It’s relatable to me too. While I didn’t have a fundamentalist upbringing, and wasn’t raised to believe that every last word of the Bible is literally true, my natural instinct is to be a continuity nerd and I consequently took a lot of it literally anyway. Which meant I spent a long time as a kid trying to come up with reasons why I could simultaneously believe in the Bible and not consider gay people eeeevul. Getting away from Christianity altogether and just being completely finished with the Bible was… well, a Revelation, if you’ll pardon the double entendre.
Yeah, had to do a lot of justifying in my younger days to explain why homosexuality in biblical times was bad whereas today it was not. “Well, back then it was just rape and lust, now it is about loving each other.” Ultimately, a disagreement over the perception of gay people is why I stopped going to church.
. . . Yes, I am aware of my handle and my gravatar.
Best I ever came up with was “okay, Leviticus was entirely about a people being nearly wiped out and birth rates being critical to their survival so those laws made sense”
“what about the new testament?”
“Oh that’s all mistranslated.”
Instead I have a lot of trouble justifying how gays are evil according to the bible? I’ve literally found only one reference and it did not really say anything about good or evil.
Given Jesus said the law of Aaron was superceded by the will to do good and be kind, the reason gays are evil is because, “Southern churches wanted a scapegoat after they could no longer hate black people publicly.”
The passage often misinterpreted as “gay sex is an abomination”, on closer inspection, more than likely actually says “sex with young boys is an abomination”. Which I think we can generally agree on.
I’ve heard that a possible translation may be “temple boys”, which is not only abominable (assuming them to be actual boys and not men who were raised as temple boys) but has a religious aspect to it there as well.
Don’t know how much, if at all, that is backed up by people who actually know the subject, but…
I had a similar experience! I wasn’t raised fundie or anything, but was raised in a generically Christian setting. My natural urge to want order and structure meant that I looked to the Bible for guidance even more strictly than the adults around me sometimes…with some of those same mental gymnastics you reference, trying to reconcile it with other knowledge.
No kidding. I’ve mentioned in the past how I grew up in a slightly conservative religious background (not quite fundie levels of “alternative” education, but still different from what’s widely accepted) and trying to shake off the shit we were taught to just accept on faith still took some real effort
I wrote a big philosophical explanation of how I lost my “faith” as well, but suffice to say it was more like bone-deep terror that I was made “wrong” and god would “find out” and send me to forever-torture for loving who I loved.
Shaking that terror as I stepped away from the religion was a horrible thing, and I do not miss the panic attacks that left me quaking like a chihuahua and crying.
I’m so sorry you had to go through that. You have my condolences.
Here it is very instructive to recognize worship for what it is: a response to threat.
When we humans are faced with a threat, we have a number of natural responses: we fight, we flee, we freeze. But we also have another possible response: fawn. We praise, we please, we submit, we worship.
Some claim that worship is a free expression of adoration. But you really only have to look at the threats aimed at us who refuse to worship any gods to recognize the underlying coercion.
I mean I’ve certainly heard Christians tell me its proper to fear god, hell my name is a Christian name that literally means “fear of God” and that’s supposed to be a good thing.
I think that’s an accurate representation of the model of a lot of Christian denominations, I would caution against applying that to all worship.
You really have to look at more than just the threats against us, because they’re not representative of all those who worship. It’s representative of those people and those people alone, and they are the loudest to be sure, but most certainly not enough to draw a conclusion that worship == threat response as a general rule.
But isn’t the very point of worship to sway the comprise of the allegedly conscious aspects of the universe to work in our favor? In other words to mitigate threatsto our lives and livelihoods?
For most of pre-industrial human history, worship, swaying the comprise of the universe, was definitely not for advancing status as much as it was for preventing bad things from happening. Pre-industrial societies (and their religious practices) were structured for stability and survival, not change and development. Equally important, people were not accustomed to economic or social progress, nor did they expect either. In fact, a “good life” to most people (especially the peasants and farmers) almost always meant the absence of ANY change. A “good life,” was one were nothing bad happened. In this world and the religions designed to support it, one generation took over from another, doing essentially the same things that their parents did. Outside the sparse upper class population, people in this world never have embraced this idea that things could better for themselves or future generations. Maintaining the status quo was thought to be as good as it gets, and religions made sure of this, often further softening peoples’ resentment through promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave.
Not all religions treat worship as a way to sway the will of the higher beings, no. That’s an extremely Christian approach. That’s not to say it’s exclusively Christian, but it’s far from the only model. Also asking for things to work in our favor is not 1:1 with threat mitigation. That’s only part of the picture. You’re over-simplifying this concept.
That’s even been explored a little in DoA. You may recall at one point Ethan was poking at Joyce for the “personal God” model of her belief that he thought was weird.
With your brief exploration of pre-industrial human history, you’re way over-generalizing, and I’m telling you that having been where you are, you need to broaden your horizons. Your concept of “religions” as a monolith is very obviously informed primarily by Christianity, and you’re doing yourself and a great many others a disservice. I’ve been there. There’s a whole lot more to the world, and most of it isn’t hostile to us.
Worship need not be exclusive to gods or beings you could call “gods” in order to motivate people to act in arbitrary ways under the premise that said behaviors somehow mitigate threat to our personal ambitions, if not our lives and livelihoods (for instance, the system of Karma in Hinduism, or the nature spirits of Japan’s Shinto).
This squares well with what is perhaps one of the loosest available definitions of a “religion”, offered by senior anthropologist Clifford Geertz:
“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive, long-lasting moods and motivations in its members by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”
Again, attempting to influence the way things go is not 1:1 with threat mitigation. Spinning every hope for a positive outcome as the result of the fear of a bad outcome is an incredibly cynical way of looking at the world, and not actually reflective of the way people think and live their lives.
When I say that your concept of “religions” as a monolith is very obviously informed primarily by Christianity, I’m talking about the behaviors of control that you attribute to “religions”.
“Maintaining the status quo was thought to be as good as it gets, and religions made sure of this…”
This kind of attribution to a monolithic entity is what makes it so obvious that your attitude towards religion has been shaped by Christianity. I understand that you get that religion can take other forms, but they do not all behave the same way. Their approaches to the world are at least as varied as the forms they can take, and they do not all deserve your ire as a collective. They certainly don’t all deserve the same charge.
Listen, I get it. I grew up atheist, I understand what it’s like to feel like you’re under assault from all sides. But being surrounded by Christianity* is not the same as being attacked by all religions. They’re not all the enemy you’re painting them as, but they’re going to be wary of you if you approach them with the same vitriol that so much of Christianity approaches us.
*I feel like this is an obligatory acknowledgement, but yes I understand that it’s not all of Christianity. I’m already too verbose and I need to use a little shorthand here.
Thank you for your criticism. Now that I think about it, it was my bad for leaving out essential context.
I understand that most people who practice religion do not necessarily intend to dedicate themselves to doctrine as their way of life, although it is very difficult to distinguish “cultural traditions” from religious practices given the tremendous influence religion and culture have had on each other for millenia.
It is absurd to live as if nothing had been learned about the world before we came into it. But we should feel free to critically assess the traditions and customs we’re born into.
We’re not obliged to follow empty or outdated conventions that have failed to anticipate our modern insights. It’s no justification to continue practices on the grounds they’ve
always been done. Justification requires evidence of ongoing relevance.
This inevitably includes practices that were designed to support monarchies and otherwise pre-industrial societies that were resistant to change and solely interested in averting threat.
Often times, people will draw on these outdated reference models without even thinking about it. They inadvertently copy the chaos of their ancestors, mimicking their good and their bad without comprehending the difference.
As humankind proceeds into uncharted areas, the gulf between our long-dead ancestors and our modern lives becomes ever wider. Advancements in technology and medicine — from in vitro fertilization to interplanetary inhabitation — raise new kinds of moral questions for which our ancestors and their dusty old tales can offer no explicit guidance. Would colonizing
other planets be a crime in the eyes of an Abrahamic god character? Would genetic engineering upset the nature spirits of the Shinto religion? How would we locate Jerusalem or Mecca in hundreds of millions of years from now, when their respective tectonic plates have shifted them far from their original coordinates? Would it be Kosher to eat pork that was grown with microbes, as opposed to pigs?
This is part of why I want you to branch out. An incredibly important part of Judaism in particularly, culturally speaking, is figuring stuff like that out. I promise you that question has been a subject of a whole lot of discussion amongst a lot of rabbis. You use that as an example when it’s already standard practice to question things like that. You clearly have a lot to learn.
Also, like, given the tiny barest sliver of a blink of Time’s eye that human civilization has existed for, those other hypotheticals are just plain bonkers. Homo sapiens have only existed for ~300,000 years, recorded history only goes back some odd 5000 years, and you’re asking about the ethics of colonizing planets? Questioning what direction to pray in hundreds of millions of years from now? Assuming humans even last that long (and that’s an assumption of OUTRAGEOUS proportions), what reason do we have to believe any cultural touchstones of today would be recognizable, religious or not? It’s naive at best and concern trolling at worst.
Wagstaff has also now gone completely off the rails, considering they went from talking about worship as a threat response to talking about the validity of critiquing outdated practices.
They very clearly have no reference point in the various religions they cite to how they would actually respond to the situations they cited. It’s hollow criticism of all religion from a position almost entirely informed by experience fighting with Christians and a culturally Christian mindset and perception of the function and behavior of religion, which in a broader context is just flat-out wrong.
Looking back, I guess what I wrote was a little excessive and definitely tangential, and I’m sorry.
In regard to viewing worship as a response to threat, I guess it helps to define what “worship” is exactly.
Many dictionary define “worship” as reverence and adoration towards a god or gods. However, people also worship pop idols and the like, and people rever and love pop idols without necessarily worshipping them, so restricting “worship” to preconceived notions of gods really does the term no justice.
“Worship”, as opposed to just “love”, means to devote one’s self to something or someone uncritically. Unquestioning dedication to rituals or figures, to the point to which you are willing to distort of deny valid information to keep with such practice, is just about always born out of fear of threat, real or perceived (threats towards livelihood, social life, identity, personal relationships, etc. ).
Also, I think it really does no justice to culture to conflate it with religion, although admittedly, untangling such a convolution is harder than it looks.
For instance, many Buddhists and non-Buddhists (myself included), will meditate and admire Buddhist art, but that doesn’t mean I am Buddhist.
Likewise, I don’t think it’s right to suggest that Judaism or any other religion or culture for that matter has some kind of patent on criticism of old practices.
I mean, Jews could adopt new techniques within dentistry for instance. That doesn’t mean those techniques are Jewish. In order to give Judaism the credit, you would have to demonstrate a sound ideological pathway to Judaism itself.
A similar misunderstanding exists within Islam, where some followers claim that the Koran predicted important scientific discoveries. This and the claim about criticism of old practices being an “important part of Judaism”, are dubious ad hoc arguments: Modern-day believers attribute these explanations to their religion after the fact. If these ideologies really contained these scientific and philosophical insights, many of their countless believers would have discovered them before anyone else. That none of these predictions were revealed by interpretations of the ideologies until after they’d come to light by secular thinkers makes such claims highly dubious.
It’s not all unknown. Becky has not been helpful to this process, she’s picking and choosing what she wants and she’s been a bit dismissive of Joyce’s crisis (which I think is why Joyce is keeping all of this from Becky). And some of what Becky has chosen to cling to is still pretty harmful.
Like, I’m glad she got there? But I’m sorry that he had to sit there and listen to her talk herself through it, rather than just working it out on her own.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with needing other people, either for listening/soundboarding or for actual help. It’s okay to not work everything out on your own in your own head and we shouldn’t have to do difficult things alone.
It’s not like it’s Joyce’s fault that she got indoctrinated and brainwashed for her entire life and it’s not like they don’t have kind of a supportive relationship already (re: texting)…short story long, I don’t see what the issue is with her working it out aloud.
As much as it would be nice for Joyce to have this revelation herself, sometimes you just need someone there so when you say it out loud and say “Wow, that sounds really dumb out loud” they can just sit there and nod.
Yes. This. Activel Listening can be incredibly powerful for both the speaker and the listener. Sometimes all one needs is to know that they have been heard.
I think it was more he was cringing more then being progressively more angry. Like he was thinking “Damn what are they teaching these people in church, this is wrong on so many levels”.
Alt text suggests it is in fact anger as well. Then again, presumably Maggie’s more used to the occasional horror of Willis revisiting childhood and going ‘holy shit they really taught you this’ and so it no longer surprises her, whereas Joe is a fresh vessel of horrible knowledge.
If she didn’t realize that view on reality was massively distorted, it’s because everything else in her life was distorted around it to make it look reasonable.
For years, she was conditioned to defend her ideology automatically, with reflex evasions to all the things that signaled to her, “you’re looking at this the wrong way!”
The flip in perspective is disorienting at first, but well worth it. She will get to enjoy more justified confidence in her knowledge, and generate her own light, instead of passively badking in the fallacious, dogmatic certainty of faith.
It is a wonderful, satisfying, empowering feeling to puzzle through something logically, step by step, arrive at a conclusion– and then discover that you were right!! Much better than coming up completely wrong, because some adult authority figure says that something written down somewhere negates at least one logical step, just because.
Let alone trying to come up with the right answer just based on guessing what that authority figure probably wants and/or expects to hear, or just straight memorization of metaphorical and open-to-interpretation verses, which themselves may be in direct conflict with something you’ve either been taught to be true by another (equally confident) authority figure (like, say, a science teacher), or something you’ve actually witnessed for yourself. (Or puzzled out yourself). Or, hell, even something else in another part of the same damned source!!
I can’t wait until she hears how they figured something out, step by step, and pipes up with the next logical step/conclusion– and is right. 😀
“Wait. I don’t need to know how God or my pastor or parents feel about it to be able to come up with the right answer? I– I can just think?!“
I watch it once every couple of months. I have a copy on my cellphone so i can watch it occasionally if i feel the need. I keep a copy of The Brave little Toaster and Monty Pythons Holy Grail at all times as well.
Oh yeah, got heated discussion with my former only colleague about this… and some neuroscience shit too… and she never got past the point “it can’t be wrong because I was told so by someone who knows more [god/priest/Charles atan], and scientists can’t possibly know more than [the bible/this snippet of cropped Freud I read on the internet/my neighbor who helped me move].
The most infuriating in this is that at one point it is impossible to make a difference, be it arguing calmly, yelling, asking for sources, pointing out she’s living in a country where this is massively called bullshit because founded on atheism…
Thankfully, that was her take on it as well. I’m just relieved that she realizes that it was a mistake, she’s kinda more than a friend to me and my wife at this point and I don’t think we could stand losing our relationship with her.
Weirdly enough, “Lizard people that secretly rule the world” is an antisemitic trope, as some people literally spread that Jews are that. Obviously you didn’t know that, or you probably wouldn’t have used that particular phrase; you might want to retire it.
The More You Know (about bizarre religion stuff)
oops, thanks for pointing that out, i’d never realized that was the case, though i’m exhaustingly unsurprised to learn it.
and while you made me stop and think, i just want to report that i’ve done a quick bit of research and will henceforth avoid using the words cabal and sabbath colloquially or metaphorically or ironically (as in, “a cabal of tech CEOs” or, (calling myself out here) “come to one of our sabbaths some time, we’re all about fornication, seditions and revelings”. (i’m sure “black mass” will do just fine next time i absolutely must roleplay a satanist))
turns out those are both regular Jewish things that have been twisted into sounding sinister by centuries of antisemitism! i mean, i knew that, just hadn’t ever actually thought about it <.<
@thejeff Reminds me a storyline from the Spinerette comic where an old nazi wizard came to the local mad scientist and wanted him to clone Hitler. He had this whole spiel about Aryans being the supreme race and all that. When the scientist’s assistant asked “But wait, if Jews rule the world, wouldn’t that make Them the supreme race” and the nazi wizard lost his shit while yelling “THEY CHEATED!”
Did not know. Did the idea of lizard people ruling the world piggyback on the idea of Jews ruling the world, or did the two ideas form separately and then overlap?
Seems to come out of the anti-Semitism. It’s a surprisingly recent idea – coming mostly from David Ickes starting around 1998. He’d referenced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in early conspiracy theory work, so the anti-Semitism was certainly there.
The reptilian angle may have come out of older fantasy and science fiction without the anti-Semitic connotations – the 80s TV series “V” and even as far back as R.E. Howard’s serpent people.
As far as I know, and I only vaguely followed this, but the current mythology of the lizard overlords who traded advanced technology for the right to experiment on humans and then slowly took over industry and governments seems to have come out of the alien abduction conspiracy movement.
Yep. Since like medieval times through today, Jews have been defamed as elite powerful creatures, who sneakily control entertainment & banking & politics, getting their power by drinking blood. So, while lizard people are supposed to drink the blood of kittens and such, not the blood of Christian babies, it’s probably a new coat of green paint on and old, old idea.
Depressing history!
Lizard people who work from the shadows and WANT to rule the world are in the D&D video game Neverwinter Nights. I assume that means lizard people were in D&D lore, so that goes back… however far. Not aware of it being analogous to anything back then- lizard people are fairly popular in fantasy, as far as animal-people go, and there’s a greater element of alien-ness than with, say, cat people. (Strange how much less common dog people have been in recent media.) Anyway, my point is that if the tie to anti-semitism is relatively recent, I think it’s highly likely that it was connected to pre-existing ideas.
In terms of pronunciation, do you prefer
a) Quick-saw-tick
b) Key-hoe-tick
or
c) Other: __________
?
Is there an emphasis on the maw, like MAWN-ster, is it still just monster, or is there a different pronunciation? (i.e. “throatwabblermangrove”)
The first part is (Quixote == key-hoe-tay (ish)), but the subsequent word is (pretty sure) an english derivation and not spanish at all. I myself am torn on the pronunciation because I’m more familiar hearing a), but from an etymological stance feel like b) is more appropriate. From an entomological stance they both kinda bug me.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard a), but now I’m questioning whether I’ve ever heard b) either. Have I just seen it written and extrapolated a pronunciation from the good Don.
It’s somewhat similar to Quick-saw-tick, but it’s not saw, it’s sah. Quick-sah-tick. Unless your British, in which case it’s Quick-sot-tick.
Let’s see if I can find on the Interwebs.
Ok, here go. Ignore what they wrote, because they would lead you to believe it’s kwuhk-saa-tuhk and instead listen to the American and British pronunciations.
* I tend to say kwik-saw-tic
* maunster is pronounced like “monster” but was a personal joke because my username as a teenager was “quixoticmaunder”
* quixotic maunder is bigwordtalk for excessively optimistic and idealistic chatter.
Essentially: I’m a hyperactive positive-thinking flibbertigibbet who likes large words too much.
There are varying beliefs. Young Earth Creationism theories claim the Universe is only 6000 years old or so. Old Earth Creationism theories accept that the Universe is millions or even billions of years old, but claim humans were specially created by God.
Even Old Earth Creationism carries its problems. If plants were created before our solar system’s sun, how could those species have survived millions of years without sunlight?
While I have no desire to defend Creationism of any form despite being a theist, I should point out that even they believe “Light” came first. You know, Day 1.
If they are integrating select scientific insights ad hoc, then light need not come from the sun or any star.
Virtual Photons are little bits of electromagnetic radiation of any frequency (including visible light) that pop in and out of existence at any point in space, lasting for no more tbay a third of a wavelength. They are sparse, yes, but they are still “light”.
So when God said, “let there be light”, he was kind of a Joani come lately, huh?
I’m reminded of a thing from the tv show NEWSROOM where the news anchor basically got some really deluded fundamentalist guests who didn’t understand the argument they were being held as “experts” on so he had to basically coach them through it on-air.
I’ve never heard that belief espoused. My exposure to what is here being called “Old Earth Creationism” is from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who teach that the story of creation in genesis is a parable where each day represents a different age of evolution spanning potentially millions or billions of years.
Fundie Christians believe some really wacky and ridiculous things. This sort of creationist nonsense is just one type of the many bizarre things they believe.
Not trying to make this a thing, but I always had an issue with that strip. Not in its entirety, but with the idea that there was no death before original sin. I really don’t get that concept and I’m feeling the urge to get it off my chest.
Maybe people just had different bibles than me and mine, but if Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden to prevent them from eating the fruit from the tree of immortality, then they were mortal and therefore would have always died, even in Eden. It was work/hardship/pain that they were given as punishment for original sin, not death.
Did other bibles simply not mention the whole “now that they have knowledge of good and evil, we need to keep them from becoming immortal so that they don’t become like us” part? Cuz if so, than I am today years old to find that out.
I meant it seemed more like a thing coming from the way it was taught than actually being laid out in the bible. Willis said in the comments in that strip you linked that his church took it from the line ‘the wages of sin is death’.
Ah. Gotcha.
That seems silly. Of course, for many people, religion itself is silly (Christianity in particular) so it’s whatever. At least now I know where that idea comes from.
(And Thag Simmons gets the credit for remembering/linking that strip.)
Well, evolution is obvious a thing, at least that what my school books have taught me, but God must also exist because we have chicken nuggets, and only a divine being could have come up with such a perfect food. 😅
It’s possibly an interpretation of Genesis 3:19, the whole ‘dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return” bit: because it’s in the middle of all his cursing, it could be taken to mean that this is the end-point of the penalty he’s laying on them, and that originally he didn’t intend them to return to the earth.
Which is not to say that your nitpicking doesn’t make a lot more sense.
I mean they were made mortal.
That doesn’t mean he was giving the opportunity to become immortal.
Both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were in the garden, but only the tree of knowledge was off limits.
Why they didn’t eat from the tree of life I have no idea, but arguably they could have via free will, and thus become immortal.
So it can easily be said that being kept from that tree by being kicked out of the garden is the reason they would return to dust.
There were two trees, two trees important to those first few chapters of genesis anyway. One being the tree of knowledge. The other being the tree of life (I just mistakenly called it immortality but it’s the same).
“ 22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:” -from the 3 chapter of genesis (kjv) per biblegateway.com
I say this with the caveat that I haven’t studied the Bible since my confirmation at 17, and that was a looong time ago, and I’m not a Christian anymore.
But as far as I can recall, according to the Anglicans, anyways (and we were using the KJV, of course), it’s not that there wasn’t any death at all in Eden; but that it was innocent. Not malicious.
Like, the carnivores would hunt, and eat the herbivores; and heck, maybe even Adam and Eve would hunt the animals and eat them. But it was just done for food, with no interest in the suffering (or in causing the suffering) of the animal.
Conceivably someone could be responsible for the death of another human being there (maybe by coming up and giving your friend a hearty backslap just as they’re swallowing a particularly large bite of banana or something and they choke to death); but you couldn’t have murder, because there couldn’t have been the intent to harm.
But then, afterwards, Cain murders Abel. Like, he falls into this jealous, murderous rage, and just straight-up kills him, with the intent to harm him, to end him, and that couldn’t have happened before the Fall.
–But I suppose, also, that it may have been more like someone who kills someone else, but then is found not criminally responsible, because they were incapable of forming the intent to kill, or else was unable to comprehend the likely consequences of their actions. Sort of how it wasn’t until after they ate the apple that Adam and Eve realized that there might be anything questionable about showing their entire bodies to just anybody and everybody.
They were naked all along; it’s just that eating the apple gave them the ability to feel bad about it. That means the decision of whether or not to cover themselves up was no longer purely an issue of comfort– it was too cold to be naked, or unpleasantly rainy (if the weather could be unpleasant in Eden), or the rocks hurt their feet, or the sand kept getting up their ass cracks– but now, not even only in addition to purely practical matters, but superseding those practical considerations, whether or not they wore clothes would have been a moral matter. It wasn’t, now, that it was too cold to not wear clothing of some kind; it was that it was now wrong to not wear clothing.
–Which I suppose also makes it easier to control them, doesn’t it? Because without a sense of morality, there’s no need or desire to question God’s authority. Because anything he might tell you to do, whether that’s to be fruitful and multiply, or to kill anyone who breaks the Sabbath, or to stone disobedient children to death, cannot possibly be immoral, by definition.
There’s no need to use your own judgment to decide if you should do it. Your God has told you to do this. Therefore, you do it.
It cannot possibly be wrong, or immoral; because right and wrong, moral and immoral, simply do not exist.
I’m so proud of her! And I’m glad it is Joe with her at this moment and not Becky. I’m not fully convinced Becky would have a problem with Joyce coming to terms with atheism, but I also don’t think Becky is the right person to talk it out with.
Becky has already been dismissive of Joyce’s crisis, so I feel like Joyce is unlikely to share this with Becky until forced to.
And I’m not entirely sure that Becky wouldn’t have a problem with Joyce going atheist, considering how hard she’s clinging to the parts of her religion that she doesn’t feel like she has to abandon for being directly antagonistic of her identity specifically or being demonstrably anti-factual.
Yeah, Becky might be fine with Dina being an atheist, but she’s never known Dina to be anything else. Joyce isn’t just Becky’s Best Friend, she’s Becky’s best friend who was the most pious among them, the one who knew all her verses and believed what she was saying. Joyce being Christian is a key part of Becky’s conception of her, and Joyce is already one of the last remnants of their old lives. If Joyce lost that, then everything really has changed forever. Plus, if Joyce the Perfect Christian still believes and is okay with Becky, then it’s the congregation that’s wrong (on those specific points, of course.)
I do wonder if it was one of the final keys to Joyce starting to come to terms with her lack of belief was when Toedad said to her they had the most hope for her not because she was the most ‘socially-adjusted’ or generally pious and religiously learned, but that she was the most obedient of the kids and they expected secular college wouldn’t change that. He brings up her knowledge, sure, but only after she tells him he’s wrong, not part of his initial line about having ‘hope’ for her. They were proud, but in the context of the obedience line while they’ve all been kidnapped and he’s allying himself with a mobster to hurt Becky? I could see that being another breaking point, and a pretty massive one. (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/renewal/ )
Not sure what to call them anymore since my family disowned me and the woman who gave birth to me separated from her husband who was my step dad while they were family, but yeah they believed this shit. I went to public school and stopped believing in religion when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. Had a lot of “Why be good if you don’t want to go to hell” talks when I was growing up. Shit’s wild.
That really helps make it ‘real’ for those of us who didn’t grow up in that environment. It’s one thing to just hear the stories, but Willis has the receipts to prove it.
Young Earth Creationists believe this versus Christians. Catholics believe in evolution as do most Protestants and Orthodox. Which to explain it in pop culture terms:
“Fans of GI JOE EXTREME believe this versus GI Joe fans.”
She had a few pretty big “everything I believe is a lie” moments along the way so I feel like a lot of it is that she has chosen to effectively dump all of that belief, she just hasn’t realized how deeply that belief went.
Yep! I fully buy that she hadn’t realized she could believe in evolution now because she hadn’t yet been given the opportunity to think through her old beliefs and go ‘wait. This doesn’t make sense without these big assumptions taken as given. Huh.’ There’s A LOT that’s gonna need unpacking, and while she’s had breakthroughs, she hasn’t exactly had the time to look at her entire childhood and deconstruct it piece by piece.
Becky didn’t build her entire worldview on top of their bible-literalism teachings the way Joyce did, though. Remember back in the first Toedead kidnapping, when she’s sorting out what she was taught vs what science says with Dina? (Or even the Ulsa doll bit at Six Flags.) She was able to toss out the parts that didn’t make sense to her or conflicted with what she felt was right. For Joyce, that stuff was load-bearing.
Of course, this makes me wonder. Find a beetle with green iridescent wings instead of clear or some other color, and it’s a new species.
But take other critters. You have a dog that weighs over 100 pounds, has long, thick fur, and stands over three feet tall at the shoulder – I’m talking here about a St. Bernard or Bernese Mountain Dog – but it’s still the same species (Canis familiaris) as a Pekingese, a dachshund, or a chihuahua.
Taxonomy is something we made up and there is a lot of debate about how to define things but generally speaking if a mating pair can produce fertile offspring, they’re of the same species
Exactly. I learned it as the morphological species concept. If 2 animals can breed and have viable offspring, then they should still be considered the same species. However, if two animals breed and the offspring are not viable (like hybrids) then they are no longer considered to be within the same species. There are many more barriers that are displayed by different species. Obvious geographical barriers, such as mountains and streams to block species intermixing. In one of my early bio college classes, I remember learning about 2 species of snails that were nearly identical. The only difference was that one species shell was spiraled clockwise, whereas the other snails shell was spiraled counterclockwise. This slight difference in morphology made it impossible to the male to mount the female.
So actually, the scientist are pretty sure as to what is going on. But, taxonomy are human-made barriers. These definitions are just our own way to understand how species are able to adapt in the past and present environments.
Oh so very loosely. There are definitely plenty of things we consider different species that can interbreed – dogs/wolves/coyotes, for example.
Obviously doesn’t apply to species that don’t reproduce sexually. There are also ring species and chronospecies: species widely distributed either geographically or in time, where neighbors could interbreed at all points, but those on the far ends couldn’t breed with each other.
As you say, it’s a made up taxonomy that we layer on top of a more complex real world. It’s still useful, as long as we remember it’s the map, not the territory.
@thejeff: map vs territory is a great analogy, thanks!
@RandomScientist: what you’re describing is the biological species concept.
The morphological species concept is when you assign organisms to different species based on their morphology, that is, how they look (and depending on the group you might be looking at some minute differences in specific places), without necessarily checking that they are reproductively isolated from other species.
(it’s actually the only species concept that applies in paleontology i believe, at least beyond ~1Mya when DNA-based classification (which is yet another species concept) is no longer an option)
Yup, my bad. That’s what I get for making a comment super late in the night. It’s even worse since I’m a paleontologist.. though that’s probably why I just called it the morphological species concept instead of the biological one.
haha that makes sense. well, i take your absence of clarification as full endorsement of my definitions then (i’m a hack and a fraud). what do you study if i may ask?
Lol, your definitions sound great to me! It’s been a while since I took an into to bio class though. Through grad school we only ever discussed the morphological one because, you’re right, that’s the one paleontologists use.
I’m a mammal paleontologist, and I focus on carnivores from the Miocene-Pleistocene. So far I’ve only done work on some saber-toothed cats (and false ones (Barbouofelis)), but I’ll be expanding my research to include Miocene East African mammals. I look at the bone morphology and determine what muscle usage the animals had to infer how they moved. With that I can then infer their ecology (such as how they hunted).
I have serious doubts that some of the teacup breeds are really still “dogs.” They may just be dog-analogues, rather than still being dogs. One of the obedience instructors for a National Chain said something to the effect that she just let them graduate on a free pass, because they were no longer capable of learning and retaining the lessons.
Dogs that are of already small breeds that are bred to be even smaller. Named as such because they’re bred so small that many of them quite literally fit inside a teacup. Generally speaking, they are less than 17 inches long and 4 pounds heavy at one year old.
Honestly, I find breeding for a trait like that rather disgusting; not literally, but morally. In most cases where animals are bred for specific traits, in order to maximize on that trait, the animals are often forcefully inbred, which causes all sorts of genetic problems, many of which can lead to the animal suffering and living short lives. All because some human wanted a certain trait in their pet. I can’t see that as anything but contemptible.
I feel that way too, but especially with facial features such as pugs and bulldogs (and Persian cats). The struggles those poor animals live with just to look “right” is awful.
But honestly I think the concept of something being “purebred” is just toxic and terrible. Animals being bred, generation after generation, with no care for quality of life or sickness, only caring that the ears are the right shape to impress some group or other. Just about every breed has some issue or other as a result of the years of breeding, and there’s only so much that can be done by even the most ethical of breeders to reduce that short of intentional and careful cross-breeding- which, of course, doesn’t have much profit to it compared to selling purebred border collies or poodles.
Though a lot of the breeds were originally developed as working dogs of various kinds – not quite as much focus on looks and more on traits for the particular job, whether that’s moving sheep around or killing wolves.
The following is only grounded in personal preference and not in fact or science: But I choose to prescribe the idea that teacup breeds and chihuahuas are actually the result of some monstrous (and yes, unnatural) attempt to cross breed sewer rats with dogs.
As for the ability to learn… well, there are some awfully smart, awfully small dinosaurs around.
and while I’m aware of the argument that “domestication means they stay like babies forever”, I’ve long predicted that the biotech company that manages to create kittens and/or puppies who literally remain so for all of their (probably much shortened) lives will make All the Money. :p
And this would seem a tragedy and yet may also be the gateway to achieving biological immortality while also creating untold tragedies of other varieties. Cute tho’, so in the words of Ruby Rhod: “But who cares!”
One of the reasons it makes sense to think of them all as just dogs is the amount of work it takes to keep the various breeds distinct. Left to themselves for only a few generations, all the breeds would merge right back into village mutt.
But probably wouldn’t merge into wolf or coyote populations, despite the occasional cross.
If you go by the most common definition of species, they are still dogs.
As someone commented above, if two individual can produce fetile offspring, they are the same species.
I don’t think that actually is a speciation limitation though. Species with severe sexual dimorphism exist, and no doubt it creates cases where two particular members cannot interbreed while each of them remain capable of breeding (being fertile) with other members of their species. It potentially introduces a selection pressure that could fork the species however, if only particular members can *ahem* fork, as it were.
Presumably there could be a case for bovines for example, where a particular bull would simply be too large to trust to safely mate traditionally with a particular cow, so they are kept apart and the cow would be artificially inseminated. (this is a thought exercise. there are other actual reasons for artificial insemination)
“Species with severe sexual dimorphism exist, and no doubt it creates cases where two particular members cannot interbreed while each of them remain capable of breeding (being fertile) with other members of their species.”
i can’t make sense of this?
my point was not that dogs don’t all belong to the same species, my point was that the interbreeding test doesn’t actually work with dogs (see C.F.B.’s comment that i was replying to.)
Try breeding a chihuahua and a mastiff (but really, don’t). everyone involved is a dog, yet they can’t interbreed. there’s some sort of sexual isolation going on here, which if those were not highly artificial breeds, would eventually lead to speciation.
if you were only going by “can interbreed YES/NO” then chihuahuas and mastiffs would be considered separate species. they’re not, because that criterion is not the end-all be-all of the species concept.
Oh ok. I read your earlier as being a point about the bio-mechanical problems of trying to breed them. I didn’t realize they straight up could not breed chomosomal/genetically. I do readily see thay it isn’t the be-all of the species concept. And even if the definition is limited to fertility (as one version’s definition), then it still wouldn’t speciate chihuahua’s and mastiffs since they can both produce offspring as individual breeds, and with other dogs, even if it’s not with each other.
“There are situations where it may seem apparent – even without any specialist knowledge – that the size discrepancy is too extreme and could even cause lethal bleeding. In this instance, the two dogs should never be encouraged to mate.”
you were mentioning ring species yesterday (the seagull thing?). well, chihuahuas and mastiffs are like that, except they aren’t considered separate species.
to reiterate, my point was to complexify CFB (and many people)’s commonly-held belief that “a species is defined solely and entirely by whether individuals can interbreed”.
well, take a chihuahua and a mastiff and you have a counterexample to that:
• can’t interbreed.
• yet same species.
one might ask, “well then why don’t we say that they’re different species?” and to be honest i’m not 100% sure, but i suspect it’s that they just look so different because they are strenuously bred generation after generation to be that way. as someone said earlier, if you just let dogs mate with whoever they wanted, they would probably all revert back to your average-looking mutt in very few generations. genetically, i imagine, all breeds of dogs are almost indistinguishable.
It actually doesn’t matter what you call them. If two groups are interbreeding, then functionally they are a species. If they aren’t interbreeding, whether because of distance or incompatibility or whatever, then they are functioning genetically as separate species.
Huh, well, at least she doesn’t assume a timespan of millions of years is impossible to begin with. If Joyce can acknowledge the Earth has existed for long enough for that to prove impossible, then it seems she has already moved on from the whole business of “no thing ever killed another until humans invented evil”.
The worse part is that according to the Bible itself, God is entirely to blame for our sinful nature.
In Genesis, God created Adam from clay, so he inherited no original sin. If God made every human this way, no human would ever be born intrinsically evil.
But after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, God mysteriously switched to creation from birth: a completely new method of making humans which he knew would guarantee that every human would be born an inherent winner.
By commanding Adam and Eve to “go forth and multiply”, God deliberately multiplies human sin, multiplies human misery, multiplies human debt, and multiplies the need for sacrificial atonement.
We have names for people who deliberately peddle inferior products that require constant, expensive maintenance work on which they have a monopoly.
Such work would be trivial to an all-knowing, all-powerful god who can not only go though the effort to make every human being from clay, but create an environment where their innocence would never be jeopardized.
If the god of the Bible wanted to preserve human ignorance of good and evil, he could have created them without curiosity. He could have made them unable to communicate with anyone but each other and him. Having just created an entire universe, he could have placed the trees of forbidden fruit some far away mountain, or some far away planet, far out of anyone’s reach. There’s no reason for why these trees even had to exist.
There would be an endless supply of simple and obvious measures available to an all-knowing, all-powerful god who wanted to venerate human innocence. The fact that none of these measures were taken indicates stupidity, negligence, incompetence or active sadism.
Not that I actually believe in the existence of this biblical tyrant; the point is that religion just about never stands up to critical scrutiny. I didn’t need to. It was never supposed to make sense. It wasn’t supposed to be a source of moral guidance (no dogmatic system can ever be a truly moral system). Religion was designed to be a tool of oppression, nothing more, nothing less. It failed drastically at everything else people tried to make it do because, as with any other tool, it of course fails really badly when people use it to do the wrong job. You might as well use your lawnmower to cut your hair.
“Religion was designed to be a tool of oppression, nothing more, nothing less.”
wow, that’s a take. kind of reductive, don’t you think?
i’m not trying to get in an argument, because i can see that you have a serious bone to pick with religion, and i’m sure you have very good reason for that.
but, you know… religion is an extremely complex and multifaceted phenomenon that has involved many billions of humans over millenia. so… that pronouncement sounds a bit cavalier to me.
Given that religions have had tremendous influence on the cultures surrounding them for millenia, it is no wonder many people have trouble separating the two.
However, at its core, religion is a means by which to control motivate people to perform behaviors by getting them to uncritically accept unprovable claims about a general order of human existence.
This has proven to work substantially well for monarchs who got their subjects to pay material tribute and reverence to them by claiming to have exclusive communication with the gods or some divine justice system (Karma, etc.).
However, using unsubstantiated, invisible, omnipresent, unbearable threats and/or intangible rewards to get people to behave morally is by its very nature a substantially flawed system that can promote some of the most extreme immorality we’ve ever seen.
Attributing justice to a universe with no inherit justice guarantees a lot of destructive behavior. People who don’t suffer spite behaving immorality will have proof of their righteousness. It also leads to a lot of unnecessary and often agonizing soul-searching for people who suffer greatly spite behaving morally. They are forced to identify nonexistent transgressions. Being human, they find them. Or worse yet they have them found by others.
When it comes to the alleged “divine authorship” of basic human moral rules, religions all over the world are but complete plagiarists.
Sorry if I seem to have rather strong positions on this. Many of my criticisms of religion are ones that I have on widespread superstitious and supernatural beliefs in general, so I don’t necessarily aim them at religion in particular.
I predict that a huge part of the problem may lie with my best attempt at finding a useful definition of “religion”, that would include systems like Buddhism or Shinto that didn’t necessarily have gods. Although a lot of focus on the discussions here was on Abrahamic religion, it’s important to recognize that many Asian and proto-european religions have many of the same problems, even without gods.
Is there a word that describes disliking *religion* more than hating *gods* per-se? Asking for a friend who attributes the suffering caused by faith to the people and organizations more than their fictions.
Or curiosity. “Hmm, I wonder what these humans will do if I stick a tree near them they can’t eat from.”
The active sadism comes from his reaction. Or shows a tyrannical mindset: I want to be sure they’ll obey me, so I’ll put this one test nearby to prove that I did that bit right. Oh shit, I guess I didn’t breed obedience into them well enough. Screw that, let ’em suffer.
An all-knowing god has no need to satisfy his curiosity, as by definition such a being would have no ignorance of ANYTHING, including the outcome of the situation he put Adam and Eve in.
God knew that Adam and Eve were given conflicting statements which they had absolutely no capacity to process (as they were innocent and ignorant by HIS design). When the Serpent told Adam and Eve that they wouldn’t die after eating the forbidden fruit, he said specifically that the very act of eating the fruit wouldn’t kill them. True to the Serpent’s word, the first humans did not die from the fruit, but instead gained wisdom. When God said that they would die, he meant that he would personally ensure their eventual death by kicking them out of Eden.
It was God’s deliberate misphrasing of his statement about the fruit that caused the whole problem. We can safely call it deliberately misleading because, being an all-knowing god, he would have known exactly how Adam and Eve would misinterpret it. Had he specifically told them that he would kick them out of his magic garden and leave them to die if they dare eat from the tree of wisdom, his statement wouldn’t have conflicted with that of the Serpent, and there would have been no problem.
The fault lays entirely with the biblical God character. The Serpent was only telling what he knew, completely unaware of God’s hidden intentions, his oh so “mysterious ways”. Adam and Eve were given conflicting information that they had absolutely no capacity to process. They were punished for failing a test that they were designed to fail.
Devil’s advocate (well, God’s advocate, I suppose): And thus, the beginning of wisdom was learning to parse statements properly. They could have noticed that God didn’t say “at once”. So now they could be kicked out and learn wisdom all on their own. :p
All of this depends on an all-knowing god, though. If he really was all-knowing, wouldn’t he have worked out that Adam needed to get laid without having to be told?
If it is taken that God is the all-knowing creator of Adam, he would have known EXACTLY what abilities his creation had, and EXACTLY how well Adam would have been able to interpret his vague statement.
Actually, the Bible implies that there were other people around already. When he gives Cain the Mark of Cain.“ Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.“
If the only other people around were Adam and Eve, that wouldn’t have been necessary…
As I read it, only those whose line traces back to Adam and Eve can have original sin. The others probably had their own creation myths.
(Why am I reminded of video games where non-playable characters cease to exist when the player is not around?)
IIRC the Bible does say that Adam and Eve had (hundreds?) of other children, it just singles out Cain and Abel because of the whole murderer/murder-victim thing.
Not to mention that Cain leaves Eden for the Land of Nod, where he gets married and founds a city.
Of course, one could argue that the mark was necessary, since at this time people lived for hundreds of years and Adam and Eve had been commanded to be fruitful and multiply. Putting aside the incest necessary for that to happen, it wouldn’t be that long before there were enough people around that they all wouldn’t recognize their great-great-great uncle Cain.
In the original Hebrew, the first word is B’reisheet, which is usually translated as “in the beginning”. B’ is a prefix that usually means “in”, you see.
However, B’ can also mean “during”. As in, “During the beginning, while God was creating the heavens and the earth…”
This alternate (and perfectly valid) translation of B’ would make Adam and Eve examples of early humans (or allegories to human nature, and not literal people at all, but I’m trying on literalism for the sake of making a more fundamentalist argument). In this story, there are other people on earth, we’re just focusing on the Adam & Eve branch. Cain and Seth can go find somebody new to marry (who isn’t their mom or their totally-unmentioned sisters). We aren’t all inbred to death.
Fundamentalist Christians insist that they’re citing the original unchanging Word of God, but they’re using a translation of it. You lose a lot when you translate stuff.
PS. I know that some of these sects consider the King James Version to be divinely inspired, like the other translations are corrupted but the KJV is perfect — why on earth do they pick that one, the KJV is the worst translation
I’m guessing it’s the one they’re used to and the one the early proponents of that particular belief strain grew up with. (A bit akin to Willis’s ‘thanks to my picture Bible, depictions of Jesus without a blue sash feel off’ thing that Robin got over in Shortpacked, but with actual consequences and none of the self-awareness. https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/sash )
Yeah, it’s one of those things where the Torah doesn’t quite manage to erase the fact that Yahweh started as your ordinary tribal god, who’s the only one you should worship cause he’s YOUR god, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other gods out there. See also the first of the ten commandments. And the occasional mention of his wife.
Actually, his wife Asherah was originally the wife of El, chief god of the Canaan pantheon. She only became the wife of Yahweh per say during the period of religious syncronitism when Yahweh, El, and Baal were combined into one god, which the Bible refers to as El Elohim Yahweh in Genesis and other books. He was most often just called Yahweh though, and this frankenstein-esque combination of gods formed the basis of the Yahsistic religion, where followers habitually worshipped only Yahweh but still achknowledged the existence of other gods.
True monotheism only came after the Babylonian captivity, where the idea that Yahweh was the only god to exist and had power over ALL the cosmos was born of of pure nationalist enthusiasm (or should I say tribalism?) among the people of Israel, resulting from the emotionally accepted rationalization that Yahweh controlled the actions of the Babylonians to punishment them for failing to condemn those who worshipped other gods. This theological transition marked the end of Yahwism, and the beginning of true Judaism.
I always like pointing out “go forth and multiply” means that God said that sex was good and awesome on the first day and everyone else is just pretending otherwise.
Second to last panel: Oh, hey, you basically just reinvented Punctuated Equilibrium! Though, uh, it does still happen a bit more slowly than “overnight”, but… Hey, at least you’re back in the ballpark of science again!
Puncuated equilibrium or not, no biologist believes entire families of organisms can diversify in a few thousand years. These kinds of creationists believe evolution is far more effective than it really is, except suddenly with hard limits.
So you can turn a gibbon into a gorilla in a couple centuries but a billion years would not suffice to make it into a human. (shrug)
That may have been true in the pre-history before genetic engineering, but gibbon DNA is mostly the same as human DNA anyway, so all you’ve got to do is find a pathway where you can adjust a few genes at a time to get a gibbon descended human.
Why you would do this is another question. It’s not like we need humans without rights today when we are busy developing artificially intelligent machines enslaved by their programming to exploit.
Wow. She got over that a lot faster than a lot of mostly-secular-raised people I’ve known who just got taught shitty biology and didn’t believe in evolution because what they were taught had a bunch of holes in it.
Before I allowed myself to believe in evolution, I made the mistake of telling my dad that I liked to think through how things might evolve because it was such a logical idea. He responded with “There’s no logic to it at all!” and I had to backpedal like crazy. Later when I could finally accept evolution it was such a relief and so fascinating.
In all fairness (and speaking as an Evolutionist), micro-evolution is easily and readily provable, but macro-evolution has NEVER been observed, either in a lab or in nature. It’s the best theory we have to fit the facts, but it’s likely going to remain a theory due to our basic lack of a geological life span.
“They’re still e. coli, right? Not macro-evolution.”
Macro-evolution has never been observed because in creationist heads the terms are slippery enough to wrap anything we observe into micro-evolution – even as that changes.
Yeah, things don’t get crazy until you try to get everything to conform to the Book of Genesis. Then they get absolutely insane once you realize that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 don’t agree on whether humans were the first to be created or the last.
According to Genesis 1, God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky,” on the fifth day. Then, on the sixth day, God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” … and then, later on during the course of the sixth day, He created man. So man came after the birds, the fish, the whales, and everything else.
Now, if you’re referring to the part in Genesis 2 (Gen 2:19-20) where it refers to man naming the animals, that’s easily reconciled. The two verses cited state “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.”
My way of looking at it is that, until they were shown to man and man gave them names (elephant, giraffe, weasel, whatever), they were just ‘creatures’.
Some are continuity nerds, and some are trying to make things consistent because as believers they feel like it should be even though they know parts are parables and metaphors, is my guess.
Well the key idea here is that if it doesn’t agree with the Bible, you spin it so it does. One of the most straightforward spins that I’ve encountered is that the REST of the world was created in order of Genesis 1, and then god creates humans where the Garden of Eden’s going to be and makes more examples of critters for Adam to name.
…. the impressive part is when Adam manages to give EVERY TYPE OF CREATURE a name in 24 hours. World record for fast talking is 11 words per second, so if we absurdly believe that Adam is capable of that and that hesomehow keeps that pace up for 24 hours (and YEC insists it’s a 24-hour day), that’s barely 10% of all species of animal. And also he needed to consider them for a helpmeet (aka fuckbuddy), so he has to at least say “no” for every animal, which doubles the number of words needed and cuts us down to 5%. And that’s assuming he doesn’t need to stop to think of a name, and that God never has to stop him to say “no, you already used that name, think of another one” (which I’d expect him a bunch of times before he reached his 200,000th name sometime around 10 hours in), or stop to have a drink of water or inhale (which I’d also expect him to do a bunch of times by the 10 hour mark), and that he doesn’t need any really long names slowing down his fast talking to avoid repeats. And that’s before we cut out more time for the other stuff god’s making stuff ex-nihilo (or maybe out of dust) on that day, and problems like trying to actually see the tardigrade he’s supposed to be naming, and the whole business of god taking some of that time to cut out Adam’s rib to make a woman with because apparently he’d run out of nihilo (or dust) to make stuff out of, and all the stuff that god takes up valuable animal-naming time saying.
And yes, I know that god is supposed to be capitalized, but I spent today hearing about an atheist whose 11-year-old daughter reported her public school teacher for proselytizing in class, and they were then run out of town by Christians who were threatening to spray their house with bullets or burn them down with them in it, so everyone who cares about god being capitalized can go suck it or at least pay attention to something more important than that.
damn that last paragraph was sobering. well, i was meaning to comment that that was a riot, it sounded like a breathless standup monologue,
but i mean… yeah. take care for now <3
You are heard and your contribution and feelings are valid. Also thank you for the convenient example supporting my point yesterday that causing strife and suffering is a _human_ trait.
In all fairness (and speaking as a biologist), if you don’t define your terms in this case, I can’t know exactly what you’re talking about, and you probably don’t either. I get the feeling it’s circular: if we can observe it, it’s microevolution, and if we haven’t, it’s not…
Yeah because if you’re referring to speciation, we actually have observed that in real time.
If you’re referring to a duck “macroevolving” into a bear, that’s not actually what evolution predicts. A thing may descend with modification but you can only work with what you’ve got. A bird could maybe convergently evolve into the niche of large omnivore that bears fill given the right environment, evolutionary pressures, and lack of competition, but it won’t ever evolve into a bear.
I think it’s more of a case of moving the goalposts – if your definition of ‘macroevolution’ includes something which has been empirically demonstrated, just redefine the term until everything works!
That’s like saying we’ve seen hundreds of years of erosion but never millions of years of erosion. Of course we haven’t in person. But what makes you think it would be different in any way except for having accumulated more change?
Y’know that gravity/gravitation is a theory, right? General relativity, too? Heck, plate tectonics is a theory. All of these things are accepted as true and proveable. So’s evolution.
Theories in science aren’t things that are somehow unproveable or untrue*; they’re explanations of why a thing works.
From Wikipedia: “A scientific theory differs from a scientific fact or scientific law in that a theory explains “why” or “how”: a fact is a simple, basic observation, whereas a law is a statement (often a mathematical equation) about a relationship between facts.”
So, yeah, evolution’s a theory! Making it out to be something that’s somehow untrue or unproven because it’s “just a theory” is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a theory is.
*noting of course that pretty much everything in science is able to be disproven given appropriate counterexamples, and then the theories change to accept our new knowledge. This is how science works – adaptation as we bring new stuff to light. It’s great!
The last panel is salvation and hope ♡. Joyce was refreshing her memories of all the weird theories she had been taught at home and she saw how much they sounded… not exactly convincing. Joe didn’t see it coming. Hilarious! GO JOYCE! LET’S THE TRUE LEARNING BEGIN!!!!
Okay, we’ve been HAVING pretty dang accurate representation of creationist dogma until today. But today? This is something you will NEVER hear from creationists! They never say this. Ever. I’ve got my ear to my ground enough to hear most of all the major bullshitters, and NEVER ONCE will any of them say anything like this.
Oh thank goodness. XD
I know its painful for Joe but IIRC he’s the only once she’s ‘out’ to about not believing anymore so its a really good thing they’re friends.
And Dorothy at least knew Joyce was starting to have a crisis of faith, but may not know it finally broke after the birthday party where we saw them talk about it.
It’s funny. As I got a lot of issues about Christianity and religion in my life, Evolution wasn’t one of these thing.
I had dealt with dinossaurs, earth having billions of years and this shit in my school days with some facility.
Yes, I still got parents that just believes that thunder are God’s furor and we must stop talking at storms and shit, but I used to deal with this.
Creationism is a uniquely American thing as far as I can tell. Pretty much all Christians outside of certain parts of rural America look at the people spouting it and step back slowly.
That’s not unconnected to the fact that the American colonies were originally just a way for England to get rid of their poor, debtors, cults and criminals while still claiming to act within the bounds of “Christian Charity”, whatever that means.
Yeah, while it’s technically accurate that the Puritans left for the Americas BECAUSE of religious freedom, they didn’t do it IN SEARCH OF religious freedom. They did it because they thought religious people in Europe were allowed to have too much fun and that would anger god.
I don’t know, it kind of fits the definition of religious freedom that’s becoming popular today – the freedom of (the right kind of) religious people to discriminate against everyone else.
The Puritans were persecuted in Europe and wanted religious freedom to practice their faith, but they didn’t want religious freedom in general, they just wanted it for themselves. Which isn’t uncommon.
Yeah, I suppose that’s TECHNICALLY accurate, in the same way that it’s technically accurate the US Civil War was about state’s rights (to declare black people property).
“Creationism is a uniquely American thing”
i am so truly sorry to report that that’s not the case. try googling “creationism brazil” and see what happens
It is interesting that Americans have taken the term so… vibrantly… to represent *their* identity, that unless a given person is actually emigrating none of the rest of us inhabitants of North or South America want to be called ‘American’ even if some of us (like Canadians) see them as metaphorical (or literal) family.
Nah I live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean it’s definitely not only an American phenomenon. They may take a lot of cues from there but over a decade ago I was getting creationist books from concerned church members due to going on to study biology.
You know, I’m quite happy that I attended Catholic school that still taught about evolution. Personally, I see evolution itself as something of a miracle, just because of the various ways everything has evolved. I mean, there are literally surfing snails! And so many different types of raptor birds, one of which, the secretary bird, has some powerful legs! Can you imagine how long it must have taken for the legs to start developing to be longer and more powerful, for the bird to gain the shape it has today? Miracle of nature!
Yes, that is a pretty mainstream subject. Poor Willis and many other Americans (including my wife) got raised in what amounts to bubbles of nuttery regarding evolution.
I thankfully never grew up in as bad a situation as Joyce, but I do know that feeling of having an authority figure telling you something you’re supposed to believe, and every part of you internally screams “nope, wrong, what they’re telling you isn’t right” but having to grin and bear it anyway.
Mine was mainly the whole “fuck poor people” part of it, and even as a small child I remember going “yeah that sounds like horseshit, it sounds like maybe poor people aren’t as bad as you think they are” but having to shut up and not argue about it
@Wagstaff, cont’d: funny, i really did think i’d told you! ^^
so anyway nope, i don’t see the Mensa constellation. (and now i see what you were trying to do with that question about whether the summer was hot where i was, though it sounds to me like you’re not getting any extra data by asking about the Mensa constellation??)
The Mensa constellation is only visible in the southern hemisphere, so now I know for sure you live somewhere in Europe.
You said you were French, but I wasn’t sure whether that meant French nationality or French ethnicity. I really feel as though English should have some kind of suffix discerning the two!
-ish. The ultimate suffix that actually covers all manner of sins. For your needs, you can have french and french-ish.
“ish” actually has it’s roots in the earliest roots of the development of the language. You see, english is actually an amalgam of multiple languages. Starting with whatever was spoken there after the romans and before the angles, then came the angles, it was then further influenced (invaded by) saxons, and normans, and french aristocracy, along with (more) latin and greek from the clergy and accedamia and by this time had a habit of readily adopting words from other languages. Even at the start of english law (this bit may be iffy), they needed two words to describe crimes so speakers of the different bits could understand the crime. (two words== same crime). Break and enter, assault and battery, etc. So what began as heavily being the language of the angles, it evolved and grew to be sort of that langauge and sort of something else. It’s angle-ish: english.
oh i thought for sure that’s what you’d been trying to ascertain by asking if i was having a hot summer. like if i was living in the southern hemisphere i would very likely have pointed out that i wasn’t having summer at all at the moment ^^
Honestly, I was kind of biased towards the southern hemisphere venue because currently, South Africa is the only country in your timezone where cannabis is legal for recreational use.
Watching Joe go from annoyed to feeling genuine pity is really interesting. Like, you always KNOW when somebody has been sheltered, but to have it laid out in front of you can really shock you.
Just look at what humans did with dogs, and you see how much can be done with selective breeding. So,ehow we produced both chihuahuas and mastiffs from thensame creature over the course of a few thousand years. Not hard to imagine the process going weirder over the course of a million years reacting to environmental stimuli.
More practical are the tinier things, but it gets weirder talking about their evolution. Bacteria can do a weird thing where they swap their DNA with their prokaryote compadres, and viruses are right on the edge of counting as alive at all, but in medicine the consequences of their ability to evolve on a much shorter timescale means that there’s all these ever-changing diseases to manage so that you need to get new flu vaccines every year, some bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, and a brand spankin’ new disease can mutate out of nowhere with a new rate of infection and new tricks to hide carriers and devastate the world before we figure it out.
A more active expression of how much animals can change is amphibians, which metamorphosis is definitely not evolution, but there’s weird examples of evolution producing significantly different creatures through circumstances related to evolution. Axolotls are creatures that mostly ditched the metamorphosis process and just stuck at becoming essentially a giant tadpole. Which is similar to how dogs present many traits of infant-wolves. Animals have the capacity for change already in them, so you can get some big evolution consequences from just screwing with that a little.
There is also behavior to consider.
Proto-avians had flaps of skin in weird places. Tastefully decorated with colorful feathers for use in mating displays. Some of the guys discovered that when they flipped their flaps, they could rise into the air. Wow, that really impressed the girls! Let’s do more of that!
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Joe: “N– …wait what”
Go Joyce go!
If Joe hadn’t gotten out of bed, he would have missed all this,
Sarah might have been nice to him for a bit if he’d recorded it.
SHE DID IT
Joe realizes he might be getting laid. Enthusiastically.
Joe: No you woke me up for this
That last panel is relatable AF
It’s relatable to me too. While I didn’t have a fundamentalist upbringing, and wasn’t raised to believe that every last word of the Bible is literally true, my natural instinct is to be a continuity nerd and I consequently took a lot of it literally anyway. Which meant I spent a long time as a kid trying to come up with reasons why I could simultaneously believe in the Bible and not consider gay people eeeevul. Getting away from Christianity altogether and just being completely finished with the Bible was… well, a Revelation, if you’ll pardon the double entendre.
Yeah, had to do a lot of justifying in my younger days to explain why homosexuality in biblical times was bad whereas today it was not. “Well, back then it was just rape and lust, now it is about loving each other.” Ultimately, a disagreement over the perception of gay people is why I stopped going to church.
. . . Yes, I am aware of my handle and my gravatar.
You could play a chaotic good Paladin, but with that handle it’s unlikely that yer playing a lawful evil gnoll berserker.
I’unno, I could see an LE character taking the name ‘TemplarKnight’ just to piss off actual Knights Templar.
Lawful Evil is the default alignment for Knights Templar in fiction anyway.
Is… is that a play on “too long; didn’t read”?
Yes. Yes it is. It started as facebook posts that were so long that I figured no one would read them, so I changed it to Long Damn Reviews.
Best I ever came up with was “okay, Leviticus was entirely about a people being nearly wiped out and birth rates being critical to their survival so those laws made sense”
“what about the new testament?”
“Oh that’s all mistranslated.”
Instead I have a lot of trouble justifying how gays are evil according to the bible? I’ve literally found only one reference and it did not really say anything about good or evil.
Given Jesus said the law of Aaron was superceded by the will to do good and be kind, the reason gays are evil is because, “Southern churches wanted a scapegoat after they could no longer hate black people publicly.”
I think it could be even worse. As far as I know the law of Aaron does not state “gays are evil”, it does not even hint at it.
The passage often misinterpreted as “gay sex is an abomination”, on closer inspection, more than likely actually says “sex with young boys is an abomination”. Which I think we can generally agree on.
I’ve heard that a possible translation may be “temple boys”, which is not only abominable (assuming them to be actual boys and not men who were raised as temple boys) but has a religious aspect to it there as well.
Don’t know how much, if at all, that is backed up by people who actually know the subject, but…
I had a similar experience! I wasn’t raised fundie or anything, but was raised in a generically Christian setting. My natural urge to want order and structure meant that I looked to the Bible for guidance even more strictly than the adults around me sometimes…with some of those same mental gymnastics you reference, trying to reconcile it with other knowledge.
Recommended reading. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53121662-jesus-and-john-wayne
You can do it, Joyce!
*plays “Brainiac Maniac” by Laura Shigihara on Voxola PR-76*
poor joe
I have sympathy for Joyce too. This sort of character development, while positive, can nonetheless be…kinda traumatic.
No kidding. I’ve mentioned in the past how I grew up in a slightly conservative religious background (not quite fundie levels of “alternative” education, but still different from what’s widely accepted) and trying to shake off the shit we were taught to just accept on faith still took some real effort
I wrote a big philosophical explanation of how I lost my “faith” as well, but suffice to say it was more like bone-deep terror that I was made “wrong” and god would “find out” and send me to forever-torture for loving who I loved.
Shaking that terror as I stepped away from the religion was a horrible thing, and I do not miss the panic attacks that left me quaking like a chihuahua and crying.
THANKS RELIGION!
I’m so sorry you had to go through that. You have my condolences.
Here it is very instructive to recognize worship for what it is: a response to threat.
When we humans are faced with a threat, we have a number of natural responses: we fight, we flee, we freeze. But we also have another possible response: fawn. We praise, we please, we submit, we worship.
Some claim that worship is a free expression of adoration. But you really only have to look at the threats aimed at us who refuse to worship any gods to recognize the underlying coercion.
wow, I never had think that way, about worship to be a response to something you fear…
Roll over on our backs and let God give us tummy rubs?
I think the term “God-fearing individual” sums it up nicely.
I mean I’ve certainly heard Christians tell me its proper to fear god, hell my name is a Christian name that literally means “fear of God” and that’s supposed to be a good thing.
I, for one, worship our new insect overlords.
I think that’s an accurate representation of the model of a lot of Christian denominations, I would caution against applying that to all worship.
You really have to look at more than just the threats against us, because they’re not representative of all those who worship. It’s representative of those people and those people alone, and they are the loudest to be sure, but most certainly not enough to draw a conclusion that worship == threat response as a general rule.
But isn’t the very point of worship to sway the comprise of the allegedly conscious aspects of the universe to work in our favor? In other words to mitigate threatsto our lives and livelihoods?
For most of pre-industrial human history, worship, swaying the comprise of the universe, was definitely not for advancing status as much as it was for preventing bad things from happening. Pre-industrial societies (and their religious practices) were structured for stability and survival, not change and development. Equally important, people were not accustomed to economic or social progress, nor did they expect either. In fact, a “good life” to most people (especially the peasants and farmers) almost always meant the absence of ANY change. A “good life,” was one were nothing bad happened. In this world and the religions designed to support it, one generation took over from another, doing essentially the same things that their parents did. Outside the sparse upper class population, people in this world never have embraced this idea that things could better for themselves or future generations. Maintaining the status quo was thought to be as good as it gets, and religions made sure of this, often further softening peoples’ resentment through promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave.
Not all religions treat worship as a way to sway the will of the higher beings, no. That’s an extremely Christian approach. That’s not to say it’s exclusively Christian, but it’s far from the only model. Also asking for things to work in our favor is not 1:1 with threat mitigation. That’s only part of the picture. You’re over-simplifying this concept.
That’s even been explored a little in DoA. You may recall at one point Ethan was poking at Joyce for the “personal God” model of her belief that he thought was weird.
With your brief exploration of pre-industrial human history, you’re way over-generalizing, and I’m telling you that having been where you are, you need to broaden your horizons. Your concept of “religions” as a monolith is very obviously informed primarily by Christianity, and you’re doing yourself and a great many others a disservice. I’ve been there. There’s a whole lot more to the world, and most of it isn’t hostile to us.
Worship need not be exclusive to gods or beings you could call “gods” in order to motivate people to act in arbitrary ways under the premise that said behaviors somehow mitigate threat to our personal ambitions, if not our lives and livelihoods (for instance, the system of Karma in Hinduism, or the nature spirits of Japan’s Shinto).
This squares well with what is perhaps one of the loosest available definitions of a “religion”, offered by senior anthropologist Clifford Geertz:
“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive, long-lasting moods and motivations in its members by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”
Again, attempting to influence the way things go is not 1:1 with threat mitigation. Spinning every hope for a positive outcome as the result of the fear of a bad outcome is an incredibly cynical way of looking at the world, and not actually reflective of the way people think and live their lives.
When I say that your concept of “religions” as a monolith is very obviously informed primarily by Christianity, I’m talking about the behaviors of control that you attribute to “religions”.
“Maintaining the status quo was thought to be as good as it gets, and religions made sure of this…”
This kind of attribution to a monolithic entity is what makes it so obvious that your attitude towards religion has been shaped by Christianity. I understand that you get that religion can take other forms, but they do not all behave the same way. Their approaches to the world are at least as varied as the forms they can take, and they do not all deserve your ire as a collective. They certainly don’t all deserve the same charge.
Listen, I get it. I grew up atheist, I understand what it’s like to feel like you’re under assault from all sides. But being surrounded by Christianity* is not the same as being attacked by all religions. They’re not all the enemy you’re painting them as, but they’re going to be wary of you if you approach them with the same vitriol that so much of Christianity approaches us.
*I feel like this is an obligatory acknowledgement, but yes I understand that it’s not all of Christianity. I’m already too verbose and I need to use a little shorthand here.
Thank you for your criticism. Now that I think about it, it was my bad for leaving out essential context.
I understand that most people who practice religion do not necessarily intend to dedicate themselves to doctrine as their way of life, although it is very difficult to distinguish “cultural traditions” from religious practices given the tremendous influence religion and culture have had on each other for millenia.
It is absurd to live as if nothing had been learned about the world before we came into it. But we should feel free to critically assess the traditions and customs we’re born into.
We’re not obliged to follow empty or outdated conventions that have failed to anticipate our modern insights. It’s no justification to continue practices on the grounds they’ve
always been done. Justification requires evidence of ongoing relevance.
This inevitably includes practices that were designed to support monarchies and otherwise pre-industrial societies that were resistant to change and solely interested in averting threat.
Often times, people will draw on these outdated reference models without even thinking about it. They inadvertently copy the chaos of their ancestors, mimicking their good and their bad without comprehending the difference.
As humankind proceeds into uncharted areas, the gulf between our long-dead ancestors and our modern lives becomes ever wider. Advancements in technology and medicine — from in vitro fertilization to interplanetary inhabitation — raise new kinds of moral questions for which our ancestors and their dusty old tales can offer no explicit guidance. Would colonizing
other planets be a crime in the eyes of an Abrahamic god character? Would genetic engineering upset the nature spirits of the Shinto religion? How would we locate Jerusalem or Mecca in hundreds of millions of years from now, when their respective tectonic plates have shifted them far from their original coordinates? Would it be Kosher to eat pork that was grown with microbes, as opposed to pigs?
Only if those microbes have split hooves and chew their cud.
This is part of why I want you to branch out. An incredibly important part of Judaism in particularly, culturally speaking, is figuring stuff like that out. I promise you that question has been a subject of a whole lot of discussion amongst a lot of rabbis. You use that as an example when it’s already standard practice to question things like that. You clearly have a lot to learn.
Also, like, given the tiny barest sliver of a blink of Time’s eye that human civilization has existed for, those other hypotheticals are just plain bonkers. Homo sapiens have only existed for ~300,000 years, recorded history only goes back some odd 5000 years, and you’re asking about the ethics of colonizing planets? Questioning what direction to pray in hundreds of millions of years from now? Assuming humans even last that long (and that’s an assumption of OUTRAGEOUS proportions), what reason do we have to believe any cultural touchstones of today would be recognizable, religious or not? It’s naive at best and concern trolling at worst.
Wagstaff has also now gone completely off the rails, considering they went from talking about worship as a threat response to talking about the validity of critiquing outdated practices.
They very clearly have no reference point in the various religions they cite to how they would actually respond to the situations they cited. It’s hollow criticism of all religion from a position almost entirely informed by experience fighting with Christians and a culturally Christian mindset and perception of the function and behavior of religion, which in a broader context is just flat-out wrong.
Looking back, I guess what I wrote was a little excessive and definitely tangential, and I’m sorry.
In regard to viewing worship as a response to threat, I guess it helps to define what “worship” is exactly.
Many dictionary define “worship” as reverence and adoration towards a god or gods. However, people also worship pop idols and the like, and people rever and love pop idols without necessarily worshipping them, so restricting “worship” to preconceived notions of gods really does the term no justice.
“Worship”, as opposed to just “love”, means to devote one’s self to something or someone uncritically. Unquestioning dedication to rituals or figures, to the point to which you are willing to distort of deny valid information to keep with such practice, is just about always born out of fear of threat, real or perceived (threats towards livelihood, social life, identity, personal relationships, etc. ).
Also, I think it really does no justice to culture to conflate it with religion, although admittedly, untangling such a convolution is harder than it looks.
For instance, many Buddhists and non-Buddhists (myself included), will meditate and admire Buddhist art, but that doesn’t mean I am Buddhist.
Likewise, I don’t think it’s right to suggest that Judaism or any other religion or culture for that matter has some kind of patent on criticism of old practices.
I mean, Jews could adopt new techniques within dentistry for instance. That doesn’t mean those techniques are Jewish. In order to give Judaism the credit, you would have to demonstrate a sound ideological pathway to Judaism itself.
A similar misunderstanding exists within Islam, where some followers claim that the Koran predicted important scientific discoveries. This and the claim about criticism of old practices being an “important part of Judaism”, are dubious ad hoc arguments: Modern-day believers attribute these explanations to their religion after the fact. If these ideologies really contained these scientific and philosophical insights, many of their countless believers would have discovered them before anyone else. That none of these predictions were revealed by interpretations of the ideologies until after they’d come to light by secular thinkers makes such claims highly dubious.
At least this time Roz isn’t here to yell at her for not being good enough for having rebelled against this as a small child.
I’m actually amazed at how much patience Joe has.
Oh, good, she’s just working out her deprogramming.
At this rate, she’ll be completely deconverted in no time!
…provided nothing goes wrong. We must account for unknown unknowns, after all.
It’s not all unknown. Becky has not been helpful to this process, she’s picking and choosing what she wants and she’s been a bit dismissive of Joyce’s crisis (which I think is why Joyce is keeping all of this from Becky). And some of what Becky has chosen to cling to is still pretty harmful.
Becky riding that fence while she could be riding Dina huh?
“…provided nothing goes wrong.”
Pffft, when has anything ever gone wrong for any character in this webcomic?
Oh god, every part of my brain dedicated to my bio major hurts
Glad to not be the only one who agrees with Joe that listening to this was painful.
Yeah, this is nails on a chalkboard.
Somewhere, Dina is taking psychic damage and doesn’t know why.
Internally: {cyberman} PAIN. PAIN. PAIN.
Like, I’m glad she got there? But I’m sorry that he had to sit there and listen to her talk herself through it, rather than just working it out on her own.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with needing other people, either for listening/soundboarding or for actual help. It’s okay to not work everything out on your own in your own head and we shouldn’t have to do difficult things alone.
It’s not like it’s Joyce’s fault that she got indoctrinated and brainwashed for her entire life and it’s not like they don’t have kind of a supportive relationship already (re: texting)…short story long, I don’t see what the issue is with her working it out aloud.
As much as it would be nice for Joyce to have this revelation herself, sometimes you just need someone there so when you say it out loud and say “Wow, that sounds really dumb out loud” they can just sit there and nod.
Yes. This. Activel Listening can be incredibly powerful for both the speaker and the listener. Sometimes all one needs is to know that they have been heard.
Agree with the last three commenters.
Rubber duck debugging: it’s definitely not just for programmers.
Progressively increasing anger is appropriate.
I think it was more he was cringing more then being progressively more angry. Like he was thinking “Damn what are they teaching these people in church, this is wrong on so many levels”.
Alt text suggests it is in fact anger as well. Then again, presumably Maggie’s more used to the occasional horror of Willis revisiting childhood and going ‘holy shit they really taught you this’ and so it no longer surprises her, whereas Joe is a fresh vessel of horrible knowledge.
Yeah, I see both anger and confusion in Joe. Just not anger at Joyce, more about what she’s been through.
As is being unable to come up with anything to say to it other than ‘no.’, because where do you even BEGIN with that one?
Joe just had a nega-orgasm – each panel progressively more painful, until at the end – sweet, sweet release!
“When I say it out loud it sounds really really stupid. It’s because it is really really stupid, isn’t it?”
If she didn’t realize that view on reality was massively distorted, it’s because everything else in her life was distorted around it to make it look reasonable.
For years, she was conditioned to defend her ideology automatically, with reflex evasions to all the things that signaled to her, “you’re looking at this the wrong way!”
The flip in perspective is disorienting at first, but well worth it. She will get to enjoy more justified confidence in her knowledge, and generate her own light, instead of passively badking in the fallacious, dogmatic certainty of faith.
It is a wonderful, satisfying, empowering feeling to puzzle through something logically, step by step, arrive at a conclusion– and then discover that you were right!! Much better than coming up completely wrong, because some adult authority figure says that something written down somewhere negates at least one logical step, just because.
Let alone trying to come up with the right answer just based on guessing what that authority figure probably wants and/or expects to hear, or just straight memorization of metaphorical and open-to-interpretation verses, which themselves may be in direct conflict with something you’ve either been taught to be true by another (equally confident) authority figure (like, say, a science teacher), or something you’ve actually witnessed for yourself. (Or puzzled out yourself). Or, hell, even something else in another part of the same damned source!!
I can’t wait until she hears how they figured something out, step by step, and pipes up with the next logical step/conclusion– and is right. 😀
“Wait. I don’t need to know how God or my pastor or parents feel about it to be able to come up with the right answer? I– I can just think?!“
“–Wait, I have to think?!
“I’m scared.” XD
“Inside of me, a light was turned on
And then I was alive”
“Suddenly came the dawn into light.
Suddenly I was born into light.
How can it be real?
I’m aliiiiive!
I’m aliiiiive!
I’m alive!”
that soundtrack and movie are one of my (slightly) guilty pleasures.
Yep. Great Soundtrack! Plus Roller Skating Olivia Newton-John!
Not gonna lie, the last bit of that post made me think of The Last Unicorn.
Right there with you. Better movie, too.
I like both, so there.
Oh man, I haven’t seen/thought about the Last Unicorn in YEARS. I kinda want to dig it out and rewatch it now. 😀
I watch it once every couple of months. I have a copy on my cellphone so i can watch it occasionally if i feel the need. I keep a copy of The Brave little Toaster and Monty Pythons Holy Grail at all times as well.
coping mechanisms
Very relatable.
“I’m Alive” is a song in the 1980 film “Xanadu”.
Which you people seem determined not to mention.
But I’m on to you.
I have Google!
Amusingly, it wasn’t even the song I was alluding to, nor was Last Unicorn, everyone just all went their own direction.
I was going for “Just Close Your Eyes” by Waterproof Blonde.
It’s more fun if you quote Handel’s Messiah here: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.”
Oh god, is this what fundamentalists actually believe!? That’s like children thinking you pee in the girl to get her pregnant!
I don’t think this comic fucks around when it comes to the things fundamentalist christians believe
This is what a large group of Creationists believe, yes. Some don’t even believe this much about evolution.
Oh yeah, got heated discussion with my former only colleague about this… and some neuroscience shit too… and she never got past the point “it can’t be wrong because I was told so by someone who knows more [god/priest/Charles atan], and scientists can’t possibly know more than [the bible/this snippet of cropped Freud I read on the internet/my neighbor who helped me move].
The most infuriating in this is that at one point it is impossible to make a difference, be it arguing calmly, yelling, asking for sources, pointing out she’s living in a country where this is massively called bullshit because founded on atheism…
When I was in elementary school, a teacher told us straight-up that kissing was how girls get pregnant.
Then my troublemaker friend kissed her twin brother to prove a point . . .
Goddammit, I meant sister, she just hadn’t hatched then. Fuck, but I normally don’t fuck that up.
If I understand what you mean, it seems like a reasonable sort of fuckup, in that the “brother” aspect must have seemed relevant at the time.
Thankfully, that was her take on it as well. I’m just relieved that she realizes that it was a mistake, she’s kinda more than a friend to me and my wife at this point and I don’t think we could stand losing our relationship with her.
Wait, what? Hatched?!? Is your friend one of those lizard people that secretly rule the world??
Trans people before they put a name to being transgender are sometimes called eggs!
Realizing that what you feel has a name (you’re transgender!) is sometimes called “hatching” or “cracking” the egg.
Okay, now things make sense again. I was a bit bewildered when that clarification only made things unclear for me.
Weirdly enough, “Lizard people that secretly rule the world” is an antisemitic trope, as some people literally spread that Jews are that. Obviously you didn’t know that, or you probably wouldn’t have used that particular phrase; you might want to retire it.
The More You Know (about bizarre religion stuff)
oops, thanks for pointing that out, i’d never realized that was the case, though i’m exhaustingly unsurprised to learn it.
and while you made me stop and think, i just want to report that i’ve done a quick bit of research and will henceforth avoid using the words cabal and sabbath colloquially or metaphorically or ironically (as in, “a cabal of tech CEOs” or, (calling myself out here) “come to one of our sabbaths some time, we’re all about fornication, seditions and revelings”. (i’m sure “black mass” will do just fine next time i absolutely must roleplay a satanist))
turns out those are both regular Jewish things that have been twisted into sounding sinister by centuries of antisemitism! i mean, i knew that, just hadn’t ever actually thought about it <.<
On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that the lizard people who secretly rule the world are not Jewish.
You’d think that if the Jews ruled the world, they’d treat the Jews better.
A fair point.
@thejeff Reminds me a storyline from the Spinerette comic where an old nazi wizard came to the local mad scientist and wanted him to clone Hitler. He had this whole spiel about Aryans being the supreme race and all that. When the scientist’s assistant asked “But wait, if Jews rule the world, wouldn’t that make Them the supreme race” and the nazi wizard lost his shit while yelling “THEY CHEATED!”
Did not know. Did the idea of lizard people ruling the world piggyback on the idea of Jews ruling the world, or did the two ideas form separately and then overlap?
Seems to come out of the anti-Semitism. It’s a surprisingly recent idea – coming mostly from David Ickes starting around 1998. He’d referenced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in early conspiracy theory work, so the anti-Semitism was certainly there.
The reptilian angle may have come out of older fantasy and science fiction without the anti-Semitic connotations – the 80s TV series “V” and even as far back as R.E. Howard’s serpent people.
As far as I know, and I only vaguely followed this, but the current mythology of the lizard overlords who traded advanced technology for the right to experiment on humans and then slowly took over industry and governments seems to have come out of the alien abduction conspiracy movement.
Yep. Since like medieval times through today, Jews have been defamed as elite powerful creatures, who sneakily control entertainment & banking & politics, getting their power by drinking blood. So, while lizard people are supposed to drink the blood of kittens and such, not the blood of Christian babies, it’s probably a new coat of green paint on and old, old idea.
Depressing history!
Lizard people who work from the shadows and WANT to rule the world are in the D&D video game Neverwinter Nights. I assume that means lizard people were in D&D lore, so that goes back… however far. Not aware of it being analogous to anything back then- lizard people are fairly popular in fantasy, as far as animal-people go, and there’s a greater element of alien-ness than with, say, cat people. (Strange how much less common dog people have been in recent media.) Anyway, my point is that if the tie to anti-semitism is relatively recent, I think it’s highly likely that it was connected to pre-existing ideas.
Those lizard/serpent people probably derive from the Robert E. Howard/Conan version.
Um…
a) “my troublemaker friend kissed her twin sister to prove a point”
or
b) “my troublemaker sister kissed her twin brother to prove a point”
Is that you Luke? Do you have the force?
c) my troublemaker friend kissed her twin sister to prove a point
They misgendered accidentally due to the doctors misdiagnosing twin sister’s gender originally.
In terms of pronunciation, do you prefer
a) Quick-saw-tick
b) Key-hoe-tick
or
c) Other: __________
?
Is there an emphasis on the maw, like MAWN-ster, is it still just monster, or is there a different pronunciation? (i.e. “throatwabblermangrove”)
Isn’t b) the Spanish pronunciation?
The first part is (Quixote == key-hoe-tay (ish)), but the subsequent word is (pretty sure) an english derivation and not spanish at all. I myself am torn on the pronunciation because I’m more familiar hearing a), but from an etymological stance feel like b) is more appropriate. From an entomological stance they both kinda bug me.
No one expects the spanish pronunciation!
I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard a), but now I’m questioning whether I’ve ever heard b) either. Have I just seen it written and extrapolated a pronunciation from the good Don.
It’s somewhat similar to Quick-saw-tick, but it’s not saw, it’s sah. Quick-sah-tick. Unless your British, in which case it’s Quick-sot-tick.
Let’s see if I can find on the Interwebs.
Ok, here go. Ignore what they wrote, because they would lead you to believe it’s kwuhk-saa-tuhk and instead listen to the American and British pronunciations.
https://www.google.com/search?q=pronunciation+of+quixotic&source=hp&ei=n-XQYMPmNcfk-gTQ-YOoCw&iflsig=AINFCbYAAAAAYNDzryOs4YdbHbX3Vguj6lR3hg8XC2x6&oq=how+is+quixotic+pronounced&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAEYATICCAAyBQgAEIYDUDZYnQJgsCtoAHAAeACAAZICiAGBBJIBAzItMpgBAKABAaoBB2d3cy13aXo&sclient=gws-wiz
* I tend to say kwik-saw-tic
* maunster is pronounced like “monster” but was a personal joke because my username as a teenager was “quixoticmaunder”
* quixotic maunder is bigwordtalk for excessively optimistic and idealistic chatter.
Essentially: I’m a hyperactive positive-thinking flibbertigibbet who likes large words too much.
so say we all (but fancy-like).
It’s even worse. Any contrary evidence is Satan trying to fool you to destroy your faith.
There are varying beliefs. Young Earth Creationism theories claim the Universe is only 6000 years old or so. Old Earth Creationism theories accept that the Universe is millions or even billions of years old, but claim humans were specially created by God.
Even Old Earth Creationism carries its problems. If plants were created before our solar system’s sun, how could those species have survived millions of years without sunlight?
…that isn’t a thing in Old Earth Creationism that I’ve heard of?
Only when the sun was introduced did they evolve to adapt to its heat, eventually becoming reliant on it. Duh!
(Is it too obvious that I have no idea what Old Earth Creationism even is?)
While I have no desire to defend Creationism of any form despite being a theist, I should point out that even they believe “Light” came first. You know, Day 1.
If they are integrating select scientific insights ad hoc, then light need not come from the sun or any star.
Virtual Photons are little bits of electromagnetic radiation of any frequency (including visible light) that pop in and out of existence at any point in space, lasting for no more tbay a third of a wavelength. They are sparse, yes, but they are still “light”.
So when God said, “let there be light”, he was kind of a Joani come lately, huh?
I’m reminded of a thing from the tv show NEWSROOM where the news anchor basically got some really deluded fundamentalist guests who didn’t understand the argument they were being held as “experts” on so he had to basically coach them through it on-air.
Though that depends on which creation story in the bible they follow, of course.
I’ve never heard that belief espoused. My exposure to what is here being called “Old Earth Creationism” is from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who teach that the story of creation in genesis is a parable where each day represents a different age of evolution spanning potentially millions or billions of years.
We should be happy Dina wasn’t here. She would be more…angry.
HOMPK!
Fundie Christians believe some really wacky and ridiculous things. This sort of creationist nonsense is just one type of the many bizarre things they believe.
Honestly, sounds like more contortioning to get to that point than to just accept evolution with no clauses.
As Joyce has mentioned previously, Evolution and natural selection being true breaks the idea of Original Sin, the foundational pillar of a lot of their beliefs. It being true means everything they have been taught is a lie
Not trying to make this a thing, but I always had an issue with that strip. Not in its entirety, but with the idea that there was no death before original sin. I really don’t get that concept and I’m feeling the urge to get it off my chest.
Maybe people just had different bibles than me and mine, but if Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden to prevent them from eating the fruit from the tree of immortality, then they were mortal and therefore would have always died, even in Eden. It was work/hardship/pain that they were given as punishment for original sin, not death.
Did other bibles simply not mention the whole “now that they have knowledge of good and evil, we need to keep them from becoming immortal so that they don’t become like us” part? Cuz if so, than I am today years old to find that out.
It seems like a theological point than a biblical one.
What do you mean?
I meant it seemed more like a thing coming from the way it was taught than actually being laid out in the bible. Willis said in the comments in that strip you linked that his church took it from the line ‘the wages of sin is death’.
Ah. Gotcha.
That seems silly. Of course, for many people, religion itself is silly (Christianity in particular) so it’s whatever. At least now I know where that idea comes from.
(And Thag Simmons gets the credit for remembering/linking that strip.)
If I were goofier (and you were conveying an accent with your text), this could almost be a conversation between Walky and Sal.
Ah dunno what you’re talking ’bout. 😛
Well, evolution is obvious a thing, at least that what my school books have taught me, but God must also exist because we have chicken nuggets, and only a divine being could have come up with such a perfect food. 😅
Mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is the perfect food. But if you want to have chicken nuggets with your mayonnaise, I have no quarrel with you.
Pizza is the perfect food, but pecan pie tastes better.
Where I live, pecan pie is the most calories per dollar that you can get (short of eating lard, which is not nearly as nice).
unless you don’t like pecans.
yes, we exist.
It’s possibly an interpretation of Genesis 3:19, the whole ‘dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return” bit: because it’s in the middle of all his cursing, it could be taken to mean that this is the end-point of the penalty he’s laying on them, and that originally he didn’t intend them to return to the earth.
Which is not to say that your nitpicking doesn’t make a lot more sense.
I mean they were made mortal.
That doesn’t mean he was giving the opportunity to become immortal.
Both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were in the garden, but only the tree of knowledge was off limits.
Why they didn’t eat from the tree of life I have no idea, but arguably they could have via free will, and thus become immortal.
So it can easily be said that being kept from that tree by being kicked out of the garden is the reason they would return to dust.
*…wasn’t giving them the opportunity to become immortal.*
I’m making so many typos today.
It was the tree of knowledge, not the tree of immortality. At least that’s the translation I heard growing up.
There were two trees, two trees important to those first few chapters of genesis anyway. One being the tree of knowledge. The other being the tree of life (I just mistakenly called it immortality but it’s the same).
“ 22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:” -from the 3 chapter of genesis (kjv) per biblegateway.com
It wasn’t a tree of immortality. It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I’ve never heard it call the tree of immortality before.
I don’t want to spam the same comment, but there were two trees.
See my reply to David.
Oh, yeah.
There were three trees, but all reference to the third tree was deleted in the Great Purge. Now we can only speculate about the tree of Gamoracy.
What kind of garden only has two trees, anyhow?
When I was very young, my parents had a vegetable garden with a tree at either end.
To the best of my knowledge tho, they didn’t name it Eden or anything else.
I say this with the caveat that I haven’t studied the Bible since my confirmation at 17, and that was a looong time ago, and I’m not a Christian anymore.
But as far as I can recall, according to the Anglicans, anyways (and we were using the KJV, of course), it’s not that there wasn’t any death at all in Eden; but that it was innocent. Not malicious.
Like, the carnivores would hunt, and eat the herbivores; and heck, maybe even Adam and Eve would hunt the animals and eat them. But it was just done for food, with no interest in the suffering (or in causing the suffering) of the animal.
Conceivably someone could be responsible for the death of another human being there (maybe by coming up and giving your friend a hearty backslap just as they’re swallowing a particularly large bite of banana or something and they choke to death); but you couldn’t have murder, because there couldn’t have been the intent to harm.
But then, afterwards, Cain murders Abel. Like, he falls into this jealous, murderous rage, and just straight-up kills him, with the intent to harm him, to end him, and that couldn’t have happened before the Fall.
–But I suppose, also, that it may have been more like someone who kills someone else, but then is found not criminally responsible, because they were incapable of forming the intent to kill, or else was unable to comprehend the likely consequences of their actions. Sort of how it wasn’t until after they ate the apple that Adam and Eve realized that there might be anything questionable about showing their entire bodies to just anybody and everybody.
They were naked all along; it’s just that eating the apple gave them the ability to feel bad about it. That means the decision of whether or not to cover themselves up was no longer purely an issue of comfort– it was too cold to be naked, or unpleasantly rainy (if the weather could be unpleasant in Eden), or the rocks hurt their feet, or the sand kept getting up their ass cracks– but now, not even only in addition to purely practical matters, but superseding those practical considerations, whether or not they wore clothes would have been a moral matter. It wasn’t, now, that it was too cold to not wear clothing of some kind; it was that it was now wrong to not wear clothing.
–Which I suppose also makes it easier to control them, doesn’t it? Because without a sense of morality, there’s no need or desire to question God’s authority. Because anything he might tell you to do, whether that’s to be fruitful and multiply, or to kill anyone who breaks the Sabbath, or to stone disobedient children to death, cannot possibly be immoral, by definition.
There’s no need to use your own judgment to decide if you should do it. Your God has told you to do this. Therefore, you do it.
It cannot possibly be wrong, or immoral; because right and wrong, moral and immoral, simply do not exist.
–Whoops, large unintentional italicization block, sorry, haha
Pedantic comment, it wasn’t an apple.
I’m so proud of her! And I’m glad it is Joe with her at this moment and not Becky. I’m not fully convinced Becky would have a problem with Joyce coming to terms with atheism, but I also don’t think Becky is the right person to talk it out with.
Becky has already been dismissive of Joyce’s crisis, so I feel like Joyce is unlikely to share this with Becky until forced to.
And I’m not entirely sure that Becky wouldn’t have a problem with Joyce going atheist, considering how hard she’s clinging to the parts of her religion that she doesn’t feel like she has to abandon for being directly antagonistic of her identity specifically or being demonstrably anti-factual.
Yeah, Becky might be fine with Dina being an atheist, but she’s never known Dina to be anything else. Joyce isn’t just Becky’s Best Friend, she’s Becky’s best friend who was the most pious among them, the one who knew all her verses and believed what she was saying. Joyce being Christian is a key part of Becky’s conception of her, and Joyce is already one of the last remnants of their old lives. If Joyce lost that, then everything really has changed forever. Plus, if Joyce the Perfect Christian still believes and is okay with Becky, then it’s the congregation that’s wrong (on those specific points, of course.)
I do wonder if it was one of the final keys to Joyce starting to come to terms with her lack of belief was when Toedad said to her they had the most hope for her not because she was the most ‘socially-adjusted’ or generally pious and religiously learned, but that she was the most obedient of the kids and they expected secular college wouldn’t change that. He brings up her knowledge, sure, but only after she tells him he’s wrong, not part of his initial line about having ‘hope’ for her. They were proud, but in the context of the obedience line while they’ve all been kidnapped and he’s allying himself with a mobster to hurt Becky? I could see that being another breaking point, and a pretty massive one. (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/renewal/ )
Just a big soutpark “Christians actually believe this” under this comic.
Blog post: ‘No seriously guys, I have evidence from my childhood’ and then those pictures of worksheets Willis posted on Tumblr way back when.
Not sure what to call them anymore since my family disowned me and the woman who gave birth to me separated from her husband who was my step dad while they were family, but yeah they believed this shit. I went to public school and stopped believing in religion when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. Had a lot of “Why be good if you don’t want to go to hell” talks when I was growing up. Shit’s wild.
That really helps make it ‘real’ for those of us who didn’t grow up in that environment. It’s one thing to just hear the stories, but Willis has the receipts to prove it.
Every now and then a creationist that isn’t batshit appears on r/debateachristian, and they are fascinating, if misguided, people.
Honestly, that disclaimer should probably name the group of Christians who believe that because a large part of Christianity actually doesn’t. 😛
Young Earth Creationists believe this versus Christians. Catholics believe in evolution as do most Protestants and Orthodox. Which to explain it in pop culture terms:
“Fans of GI JOE EXTREME believe this versus GI Joe fans.”
And in the dorms, Dina feels a sudden burst of inexplicable elation.
As do I.
Ooooohhh Yeaaahhhh!!!!!
I cannot wait for Mary to meet New Joyce.
I feel as if that is either going to be a slight 2 or 3 strip joke, or it’ll end up being a very toxic and stressful chapter ending…
Well, Joyce doesn’t have far to fall in Mary’s eyes, so I’m hoping for the former.
Oooh, let’s get Joyce to repeat the first four panels to Dina. I’ll get the popcorn.
*throws Indiana-grown popcorn kernels into homemade Telsa Coil Chamber*
What toppings should I add?
Mayonnaise.
Space mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise on popcorn? Heresy! What planet are you people from?
What next? Popcorn desecrated with the filthy red ichor known as ketchup?
Interestingly enough, in Japan, it’s actually not uncommon for people to use mayonaise as a substitute for pizza sauce.
Yes, but Japan has an entire island that is used as a resort for bunny rabbits.
http://rabbit-island.info/en/
I forget what my point was.
Whatever it was, it’s been well received. That’s a bucket-list style place.
They are both Mike. This is the only explanation.
No, no. Booster and Jennifer are Mike. It keeps them busy switching back and forth.
Booster, Jennifer, milu and Jhon can all be Mike. Mike just needs a body double to fill in some times.
She’s working some stuff out.
Amazing progress for only 6 months out.
She had a few pretty big “everything I believe is a lie” moments along the way so I feel like a lot of it is that she has chosen to effectively dump all of that belief, she just hasn’t realized how deeply that belief went.
Yep! I fully buy that she hadn’t realized she could believe in evolution now because she hadn’t yet been given the opportunity to think through her old beliefs and go ‘wait. This doesn’t make sense without these big assumptions taken as given. Huh.’ There’s A LOT that’s gonna need unpacking, and while she’s had breakthroughs, she hasn’t exactly had the time to look at her entire childhood and deconstruct it piece by piece.
On Joe’s chest?
NO, JOYCE, YOU HAVE TO FINISH YOUR HOMEWORK FIRST. Then you can nap.
This revelation is gonna be rough but necessary. Godspeed, kid. We love that for you.
Joe: “Holy shit, are you okay?”
Joe has more than just 30 minutes of homework to do.
Ohhh this was just brain constipation. Good.
DOA Volume ?: “No. No. No. No.”
DoA Book 11: I Need a Nap
Oh dear, I’ve punctuated my equilibrium.
*spurts a tail and wings suddenly*
considering the year, you’re more likely to grow horns and/or tusks, or just turn into an elf.
Watch that become the next 5G or human magnetism.
I do like that a part of Joyce learning actual science is to make a conscious admission of what needs to first be UNlearnt.
Same way Becky went about it, interestingly enough.
Becky didn’t build her entire worldview on top of their bible-literalism teachings the way Joyce did, though. Remember back in the first Toedead kidnapping, when she’s sorting out what she was taught vs what science says with Dina? (Or even the Ulsa doll bit at Six Flags.) She was able to toss out the parts that didn’t make sense to her or conflicted with what she felt was right. For Joyce, that stuff was load-bearing.
It’s always seemed to me that Joe and Joyce are the two best-realised characters on this strip
They really do seem the most realistically portrayed
they’re so much more realistic than me
“A nap on your chest….uh I mean…actually that’s exactly what I mean. I no longer have to believe in religious expectations of propriety either!”
~ The End ~
Of course, this makes me wonder. Find a beetle with green iridescent wings instead of clear or some other color, and it’s a new species.
But take other critters. You have a dog that weighs over 100 pounds, has long, thick fur, and stands over three feet tall at the shoulder – I’m talking here about a St. Bernard or Bernese Mountain Dog – but it’s still the same species (Canis familiaris) as a Pekingese, a dachshund, or a chihuahua.
Apparently even the scientists aren’t sure.
Taxonomy is something we made up and there is a lot of debate about how to define things but generally speaking if a mating pair can produce fertile offspring, they’re of the same species
Exactly. I learned it as the morphological species concept. If 2 animals can breed and have viable offspring, then they should still be considered the same species. However, if two animals breed and the offspring are not viable (like hybrids) then they are no longer considered to be within the same species. There are many more barriers that are displayed by different species. Obvious geographical barriers, such as mountains and streams to block species intermixing. In one of my early bio college classes, I remember learning about 2 species of snails that were nearly identical. The only difference was that one species shell was spiraled clockwise, whereas the other snails shell was spiraled counterclockwise. This slight difference in morphology made it impossible to the male to mount the female.
So actually, the scientist are pretty sure as to what is going on. But, taxonomy are human-made barriers. These definitions are just our own way to understand how species are able to adapt in the past and present environments.
Oh so very loosely. There are definitely plenty of things we consider different species that can interbreed – dogs/wolves/coyotes, for example.
Obviously doesn’t apply to species that don’t reproduce sexually. There are also ring species and chronospecies: species widely distributed either geographically or in time, where neighbors could interbreed at all points, but those on the far ends couldn’t breed with each other.
As you say, it’s a made up taxonomy that we layer on top of a more complex real world. It’s still useful, as long as we remember it’s the map, not the territory.
@thejeff: map vs territory is a great analogy, thanks!
@RandomScientist: what you’re describing is the biological species concept.
The morphological species concept is when you assign organisms to different species based on their morphology, that is, how they look (and depending on the group you might be looking at some minute differences in specific places), without necessarily checking that they are reproductively isolated from other species.
(it’s actually the only species concept that applies in paleontology i believe, at least beyond ~1Mya when DNA-based classification (which is yet another species concept) is no longer an option)
Yup, my bad. That’s what I get for making a comment super late in the night. It’s even worse since I’m a paleontologist.. though that’s probably why I just called it the morphological species concept instead of the biological one.
haha that makes sense. well, i take your absence of clarification as full endorsement of my definitions then (i’m a hack and a fraud). what do you study if i may ask?
Lol, your definitions sound great to me! It’s been a while since I took an into to bio class though. Through grad school we only ever discussed the morphological one because, you’re right, that’s the one paleontologists use.
I’m a mammal paleontologist, and I focus on carnivores from the Miocene-Pleistocene. So far I’ve only done work on some saber-toothed cats (and false ones (Barbouofelis)), but I’ll be expanding my research to include Miocene East African mammals. I look at the bone morphology and determine what muscle usage the animals had to infer how they moved. With that I can then infer their ecology (such as how they hunted).
I have serious doubts that some of the teacup breeds are really still “dogs.” They may just be dog-analogues, rather than still being dogs. One of the obedience instructors for a National Chain said something to the effect that she just let them graduate on a free pass, because they were no longer capable of learning and retaining the lessons.
What are teacup breeds?
Dogs that are of already small breeds that are bred to be even smaller. Named as such because they’re bred so small that many of them quite literally fit inside a teacup. Generally speaking, they are less than 17 inches long and 4 pounds heavy at one year old.
Honestly, I find breeding for a trait like that rather disgusting; not literally, but morally. In most cases where animals are bred for specific traits, in order to maximize on that trait, the animals are often forcefully inbred, which causes all sorts of genetic problems, many of which can lead to the animal suffering and living short lives. All because some human wanted a certain trait in their pet. I can’t see that as anything but contemptible.
I am so disappointed that no-one is breeding teacups.
I feel that way too, but especially with facial features such as pugs and bulldogs (and Persian cats). The struggles those poor animals live with just to look “right” is awful.
But honestly I think the concept of something being “purebred” is just toxic and terrible. Animals being bred, generation after generation, with no care for quality of life or sickness, only caring that the ears are the right shape to impress some group or other. Just about every breed has some issue or other as a result of the years of breeding, and there’s only so much that can be done by even the most ethical of breeders to reduce that short of intentional and careful cross-breeding- which, of course, doesn’t have much profit to it compared to selling purebred border collies or poodles.
Though a lot of the breeds were originally developed as working dogs of various kinds – not quite as much focus on looks and more on traits for the particular job, whether that’s moving sheep around or killing wolves.
The following is only grounded in personal preference and not in fact or science: But I choose to prescribe the idea that teacup breeds and chihuahuas are actually the result of some monstrous (and yes, unnatural) attempt to cross breed sewer rats with dogs.
As for the ability to learn… well, there are some awfully smart, awfully small dinosaurs around.
and while I’m aware of the argument that “domestication means they stay like babies forever”, I’ve long predicted that the biotech company that manages to create kittens and/or puppies who literally remain so for all of their (probably much shortened) lives will make All the Money. :p
And this would seem a tragedy and yet may also be the gateway to achieving biological immortality while also creating untold tragedies of other varieties. Cute tho’, so in the words of Ruby Rhod: “But who cares!”
One of the reasons it makes sense to think of them all as just dogs is the amount of work it takes to keep the various breeds distinct. Left to themselves for only a few generations, all the breeds would merge right back into village mutt.
But probably wouldn’t merge into wolf or coyote populations, despite the occasional cross.
If you go by the most common definition of species, they are still dogs.
As someone commented above, if two individual can produce fetile offspring, they are the same species.
if you go by that definition, some dogs physically can’t interbreed.
…sooo…
I don’t think that actually is a speciation limitation though. Species with severe sexual dimorphism exist, and no doubt it creates cases where two particular members cannot interbreed while each of them remain capable of breeding (being fertile) with other members of their species. It potentially introduces a selection pressure that could fork the species however, if only particular members can *ahem* fork, as it were.
Presumably there could be a case for bovines for example, where a particular bull would simply be too large to trust to safely mate traditionally with a particular cow, so they are kept apart and the cow would be artificially inseminated. (this is a thought exercise. there are other actual reasons for artificial insemination)
“Species with severe sexual dimorphism exist, and no doubt it creates cases where two particular members cannot interbreed while each of them remain capable of breeding (being fertile) with other members of their species.”
i can’t make sense of this?
my point was not that dogs don’t all belong to the same species, my point was that the interbreeding test doesn’t actually work with dogs (see C.F.B.’s comment that i was replying to.)
Try breeding a chihuahua and a mastiff (but really, don’t). everyone involved is a dog, yet they can’t interbreed. there’s some sort of sexual isolation going on here, which if those were not highly artificial breeds, would eventually lead to speciation.
if you were only going by “can interbreed YES/NO” then chihuahuas and mastiffs would be considered separate species. they’re not, because that criterion is not the end-all be-all of the species concept.
Oh ok. I read your earlier as being a point about the bio-mechanical problems of trying to breed them. I didn’t realize they straight up could not breed chomosomal/genetically. I do readily see thay it isn’t the be-all of the species concept. And even if the definition is limited to fertility (as one version’s definition), then it still wouldn’t speciate chihuahua’s and mastiffs since they can both produce offspring as individual breeds, and with other dogs, even if it’s not with each other.
oh i absolutely did mean they couldn’t reproduce for biomechanical reasons, not genetic.
quote from some dog site:
“There are situations where it may seem apparent – even without any specialist knowledge – that the size discrepancy is too extreme and could even cause lethal bleeding. In this instance, the two dogs should never be encouraged to mate.”
you were mentioning ring species yesterday (the seagull thing?). well, chihuahuas and mastiffs are like that, except they aren’t considered separate species.
to reiterate, my point was to complexify CFB (and many people)’s commonly-held belief that “a species is defined solely and entirely by whether individuals can interbreed”.
well, take a chihuahua and a mastiff and you have a counterexample to that:
• can’t interbreed.
• yet same species.
one might ask, “well then why don’t we say that they’re different species?” and to be honest i’m not 100% sure, but i suspect it’s that they just look so different because they are strenuously bred generation after generation to be that way. as someone said earlier, if you just let dogs mate with whoever they wanted, they would probably all revert back to your average-looking mutt in very few generations. genetically, i imagine, all breeds of dogs are almost indistinguishable.
…it was thejeff, like 5 comments above, who i’ve essentially just plagiarized lol.
Oh and yeah, a reminder is always welcome. I’ve heard of the dangers of crossbreeding.
It actually doesn’t matter what you call them. If two groups are interbreeding, then functionally they are a species. If they aren’t interbreeding, whether because of distance or incompatibility or whatever, then they are functioning genetically as separate species.
“groups are interbreeding” is probably a better way to think about it than “can interbreed”.
Tbh I’m really happy she has a friend in Joe.
I’m a huge shipper but their friend/ship/ is very important. They make each other better imo.
Maybe one day they’ll fuck!
Don’t forget, Canons sink ships!
*mind blown*
Maybe she *wants* to sink onto his canon.
*cannon
Huh, well, at least she doesn’t assume a timespan of millions of years is impossible to begin with. If Joyce can acknowledge the Earth has existed for long enough for that to prove impossible, then it seems she has already moved on from the whole business of “no thing ever killed another until humans invented evil”.
The worse part is that according to the Bible itself, God is entirely to blame for our sinful nature.
In Genesis, God created Adam from clay, so he inherited no original sin. If God made every human this way, no human would ever be born intrinsically evil.
But after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, God mysteriously switched to creation from birth: a completely new method of making humans which he knew would guarantee that every human would be born an inherent winner.
By commanding Adam and Eve to “go forth and multiply”, God deliberately multiplies human sin, multiplies human misery, multiplies human debt, and multiplies the need for sacrificial atonement.
We have names for people who deliberately peddle inferior products that require constant, expensive maintenance work on which they have a monopoly.
TIL that Apple being called Apple is a very deep, very sick burn.
Yeah, but it’s a lot less work to make them self-replicating.
Such work would be trivial to an all-knowing, all-powerful god who can not only go though the effort to make every human being from clay, but create an environment where their innocence would never be jeopardized.
If the god of the Bible wanted to preserve human ignorance of good and evil, he could have created them without curiosity. He could have made them unable to communicate with anyone but each other and him. Having just created an entire universe, he could have placed the trees of forbidden fruit some far away mountain, or some far away planet, far out of anyone’s reach. There’s no reason for why these trees even had to exist.
There would be an endless supply of simple and obvious measures available to an all-knowing, all-powerful god who wanted to venerate human innocence. The fact that none of these measures were taken indicates stupidity, negligence, incompetence or active sadism.
The more you go on, the more you sound to me, not so much like an atheist and more like a misotheist.
which is fine, you’re in great company ^^
Not that I actually believe in the existence of this biblical tyrant; the point is that religion just about never stands up to critical scrutiny. I didn’t need to. It was never supposed to make sense. It wasn’t supposed to be a source of moral guidance (no dogmatic system can ever be a truly moral system). Religion was designed to be a tool of oppression, nothing more, nothing less. It failed drastically at everything else people tried to make it do because, as with any other tool, it of course fails really badly when people use it to do the wrong job. You might as well use your lawnmower to cut your hair.
“Religion was designed to be a tool of oppression, nothing more, nothing less.”
wow, that’s a take. kind of reductive, don’t you think?
i’m not trying to get in an argument, because i can see that you have a serious bone to pick with religion, and i’m sure you have very good reason for that.
but, you know… religion is an extremely complex and multifaceted phenomenon that has involved many billions of humans over millenia. so… that pronouncement sounds a bit cavalier to me.
Given that religions have had tremendous influence on the cultures surrounding them for millenia, it is no wonder many people have trouble separating the two.
However, at its core, religion is a means by which to
controlmotivate people to perform behaviors by getting them to uncritically accept unprovable claims about a general order of human existence.This has proven to work substantially well for monarchs who got their subjects to pay material tribute and reverence to them by claiming to have exclusive communication with the gods or some divine justice system (Karma, etc.).
However, using unsubstantiated, invisible, omnipresent, unbearable threats and/or intangible rewards to get people to behave morally is by its very nature a substantially flawed system that can promote some of the most extreme immorality we’ve ever seen.
Attributing justice to a universe with no inherit justice guarantees a lot of destructive behavior. People who don’t suffer spite behaving immorality will have proof of their righteousness. It also leads to a lot of unnecessary and often agonizing soul-searching for people who suffer greatly spite behaving morally. They are forced to identify nonexistent transgressions. Being human, they find them. Or worse yet they have them found by others.
When it comes to the alleged “divine authorship” of basic human moral rules, religions all over the world are but complete plagiarists.
yeah ok, this is one topic we won’t be agreeing on. oh well
Sorry if I seem to have rather strong positions on this. Many of my criticisms of religion are ones that I have on widespread superstitious and supernatural beliefs in general, so I don’t necessarily aim them at religion in particular.
I predict that a huge part of the problem may lie with my best attempt at finding a useful definition of “religion”, that would include systems like Buddhism or Shinto that didn’t necessarily have gods. Although a lot of focus on the discussions here was on Abrahamic religion, it’s important to recognize that many Asian and proto-european religions have many of the same problems, even without gods.
Is there a word that describes disliking *religion* more than hating *gods* per-se? Asking for a friend who attributes the suffering caused by faith to the people and organizations more than their fictions.
Or curiosity. “Hmm, I wonder what these humans will do if I stick a tree near them they can’t eat from.”
The active sadism comes from his reaction. Or shows a tyrannical mindset: I want to be sure they’ll obey me, so I’ll put this one test nearby to prove that I did that bit right. Oh shit, I guess I didn’t breed obedience into them well enough. Screw that, let ’em suffer.
An all-knowing god has no need to satisfy his curiosity, as by definition such a being would have no ignorance of ANYTHING, including the outcome of the situation he put Adam and Eve in.
God knew that Adam and Eve were given conflicting statements which they had absolutely no capacity to process (as they were innocent and ignorant by HIS design). When the Serpent told Adam and Eve that they wouldn’t die after eating the forbidden fruit, he said specifically that the very act of eating the fruit wouldn’t kill them. True to the Serpent’s word, the first humans did not die from the fruit, but instead gained wisdom. When God said that they would die, he meant that he would personally ensure their eventual death by kicking them out of Eden.
It was God’s deliberate misphrasing of his statement about the fruit that caused the whole problem. We can safely call it deliberately misleading because, being an all-knowing god, he would have known exactly how Adam and Eve would misinterpret it. Had he specifically told them that he would kick them out of his magic garden and leave them to die if they dare eat from the tree of wisdom, his statement wouldn’t have conflicted with that of the Serpent, and there would have been no problem.
The fault lays entirely with the biblical God character. The Serpent was only telling what he knew, completely unaware of God’s hidden intentions, his oh so “mysterious ways”. Adam and Eve were given conflicting information that they had absolutely no capacity to process. They were punished for failing a test that they were designed to fail.
Devil’s advocate (well, God’s advocate, I suppose): And thus, the beginning of wisdom was learning to parse statements properly. They could have noticed that God didn’t say “at once”. So now they could be kicked out and learn wisdom all on their own. :p
All of this depends on an all-knowing god, though. If he really was all-knowing, wouldn’t he have worked out that Adam needed to get laid without having to be told?
If it is taken that God is the all-knowing creator of Adam, he would have known EXACTLY what abilities his creation had, and EXACTLY how well Adam would have been able to interpret his vague statement.
Actually, the Bible implies that there were other people around already. When he gives Cain the Mark of Cain.“ Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.“
If the only other people around were Adam and Eve, that wouldn’t have been necessary…
Honestly, this is even more confusing. Adam and Eve sin so then Yahweh makes a bunch of other people but makes THEM born sinners? I don’t get it.
It means Yahweh was a scam artist. It’s like the bronze age equivalent of Apple.
As I read it, only those whose line traces back to Adam and Eve can have original sin. The others probably had their own creation myths.
(Why am I reminded of video games where non-playable characters cease to exist when the player is not around?)
IIRC the Bible does say that Adam and Eve had (hundreds?) of other children, it just singles out Cain and Abel because of the whole murderer/murder-victim thing.
Not to mention that Cain leaves Eden for the Land of Nod, where he gets married and founds a city.
Of course, one could argue that the mark was necessary, since at this time people lived for hundreds of years and Adam and Eve had been commanded to be fruitful and multiply. Putting aside the incest necessary for that to happen, it wouldn’t be that long before there were enough people around that they all wouldn’t recognize their great-great-great uncle Cain.
In the original Hebrew, the first word is B’reisheet, which is usually translated as “in the beginning”. B’ is a prefix that usually means “in”, you see.
However, B’ can also mean “during”. As in, “During the beginning, while God was creating the heavens and the earth…”
This alternate (and perfectly valid) translation of B’ would make Adam and Eve examples of early humans (or allegories to human nature, and not literal people at all, but I’m trying on literalism for the sake of making a more fundamentalist argument). In this story, there are other people on earth, we’re just focusing on the Adam & Eve branch. Cain and Seth can go find somebody new to marry (who isn’t their mom or their totally-unmentioned sisters). We aren’t all inbred to death.
Fundamentalist Christians insist that they’re citing the original unchanging Word of God, but they’re using a translation of it. You lose a lot when you translate stuff.
PS. I know that some of these sects consider the King James Version to be divinely inspired, like the other translations are corrupted but the KJV is perfect — why on earth do they pick that one, the KJV is the worst translation
It’s a very pretty translation. The writing in it is excellent as poetry.
It’s not even a bad translation – just an old one. We’ve gotten better.
I’m guessing it’s the one they’re used to and the one the early proponents of that particular belief strain grew up with. (A bit akin to Willis’s ‘thanks to my picture Bible, depictions of Jesus without a blue sash feel off’ thing that Robin got over in Shortpacked, but with actual consequences and none of the self-awareness. https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/sash )
During their work, the KJV translators prayed for guidance.
Yeah, it’s one of those things where the Torah doesn’t quite manage to erase the fact that Yahweh started as your ordinary tribal god, who’s the only one you should worship cause he’s YOUR god, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other gods out there. See also the first of the ten commandments. And the occasional mention of his wife.
Actually, his wife Asherah was originally the wife of El, chief god of the Canaan pantheon. She only became the wife of Yahweh per say during the period of religious syncronitism when Yahweh, El, and Baal were combined into one god, which the Bible refers to as El Elohim Yahweh in Genesis and other books. He was most often just called Yahweh though, and this frankenstein-esque combination of gods formed the basis of the Yahsistic religion, where followers habitually worshipped only Yahweh but still achknowledged the existence of other gods.
True monotheism only came after the Babylonian captivity, where the idea that Yahweh was the only god to exist and had power over ALL the cosmos was born of of pure nationalist enthusiasm (or should I say tribalism?) among the people of Israel, resulting from the emotionally accepted rationalization that Yahweh controlled the actions of the Babylonians to punishment them for failing to condemn those who worshipped other gods. This theological transition marked the end of Yahwism, and the beginning of true Judaism.
I always like pointing out “go forth and multiply” means that God said that sex was good and awesome on the first day and everyone else is just pretending otherwise.
Sure, but only to have kids. None of this non-reproductive messing around.
There’s a subsection about protection that was meant to be added later. 🙂
“We have names for people who deliberately peddle inferior products that require constant, expensive maintenance work on which they have a monopoly.”
Ooo! I’ve got this one.
The word is multi-millionaire.
Second to last panel: Oh, hey, you basically just reinvented Punctuated Equilibrium! Though, uh, it does still happen a bit more slowly than “overnight”, but… Hey, at least you’re back in the ballpark of science again!
Puncuated equilibrium or not, no biologist believes entire families of organisms can diversify in a few thousand years. These kinds of creationists believe evolution is far more effective than it really is, except suddenly with hard limits.
So you can turn a gibbon into a gorilla in a couple centuries but a billion years would not suffice to make it into a human. (shrug)
That may have been true in the pre-history before genetic engineering, but gibbon DNA is mostly the same as human DNA anyway, so all you’ve got to do is find a pathway where you can adjust a few genes at a time to get a gibbon descended human.
Why you would do this is another question. It’s not like we need humans without rights today when we are busy developing artificially intelligent machines enslaved by their programming to exploit.
Evolution is VERY fast these days.
sometimes it can happen in the course of one conversation!
I think we call that an epiphany.
And it’s celebrated among atheists as the Feast of the Unclenching.
Especially around here. Have you SEEN how fast people evolve when they’re playing gravatar roulette?
Thank goodness for Joyce’s awakening in the last panel. Now I feel less agitated than seconds ago.
I read the last panel and thought I understood it but went back to reread it and figure out where Joyce’s uncle came into this
Is N. Ching her uncle on her mother’s side or her father’s side?
He is her father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former room-mate.
But what I want to know is what did they do to Uncle Ching’s brain for 18 years.
Refridgerator, second shelf, behind the macaroni casserole. It’s amazing what you can lose back there.
Joe’s face in that last panel.
We have reached empathy.
Wow. She got over that a lot faster than a lot of mostly-secular-raised people I’ve known who just got taught shitty biology and didn’t believe in evolution because what they were taught had a bunch of holes in it.
It’s a comic strip. It doesn’t have to be realistic to get its point across.
Joyce just finally got rid of a lot of lag in that final panel, huh?
“… but when I became a man [sic] I put away childish things”
This is why I kniw I am a child: it’s because I still want to spank that, baby!
“including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
Before I allowed myself to believe in evolution, I made the mistake of telling my dad that I liked to think through how things might evolve because it was such a logical idea. He responded with “There’s no logic to it at all!” and I had to backpedal like crazy. Later when I could finally accept evolution it was such a relief and so fascinating.
In all fairness (and speaking as an Evolutionist), micro-evolution is easily and readily provable, but macro-evolution has NEVER been observed, either in a lab or in nature. It’s the best theory we have to fit the facts, but it’s likely going to remain a theory due to our basic lack of a geological life span.
Also, yay, Sal, at last!
> macro-evolution has NEVER been observed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
You’re welcome.
“They’re still e. coli, right? Not macro-evolution.”
Macro-evolution has never been observed because in creationist heads the terms are slippery enough to wrap anything we observe into micro-evolution – even as that changes.
“Move the goalposts” is always the last step in their mental debate flowchart.
Um, yeah, I’m NOT a creationist, thank you.
Evolution is evolution.
Yeah, things don’t get crazy until you try to get everything to conform to the Book of Genesis. Then they get absolutely insane once you realize that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 don’t agree on whether humans were the first to be created or the last.
According to Genesis 1, God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky,” on the fifth day. Then, on the sixth day, God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” … and then, later on during the course of the sixth day, He created man. So man came after the birds, the fish, the whales, and everything else.
Now, if you’re referring to the part in Genesis 2 (Gen 2:19-20) where it refers to man naming the animals, that’s easily reconciled. The two verses cited state “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.”
My way of looking at it is that, until they were shown to man and man gave them names (elephant, giraffe, weasel, whatever), they were just ‘creatures’.
Or you know, it’s an actual contradiction caused by merging two variants of the creation myth together into one text.
Why anyone other than fundamentalist literalists bothers jumping through hoops to try to make the Bible coherent in a literal sense is beyond me.
Some are continuity nerds, and some are trying to make things consistent because as believers they feel like it should be even though they know parts are parables and metaphors, is my guess.
Well the key idea here is that if it doesn’t agree with the Bible, you spin it so it does. One of the most straightforward spins that I’ve encountered is that the REST of the world was created in order of Genesis 1, and then god creates humans where the Garden of Eden’s going to be and makes more examples of critters for Adam to name.
…. the impressive part is when Adam manages to give EVERY TYPE OF CREATURE a name in 24 hours. World record for fast talking is 11 words per second, so if we absurdly believe that Adam is capable of that and that hesomehow keeps that pace up for 24 hours (and YEC insists it’s a 24-hour day), that’s barely 10% of all species of animal. And also he needed to consider them for a helpmeet (aka fuckbuddy), so he has to at least say “no” for every animal, which doubles the number of words needed and cuts us down to 5%. And that’s assuming he doesn’t need to stop to think of a name, and that God never has to stop him to say “no, you already used that name, think of another one” (which I’d expect him a bunch of times before he reached his 200,000th name sometime around 10 hours in), or stop to have a drink of water or inhale (which I’d also expect him to do a bunch of times by the 10 hour mark), and that he doesn’t need any really long names slowing down his fast talking to avoid repeats. And that’s before we cut out more time for the other stuff god’s making stuff ex-nihilo (or maybe out of dust) on that day, and problems like trying to actually see the tardigrade he’s supposed to be naming, and the whole business of god taking some of that time to cut out Adam’s rib to make a woman with because apparently he’d run out of nihilo (or dust) to make stuff out of, and all the stuff that god takes up valuable animal-naming time saying.
And yes, I know that god is supposed to be capitalized, but I spent today hearing about an atheist whose 11-year-old daughter reported her public school teacher for proselytizing in class, and they were then run out of town by Christians who were threatening to spray their house with bullets or burn them down with them in it, so everyone who cares about god being capitalized can go suck it or at least pay attention to something more important than that.
*sigh* Sorry, I’m pissed off and this is not the appropriate venue. Apologies for not keeping my anger under control
It’s understandable Reltzik. Be well. 🙂
damn that last paragraph was sobering. well, i was meaning to comment that that was a riot, it sounded like a breathless standup monologue,
but i mean… yeah. take care for now <3
You are heard and your contribution and feelings are valid. Also thank you for the convenient example supporting my point yesterday that causing strife and suffering is a _human_ trait.
Genesis 1 had a better sound chip, but Genesis 2 has cleaner video.
Genesis 3 is inferior to both because it doesn’t work with Virtua Racing or the 32X.
In all fairness (and speaking as a biologist), if you don’t define your terms in this case, I can’t know exactly what you’re talking about, and you probably don’t either. I get the feeling it’s circular: if we can observe it, it’s microevolution, and if we haven’t, it’s not…
Give me at least an example of what you mean!
Yeah because if you’re referring to speciation, we actually have observed that in real time.
If you’re referring to a duck “macroevolving” into a bear, that’s not actually what evolution predicts. A thing may descend with modification but you can only work with what you’ve got. A bird could maybe convergently evolve into the niche of large omnivore that bears fill given the right environment, evolutionary pressures, and lack of competition, but it won’t ever evolve into a bear.
Terror Birds back again? Brrrr.
I think it’s more of a case of moving the goalposts – if your definition of ‘macroevolution’ includes something which has been empirically demonstrated, just redefine the term until everything works!
That’s like saying we’ve seen hundreds of years of erosion but never millions of years of erosion. Of course we haven’t in person. But what makes you think it would be different in any way except for having accumulated more change?
Y’know that gravity/gravitation is a theory, right? General relativity, too? Heck, plate tectonics is a theory. All of these things are accepted as true and proveable. So’s evolution.
Theories in science aren’t things that are somehow unproveable or untrue*; they’re explanations of why a thing works.
From Wikipedia: “A scientific theory differs from a scientific fact or scientific law in that a theory explains “why” or “how”: a fact is a simple, basic observation, whereas a law is a statement (often a mathematical equation) about a relationship between facts.”
So, yeah, evolution’s a theory! Making it out to be something that’s somehow untrue or unproven because it’s “just a theory” is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a theory is.
*noting of course that pretty much everything in science is able to be disproven given appropriate counterexamples, and then the theories change to accept our new knowledge. This is how science works – adaptation as we bring new stuff to light. It’s great!
Joyce is macro-evolving!
Joyce just made my head hurt. That was some insane logic.
That’s basic Young Earth Creationist boilerplate.
I was raised to believe in God and I have to say that Joyce’s explanation is the biggest BS I have ever read. That is just crazy.
Joe: “…I can’t believe you woke me up, only to tell me 10 minutes later that you need a nap.”
The last panel is salvation and hope ♡. Joyce was refreshing her memories of all the weird theories she had been taught at home and she saw how much they sounded… not exactly convincing. Joe didn’t see it coming. Hilarious! GO JOYCE! LET’S THE TRUE LEARNING BEGIN!!!!
Okay, we’ve been HAVING pretty dang accurate representation of creationist dogma until today. But today? This is something you will NEVER hear from creationists! They never say this. Ever. I’ve got my ear to my ground enough to hear most of all the major bullshitters, and NEVER ONCE will any of them say anything like this.
….
But for the first four panels, it was accurate.
Well played. But isn’t Willis himself a living counterexample to your point?
Willis is not an accurate representation of creationist dogma, and I never heard this from him while he was a creationist.
Joe and Dina need a support group.
wow. It’s ok, you can use Joe’s lap as he work on the actual damn homework.
OMG.
The most horrible thing is that…. people believe this!
People teach this to others…. !
people actually believe this.!!!
Well, she wasn’t teasing, but she’s doing pretty well anyway. Go Joyce!
Nap later. You’ve got two hours
Oh thank goodness. XD
I know its painful for Joe but IIRC he’s the only once she’s ‘out’ to about not believing anymore so its a really good thing they’re friends.
(Also holy crap fundie brainwashing is scary.
Sarah knows, too.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/unpacking/
And Dorothy at least knew Joyce was starting to have a crisis of faith, but may not know it finally broke after the birthday party where we saw them talk about it.
Indeed, it is very scary. Its even scarier if you consider that you don’t even need to be born into such a group to be brainwashed.
Indeed, it is very scary. It’s even scarier if you consider that you don’t even need to be born into such a group to be brainwashed.
Joe slowly losing faith in humanity panel after panel lmao
Joyce’s church really love retcons.
Joe’s facial expressions accurately depict *exactly* what it feels like to listen to these arguments over and over and over again.
Also, proud of Joyce for making progress and figuring out how to unclench.
Joyce clearly didn’t went just to drag job into homework. She kinda has
Revelationsepiphanies every time they spend time together.I don’t usually get invested with straight ships, but this one is super interesting :333
That’s it, Joyce! One step at a time. Keep making these little steps, and over time they’ll add up to big ones.
I see what you did there!
I’m finding Joe super relatable again. And I’m relieved that Joyce no longer believes that nonsense she just spouted.
This is so real. When you stop believing in god all the connecting ideas take time and stress to iron out.
It’s hard to let go of pre-established patterns of thought. Kudos to Joyce, and kudos to Joe for being (relatively) patient.
It’s funny. As I got a lot of issues about Christianity and religion in my life, Evolution wasn’t one of these thing.
I had dealt with dinossaurs, earth having billions of years and this shit in my school days with some facility.
Yes, I still got parents that just believes that thunder are God’s furor and we must stop talking at storms and shit, but I used to deal with this.
Creationism is a uniquely American thing as far as I can tell. Pretty much all Christians outside of certain parts of rural America look at the people spouting it and step back slowly.
That’s not unconnected to the fact that the American colonies were originally just a way for England to get rid of their poor, debtors, cults and criminals while still claiming to act within the bounds of “Christian Charity”, whatever that means.
To be fair, it was a mutual decision as the Pilgrims left because they weren’t allowed to murder people that weren’t as crazy as they were.
Yeah, while it’s technically accurate that the Puritans left for the Americas BECAUSE of religious freedom, they didn’t do it IN SEARCH OF religious freedom. They did it because they thought religious people in Europe were allowed to have too much fun and that would anger god.
I don’t know, it kind of fits the definition of religious freedom that’s becoming popular today – the freedom of (the right kind of) religious people to discriminate against everyone else.
The Puritans were persecuted in Europe and wanted religious freedom to practice their faith, but they didn’t want religious freedom in general, they just wanted it for themselves. Which isn’t uncommon.
Yeah, I suppose that’s TECHNICALLY accurate, in the same way that it’s technically accurate the US Civil War was about state’s rights (to declare black people property).
“Creationism is a uniquely American thing”
i am so truly sorry to report that that’s not the case. try googling “creationism brazil” and see what happens
It is interesting that Americans have taken the term so… vibrantly… to represent *their* identity, that unless a given person is actually emigrating none of the rest of us inhabitants of North or South America want to be called ‘American’ even if some of us (like Canadians) see them as metaphorical (or literal) family.
There’s also some in Australia but I note that I think that’s from American missionary movements.
Nah I live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean it’s definitely not only an American phenomenon. They may take a lot of cues from there but over a decade ago I was getting creationist books from concerned church members due to going on to study biology.
You know, I’m quite happy that I attended Catholic school that still taught about evolution. Personally, I see evolution itself as something of a miracle, just because of the various ways everything has evolved. I mean, there are literally surfing snails! And so many different types of raptor birds, one of which, the secretary bird, has some powerful legs! Can you imagine how long it must have taken for the legs to start developing to be longer and more powerful, for the bird to gain the shape it has today? Miracle of nature!
Neat! My avatar is cool Joyce!
what are you talking about, that’s Julia Gray.
Definitely not Joyce at all!
But cool.
Yes, that is a pretty mainstream subject. Poor Willis and many other Americans (including my wife) got raised in what amounts to bubbles of nuttery regarding evolution.
She had us in the first half, not gonna lie.
The first 4/5ths.
I would figuratively kill to see this happen in real time with some of my theist friends.
Willis, are you cool? You okay? Can breathe?
I thankfully never grew up in as bad a situation as Joyce, but I do know that feeling of having an authority figure telling you something you’re supposed to believe, and every part of you internally screams “nope, wrong, what they’re telling you isn’t right” but having to grin and bear it anyway.
Mine was mainly the whole “fuck poor people” part of it, and even as a small child I remember going “yeah that sounds like horseshit, it sounds like maybe poor people aren’t as bad as you think they are” but having to shut up and not argue about it
@Wagstaff, cont’d: funny, i really did think i’d told you! ^^
so anyway nope, i don’t see the Mensa constellation. (and now i see what you were trying to do with that question about whether the summer was hot where i was, though it sounds to me like you’re not getting any extra data by asking about the Mensa constellation??)
The Mensa constellation is only visible in the southern hemisphere, so now I know for sure you live somewhere in Europe.
You said you were French, but I wasn’t sure whether that meant French nationality or French ethnicity. I really feel as though English should have some kind of suffix discerning the two!
-ish. The ultimate suffix that actually covers all manner of sins. For your needs, you can have french and french-ish.
“ish” actually has it’s roots in the earliest roots of the development of the language. You see, english is actually an amalgam of multiple languages. Starting with whatever was spoken there after the romans and before the angles, then came the angles, it was then further influenced (invaded by) saxons, and normans, and french aristocracy, along with (more) latin and greek from the clergy and accedamia and by this time had a habit of readily adopting words from other languages. Even at the start of english law (this bit may be iffy), they needed two words to describe crimes so speakers of the different bits could understand the crime. (two words== same crime). Break and enter, assault and battery, etc. So what began as heavily being the language of the angles, it evolved and grew to be sort of that langauge and sort of something else. It’s angle-ish: english.
oh i thought for sure that’s what you’d been trying to ascertain by asking if i was having a hot summer. like if i was living in the southern hemisphere i would very likely have pointed out that i wasn’t having summer at all at the moment ^^
Honestly, I was kind of biased towards the southern hemisphere venue because currently, South Africa is the only country in your timezone where cannabis is legal for recreational use.
lol! well! =)
Woops! My bad! It’s not legal for recreational use ANYWHERE in your timezone except Amsterdam.
therefore it logically follows that i live in Amsterdam. case closed!
You may be recollecting out conversation where I asked for confirmation based on some things you’d said.
that’s very possible ^^
Wow, it’s actually kind of eerie seeing Joyce deliver the explanation I semi-facetiously made up yesterday.
(I promise that wasn’t a Patreon leak, I don’t subscribe to the read-ahead tier.)
Watching Joe go from annoyed to feeling genuine pity is really interesting. Like, you always KNOW when somebody has been sheltered, but to have it laid out in front of you can really shock you.
it must be nice to have stuff unclenched from your brain. probably like going to a chiropractor but without the satisfying cracking noise.
If your brain does produce a cracking noise, please see a doctor.
don’t trust a chiropractor to do a neurologists job
Yeah, that really gets on their nerves.
*rimshot*
I now understand why two hours is not enough time to do this project.
I was going to say “Joyce you don’t have to believe that crap anymore” but she said it for me
my facial expression matched Joe’s too, followed by the sudden snap when she realized she was spouting propaganda out of habit, then I cracked up
Just look at what humans did with dogs, and you see how much can be done with selective breeding. So,ehow we produced both chihuahuas and mastiffs from thensame creature over the course of a few thousand years. Not hard to imagine the process going weirder over the course of a million years reacting to environmental stimuli.
More practical are the tinier things, but it gets weirder talking about their evolution. Bacteria can do a weird thing where they swap their DNA with their prokaryote compadres, and viruses are right on the edge of counting as alive at all, but in medicine the consequences of their ability to evolve on a much shorter timescale means that there’s all these ever-changing diseases to manage so that you need to get new flu vaccines every year, some bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, and a brand spankin’ new disease can mutate out of nowhere with a new rate of infection and new tricks to hide carriers and devastate the world before we figure it out.
A more active expression of how much animals can change is amphibians, which metamorphosis is definitely not evolution, but there’s weird examples of evolution producing significantly different creatures through circumstances related to evolution. Axolotls are creatures that mostly ditched the metamorphosis process and just stuck at becoming essentially a giant tadpole. Which is similar to how dogs present many traits of infant-wolves. Animals have the capacity for change already in them, so you can get some big evolution consequences from just screwing with that a little.
There is also behavior to consider.
Proto-avians had flaps of skin in weird places. Tastefully decorated with colorful feathers for use in mating displays. Some of the guys discovered that when they flipped their flaps, they could rise into the air. Wow, that really impressed the girls! Let’s do more of that!
Holy shit COMMON SENSE
This reminds me of the Simpsons episode that parodied The Shinning. “Anger rising…”
I thought it was “Urge to kill…rising….”
But I doubt Joe has an urge to kill Joyce. Maybe no quotes next time.
Could it be that Joyce is starting….to evolve?
::shades::
What? JOYCE is evolving!
[Silhouettes of early DoA Joyce and current Joyce character models alternately flash on screen back and forth]
Crap, someone pressed B…