not trying to disagree with you–my experience is that is what is done.
But I am someone who leads Bible studies for adults. I ask people to confront their own assumptions and biases, ignore official doctrine and see if the text agrees or disagrees with it, and consider other interpretations. And this is done without judgment. People are surprisingly un-indoctrinated when you let them speak their own thoughts.
The idea of Bible study as indoctrination is probably why there are some people at my church not very happy with my studies. Luckily there’s almost nobody who wants to teach Religious Ed, so I’ll probably be corrupting the children sometime soon.
Quakers believe that the only true method to find god is to read the fucking bible, and decide for yourself. Never trust someone else’s reading.
Don’t know about churches, but in synagogues the rabbi will try to get everyone to disagree with each other and find multiple ways to interpret each reading. I’ve had my rabbi get into arguments with himself just because everyone was quietly going along with his interpretation, and you’re not participating if you don’t disagree with anyone.
Worth noting that there’s not really any such thing as a Quaker priesthood. There is essentially no organized institution that needs to maintain power over its membership to persist – it’s among the most decentralized versions of Christianity out there.
To a lesser extent, the same can be said of Judaism – there have been no Jewish priests for several thousand years. Rabbis are explicitly NOT priests – the word means ‘teacher – though some branches of Judaism blur the distinction more than others.
Doesn’t help that most translations are kind of garbage. KJV in particular is a dumpster fire. Comparing it to Vulgate makes it clear that the translators didn’t actually know Latin. Not that Vulgate is great to begin with. So if you don’t like implications of translation of one passage, you can probably find another passage that makes completely different kind of sense, because who ever heard of keeping things consistent?
I think people hold on to KJV for the same reason there was so much resistance to translating into common languages. If it’s not everyday language, it feels holier.
I’m pretty sure it’s KJV that mangled the proverb we know as “train up a child in the way that he should go and he will not turn from it”, and even though modern translators know it’s more like “if you let a child do whatever they want, when they grow up nobody will be able to control them”, but many feel they have to leave the bad translation meaning because it’s so well known that people would treat them like the Wicked Bible (forgot the “not” in “thou shalt not commit adultery”) if they used a more accurate meaning.
“Spare the rod and and spoil the child”? That passage?
You mean, “[You should] spare the rod and spoil the child”? That one? XD
I know it’s more usually taken to mean “[If you] spare the rod [then you will] […] spoil the child,” but I would like to point out that the latter reading, rather than simply assuming that one understands that the statement is a direct command, instead forces one to lose or change the “and” in order to force that interpretation to make grammatical sense.
It’s obviously been grievously misinterpreted for a long while. 😉
Plus, while it’s lousy as a translation, in many places it’s really beautiful as writing.
There are good modern translations out there though, that work from current scholarship. There is that streak of fundamentalist churches that cling to the KJV though.
I am skeptical of “didn’t actually know Latin”, given the important of Latin in Europe.
“Didn’t know Greek and Hebrew well” is both more plausible and more relevant, since the KJV committees went to the Greek and Hebrew sources, rather than translating the Vulgate into English.
People who turn atheist due to reading the Bible cover to cover are indeed unlikely to support Prosperity Gospel.
Which is precisely why they don’t actually read the Bible.
That’s exactly what happened to me. I read the bible start-to-finish on a 9h flight from Washington to Rome back in 2004 and I remember exclaiming “man what a load of rubbish” out loud when I finished, sending the 60 year old white protestant lady sitting next to me straight into pearl clutching mode… Good times.
Fortnight Athiest coven GO!
-DABS-
…I’ll show myself out
“Atheist Coven” is the name of my next metal band.
Skip right over atheism, watching Hymmel (or his real life equivalent Psalty) could convert people to Satan worship.
And Joyce, we know you were only into it because of that kid in the mouse suit.
I want some contrived offscreen shenanigans to result in Walky walking in the door in a mouse costume for some reason, just to see Joyce react.
That was going to be Walky’s Halloween costume……
Damn you, Willis, for skipping over Halloween!!
You have achieved the impossible and made me want DOA: Halloween even more.
this makes me sad. Couldnt we have just had Halloween- thanksgiving – Hanukkah and New years eve ?
It’s all part of the plan: DOA Book X: Bonus Content – All the shit you missed during the timeskip.
Look I’m with Joyce.
Chicken fingers beat kale any day.
If eating kale is an atheist thing then I must have missed the memo, because I survive off of chicken fingers.
Kale is just our code-word for babies.
I thought the code word was arugula, because you can’t expect anyone to believe people eat that.
We can have more than one code word!
TRIGGERED VEGAN WARNING
Arioch, have you never tasted arugula? It’s yummy. I have put it in tacos and in burgers. I have eaten it by the handfuls out of the container. Maybe you’re a supertaster, which means a lot of things taste way more bitter to you than to most people. Can you eat brocolli? If you’re a supertaster that stuff will be VILE.
Seriously, what’s the deal with kale hate as well? I hate to prep it, but I think it’s tasty. Hate how it gets between my teeth though.
I’m no vegan, but I use arugula in salads more often than not. It’s awesome.
Kale got the same treatment as brussel sprouts, where lots of people were fed improperly prepared variants and decided it was terrible evermore.
Sliced thick on salad it’s too thick to chew, put too much into a shake and its too pulpy. Sliced and sauteed in butter, or dried with olive oil and salt however, it’s great.
For arugula, it’s an entirely different problem: the american vegetables for the non-vegetarian have been aimed at providing the least flavor possible for so long that people take a bite, go “it’s bitter and tastes like pepper” when they’re expecting iceburg lettuce.
My German dad taught us a fantastic way to prepare kale. You start with I guess about a can of kale (you can make it from fresh or frozen too if you prefer, but then I have no idea of the amounts to use but you will need to cook it until it’s tender and probably also add salt), drain it, and add it to a big stewpot. Add a rasher or two of bacon, chopped already-boiled potatoes (great way to use up leftovers from the night before; Dad would make extra just for the kale the next day), and one to two farmer’s sausages per person. You can put the sausages in whole, but I like to slice them up so they distribute more evenly.
Heat the whole thing up (you may need to add some salt) and let it simmer a little bit until the sausages are warmed through, and serve it up in a big bowl. Absolutely delicious, just a big warm sausage-and-bacony bowl of savoury goodness, and the perfect thing for a cold day. Also it reheats well–assuming you have any left over.
And now I wish I could actually get canned kale and farmer’s sausage here in Nova Scotia, because I’ve made myself hungry. 🙁 You can substitute kielbasa in a pinch but it really isn’t the same, and I can’t find the canned stuff here, either. 🙁 Unfortunately you only really have ready access to German ingredients in Western Canada. *cries in German*
So you are the reason all those chickens are running around unable to pick up things.
That just means you haven’t prepared the kale properly. Put it in a big pot with meat, cook the shit out of it, serve with potatoes.
That sounds like the way my Mom prepared spinach, only without the meat. Rinse it, boil the piss out of it, and serve it as a side dish instead of green beans, peas, or whole-kernel corn.
Kale with meat and potatoes is a traditional dish in North Germany. Just google “Grünkohlessen” (substitute the ü with ue in case you’re lacking umlauts).
Sounds like our Stamppot Boerenkool. Assuming we’re speaking curly kale here, and not one of the many other kinds.
With spekkies and rookworst, of course.
As a German i might add…while we have a few kale dishes.
There are alot of Germans who actually hate that stuff.
Same goes for “Sauerkraut”
– that all germans eat that stuff is actually a myth.
Yeah, it’s great once you add [17 flavourful ingredients] and only eat a little bit of it as a side!
You don’t need a lot of ingredients. Just a bit of salt – heck, you might not even need the salt depending on the meat you’re putting in the pot.
I prefer to steam it, without meat. And then it’s tasty. But ofc, like all vegetables and fruits, the taste clearly depends of where and how it grew.
Like tomatoes.
I can’t eat a supermarket tomato since I’ve eaten the good ones, the one that doesn’t taste like – fridge.
There are a lot of meh tomatoes out there, but putting your tomatoes in the fridge is itself a mistake.
I don’t. That’s the problem, when tomatoes that weren’t even in a fridge taste like a mix of freon and plastic, don’t age, but smell of ripe tomatoes.
I really like it raw in salads. Like, cut it finely and leave it for a couple of hours with a bit of sugar and salt and then mix with, for example, thin apple slices, dry cranberries, and cut hazel nuts.
Put the kale on a pot with water, a kangaroo tail, pimiento, sweet paprika, garlic, long pepper, and a stock cube. Cover with a sheet of slate, and stew gently until the slat is soft.
Then eat the slate.
It’s rare you meet a kale lover who is such a connoisseur.
Huh. That’s the recipe I was given for Galah.
It’s a basic cooking technique for bush tucker. Works on everything from cockatoos to bunya nuts.
I am Gene C’Pause. And I second this message.
And add red kiddely beans to the potatoes. Also after the first frost Kale gets sweet tasting.
Yup!! Bitter if you pick it too soon; but you can toss it in the freezer overnight to fix that.
And pick out the kale and throw it away.
Yasssss!! Use bacon and farmer’s sausage; soooo good!!
Agreed.
I’m totally the atheist Joyce’s church imagines. But kale is basically a tougher version of grass clippings.
Don’t mind me. I’m still trying to figure out why Edamame tastes so much better than soybeans.
Fresh edamame. Dried edamame tastes like something Joyce would refer to only by its first letter. Not sure what that would be, but it’s bad.
Probably the (almost) obscene amount of salt?
That’s why you have both with lots of ranch dressing.
I feel as though Joyce hasn’t actually learned much about atheism or her other alternatives, despite all the time she has had to do so. Which also makes me wonder, what were people’s assumptions about atheism/agnosticism/other before you really learned about?
“Agnostics are just lazy atheists”- a community reference I took to believe as fact as a child.
Also, that atheists had moral objections to the bible or god’s various acts of destruction (which I totally got at age 5) instead of not believing in the afterlife (which I didn’t get, because so bleak)- I sorta conflated it with Antitheism
I still have moral objections to a lot of the Bible. I’m actually in a lengthy (and respectful, yay!) combox discussion about that now. That’s in addition to not believing it’s real.
Most Christians I meet are actually decent people, so the OT atrocities bother them.
Abraham and Isaac and the fake-out sacrifice is the moral event horizon for me. Genocide, sure, whatever, the flood’s a metaphor. “Obedience is more important than your own moral judgment”? Yeah, that makes me have to take a day to cool off after I read it.
“hardened Pharaoh’s heart” – “hold on, hold on, I know it’s messing with free will but I’m not done fucking Egypt over yet.”
I remember a weird conversation about Abraham and Isaac:
Friend: I can’t believe you believe in this stuff. Abraham and Isaac is a story of pure evil.
Me: What do you mean?
Friend: God asked Abraham to kill his own son to prove his loyalty.
Me: Yeah, it’s a prohibition against human sacrifice.
Friend: Wait, what?
Me: What do YOU think it’s about?
Friend: Blind unblinking loyalty.
Me: Uh, no, it’s about telling people the Hebrew God doesn’t engage in mass murder of your children.
Friend: Why would they have to do that?
Me: Uh, because that literally was an incredibly common religious practice. Look at Carthage and every other culture of the region at the time.
Friend: I feel like we have different perspectives on this.
Me: Yeah, I’m studying to be an anthropologist.
…that is legitly fascinating.
And yeah, it’s something that religious folk need to come to terms with regarding the Bible (and other such religious texts): They were written and edited by people to address the issues *of the time*. If you strip it of that context, the stories lose their original meanings.
My personal favorite is the parable of the Good Samaritan. These days it’s a simple “it’s awesome to help people out” thing. But in the original context, Samaritans were a rival religious offshoot of Judaism, and hated by the people that Jesus was talking to. The parable’s really about contrasting two purportedly upstanding individuals who ignored the man in need of help, and the “hated enemy” who does the kind thing… and that’s a factor that’s easy to lose when, these days, “Samaritan” hardly needs the “Good” said anymore to imply it.
Very good point about the Samaritan Parable. Literalism doesn’t benefit anyone, especially when people are talking in parable in the first place.
Yeah, that’s one of the things about a lot of the Bible, especially the Old Testament: It makes far more sense read as a history of the cultural evolution of the people and the religion than it does as the unchanging Word of a perfect moral being.
“Here is a fable about why we don’t do human sacrifice, unlike those other religions” vs “It would absolutely be right to murder your children if God wanted it like He used to, but luckily he doesn’t anymore.”
See, if the point is “don’t sacrifice your kids to God”, then the way you show that is either by having Abraham punished for trying or by having him rewarded for refusing.
“Sacrifice your kids to me” “Okay” “Psych, but since you listened, here’s a reward, never actually sacrifice your kids” doesn’t actually convey “don’t sacrifice kids”, it conveys “do whatever God says, anything he tells you to do will work out fine in the end”.
Yeah, I’m not buying it.
The whole thing was a political document, designed to maintain power. Absolute obedience was clearly a goal of the authors. Avoiding human sacrifice would have only been a tiny side goal vs being the people who could interpret the word of their god for the people they were trying to control.
(Yes, I’m actually convinced that the authors of the vast majority of religious texts were in fact atheists, very much aware that they were writing documents to give themselves control of the uncritical masses, with the remaining few being under the influence of hallucinogens or schizophrenics.)
Whether you buy it or not, I think you should take into account that the storyline is a book of folklore. Ascribing a kind of Illuminati-esque supervillain teaching obedience over it is about as valid as saying “The Deep State is behind it.” Whatever people take from it, the story has God substitute a lamb (literal one, not Jesus) for Isaac and establishes this is not cool.
While simultaneously this is very cool in every other culture around us, including the ones we regularly war with.
Yeah I’d argue that authorial intent needs to be studied in cultural context- I’m sure the bible was a political work (literally any work is political) but the specific aims can vary wildly. In modern contexts it’s held up by cultural conservatives; but in ancient contexts what conservatism *itself* was is different. (Not to mention jesus being a commie and the new testiment arguably being written at first around an illegal/frowned on upstart religion).
Like to be clear, the bible is definitely used as a tool for a ton of authoritarians; but I don’t think everyone who’s wielded it in the past has been
(And finally: I’m honestly pretty sure religious people do write religious texts; both because someone can do awful cynical things in the name of their beliefs and because there are definitely for sure people who consider themselves legitimately inspired- like I’m not an atheist so much as a “meh”, so naturally this would color my view but even if it is all fake that doesn’t mean a vast majority of folk involved would have known it was)
To some extent. On the other hand, there likely wasn’t an “author” in the traditional modern sense, but editors and compilers working with stories out of oral tradition.
They can change those stories, but only so far before the populace rejects them as not being the ones they know.
Don’t forget the flood. “This small group of people are bad, so I am going to drown everything and start over.” So fuck all the people who have never heard of the Christian religion, along will all the innocent animals and plants.
Even within the story, the Flood long pre-dates Judaism, let alone Christianity. There are also Mesopotamian (probably the original) and Greek versions.
I thought believing that God exists but is a jerk was Maltheism.
Misotheism is where you believe god exists but you hate him.
Kevin Sorbo’s professor in “God’s not dead” is a misotheist, not an atheist. That’s right, christian anti-atheist propaganda is so off base that they can’t even get it right when one of their main characters is an atheist.
“…when one of their main characters is supposed to be an atheist.”
Sorry, my proofreading-fu is lacking.
I wish there were more misotheists. Leslie believing in God but hating him would be interesting.
We could have a crossover with the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina or Supernatural.
(Leslie has never watched an episode of the latter, I’ll bet)
“Got it all wrong, holy man. I absolutely believe in God. And I absolutely hate the fucker.” – Riddick, Pitch Black
I really liked the Rose of the Prophet trilogy bc the highly religious people would thank their God(dess) for the good things BUT ALSO curse them for the bad things. None of this, “yeah ok if it was bad then it’s God’s will” stuff.
As was also pointed out to me, sports all players will thank Jesus for good plays but kick themselves for messing up; no one says, “Jesus made me miss that pass!” even though that would be contextually reasonable to believe
“Misotheism” makes me think of soup. And now I’m hungry.
Me: “Knock knock.”
You: “Who’s there?”
Me: “Miso.”
You, expecting a pun about soup and/or a bedroom joke: “Miso who?”
Me, rebelling against God: “Misotheism.”
Ohhh!!!!!! It’s mal-theism, I read it as malt-theism and thought it was the worship of Beer, and I was gonna tell you off, that Bacchus already had thst sewn up. 4am is too sleepy to respond to comments.
Maltheism, the worship of Mal.
You can’t take the sky from me.
Have a spare Internet.
“Agnostics are just lazy atheists” – That’s not completely wrong. ^^
Agnostics are people who don’t believe in Gnostic mysticism
I have no memory of not having a good understanding of atheism and agnosticism.
Yeah. My mother de-converted thirteen years before I was born, and I don’t think my father’s family had been religious since George IV. Except for building churches so they could sit in the front pew.
(St Andoenus’ Church, Mounton.)
Yeah, I was raised without religion as well – though I don’t really remember learning anything about atheism or agnosticism until fairly late. We just didn’t do religion. It didn’t really come up much.
I do remember somewhere in early elementary school doing a go round the circle introduction/icebreaker thing where one of the things we were supposed to tell the class was what church we went to. I was much confused and responded with something like “I think my grandmother’s Congregationalist?”
I was, however, surprised by other people’s surprise at my being atheist. Don’t recall details. Was also surprised by the middle school bus mostly not knowing ‘agnostic’.
“You mean there’s a word for not believing in God?”
Followed a few years later by:
“You mean there’s a word for not being sure one way or the other and/or not caring?”
Bits of the Bible were a great read, but it was so similar to other mythologies–like, say, the Greeks, Romans, Sumerians, etc. And no one had the forethought to tell me those were other religions, but instead that they were all fiction. And, well, 9-10 year old me found it a bit odd that some of these stories were fiction but the ones in the Bible weren’t. Aaaand no one could explain that one to me, either. A neighbor giving me Silmarillion as a 10-year-old after finding out I’d read The Hobbit was the clincher. “This is basically the Bible meets Greek stuff.”
To be fair, the Silmarillion echoes the Bible because Tolkien was a catholic. Any similarities were very likely fully intentional.
One of the reasons I couldn’t get into the Silmarillion was because I had forced my way through the bible and refused to do it again, even if there were elves this time.
My mom was convinced atheism is a phase. All the atheists I came into contact with before leaving the LDS church were newly-adult militant ex-Mormons. I was ashamed of having something in common with them. Later I realized defying your parents and experiencing anger isn’t all that shameful – although most new ex-Mormons are still a bit more in-your-face than I’d prefer.
I always figured agnosticism had something to do with Gnosticism, but I didn’t really understand the difference until I spent some actual time learning about Gnosticism.
I also always figured atheism was pretty benign until I met atheists on the internet. Anyone else remember the people who called themselves “Brights”?
More like it took one month of hell…
Joyce didnt seem all that tramatized, most of the characters didnt. Joyce was mostly just pissed off about the situation and did her best to protect her friend. While it probably had a huge impact on her current religous choices, it wasnt really a month of Hell for her as much as it was a Month of learning that her mother is horrible and so is her church, which lead her to questioning her religion and really thinking things through over that break.
Im pretty sure the only part of that month that effected her long term is maybe if her parents got a divorce.
I would disagree with the statement that she didn’t seem traumatized. She had issues with walking outdoors unescorted after the Ryan situation.
Joyce is aware of good Christians. It’s just that for Becky, the church was the evil that she turned to her faith to fight. For Joyce, her church was the only reason she believed in the first place. The structure was what was important.
I think it was more like two months before the timeskip, but apart from ‘I will die for you’ as an explicit trigger, a lot of her loss of faith had less to do with the trauma and more to do with meeting people with different viewpoints, discovering they are perfectly decent people, and getting more and more alienated from the church she grew up in with its insistence those people are Different and therefore Bad. (Most particularly, seeing they didn’t have Becky’s back, but Dorothy, Joe, Ethan, Dina, and Sierra and Agatha and other devout but Different Christians were influential in this as well.) Ryan doesn’t shake her faith in God, though the incident does probably teach her that quoting Scripture isn’t a guarantee of moral goodness. (In hindsight, that is pretty big.) It’s realizing the Good Christian in her hall (Mary) is terrible, and that even when they conflict she has more respect for Roz. It’s Dina’s insistence in scientific evidence that slowly begins cracking through Joyce’s walls (even if she’s not on the same ground as Becky, the all or nothing approach to faith Joyce had means she’s probably more open to evolution now because she no longer believes in original sin, really.) It’s Dorothy being kind and nonjudgmental when Joyce is starting to reveal her hangups about sexuality, and demonstrating she does have morals without needing to believe in God.
Becky coming out and her treatment by the community was, I think, the thing that burst the floodgates open, but it wasn’t the trauma that did it. It was realizing she loved Becky, as she was, and if God said there was something wrong with Becky then God had to be wrong. That’s the point from which she was willing to recognize ‘I would die for you because I know best’ as a fucked-up perspective, and from there to start reassessing whether the things she’d been taught were healthy.
Good analysis.
Thanks to COVID, we’ve had to cancel the covens. Sucks.
Doing them over Zoom just isn’t the same. Everyone has to bring their own kale.
Can’t you just scan the kale to a pdf and use Share Screen?
Tastes better that way.
Cancel the covens? Oh, yea of little faith.
50 points to clifendor.
Eh, the covens were overrated. I mean the Satanists get to sacrifice cats, but our covens involved herding them. Hard pass.
covid-covered covens
While I doubt that would be where it goes, Wiccan Joyce would be adorable.
Maybe just because I imagine she’d wear a Halloween witch’s hat the entire time.
*cues up “Personal Jesus” for the hacked Muzak*
The problem is that The Jackson’s “Blame It On The Boogie” is stuck on repeat. Can’t be helped. The repair tech is in isolation in another city.
Stephen, you don’t ‘repair’ a hacked system; hacked systems, by definition, aren’t working the way they’re supposed to. You simply hack them some more.
*gets to tinkering*
Did you try giving it a good Fonzie thump?
Are you sure you wouldn’t rather play “Plastic Jesus” by the Goldcoast Singers?
What about Chocolate Jesus by Tom Waits
TIL about the source for the comedic song “Plastic Jeezus” by The Levellers, and I am indebted to you Bicycle Bill, thanks.
Nah, “Velvet Elvis” by Weird Al.
Perhaps American Jesus by Bad Religion might be fitting.
There’s always Dear god – XTC
Go with the Johnny Cash version.
someone’s gonna clue joyce into the fact that there’s many, many atheists who’ve dome from where she has.
Yes but she’s COMPLETELY different.
She’s not like most fundie-turned-atheists.
She might or not might change her position on socialism but the blue sash is staying, here and and on all the universes.
Considering Robin has the same position… maybe she should consider campaign based on that 😛
“She might or not might change her position on socialism”
All it takes is one good health care bill.
What’s funny to me is that Becky is *much* more radically left than Joyce, and I’m surprised it hasn’t led to more conflict.
I think it’s actually quite understandable. Joyce tied up her Christian identity in a strict social structure that appeals to her (perhaps related to her being on the spectrum – note I am on it myself) while Becky’s Christian identity is related to her personal relationship to the faith.
Becky is down with Rebel JesusTM.
Joyce finds rebellion horrible!
I also think Joyce has a warped view of socialism, much like the view of atheism she’s showing here. If you told her any given POSITION socialists support, absent fearmongering and away from whatever words were loaded with that fearmongering… well, of COURSE Joyce thinks everyone should have safe housing and access to food and medicine when they need it! If Joyce saw what Becky had been paid at Galasso’s and then tried to go shopping on it, she’d recognize that yeah, this is abysmally low. And I suspect once it was explained to her that, say, uninsured people not being able to go to the doctor until it’s ER levels also costs more than guaranteed healthcare, she’d be even more confused and downright outraged. Obviously you should do this because it’s morally right, but why aren’t you doing it when it makes more sense anyway?
But if you told her all those positions made her a socialist, she’d have the exact same freakout as she’s having here. Joyce only recognizes socialism as a Scary Other still, so she’s vehemently not that. And Joyce hasn’t been homeless and employed in a sub-minimum wage job firsthand, so she doesn’t have quite the same experience to go ‘universal basic income all the way’ yet the way Becky did.
“Jesus doesn’t exist, but he wears a blue sash and I will fight you on both of things”
Is Joyce an egirl?
She’s a VTuber egirl, specifically.
Joyce, it’s AGNOSTICS who have covens, get it right.
And Sarah, it’s called a delayed reaction.
Fortnightly covens. Details are important, or something like that.
What did they play before Fortnite came out?
Good games.
Strip Apples to Apples.
You’re just trying to see JoyceZombieFace again, aren’t you?
NetHack.
Crusader Kings
Is that the show Walky was a singing mouse in?
Weirdly enough, there’s a lot of those. Somehow Walky just kept being a singing mouse in things.
It’s basically this MST3K sketch with mice.
Panel 2: there is so much to unpack I am just gonna say I know several atheist folks who like chicken fingers and several religious folks who are vegetarians, or vegan. As an Agnostic/Jewish (when my mom asks) I enjoy pulled pork and chicken fingers on my kale salad.
Listen, that’s just too much. I can’t believe it! There’s some things that are NOT possible!
Like being able to enjoy kale, even when dipped in pulled pork. Such a waste of a pig.
Heh, I KNEW the mouse-boy tape would show up again, if we waited long enough.
PUT! IT! ON!
PUT! IT! ON!
PUT! IT! ON!
Will this prompt Willis to bring back the Terrifying Psalty Image they used as a Tumblr background for a while? I do of course appreciate Blowjob Cat, but people need the Horror of Psalty returned to their lives.
By which I mean, if he’s haunting my dreams, he’s damn well haunting yours, too.
Seeing shows like Psalty and Colby make me thankful my parents let me watch Monty Python as a kid.
Monty Python is basically my sense of humor. I grew up memorizing Monty Python and The Holy Grail.
“It’s always ‘Sorry this .. ‘ and ‘Forgive me that …’ and “I’m not worthy…'”
“So depressing.”
“And stop grovelling!”
Joyce, I was raised a Catholic, but didn’t question my faith until high school. Not all atheists follow the stereotypes you think about: some are friendly people that care about other people, and some are horrible people that use scientific facts to try to justify racism and transphobia.
Also, not believing in gods doesn’t make a you leftist by default. Objectivists dislike both God and democracy.
“There is no God and Ayn Rand is His prophet.”
Heh!
Though in our current political climate the Objectivists are allied with the Religious Right, with little apparent conflict.
They also seem to like Rage Against The Machine, which is weird.
The sliding timescale means that Joyce Brown has a tiktok? o.O
That’s the app where kids dance around to Rick & Morty soundclips dressed as Harley Quinn, right?
I went Pagan instead of atheist after getting told the batshit fundies wanted to reduce the Earth to a smoking cinder so that Jesus would come back. I think having had the previous Near Death experience led me to think that there had to be something out there beyond what we know from our lives, but Yaweh was an asshole. Especially if He wanted our home to be in ruins before taking us back to Paradise. That struck me as something a loving deity would not do.
Besides the revels after the sabbats were a heck of a lot better than the pot luck socials after Sunday Services.
When I reach 80 I am totally starting a band and naming it The Pot Luck Socialists.
Sorry. You were saying?
Something is bothering me about the way you’re using a Jewish name for God while decrying a Death-Cult philosophy that is specifically Christian in nature—and a fairly antisemitic branch of Christianity, to boot. You generally seem like a pretty cool person, so could you please reconsider?
I think it’s done to identify the root Abrahamic god, as distinct from say, Zeus or Ghanesh or Ra or Odin. When you don’t believe in any dieties, it’s equally weird to refer to a particular sect’s god as God, since you don’t believe that particular one is correct either.
@RT Do you have something that is a more convenient reference to the Jesus faiths’ based god than, “the christian god” since it seems otherwise to not have a name?
“Jesus” isn’t helpful since it is also necessary to use that label to refer to the character in the bible distinct from the entity that supposedly spawned him and yet also was him. Which is I sulpose how the holy moly gets into the mix?
“Jehovah” is essentially the same as Yahweh, but a Latinized version that would thus appear only in Christianity, not Judaism.
In recent decades though it’s seen less usage in Christianity and Yahweh has seen more.
I think “Jehovah” might be appropriate. Thanks, thejeff!
Uh oh. References to TikTok and European-style socialism. The Dumbing world is not immune to these things.
*cut to Amber and Dina watching TikTok* *cut away again for two arcs of story with other characters* *cut back to Amber and Dina, still watching TikTok*
(I love how Joyce’s idea of not believing in a god still revolves around a group of people that meet regularly and eat certain foods)
(For clarity, the joking “uh oh” is at the references to socialism not to socialism itself or any policies that could be considered socialist)
As near as I can tell TikTok is the twitter version of YouTube and is cool because parents aren’t on it yet.
Am I missing anything important?
It’s owned by China.
Tik Tok is just Vine 2.0
Theeeee LAST time we saw Joyce vent
Coven…
It’s okay, Joyce. I’m an atheist and I eat chicken nuggets for breakfast, like, 50% of my workdays, lol
For clarity: the dinosaur shaped ones. Like any self-respecting adult. ^_^
Um… since chicken nuggets *ARE* made of dinosaur… what exactly are -non- dinosaur shaped nuggets?
(presuming of course, that no other animal fell into the flesh grinder)
Well, it’s not like chicken nuggets are shaped like chickens.
Here we’re talking about nuggets made of dinosaur and shaped like dinosaurs, as opposed to nuggets made of dinosaur but just shaped like little blobs.
Well you’re doing it wrong.
You also must live in Seattle, Los Angeles, or Atheistland.
What, Portland not good enough for ya?
I genuinely forgot I set my display name to Portland, whoops.
I did say Atheistland!
🙂
Oh shit, I’ve been doing it wrong all this time by living in the buckle of the Bible Belt lmfao (I wish I was kidding)
Someone needs to tell Joyce she can still enjoy and do all of that stuff and still be an atheist. It’s not an exclusive club of leftist hipster vegans or whatever she thinks it is.
Of course she can still be an atheist. She just can’t be one of the cool atheists.
Yeah, the cool atheists all have big spliffs and thug-life glasses.
Hey so this is going to be a long post and it has nothing to do with what everyone was talking about. About three years ago I was struggling with serious depression, which was later diagnosed as bipolar 1. I posted on this comments section about how I was struggling and how I was worried about telling my dad. I don’t expect anyone to remember, but going back to that page and looking at the comments I got, and all the support I got helped me past some bad times. I re-read those comments and knowing that people were rooting for me and wanted me to get better gave me hope.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/lights/#comment
This was the page. To anyone who might remember me, I am much healthier now. I ended up dropping out of college and I am doing a lot better without the stress of grades. Now, I’m living with a roommate, working a proper job and mostly succeeding in taking care of myself. I want to say thank you. This comic, and the amazing people who comment on it have done a lot for me. So, thank you.
I wasn’t around for that, but I’m glad you’re well!
8-)}
I know I didn’t comment at the time but I’m so glad to hear you’re doing well! Excellent job! <3
Good for you, Cap! I’m glad leaving college helped; it helped me, too, in a somewhat similar situation. Mostly succeeding at taking care of yourself is awesome; go you!
That comment was years ago for you, but for me? It was last week. I was kind of curious as to how you turned out. Congrats on your recovery.
Glad to hear you’re doing well!
♡♡♡
Glad to hear that you’re thriving on more suitable terms!
i’m happy for you!
Ok, the alt text made me lol for real.
She may not EAT vegetables, but she WILL watch them SING
Veggie Kales
I’m not that fond of kale, but I’d gladly eat a bushel of it rather than watch it sing.
Has Joyce just never interacted with atheist dudebros? At all? She has a twitter where she’s posted bible verses, I’m surprised she’s never had one try to “educate” her about how backwards she is while also trying to get her to send nudes.
Sarah should introduce Joyce to the concept of conservative atheists. It’s cute that she thinks all atheists are like Dorothy, but that’s just factually incorrect
Is it wrong I’m now envisioning Mike to be out of his coma SOLELY to show Joyce that bad atheists [like him] exist? Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike adopts religions to annoy people at will.
I imagined him rising from the hospital bed like Dracula in the Mel Brooks movie “I have returned for there are Souls to torment.”
Have we seen Dorothy not eat Chicken fingers (well, maybe she’s too adult for that) but kale instead (which is quite a recent fad and I don’t see Dorothy running after food fads)?
I could see Dorothy being a vegetarian. Something that would also shock Joyce.
I feel like Dorothy being veg would have come up by now, we’ve seen lots of meals. Including going out for sushi.
Recent fad? I got a cookbook with kale recipes from the 80’s…
I’m glad Joyce has Sarah, someone she can trust enough to open up like this. Sarah and her curmudgeonly sarcasm somehow fits perfectly with Joyce’s self-deprecating humor so Joyce can share things she wouldn’t dare with anyone else.
Wait a minute, atheists aren’t allowed to eat chicken fingers? …Please don’t tell the other atheists.
It’s okay. Since we don’t believe in God, we don’t believe in rules, especially rules like “don’t eat chicken fingers.” Use Joyce’s beliefs against her!
Galaxy brain
Wait, aren’t they in 2011? How they have access to tiktok?
Sliding time scale, dear chum. They watched Frozen on DVD in late 2010.
No, they’re in “current year”, whichever year that is at the moment
They have access to time travel. I mean the clue is in the name. Tik Tok.
It is two-thousand and twenty. It has always been two-thousand and twenty.
Joyce is The One Who Is. She is not The One Who Was. She is not The One Who Will Be.
Always Joyce today, never Joyce tomorrow.
Fortunately tomorrow never comes.
But it did. I saw it yesterday.
So you admit to being a time traveler?
Are you not familiar with the TARDIS Act of 2011?
http://scarygoround.com/bobbins/index.php?date=20171103
Honestly, the tiktok thing is the only one that really strikes me as particularly unusual for an atheist, unless they were talking about how they used to think Jesus should be drawn.
Then again, I can think of plenty of former Christians who still haven’t let go of old theological disagreements, and still hold particular disdain for their old rivals, so I guess it’s not that outlandish, just… A rather odd detail to end up fixated on, in my opinion.
Real atheists don’t use TikTok?
Boy am i glad that that show isn’t real
Kinda glad
I’d probably watch it once
Who’s gonna tell them?
Onetwothree NOT IT
Yeah, I’m not going to look up the links.
It’s based on the very real Psalty the Songbook which, yes, you can find on Youtube.
(Note: Reltzik is not culpable for any brain damage suffered by individuals who will probably watch said show once. It’s the internet, so you should know to click responsibly.)
Having helped others down from the existential precipice Joyce has placed herself on I get why she’s having this reaction, but I’ve personally never experienced it internally. I’ve been certain for many years (at least around 20) that all discourse on the existence or nature of any deities is a meaningless distraction regardless what one chooses to believe in that regard.
Faith is a personal matter. It doesn’t matter to anybody else if you have it or not.
Even as a Catholic, I firmly believe that other people’s beliefs are none of my business. If God has a problem with them, He will let them know when their time comes. It doesn’t involve me.
Faith is a personal matter until large bodies of religious extremists decide they can use it and their numbers to ruin the world and make your life hell because God.
Oh, look, that’s where we’ve been at for the past four evers.
“I’m not most people! It took me eighteeen years!”
… to turn into an atheist.
Also, Joyce, lots of atheists come from similarly intense Christian background. They’re probably the ones most vocal about being atheist. There might even be a campus club, “Secular Society” if not “American Atheists” or something. (I knew an IU undergrad who started a Secular or Freethinkers or Rationalists club, though I don’t know if it survived his time.)
Weirdly enough, I met one person who had the opposite: a father who was so obnoxious about being atheist, he decided to become a born-again Christian.
You’ve got to watch out for those though. Some of those Freethinkers and Rationalists groups are pretty damn toxic in their own right. That whole branch of dudebro atheism that decided they were so brilliant at being skeptical about religion they decided to apply that same skepticism to attacking feminists and SJWs.
To be fair, that may be a little outdated. Most of them may have either given up or moved on to being openly Nazi now.
Here we got all these atheists so hung up on being against islam they became catholics -out of spite? I don’t know I can’t even begin to understand how it’s not just plain racism?
Yeah, you’ve gotta be careful about those white male atheists that have a pile of privilege to stand on and don’t believe ‘because it is stupid’ and are all about how intellectual they are.
I’d be wary of anyone that calls themselves a ‘freethinker’ or ‘rationalist’ until you know specifically what they mean personally by using that word. There is a world of difference between thinking you are a freethinker because your community acts like a cult that has never had an original idea in 30 years and just expects you to go along with their religious beliefs because they say so vs thinking you are a freethinker for insulting anyone that is religious especially by implying they are unintelligent/lesser.
Well that wasn’t really the case here (almost atheist country with law based on freethinking and communities not really being a thing then – so that was rather a conservative/far right outing through this occasion to give racism a free ticket) but I believe you about this in the US.
Being a culturally christian atheist is weird. But there’s tons of us!!
True.
I think she is assigning too much cultural identity to atheism. A lot of that sounds way more ritualistic than necessary.
At first I wished atheism had more cultural identity but I’m ok with it now. my kids spouse and I made our own atheistic religion of symbolically worshiping the goddesses of Hylia.
I think Joyce’s relationship to religion was defined by cultural identity. She wanted God less than the communition and traditions.
Exactly. Joyce has never been focused on theology or doctrine – though she’s picked up the hot button issues, but on the emotional experience. Which is something she’s not really going to get from atheism. She probably could from what she’d call a hippy church, if it had the right kind of music (and most importantly portrayed Jesus properly in a blue sash).
She’s not likely to go there though.
There are oddly some non-theistic Churches but you have to look for them. Basically, they just treat Jesus as a way cool dude.
There is a Unitarian Universalist church in Bloomington, though it’s on the far north side of town, so Joyce would need a car ride or a bike. I went a couple times. UUs are probably too wishy-washy for Joyce, though.
(I have limited direct experience, but the UUs in San Francisco seemed relatively theistic. I was told “the Midwest is a hotbed of humanism” for the UU — I suspect that where Christianity is more culturally dominant, the UUs function as a refuge and support for many atheists, whereas in SF they don’t need it so UU was more for very liberal theists.
Bloomington is in the Midwest but is a liberal college town, so I dunno what to expect there, and I didn’t go enough to get a feel.)
I want to let her know that Agnostic is also an option. XD The middle step between “I know there’s no god” and “Well, it seems unlikely….”
Atheism is lack of a belief in god, not the certainty that there is none.
Most atheists I know are agnostic atheists. We don’t believe because there’s no evidence, but we cannot state as fact that there isn’t one, somewhere in the universe. Cannot prove a negative, etc.
For some people it’s reeeaally important to distinguish between “lack of belief” and “belief there is none”. I dunno. 🤷♂️ Seems in effect the same to me but what do I know.
Practically it is the same, but some people are into philosophical questions of epistemology and certainty. This goes back to the very guy who coined ‘agnosticism’ for himself, TH Huxley:
> I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel. I cannot see one shadow or tittle of evidence that the great unknown underlying the phenomenon of the universe stands to us in the relation of a Father [who] loves us and cares for us as Christianity asserts.
He’s saying he’s basically an atheist, but he doesn’t like other atheists, and (in another wikipedia quote) says “they” were sure they had achieved gnosis, solved the problem of existence. Whether he was accurately describing the atheists he knew, I beg leave to doubt.
Bertrand Russell had
> As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
Aaaaand cue agnosticism/atheism definition internet fight #681340. … or is it 681339? Crap, I’ve lost count.
Seriously, I’d like to know what particular definition Sarah and Joyce mean when they’re using the word atheist in this conversation.
Like most people not involved in internet pie fights over atheism, no particular definition, just a broad “doesn’t believe in God” like we use for lack of belief in everything else.
Joyce, I know this may be difficult for you to accept, but when it comes to faith, there is always the option to say “I don’t know for sure.”
This, this, a thousand times this.
Folks seem to want to be putting her in a defined box, be it Athiest, Agnostic, or Christian-just-questioning, when where she’s really at is a giant question mark, one that *she* needs to solve, not have solved for her.
Now, her friends pushing her a bit, if done in a supportive way, isn’t a bad thing. But folks need to stop assuming that her new mindstate is entirely coherent.
Her mindstate certainly isn’t coherent – see her imagination on what being an atheist is about.
But focusing on the details of exactly how much she doesn’t believe in God is missing the point and wouldn’t help her struggle here at all. She’s lost her faith and she’s struggling to accept that. A nuanced debate about the finer details of agnosticism vs atheism won’t change the fact that she no longer believes in God.
There isn’t that option, though. I mean, if you really are uncertain, yeah but again it isn’t optional. If you are honest, your belief and level of certainty is something you can’t just decide on.
I could say I allow for the possible existence of god but that would be a lie. Best I can say is “If it turns out there is a god, I’ll have to admit I was wrong. But I just don’t see it.”
This hits very hard and I’ve never been allowed to express it here. Goes karen.
Atheist Vegans of Marx, coming to a town near you!
For real tho, I can think of way too many atheist capitalist supporters. And you ain’t enjoyed kale until you served it on a burger. (A thick one, though, not the thin fast-food kind)
Joyce has some weird ideas on atheism…
I would not be surprised if Joyce would be surprised to find out Democrats include Christians or that Hillary and Obama are.
“I eat chicken fingers, not kale”
Same, fuck kale
“I have a closet full of stuffed Veggietales”
I don’t have LarryBoy anymore but it’s not because I wanted to lose him
“I do Tiktoks-”
Are we sure Joyce is an atheist and not a devil worshipper now? That’s, like, beyond demented.
The Peas as Roman centurions is comedic Gold!
I’m pretty sure there are entire subcultures of atheist that would shank a motherfucker if someone inplied they wouldn’t get their chickie tendies.
Also I have to say again that that mouth is the cutest triangle ever
Just heard an online presentation from David Dylan Thomas on Cognitive bias yesterday. The shortcut Joyce’s brain takes: atheism = Health food, socialism (this means wanting health insurance, right?) and not being on social media are quite breathtaking.
I’m totally signing up on the Atheist Coven.
Ugh, not me. One of the greatest things about being an atheist is not having to get up on Sunday mornings and listen to some asshole blather on about some god.
I don’t have any desire to replace that.
(I’ve been an atheist since I was six. Got dragged to church until I was about 11 and explained to my parents that I wasn’t ever going again, and if they forced me I would make a massive and very unpleasant scene by very loudly calling the preacher a liar every time he opened his mouth.)
Atheist coven meets Saturday night.
Full disclosure: atheist covens are not entirely free of blathering assholes.
And oddly enough they do tend to blather on about god – specifically about how there isn’t one, but still.
While I’m all in favor of European-style socialism, I’ve long since given up on the idea that our congresspeople would give us that if we asked them for it. Also, this atheist definitely prefers chicken fingers over kale.
Honestly this term is rather misleading. Europe doesn’t have Socialism, Europe has Social Policies. The countries are still very much Capitalist Democracies.
Yeah, it’s more capitalism with strong social welfare policies.
Exactly.
I’ll definitely take that over what we have in the U.S., though.
As a European, I’m always astonished to read that there is socialism in Europe somewhere. Having mandatory health insurance is not socialism.
Following a concept of ‘ it keeps the peace within a nation to not let the gap between the rich and the poor become ridiculously large’ still isn’t socialism.
SHE HAS A TIKTOK ?!
Yeah, it takes a while to have your entire lifestyle catch up with your atheism. Just because you stop believing in God doesn’t mean you’ll instantly start cussing, smoking, drinking, fucking, engaging in “New Age” tomfoolery. I wouldn’t be surprised if Joyce was drawn to Ayn Rand briefly. It wouldn’t stick permanently though. Joyce has too much love for people to be objectivist.
Burying the lede here. I want to see Joyce’s TikTok. I wonder how many strips would have been dedicated to it if TikTok had existed when the comic started.
I understand that people eat kale, but does anyone actually like it?
This atheist had coffee and string cheese for breakfast, just for the record.
Pan fry it, it’s so tasty
I don’t like kale, it’s the wrong parts of broccoli.
(Breakfast was coffee and a Pop-Tart. I’m lazy.)
I grew up on it. In Germany there’s a whole winter festival around Kale. GruenKohl und Pinkle is yum! Basically Kale mixed with sausage or any kind of meat (i usually use bacon) and sometimes potatoes as well. Really nummy.
I also make my own Kale Chips.
There we have it: Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics as the Red Tribe and atheism, homosexuality, and progressive politics as the Blue Tribe. It’s one thing to have Blue Tribe friends like gay people and atheists, but becoming an atheist herself means Joyce is leaving her tribe and joining the enemy tribe.
How much it actually works like this and how much people only think it works like this can get very blurry.
I envy Joyce her lack of knowledge that there are some fringes of the New Atheism movement who make the religious right look like cuddly left-of-centre moderates.
Joyce plans to go to her first coven ceremony with what she thinks is appropriate; organic sea salt, a box cutter, box of birthday candles, the jingle bell from a cat toy, Bottle of Evian, jar with aroma therapy sticks, paper dessert plate, a blue essay book with a purple felt tip pen.
Sarah: Joyce, What is all this…?
Joyce: I’ve been invited to join a Coven!
Sarah: That’s insulting, that’s wholly … No, you know what? …..ugh, Just never mind.
Haha, this is such an interesting way to take Joyce’s character. She’s lost her faith in god but still normalized the politics of her conservative christian upbringing.
I cant help but think about the old strip where Joyce and Dorothy are watching Hymmel, and Walky drops in … that young actress wearing the chastity lock in the video is probably in her upper 20s now with three kids, five teeth, and living in a trailer park.
Show biz will do that to you.
European-style socialism… HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! USA inhabitants are so funny!
Like I said yesterday, decades of Cold War propaganda programmed generations of Americans to reflexively reject any “ism” (except capitalism) as an evil virus of Satan. Even while they enjoy infrastructure and services built by the federal government.
Do you believe in God? Do you pray to God? No? Then you’re atheist.
Is it a self-cleaning coven? That cleaning stuff in the spray can burns.
I think… Joyce, I’m not sure that all of those things automatically go together.
The hovertext is true. Who went and blabbed to the press?
Aw, god bless you, Joyce. D’oh, wait …
So relatable. I went through a long period of denial and disengagement; it was painful and grief was proportionate to what I’d invested in Christianity.
To this day it really bugs me when people think atheists could just choose not to believe for reasons.
And panel four? You just said it. It’ll just take time to get used to saying it.
It’s the flip side of Christians acting as if people could just choose to believe.
For the most part, that is a defense mechanism that Christians employ so that they don’t actually have to think about the fact that they never chose to believe either. Most Christians were never given an option, they were just brought up in some variation of Christianity and never gave it much serious thought because their parents pressured them into it.
I think you choose to believe or not. It’s just whether you want to make that choice. Because if you don’t FEEL faith and choose to believe, you’ve chosen.
Plenty of people have done that in RL.
It’s not a moral stance but a way of living your life.
The choice is made based on a mix of perceived evidence and conscience (same with religion, I guess). You don’t get much more freedom of will than that.
I’m sorry, but this is a false dichotomy. Just because she no longer sees herself as an Evangelical, does not make her an Atheist. There are several denominations of Christianity, which are more open and tolerant. One only need to look at Sierra and Jacob to realize that. Yes, in the end, she could decide to be Atheist, or she could choose to be Agnostic, or the many other hundreds of other Christian based Faiths. Just please, do not make this a, “you are either A or B”, scenario.
No, but the not believing in God part does make her an atheist. She hasn’t just decided she doesn’t agree with her former churches intolerance. She has lost her faith in God altogether.
She’s just having trouble thinking of herself as atheist, because she still has all these weird assumptions about what it means.
More, she’s not “choosing”. Which is pretty common among both theists and atheists – we don’t choose to believe or disbelieve, we just do or don’t. And then sometimes live in denial or fake it for awhile.
Joyce doesn’t believe in God. In any Gods or higher beings of any kind. That makes her an atheist.
This isn’t a dichotomy where Willis is saying you are X or you are Y. It is Willis saying that for Joyce personally, the option was X, or it was Y, and now she is Y but struggling to accept it.
As some people have said in the comments in the last few comics, in an extreme branch, once one strand unravels, the whole thing tends to fall apart. If I were to make a comparison, it is like cutting off the base of a branch on a tree. Some might just prune off small twigs and rotten parts – this was how Becky approached it despite being from the same extreme environment, she pruned out the worst parts and believed the faith itself was fine. But for Joyce, the whole branch is diseased and has got to go. Not because she wanted it be, but when she pruned, all she kept finding was more rotten parts of the branch that needed to be removed until she gave up on trying to save the branch. The branch for her rotted entirely and couldn’t be saved.
Joyce’s faith didn’t shatter at a point where another branch, community, church or religion could fix it. It shattered at the point of God existing at all as a concept. You can’t magic up a belief in God, or in any religious figure, that you just don’t have or feel no connection to. Joyce isn’t uncertain about it either, she just plain doesn’t believe in any form of God at all. That is called being an atheist.
Could events occur that bring back enough faith to make her uncertain? Yes, but right now, that’s not where she is. She is at 0% faith. She is at faith gone. She is at No God Or Higher Being Club. And she’s not comfortable with it yet because being a Christian was a large part of her identity for a large part of her life and she still holds a lot of false assumptions about atheists.
All of this! Joyce thinks she can’t be an atheist because Obviously Atheists Are X, Y, and Z, and Joyce is not. But the core factor – Joyce does not believe in God, does not feel God when she prays, and in the dream that most directly addressed the subject and seemed to have spurred the Jacob Debacle a few days later talks to a clear God analogue/metaphor and asks ‘But you’re not here at all, are you? You never were.’ The stuff here is deflection from the most important point, and the one she can’t refute: She doesn’t believe in God, because she cannot reconcile every other thing the congregation taught her being wrong and this thing alone being true. She cannot accept the concept of ‘We’re all imperfect. Except for Jesus Christ.’ as a thing she takes comfort in, because the subsequent ‘Jesus died for us because he is perfect and we are sinful’ reminds her – and by that I mean ‘actively triggers her’ – to Ross saying the same thing while pointing a gun at her and Becky and Carol saying it to justify his actions. Joyce is not in a place where she will be Christian again any time soon, because the entire framework was unsalvageable to Joyce, personally.
I have no idea where those second and third sentences went, but I’m not up to detangle them.
Exactly. I see this a lot in the atheist community when somebody first becomes an atheist. Or when religious people try to look into our community and are scratching their heads to try to figure out what’s going on.
I have a very simple metaphor I use to help teach new people what being an atheist is like. Being an atheist is a lot like being a non-smoker. In each case, there is something that you have identified as extremely harmful and not for you period so you don’t do it. just knowing that somebody is a non-smoker doesn’t tell you about what they eat and drink, how they vote, or anything else in their life except the fact that they don’t smoke. and the same applies to being an atheist. It doesn’t tell you anything else about that person except that they just don’t believe in a god. If you want to actually know about a person, you should interact with them and find out for yourself instead of trying to just apply a single label and assume that it is accurate.
Sorry, ziggy. But it really is a binary proposition. you are either a theist or an atheist period just like you are either a smoker or a non-smoker. There is no middle ground between the two. And no, agnosticism is not a third option. Gnosticism and agnosticism address knowledge. Not belief. and there are not mutually exclusive. There is such a thing as a gnostic atheist, who claims to know that there is no god. there is also the agnosticate atheist who does not believe that a God exists but isn’t willing to stake their reputation on it, being open to being proved wrong. There’s the Gnostic theist who claims to know with absolute certainty that a god exists. And the agnostic theists who believe that a God exists but claims that they don’t really know anything about it.
But atheism at its most basic is a very simple proposition. If you do not actively believe in at least one god, you are an atheist. Full stop. If you do actively believe in at least one god, you are some variety of theists and we can ask more questions to parse out exactly which flavor you might happen to be.
note “actively believe”, a good and telling qualification. i doubt that it’s meaningfully possible to identify with athiesm without coming to believe that there is no god. i think there is a meaningful stratum between that and “active belief” in one or more deities. also think the term agnostic can usefully be applied to the position of finding a deity _plausible_ while at the same time having never heard a credible account of its nature and behavior.
I am not buying it, not one iota. There is no binary, for sexual/gender identity, we can agree on that. There is no binary on the political spectrum, again, something we can wrap our heads around. When it comes to most aspects of identity, there is no simple binary, we hear it all the time. So when it comes to religious belief, you are now suddenly, “nope there are only two choices”? No, Uh uh. Nope. Never, ever. I am not saying that she cannot be, I am only against that is her only other option.
There are plenty of choices, but they arrange like a flow chart. The first choice on that chart is a simple a/b choice. If you pick a, you’re done. Atheist. End of line. If you pick b, then you can go down the list and figure out exactly what variety of b you are.
But being an atheist isn’t an important part of a person’s identity. Any more than being a non-smoker is. This is why I use the non-smoking metaphor quite a bit. See smokers will argue over which brand is better. and if you can get them to agree on a brand then they’re going to argue about whether to use filtered or unfiltered. Menthol or no menthol. Shorts, regulars, or hundreds. But if you are a non-smoker, or an atheist, none of that matters. Full stop. None of it is important to you. As I often say. *”I don’t care if you’re offering me unfiltered fundamentalism or heavily filtered reformed. I don’t care if you mix spiritual menthol in or if you’re straight from the book purist. I especially don’t care if your hand rolled homegrown ‘spiritual but not religious* beliefs will toootally open my mind, maaaaannn….. I’m an atheist. And I don’t want any of whatever you’re smoking.”*
found the asshole.
I’m not sure I can even keep track of all the stereotypes she’s ascribing to atheists here.
Kale is awesome!
She should really look into Quakers. They’re a lot more sensible.
Those are pretty thin to be VHS ta… oh
Speaking as an atheist, I see this exact same situation a lot. people who have just had their faith shaken or destroyed, who have just left the religion their parents brought them up in, and who have a lot of ridiculous misconceptions about how to be an atheist. Many of them expect to trade one color of robes or hat for another. Silly, I know, but that’s just the way things are.
ah, I see Joyce hasn’t quite hit “if they lied to me about GOD, what ELSE have they lied to me about???” yet.
She most certainly has
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/originalsin/
altough I suppose it takes a while to put that insight into practise
Alright willis, I cant get mad at this one this time. Thats me there in the coroner. 🙁 Christianity made me an athiest. is that a hashtag? are those things? I dunno, I dont tweet.
Hot take: “European-style socialism” is just “Love thy neighbour” and “Do unto others” without the overt Biblical messages.
Oh Joyce, if it makes you feel any better, it took ME like 22 years. I do not like admitting.
Joyce gives out a lot of talking points that I love to get from theists when discussing atheism. Atheism, by itself – a rejection of claims of the existence of gods, is very hard to argue against so they try to link it to evolution, socialism, satanism, etc. which they have an easier time criticizing – partly because people don’t understand what those words actually mean but still have negative feelings about. Connect atheism to them around people conditioned to view them negatively, and atheism automatically becomes evil.