The headline here is that these are 18 year olds who were raised with no conflict resolution skills because the prospect of causing intracommunity conflict was off-limits, especially along faith lines, with serious consequences for violations. Neither of them are evil or awful or abusive, and failing to win a friend-of-the-year award is not the end of the world. So keep that in mind.
I don’t believe Joyce’s failing was keeping secrets or privately venting. It’s that when Becky discovered what was happening, and had her feelings hurt, Joyce did not approach it from an emotional angle. She didn’t tell Becky why she felt she needed to abandon her faith. She didn’t tell Becky why she didn’t feel safe opening up. She framed it in terms of pure intellectual rigor. Becky asked Joyce how Joyce felt about Becky and Joyce didn’t answer any of those questions. Instead Joyce tried to talk Becky into sharing Joyce’s opinions while Becky was feeling hurt and vulnerable. And I understand why it happened–Becky being hurt did not gift Joyce the ability to magically become emotionally honest with her. But by taking this tact, Joyce sacrificed the ability to gain forgiveness, because Becky has absolutely no insight into Joyce’s thought process that would convince her forgiveness is warranted. Joyce insulted her, and then when Becky called her on it Joyce tried to convince her those insults were right. Why would Becky forgive?
But equally, Becky has no insight into why Joyce would be upset with her, or why Joyce might be owed an apology. As far as Becky was concerned, things were fine for months, and then it turns out Joyce hates (and doesn’t even understand) Becky’s beliefs. Becky can’t apologize to Joyce for overstepping, for creating an environment where Joyce can’t be honest with her, or for any of a thousand tiny things that brought us here, because she doesn’t know Joyce has an issue with any of that. Hell, Joyce has a long history of being exactly as clingy and overbearing as Becky is! Why would it be a problem? Joyce has only, in this moment, expressed issues with Becky’s beliefs, and Becky can’t and won’t apologize for those.
Joyce didn’t just need to talk to Becky about atheism. She needed to talk to Becky about a whole bunch of behaviors, some of which Becky might not even be cognizant of (or think of as fun quirks/Dorothy irritants), most of which Joyce has preformed herself at some point, some of which even Joyce herself might not realize were barriers to productive conversations. That’s a lot of work, with absolutely no guarantee it’ll go well. So Joyce avoided it, and then when Becky saw just the tip of the iceberg and thought it was the whole, Joyce doubled down on that perception to keep avoiding that work.
These are, frankly, some really benign mistakes when boiled down. Joyce needs to figure out what’s really bothering her, both about Becky and about faith. Becky needs to exercise some self-awareness. Both need to learn how to have open, honest conversations, because eventually they become unavoidable–keeping secrets is morally neutral, but secrets don’t last forever, and this is an eventuality Joyce could’ve been preparing for. None of these are skills these kids were raised to have. (Not even necessarily because they were raised fundie–I’d wager most 18yos can’t do any of this shit. I couldn’t!) That doesn’t make them monsters or evil or abusive. They made mistakes, and now they’ll learn from them. After all, nothing prepares you for the outside world except being stupid over and over and over.
And neither needs to convert the other. Fuck’s sake.
A+, in particular with the emphasis on Joyce and Becky’s closeness and inability to meaningfully communicate here being something deliberately molded into them.
This is also the sad area where many old friendships end up dieing.
Even adults struggle with the skills you’ve listed and while they seem simple to list its actually really hard for people to break out of old habits and patterns.
It’s kinda sad to look back sometimes on people and relationships that can be lost due to these factors. I think back to some of my early ex’s and realize I’ve been on both sides of similar situations and it just comes with both teenage and early adult years.
Excellent manifesto– I think too many people have been focused on who deserved to win the argument, not on how Joyce or Becky actually treated each other. This is the empathy they needed, I’m happy to see it
Thanks for taking the time to write this out @Wack’d. Neither of them are 100% at fault. The issue isn’t even really about fault, and neither of them have experience recognizing that. Responsibility does play _a_ role, but it is not the central role here. The central role is their changing world views, and both needing to learn that their friend is a different person than the idea of their friend that is in their heads. I think they can work through this, but it will take them both time and individual development. (laying off attacking each other, and instead just *listening* will help too.)
I’m curious how this arc will turn out in a way. I can’t see a formalized path towards this this resolution. Neither of them has a friend that is a conflict resolution expert especially not in this area.
Best I can imagine is them growing through individual arcs and only becoming friends at some point later down the road. It’s weird because as much as I feel sad seeing a friendship end I am curious how this will play out for both characters now.
This put the major issues into words really well. I especially appreciate that you are acknowledging Joyce’s mistakes without also saying her venting or beliefs about theism are wrong. You don’t even say that Joyce should apologize, just that she needed to come at this with empathy and understanding and didn’t. Which is exactly how I’ve felt, though it can get lost in these discussions sometimes.
I think some of what Becky said was worse than the picture you paint, but at the end of the day, that was still learned behaviors that she can’t be blamed for too much given her upbringing. So that’s really just details.
I don’t think Joyce should apologize for venting or being overheard but everything that happened on the stairs after 110% requires copious apologies. .
Honestly? I think the best possible thing for both of them is to just feel some raw, ugly-ass emotions without trying to kiss and make up, because for the reasons you listed as well as their own relationship where Joyce doesn’t ever seem to want to rely on Becky and Becky doesn’t seem to really know how bad her possessiveness of Joyce really is, they kind of need to be mad at each other long enough for them to learn it’s okay to be mad at each other and that things can still be okay later on. Just get wildly, outrageously, stupidly wrong and hate each other’s fucking guts for a bit.
‘Cause right now, neither of them would have any idea on what it is they’re even apologizing for.
Yeah, I agree. Clearly there’s much to learn, but hopefully after stewing over things for a few days… or maybe a week or two… they’ll figure some things out about themselves and the other person, and be able to talk things out once they realize religion isn’t the real issue here.
i think it was @Airyu who recently said something like, “i’m starting to feel like everyone here is a better person than me, because i don’t think i would’ve done any better than either of them.” and i thought that was a lovely thing to say and i subscribe to it whole-heartedly <3
Am I the only one here who feels that she *didn’t* insult Becky? Becky took umbrage with Joyce’s generalized statements about religion and the religious. Becky’s choice to take that personally may be understandable, but it was still her CHOICE to lace that shoe up and wear it.
I mean, even in my most narcissistic moments, I still think my younger self was a dumb little shit. Joyce is looking down on Christians, and her past self was also a Christian, so if anything, this reinforces the idea that she was shitting on herself.
Personally I think she WAS talking about herself. She feels stupid for ever believing these things.
But if she thinks herself stupid for ever believing them, then confronted with the reality that Becky *still* believes them, she can’t find a way around coming to the same conclusion about Becky.
Yeah, that’s where I stand too. I think she wasn’t thinking about Becky at all when she said those things, but when somewhere between when she saw Becky was there and when Becky made it about her (“do you really think I’m an idiot for believing in God”), it became about Becky too.
The other possibility I’ve been entertaining is that she was thinking about Becky. But if it was about Becky, I think it came out of a place of jealousy. She really really wishes for the comfort of knowing that there’s some ineffable Plan for her, that she’ll get through all the trials set for her stronger on the other side instead of more and more broken with every hardship that she stumbles across. She really really wishes for the comfort of knowing that _someone_ loves her unconditionally and infallibly. But she doesn’t have that, so she’s mocking someone who does to try to make herself feel better about not having that.
(Or maybe that’s just my ignorant almost-atheist raised-to-distrust-organized-religion self projecting real hard onto this fictional raised-fundie-now-struggling-with-atheism character when I honestly probably don’t have enough relevant cultural context to understand her struggles.)
And if she condemns it really aggressively now, it will retroactively remove some of the shame she still harbors for believing those stupid things for so long.
Imagine ever being so confident that Joyce was solely talking about herself to the point of believing that she still deeply respect and admired Becky’s faith and thought of her atheism as a personal failing, that you take an avatar bet with yourself when you’ve never been right about anything that has ever happened in this comic before.
(this is much more interesting than what I thought would transpire, really. If Becky and Joyce are going to come to blows it should be over an actual conflict and not just Becky being sad at misunderstood Joyce)
I feel that the situation’s complexities (Joyce was referring to everyone who believes, except she has never once thought anyone thought differently than her and assumed the whole world ran on slavish adherence to rules) made me not totally wrong, in that Joyce’s beliefs are self-aimed but she thought the whole world was Joyce, but wrong enough that trying to back out would be an act of cowardice.
So two weeks and then back to Sneaky Crime Man getting bonked.
I like how they’ve never tried to justify Lupin still being the grandson of Arsene Lupin even though the franchise is 52 years old. I guess both he and his son waited until they were like 70 to have kids.
This obviously will never matter but I like to think of it as Lupin being so good that he’s the third person to deserve the name of Lupin.
Yeah, she’s echoing Liz’s line from a few days ago here almost verbatim. “Becky’s SMART, so it’s only a matter of time until she becomes an atheist like me!”
same thing we do every night, pinky: try to create an unimpeachable argument for a shitty teen being irredeemably evil based on deeply-held convictions about vast swaths of people based on whether they’re religious or not
(To be perfectly clear, the above comment is intended to be a lighthearted riff off of Thag’s, using the lyrics of a Limp Bizkit song. I am not threatening or calling out even one single person.)
I was honestly afraid Walky was going to win just by virtue of being the only one to submit something.
Not that his comic is bad, but c’mon, Julia Grey!
LAWsome has not-Mike as one of its characters, so if it wins on the other hand, it could be a vehicle for Walky to start working through the emotions of his roommate dying last semester.
Taking bets: 400 comments? 500? Cause we ain’t going back down any time soon.
To throw in my two cents, I think they’re both dumb BUT they are ALLOWED to be dumb. I’m in my 30s, and I, too, am frequently an idiot. And I’ll be honest…I don’t know what Joyce said in the last panel when Becky walked into the room, because seeing Becky’s face makes me go “nope, nope nope nope, don’t wanna know how dumb Joyce is being in front of her, nope right the fuck out.” and I just can’t bring myself to read it. Maybe I should try to crop it out…No upset Becky face to distract me.
Those are rookie numbers. If it’s fewer than 700 by the time Saturday’s strip is up, I’ll be surprised. I’d put money on 2300 total between Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, only I’m half convinced we’re gonna jump back to Danny and Sal or Lucy and Wally by then.
We’ve been averaging about 500 comments per day over the past eight days since Becky left Joe’s room. It’s been a little more than 90 minutes since today’s installment went up and the comment count is already up to 175. I think breaking 600 is almost a given.
Considering I woke up and we’re at 350+ comments, I don’t think the cooldown will happen until as Andy said, we switch to a different set of characters.
… wait, does a person’s own comments count towards them winning the bet? Because if that’s allowed there could be problems. And if that ISN’T allowed, the math gets funky.
This is part of why I don’t watch it anymore. It was funny and edgy when I though being funny and edgy was a good thing, and then it was pointed out how the show has a hate-on for anyone that’s passionate about stuff. Between that and the growing discomfort I had with Cartman’s casual racism and antisemitism (and the fact that it was never really called out as a bad thing), I kinda just walked away. Maybe some of that has been fixed in the last 10-ish years, but I doubt it.
South Park is a horrible little show with very little of substance to say because it constantly and consistently derides anything outside of Matt and Trey’s weirdo little libertarian mental bubble. The show takes potshots at everyone because anything but a pathetic, spineless status quo is too much for them.
Ah yes. Those extreme atheists. Horrible people, they are irritating on message boards.
Quite comparable to religious extremests. Nearly indistinguishable.
Okay, but from the outside, I’m just imagining Becky going: Dorothy has glasses and is an atheist…Joyce got glasses and became an atheist…it must be the glasses! This never happened before she got glasses! Optometrists are an atheist scheme!
I love this theory but I know way too many pastors with glasses for it to hold in real life. But in-comic, that’s totally a viable theory. Is Jennifer more atheist with or without her glasses?
Jennifer is a self-professed Christian last we heard from her, but maybe wearing contacts instead of glasses (when was the last time we saw her wearing glasses?) allows her to loophole the theory?
I’m an agnostic atheist to be fair but my vision is perfectly fine for the time being. I do have the ability to make my vision go blurry at will so maybe that’s the agnostic part 😛
Bad vision causes you to become an atheist? That’s an interesting theory that I’d never considered before. I’d try an refute that, but I’ve worn glasses since I was three and I’m an atheist so…
To be fair, both Becky and Joyce are being bongos right now. Becky’s putting so much pressure on Joyce to stay the same, while she’s changing herself as is natural, which isn’t fair. Joyce doesn’t have to believe in a deity that would let all the stuff that happened to her happen, or one that would put her best friend in the bad place.
But Becky is allowed to believe in what she believes, and Joyce doesn’t have to be a bongo to Becky just because of what she believes. Dorothy isn’t rude to Joyce when she states her beliefs, even if she doesn’t agree.
Welp, there’s the confirmation that Joyce really actually doesn’t really get what she did that upset Becky and thinks it’s just that she’s athiest now that was the problem and not the, uh, presentation of the athiesm. Not that the argument where they talled so far past each other they looped around the Earth and smacked into each other again wasn’t enough of a clue, but here we have it spoken out loud by her.
(Though part of me is slightly annoyed at this from a Doylist point of view, because it means we’re gonna spend more time on Joyce being less of a butt which is good becuase Joyce needs to STOP BEING A BUTT but it also means the narrative can of “Becky is super possessive of Joyce in some pretty unhealthy boundary-stomping ways” might get kicked down the road again to make room for the “Joyce is a thoughtless butt” can, and as someone with privacy/boundary/personal space anxieties that Becky has been setting off since the start of Book 11, that is. Exhausting to think about. 🙁 )
In Joyce’s defense, there’s probably a bunch of people in her religion, her parents included who would just acted that way to atheism. She doesn’t know that that isn’t what Beckey was upset about, and she’s probably been defensively gearing up for it
That doesn’t make what she’d done excusable, just understandable.
Totally feel where you’re coming from. Joyce is pretty obviously the wrongest here but I still don’t think Becky was right to track Joyce down because she was jealous, nor do I think Dorothy was right in accompanying her or being so judgmental about Joyce skipping class. Joyce’s bad behavior here is easier to take for me because it’s clear that the narrative KNOWS she’s wrong and it’s going to be dealt with but… it does kind of seem like Becky and Dorothy’s possessiveness is being condoned as it stands right now. But it’s a long (long, long) running strip, we just kind of have to trust that things will be dealt with!
Yeah Becky is super effing annoying and overstepping. To Dorothy especially. I’d much rather see her issues dealt with/called out. Maybe this will lead to a confrontation about all of these issues.
I mean, I don’t think we’d have this giant conflict between these start with Becky’s wild possessiveness of Joyce leading to dramatic consequences if their existing friendship wasn’t going to analyzed to at least some degree, considering we’ve got a fairly clear implication (as in Wack’d spelled it out for me) that these two are just about incapable of holding a view contrary to the other, and that for as all as Becky is an unflappable rebel that Joyce thinks is the coolest person in the world for that rebellion, they need to be a united front.
Like, sometimes, even when it’s hardest because when it’s hardest is when it matters the most. you just gotta fight your friends.
Physically.
The only new understanding of each other Joyce and Becky need to catch are these hands.
On the one hand, I can see how she feels hurt and attacked and might be lashing out. On the other hand, the time to completely own her shit (whether be ause she’s lashing out or truly believes it, either way) was like 3 strips ago when Becky called her out for only being sorry Becky heard her. Agree to that, give your spiel about how you’re a brain genius and all Christians are morons, and let the chips fall where they may. Or own that you were a complete dumbass who shouldn’t have said that shit and let those chips fall. That wishy-washy shit is the worst of both worlds, though.
This is classic Joyce. She changes her life at the drop of a hat, deciding her new perspective is ‘right’ and ‘perfect’. She did it with Ethan. She did it with Jacob. She’s doing it now.
Joyce sees the world in black and white, and she’s not going to change until she learns to see grey. Right now, the way she sees the world is right, and everybody who disagrees is wrong and needs to get on board with her way. She hasn’t grown up or matured at all.
That can still be a definition of maturity. There’s actually been major research on how as people age, they are able to see nuance and shades of grey more. Sure, there’s still plenty of older people who don’t reach that stage, and there’s younger people who reach it faster, but *in general* black and white thinking decreases with age aka maturity (and I would add, healing from trauma/emotional wounding, as well). See for example Jane Loevinger’s research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loevinger%27s_stages_of_ego_development
look, sometimes pokémon evolutions are aesthetically worse even if the stats are better. joyce has gained moves like “understand that the bible is a work written by flawed, mortal men” but she’s still a dang lickilicky
The greatest misconception about evolution (I mean if we use the non Pokémon version) however is that there is an endpoint or a true goal. It’s really a consequence over time of environments and mutations and a long the way there can be things which in fact don’t work and get replaced by something else.
This ain’t Joyce’s final form. There isn’t one though really.
(Like that really old strip where Leslie tells Roz about statues and beliefs and learning and chiselling down and adding details is probably also applicable).
I find it strange that you can point to a long sequence of changes that shows Joyce’s gradual growth from where she was at the beginning of the comic to where she is now and then declare she switches beliefs at the drop off a hat. She did not become an atheist overnight. It started when she first decided to reach out to Dorothy and is the culmination of months of new experiences since then. She’s got a ways to go, and there will always be more ways she can grow, as that’s true for all of us.
Refusing to back down from the harsh reality of her beliefs just because they might upset people, especially if phrased bluntly, is progress in my book. It means her beliefs aren’t reliant on phrasing and word choice for her to be okay with them. Earlier Joyce balked a lot when presented with the full reality of her beliefs and their effects on people. She doesn’t yet know how to handle this situation of “Yes, this accurate description of my beliefs will hurt others’ feelings, but that is not a reason to change them,” but she does believe things that aren’t contingent on those beliefs sounding nice.
I remember picking either “Both are right but Becky is more right” or “Both are wrong but Becky is more wrong.” Not entirely sure which of those is better.
**SIGH**
That moment after you click “Post Comment” but before the page actually loads when you see the typo and can no longer stop it from being posted.
“there” not “where”.
it was buried in the humongous comment section of two days ago, but Willis also linked to it on twitter before deciding to put up his own poll yesterday.
i think both polls are complementary. Willis is a lumper, i’m a splitter (although i did rein in my splitting tendencies, and predictably, there were complaints ^^)
Also unrelated to today’s strip: the site (on PC) currently is showing me some Amazon Prime game ad (something titled “New World”) which keeps taking up the entire page, popping up over the comic and the comments both. :\
No, see, but this time she’s being judgmental because she’s RIGHT and LOGICAL and not just that she BELIEVES she’s right and logical. Totally different.
But I’ll still take judgemental atheist assholes who AREN’T part of a movement promoting a harmful religio-political agenda targeting vulnerable minorities over judgemental Christian assholes who ARE.
AKA the “Facts and Logic Brigade”. Once someone’s convinced themself their brain is mighty enough to slay God, they don’t have to bother actually /thinking/ anymore, it seems…
Probably, depending on how you define alt-right. The broader extreme right certainly.
But they’re still judgemental atheist assholes who are part of a movement promoting a harmful agenda targeting vulnerable minorities,
How about we just put THOSE atheists in a room with THOSE Christians, ask them to reason things out through polite dialogue, and come back in an hour to clean out the corpses.
…. yeah, okay, probably shouldn’t be indulging in that kind of dark thinking…
Still, that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in Joyce’s case. She’s coming out of a particular house of worship that is deeply embedded in Christian supremacy, and she doesn’t seem to be heading into an equivalent place in atheism.
becky skipped the part where joyce falls in a hole and then dies for unrelated reasons, instead going directly from smooching joyce to being adopted into her family
Hear that? That was the sound of any remaining benefit of doubt flying out the window
I still feel for Joyce here, she’s ended up exactly where she started, just swapped out the Christianity stuff for anti religion zealotry, she’ll probably stay here for a bit before settling into a healthier mindset
While she’s certainly being overly aggressive about it (particularly to her friends) assuming some guys 2000 years ago lied about somebody else coming back to life seems… a bit more reasonable, let’s say, than her previous beliefs.
Current understanding has Marc written in the late 60s, Matthew and Luke in the 80s and John around 100. So between 35 and 70 years after Jesus’s death.
It is thought that Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark, as well as from a ‘lost’ gospel ‘Q’. Plus, there were also gospels and other material that were in existence before the ‘Bible’, but which weren’t included in the Bible, not because they were found to be inaccurate or flawed, but just because “Meh, they weren’t popular enough”.
That’s a simplification. While there were certainly other gospels and texts not included, from everything we know of them the non-canonical gospels at least were significantly later and often much more fanciful or otherwise shifted even farther from early Christian beliefs. Whatever you think of their criteria, they seemed to do a pretty decent job.
Some of the non-Canonical Epistles are apparently older. It’s not as clear to me why they weren’t included, but I don’t know as much about them.
the only reason the Q hypothesis even exists is that Bible scholars who were also believers couldn’t stomach the thought that Luke could have actually had a copy of Matthew on hand and was purposefully redacting all of the stuff he thought Matthew got wrong, which is a far easier explanation of all of the text that Luke and Matthew have in common.
Mark has to post-date the fall of Jerusalem (71) because the text pervasively assumes the temple is gone — i.e., even if it’s apparently treated as prophecy you don’t see any of the serious questioning that it’s going to happen that you’d expect if the text really was written beforehand (and the whole theme of Mark is, essentially, How Can We Be Jews now that the Temple is Gone? [answer: Jesus was the *last* Yom Kippur / Passover sacrifice; we’re done with all that now]).
Meanwhile, Luke is almost certainly cribbing from (and therefore post-dates) Josephus (94) when he’s filling in random historical facts.
the other fun thing is there is zero source material on what happened with the church between 62 (when Luke/Acts leaves off, even if we assume everything there is true, which is highly doubtful) and 110 or so (whenever it was Pliny the Younger started interviewing Christians in his province and it’s clear that some version of Mark’s gospel was circulating), i.e., no documents produced other than the Gospels themselves, maybe Revelation (which, if you read the allegorical listing of Roman emperors the right way, suggests it was written in the time of Domitian (90s) but still doesn’t say anything about what was happening in the real world), and maybe 1 Clement (which is traditionally dated to 95 for no reason, but reads as if it was written in the 60s — Clement somehow does not know that Jerusalem has been destroyed).
Which means that when they say Mark dates somewhere between 71 and 100, Matthew dates somewhere between 80 and 110, etc… they mean just that, i.e., there’s no information (beyond it being known that Matthew postdates Mark by some number of years) that lets us nail them down any more narrowly.
Exactly, but we had people up and down the comments insisting that Joyce HAD apologized and that Becky was in the wrong for not accepting that apology. When Joyce wasn’t apologizing for how she’d hurt Becky in the first place.
Because I do think Joyce is sorry that she hurt Becky and Becky saying otherwise don’t necessarily mean it’s unarguably correct, Joyce calling Becky smart enough to understand The Truth (which is also an entirely separate conversation that’s made me deeply fearful of the phrase “inerrant facts”) kind of sells to me that this whole thing is that Becky believes in Wrong Things and it’s as simple as fact-checking for the problem to go away and once Becky does Joyce can be properly contrite for hurting Becky, and right now Becky’s belief in the Wrong Thing means she’s making the mistake Joyce has outgrown and Joyce was talking about her by association. Becky just needs to get better at math, basically.
Like I don’t actually think “my statement is correct” and “I feel remorse that my statement has caused you pain” are inherently contradictory things, at least from the viewpoint of the person saying that which would naturally come off way different to the person hearing it who would naturally process it as “you are justifying why it was okay to hurt me.” Certainly to Becky, but that’s because Becky thinks she’s being judged for her faith instead of her continued belief in something that is objectively wrong on the grounds that Joyce processed her belief that way and therefore so does Becky.
Right, because Joyce has definitely been indicated that she is sorry for hurting Becky and not just embarrassed that she was overheard. Like, you seem to have a fundamental inability to grasp that *Joyce was hurtful and insulting* to her best friend, and that she needs to apologize for that if she hopes to salvage their friendship. We’re just gonna have to agree to disagree about Becky being the one in the wrong here.
To be fair to Joyce, growing up in a literalist cult very much makes faith an all-or-nothing proposition. If the Bible is the literal Word of God, then either it’s ALL true or it’s ALL fake. There’s no room for middle ground.
*le sigh* literalists shooting themselves in the foot again.
I mean Becky grew up in the same community, it can probably be assumed that her mother’s influence helped Becky’s faith stay flexible, while Joyce had no such positive influence
Not a universal thing, but I got the impression that her queerness was the catalyst that led to her developing her own faith separate from her parents’ doctrine.
Somebody said this was her “let the past die” moment and by jove am I ready for her to meet, I dunno, a projected Dorothy on the field and demands Joe to “blast that piece of junk out of the sky” because it feels like a full blown heel turn.
What if Joyce slowly becomes the comic’s main villain? Like piece by piece, she does worse and worse things to prove that she’s “right” while refusing to admit any fault. Eventually, she fights either Sarah, Becky, or Dorothy to the death.
Joyce needs to change her name to Anne Theist and start wearing a costume that looks like a broken cross. You know, if you want to get the proper Batman attitude.
Trying to figure how to get a pic off my phone to provide, but here’s an image (from Wikipedia) of the same species in the meanwhile – I called it the “Appa spider” because of the faint-but-visible arrow on its back, pointing to its head. XD
Look most of society has yet to figure a way to solve what is probably one of the primary conflicts facing humanity so why should we expect two freshman college students to sort it out in one conversation?
I do appreciate how Dotty’s face here is ever atheist’s face when we hear one of THOSE atheists going on like this. Just -_- as we try to hold onto patience in hopes they move past this.
i’ll repeat that i don’t think anyone’s evil here and that everyone’s making the sort of stupid but ultimately fairly benign mistakes you make when you’re young and which are more broadly endemic to the difficult process of learning to have constructive dialogues
but i’m not sure being judgey is the most productive thing dorothy could do in this situation
See, I don’t think Dorothy looks judgey here. To me she just looks sad– sad that Joyce is so clearly hurt, sad that two of her friends are fighting, sad that one of the most compassionate people she knows is in a place where she can’t cede anything to anyone anymore.
Like, yeah, she is disappointed, but I don’t think that’s what’s really on her face there.
While Joyce is definitely being pissy and judgemental about Christian faith right now, she isn’t exactly wrong that Christianity has had a documented history of essentially committing libel against Judaism and trying to claim that Jesus’ coming was “foreshadowed” in the Tanakh.
I think Willis himself in the past as even discussed that there is strong evidence (proof?) that many of the popular known disciples of Jesus (like Luke) weren’t even alive when a historical Jesus would have lived.
yeah, joyce mentioned christianity’s long history of plagiarism and its use in persecuting the people they stole from earlier in her convo with liz, and the bible’s more general fallibility as a text has come up more generally both here and in shortpacked!
as a jew i am always here for dunking on christianity but there’s a time and a place, and it’s definitely not something i make a habit of doing around queer christians who find meaning in faith, because usually they know all that shit! they don’t need my sass!
According to Paul Johnston’s A History of Christianity there were in the time of the early Roman empire (and the Principate) a large number of people who were attracted to Jewish monotheism (the view of a single vast moral god un-muddied by the human failings of the gods in the standard polytheistic god-stories), and known as “God-fearing people” (phoboumenoi ton Theon).
Jewish doctrine of the time was that they were not of the chosen people or parties to the Covenant, and were subject only to the laws that God gave Noah after the flood. They were referred to as “God-fearers” or “Noahides“. Jews did not encourage conversion very much, and the Noahides were not much attracted to circumcision or the temple sacrifice elements of Judaism, so there were (according to Johnston) a great many God-worshipping gentiles in the Mediterranean and the Middle East; they were more numerous than Jews. The chief obstacle to Noahidism flourishing was that the doctrine gave converts and their descendants a lower status than ethnic Jews.
So when Pauline Christianity came along with the interpretation that Christ had fulfilled the Covenant, and that converts were now in no way inferior to Jews (nor obligated to circumcision and the strictures of Leviticus) it appealed most strongly to, and spread most rapidly among, the very numerous Noahides. If Johnston is right, then at the time when the Gospels were written the great majority of Christians (at least, outside the Jerusalem Church) would have been Christianised Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Arameans, Egyptians etc., converted by an easy step from among the Theosebeis rather than all the way from Roman state polytheism etc..
Sure, fully agreed, Christianity has a long history of political maneuvering and careful editing of the bible in order to twist the message to suit the powers that be. That’s been the case ever since the religion split off from Judaism.
The problem is that Becky just got done telling Joyce “Yeah, those stupid, obviously wrong details are bogus, they’re stupid and obviously wrong, but they’re tiny details and not the main point”. Joyce is arguing against a stance that Becky adamantly refuses to support.
It’s like seeing someone saying they like oranges more than apples, but oranges aren’t as good in pies, and then rushing in to rant about how orange pies would utterly suck. It’s like… yeah, dude, we fucking agree there, why are you getting on my case about it?
And before then, Judaism did the same thing with their Bible. Christians were just carrying on the tradition. Essentially all the books of the Bible were written to promote the authors historical or theological views, and possibly edited to meet those of the editors and selected to be canon at least partly for the same reasons.
Once the canon was settled, then they had to resort to reinterpreting the texts rather than editing them.
I don’t know about “not alive when Jesus would have lived”, but it’s practically certain that Matthew, Marc and John were not written by the Apostles they’re traditionally ascribed to. Luke and Acts were almost certainly not written by Luke the companion of Paul.
As the earliest, written some 30+ years after Jesus’s death, Marc was most likely written by someone alive at the time, though no personal knowledge is claimed and there’s little reason to think it was written by someone who followed Jesus before his death.
Paul is the earliest source we have — by which I mean the core set of six or seven Epistles that nearly everybody believes are authentic in the sense that they share a common outlook + writing style + no obvious anachronisms, ie., no reason to believe they weren’t written by the same person in the time frame claimed, mid 50s AD — as opposed to the other Epistles that were clearly forged much later.
Paul never uses the word “disciple” at all. He never refers to Jesus as having had an earthly ministry or followers at all. His description of the Lord’s Supper is as a personal vision of his and no one else is present. Jesus is killed by agents of Satan; there no mention that the Romans or the Jews had anything to do with it. And he only ever refers to “apostles”, i.e., others who have had the same vision that he’s had , including Peter, who he’s met, and who he agrees was the first to receive the vision (Paul conveniently designates himself the last) but otherwise has no special status — i.e., there’s never any reference to Peter having met or known Jesus in any way that Paul hasn’t (and if that had ever been an issue with any of his congregations, you’d think he’d have been constantly having to answer that question in his letters, and somehow he never is…).
and whoever wrote Hebrews and 1 Peter all seem to be on the same page.
the author of Luke/Acts, written a minimum of 40 years later, explicitly contradicts Paul on any number of matters, and has a rather clear agenda of wanting to whitewash the differences between Peter and Paul (on circumcision/etc — we never get Paul’s account of his final trip to Jerusalem; it’s quite possible that Peter and Paul never actually reconciled after their falling out in Galatians), presents Paul has having been a Roman citizen, which is really unlikely — Paul’s own letters describe him having been beaten in ways that Roman citizens were exempt from. The whole sent-to-Rome-for-trial-before-Nero narrative is likely bogus as well, especially since we also have 1 Clement, which appears to be an earlier source, which has Paul dropping by Rome for a visit (not bound for trial) and then heading off to Spain where he gets killed.
Willis, I gotta give it to you…there is no way I would have ever ran with this storyline knowing the amount of off the chain comments you have gotten and are about to get. Kudos and bless your willpower, the nerves would be getting snatched from my body.
Hey Joyce, if you’re so smart, why didn’t you deconvert that long ago?
I sure hope Dorothy or some other athiest in her life gets inducted into Scientology or MLM or something to SHOW her that we can ALL be manipulated by dogma.
I don’t think it’d be enough to have a therapist explain that to her.
pretty sure she’s sorry about Becky catching the strays and making it sound like she’s dumb, but she damn sure ain’t sorry about escaping all the stuff she was force fed all her life that’s brought her nothing but pain in her adult life.
Yep. She still just fundamentally doesn’t get it and rather than trying to understand what exactly Becky believes in, she’s being a massive jerk about it. She still hasn’t grasped you can believe in god without believing the Bible. Even my rabbi taught us that the torah should be interpreted as parables and not literal history
It’s my understanding (although it might be wrong) that the prevalent attitude of Jewish people is to dissect and analyse parts of their religion and teachings rather than to follow them blindly.
Joyce’s position isn’t “all of it is real or none of it is” but in effect “this is why evil in the world that god made isn’t god’s fault” IS an important part and if that justification for evil not being god’s fault relies on the world being 6000 years old that really starts tearing away at the foundations.
I don’t know why ur sighing like Joyce had her worldview built in a foundation of all of those things being true and justifying why the world was the way it was, and having them picked apart but by bit by enormous bit it showed her that no, the things she felt and believed were incompatible with the world as it Is. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable reaction it just demonstrates how different Joyce and Becky’s lives were even being raised in the same cult environment
I can’t decide whether I should say “Joyce, after two weeks of the commentariat insisting she thinks Becky is an idiot with no margin for error or interpretation: ‘Becky’s smart'” or “damn I can’t believe someone who claims to care for Becky could be so cruel as to treat Becky’s religion as something she is hopeful to escape from.”
So both.
(The traditional Word Pile will be written after a reasonable approximation of a good night’s sleep but also save yourself the trouble and just go read Wack’d’s lovely analysis up above because they’re way better at this than I am)
Joyce does it in fact think Becky is being an idiot though. That’s why she’s convinced that Becky being smart means that she’ll eventually decide Joyce is right and become an atheist like she did
If you can’t see the condescension there just cuz Joyce acknowledged Becky’s intelligence then I don’t know that it can be explained to you
I need to come at this honestly that not explicitly condemning a character’s actions does not mean I am justifying or praising them, or even that justifying, praising and/or condemning these actions is something I feel the need to do when it is the beginning of a new character arc for both Joyce and Becky after they just got done blaming the other for being wrong and that they alone got it right because they have never had any idea how the other thought about their beliefs, let alone actions taken when two best friends who have not only never fought but are practically incapable of fighting over their religion in a healthy way suddenly have the entire house of cards that is their existing friendship collapse in on itself.
Tempting fate at this point would be a massive act of hubris, as in obviously I will do that, but I don’t read this as Joyce the Angry Atheist who just needs to learn to stop being so problematic like some of y’all and think it’s a bit… what’s a way to convey “lacking in nuance” without making myself come off as a condescending asshole? Like, that I think it’s coming at this story, one that is just beginning no less, based on the surface level behaviour Joyce is displaying (an atheist who says believers are dumb) without thinking about massive surrounding radius of context and even how Joyce has since been revealed to process her religious beliefs and, now, the act of belief itself, and how Becky’s wrongheaded thought processes and actions are both on display and indicative of massive character flaws on her part beyond just being the sad victim of Joyce’s mad search for the golden fedora, granting her ultimate power when arguing on the internet.
Let me put it like this, in a “is this how Joyce would act in the best circumstances?” kind of way. Joyce, who does not believe in the non-existence of God so much as had her every hardcoded fact about the universe revealed as total bullshit (as in she’s in the scenario Dina would be if Satan popped out of the ground with some dinosaur fossils announcing to all the Earth that they just got fucking served), has slowly been making some progress in finding out what she actually believes thanks to Joe. Joyce is a monkey, Heaven and Hell aren’t real but Joyce herself is and the person she is has always mattered.
And then Becky, acting in a way that she’s always acted but wildly recontextualized by the dramatic consequences her behaviour have led to when at any other point in the comic it would lead to Joyce going “heck yeah, Becky, you extremely cool rebel”, just made Joyce face the most difficult conversation she could possibly have about her newfound belief: so what about Becky, the person she loves more than anyone?
And it goes poorly, natch, so in the baby steps Joyce could have been making through Joe and eventually Dorothy and Dina (in that I think once she got some stability she could bring herself to ask them about it healthily… maybe. I say baby steps but it’s Joyce and she’s all about avoidance and a Joyce-paced atheist awakening would take approximately 1000 years and while that’s fine on paper it sure isn’t for drama) she suddenly has to jump all the way to step 10 and do the hardest part and, naturally, is completely unequipped to have this conversation to the point where she and Becky just plain don’t have a conversation at all. With all of that, is there any way Joyce wouldn’t dig a trench of her own self-righteousness the way Becky did at her?
(total cumulative sleep hours: five so far. Damn adderall and/or perforated ear drum)
Are people not allowed to hope that those they care about escape situations that they view as harmful? Because if someone believes religion is a bunch of harmful lies and has seen faith hurting them and people they loves repeatedly, I don’t know why that person wouldn’t be crossing their fingers that anyone they care for gets as far away from that ticking time bomb as possible.
Or are people just not allowed to think religion is harmful?
Oh, lol. I didn’t catch the sarcasm. My bad. It’s a pretty good example of how the exact same sentiment expressed differently provokes totally different responses. Both are responses of “This religious faith stuff is undesirable,” but one is silly and over the top so it’s a joke while the other is grumpy in a moment of emotional pain, so one is fine and the other is awful.
This seems like something an individual person can believe and in particular due to lived experience and not, say, an institution with enough power that if they wanted to enact that will they could do so.
Like, I think that religions can prove harmful when that religion becomes a cultural touchstone and thus is able to influence the course of their society as they see fit, for example.
I get what you’re trying to say but it’s a more nuanced thought process than “Joyce Brown thinks God is dumb.”
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at all by this, but I did not expect Joyce to have actually been talking about Becky before.
Unfortunately teenagers who embrace atheism tend to go through a shitty insufferable phase where they start looking down on religious people with contempt. Former believers seem to go the hardest as atheists thanks to bitterness towards their former religion and familiar pigheaded zealotry they can fall back into, which seems to be exactly what is happening with Joyce right now
She rejected her fundie upbringing so hard she’s accidentally started acting like her mom, at least with respect to how she regards people not having the “correct” religious beliefs
In real life most atheists who have this kinda phase take years to relearn how to chill tf out. Hopefully Joyce will get snapped out of it abruptly, or at least dials it back to “obnoxious, but at least not overly disrespectful” before it totally screws up her friendships. Gonna be at least a few days before she and Becky make up tho. Definitely not happening in this storyline. They both need to cool off before anything like that will be possible
That is my thought too. Maybe I’m still grasping at benefit of the doubt here? But this still feels like Joyce trying to protect herself from actually unpacking her upbringing, on the theory that “if it was ALL complete bullshit, then I can completely write it off, and therefore it has no power over me. I’m not dumb. I will never be dumb again. Nobody will screw me up like Christianity did, ever again.”
Not the healthiest approach. But understandable, given what Christianity has done to her in the past 5 months.
I agree. I’m surprised so many people are leaping to “ah, so it was about Becky all along.” They talked past each other that whole argument, and Joyce still seems to believe that Becky was upset that Joyce doesn’t believe the same things anymore. So obviously now she’s frustrated because she “knows” that the things they were taught weren’t literal, and Becky “still doesn’t get it” (disclaimer: we all know Becky gets it, but Joyce clearly doesn’t).
Even these examples seem less about Becky and more about Joyce. These are things Joyce believed and, as we have seen from her multiple times, from Joyce’s POV, once one thing she was taught to proven to be wrong, everything else is a house of cards. In Joyce’s mind, if Becky is still religious, she probably believes a lot of these things still (despite all evidence pointing to Becky’s ability to be religious but divorce herself from certain things she doesn’t believe). But Joyce is still naming myths that JOYCE always took as fact, not necessarily Becky.
I think one of the issues Joyce is running into here is they grew up learning the same stuff, it never even occurred to her that Becky was taking something different away from what they were learning
Ultimately it seems like neither of them knew the other as well as they thought, and possibly never did
They really did not and it took Wack’d’s post on Patreon for me to realize how deep it goes.
Because the two of them having such a strong love for each other that they can’t bring themself to argue about anything is one thing, but it never occurred to me that the ability to process belief outside of your own (as in, what the Evangelical collective imprinted onto them) was something they were never taught, because they were supposed to believe without any deviation to the point where the couldn’t deviate in belief from each other.
I assumed that was why she picked those things to start the conversation. She knew Becky doesn’t believe those myths – she knows Becky cast off those beliefs before she did.
My reading was that after Becky put words in her mouth before she could finish the apology*, Joyce wanted to start from common ground and figure out what to say that would actually fix it that wasn’t “I’m sorry for what I believe/I don’t actually believe that” (which I’m really glad she didn’t do, because that’s what she thought Becky wanted to hear, but she would have hurt herself so much by saying that). I mean, obviously not going to be mendable in one conversation, especially with emotions so high, but Joyce wanted to fix it in one conversation if not less.
* she only got to the first part, express remorse, and didn’t get to acknowledging the damage, taking responsibility, or steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again, before Becky jumped in and declared anything other that “I don’t believe in what I said” insincere (“sorry I heard you”). Then again, maybe I’m giving Joyce too much credit and she wasn’t going to say anything beyond “I’m really sorry”, but we’ll never know since Becky did jump in.
Sort of.
On the deep inner level, I do think it’s about herself. That initial rant wasn’t thinking of Becky, but of her past self (and likely some people from her religious upbringing). But she doesn’t separate Becky from that, so it’s about Becky.
And it’s probably not as simple as not understanding that Becky’s beliefs are and always were different from hers. Not only are some of the literal Bible stories to stupid to believe in her mind, but so is throwing those away and only believing the so-called important parts.
Joe. 100%. Sarah and Dorothy are both gonna be too disgusted to talk to her about this, but Joe seems to care in a different way. Plus his talk with her about evolution is the most Joyce has ever opened up about this stuff, with anyone at college.
I think there’s a strong case to be made that Joe will help Joyce with at least a bit of this.
We know that Joe cares about Joyce in a very, very deep way that he only barely admits to himself.
Also we have the sense that lately Joe thinks very poorly of himself, which I think probably leads him to be less judgemental of someone like Joyce who is wading through a dark path. I think he can identify with that a little.
Allll of this. I went through a phase like this. Eventually settled into a “chill agnostic” mindset. But for a while there it was the Most Important Thing Ever for me to convince everyone of the “truths” I had discovered and I wasted a lot of time arguing about it on the internet.
It’s super interesting reading this, knowing college me would’ve sided with Joyce, and 30s me now sides with Becky (not in a religious sense, but in a “don’t be a jerk to people just because they believe stuff you find unprovable, and as long as it’s not hurting anyone, people can believe what they want” way).
As someone who has remained spiritual throughout my life despite not having a high opinion of organized religion, I take (very very extremely) minor credit for helping two of my friends grow out of their smug atheist phases. As I said in a previous commentary, smug atheists at that age are just as annoying if not more so than smug Christians. I feel like deep down Joyce knows this a little bit but isn’t willing to admit it yet, because she’s finally certain of things again (or so she feels right now).
The fact that Becky’s faith survived in spite of everything that happened last semester is remarkable.
That said, I feel Joyce had more to lose. Her belief in people she’s known her whole life was betrayed in a big way, and now the only belief she has left seems to be that there is nothing to believe in.
I don’t think either of them is to blame. They’ve both had traumatic experiences with people they were supposed to trust. Becky is holding onto her faith as hard as she can, while Joyce is still dealing with hers being completely shattered. Somewhere in here should be some kind of happy medium.
Though I think Joyce will be eating lunch by herself for a while.
I voted for Walky for unrelated reasons (I thought Joyce losing after pouring so much efforts into her strips would be very funny), but today of all days I kind of feel like Joyce has more to worry about
I didn’t mean literally. Joe has been sympathetic to her as of late, and since her sister was the catalyst of all this, Sarah might lend an ear (in a manner that befits her aloofness).
I think Dorothy will absolutely try to be a friend of Joyce. But she doesn’t know how to be a friend without expressing her disapproval of Joyce’s new attitude and belief system. And Joyce isn’t in the mood to listen to that.
I think Joe might do a better job of being a friend to Joyce without judging her, and just giving her space to stew with her emotions for a while. He knows what it’s like get through each day despite holding onto some dark thoughts, so he may identify a bit with the path she’s wading through.
Dorothy, and I fully acknowledge that my views on her character may be influenced by being a Dorothy Hater ™, kinda feels like she’d approach this on the grounds of Joyce “being the person Dorothy knows she can be, which is why she needs to go make it right.” Joyce’s feelings matter, but they only matter long enough until they stop accommodating a peaceful status quo and afterwards it’s “still understandable” for Joyce to be upset but she needs to Be Better, even though Dorothy’s idea of Be Better is a vague blob of properly computing the amount of niceness that must be dispensed in this situation of the human emotion you call anger. Joyce and Becky are friends and for the time they are not, and instead of coming back together when they’re prepared to or even just drifting apart if it proves totally irreconcilable, they need to fix it because that’s what they’re supposed to do.
(though that does make me think the newfound lack of Joyce is gonna make Becky ramp it up even harder at Dorothy, because I’ve come to think of Becky’s recent behaviour as her proving to Dorothy that she’s a cool fun badass in a way that only ever worked on Joyce, and Becky just lost one of three people she can cry in front of without thinking they’ll stop liking her)
Joe, and I hope Sarah too, would just let Joyce feel however she wants and offer their perspective, not even judgment or as an argument, just an equal sharing of thoughts that Joyce can take at her leisure, and for the time being that’s what Joyce actually needs. Joyce is a monkey, factually, and Joyce needs to flail and scream and panic until being a monkey is something she can accept and Joe can chime in that being a monkey means he can decide what matters, much like how the person she is still matters even without the existence of Heaven and Hell.
A traumatic experience isn’t typically the reason someone loses their religion. And it’s not in Joyce’s story either. It wasn’t the terrible things that happened to her. It was Becky coming out, and Joyce questioning for the first time the authority of the Bible and Christianity (as she’d been taught) and finding it full of cracks.
I’d say it was more the trauma and less the questioning. The preacher boy attacking her. Her friend’s father using their religion as motivation for the kidnapping. Her mother (and then their church) echoing his words: “I’d die for you”.
When Becky came out to her, she was able to find ways to reconcile that with the Bible, even if it was after the fact.
When you put it like that, no wonder she seems to not know what she believes in, only what she doesn’t. One of the only things I think she understands about what atheists do/can believe (as opposed to what they don’t, mostly by definition God) is “other people of their choosing”. But she wouldn’t trust her ability to choose people to believe in any more…
I’m disappointed in Joyce but not for the reason she would think. She and Becky really WERE talking past each other, and doubling down might feel good now but it’ll make things worse later.
I am also disappointed in Becky, but again, not for the reasons she would think. She wasn’t in a good place to think clearly, so distance was the right answer there, but I also worry that her habit of pretending everything is fine will bite her in the butt here.
I hope they can both work through this and actually talk to each other without letting their crap get in the way. :/
I like how Joyce is converted away from Christianity by living in this college only for all her athiest friends to immediately get mad at her for not respecting Christianity enough. No wonder she’s so mad.
Literally on my like second visit to the local temple a couple turned around and said “Oh you’re converting? Good for you! Don’t worry you don’t even have to believe in god, in case you were worrying about that!”
Huh. I could’ve sworn that Joyce’s last line here was something that either Ross or Carol said at some point, but if it is I can’t seem to find it. Closest I can find are this and this. Definitely the same condescending tone, though.
…this is why I shouldn’t write comments at 1 in the morning now matter how much insomnia I’ve got
like, I guess I interpreted ARB’s comment about it being “very HUMAN” as a criticism of me or something? Even though I’m pretty sure looking at it now that it wasn’t? Like, it is very human. This arc has been painful to read at times because of how real it felt.
And then I basically ended up sounding exactly like Joyce in the comic, oops
honestly that arc plays much better in print, where it’s extensively footnoted to explain that it’s not just a take-that at religion but a hyperspecific parody of the story of king josiah
I remember when Joyce first got her glasses a reason why she kept wearing them is because after rejecting Christianity and the pedestal she put her parents her biggest authority in her life was possibly the optometrist. She’s echoing Liz’s words from earlier in the last panel so: interesting? Granted as I’ve stated before this is sometimes something I saw when I vented in exchristian.net like the anger can be real but on that site it can be mixed with other peoples views: so while in some ways it helped in others I really can’t recommend it too easily.
Also she does call Becky smart here, she actually doesn’t think she’s stupid as a person. Maybe. Yay?
Also got to love given how his eyes are drawn Joes expression isn’t very readable. Like Dorothy looks worried, Sarah surprised and worried but Joe is a wild card of uncertainty to me.
And all three of them are atheists but atheists who probably didn’t go through anything similar to come to that conclusion. Like maybe Sarah had Christian parents but who knows really. Pretty out of their wheel park and completely baffling to them.
Anger in deconversion is pretty normal. Sometimes healing is ugly and honestly Becky is perfectly in her rights not to want to hang around for that. Like even if she did eventually disbelieve it’s quite likely she’s not going to care for how Joyce made her feel. Just a heads up there Joyce.
Just for the record, I believe Sarah has said she’s agnostic.
Joe is Jewish, and he claimed at one point to have pretended to be atheist while his parents were getting divorced, so I’d assume he still believes and isn’t just culturally Jewish. Like many people though it doesn’t seem to be a huge part of his life.
Ah, I see Joyce has reached the “angry atheist” phase. With time, she’ll probably get around to “understanding atheist” phase. After all, Dorothy’s been giving her a role model on how to be an atheist without being a dick for a while.
Except for all those times Dorothy has clobbered someone with a nearby chair for shit as simple as looking in her general direction for too long. I’m so tired of people pretending she didn’t just outright take off Agatha’s left hand with a band saw during Family Weekend. It grew back, sure, but she didn’t know it would when she did it.
That’s actually a common misconception. Agatha’s hand didn’t grow back after Dorothy hacked it off, she was immediately contacted by the Pleasant People Association and given a donation hand as compensation for her hard work in the organization’s name.
I feel I have to ask, since this is the only one of Willis’s comics that I’ve read, are you riffing off of each other or referenced something that happened to a different version of those characters?
Nah, don’t you remember, there was that whole subplot where Sal, Walky and Jason had to take Agatha back to her people on the planet Zeta Reticuli D so she could regrow it in the protoplasm tanks. The PPA thing was just a cover story. Of course, the arc where the Pleasant People Association /did/ finally appear was a bit controversial.
Joyce can definitely learn to be more diplomatic about it, but she’s kind of in a pickle. Becky is mad because Joyce lied and also Joyce thinks her beliefs are absurd. She can’t make herself believe, so she’s going to keep thinking those beliefs are absurd. So that leaves lying.
Becky’s beliefs are pick-and-choose. There’s a lot of contradictions in the Bible, so there’s a lot of options to pick-and-choose from. And discovering that is what lead Joyce to question Christianity. Because even if you get the good feels or bad feels that convince you you’re experiencing God, it’s still based on an authoritative source. And Becky got pissed at Joyce way back when Joyce didn’t take the wish fulfillment approach to Christianity way back when she came out to Joyce.
And that’s something Becky’s going to be mad about if talked to honestly. She’s not going to understand, she’s not going to figure it out on her own. She’s smart, but smart people can believe silly things.
Becky wants Joyce to lie to her and for those lies to be true.
Joyce has a lot to learn about being diplomatic and understanding. She’s still in the middle of her major life change. She’s angry at what Christianity did to her, and from the argument (where she was accused of only caring about the factoids of Christianity and being holier-than-thou, when it legit was her confronting the contradictions regarding gays).
I think Dorothy’s advice isn’t going to be helpful. I think it’s going to be Joe who gets her to a more humanistic and diplomatic place. Joyce can’t (and shouldn’t) apologize for everything Becky wants, but there is some of it she should. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/shallow/
Dude, you’re displaying even less chill here than Claire or Clinton.
Do you think, to make the obvious comparison, that Jeph intends every word those characters (or Faye, or Hanners, or Sam) say to be his own opinion and gospel truth? You think they’re infallible author mouthpieces?
Joyce is definitely autobiographical. That said, Willis has been quite willing to show her being flat out wrong before. I think she’s staking out a position here that she’ll end up walking back/softening a bit in the future. At the risk of making a bad pun: have a little faith.
Yeah, I think right now Joyce is reflexively overcorrecting. She broke herself free from the cult, but pulled a hard 180 into anti-theism. She’s angry, hurt, confused, and scared. She’s doubting everything that had to do with her past, indoctrinated self, including the values she held and her relationships with her friends and family. She’s trying to make it all make sense now that the bedrock she built them on disintegrated.
I think eventually she’ll settle into personal atheism and be accepting of her friends’ beliefs again, but right now she’s releasing all the anger and pain she’s kept under wraps.
Yep, hard this. I was brought up in a hard-right household (like so far right wing they’re not explicitly white nationalists but having folks who ARE explicitly white nationalists at high levels of the political parties they are members of isn’t a deal breaker and the libs are just making a mountain out of a mole-hill. For Canadians, they were Reformers in the 90s and for USians, think like the average tea party or current Republican base member.) And they were very authoritarian. I can say from experience that after you break out of an authoritarian, black and white, deeply controlling belief system, especially if like Joyce you’re not the sort to do anything by half’s, there certainly was a phase of extreme over-correction fueled by rage at myself, my old belief system and anything even adjacent to it. But at the same time, I neither understood my own beliefs very well nor did I recognize how much I had to learn about social issues and such.
I am very firmly still in camp “Joyce was mocking her own old beliefs not speaking with Becky in mind” but at the same time, yes I can totally buy her realizing she cast a wide enough net to catch Becky, and being too pissed off and in her own deconversion to really care about it. Certainly I almost nuked a few friendships with similar confrontations in my angry overcorrection phase.
And I expect we’ll see more of this sort of thing from Joyce until she gets it out of her system and is better able to articulate and conceptualize her own values and principles and identifies what battles are worth fighting for her. Cuz like right now Joyce is such a ball of anger and bitterness over religion her answer to “What arguments are worth having about religion?” is gonna be “Yes.” Eventually as she figures her shit out I bet she’ll get to a point of saying, I’ll argue against toxic beliefs but it’s not worth it to argue about faith and the concept of God.”
Most atheists are more like Dina and Dorothy than Joyce or Liz (even if we did go through a Joyce/Liz phase). It’s not so much that I don’t think the idea of God as conceptualized by Christianity in general and literally any translation of the Bible is dumb but more that I don’t think it’s really relevant to talk about and furthermore, the fact that it’s dumb to me really isn’t with me starting a fight over if someone else values it (any more than my atheism is with starting a fight over to most Christians even if they think it’s dumb to be an atheist). I may as well start a blow up shouting match over whether white or dark chocolate is better (dark, obviously, but if someone else is wrong about it I really don’t care and also more dark chocolate for me then). Now if you think LGBT people should be stoned, we’re gonna have a problem.
Willis is kind of respectful with other religion. As we saw with Jacob. Even Raidah.
No, the problem was really Christianity, as @eh, whatever have said.
There’s also the fact that Jesus was actually persecuted and ultimately killed for the fact that he picked and choosed. The whole point of his reform ministry was saying a lot of stuff like, “Don’t do that”, “That doesn’t mean that”, and “a literal interpretation of scripture is stupid.”
It shows what Joyce wants from religion and what Becky does could never have been reconciled. Christian fundamentalism has been absurd since John Calvin who INSISTED it all made PERFECT SENSE with NO CONTRADICTIONS.
You know, even the parts where Jesus contradicted people.
The whole smug atheist concept blows my mind. Like, I get religious people wanting to convert others to their religion – they think they are saving them from a bad fate. But as an atheist it’s like… what do I care if someone drops their religion? It’s different if their beliefs are harmful to people, but honestly at that point I don’t care what they believe, I care about stopping their actions. But if someone believes in a religion and they’re not harmful and it brings them joy? That’s great! We all die one day and I don’t believe there’s anything after, so you might as well live with peace and happiness, and if religion does that for you, go get it! I have a limited amount of days too and it makes no sense to spend them de-converting people. And like, literally anyone can be wrong? I personally don’t believe in god, but I could totally be wrong about that. Maybe we’re in a simulation and I’m literally wrong about everything my senses are telling me! So I don’t get why I would hold up atheism as being better than someone? Idk it’s just mind-boggling to me
I mean, atheists can and do believe that truth has its own inner value. If God is real then everyone should know it. If God is not real, everyone should not. There’s no value to a lie.
It’s why I had a weird reaction to WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS from Star Trek. My friends went, “Hey, Chuck, you’re a big Christian. That was a HUGE take that against your religion with Picard saying that invisible sky people are a thing to get over.”
And I’m like, “Why would I support Picard lying about being a god?”
Ohhh that makes a lot of sense, and is honestly making me think about my thought process. I think am not a 100% Gnostic atheist, and I think I am an individual moral relativist, so I don’t think it’s lying to accept someone’s beliefs as valid without believing in it yourself
I feel like I’m missing a lot by not knowing anything about Star Trek >_< the character said people shouldn't believe in "invisible sky people" and then claimed to be a god? Btw I really hope I didn't come off as saying that religious people would tell lies just to convert someone! I do think the ones who are trying to convert people out of kindness are telling their truth
The episode has the characters mistaken for gods on a primitive planet that has abandoned religion generations ago. Their actions result in a revival of the dead faith. Picard decides to reveal that they are space travelers, regardless of the Prime Directive, because the alternative is to revive superstition on the planet as well as the old religion.
Gene Roddenberry and others felt it would be a very controversial episode. Instead, religious people just went, “Yep. Good for Picard, It’d be blasphemous to claim to be a god.”
Uh, to revive the religion would also be a blatant violation of the Prime Directive, so he had to choose which way to violate the Prime Directive, and he chose the one that’s more in line with the intent behind the Prime Directive in the long run.
In what culture would that be controversial…?
…oh, wait. When did Ghostbusters come out? “Ray, if you’re asked if you’re a god, you say YES!”
I think the buttheads at Starfleet probably would have just said to tell them nothing and get the spock out of there. Picard instead decided to tell them the truth and is the better man for it.
The Prime Directive is more gets violated all the time. Remember the one where Riker’s undercover on the surface of a pre-warp planet for some reason? Or the time Voyager got stuck in orbit of a planet with a temporal core so 3 days on the ship is thousands of years on the surface? Or Friendship One? Or pretty much every other episode of Voyager?
Whenever I watch that episode, I’m always dumbstruck by the fact that Picard’s big plan to prove to the natives that he’s not a god is to invite them up to his magic sky castle.
Mostly because atheists are human beings and not the pure rational machines some pretend to be.
Especially for new atheists, wanting to share the cool new thing you’ve figured out is a very natural impulse. Not really any different at its base than “I found this great webcomic, you have to check it out.”
Others were raised in damaging cult-like religions and tend to see all religions that way, at least until they get more distance. That does give them a similar “saving them from a bad fate” motivation.
For 98% of uses of the word “objective” on the Internet, the correct response is “I do not think that word means what you think it means.” (This is objectively true.)
Actually, there is a goal of evolution and that is to pass on to the next generation. Its just short term versus longterm. Its also still anthropomorphizing a bit.
I find it hard to be angry at young atheists who had heavy-handed religious upbringings for acting like this. I went through a phase like this, as I’m sure Willis and many others did, where we’re lashing out. Hell I still get bothered thinking about basically not being allowed to have fun if it wasn’t with a group of kids from the mosque when I was younger.
Best case scenario, Becky understands that Joyce was venting a lot of pent up frustration and Joyce realizes that insulting Christians isn’t the same as venting about Christianity. Ultimately though even if they get back to being friends Joyce is probably always going to have these thoughts in the back of her mind and Becky’s probably always going to feel self conscious around her.
Yeah, atheists who didn’t grow up in a super religious environment or have been a non-believer for many years? This kind of behaviour is incredibly obnoxious and gross. But for someone like Joyce raised in a culty christian sect who lost faith very, very recently? Pretty understandable. How do you go from “atheists are bad, evolution isn’t real” to “god doesn’t exist” in the space of a couple months without some growing pains?
Yeah I think this is an important distinction we’re not really processing like we should.
For me to act like Joyce would be wildly egotistical because religion had little impact on my life and was entirely predicated on faith that I had because having it was how I was raised, and then once I was like 12 I was old enough that the expectation of faith vanished and with it any importance I ascribed to the existence of God, whose existence was just “hangs out in the sky and sends you a thumbs up ’cause he likes you” anyway.
Joyce is rebelling against her upbringing, all she’s ever known, and then that upbringing was revealed to be total bullshit, most of her loved ones were revealed as garbage people who let a man who pointed a gun at her and kidnapped his daughter a chance to do it all over again, and Joyce realized she never had faith at all, just a light switch that flicks between the canonical text of God’s will and nothing.
See that’s my issue with how everyone is talking about Joyce right now.
This is a very recent development for her, she only JUST realized she believes the same things as Dina now, and this is all very new to her.
While my upbringing wasnt quite as intense as Joyce’s I still grew up in CATHOLIC IRELAND where baptism was required in order to go to school (yes really)
But after a while I ended up becoming atheist and my behaviour was more the same. Especially after I realized my own sexuality I lashed out against religion, christianity in particular in much the same way Joyce is
She is young, and in learning alot of really harmful things she grew up with and most young atheist go through a sort of phase like this. Most mellow tf put after a little while but when you’ve been more or less indoctrinated into this way of thinking when you break putnof it your attitude towards it is going to be harsh.
Like she’s 19 and was always The Good One in a household that handed out favoritism based on compliance. And now she’s the kid who goes against literally everything her upbringing taught. She’s gonna be pissed off and angry. And that’s gonna come out in unfortunate ways.
I had a similar but not quite as heated blow up with the person who is now my partner during my own angry phase. I mean if she was like certain YouTube atheists who basically turned that phase into their entire identity and never did the work of challenging their old beliefs so they still believe all their old problematic shit it’s just justified with Evo psych just so stories instead of religious just so stories, I could see condemning her. But this phase? Basically every person who deradicalizes from a toxic or culty belief system goes through it, it’s part of the process even if it’s not pretty.
(I am purposefully not referencing the guy I am talking about by name because alt reich atheists are just as creepy and fanatical as alt reich fundies or TERFs and I don’t want Willis to have to deal with it)
I can’t take credit for coining the term but I’m firmly of the opinion that if it spews anti-Semitic hate like a Nazi and salutes like a Nazi and uses hate symbolism like a Nazi and chants Nazi chants like a Nazi, it’s a Nazi.
I do agree with all that and I’ve never been angry at Joyce through all this, despite not being on her side in the dispute.
But that’s from the outside. That I can understand and sympathize with Joyce here, doesn’t mean that Becky should be able to as easily. She has her own trauma and this venting is at least partly directed at her.
she seems to be mental exhausted and the filter she used to have… is gone.
yes she is an asshole. but was Becky all in right? kinda but she didn’t extacly help Joyce to understand. she was all “HHAHAH SILLY JOYCE!” while Joyce was struggling with her problems.
not excusing her behavior but… she just got enough.
I think it’s notable that for the thousands of things Joyce has said about Christianity, has she ever actually talked about how Christians are meant to behave? It seems like that wasn’t something that was emphasized at her church.
Of course she has.
They’re not supposed to swear. They’re not supposed to have sex before marriage. They’re supposed to obey their parents. Girls in particular are supposed to get married and have kids and spend their time raising them and obeying their husbands rather than having a career or thinking for themselves.
What else could you possibly mean?
Less sarcastically, I think she has a few times, but I’m not sure where to look for examples.
I have to admit. It’s great to see Joyce so fierce and secure of herself. Plus, she’s skipping class to go submit the comic strip she worked so hard instead of going in a self destructive mode owerthincking what she has do and how much her friend is angry for what she said and believe. Joyce has new priorities in life, new objectives. Nice to see her wants to succeed in it without letting other things distracting her.
It is disappointing to see someone who admired everything about Dorothy except one thing finally agree with that one thing but subsequently throw everything else out the door.
I know that Joyce doesn’t really ‘owe’ Dorothy for being treated with respect and decency but I do kind of want Dorothy to grab her by the arms and shake her while screaming “Think of how I treated you! Stop making atheists look bad!”
Is making atheists look bad something that Joyce need to consider?
Like in general and not even within the specific context of rebelling against outrageous bullshit that’s made her incapable of processing belief, or that Joyce has twice now been unable to actually refer to herself as an atheist.
Yeah, as much as she’s not in a very good place right now, she is also dealing with her own personal feelings. She has no obligation to act as some sort of representative for all atheists.
Okay NOW Joyce is being pretty terrible ashiest, dang it Joyce it’s not always a zero sum game.
There were a thousand things she could have said, but at the same time I guess people are right, she’s a teenager, so she’s not going to pick the right one.
She’s pretty much LOOK EITHER IT’S RIGHT, OR IT’S WRONG! Yeah, but…I mean tbh yeah that’s not surprising.. this is the person who will either eat the potatoes or WONT eat the potatoes, based on the existence of green beans next to them…
Joyce was raised to believe that everything regarding her religion had a right or wrong answer and that she and those who thought like her were the only ones who got it right, yeah.
Minus the last two sentences, Joyce is 100% right. She shouldn’t be bullied into watering down her beliefs to make them palatable for others like that.
It’s truly sad how many people are flip flopping over this. You’re only with Joyce in criticizing her abusive upbringing as long as she’s only being self deprecating? She’s not allowed to think that in general, belief in a god is idiotic? She has to only think that about her past self or she’s an asshole? Should she be giving Becky some kind of special exemption? She’s not allowed to think Becky is an idiot for that belief while also thinking Becky is smart overall and still cares about Becky regardless of what Joyce thinks of her religious beliefs?
I’m sorry, but that is nothing but tone policing. If you’re mad or grumpy, that means you’re wrong. If you aren’t perfectly diplomatic, you’re just as bad as the angry people on the other side. Whether you’re right or wrong is down to whether people hearing it are upset by the things you’re saying or not.
Fuck that.
Joyce is allowed to be angry. She’s allowed to use strong language. She’s not less right or somehow wrong about the flaws in Christianity just because she said it in a mean way. Sometimes the truth hurts, and shying away from that isn’t a good thing at all.
I will agree that her attitude isn’t productive from the standpoint of mending the friendship, but people are allowed to take stances and approaches not finely tuned for diplomacy and social cohesion. That doesn’t mean their grievances and feelings are invalid.
The whole idea of “They’re just as bad as the other side” is a very common tactic for distracting from the real issues. The difference between a homophobe and someone who isn’t a homophobe isn’t that one is mean and one is nice. The homophobe can be the nicest, most diplomatic person in the world, and the person criticizing homophobia can be a total asshole about it. The important difference is that the homophobe believes in a harmful and wrong ideology, and the other person is quite correct in criticizing that. Getting distracted because “Oh, that guy said a mean word” is falling into a rhetorical trap where you forget what’s actually being said because you’re paying too much attention to how it’s being said. Which is handing your beliefs and sentiments to the people best at rhetoric, not those who actually care about people.
Over and over again throughout history, we’ve seen patterns of oppressed groups getting push back over this tone policing. Don’t fall for it.
Yeah, Joyce is failing the criteria of social cohesion, and that’s what’s going to mend things. But she is not the same as the worst parts of fundamentalist Christianity just because they both sound mean. “Saying things in a mean way” is not the thing that makes religion objectionable.
And if you just disagree with Joyce and think she’s wrong, either because you’re a theist or you don’t think religion is as bad as she’s treating it, just say that. Don’t just police her tone and call it a day.
And as for the last two sentences… Joyce, I’m sorry, but that’s not how it works. Intelligence is not the thing that determines whether people get out of their faith or not. It’s how susceptible they are to faith and the strategies that keep it alive. That susceptibility isn’t directly linked to intelligence. Nor is it directly linked to someone’s human decency. That’s why it’s important to work towards a point where you can get along with people who believe that kind of stuff regardless of what you might think of their particular beliefs. Because there are plenty of perfectly fine people who are still susceptible to that kind of thing, and some of those people are worth it. Becky seems really deep into the compartmentalization and such, so I wouldn’t give good odds on her changing her mind about it. It’s up to you whether she’s worth working past that or not. You should probably consider that only after you’ve calmed down more and can process things better.
You say “allowed to be angry” as though that was the crux of the matter. Of course she’s allowed that and much more and so is Becky. But “allowed to” doesn’t mean they should or that it is a good thing. In other words, their feelings are warranted and their actions, understandable. Still, they could and should aim to do better.
Does Joyce need to process complex thoughts about her life and everything beyond it on the grounds of doing better?
What does it mean to do better in this circumstance anyway? Should Joyce develop her beliefs not for herself, as in finding out how to be the person she always was instead of the person she’d rather think of as changing into, but on the grounds of… what, exactly? Just being a vague nicer, more accommodating person?
“DO” better, not be better. Regardless of your beliefs, experiences or whatever else, you should strive to be compassionate and understanding, especially when dealing with your friends. Or what are you alleging? That having gained a new (and objectively, more fact-based) perspective in life constitutes a blank permit to be a jerk to your friends who have not reached it?
I’m alleging that I don’t need to answer that last part since I’m not in the mood of justifying stances ascribed to me on the grounds of “saying X means you believe Y”, and by alleging I mean I just said it in a way that is not at all alleging.
More importantly, you probably can’t be compassionate and understanding like two months after your understanding of reality came crashing down and in the immediate aftermath of shattering your friendship with the person you love most because you never learned how to disagree with them to the point of never realizing you two have conceptualized religious belief, the most deeply held concept drilled into your head, in entirely separate ways.
That is actually the most appropriate point in time for you to be allowed to be angry, to experience hate and outrage that feels so much worse when you hate someone as much as you loved them about half an hour ago, and what actually matters is for both of them to figure out if that hate you feel in the moment matters more than everything else.
Life ain’t a linear ascension into being a better person because better isn’t a thing you do.. Compassion is a special thing, it’s not an expectation, because if it were then it wouldn’t be compassion anymore.
But your caveat on those last two sentences undermines your whole argument and why Becky and many of us are upset with her.
If losing or keeping your faith isn’t tied to intelligence (and I agree that it isn’t), then Becky isn’t an idiot for not losing hers, nor do she and other believers deserve to be mocked for believing. Which is, at the very least a good part of what Becky’s mad about.
Is it really “tone policing” when the tone directly hurts your friend and you keep doubling down on it anyway? I’ve usually seen it applied in a more abstract sense – or to control a discussion with people who aren’t actually being hurt by it, not to prevent someone being insulted from being allowed to be hurt by it.
I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone even imply that Joyce is the same as the worst parts of fundamentalist Christianity. Many people seem to think she’s in the wrong, but I think people can still be upset with her and recognize that she hasn’t even come close to stepping over the “you are now a horrible person” line.
Hm, so Joyce/Becky will be the Sal/Amber of Season 2? Like in lots of tension building because of they don’t find easy outlets for their repressed rage?
Yes, and after that they will join to beat the hell out of some homophobic creationists. But Dina finds out and then they have to battle together to restrain her before she devours the whole congregation.
I thought the driving force behind the Christmas Story was the “official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time”.
Even beyond that, the Gospel accounts differ greatly. The oldest Gospel, Marc, has nothing about Jesus’s birth. He mentions that Jesus came from Nazareth, but in a context that could just mean he journeyed from there, not necessarily that he was born there.
Luke introduces the census story to get the family to Bethlehem for Jesus’s birth. Matthew also need to have him born there, but instead has the family living there when Jesus was born but then having to flee to Egypt until Herod’s death. When they return they then go to live in Nazareth.
This is actually more interesting than just “The Bible is wrong because it contradicts and is made up”, since it tells us a lot about what the Gospel writers were thinking and thus what was going on in the early years of Christianity. Both Matthew and Luke are treating Jesus as a more Jewish Messiah and thus want him to fulfill that particular prophecy about where the Messiah will come from. Jesus seems to have been known to have come from Nazareth, so they need to explain that, but also have him tied to Bethlehem. They’re also the two who give extensive (but somewhat different) genealogies of Jesus to trace him back to David. Marc isn’t invested in Jesus being a Davidic Messiah, so he ignores the entire issue.
John, as usual, is off in an entirely different direction. He’s also writing almost a generation later, so in a very different part of Christianity’s development.
There is a very interesting piece called “Leave No Stone Unturned” by Dan Barker, who was a former preacher-turned-atheist.
He mentions a particular challenge: Using the bible, tell me what happened on Easter. (Easter being significant because of its importance to christianity… jesus rising from the dead and all.) If you try to, you run into all sorts of contradictions: one account has women showing up to the tomb blocked, another has the tomb already opened. One has jesus first appearing to his disciples on a mountain, another has him appearing indoors. (And that’s assuming you accept many of the more ‘supernatural’ elements… dead people being seen wandering around, great earthquakes.)
Its the fact that there were so many contradictions over arguably the most important part of the biblical story that should give believers some pause.
Showing there are contradictions is a like a parlor trick, as far as I’m concerned. It impresses the new atheists, but the literalists generally have complex answers prepared and the non-literalists don’t really care and get annoyed with people trying to make them argue on grounds that aren’t important to them – like Becky’s response to Joyce implying she’s an idiot over YEC and dinosaurs on the ark.
What I do find interesting is why the stories are different. What were the different authors trying to say with their different takes on a given event?
There was a real census of Judea in 6 AD conducted by the Roman governor of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, when the province was first annexed. And this was a typical thing for Romans to do upon first acquiring a territory, i.e., take inventory of who was there. The source on this is Josephus, “Antiquities of the Jews”. It’s possible/likely that any Roman records of the census would eventually have been lost; they wouldn’t have been needed after a certain point; parchment decays; Rome itself had at least 3 fires in the first century, although it’s also likely these records would never have left Caesaria, the provincial capital.
What Luke gets wrong, purposefully or otherwise:claiming that this was a census of the entire Empire, decreed by Augustus. There is indeed no record or evidence that the Romans ever did such a thingthe idea that everyone had to travel to their birth city to get registered, which makes zero sense from any logistical point of view, was contrary to standard Roman practice to count everybody in place,… pretty much the only way to justify it is as a contrivance to get Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem when they would otherwise have no reason to go there.
Yeah it’s fake, no record of it and the mechanics of the supposed census don’t make sense with any sort of knowledge of the methodology and purpose of census taking in Rome. Long story short why would u have to travel to your hometown if you don’t live there all the time to be censused? You contribute taxes in the locality you live and work. It’s just silly
My prediction: The story will critisize Joyce for becoming an atheist for the “wrong” reasons, aka, all the logical fallacies, instead of humanists reasons.
I hope it doesn’t go that way. Yes, it fits Joyce’s character to rely on rules and patterns, but her original reason was that she was open and tolarant of other people, enough to question her own beliefs.
She needs to vent this stuff, and could’ve done so in a more “agreeable” way, if she didn’t feel like having to hold her tongue for months about it, because she lost the oppression olympics to Becky.
Joyce’s first permanent damage to the big block of unending belief in rules and authority was when Becky was made to suffer because of those rules and authority and Joyce couldn’t justify on any level the idea of letting the person she loves more than anyone suffer.
Like she yelled at Becky, specifically, that she had to change because staying the same would have meant she’d turn on Becky to do it.
Someone needs to explain explicitly, NOT implicitly to Joyce that Becky probably doesn’t believe that stuff, but likely believes in the higher power stuff and the heaven stuff, and especially the love they neighbor stuff. I’m atheist and Jewish and what really stuck with me from religious school was to take the Torah seriously, not literally.
Joyce is turning into the most anoying type of atheist, the former Christian. They know what their talking about and imediatly can make alot of logical shifts when it comes to anything to do with the scriptiure. But they are ALWAYS harping on it to an anoying extent.
Even worse, they are the most focused types of atheists, they have absolutely no argument for non scripture based faiths, or even other scripture based faiths. They keep the monotheistic “Christians only” asumption going and then become tied to arguing the one thing with the one group of people.
That’s not to say Joyce’s not becoming a really interesting charecter, she’s just becoming a shitty person.
If there’s one thing Joyce has been extremely eager to talk about since the timeskip, it’s being an atheist.
Also Joyce has no argument for non-scripture based faiths because as far as Joyce knew everyone, including Becky, processed faith exactly like her. She fundamentally (fnar fnar) does not process religious belief as an act of faith, as perceiving the world as having being created by an all-powerful God, she thinks religious beliefs are in following inerrant facts and the creation myths were all true and exactly as they were in the bible, which is not a scripture to draw interpretations but the canonical text of the origin of life and the universe, and then the people who were supposed to care and nurture her, as since they are authority figures they are objectively superior to her, began betraying her belief in them as flawless figures of justice.
That’s why that fight they just had went the way it did: Joyce was talking to the Becky she thinks exists, the Becky who knows by now that the Earth is not 6000 years old and since that part of it is wrong so is the existence of God himself so why is Becky clinging onto something obviously untrue, while Becky was talking to the Joyce she thinks exists, the Joyce who was removing all the unimportant stuff of their upbringing and was able to roll with faith in God once reality contradicted what she was told.
Your absouletly right, this is an extremely realistic charecterisation. She based her faith on literal ideas of textual beleifs and she has a vary different concept of Faith from Becky.
These arguments reveal a deep-seated concept that Joyce needs to ask herself and consider. I just hope she gets to it.
OK I may feel like an idiot after I read the comments and without an edit function, but this is still Joyce and Becky being failed by their upbringing, about things they couldn’t learn growing up in the families that raised them. Even after being friends with Dorothy and seeing a different model, Joyce is behaving exactly like she was raised to think that atheists always behave toward religion, mocking and derisive. As if some part of her brain were thinking; “I’m an atheist now, I should be confrontational about it.”
And Becky, her feelings legitimately hurt, is being quick to judge while carefully compartmentalizing how she feels about atheism in the context of her relationship with Dina.
Deconversion was a long process for me, but I went through a whole bunch of conflicting feelings. The only thing that saved me from being mean to my Christian friends was my barely concealed social anxiety. So instead it manifested as depression, which I also hid from everyone. But I did eventually figure out that believers aren’t perforce idiots, including me when I was a believer. We are very much a product of the culture we live in. And changing core beliefs can be as much a matter of identifying with a new culture as of adopting a different philosophy. This is one of the things that makes change so difficult; it is a social leap into the darkness.
And that change of identification is what strains relationships from your previous culture, unless you also understand about giving close friends permission to think differently because they are not you. Like insisting your friend play along with comforting thoughts about departed mother, or (other direction) your friend be “smart” and come around to your unbelief.
Their friendship will be crushed if they don’t give each other room to move around and be wrong and figure things out.
What Joyce is missing here is this: It’s fine to be an unbeliever, but it’s not fine to belittle people because they are believers. It’s fine to belittle a concept, but it’s not fine to belittle people.
If Joyce thinks she was stupid to believe in a Christian god who loves her, it’s pretty fucked up to expect her to NOT think other people are being stupid to believe in Christian gods that love THEM. That’s just self-loathing with extra steps. In her own head, Joyce shouldn’t have to treat other people better than she treats herself. And she shouldn’t be expected to never ever say what’s in her head because someone from her college might stumble upon her and be hurt by it.
Also, there’s a bunch of ethical problems with an omni-etc God, especially one who answers prayers and actively effects the world like Becky believes. Joyce hasn’t touched on them, but it probably hurts her (now that she’s out of it) that Becky unconditionally loves something so morally questionable, who maybe loves Becky but didn’t seem to love Joyce (or else He would have let her feel Him). This isn’t only a problem about historical facts for Joyce, even if that’s what’s easy for her to point to right now.
also I was fine the rest of the week but I guess today I’m feeling more sensitive about how life is awful and unfair, cuz the comments are making me real upset. I’m gonna go play some crosswords instead of continuing to think about this.
OTOH, while Joyce’s new beliefs are understandable and we shouldn’t expect her to never say them or to treat other people better than herself or to generally not screw up, we also shouldn’t expect Becky to not be hurt by them or to not immediately understand or forgive, especially when Joyce keeps doubling down on what hurt her the first time.
Joyce is behaving in a healthy way that will (or would’ve, if Becky and Dorothy hadn’t shown up) help her with her problems, and the alternatives would be harmful for her. On that other hand, just because what Becky’s doing is expectable doesn’t mean it’s healthy. She’s feeling hurt by the reality of Joyce being angry at religion, which sucks, and she’s trying to find someone to hold responsible for her hurt. But sometimes life just hurts and no one’s the bad guy who did it to you.
Becky has been failing as a friend for a lot longer than today. I think she’s completely out of line to try to block Joyce from her education. But the rest of it is just Becky continuing on her track of not being a good friend, and I probably wouldn’t mind how she responded today if it wasn’t part of a larger issue.
Eh I’m definitely #TeamJoyce for the specifics but this is a big messy scenario where she and Becky were using the same words to have two different conversations and the reason it got so bad is that Becky is a possessive nutbar having never been an indication not to be and Joyce treats her as a helpless damsel to protect from cruelty, so they built a relationship of deep emotional love and affection where neither of them could ever allow themselves to think a problem between them existed, let alone vocalize it.
their friendship became so important to the both of them while simultaneously being completely unable to talk about anything that could prove challenging, faith in particular, and it all bubbled over at once where Becky goes and stalks Joyce to assert herself as Joyce’s best friend because in any other scenario Joyce would think that was charming, and then once that part of their friendship finally proved problematic they get to the part where we find out they never realized they’ve approached religious belief differently than the other the whole time, but because they can’t conceive of the other believing differently than them they just keep insisting on their own points long enough that it all collapses and they pin the blame on the other as the true culprit.
They’ve been best friends their whole lives and it took them an entire 10 minutes to dismiss the other as bullheadedly stupid and wrong, because Joyce and Becky never learned how to think the other could make a mistake and then they learned the other was making the biggest, most wrong mistake imaginable.
“Screw-up” does feel descriptive of an immediate mistake and in that regard I agree, let alone that this is just a big ugly mess where it’s not about right or wrong.
Joyce, you don’t have to apologize for no longer believing. You need to apologize for being an insufferable asshole about it, and lying to your friend.
Yeah, that was kind of a lose/lose situation for Joyce: lie to Becky (and risk a worse fallout when the lie gets exposed) about believing or tell her she doesn’t really think her Mom is still there somewhere. She picked the one that seemed better in the moment, but, well…
I don’t think Joyce should be held accountable, either in terms of responsibility for the current crisis or even clearing the air of strong feelings to calmly talk about it (because Joyce and Becky could never do this on the topic of theology), for having deeply complex thoughts about her upbringing and newfound shattered belief that Becky only learned because she thought being a clingy weirdo made her a huge badass and she and Dorothy cyberstalked Liz to find Joyce so they could insert themselves into her day.
Becky gets to have feelings on Joyce being an atheist. In particular, we learned that their friendship was completely and sincerely loving but with the subtext of emotional codependency where a sufficiently large fight about theology is enough to, seemingly and for the time being, shatter it, and that codependency is something Joyce and Becky nurtured in each other where Becky could do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted with her Joyce, and Joyce thought this was awesome and made Becky a cool rebel.
But Becky doesn’t deserve an apology for being lied to about something she doesn’t have the right to know in the first place, let alone when that something is of the utmost importance to Joyce and we just saw why Becky would never be able to handle it and especially not when Joyce herself barely understands her own feelings on atheism.
On the specific subject of Joyce lying about being an atheist, as in Joyce has been dodging the question a whole bunch and when she couldn’t do it on Bonnie’s birthday Becky demanded she pull the Joyce Nonsense out of her head right this second, Becky’s feelings don’t actually matter.
I’d apologize to my friend if I hurt them like Joyce did Becky by lying about believing her dead Mom is still around. Doesn’t matter if she deserves an apology, this isn’t about carmic debt, just, I would want my friend to know I’m sorry they’re hurting, and that I’m sorry I did that.
In my experience, that helps.
So I think that’s what Joyce should do.
Joyce’s own grappling with what it means to an atheist is both already hard enough and something she needs to think about on her own time, but Becky’s already proven herself to be someone who can’t handle Joyce questioning her on their beliefs.
Why? Because eventually something like this would happen and it’ll be worse than telling her upfront would be.
That’s not a moral judgment that Joyce had an obligation to tell her or anything, just that some scene like this is a predictable consequence of not doing so. Keeping secrets from close friends is risky. You need to weigh that risk.
And she might be wearing a Cool Beans shirt instead and the argument would ruin it for her so she’d never be able to wear that shirt again. And that would be sad.
No, I don’t think she needs to apologize for lying there. Like, what was she gonna do, admit to being an atheist while attempting to make Becky feel better about her dead mom?
“Oh Becky, it’s terrible that your mom died and I really want to make you feel better about it.”
“That’s okay, my mom’s in heaven right now watching us.”
“Well actually, I’m pretty sure that’s not real, and also God is fake.”
Like, there is ZERO CHANCE that works well. It ends up being the opposite of what she’s attempting to do. Instead of helping her friend, she ends up in a throw down fight like what literally just happened, and makes her friend’s tragedy all about herself.
Lying is bad, but there was literally no other option in that situation. The most you can apologize for is “Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner so I didn’t have to lie.”
Becky is smart and not an idiot, therefore Becky can definitely figure this out the Earth isn’t 6000 years old and once she does she’ll understand God isn’t real.
Much like how Joyce has morally failed in Becky’s eyes, because Becky thinks she only ever had faith to begin with because it made her better than other people when the reality is Joyce never had faith at all.
The former. She is parroting Liz’s stance and completely ignoring that Becky told her two minutes ago those parts were never the parts that were important to her. She is basically projecting by assuming these are the parts that matter as they mattered to her.
The thing is, regardless of what it’s about, Joyce has *no* give. She’s not renowned for her flexibility, whether it’s about food, or how a religious service should go or… well, you see it. So when she *does* change positions, it’ll be as iron clad as the last time, and also attacking herself for not always having thought that way.
Honestly, from a plot perspective I can see why the early stuff came in when it did, because if people didn’t feel protective of her, I couldn’t see them bothering with her.
I don’t think that’s what Becky wants, though. I don’t think Joyce’s beliefs are the point here, more like… the lying. And the unearned sense of superiority.
Honestly what hits me here is Sarah’s face. I am dealing with something like what she is saying in real life right now, a friend I trusted shared a story about me with a coworker I dislike and when I got mad at her replied with “I am sorry you got upset about that story but it was embarrassing for me too.”
My mom always taught me that if I am going to apologize, I can never follow it up with justification. Even if I *feel* justified that isn’t the time for it. Either you apologize and admit your part in the behaviors or if you can’t figure out the underlying issue you ask and adjust behavior.
I agree Becky has behaviors that *really* need adjusting, but honestly most of those are ones that she needs to be exposed to a wider friend group and that is starting. I have also been where Joyce is (not in the sense of religion but I used to be a rather… intellectual elitist *jerk*) and it took a close friend of mine to get hurt to make me re-evaluate. But I had the benefit of having a wider worldview that was flexible. Until Joyce learns to bend instead of snapping she will not be happy. She is angry, at her past self, at her family and at the world. And that just makes me sad for her.
Mmm, yeah. I’m kinda the same, I’m looking at Dorothy’s face here and going “…ah, so you’ve also met this flavor of Atheist…” and offering her a shot of rum.
I don’t think Joyce was “lying” because she wasn’t ready to open up about a serious inner conflict that was hurting her badly. I mean, if she was, then it should begin with Becky apologizing for the years she “lied” about her sexuality.
There’s plenty Joyce is doing wrong in this story, but not lying. She opened up to the people she felt safe around. While Joyce is figuring out what she did wrong, maybe Becky can sit with the question of why the friend she’s been leaning on for years was more comfortable going to people she’s known less than a year instead of her best friend.
I’m pretty sure it’s canonical that Becky wasn’t lying about her sexuality. She basically figured it out at Anderson. She said somewhere that it took some time away from Joyce to figure it out.
Yeah but she kept quiet about it the whole day visiting when she was super shaken up by getting forcibly outed, Katelin turning on her, her dad pulling her out of school to take her to conversion therapy, and then desperately escaping to IU so that she could live with Joyce forever since Joyce has also always been in love with Becky.
I know what you’re doing here, but really, could you just not.
For a single day, without actually hurting Joyce with those lies, in complete trauma, while she was working her courage up to tell Joyce. Which she did.
As opposed to concealing it for months, which required direct lies touching on Becky’s grief about her mom, as Becky discovered when she found Joyce mocking her religion behind her back – with no reason to think she hadn’t been doing so all along, even when supposedly comforting her.
… Okay so I know “it was just a prank bro” is pretty much always an admission that a joke is not funny and badly told, I will take that L.
I just have no idea how you read that as anything but “yeah holy shit complicated feelings in the face of life-altering events are not a good mix and people who are currently going through significantly traumatic incidents can’t be expected to act like robots who need a second to compute the best answer possible.”
First of all, we don’t know exactly when Becky learned she was a lesbian. It has been suggested she only figured it out when she went to college, but ‘figuring it out’ could have also referred to her attraction to Joyce.
Secondly, even if you assume Becky was only lying for a day (or a few days, if her “experimentation” went on for a while before she was caught), there was significantly more pressure for her to tell the truth to Joyce… Ross could have shown up at any moment, which meant that she NEEDED to come clean as quickly as possible. There was no such pressure for Joyce… no risk of anyone dragging her from school or being arrested by the church police… which meant she could pick and choose the best time to raise the issue.
Yes, Becky did flee Anderson in panic. I’m not sure how that contradicts anything I said.
Its because of the panic that she should have told Joyce immediately on her arrival that she was gay and what had happened. Because a delay in telling Joyce that information would have risked everything. That’s why Becky’s lie was so significant (even if it lasted a shorter period than Joyce’s Christian/Atheist lie.)
I assumed that the “figuring it out” line wasn’t about Becky figuring out that she was lesbian (something she probably knew for some time), but that she was specifically interested in JOYCE.
Plus, in the cartoon that preceded that, Joyce points out that Becky never really had an interest in boys. (Which doesn’t automatically make her a lesbian, but it is sort of an indicator that she had an idea about her sexual preferences long before college.)
Yea, lying is not what’s wrong with Joyce right now. Faith is a highly personal thing and if your struggle is with being okay with not having faith going to someone whose super invested in it is the wrong person. That person will only advocate for the religion and never properly validate a non-religious perspective.
Joyce and Becky just gotta be as rip roaring pissed as long as they need to be before the consequence of not having the other around anymore gets to them.
The one think that Dorothy could say that might really help, is to remind Joyce that when they met, Joyce was a christian that Dorothy accepted as a friend, despite her religious leanings.
And yet, Dorothy allowed YOU that courtesy from the moment you two met. And your friendship flourished. Oh Joyce, don’t lose the faith. I hope you reconcile what you once believed and keep an open mind. Becky – stay strong! Forgive Joyce and keep that friendship alive!
I love that Wack’d did such a good job summarising that there’s basically little to be said about the strip, truly a masterful take if ever there was one
I feel for Becky. Becky’s faith and belief is a loving god has been an anchor for her whole life despite everything that’s happened to her. That faith in a loving god led her to toss out many of the hurtful beliefs her childhood church and family taught her because the god Becky knows wouldn’t hate or disown a child/ young person for being gay so therefore the church had to be wrong not her. Becky has already reconciled her childhood beliefs with her adult reality to find her truth and meaningful for her, and the hurt she feel seems more to do with Joyce being unable to do the same. It’s not that Joyce doesn’t believe in God that hurt, but that in her mind Joyce is unable to reconcile the idea of a god that could love Becky unconditionally with the things she was taught and therefore God can’t exist. That was my take away from their conversation and of course that’s painful. It’s not that Joyce doesn’t believe in God it’s that Joyce wasn’t able to believe in a God that would love Becky unconditionally. Joyce’s journey to Atheism makes perfect sense but so does Becky finding strength in her faith. I kinda hope Joyce and Becky are better able to talk things out because the hurt seems less about leaving religion and more about further personal rejection.
There’s a reason you get stressed and develop health issues when you’re not thinking right! People shouldn’t want to turn their friends into enemies, but that’s what ideology can do—atheism included.
(speaking as a guy who flip-flops between agnosticism and full atheism)
Oy, no mocking. Upsetting a spectrum of personalities that includes Dorothy, Sarah, and Joe in a single move is pro-level stuff. That shit takes TALENT.
This phrase popped into my head right now when I started thinking about Joyce’s faith in inerrant facts versus Becky’s faith in God’s love for her, and I wanted to see what anyone else thought about it:
Becky’s continued faith in God exists because she had Joyce and friends to protect her over and over, thus reinforcing to Becky that God’s love worked through them and it’s the people doing wrong in Becky’s life who are full of shit.
As in the “unimportant stuff” only became as such to Becky once she had ultimate proof of the important stuff, she now had enough stability that she could start critically analyzing when reality got in the way of what she was told, and that stability allowed her to accept that reality mattered more and she could still be faithful to God, because she felt his presence through his miracles.
…and now that I think about it, I wonder if Joyce’s insistent on Factual Belief and that Becky herself needs to get with the times is, to Becky and that specific view of God’s love, an admission that Joyce didn’t actually do the things she did for the reasons Becky thinks they happened.
Like, Joyce saving her life isn’t all the evidence Becky needed that life is wonderful and miracles can happen, it’s just A Thing that Joyce did while she was getting her faith wrong, and maybe she otherwise wouldn’t have done it.
That feels like a bit too much extrapolation on my part, but I thought it sounded cool enough to say it.
Someone being rescued from an abusive father will have a different perspective than the rescuer who knew they couldn’t rely on their community and had to take action themselves.
In a strip that I cannot currently find FOR THE LIFE OF ME, early Joyce has, in fact, told Dorothy that all the good things she did was god acting through her. Dorothy’s reaction was the proper one at the ridiculous level of cringe involved in the statement.
Gonna be honest here, I don’t get how anyone thinks Joyce is the good guy in this. Her breaking point was that part of her faith is wrong, therefore all of it was wrong. She’s dealing in absolutes here, and who are the only people to deal in absolutes? That’s right, Sith. Joyce is a Sith and is therefore evil and in the wrong. QED.
Of course, “only a sith deals in absolutes” is, in itself, an absolute, so therefore you are also a Sith and, according to yourself, evil and in the wrong.
I think the point of the thing is that the only support for the content of the Bible is the Bible itself, and if one thing is a demonstrable deliberate lie, why would she believe the rest?
If you haven’t read it, one of the earlier comments by Wack’d presents the viewpoint that this is less about who is wrong, and more about the mistakes that they’ve both made.
I’m unsure if this is a joke comment or not, but I recommend it either way.
The thing is, when you are dealing with logic, reason, and facts, then absolutes do absolutely matter. The sky is blue, the earth goes around the sun, etc. The idea that “there is no proof that god exists and no reason to believe so” is an absolute because, well, its where evidence and logic take us.
And rejecting religion because “if part is wrong, all is wrong” is logical, because if you end up engaging in some sort of cafeteria-style religion, you can never know whether you are actually dealing with ‘god’ or not.
The main problem with Joyce is not that she ‘believes in absolutes’, but that she needs to 1) be able to explain herself better, and 2) accept that other people are going to believe in irrational things, regardless of the evidence
Love that her comic alter ego is Julia Grey, since Joyce isn’t capable of seeing grey or nuances. Whatever she believes is right and others should get on board. She takes after her mother more than a bit. With any luck she’ll talk to her sister about this before it ends her friendship with Becky.
That’s how you know Julia is her idealized Mary Sue.
Julia sees nuance! She’s nothing like her mother! She’s cool under pressure! She doesn’t care if a pea rolls across her plate and touches her macaroni and cheese!
A nitpick maybe, but Joyce would know that one of the genealogies is through Joseph and the other is through Mary. That’s why they don’t have to match up. The number of possible genealogies a person has doubles every generation you go back.
Joyce didn’t mention the genealogies. She’s talking about the census. The Roman-decreed census that sent Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Joseph’s supposed ancestral home of Bethlehem, where Jesus is stated to be born.
Though you probably don’t want to get into the genealogies either. Joyce has probably already wondered why one is half the length of the other and why a genealogy from anybody to Jesus’s adopted non-biological father even matters. (That one of them is actually for Mary is made up in order to explain why they’re different. Both claim in-text to be to Joseph.)
Had to take a break, this storyline hit me hard a bit. So when I lost my faith, I immediately came out to all my family. I was in the Navy at the time, away from my Christian friends. For me, more than anything else, it was the silence of God, the lack of explanation for the nonsense. So, when I came out to my mother, she kept trying to use Scripture to justify believing in Scripture. After a couple futile attempts at explaining how that doesn’t really work, I started laughing. That set her off, and she disowned me. Short version, she got over it and we have a good relationship now, though I can’t really talk about atheism without making her cry or get angry. What I’ve learned the hard way from that is that faith is deeply personal to people, and that just because you lose faith, doesn’t mean someone else will, with the same rationale. Because your atheism only means as much as it does to you, when you’ve had years of faith. You can’t push other people into an epiphany, no more than you would’ve been pushed at the height of your own faith. Joyce is wrong right now, but I truly relate to her, because that is how I was when I first became an atheist. Honesty with her close friends would’ve hurt them a lot less, even though Becky likely wouldn’t change her beliefs. Also just throwing this out there, Liz is terrible.
An archive trawl for another comment turned up this comic, which I think helps frame Becky’s mindset of “all the good things we do are God working through us”:
I must apologize if this has been covered already, but 545 comments are an awful lot to read.
Before I begin, I cannot emphasize this enough; Joyce and Becky have both experienced multiple extremely traumatic events closely related to their religious community in very recent history and are both comporting themselves far better than I could in such a situation. They’ve collectively been through an attempted rape by a preacher’s son, multiple abductions, and the violent, bloody murders of friends and loved ones; all in the span of a semester. Maybe cut the kids some damn slack if they aren’t at their very best right now.
Now, that being said, they way I read it, the conflict between Joyce and Becky has almost nothing at all to do with Joyce being mean. The entire conversation on the steps was superficial. The entire fight is subtext and even they might not realize that.
Joyce’s faith is (or was) one built on identity. Joyce was a Christian first and foremost and her beliefs followed from that identity. That is, she was not a Christian because she believed. She believed because she was a Christian. That Christian identity gave her a community. It gave her a family that loved and supported her. It gave her fellowship with other Christians. As long as she obeyed the rules and believed with all her heart, she would be a part of a strong community that gave her all the love and validation she could ever want.
Becky’s faith was far more personal. It had to be. She didn’t have the strong sense of community. She had an abusive Christian dad. She had a Christian church that either ignored or endorsed Ross’ abuse. She had a community that made her hide part of herself out of fear for her entire life until now. I can’t imagine Becky ever felt like Christians were her community. Instead, she had a personal faith, faith in a God that was there to love and protect her through the horrors of living with Ross. Her faith gave her comfort and hope when those things were hard to find. And, critically in all this, it brought her Joyce.
Joyce was Becky’s rock and sometimes her hard place, too (it can be hard to be so very gay for your best friend). She was a beacon of Godly love that Becky was often told about but seldom shown; a love that was earnest and excited and unconditional. Yes, Becky’s very possessive of that relationship and yes, that is a problem they need to work on; but we certainly can’t fault her for it.
This difference in faith has been highlighted before. When Becky came out, Joyce went looking for loopholes (she did this for Dorothy, too). She went looking for ways to change the requisite beliefs of her community. She clearly didn’t think Becky deserved Hell for being a lesbian, but she had to find a way to square it with her Christian identity. Becky was completely uninterested in Joyce’s exegesis. She had no need to conform to a Christian community. She was happy to say “Of course God doesn’t have a problem with lesbians. He wouldn’t have made me gay if he did.”
Little by little, Joyce’s Christian identity has been cracking, though. Every time her faith came into conflict with her compassion, it was her faith that yielded. It was slow going and her friends showed her much more patience than she deserved (the quest to turn Ethan straight was especially awful of her), but she was putting in the work. After the second abduction, though, it finally broke. Her mother, her brother, Ross, the church; they were no longer a community she wanted to be any part of. That Christian identity was no longer a source of anything good. So she cast it off and her beliefs along with it.
She wasn’t reasoned out of her beliefs. She couldn’t have been because she wasn’t reasoned into them. She didn’t see evidence that the Pentateuch wasn’t written by Moses and suddenly realize that the whole Bible must therefore be wrong. She lost her motivation to believe otherwise.
Becky never had that motivation to believe in the stories. “Those were never the important parts”. She was motivated to believe in the messages of love and compassion and grace. Her dad couldn’t take that away.
Hence the conflict. Joyce can’t understand why Becky would still believe when she sees those beliefs as a symbol of the people who tried to kill her. Becky is hurt because she sees Joyce’s rejection of faith as a rejection of the love and grace they have shown to each other all these years. Joyce want’s Becky to escape with her. Becky feels abandoned.
Now, like I said, that’s just the way I see it. I might be giving them both too much credit or reading a lot more into the text than is there. But I swear to a whole pantheon of gods I don’t even believe in that if Joyce starts reading Sam Harris I will absolutely shit. Her whole story has been about slowly becoming a better person and I would hate to see it all thrown away like that.
It is so weird to me to see so much commentary these last two weeks entirely focused on what’s happening at a surface level “Joyce is lashing out and being mean like an angry atheist” with zero understanding of how deeply, painfully personal all of this has gotten for the both of them on every level.
And this ain’t wild and destructive lashing out, not really, this is Joyce and Becky obliterating the foundations of their existing friendship and one day we’re gonna see them rebuild it a thousand times better than what it was before; where Joyce can trust Becky with shit instead of picturing her as made of glass and unable to support Joyce as she has Becky, where Becky doesn’t need Joyce to exist in a box that she can constantly cling to whenever the urge hits her, where the two of them can exist as individual people who can think differently than the other without it being indicative of a great wrong in the universe that has to be rejected and filed away to be forgotten.
‘Cause the real inerrant fact of these two is that they’d tear the sky down for each other, and they’re gonna see it too eventually.
I agree with all of this, I’d just like to emphasize that when you lose a loved one like Becky did with her mom, you hold onto faith to hold onto them as well. I’ve mentioned in a previous comment I’ve never been religious but I did believe in God until my late teens, because I lost my dad as a small child and needed there to be an afterlife for him to still be with me.
as someone who grew up in a mildly religious house (presbyterian, one of the more chill and boring denominations) and figured out as a teen that none of it was real, i find myself sticking to what i’ve heard called the first rule of athiesm, namely “don’t be an asshole”
i’ll argue politics all day long but arguing faith vs non-faith feels unseemly; the whole [i]point[/i] of “faith” is that it’s immune to argument
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I hear dat Double Down is amazing
…ly bad for you
It’s the best Neil Breen movie.
Ah yes, the movie that broke Rich Evans…
Anyone remember when Joyce’s nascent atheism took the form of Rich Mullins?
She’s just cranky because the sound of a hammered dulcimer is constantly ringing in her head.
and now all these skeletons are attracted to it and following her around
.well, tis the season.
for us, i mean. not for her
Everyone else is writing manifestos so why not.
The headline here is that these are 18 year olds who were raised with no conflict resolution skills because the prospect of causing intracommunity conflict was off-limits, especially along faith lines, with serious consequences for violations. Neither of them are evil or awful or abusive, and failing to win a friend-of-the-year award is not the end of the world. So keep that in mind.
I don’t believe Joyce’s failing was keeping secrets or privately venting. It’s that when Becky discovered what was happening, and had her feelings hurt, Joyce did not approach it from an emotional angle. She didn’t tell Becky why she felt she needed to abandon her faith. She didn’t tell Becky why she didn’t feel safe opening up. She framed it in terms of pure intellectual rigor. Becky asked Joyce how Joyce felt about Becky and Joyce didn’t answer any of those questions. Instead Joyce tried to talk Becky into sharing Joyce’s opinions while Becky was feeling hurt and vulnerable. And I understand why it happened–Becky being hurt did not gift Joyce the ability to magically become emotionally honest with her. But by taking this tact, Joyce sacrificed the ability to gain forgiveness, because Becky has absolutely no insight into Joyce’s thought process that would convince her forgiveness is warranted. Joyce insulted her, and then when Becky called her on it Joyce tried to convince her those insults were right. Why would Becky forgive?
But equally, Becky has no insight into why Joyce would be upset with her, or why Joyce might be owed an apology. As far as Becky was concerned, things were fine for months, and then it turns out Joyce hates (and doesn’t even understand) Becky’s beliefs. Becky can’t apologize to Joyce for overstepping, for creating an environment where Joyce can’t be honest with her, or for any of a thousand tiny things that brought us here, because she doesn’t know Joyce has an issue with any of that. Hell, Joyce has a long history of being exactly as clingy and overbearing as Becky is! Why would it be a problem? Joyce has only, in this moment, expressed issues with Becky’s beliefs, and Becky can’t and won’t apologize for those.
Joyce didn’t just need to talk to Becky about atheism. She needed to talk to Becky about a whole bunch of behaviors, some of which Becky might not even be cognizant of (or think of as fun quirks/Dorothy irritants), most of which Joyce has preformed herself at some point, some of which even Joyce herself might not realize were barriers to productive conversations. That’s a lot of work, with absolutely no guarantee it’ll go well. So Joyce avoided it, and then when Becky saw just the tip of the iceberg and thought it was the whole, Joyce doubled down on that perception to keep avoiding that work.
These are, frankly, some really benign mistakes when boiled down. Joyce needs to figure out what’s really bothering her, both about Becky and about faith. Becky needs to exercise some self-awareness. Both need to learn how to have open, honest conversations, because eventually they become unavoidable–keeping secrets is morally neutral, but secrets don’t last forever, and this is an eventuality Joyce could’ve been preparing for. None of these are skills these kids were raised to have. (Not even necessarily because they were raised fundie–I’d wager most 18yos can’t do any of this shit. I couldn’t!) That doesn’t make them monsters or evil or abusive. They made mistakes, and now they’ll learn from them. After all, nothing prepares you for the outside world except being stupid over and over and over.
And neither needs to convert the other. Fuck’s sake.
^^^^^^^^^
Well manifested!
Exactly
this is 1000% where i’m at. VERY well said.
This was fun to read! Thank you for your manifesto-writing services Wack’d.
Some very good analysis!
Thanks for this post. I’m glad it’s near the top of this update.
So yeah, college students are college students. It’s almost like they’re dumb, and they’re coming of age.
everyone does the “it’s not called smarting of age” thing so for my penultimate sentence i went for a real deep cut
Bravo.
that phrase needs to be an abbreviation already.
Commenter 1: ugh!!! these characters are so immature!!!
Commenter 2: incsoa, my dude
That’s (almost) the name of the comic!
Well said.
A+, in particular with the emphasis on Joyce and Becky’s closeness and inability to meaningfully communicate here being something deliberately molded into them.
This is also the sad area where many old friendships end up dieing.
Even adults struggle with the skills you’ve listed and while they seem simple to list its actually really hard for people to break out of old habits and patterns.
It’s kinda sad to look back sometimes on people and relationships that can be lost due to these factors. I think back to some of my early ex’s and realize I’ve been on both sides of similar situations and it just comes with both teenage and early adult years.
…and middle adult years…and later adult years…
Well put.
Excellent manifesto– I think too many people have been focused on who deserved to win the argument, not on how Joyce or Becky actually treated each other. This is the empathy they needed, I’m happy to see it
Wack’d wins!
DUMBINGTALITY
Thanks for taking the time to write this out @Wack’d. Neither of them are 100% at fault. The issue isn’t even really about fault, and neither of them have experience recognizing that. Responsibility does play _a_ role, but it is not the central role here. The central role is their changing world views, and both needing to learn that their friend is a different person than the idea of their friend that is in their heads. I think they can work through this, but it will take them both time and individual development. (laying off attacking each other, and instead just *listening* will help too.)
I’m curious how this arc will turn out in a way. I can’t see a formalized path towards this this resolution. Neither of them has a friend that is a conflict resolution expert especially not in this area.
Best I can imagine is them growing through individual arcs and only becoming friends at some point later down the road. It’s weird because as much as I feel sad seeing a friendship end I am curious how this will play out for both characters now.
“Friend who is a conflict resolution expert” Booster? I mean, not exactly a friend, but…
You said it all! Absolutely.
(Applause)
Thank you for this!! 💜💜💜💜💜💜
This put the major issues into words really well. I especially appreciate that you are acknowledging Joyce’s mistakes without also saying her venting or beliefs about theism are wrong. You don’t even say that Joyce should apologize, just that she needed to come at this with empathy and understanding and didn’t. Which is exactly how I’ve felt, though it can get lost in these discussions sometimes.
I think some of what Becky said was worse than the picture you paint, but at the end of the day, that was still learned behaviors that she can’t be blamed for too much given her upbringing. So that’s really just details.
I don’t think Joyce should apologize for venting or being overheard but everything that happened on the stairs after 110% requires copious apologies. .
Honestly? I think the best possible thing for both of them is to just feel some raw, ugly-ass emotions without trying to kiss and make up, because for the reasons you listed as well as their own relationship where Joyce doesn’t ever seem to want to rely on Becky and Becky doesn’t seem to really know how bad her possessiveness of Joyce really is, they kind of need to be mad at each other long enough for them to learn it’s okay to be mad at each other and that things can still be okay later on. Just get wildly, outrageously, stupidly wrong and hate each other’s fucking guts for a bit.
‘Cause right now, neither of them would have any idea on what it is they’re even apologizing for.
Yeah, I agree. Clearly there’s much to learn, but hopefully after stewing over things for a few days… or maybe a week or two… they’ll figure some things out about themselves and the other person, and be able to talk things out once they realize religion isn’t the real issue here.
moustache gracias.
i think it was @Airyu who recently said something like, “i’m starting to feel like everyone here is a better person than me, because i don’t think i would’ve done any better than either of them.” and i thought that was a lovely thing to say and i subscribe to it whole-heartedly <3
Manifest! Oh.
Bravo.
TLDR. Well ok, I read the last sentence which summed things up nicely.
I’m late to this because I was otherwise occupied last night.
**suggestive eyebrow waggle**
But yeah. I will jump on this bandwagon with whole hearted approval. Excellent Manfesto. Beautifully said.
you were… tweezing your eyebrows?
one doesn’t tweeze and tell~
Joke’s on you, rookie, some of us continue to post during sex. It helps keep the mind focused.
Your comment is particularly good matched with your current gravatar.
Have an internet.
Am I the only one here who feels that she *didn’t* insult Becky? Becky took umbrage with Joyce’s generalized statements about religion and the religious. Becky’s choice to take that personally may be understandable, but it was still her CHOICE to lace that shoe up and wear it.
This is good stuff!
But of course what Dorothy really did wrong was have her triangle mouth pointed in the wrong direction (ok, no).
Joyce! Joyce’s mouth is pointing the wrong way!
All my yes
Oh yeah, Joyce TOTALLY was just talking about herself
Hey, I’ll cop to it, I was wrong.
I mean, even in my most narcissistic moments, I still think my younger self was a dumb little shit. Joyce is looking down on Christians, and her past self was also a Christian, so if anything, this reinforces the idea that she was shitting on herself.
Wow, I didn’t know you were a yoga instructor.
I don’t get it
Unless you were yoga instructor, no way are you going to be limber enough to shit on yourself.
Thanks for the mental picture Suzi.
“Some say he is a holy man, others say he is a shithead.”
Hearing this, the man was enlightened.
Y’all are gross. Ew, potty humor.
Personally I think she WAS talking about herself. She feels stupid for ever believing these things.
But if she thinks herself stupid for ever believing them, then confronted with the reality that Becky *still* believes them, she can’t find a way around coming to the same conclusion about Becky.
Yeah, that’s where I stand too. I think she wasn’t thinking about Becky at all when she said those things, but when somewhere between when she saw Becky was there and when Becky made it about her (“do you really think I’m an idiot for believing in God”), it became about Becky too.
The other possibility I’ve been entertaining is that she was thinking about Becky. But if it was about Becky, I think it came out of a place of jealousy. She really really wishes for the comfort of knowing that there’s some ineffable Plan for her, that she’ll get through all the trials set for her stronger on the other side instead of more and more broken with every hardship that she stumbles across. She really really wishes for the comfort of knowing that _someone_ loves her unconditionally and infallibly. But she doesn’t have that, so she’s mocking someone who does to try to make herself feel better about not having that.
(Or maybe that’s just my ignorant almost-atheist raised-to-distrust-organized-religion self projecting real hard onto this fictional raised-fundie-now-struggling-with-atheism character when I honestly probably don’t have enough relevant cultural context to understand her struggles.)
And if she condemns it really aggressively now, it will retroactively remove some of the shame she still harbors for believing those stupid things for so long.
That one, at least, I can identify with.
I mean this doesn’t mean she wasn’t talking about her pet self, just that she wasn’t *only* talking about herself.
Imagine ever being so confident that Joyce was solely talking about herself to the point of believing that she still deeply respect and admired Becky’s faith and thought of her atheism as a personal failing, that you take an avatar bet with yourself when you’ve never been right about anything that has ever happened in this comic before.
(this is much more interesting than what I thought would transpire, really. If Becky and Joyce are going to come to blows it should be over an actual conflict and not just Becky being sad at misunderstood Joyce)
Does that mean that we shall see the blursed gravatar for the full month now?
I feel that the situation’s complexities (Joyce was referring to everyone who believes, except she has never once thought anyone thought differently than her and assumed the whole world ran on slavish adherence to rules) made me not totally wrong, in that Joyce’s beliefs are self-aimed but she thought the whole world was Joyce, but wrong enough that trying to back out would be an act of cowardice.
So two weeks and then back to Sneaky Crime Man getting bonked.
Sneaky Crime Man the Third, if I’m not mistaken
I like how they’ve never tried to justify Lupin still being the grandson of Arsene Lupin even though the franchise is 52 years old. I guess both he and his son waited until they were like 70 to have kids.
This obviously will never matter but I like to think of it as Lupin being so good that he’s the third person to deserve the name of Lupin.
Pretty sure if you’re passing names down from father to son you keep the numbering going even if it skips a generation or two
She says Becky is smart tho on the same page
In a very backhanded way, though.
“Becky is smart, she’ll come around to my side when she sees it makes more sense.”
Yeah, she’s echoing Liz’s line from a few days ago here almost verbatim. “Becky’s SMART, so it’s only a matter of time until she becomes an atheist like me!”
Yeah but that doesn’t count.
Whelp, gonna be another one of those days.
Shall I fetch the bunker keys, my good fellow?
I was certain we’d seen the worst of it. Nope!
“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.”
don’t know what that’s from but it’s pretty funny even without the reference ^^
Airplane! (1980) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm8fYf53SMg
The movie Airplane, which came out in 1980.
Go watch Airplane!
thanks, will do ^^
same thing we do every night, pinky: try to create an unimpeachable argument for a shitty teen being irredeemably evil based on deeply-held convictions about vast swaths of people based on whether they’re religious or not
To quote the late Fred Durst:
No human contact, and if ya interact, your life is on contract. Your best bet is to stay away, motherfucker.
(To be perfectly clear, the above comment is intended to be a lighthearted riff off of Thag’s, using the lyrics of a Limp Bizkit song. I am not threatening or calling out even one single person.)
Well, personally speaking, I don’t mess with Limp Bizkit.
The guy in that new Final Fantasy game sure does.
He has a playlist specifically for power walking away for nonsense anime speeches about darkness.
…Is this literally true?
Is there literally a playlist?
Just watch it. There’s no way to prepare you with words.
https://twitter.com/sumnnine/status/1443936844379533318?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1443936844379533318%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=
Honestly, with everything else going on, I’m actually really relieved Joyce hasn’t forgotten to submit her comic strips.
I was honestly afraid Walky was going to win just by virtue of being the only one to submit something.
Not that his comic is bad, but c’mon, Julia Grey!
Joyce kind of has to win for the comic subplot to be a continuing thing, which it probably will be given the source material.
I don’t think Lawsome is flexible enough to support a long running subplot about making it.
LAWsome has not-Mike as one of its characters, so if it wins on the other hand, it could be a vehicle for Walky to start working through the emotions of his roommate dying last semester.
It can’t really do that while staying LAWsome though. That strip has a very defined structure that can’t be deviated from without breaking the joke.
Does Walky have the attention span to keep at it for more than a week though?
Instead, Walky wins by virtue of having already turned his in and landed the job.
I wonder if Walky has already submitted his.
Joyce is evolving? Hit B! Hit B!
Taking bets: 400 comments? 500? Cause we ain’t going back down any time soon.
To throw in my two cents, I think they’re both dumb BUT they are ALLOWED to be dumb. I’m in my 30s, and I, too, am frequently an idiot. And I’ll be honest…I don’t know what Joyce said in the last panel when Becky walked into the room, because seeing Becky’s face makes me go “nope, nope nope nope, don’t wanna know how dumb Joyce is being in front of her, nope right the fuck out.” and I just can’t bring myself to read it. Maybe I should try to crop it out…No upset Becky face to distract me.
Those are rookie numbers. If it’s fewer than 700 by the time Saturday’s strip is up, I’ll be surprised. I’d put money on 2300 total between Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, only I’m half convinced we’re gonna jump back to Danny and Sal or Lucy and Wally by then.
Ooh, that, that’d cool everyone down
I’ll bet exactly 525,000 gil that we break 600 comments.
Five minutes to go, who collects if 600 isn’t hit?
We’ve been averaging about 500 comments per day over the past eight days since Becky left Joe’s room. It’s been a little more than 90 minutes since today’s installment went up and the comment count is already up to 175. I think breaking 600 is almost a given.
Honestly this feels like a cooldown. In the early strips of the argument, there was enough ambiguity that one could argue for Joyce or Becky.
Now Joyce is kiiiinda more firmly in the asshole camp, so there’s less debate.
Considering I woke up and we’re at 350+ comments, I don’t think the cooldown will happen until as Andy said, we switch to a different set of characters.
900. *prepares to make hundreds of innocuous comments and hopes they don’t get banned*
… wait, does a person’s own comments count towards them winning the bet? Because if that’s allowed there could be problems. And if that ISN’T allowed, the math gets funky.
I’d say if a person’s comments are more than 10% the total number of comments, their bet is disqualified.
I definitely agree that this is the time where you make mistakes and lose friendships. It’s practically what this age was made for.
Atheists, amiright everyone?
(Yoto is an atheist.)
Extremists of any flavor.
Wanna extinguish extremism?
Just watch some South Park.
The whole show is basically about making fun of it.
Eh, Matt and Trey are usually on the ball, but they tend to “both sides” much of the time. That’s been a fallacy for over a decade.
At least they came around about ManBearPig.
This is part of why I don’t watch it anymore. It was funny and edgy when I though being funny and edgy was a good thing, and then it was pointed out how the show has a hate-on for anyone that’s passionate about stuff. Between that and the growing discomfort I had with Cartman’s casual racism and antisemitism (and the fact that it was never really called out as a bad thing), I kinda just walked away. Maybe some of that has been fixed in the last 10-ish years, but I doubt it.
South Park is a horrible little show with very little of substance to say because it constantly and consistently derides anything outside of Matt and Trey’s weirdo little libertarian mental bubble. The show takes potshots at everyone because anything but a pathetic, spineless status quo is too much for them.
I was gonna comment similar. It’s really just there to make fun of people who have a stance on anything.
Extreme moderation in defense of virtue is no flavor.
Or something like that.
Ah yes. Those extreme atheists. Horrible people, they are irritating on message boards.
Quite comparable to religious extremests. Nearly indistinguishable.
“ They looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. “
Dude, when the author of the comic was calling out commenters like yourself on Twitter, maybe take the L
Hey man, I’m done writing long defenses of my viewpoint. I’ve said my piece, y’all think I’m an asshole. Fair enough.
This comment though? “Argues in the comment section” is not exactly what people mean by “religious extremest.”
Okay, but from the outside, I’m just imagining Becky going: Dorothy has glasses and is an atheist…Joyce got glasses and became an atheist…it must be the glasses! This never happened before she got glasses! Optometrists are an atheist scheme!
(Just to inject some levity.)
dina’s glasses are always hiding behind a door
she must have contact lenses, an undercover atheist scheme!
Joyce used to see just fine but as her faith dwindled so did her eyesight. Your vision is only proportional to your theism.
As an atheist with astigmatism, this comment really hit me!
Aaaaaaatheist. Aaaaaaaastigmatism. Hmmmm. I wonder…
Agnostic with astigmatism here
I also wonder.
is this a Lost Skeleton of Cadavra deep cut? bless if so.
I do have glasses I should be wearing.
(they’re cheap as shit and don’t work so I need to wait another year for my insurance to cover a new pair)
I love this theory but I know way too many pastors with glasses for it to hold in real life. But in-comic, that’s totally a viable theory. Is Jennifer more atheist with or without her glasses?
Jennifer is a self-professed Christian last we heard from her, but maybe wearing contacts instead of glasses (when was the last time we saw her wearing glasses?) allows her to loophole the theory?
I’m an agnostic atheist to be fair but my vision is perfectly fine for the time being. I do have the ability to make my vision go blurry at will so maybe that’s the agnostic part 😛
Walkyverse!Joyce remained a Christian. If the Visual Aid Hypothesis is multi-versal, you may be on to something here!
Hmm…i have glasses…I’m an atheist… GASP
Bad vision causes you to become an atheist? That’s an interesting theory that I’d never considered before. I’d try an refute that, but I’ve worn glasses since I was three and I’m an atheist so…
Atheist here, never needed corrective lenses of any type.
*was about to say never wore glasses… but sunglasses, safety goggles, etc*
Lifelong atheist here. Just had my first eye exam in at least 20 years and will finally be getting glasses.
… Damn. Wasn’t expecting that.
I mean, I saw it coming because Joyce would have said, “I wasn’t talking about you” if she hadn’t REALLY SINCERELY meant that it was about Becky too.
Joyce is being a bongo and Dorothy looks like she’s ready to play a solo on her.
To be fair, both Becky and Joyce are being bongos right now. Becky’s putting so much pressure on Joyce to stay the same, while she’s changing herself as is natural, which isn’t fair. Joyce doesn’t have to believe in a deity that would let all the stuff that happened to her happen, or one that would put her best friend in the bad place.
But Becky is allowed to believe in what she believes, and Joyce doesn’t have to be a bongo to Becky just because of what she believes. Dorothy isn’t rude to Joyce when she states her beliefs, even if she doesn’t agree.
Bongos all round.
Welp, there’s the confirmation that Joyce really actually doesn’t really get what she did that upset Becky and thinks it’s just that she’s athiest now that was the problem and not the, uh, presentation of the athiesm. Not that the argument where they talled so far past each other they looped around the Earth and smacked into each other again wasn’t enough of a clue, but here we have it spoken out loud by her.
(Though part of me is slightly annoyed at this from a Doylist point of view, because it means we’re gonna spend more time on Joyce being less of a butt which is good becuase Joyce needs to STOP BEING A BUTT but it also means the narrative can of “Becky is super possessive of Joyce in some pretty unhealthy boundary-stomping ways” might get kicked down the road again to make room for the “Joyce is a thoughtless butt” can, and as someone with privacy/boundary/personal space anxieties that Becky has been setting off since the start of Book 11, that is. Exhausting to think about. 🙁 )
In Joyce’s defense, there’s probably a bunch of people in her religion, her parents included who would just acted that way to atheism. She doesn’t know that that isn’t what Beckey was upset about, and she’s probably been defensively gearing up for it
That doesn’t make what she’d done excusable, just understandable.
Totally feel where you’re coming from. Joyce is pretty obviously the wrongest here but I still don’t think Becky was right to track Joyce down because she was jealous, nor do I think Dorothy was right in accompanying her or being so judgmental about Joyce skipping class. Joyce’s bad behavior here is easier to take for me because it’s clear that the narrative KNOWS she’s wrong and it’s going to be dealt with but… it does kind of seem like Becky and Dorothy’s possessiveness is being condoned as it stands right now. But it’s a long (long, long) running strip, we just kind of have to trust that things will be dealt with!
Yeah Becky is super effing annoying and overstepping. To Dorothy especially. I’d much rather see her issues dealt with/called out. Maybe this will lead to a confrontation about all of these issues.
I think there’s an easier way of saying it and it’s the very Karen-esque one.
“I’m sorry that Becky is upset about it. Not what I said or believe.”
I mean, I don’t think we’d have this giant conflict between these start with Becky’s wild possessiveness of Joyce leading to dramatic consequences if their existing friendship wasn’t going to analyzed to at least some degree, considering we’ve got a fairly clear implication (as in Wack’d spelled it out for me) that these two are just about incapable of holding a view contrary to the other, and that for as all as Becky is an unflappable rebel that Joyce thinks is the coolest person in the world for that rebellion, they need to be a united front.
Like, sometimes, even when it’s hardest because when it’s hardest is when it matters the most. you just gotta fight your friends.
Physically.
The only new understanding of each other Joyce and Becky need to catch are these hands.
On the one hand, I can see how she feels hurt and attacked and might be lashing out. On the other hand, the time to completely own her shit (whether be ause she’s lashing out or truly believes it, either way) was like 3 strips ago when Becky called her out for only being sorry Becky heard her. Agree to that, give your spiel about how you’re a brain genius and all Christians are morons, and let the chips fall where they may. Or own that you were a complete dumbass who shouldn’t have said that shit and let those chips fall. That wishy-washy shit is the worst of both worlds, though.
No, alt text, no she is not.
This is classic Joyce. She changes her life at the drop of a hat, deciding her new perspective is ‘right’ and ‘perfect’. She did it with Ethan. She did it with Jacob. She’s doing it now.
Joyce sees the world in black and white, and she’s not going to change until she learns to see grey. Right now, the way she sees the world is right, and everybody who disagrees is wrong and needs to get on board with her way. She hasn’t grown up or matured at all.
If that standard of maturity hold true, than like half the world right now is immature.
And that’s low-balling it.
This black and white thinking is a very human phenomenon that affects all ages, period.
That can still be a definition of maturity. There’s actually been major research on how as people age, they are able to see nuance and shades of grey more. Sure, there’s still plenty of older people who don’t reach that stage, and there’s younger people who reach it faster, but *in general* black and white thinking decreases with age aka maturity (and I would add, healing from trauma/emotional wounding, as well). See for example Jane Loevinger’s research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loevinger%27s_stages_of_ego_development
look, sometimes pokémon evolutions are aesthetically worse even if the stats are better. joyce has gained moves like “understand that the bible is a work written by flawed, mortal men” but she’s still a dang lickilicky
Ah the midstage evolution. We gotta wait until she gets to the third stage and gets her second typing.
My money’s on fighting type.
Or acid type.
I can see her delivering some SICK burns.
Poison type has a move called acid. I guess she can be a poison type.
Nah, I must have been thinking of something else, like that one that looks like a pinapple.
She’s definitely not gonna join Billy and the Toxic Crusaders.
Hopefully.
I was about to ask the alt-text: Is she macro-evolving or micro-evolving?
She’s stuck at the impasse of a branched evolution!
We still have yet to see if she’s gonna shinka or hentai.
The greatest misconception about evolution (I mean if we use the non Pokémon version) however is that there is an endpoint or a true goal. It’s really a consequence over time of environments and mutations and a long the way there can be things which in fact don’t work and get replaced by something else.
This ain’t Joyce’s final form. There isn’t one though really.
(Like that really old strip where Leslie tells Roz about statues and beliefs and learning and chiselling down and adding details is probably also applicable).
Not to mention the fact that real world evolution only happens to populations, not to individual organisms.
*forceful nods of agreement*
I find it strange that you can point to a long sequence of changes that shows Joyce’s gradual growth from where she was at the beginning of the comic to where she is now and then declare she switches beliefs at the drop off a hat. She did not become an atheist overnight. It started when she first decided to reach out to Dorothy and is the culmination of months of new experiences since then. She’s got a ways to go, and there will always be more ways she can grow, as that’s true for all of us.
Refusing to back down from the harsh reality of her beliefs just because they might upset people, especially if phrased bluntly, is progress in my book. It means her beliefs aren’t reliant on phrasing and word choice for her to be okay with them. Earlier Joyce balked a lot when presented with the full reality of her beliefs and their effects on people. She doesn’t yet know how to handle this situation of “Yes, this accurate description of my beliefs will hurt others’ feelings, but that is not a reason to change them,” but she does believe things that aren’t contingent on those beliefs sounding nice.
Yeah that.
Be honest with me.
How many of you think you filled out the poll too early?
I remember picking either “Both are right but Becky is more right” or “Both are wrong but Becky is more wrong.” Not entirely sure which of those is better.
There’s also an “official” poll next to the comic now, replacing the old one about cake.
… where was another poll? The official one that used to be about cake is the only one I was aware of.
**SIGH**
That moment after you click “Post Comment” but before the page actually loads when you see the typo and can no longer stop it from being posted.
“there” not “where”.
i made a poll.
it was buried in the humongous comment section of two days ago, but Willis also linked to it on twitter before deciding to put up his own poll yesterday.
i think both polls are complementary. Willis is a lumper, i’m a splitter (although i did rein in my splitting tendencies, and predictably, there were complaints ^^)
Voted! Also, I find your avatar very restful.
Why thank you, feel free to gaze at it as much as you need ^^
Just saw the poll a few minutes ago, didn’t find the “both are a bit right and a bit wrong” option, didn’t vote.
Too early? I’ve been “Both are wrong but Joyce is less wrong” since about two storylines ago.
Also unrelated to today’s strip: the site (on PC) currently is showing me some Amazon Prime game ad (something titled “New World”) which keeps taking up the entire page, popping up over the comic and the comments both. :\
Go to therapy. Go directly to therapy. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
I’m sure the ad isn’t THAT bad.
Oh ha ha ;P
The ad might not be, but I’ve hear the game is aggressively mediocre. That might make it necessary
I played it to stress test it. You are not incorrect.
And… that was a reply instead of a separate post. Oops XD
I’m so glad you clarified because I was deeply confused before reaching this comment.
Joyce needs to let herself be mad, and Becky has every right to think Joyce was being an asshole, on account of she was being an asshole.
Joyce bottled up too much shit for too long, and she hasn’t found an appropriate outlet yet, frankly.
Which is strange, because he’s *right* over there.
Don’t they all have half-baths with toilets designed SPECIFICALLY to serve as outlets for shit?
*reads comic for the day*
Aight I’ma go rewatch the new Descendants special. There’s no sassy Joe to keep me here today.
Ooooh, which one?
The Royal Wedding. Hadn’t seen it since it came out and watched it tonight and thought it was quite ace, all things considered.
Simple but ace.
I misread that as ‘the Red Wedding’ and for a second thought the Descendants was much darker than I had been led to believe.
Disney has never been the same since they hired GRRM as a fulltime writer for their shows.
Oh please god yes
Oh, nice! It was a pretty sweet little wrap up special, I thought.
Sad as I was over Carlos, but there was nothing that could be done about that.
They did it as tastefully as they could. If they ever do reference it than they’ll probably leave it vague.
Although I don’t think the series is over.
The series, no, but I think Mal’s story is. Most of the actors have moved on.
And yeah, I think they did what they felt would be most respectful. I loved that scene with Mal, Jay and Evie, even if it hurt to watch.
Becoming a judgemental asshole of an atheist is not an upgrade from being a judgemental asshole of a Christian Joyce.
No, see, but this time she’s being judgmental because she’s RIGHT and LOGICAL and not just that she BELIEVES she’s right and logical. Totally different.
Joyce: Listen, it’s not my fault Becky is still brainwashed! She’ll come around!
Well…. that’s kind of true, too….
I agree in principle.
But I’ll still take judgemental atheist assholes who AREN’T part of a movement promoting a harmful religio-political agenda targeting vulnerable minorities over judgemental Christian assholes who ARE.
How about the judgmental atheist assholes who jumped on the anti-SJW wagon and swung hard into the alt-right, if not into outright fascism?
Not that Joyce is going to head in that direction of course.
AKA the “Facts and Logic Brigade”. Once someone’s convinced themself their brain is mighty enough to slay God, they don’t have to bother actually /thinking/ anymore, it seems…
I don’t think “athiest assholes” make up a significant portion of the alt-right.
I suspect the alt-right demographic continues to be dominated by christian/evangelical groups.
Probably, depending on how you define alt-right. The broader extreme right certainly.
But they’re still judgemental atheist assholes who are part of a movement promoting a harmful agenda targeting vulnerable minorities,
How about we just put THOSE atheists in a room with THOSE Christians, ask them to reason things out through polite dialogue, and come back in an hour to clean out the corpses.
…. yeah, okay, probably shouldn’t be indulging in that kind of dark thinking…
Still, that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in Joyce’s case. She’s coming out of a particular house of worship that is deeply embedded in Christian supremacy, and she doesn’t seem to be heading into an equivalent place in atheism.
Joyce is having her Kylo Ren “Let the past die” moment, huh?
becky skipped the part where joyce falls in a hole and then dies for unrelated reasons, instead going directly from smooching joyce to being adopted into her family
“No no you’re still holding on! LET GO!
Hear that? That was the sound of any remaining benefit of doubt flying out the window
I still feel for Joyce here, she’s ended up exactly where she started, just swapped out the Christianity stuff for anti religion zealotry, she’ll probably stay here for a bit before settling into a healthier mindset
While she’s certainly being overly aggressive about it (particularly to her friends) assuming some guys 2000 years ago lied about somebody else coming back to life seems… a bit more reasonable, let’s say, than her previous beliefs.
Technically, it’s some guys 1600 years ago. It was about 400 years before people started writing down the Gospels.
No, more like 100–200.
Gotcha.
Current understanding has Marc written in the late 60s, Matthew and Luke in the 80s and John around 100. So between 35 and 70 years after Jesus’s death.
There is even more complexity…
It is thought that Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark, as well as from a ‘lost’ gospel ‘Q’. Plus, there were also gospels and other material that were in existence before the ‘Bible’, but which weren’t included in the Bible, not because they were found to be inaccurate or flawed, but just because “Meh, they weren’t popular enough”.
That’s a simplification. While there were certainly other gospels and texts not included, from everything we know of them the non-canonical gospels at least were significantly later and often much more fanciful or otherwise shifted even farther from early Christian beliefs. Whatever you think of their criteria, they seemed to do a pretty decent job.
Some of the non-Canonical Epistles are apparently older. It’s not as clear to me why they weren’t included, but I don’t know as much about them.
the only reason the Q hypothesis even exists is that Bible scholars who were also believers couldn’t stomach the thought that Luke could have actually had a copy of Matthew on hand and was purposefully redacting all of the stuff he thought Matthew got wrong, which is a far easier explanation of all of the text that Luke and Matthew have in common.
some nitpicks:
Mark has to post-date the fall of Jerusalem (71) because the text pervasively assumes the temple is gone — i.e., even if it’s apparently treated as prophecy you don’t see any of the serious questioning that it’s going to happen that you’d expect if the text really was written beforehand (and the whole theme of Mark is, essentially, How Can We Be Jews now that the Temple is Gone? [answer: Jesus was the *last* Yom Kippur / Passover sacrifice; we’re done with all that now]).
Meanwhile, Luke is almost certainly cribbing from (and therefore post-dates) Josephus (94) when he’s filling in random historical facts.
the other fun thing is there is zero source material on what happened with the church between 62 (when Luke/Acts leaves off, even if we assume everything there is true, which is highly doubtful) and 110 or so (whenever it was Pliny the Younger started interviewing Christians in his province and it’s clear that some version of Mark’s gospel was circulating), i.e., no documents produced other than the Gospels themselves, maybe Revelation (which, if you read the allegorical listing of Roman emperors the right way, suggests it was written in the time of Domitian (90s) but still doesn’t say anything about what was happening in the real world), and maybe 1 Clement (which is traditionally dated to 95 for no reason, but reads as if it was written in the 60s — Clement somehow does not know that Jerusalem has been destroyed).
Which means that when they say Mark dates somewhere between 71 and 100, Matthew dates somewhere between 80 and 110, etc… they mean just that, i.e., there’s no information (beyond it being known that Matthew postdates Mark by some number of years) that lets us nail them down any more narrowly.
So Becky was right – Joyce WAS only sorry that she’d been overheard. And Becky was right to be upset – Joyce WAS talking in part about her. Welp!
Pretty much, yeah.
I mean, if she was sorry, she would have said, “I’m sorry and didn’t mean you.”
Exactly, but we had people up and down the comments insisting that Joyce HAD apologized and that Becky was in the wrong for not accepting that apology. When Joyce wasn’t apologizing for how she’d hurt Becky in the first place.
I mean, is it hard for it to be both?
Because I do think Joyce is sorry that she hurt Becky and Becky saying otherwise don’t necessarily mean it’s unarguably correct, Joyce calling Becky smart enough to understand The Truth (which is also an entirely separate conversation that’s made me deeply fearful of the phrase “inerrant facts”) kind of sells to me that this whole thing is that Becky believes in Wrong Things and it’s as simple as fact-checking for the problem to go away and once Becky does Joyce can be properly contrite for hurting Becky, and right now Becky’s belief in the Wrong Thing means she’s making the mistake Joyce has outgrown and Joyce was talking about her by association. Becky just needs to get better at math, basically.
Like I don’t actually think “my statement is correct” and “I feel remorse that my statement has caused you pain” are inherently contradictory things, at least from the viewpoint of the person saying that which would naturally come off way different to the person hearing it who would naturally process it as “you are justifying why it was okay to hurt me.” Certainly to Becky, but that’s because Becky thinks she’s being judged for her faith instead of her continued belief in something that is objectively wrong on the grounds that Joyce processed her belief that way and therefore so does Becky.
Right, because Joyce has definitely been indicated that she is sorry for hurting Becky and not just embarrassed that she was overheard. Like, you seem to have a fundamental inability to grasp that *Joyce was hurtful and insulting* to her best friend, and that she needs to apologize for that if she hopes to salvage their friendship. We’re just gonna have to agree to disagree about Becky being the one in the wrong here.
This might be hard to believe but it was never about right or wrong to begin with.
You wouldn’t be defending Joyce so hard and going after Becky just as hard if you really believed that, lol.
This might also be hard to believe but stories mean more than the character I like more being correct.
I don’t need to engage with fiction so simplistically.
To be fair to Joyce, growing up in a literalist cult very much makes faith an all-or-nothing proposition. If the Bible is the literal Word of God, then either it’s ALL true or it’s ALL fake. There’s no room for middle ground.
*le sigh* literalists shooting themselves in the foot again.
I mean Becky grew up in the same community, it can probably be assumed that her mother’s influence helped Becky’s faith stay flexible, while Joyce had no such positive influence
I assumed it was the whole being a Lesbian thing.
You say that but there are homosexuals willingly pandering to hateful bigots in the real world, it’s hardly a guarantee
(Plus there’s the possibility that if Becky’s faith was a rigid as Joyce’s she’d end up in the same place Joyce is now)
Not a universal thing, but I got the impression that her queerness was the catalyst that led to her developing her own faith separate from her parents’ doctrine.
It was probably her mom’s death too – her mom died the semester before she started college
Last line reads like something a villain says before they start committing atheist crimes.
Next chapter, “I’ll Leave You A Phantom”, is actually titled after Joyce’s new supervillain name.
she’s gonna kill the ghost who walks and drop the corpse in becky’s mailbox
Okay honestly I’d read the heck out of Joyce v Superman or something.
I mean she is being about as subtle as Jesse Eisenburg’s Lex Luthor.
Joyce v Maisie: Dawn of Just Us
Like masterbating in private?
Or did you have something more sinister in mind?
Masturbating in public.
Masturbating in Publix. They’ve got the sexiest produce.
So like the washing machine?
Hmmm…. just how much privacy you think she’d get on the inside of a pokeball?
Mmmmmmmmmmm cucumbers.
Man now you got me thinking about cucumbers, such a pickle.
There are specific atheist crimes? Great, something else for me to worry about getting caught doing.
Joyce is breaking through as a Spark. Soon she will show them! SHE WILL SHOW THEM ALL!!!
Somebody said this was her “let the past die” moment and by jove am I ready for her to meet, I dunno, a projected Dorothy on the field and demands Joe to “blast that piece of junk out of the sky” because it feels like a full blown heel turn.
What if Joyce slowly becomes the comic’s main villain? Like piece by piece, she does worse and worse things to prove that she’s “right” while refusing to admit any fault. Eventually, she fights either Sarah, Becky, or Dorothy to the death.
I told y’all. Becky. Joyce. River of
lavaoatmeal.I don’t know about you, but I would fucking love it.
Joyce needs to change her name to Anne Theist and start wearing a costume that looks like a broken cross. You know, if you want to get the proper Batman attitude.
Joyce will be the impetus for Amazi-girl coming out of retirement to fight crime once again.
(In the distance, the sounds of keyboards being typed on at lighting speed to produce 200k words worth of essays.)
I thought that sound was the finger-sized orb spider that webbed across my doorway today.
PICS OR DIDNT HAPPEN
…is the spider a pet? maybe it was catching bugs to offer their half-eaten corpses to you =D
Trying to figure how to get a pic off my phone to provide, but here’s an image (from Wikipedia) of the same species in the meanwhile – I called it the “Appa spider” because of the faint-but-visible arrow on its back, pointing to its head. XD
nice =)
well, not as nice if you briskly walk out your door before you have time to realize it’s there i guess X(
I did not come here on this to night to be personally attacked in such a manner.
/s
(if i get started I will not fall back asleep)
i cheated and did mine last night on patreon to focus-test it so i could drop it here first thing when the comic dropped
my remaining ~199,400 words are looking like they’ll be mostly shitposts
Look most of society has yet to figure a way to solve what is probably one of the primary conflicts facing humanity so why should we expect two freshman college students to sort it out in one conversation?
Joyce: She just needs to change her beliefs!
She looks almost identical to her mother here in more ways than one.
I do appreciate how Dotty’s face here is ever atheist’s face when we hear one of THOSE atheists going on like this. Just -_- as we try to hold onto patience in hopes they move past this.
i’ll repeat that i don’t think anyone’s evil here and that everyone’s making the sort of stupid but ultimately fairly benign mistakes you make when you’re young and which are more broadly endemic to the difficult process of learning to have constructive dialogues
but i’m not sure being judgey is the most productive thing dorothy could do in this situation
In fairness to Dorothy, it’s hard to imagine anything at all productive she could do right in this moment.
Joyce isn’t in the mood to listen to anyone.
See, I don’t think Dorothy looks judgey here. To me she just looks sad– sad that Joyce is so clearly hurt, sad that two of her friends are fighting, sad that one of the most compassionate people she knows is in a place where she can’t cede anything to anyone anymore.
Like, yeah, she is disappointed, but I don’t think that’s what’s really on her face there.
well, she did play the “you’re better than this” card a few pages ago. eyebrows look kinda stern to me, i dunno.
Oof. That’s kind of a low blow.
Time skip 30 years to Joyce’s daughter turning religious?
it’s the circle of liiiiiife
Go to therapy. Go directly to therapy. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Sucks that you won’t collect that $200 cuz therapy ain’t free.
Sigh. If only.
Nooooooo Joyce ;_;
Yeah no Joyce it’s not just about debunking historical facts about what is or isn’t plausible.
While Joyce is definitely being pissy and judgemental about Christian faith right now, she isn’t exactly wrong that Christianity has had a documented history of essentially committing libel against Judaism and trying to claim that Jesus’ coming was “foreshadowed” in the Tanakh.
I think Willis himself in the past as even discussed that there is strong evidence (proof?) that many of the popular known disciples of Jesus (like Luke) weren’t even alive when a historical Jesus would have lived.
yeah, joyce mentioned christianity’s long history of plagiarism and its use in persecuting the people they stole from earlier in her convo with liz, and the bible’s more general fallibility as a text has come up more generally both here and in shortpacked!
as a jew i am always here for dunking on christianity but there’s a time and a place, and it’s definitely not something i make a habit of doing around queer christians who find meaning in faith, because usually they know all that shit! they don’t need my sass!
I think that’s a weird place to go as that was written when it was by Jews. Unless you believe it was completely made up by the Christianized Romans.
According to Paul Johnston’s A History of Christianity there were in the time of the early Roman empire (and the Principate) a large number of people who were attracted to Jewish monotheism (the view of a single vast moral god un-muddied by the human failings of the gods in the standard polytheistic god-stories), and known as “God-fearing people” (phoboumenoi ton Theon).
Jewish doctrine of the time was that they were not of the chosen people or parties to the Covenant, and were subject only to the laws that God gave Noah after the flood. They were referred to as “God-fearers” or “Noahides“. Jews did not encourage conversion very much, and the Noahides were not much attracted to circumcision or the temple sacrifice elements of Judaism, so there were (according to Johnston) a great many God-worshipping gentiles in the Mediterranean and the Middle East; they were more numerous than Jews. The chief obstacle to Noahidism flourishing was that the doctrine gave converts and their descendants a lower status than ethnic Jews.
So when Pauline Christianity came along with the interpretation that Christ had fulfilled the Covenant, and that converts were now in no way inferior to Jews (nor obligated to circumcision and the strictures of Leviticus) it appealed most strongly to, and spread most rapidly among, the very numerous Noahides. If Johnston is right, then at the time when the Gospels were written the great majority of Christians (at least, outside the Jerusalem Church) would have been Christianised Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Arameans, Egyptians etc., converted by an easy step from among the Theosebeis rather than all the way from Roman state polytheism etc..
Sure, fully agreed, Christianity has a long history of political maneuvering and careful editing of the bible in order to twist the message to suit the powers that be. That’s been the case ever since the religion split off from Judaism.
The problem is that Becky just got done telling Joyce “Yeah, those stupid, obviously wrong details are bogus, they’re stupid and obviously wrong, but they’re tiny details and not the main point”. Joyce is arguing against a stance that Becky adamantly refuses to support.
It’s like seeing someone saying they like oranges more than apples, but oranges aren’t as good in pies, and then rushing in to rant about how orange pies would utterly suck. It’s like… yeah, dude, we fucking agree there, why are you getting on my case about it?
And before then, Judaism did the same thing with their Bible. Christians were just carrying on the tradition. Essentially all the books of the Bible were written to promote the authors historical or theological views, and possibly edited to meet those of the editors and selected to be canon at least partly for the same reasons.
Once the canon was settled, then they had to resort to reinterpreting the texts rather than editing them.
I don’t know about “not alive when Jesus would have lived”, but it’s practically certain that Matthew, Marc and John were not written by the Apostles they’re traditionally ascribed to. Luke and Acts were almost certainly not written by Luke the companion of Paul.
As the earliest, written some 30+ years after Jesus’s death, Marc was most likely written by someone alive at the time, though no personal knowledge is claimed and there’s little reason to think it was written by someone who followed Jesus before his death.
it’s even weirder than that.
Paul is the earliest source we have — by which I mean the core set of six or seven Epistles that nearly everybody believes are authentic in the sense that they share a common outlook + writing style + no obvious anachronisms, ie., no reason to believe they weren’t written by the same person in the time frame claimed, mid 50s AD — as opposed to the other Epistles that were clearly forged much later.
Paul never uses the word “disciple” at all. He never refers to Jesus as having had an earthly ministry or followers at all. His description of the Lord’s Supper is as a personal vision of his and no one else is present. Jesus is killed by agents of Satan; there no mention that the Romans or the Jews had anything to do with it. And he only ever refers to “apostles”, i.e., others who have had the same vision that he’s had , including Peter, who he’s met, and who he agrees was the first to receive the vision (Paul conveniently designates himself the last) but otherwise has no special status — i.e., there’s never any reference to Peter having met or known Jesus in any way that Paul hasn’t (and if that had ever been an issue with any of his congregations, you’d think he’d have been constantly having to answer that question in his letters, and somehow he never is…).
and whoever wrote Hebrews and 1 Peter all seem to be on the same page.
the author of Luke/Acts, written a minimum of 40 years later, explicitly contradicts Paul on any number of matters, and has a rather clear agenda of wanting to whitewash the differences between Peter and Paul (on circumcision/etc — we never get Paul’s account of his final trip to Jerusalem; it’s quite possible that Peter and Paul never actually reconciled after their falling out in Galatians), presents Paul has having been a Roman citizen, which is really unlikely — Paul’s own letters describe him having been beaten in ways that Roman citizens were exempt from. The whole sent-to-Rome-for-trial-before-Nero narrative is likely bogus as well, especially since we also have 1 Clement, which appears to be an earlier source, which has Paul dropping by Rome for a visit (not bound for trial) and then heading off to Spain where he gets killed.
Willis, I gotta give it to you…there is no way I would have ever ran with this storyline knowing the amount of off the chain comments you have gotten and are about to get. Kudos and bless your willpower, the nerves would be getting snatched from my body.
Yeah, he deserves a panda for his efforts.
A live one and a bamboo forest to feed it.
Hey Joyce, if you’re so smart, why didn’t you deconvert that long ago?
I sure hope Dorothy or some other athiest in her life gets inducted into Scientology or MLM or something to SHOW her that we can ALL be manipulated by dogma.
I don’t think it’d be enough to have a therapist explain that to her.
dorothy has been inducted into a mlm, it’s called electorialism and
If a cult has an army and a navy, it’s no longer a cult.
It’s a “religion”.
pretty sure she’s sorry about Becky catching the strays and making it sound like she’s dumb, but she damn sure ain’t sorry about escaping all the stuff she was force fed all her life that’s brought her nothing but pain in her adult life.
Joyce has been asked twice now if she’s really sorry, and has answered with silence. I don’t think she is.
“Those were never the important parts,” Becky says, “The heart of it is real even if the details aren’t all true.”
“Either ALL of it is real,” Joyce says, “Or NONE of it can be.”
Sigh. 😔
Yep. She still just fundamentally doesn’t get it and rather than trying to understand what exactly Becky believes in, she’s being a massive jerk about it. She still hasn’t grasped you can believe in god without believing the Bible. Even my rabbi taught us that the torah should be interpreted as parables and not literal history
Joyce: if you don’t believe the bible, why are you believing in God? If I enjoy stories I don’t start thinking the characters are real.
It’s my understanding (although it might be wrong) that the prevalent attitude of Jewish people is to dissect and analyse parts of their religion and teachings rather than to follow them blindly.
Joyce’s position isn’t “all of it is real or none of it is” but in effect “this is why evil in the world that god made isn’t god’s fault” IS an important part and if that justification for evil not being god’s fault relies on the world being 6000 years old that really starts tearing away at the foundations.
I don’t know why ur sighing like Joyce had her worldview built in a foundation of all of those things being true and justifying why the world was the way it was, and having them picked apart but by bit by enormous bit it showed her that no, the things she felt and believed were incompatible with the world as it Is. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable reaction it just demonstrates how different Joyce and Becky’s lives were even being raised in the same cult environment
Damn Joyce, I hope somebody can slap some empathy into you soon…
I can’t decide whether I should say “Joyce, after two weeks of the commentariat insisting she thinks Becky is an idiot with no margin for error or interpretation: ‘Becky’s smart'” or “damn I can’t believe someone who claims to care for Becky could be so cruel as to treat Becky’s religion as something she is hopeful to escape from.”
So both.
(The traditional Word Pile will be written after a reasonable approximation of a good night’s sleep but also save yourself the trouble and just go read Wack’d’s lovely analysis up above because they’re way better at this than I am)
Joyce does it in fact think Becky is being an idiot though. That’s why she’s convinced that Becky being smart means that she’ll eventually decide Joyce is right and become an atheist like she did
If you can’t see the condescension there just cuz Joyce acknowledged Becky’s intelligence then I don’t know that it can be explained to you
I need to come at this honestly that not explicitly condemning a character’s actions does not mean I am justifying or praising them, or even that justifying, praising and/or condemning these actions is something I feel the need to do when it is the beginning of a new character arc for both Joyce and Becky after they just got done blaming the other for being wrong and that they alone got it right because they have never had any idea how the other thought about their beliefs, let alone actions taken when two best friends who have not only never fought but are practically incapable of fighting over their religion in a healthy way suddenly have the entire house of cards that is their existing friendship collapse in on itself.
Tempting fate at this point would be a massive act of hubris, as in obviously I will do that, but I don’t read this as Joyce the Angry Atheist who just needs to learn to stop being so problematic like some of y’all and think it’s a bit… what’s a way to convey “lacking in nuance” without making myself come off as a condescending asshole? Like, that I think it’s coming at this story, one that is just beginning no less, based on the surface level behaviour Joyce is displaying (an atheist who says believers are dumb) without thinking about massive surrounding radius of context and even how Joyce has since been revealed to process her religious beliefs and, now, the act of belief itself, and how Becky’s wrongheaded thought processes and actions are both on display and indicative of massive character flaws on her part beyond just being the sad victim of Joyce’s mad search for the golden fedora, granting her ultimate power when arguing on the internet.
Let me put it like this, in a “is this how Joyce would act in the best circumstances?” kind of way. Joyce, who does not believe in the non-existence of God so much as had her every hardcoded fact about the universe revealed as total bullshit (as in she’s in the scenario Dina would be if Satan popped out of the ground with some dinosaur fossils announcing to all the Earth that they just got fucking served), has slowly been making some progress in finding out what she actually believes thanks to Joe. Joyce is a monkey, Heaven and Hell aren’t real but Joyce herself is and the person she is has always mattered.
And then Becky, acting in a way that she’s always acted but wildly recontextualized by the dramatic consequences her behaviour have led to when at any other point in the comic it would lead to Joyce going “heck yeah, Becky, you extremely cool rebel”, just made Joyce face the most difficult conversation she could possibly have about her newfound belief: so what about Becky, the person she loves more than anyone?
And it goes poorly, natch, so in the baby steps Joyce could have been making through Joe and eventually Dorothy and Dina (in that I think once she got some stability she could bring herself to ask them about it healthily… maybe. I say baby steps but it’s Joyce and she’s all about avoidance and a Joyce-paced atheist awakening would take approximately 1000 years and while that’s fine on paper it sure isn’t for drama) she suddenly has to jump all the way to step 10 and do the hardest part and, naturally, is completely unequipped to have this conversation to the point where she and Becky just plain don’t have a conversation at all. With all of that, is there any way Joyce wouldn’t dig a trench of her own self-righteousness the way Becky did at her?
(total cumulative sleep hours: five so far. Damn adderall and/or perforated ear drum)
oops i did it again
Are people not allowed to hope that those they care about escape situations that they view as harmful? Because if someone believes religion is a bunch of harmful lies and has seen faith hurting them and people they loves repeatedly, I don’t know why that person wouldn’t be crossing their fingers that anyone they care for gets as far away from that ticking time bomb as possible.
Or are people just not allowed to think religion is harmful?
(the joke is that Dina engaged in this exact behaviour when she first Becky)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/03-the-butterflies-fly-away/radiometric/
Oh, lol. I didn’t catch the sarcasm. My bad. It’s a pretty good example of how the exact same sentiment expressed differently provokes totally different responses. Both are responses of “This religious faith stuff is undesirable,” but one is silly and over the top so it’s a joke while the other is grumpy in a moment of emotional pain, so one is fine and the other is awful.
Nah it’s cool it was a deliberate trap.
Someone would go “that’s terrible to treat someone’s faith like that!
And I would reply:
“yuo dont like joyce yet you like dina, curious”
No, we’re not. Concluding that religion is harmful is currently unacceptable.
This seems like something an individual person can believe and in particular due to lived experience and not, say, an institution with enough power that if they wanted to enact that will they could do so.
Like, I think that religions can prove harmful when that religion becomes a cultural touchstone and thus is able to influence the course of their society as they see fit, for example.
I get what you’re trying to say but it’s a more nuanced thought process than “Joyce Brown thinks God is dumb.”
Why?
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at all by this, but I did not expect Joyce to have actually been talking about Becky before.
Unfortunately teenagers who embrace atheism tend to go through a shitty insufferable phase where they start looking down on religious people with contempt. Former believers seem to go the hardest as atheists thanks to bitterness towards their former religion and familiar pigheaded zealotry they can fall back into, which seems to be exactly what is happening with Joyce right now
She rejected her fundie upbringing so hard she’s accidentally started acting like her mom, at least with respect to how she regards people not having the “correct” religious beliefs
In real life most atheists who have this kinda phase take years to relearn how to chill tf out. Hopefully Joyce will get snapped out of it abruptly, or at least dials it back to “obnoxious, but at least not overly disrespectful” before it totally screws up her friendships. Gonna be at least a few days before she and Becky make up tho. Definitely not happening in this storyline. They both need to cool off before anything like that will be possible
I think she wasn’t at first, maybe at all really, but Becky heard it anyway and Joyce is mad about that so now it was retroactively about her
That is my thought too. Maybe I’m still grasping at benefit of the doubt here? But this still feels like Joyce trying to protect herself from actually unpacking her upbringing, on the theory that “if it was ALL complete bullshit, then I can completely write it off, and therefore it has no power over me. I’m not dumb. I will never be dumb again. Nobody will screw me up like Christianity did, ever again.”
Not the healthiest approach. But understandable, given what Christianity has done to her in the past 5 months.
I agree. I’m surprised so many people are leaping to “ah, so it was about Becky all along.” They talked past each other that whole argument, and Joyce still seems to believe that Becky was upset that Joyce doesn’t believe the same things anymore. So obviously now she’s frustrated because she “knows” that the things they were taught weren’t literal, and Becky “still doesn’t get it” (disclaimer: we all know Becky gets it, but Joyce clearly doesn’t).
Even these examples seem less about Becky and more about Joyce. These are things Joyce believed and, as we have seen from her multiple times, from Joyce’s POV, once one thing she was taught to proven to be wrong, everything else is a house of cards. In Joyce’s mind, if Becky is still religious, she probably believes a lot of these things still (despite all evidence pointing to Becky’s ability to be religious but divorce herself from certain things she doesn’t believe). But Joyce is still naming myths that JOYCE always took as fact, not necessarily Becky.
I think one of the issues Joyce is running into here is they grew up learning the same stuff, it never even occurred to her that Becky was taking something different away from what they were learning
Ultimately it seems like neither of them knew the other as well as they thought, and possibly never did
I thought I knew you
What did I know?
They really did not and it took Wack’d’s post on Patreon for me to realize how deep it goes.
Because the two of them having such a strong love for each other that they can’t bring themself to argue about anything is one thing, but it never occurred to me that the ability to process belief outside of your own (as in, what the Evangelical collective imprinted onto them) was something they were never taught, because they were supposed to believe without any deviation to the point where the couldn’t deviate in belief from each other.
I assumed that was why she picked those things to start the conversation. She knew Becky doesn’t believe those myths – she knows Becky cast off those beliefs before she did.
My reading was that after Becky put words in her mouth before she could finish the apology*, Joyce wanted to start from common ground and figure out what to say that would actually fix it that wasn’t “I’m sorry for what I believe/I don’t actually believe that” (which I’m really glad she didn’t do, because that’s what she thought Becky wanted to hear, but she would have hurt herself so much by saying that). I mean, obviously not going to be mendable in one conversation, especially with emotions so high, but Joyce wanted to fix it in one conversation if not less.
* she only got to the first part, express remorse, and didn’t get to acknowledging the damage, taking responsibility, or steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again, before Becky jumped in and declared anything other that “I don’t believe in what I said” insincere (“sorry I heard you”). Then again, maybe I’m giving Joyce too much credit and she wasn’t going to say anything beyond “I’m really sorry”, but we’ll never know since Becky did jump in.
Sort of.
On the deep inner level, I do think it’s about herself. That initial rant wasn’t thinking of Becky, but of her past self (and likely some people from her religious upbringing). But she doesn’t separate Becky from that, so it’s about Becky.
And it’s probably not as simple as not understanding that Becky’s beliefs are and always were different from hers. Not only are some of the literal Bible stories to stupid to believe in her mind, but so is throwing those away and only believing the so-called important parts.
I think so too.
Yeah it’s gonna be at least a day till they talk again.
Care to guess who’s gonna be on the receiving end of the fallout?
I think Joyce might seek someone outside of her friend group to vent to, maybe an avenue for Jocelyn to reenter the story
Becky may vent to Dina unless Joyce’s “Wow I think like Dina now” sticks with her and makes her afraid Dina might take Joyce’s side
Given that Becky’s not as stupid as Joyce thinks she is, she probably isn’t afraid that Dina’s automatically gonna take Joyce’s side.
Hopefully.
I only bring it up because Becky has already expressed insecurities about their relationship, this could aggravate them
I suspect Dina herself might have a surprisingly nuanced take on this once she gets past “Joyce upset Becky”
Dina has a way of telling things as they are without emotion getting in the way, so I have a feeling she will 100% be the one to calm Becky down.
I’d love to see Leslie return in supportive adult person role for Becky
“maybe an avenue for Jocelyn to reenter the story”
EVERY SISTER IS HERE!
(#thankssakurai)
Joe. 100%. Sarah and Dorothy are both gonna be too disgusted to talk to her about this, but Joe seems to care in a different way. Plus his talk with her about evolution is the most Joyce has ever opened up about this stuff, with anyone at college.
Joe also has his own issues and has expressed a dislike of dealing with drama, I think he’d be about as helpful for Joyce as he’s been so far
I think there’s a strong case to be made that Joe will help Joyce with at least a bit of this.
We know that Joe cares about Joyce in a very, very deep way that he only barely admits to himself.
Also we have the sense that lately Joe thinks very poorly of himself, which I think probably leads him to be less judgemental of someone like Joyce who is wading through a dark path. I think he can identify with that a little.
Allll of this. I went through a phase like this. Eventually settled into a “chill agnostic” mindset. But for a while there it was the Most Important Thing Ever for me to convince everyone of the “truths” I had discovered and I wasted a lot of time arguing about it on the internet.
It’s super interesting reading this, knowing college me would’ve sided with Joyce, and 30s me now sides with Becky (not in a religious sense, but in a “don’t be a jerk to people just because they believe stuff you find unprovable, and as long as it’s not hurting anyone, people can believe what they want” way).
THIS!
As someone who has remained spiritual throughout my life despite not having a high opinion of organized religion, I take (very very extremely) minor credit for helping two of my friends grow out of their smug atheist phases. As I said in a previous commentary, smug atheists at that age are just as annoying if not more so than smug Christians. I feel like deep down Joyce knows this a little bit but isn’t willing to admit it yet, because she’s finally certain of things again (or so she feels right now).
The fact that Becky’s faith survived in spite of everything that happened last semester is remarkable.
That said, I feel Joyce had more to lose. Her belief in people she’s known her whole life was betrayed in a big way, and now the only belief she has left seems to be that there is nothing to believe in.
I don’t think either of them is to blame. They’ve both had traumatic experiences with people they were supposed to trust. Becky is holding onto her faith as hard as she can, while Joyce is still dealing with hers being completely shattered. Somewhere in here should be some kind of happy medium.
Though I think Joyce will be eating lunch by herself for a while.
I’m also kinda cheering for Walky to get that comic strip job at the newspaper right now.
Out of spite, I admit.
I voted for Walky for unrelated reasons (I thought Joyce losing after pouring so much efforts into her strips would be very funny), but today of all days I kind of feel like Joyce has more to worry about
“Though I think Joyce will be eating lunch by herself for a while”
I know you’re probably not talking literally but isolating her might be one of the worst thing that can happen here
It could easily lead to her being even more bitter and angry and make it harder to get her out of this mindset
I didn’t mean literally. Joe has been sympathetic to her as of late, and since her sister was the catalyst of all this, Sarah might lend an ear (in a manner that befits her aloofness).
I think Dorothy is where it starts to get iffy.
Sarah doesn’t have much of a choice really, unless she wants to live with this version of Joyce
I think Dorothy will absolutely try to be a friend of Joyce. But she doesn’t know how to be a friend without expressing her disapproval of Joyce’s new attitude and belief system. And Joyce isn’t in the mood to listen to that.
I think Joe might do a better job of being a friend to Joyce without judging her, and just giving her space to stew with her emotions for a while. He knows what it’s like get through each day despite holding onto some dark thoughts, so he may identify a bit with the path she’s wading through.
Yeah that.
Dorothy, and I fully acknowledge that my views on her character may be influenced by being a Dorothy Hater ™, kinda feels like she’d approach this on the grounds of Joyce “being the person Dorothy knows she can be, which is why she needs to go make it right.” Joyce’s feelings matter, but they only matter long enough until they stop accommodating a peaceful status quo and afterwards it’s “still understandable” for Joyce to be upset but she needs to Be Better, even though Dorothy’s idea of Be Better is a vague blob of properly computing the amount of niceness that must be dispensed in this situation of the human emotion you call anger. Joyce and Becky are friends and for the time they are not, and instead of coming back together when they’re prepared to or even just drifting apart if it proves totally irreconcilable, they need to fix it because that’s what they’re supposed to do.
(though that does make me think the newfound lack of Joyce is gonna make Becky ramp it up even harder at Dorothy, because I’ve come to think of Becky’s recent behaviour as her proving to Dorothy that she’s a cool fun badass in a way that only ever worked on Joyce, and Becky just lost one of three people she can cry in front of without thinking they’ll stop liking her)
Joe, and I hope Sarah too, would just let Joyce feel however she wants and offer their perspective, not even judgment or as an argument, just an equal sharing of thoughts that Joyce can take at her leisure, and for the time being that’s what Joyce actually needs. Joyce is a monkey, factually, and Joyce needs to flail and scream and panic until being a monkey is something she can accept and Joe can chime in that being a monkey means he can decide what matters, much like how the person she is still matters even without the existence of Heaven and Hell.
I hope that they can come to an understanding before that happens.
A traumatic experience isn’t typically the reason someone loses their religion. And it’s not in Joyce’s story either. It wasn’t the terrible things that happened to her. It was Becky coming out, and Joyce questioning for the first time the authority of the Bible and Christianity (as she’d been taught) and finding it full of cracks.
I’d say it was more the trauma and less the questioning. The preacher boy attacking her. Her friend’s father using their religion as motivation for the kidnapping. Her mother (and then their church) echoing his words: “I’d die for you”.
When Becky came out to her, she was able to find ways to reconcile that with the Bible, even if it was after the fact.
When you put it like that, no wonder she seems to not know what she believes in, only what she doesn’t. One of the only things I think she understands about what atheists do/can believe (as opposed to what they don’t, mostly by definition God) is “other people of their choosing”. But she wouldn’t trust her ability to choose people to believe in any more…
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/hug-2/
I am recalling “Babylon 5: River Of Souls” We Were Evolving!
I love Joyce’s hair in panel 5. It looks like a lions main 😀
Definitely gives her an oddly imposing presence.
I just want her to cut her hair. I want them ALL to cut their hair. How does it not drive them crazy? It drives me crazy just looking at it!
What’s wrong with their hair?
I love that three-person stare
I would like to ask this to them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-l6tHeseDY
I’m disappointed in Joyce but not for the reason she would think. She and Becky really WERE talking past each other, and doubling down might feel good now but it’ll make things worse later.
I am also disappointed in Becky, but again, not for the reasons she would think. She wasn’t in a good place to think clearly, so distance was the right answer there, but I also worry that her habit of pretending everything is fine will bite her in the butt here.
I hope they can both work through this and actually talk to each other without letting their crap get in the way. :/
I like how Joyce is converted away from Christianity by living in this college only for all her athiest friends to immediately get mad at her for not respecting Christianity enough. No wonder she’s so mad.
Of the three friends here Dorothy is the only atheist. Sarah is agnostic, Joe is jewish.
You can be an atheist and Jewish. I’m pretty sure Joe mentioned he was? Maybe I’m misremembering though.
Joe said he lied about becoming an atheist, which I took to mean he was still a believer.
statistically you’re unlikely to find a jew who’s not at least agnostic
Literally on my like second visit to the local temple a couple turned around and said “Oh you’re converting? Good for you! Don’t worry you don’t even have to believe in god, in case you were worrying about that!”
More like not respecting her friend enough.
The myth of consensual Joyce changing:
Joyce: I consent!
Becky: I don’t!
Huh. I could’ve sworn that Joyce’s last line here was something that either Ross or Carol said at some point, but if it is I can’t seem to find it. Closest I can find are this and this. Definitely the same condescending tone, though.
Second “this” should go here.
I wonder how Joyce would react to finding out she sounds like those few folk she’s come to hate the most….
She’s doing the same thing she always has, only in reverse.
Before she lost faith, her religion was the infallible standard of truth, and any truth that contradicted it was a lie.
Now it’s become her infallible standard of falsehood, and any good that aligns with it is now evil, period.
This phenomena of hero worship, or villian ANTI-worship, is not exclusively Christian or atheistic.
It is very… what’s the word I’m looking for…. HUMAN.
Sorry if I came off as a hate post, I didn’t mean to.
…this is why I shouldn’t write comments at 1 in the morning now matter how much insomnia I’ve got
like, I guess I interpreted ARB’s comment about it being “very HUMAN” as a criticism of me or something? Even though I’m pretty sure looking at it now that it wasn’t? Like, it is very human. This arc has been painful to read at times because of how real it felt.
And then I basically ended up sounding exactly like Joyce in the comic, oops
No hard feelings here.
Don’t be too hard on yourself.
More like Liz’s line in the second panel:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/fiveseconds/
I sure can’t wait for “Julia Gray and the Tome of the Ages.”
honestly that arc plays much better in print, where it’s extensively footnoted to explain that it’s not just a take-that at religion but a hyperspecific parody of the story of king josiah
Nothing like losing your faith to become an annoying, self righteous, self loathing atheist.
I’m very glad I eventually managed to move past that stage, and I hope Joyce manages to sort herself out sooner than I did.
I remember when Joyce first got her glasses a reason why she kept wearing them is because after rejecting Christianity and the pedestal she put her parents her biggest authority in her life was possibly the optometrist. She’s echoing Liz’s words from earlier in the last panel so: interesting? Granted as I’ve stated before this is sometimes something I saw when I vented in exchristian.net like the anger can be real but on that site it can be mixed with other peoples views: so while in some ways it helped in others I really can’t recommend it too easily.
Also she does call Becky smart here, she actually doesn’t think she’s stupid as a person. Maybe. Yay?
Also got to love given how his eyes are drawn Joes expression isn’t very readable. Like Dorothy looks worried, Sarah surprised and worried but Joe is a wild card of uncertainty to me.
And all three of them are atheists but atheists who probably didn’t go through anything similar to come to that conclusion. Like maybe Sarah had Christian parents but who knows really. Pretty out of their wheel park and completely baffling to them.
Anger in deconversion is pretty normal. Sometimes healing is ugly and honestly Becky is perfectly in her rights not to want to hang around for that. Like even if she did eventually disbelieve it’s quite likely she’s not going to care for how Joyce made her feel. Just a heads up there Joyce.
Just for the record, I believe Sarah has said she’s agnostic.
Joe is Jewish, and he claimed at one point to have pretended to be atheist while his parents were getting divorced, so I’d assume he still believes and isn’t just culturally Jewish. Like many people though it doesn’t seem to be a huge part of his life.
Anyway so I love how Joyce’s face is like 80% bangs/hairhelmet now
Ah, I see Joyce has reached the “angry atheist” phase. With time, she’ll probably get around to “understanding atheist” phase. After all, Dorothy’s been giving her a role model on how to be an atheist without being a dick for a while.
Except for all those times Dorothy has clobbered someone with a nearby chair for shit as simple as looking in her general direction for too long. I’m so tired of people pretending she didn’t just outright take off Agatha’s left hand with a band saw during Family Weekend. It grew back, sure, but she didn’t know it would when she did it.
Look it wasn’t Dorothy’s fault, Agatha should have been more careful around the dangerous equipment.
She should’ve been more responsible
I guess if your hands grow back you don’t have to be as careful, but still
Okay that’s got to be the scariest Joyce gravatar I’ve seen yet. It’s even
worse bettermore effective than the weird crying emoji one.how dare
Sorry. Weird crying emoji Joyce is definitely unsettling, but the blank eyes and tiny smile are a freaky combo.
I warned you about toying with Taffy’s powers!
“I told you, man. I told you about stares.” -Needfuldoer, 2021
That’s actually a common misconception. Agatha’s hand didn’t grow back after Dorothy hacked it off, she was immediately contacted by the Pleasant People Association and given a donation hand as compensation for her hard work in the organization’s name.
Thank you for clearing that up. I had thought Agatha was part lizard and could regrow body parts.
Wait. This doesn’t prove Agatha’s not part lizard…
I feel I have to ask, since this is the only one of Willis’s comics that I’ve read, are you riffing off of each other or referenced something that happened to a different version of those characters?
It happened in this comic, fairly early on. I’ve barely glanced at anything pre-Shortpacked!, so I’ve got no idea about those.
you troll XD
I take offense to that label. I’m a benign smartass, thank you.
I am trying to find the comics to link to. I know they’re here someplace… I think they were right after the Mandela strips.
You mean the 2009 chapter where the kids had Nelson Mandela as a substitute pol-sci teacher?
Yeah, that’s the one. Gosh, Becky’s early design with the green hair and white face paint and and purple suit sure was weird, in hindsight
Thank you for saying it so I don’t have to.
Checking back, y’all are right. It’s been a minute since I did a re-read. Maybe I should make use of the 12 DoA books I bought.
Nah, don’t you remember, there was that whole subplot where Sal, Walky and Jason had to take Agatha back to her people on the planet Zeta Reticuli D so she could regrow it in the protoplasm tanks. The PPA thing was just a cover story. Of course, the arc where the Pleasant People Association /did/ finally appear was a bit controversial.
Joyce can definitely learn to be more diplomatic about it, but she’s kind of in a pickle. Becky is mad because Joyce lied and also Joyce thinks her beliefs are absurd. She can’t make herself believe, so she’s going to keep thinking those beliefs are absurd. So that leaves lying.
Becky’s beliefs are pick-and-choose. There’s a lot of contradictions in the Bible, so there’s a lot of options to pick-and-choose from. And discovering that is what lead Joyce to question Christianity. Because even if you get the good feels or bad feels that convince you you’re experiencing God, it’s still based on an authoritative source. And Becky got pissed at Joyce way back when Joyce didn’t take the wish fulfillment approach to Christianity way back when she came out to Joyce.
And that’s something Becky’s going to be mad about if talked to honestly. She’s not going to understand, she’s not going to figure it out on her own. She’s smart, but smart people can believe silly things.
Becky wants Joyce to lie to her and for those lies to be true.
Joyce has a lot to learn about being diplomatic and understanding. She’s still in the middle of her major life change. She’s angry at what Christianity did to her, and from the argument (where she was accused of only caring about the factoids of Christianity and being holier-than-thou, when it legit was her confronting the contradictions regarding gays).
I think Dorothy’s advice isn’t going to be helpful. I think it’s going to be Joe who gets her to a more humanistic and diplomatic place. Joyce can’t (and shouldn’t) apologize for everything Becky wants, but there is some of it she should. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/shallow/
Becky wants Joyce to pick and choose, like she does.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/crimson/
Joyce wants Becky to drop it all, like she did.
Neither is going to get everything they want.
Sweet zealus atheism, i feel young again
Oh, yeah, I forgot how bitter Willis is and how he blames God and the Bible for his mother being a terrible person.
Bye everyone! Last strip for me!
That was just rude.
I think we’re reading different comic strips
Hey hey dude?
Dont be THAT guy
Get the fuck over yourself
I think it’s a real shame that young people can’t engage with media anymore without wokescolding the characters.
I do not think this person’s issue is that the author is not woke enough
Dude, you’re displaying even less chill here than Claire or Clinton.
Do you think, to make the obvious comparison, that Jeph intends every word those characters (or Faye, or Hanners, or Sam) say to be his own opinion and gospel truth? You think they’re infallible author mouthpieces?
Joyce is definitely autobiographical. That said, Willis has been quite willing to show her being flat out wrong before. I think she’s staking out a position here that she’ll end up walking back/softening a bit in the future. At the risk of making a bad pun: have a little faith.
Yeah, I think right now Joyce is reflexively overcorrecting. She broke herself free from the cult, but pulled a hard 180 into anti-theism. She’s angry, hurt, confused, and scared. She’s doubting everything that had to do with her past, indoctrinated self, including the values she held and her relationships with her friends and family. She’s trying to make it all make sense now that the bedrock she built them on disintegrated.
I think eventually she’ll settle into personal atheism and be accepting of her friends’ beliefs again, but right now she’s releasing all the anger and pain she’s kept under wraps.
Yep, hard this. I was brought up in a hard-right household (like so far right wing they’re not explicitly white nationalists but having folks who ARE explicitly white nationalists at high levels of the political parties they are members of isn’t a deal breaker and the libs are just making a mountain out of a mole-hill. For Canadians, they were Reformers in the 90s and for USians, think like the average tea party or current Republican base member.) And they were very authoritarian. I can say from experience that after you break out of an authoritarian, black and white, deeply controlling belief system, especially if like Joyce you’re not the sort to do anything by half’s, there certainly was a phase of extreme over-correction fueled by rage at myself, my old belief system and anything even adjacent to it. But at the same time, I neither understood my own beliefs very well nor did I recognize how much I had to learn about social issues and such.
I am very firmly still in camp “Joyce was mocking her own old beliefs not speaking with Becky in mind” but at the same time, yes I can totally buy her realizing she cast a wide enough net to catch Becky, and being too pissed off and in her own deconversion to really care about it. Certainly I almost nuked a few friendships with similar confrontations in my angry overcorrection phase.
And I expect we’ll see more of this sort of thing from Joyce until she gets it out of her system and is better able to articulate and conceptualize her own values and principles and identifies what battles are worth fighting for her. Cuz like right now Joyce is such a ball of anger and bitterness over religion her answer to “What arguments are worth having about religion?” is gonna be “Yes.” Eventually as she figures her shit out I bet she’ll get to a point of saying, I’ll argue against toxic beliefs but it’s not worth it to argue about faith and the concept of God.”
Most atheists are more like Dina and Dorothy than Joyce or Liz (even if we did go through a Joyce/Liz phase). It’s not so much that I don’t think the idea of God as conceptualized by Christianity in general and literally any translation of the Bible is dumb but more that I don’t think it’s really relevant to talk about and furthermore, the fact that it’s dumb to me really isn’t with me starting a fight over if someone else values it (any more than my atheism is with starting a fight over to most Christians even if they think it’s dumb to be an atheist). I may as well start a blow up shouting match over whether white or dark chocolate is better (dark, obviously, but if someone else is wrong about it I really don’t care and also more dark chocolate for me then). Now if you think LGBT people should be stoned, we’re gonna have a problem.
….. I’d be bitter too if I was raised in a cult.
I was raised in one! I am still pretty bitter about it, it’s a hard taste to get out of your mouth x.x
…do you really believe he blames someone he thinks doesn’t exist?
There are people that literally can’t comprehend not believing in a God.
Admittedly I haven’t been paying much attention to the comments lately, yours included, but this seems slightly out of left field.
Willis is kind of respectful with other religion. As we saw with Jacob. Even Raidah.
No, the problem was really Christianity, as @eh, whatever have said.
Maybe it’s just me, but I read this comment as sarcastic, not serious?
I guess we’ll see if BenRG actually vanishes or not.
We’ve exchanged messages else-forum. Quite serious.
OK then. Sad to be wrong.
That’s sad.
Bye!
Wow! I am so not gonna miss you after that!
I was about to laugh but apparently you’re serious so, buh bye. Door, ass, etc.
There’s also the fact that Jesus was actually persecuted and ultimately killed for the fact that he picked and choosed. The whole point of his reform ministry was saying a lot of stuff like, “Don’t do that”, “That doesn’t mean that”, and “a literal interpretation of scripture is stupid.”
It shows what Joyce wants from religion and what Becky does could never have been reconciled. Christian fundamentalism has been absurd since John Calvin who INSISTED it all made PERFECT SENSE with NO CONTRADICTIONS.
You know, even the parts where Jesus contradicted people.
Oh no, she’s gonna go full Amazing Atheist. Brace yourselves y’all.
Good thing Dotty is there, hopefully she will smack this down right away.
The whole smug atheist concept blows my mind. Like, I get religious people wanting to convert others to their religion – they think they are saving them from a bad fate. But as an atheist it’s like… what do I care if someone drops their religion? It’s different if their beliefs are harmful to people, but honestly at that point I don’t care what they believe, I care about stopping their actions. But if someone believes in a religion and they’re not harmful and it brings them joy? That’s great! We all die one day and I don’t believe there’s anything after, so you might as well live with peace and happiness, and if religion does that for you, go get it! I have a limited amount of days too and it makes no sense to spend them de-converting people. And like, literally anyone can be wrong? I personally don’t believe in god, but I could totally be wrong about that. Maybe we’re in a simulation and I’m literally wrong about everything my senses are telling me! So I don’t get why I would hold up atheism as being better than someone? Idk it’s just mind-boggling to me
I mean, atheists can and do believe that truth has its own inner value. If God is real then everyone should know it. If God is not real, everyone should not. There’s no value to a lie.
It’s why I had a weird reaction to WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS from Star Trek. My friends went, “Hey, Chuck, you’re a big Christian. That was a HUGE take that against your religion with Picard saying that invisible sky people are a thing to get over.”
And I’m like, “Why would I support Picard lying about being a god?”
Ohhh that makes a lot of sense, and is honestly making me think about my thought process. I think am not a 100% Gnostic atheist, and I think I am an individual moral relativist, so I don’t think it’s lying to accept someone’s beliefs as valid without believing in it yourself
I feel like I’m missing a lot by not knowing anything about Star Trek >_< the character said people shouldn't believe in "invisible sky people" and then claimed to be a god? Btw I really hope I didn't come off as saying that religious people would tell lies just to convert someone! I do think the ones who are trying to convert people out of kindness are telling their truth
The episode has the characters mistaken for gods on a primitive planet that has abandoned religion generations ago. Their actions result in a revival of the dead faith. Picard decides to reveal that they are space travelers, regardless of the Prime Directive, because the alternative is to revive superstition on the planet as well as the old religion.
Gene Roddenberry and others felt it would be a very controversial episode. Instead, religious people just went, “Yep. Good for Picard, It’d be blasphemous to claim to be a god.”
Uh, to revive the religion would also be a blatant violation of the Prime Directive, so he had to choose which way to violate the Prime Directive, and he chose the one that’s more in line with the intent behind the Prime Directive in the long run.
In what culture would that be controversial…?
…oh, wait. When did Ghostbusters come out? “Ray, if you’re asked if you’re a god, you say YES!”
I think the buttheads at Starfleet probably would have just said to tell them nothing and get the spock out of there. Picard instead decided to tell them the truth and is the better man for it.
The Prime Directive is more gets violated all the time. Remember the one where Riker’s undercover on the surface of a pre-warp planet for some reason? Or the time Voyager got stuck in orbit of a planet with a temporal core so 3 days on the ship is thousands of years on the surface? Or Friendship One? Or pretty much every other episode of Voyager?
Whenever I watch that episode, I’m always dumbstruck by the fact that Picard’s big plan to prove to the natives that he’s not a god is to invite them up to his magic sky castle.
Yes, but then he introduces them to Clarke’s Law.
“I am not a god. I am a wizard!”
Mostly because atheists are human beings and not the pure rational machines some pretend to be.
Especially for new atheists, wanting to share the cool new thing you’ve figured out is a very natural impulse. Not really any different at its base than “I found this great webcomic, you have to check it out.”
Others were raised in damaging cult-like religions and tend to see all religions that way, at least until they get more distance. That does give them a similar “saving them from a bad fate” motivation.
When someone, anyone, claims to be perfectly objective and rational, my first impulse is to laugh in their face.
For 98% of uses of the word “objective” on the Internet, the correct response is “I do not think that word means what you think it means.” (This is objectively true.)
“69% of all unsourced statistical statements on the internet prove untrue.” ~Abraham Lincoln
43% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Yeah, it’s really funny when people claim that, because they’re often the type to get inordinately agitated if you sniff at anything they say.
I like Joyce.
Evolution is a ladder. There are many steps to take.
With real world evolution, there’s no goal at all, and no steps needed to be taken.
In Pokemon AND real world evolution, there’s definitely branching.
Can any ladder do that?
Actually, there is a goal of evolution and that is to pass on to the next generation. Its just short term versus longterm. Its also still anthropomorphizing a bit.
Yeah the point is that it’s not destined in any way to lead to any form in particular.
No, that’s not a goal, it’s a tautology: those whose descendants are underrepresented in the next generation don’t get to evolve as much.
*more vigorous nodding*
I find it hard to be angry at young atheists who had heavy-handed religious upbringings for acting like this. I went through a phase like this, as I’m sure Willis and many others did, where we’re lashing out. Hell I still get bothered thinking about basically not being allowed to have fun if it wasn’t with a group of kids from the mosque when I was younger.
Best case scenario, Becky understands that Joyce was venting a lot of pent up frustration and Joyce realizes that insulting Christians isn’t the same as venting about Christianity. Ultimately though even if they get back to being friends Joyce is probably always going to have these thoughts in the back of her mind and Becky’s probably always going to feel self conscious around her.
Yeah, atheists who didn’t grow up in a super religious environment or have been a non-believer for many years? This kind of behaviour is incredibly obnoxious and gross. But for someone like Joyce raised in a culty christian sect who lost faith very, very recently? Pretty understandable. How do you go from “atheists are bad, evolution isn’t real” to “god doesn’t exist” in the space of a couple months without some growing pains?
Yeah I think this is an important distinction we’re not really processing like we should.
For me to act like Joyce would be wildly egotistical because religion had little impact on my life and was entirely predicated on faith that I had because having it was how I was raised, and then once I was like 12 I was old enough that the expectation of faith vanished and with it any importance I ascribed to the existence of God, whose existence was just “hangs out in the sky and sends you a thumbs up ’cause he likes you” anyway.
Joyce is rebelling against her upbringing, all she’s ever known, and then that upbringing was revealed to be total bullshit, most of her loved ones were revealed as garbage people who let a man who pointed a gun at her and kidnapped his daughter a chance to do it all over again, and Joyce realized she never had faith at all, just a light switch that flicks between the canonical text of God’s will and nothing.
See that’s my issue with how everyone is talking about Joyce right now.
This is a very recent development for her, she only JUST realized she believes the same things as Dina now, and this is all very new to her.
While my upbringing wasnt quite as intense as Joyce’s I still grew up in CATHOLIC IRELAND where baptism was required in order to go to school (yes really)
But after a while I ended up becoming atheist and my behaviour was more the same. Especially after I realized my own sexuality I lashed out against religion, christianity in particular in much the same way Joyce is
She is young, and in learning alot of really harmful things she grew up with and most young atheist go through a sort of phase like this. Most mellow tf put after a little while but when you’ve been more or less indoctrinated into this way of thinking when you break putnof it your attitude towards it is going to be harsh.
Yeah, this exactly.
Like she’s 19 and was always The Good One in a household that handed out favoritism based on compliance. And now she’s the kid who goes against literally everything her upbringing taught. She’s gonna be pissed off and angry. And that’s gonna come out in unfortunate ways.
I had a similar but not quite as heated blow up with the person who is now my partner during my own angry phase. I mean if she was like certain YouTube atheists who basically turned that phase into their entire identity and never did the work of challenging their old beliefs so they still believe all their old problematic shit it’s just justified with Evo psych just so stories instead of religious just so stories, I could see condemning her. But this phase? Basically every person who deradicalizes from a toxic or culty belief system goes through it, it’s part of the process even if it’s not pretty.
(I am purposefully not referencing the guy I am talking about by name because alt reich atheists are just as creepy and fanatical as alt reich fundies or TERFs and I don’t want Willis to have to deal with it)
“alt reich”! love it.
I can’t take credit for coining the term but I’m firmly of the opinion that if it spews anti-Semitic hate like a Nazi and salutes like a Nazi and uses hate symbolism like a Nazi and chants Nazi chants like a Nazi, it’s a Nazi.
So yeah. Alt reich.
I do agree with all that and I’ve never been angry at Joyce through all this, despite not being on her side in the dispute.
But that’s from the outside. That I can understand and sympathize with Joyce here, doesn’t mean that Becky should be able to as easily. She has her own trauma and this venting is at least partly directed at her.
she seems to be mental exhausted and the filter she used to have… is gone.
yes she is an asshole. but was Becky all in right? kinda but she didn’t extacly help Joyce to understand. she was all “HHAHAH SILLY JOYCE!” while Joyce was struggling with her problems.
not excusing her behavior but… she just got enough.
Worse than that, she was “this is a stupid phase, I had it worse, get over it” about Joyce’s newfound nihilism.
I think it’s notable that for the thousands of things Joyce has said about Christianity, has she ever actually talked about how Christians are meant to behave? It seems like that wasn’t something that was emphasized at her church.
I think so, like when she defended Dorothy to her parents, early on.
Yup. There and probably the wrist brace heart-to-heart she had with Hank at their church after they went home following the first kidnapping.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/neighbor-2/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/burgerking/
Of course she has.
They’re not supposed to swear. They’re not supposed to have sex before marriage. They’re supposed to obey their parents. Girls in particular are supposed to get married and have kids and spend their time raising them and obeying their husbands rather than having a career or thinking for themselves.
What else could you possibly mean?
Less sarcastically, I think she has a few times, but I’m not sure where to look for examples.
I have to admit. It’s great to see Joyce so fierce and secure of herself. Plus, she’s skipping class to go submit the comic strip she worked so hard instead of going in a self destructive mode owerthincking what she has do and how much her friend is angry for what she said and believe. Joyce has new priorities in life, new objectives. Nice to see her wants to succeed in it without letting other things distracting her.
Way to think of the positives!
Oh yes.
Everyone will disagree, but, at least, Liz helped Joyce in this final push. Kind of all Joyce needed.
Tbh, yeah. It’s nice to see Joyce becoming more self assured and willing to stand up for herself instead of only willing to stand up for others.
Is she handling it the best possible way? No, but she’s 19. Nobody handles things the best possible way, but especially not teenagers.
Though she’s also skipping class to avoid Becky, as Becky suggested, and not telling the others about that. Using the comic as an excuse.
Smart move. Right now they both are too mad to each other.
oh right! hadn’t even realized.
It’s the glasses, isn’t it
They have a mind control microchip from The Atheist Conspiracy™.
It is disappointing to see someone who admired everything about Dorothy except one thing finally agree with that one thing but subsequently throw everything else out the door.
I know that Joyce doesn’t really ‘owe’ Dorothy for being treated with respect and decency but I do kind of want Dorothy to grab her by the arms and shake her while screaming “Think of how I treated you! Stop making atheists look bad!”
Is making atheists look bad something that Joyce need to consider?
Like in general and not even within the specific context of rebelling against outrageous bullshit that’s made her incapable of processing belief, or that Joyce has twice now been unable to actually refer to herself as an atheist.
why does everything i write have at least one spelling or grammar error
what is wrong with me
i made like four just writing this
Just God trying to teach you humility. Or someone sicced the Demon Of Typos on you.
Yeah, as much as she’s not in a very good place right now, she is also dealing with her own personal feelings. She has no obligation to act as some sort of representative for all atheists.
Okay NOW Joyce is being pretty terrible ashiest, dang it Joyce it’s not always a zero sum game.
There were a thousand things she could have said, but at the same time I guess people are right, she’s a teenager, so she’s not going to pick the right one.
Athiest, I do not know what an Ashiest is… dang typos
Ashiests believe that only cremated people can go to Heaven. “If you don’t burn on Earth, you’ll burn in Hell.”
Its a belief that Ash is and always will be the greatest Pokemon trainer in any universe.
It is actually a zero sum game for Joyce yeah.
She’s pretty much LOOK EITHER IT’S RIGHT, OR IT’S WRONG! Yeah, but…I mean tbh yeah that’s not surprising.. this is the person who will either eat the potatoes or WONT eat the potatoes, based on the existence of green beans next to them…
Joyce was raised to believe that everything regarding her religion had a right or wrong answer and that she and those who thought like her were the only ones who got it right, yeah.
Yeah, I’m aware, I was raised the exact same way, right down to the “Everything in the bible is correct and FACT, you do not question it” bits.
We were right, the world was WRONG and we must help those in the WORLD see the TRUTH.
It was a unfun place.
Minus the last two sentences, Joyce is 100% right. She shouldn’t be bullied into watering down her beliefs to make them palatable for others like that.
It’s truly sad how many people are flip flopping over this. You’re only with Joyce in criticizing her abusive upbringing as long as she’s only being self deprecating? She’s not allowed to think that in general, belief in a god is idiotic? She has to only think that about her past self or she’s an asshole? Should she be giving Becky some kind of special exemption? She’s not allowed to think Becky is an idiot for that belief while also thinking Becky is smart overall and still cares about Becky regardless of what Joyce thinks of her religious beliefs?
I’m sorry, but that is nothing but tone policing. If you’re mad or grumpy, that means you’re wrong. If you aren’t perfectly diplomatic, you’re just as bad as the angry people on the other side. Whether you’re right or wrong is down to whether people hearing it are upset by the things you’re saying or not.
Fuck that.
Joyce is allowed to be angry. She’s allowed to use strong language. She’s not less right or somehow wrong about the flaws in Christianity just because she said it in a mean way. Sometimes the truth hurts, and shying away from that isn’t a good thing at all.
I will agree that her attitude isn’t productive from the standpoint of mending the friendship, but people are allowed to take stances and approaches not finely tuned for diplomacy and social cohesion. That doesn’t mean their grievances and feelings are invalid.
The whole idea of “They’re just as bad as the other side” is a very common tactic for distracting from the real issues. The difference between a homophobe and someone who isn’t a homophobe isn’t that one is mean and one is nice. The homophobe can be the nicest, most diplomatic person in the world, and the person criticizing homophobia can be a total asshole about it. The important difference is that the homophobe believes in a harmful and wrong ideology, and the other person is quite correct in criticizing that. Getting distracted because “Oh, that guy said a mean word” is falling into a rhetorical trap where you forget what’s actually being said because you’re paying too much attention to how it’s being said. Which is handing your beliefs and sentiments to the people best at rhetoric, not those who actually care about people.
Over and over again throughout history, we’ve seen patterns of oppressed groups getting push back over this tone policing. Don’t fall for it.
Yeah, Joyce is failing the criteria of social cohesion, and that’s what’s going to mend things. But she is not the same as the worst parts of fundamentalist Christianity just because they both sound mean. “Saying things in a mean way” is not the thing that makes religion objectionable.
And if you just disagree with Joyce and think she’s wrong, either because you’re a theist or you don’t think religion is as bad as she’s treating it, just say that. Don’t just police her tone and call it a day.
And as for the last two sentences… Joyce, I’m sorry, but that’s not how it works. Intelligence is not the thing that determines whether people get out of their faith or not. It’s how susceptible they are to faith and the strategies that keep it alive. That susceptibility isn’t directly linked to intelligence. Nor is it directly linked to someone’s human decency. That’s why it’s important to work towards a point where you can get along with people who believe that kind of stuff regardless of what you might think of their particular beliefs. Because there are plenty of perfectly fine people who are still susceptible to that kind of thing, and some of those people are worth it. Becky seems really deep into the compartmentalization and such, so I wouldn’t give good odds on her changing her mind about it. It’s up to you whether she’s worth working past that or not. You should probably consider that only after you’ve calmed down more and can process things better.
You say “allowed to be angry” as though that was the crux of the matter. Of course she’s allowed that and much more and so is Becky. But “allowed to” doesn’t mean they should or that it is a good thing. In other words, their feelings are warranted and their actions, understandable. Still, they could and should aim to do better.
Does Joyce need to process complex thoughts about her life and everything beyond it on the grounds of doing better?
What does it mean to do better in this circumstance anyway? Should Joyce develop her beliefs not for herself, as in finding out how to be the person she always was instead of the person she’d rather think of as changing into, but on the grounds of… what, exactly? Just being a vague nicer, more accommodating person?
“DO” better, not be better. Regardless of your beliefs, experiences or whatever else, you should strive to be compassionate and understanding, especially when dealing with your friends. Or what are you alleging? That having gained a new (and objectively, more fact-based) perspective in life constitutes a blank permit to be a jerk to your friends who have not reached it?
I’m alleging that I don’t need to answer that last part since I’m not in the mood of justifying stances ascribed to me on the grounds of “saying X means you believe Y”, and by alleging I mean I just said it in a way that is not at all alleging.
More importantly, you probably can’t be compassionate and understanding like two months after your understanding of reality came crashing down and in the immediate aftermath of shattering your friendship with the person you love most because you never learned how to disagree with them to the point of never realizing you two have conceptualized religious belief, the most deeply held concept drilled into your head, in entirely separate ways.
That is actually the most appropriate point in time for you to be allowed to be angry, to experience hate and outrage that feels so much worse when you hate someone as much as you loved them about half an hour ago, and what actually matters is for both of them to figure out if that hate you feel in the moment matters more than everything else.
Life ain’t a linear ascension into being a better person because better isn’t a thing you do.. Compassion is a special thing, it’s not an expectation, because if it were then it wouldn’t be compassion anymore.
well said.
But your caveat on those last two sentences undermines your whole argument and why Becky and many of us are upset with her.
If losing or keeping your faith isn’t tied to intelligence (and I agree that it isn’t), then Becky isn’t an idiot for not losing hers, nor do she and other believers deserve to be mocked for believing. Which is, at the very least a good part of what Becky’s mad about.
Is it really “tone policing” when the tone directly hurts your friend and you keep doubling down on it anyway? I’ve usually seen it applied in a more abstract sense – or to control a discussion with people who aren’t actually being hurt by it, not to prevent someone being insulted from being allowed to be hurt by it.
Tone policing traditionally means “I don’t like your tone, therefore your argument is invalid.”
Yeah, which this really isn’t. More like, “you might be right, but you’re still being a jerk”.
Yeah, agreed. This doesn’t read like ‘You’re mad, therefore you’re wrong.’ to me either.
I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone even imply that Joyce is the same as the worst parts of fundamentalist Christianity. Many people seem to think she’s in the wrong, but I think people can still be upset with her and recognize that she hasn’t even come close to stepping over the “you are now a horrible person” line.
Nah definitely some people have been implying it.
Hm, so Joyce/Becky will be the Sal/Amber of Season 2? Like in lots of tension building because of they don’t find easy outlets for their repressed rage?
So what you’re saying is that Joyce and Becky will reconcile by beating the hell out of each other.
Like this
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/hotlink/thumbnails/crop1200x630gH2/cms/this-week-in-anime/171667/nicky_10.png.jpg
but with Joyce and Becky
Yes, and after that they will join to beat the hell out of some homophobic creationists. But Dina finds out and then they have to battle together to restrain her before she devours the whole congregation.
It turns out the entire webcomic is just an advertisement to get people to join Roller Derby.
I think they’re more like Sal and Marcie, old friends with a new conflict and a changing dynamic.
Wait: these thing about Bethelem census was really fake?? It can’t be…
Oh yeah. The census, despite being one of the driving forces of the Christmas story, does not exist in Roman records.
And that’s not even getting into what kind of census requires the people to travel.
I thought the driving force behind the Christmas Story was the “official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time”.
Even beyond that, the Gospel accounts differ greatly. The oldest Gospel, Marc, has nothing about Jesus’s birth. He mentions that Jesus came from Nazareth, but in a context that could just mean he journeyed from there, not necessarily that he was born there.
Luke introduces the census story to get the family to Bethlehem for Jesus’s birth. Matthew also need to have him born there, but instead has the family living there when Jesus was born but then having to flee to Egypt until Herod’s death. When they return they then go to live in Nazareth.
This is actually more interesting than just “The Bible is wrong because it contradicts and is made up”, since it tells us a lot about what the Gospel writers were thinking and thus what was going on in the early years of Christianity. Both Matthew and Luke are treating Jesus as a more Jewish Messiah and thus want him to fulfill that particular prophecy about where the Messiah will come from. Jesus seems to have been known to have come from Nazareth, so they need to explain that, but also have him tied to Bethlehem. They’re also the two who give extensive (but somewhat different) genealogies of Jesus to trace him back to David. Marc isn’t invested in Jesus being a Davidic Messiah, so he ignores the entire issue.
John, as usual, is off in an entirely different direction. He’s also writing almost a generation later, so in a very different part of Christianity’s development.
I just love the John Gospel so much, is so methaforical. No irony.
There is a very interesting piece called “Leave No Stone Unturned” by Dan Barker, who was a former preacher-turned-atheist.
He mentions a particular challenge: Using the bible, tell me what happened on Easter. (Easter being significant because of its importance to christianity… jesus rising from the dead and all.) If you try to, you run into all sorts of contradictions: one account has women showing up to the tomb blocked, another has the tomb already opened. One has jesus first appearing to his disciples on a mountain, another has him appearing indoors. (And that’s assuming you accept many of the more ‘supernatural’ elements… dead people being seen wandering around, great earthquakes.)
Its the fact that there were so many contradictions over arguably the most important part of the biblical story that should give believers some pause.
Showing there are contradictions is a like a parlor trick, as far as I’m concerned. It impresses the new atheists, but the literalists generally have complex answers prepared and the non-literalists don’t really care and get annoyed with people trying to make them argue on grounds that aren’t important to them – like Becky’s response to Joyce implying she’s an idiot over YEC and dinosaurs on the ark.
What I do find interesting is why the stories are different. What were the different authors trying to say with their different takes on a given event?
There was a real census of Judea in 6 AD conducted by the Roman governor of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, when the province was first annexed. And this was a typical thing for Romans to do upon first acquiring a territory, i.e., take inventory of who was there. The source on this is Josephus, “Antiquities of the Jews”. It’s possible/likely that any Roman records of the census would eventually have been lost; they wouldn’t have been needed after a certain point; parchment decays; Rome itself had at least 3 fires in the first century, although it’s also likely these records would never have left Caesaria, the provincial capital.
What Luke gets wrong, purposefully or otherwise:claiming that this was a census of the entire Empire, decreed by Augustus. There is indeed no record or evidence that the Romans ever did such a thingthe idea that everyone had to travel to their birth city to get registered, which makes zero sense from any logistical point of view, was contrary to standard Roman practice to count everybody in place,… pretty much the only way to justify it is as a contrivance to get Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem when they would otherwise have no reason to go there.
Yeah it’s fake, no record of it and the mechanics of the supposed census don’t make sense with any sort of knowledge of the methodology and purpose of census taking in Rome. Long story short why would u have to travel to your hometown if you don’t live there all the time to be censused? You contribute taxes in the locality you live and work. It’s just silly
Also this comic was the moment that it struck me like a thunderclap
“Oh right, they’re both being dumb here, right, right teenagers…Man can’t believe I forgot”
Yay being a puffy anger ball of emotions, undeveloped brains, and groundshattering realizations~!
Nothing really to debate or argue, but boy is this a fun rollercoaster of emotions to ride on.
[Imagine the “don’t make me tap the sign” meme here, but the sign has the comic’s logo on it.]
To be fair you can be dumb at ANY age :V
but then you’re just dumb, not portmanteau’d-with-“coming-of-age” dumb.
You could be coming of age.. to die? :V
haha well i guess you’re always coming of some age =)
“going of age”
My prediction: The story will critisize Joyce for becoming an atheist for the “wrong” reasons, aka, all the logical fallacies, instead of humanists reasons.
I hope it doesn’t go that way. Yes, it fits Joyce’s character to rely on rules and patterns, but her original reason was that she was open and tolarant of other people, enough to question her own beliefs.
She needs to vent this stuff, and could’ve done so in a more “agreeable” way, if she didn’t feel like having to hold her tongue for months about it, because she lost the oppression olympics to Becky.
Joyce’s first permanent damage to the big block of unending belief in rules and authority was when Becky was made to suffer because of those rules and authority and Joyce couldn’t justify on any level the idea of letting the person she loves more than anyone suffer.
Like she yelled at Becky, specifically, that she had to change because staying the same would have meant she’d turn on Becky to do it.
Someone needs to explain explicitly, NOT implicitly to Joyce that Becky probably doesn’t believe that stuff, but likely believes in the higher power stuff and the heaven stuff, and especially the love they neighbor stuff. I’m atheist and Jewish and what really stuck with me from religious school was to take the Torah seriously, not literally.
Joyce is turning into the most anoying type of atheist, the former Christian. They know what their talking about and imediatly can make alot of logical shifts when it comes to anything to do with the scriptiure. But they are ALWAYS harping on it to an anoying extent.
Even worse, they are the most focused types of atheists, they have absolutely no argument for non scripture based faiths, or even other scripture based faiths. They keep the monotheistic “Christians only” asumption going and then become tied to arguing the one thing with the one group of people.
That’s not to say Joyce’s not becoming a really interesting charecter, she’s just becoming a shitty person.
Give her time; this is all new and she was lied to her entire life.
If there’s one thing Joyce has been extremely eager to talk about since the timeskip, it’s being an atheist.
Also Joyce has no argument for non-scripture based faiths because as far as Joyce knew everyone, including Becky, processed faith exactly like her. She fundamentally (fnar fnar) does not process religious belief as an act of faith, as perceiving the world as having being created by an all-powerful God, she thinks religious beliefs are in following inerrant facts and the creation myths were all true and exactly as they were in the bible, which is not a scripture to draw interpretations but the canonical text of the origin of life and the universe, and then the people who were supposed to care and nurture her, as since they are authority figures they are objectively superior to her, began betraying her belief in them as flawless figures of justice.
That’s why that fight they just had went the way it did: Joyce was talking to the Becky she thinks exists, the Becky who knows by now that the Earth is not 6000 years old and since that part of it is wrong so is the existence of God himself so why is Becky clinging onto something obviously untrue, while Becky was talking to the Joyce she thinks exists, the Joyce who was removing all the unimportant stuff of their upbringing and was able to roll with faith in God once reality contradicted what she was told.
Your absouletly right, this is an extremely realistic charecterisation. She based her faith on literal ideas of textual beleifs and she has a vary different concept of Faith from Becky.
These arguments reveal a deep-seated concept that Joyce needs to ask herself and consider. I just hope she gets to it.
OK I may feel like an idiot after I read the comments and without an edit function, but this is still Joyce and Becky being failed by their upbringing, about things they couldn’t learn growing up in the families that raised them. Even after being friends with Dorothy and seeing a different model, Joyce is behaving exactly like she was raised to think that atheists always behave toward religion, mocking and derisive. As if some part of her brain were thinking; “I’m an atheist now, I should be confrontational about it.”
And Becky, her feelings legitimately hurt, is being quick to judge while carefully compartmentalizing how she feels about atheism in the context of her relationship with Dina.
Deconversion was a long process for me, but I went through a whole bunch of conflicting feelings. The only thing that saved me from being mean to my Christian friends was my barely concealed social anxiety. So instead it manifested as depression, which I also hid from everyone. But I did eventually figure out that believers aren’t perforce idiots, including me when I was a believer. We are very much a product of the culture we live in. And changing core beliefs can be as much a matter of identifying with a new culture as of adopting a different philosophy. This is one of the things that makes change so difficult; it is a social leap into the darkness.
And that change of identification is what strains relationships from your previous culture, unless you also understand about giving close friends permission to think differently because they are not you. Like insisting your friend play along with comforting thoughts about departed mother, or (other direction) your friend be “smart” and come around to your unbelief.
Their friendship will be crushed if they don’t give each other room to move around and be wrong and figure things out.
Yep, should have read the comments first. Wack’d already nailed it.
eh, fwiw yours was still a good read. different angles approaching a similar core, &c.
What Joyce is missing here is this: It’s fine to be an unbeliever, but it’s not fine to belittle people because they are believers. It’s fine to belittle a concept, but it’s not fine to belittle people.
If Joyce thinks she was stupid to believe in a Christian god who loves her, it’s pretty fucked up to expect her to NOT think other people are being stupid to believe in Christian gods that love THEM. That’s just self-loathing with extra steps. In her own head, Joyce shouldn’t have to treat other people better than she treats herself. And she shouldn’t be expected to never ever say what’s in her head because someone from her college might stumble upon her and be hurt by it.
Also, there’s a bunch of ethical problems with an omni-etc God, especially one who answers prayers and actively effects the world like Becky believes. Joyce hasn’t touched on them, but it probably hurts her (now that she’s out of it) that Becky unconditionally loves something so morally questionable, who maybe loves Becky but didn’t seem to love Joyce (or else He would have let her feel Him). This isn’t only a problem about historical facts for Joyce, even if that’s what’s easy for her to point to right now.
also I was fine the rest of the week but I guess today I’m feeling more sensitive about how life is awful and unfair, cuz the comments are making me real upset. I’m gonna go play some crosswords instead of continuing to think about this.
yo, mood. the smug self-satisfaction in some of ’em has been a real yikeroni salad.
“And she shouldn’t be expected to never ever say what’s in her head because someone from her college might stumble upon her and be hurt by it.”
This is objectively true and you should say it.
OTOH, while Joyce’s new beliefs are understandable and we shouldn’t expect her to never say them or to treat other people better than herself or to generally not screw up, we also shouldn’t expect Becky to not be hurt by them or to not immediately understand or forgive, especially when Joyce keeps doubling down on what hurt her the first time.
Joyce is behaving in a healthy way that will (or would’ve, if Becky and Dorothy hadn’t shown up) help her with her problems, and the alternatives would be harmful for her. On that other hand, just because what Becky’s doing is expectable doesn’t mean it’s healthy. She’s feeling hurt by the reality of Joyce being angry at religion, which sucks, and she’s trying to find someone to hold responsible for her hurt. But sometimes life just hurts and no one’s the bad guy who did it to you.
Becky has been failing as a friend for a lot longer than today. I think she’s completely out of line to try to block Joyce from her education. But the rest of it is just Becky continuing on her track of not being a good friend, and I probably wouldn’t mind how she responded today if it wasn’t part of a larger issue.
Also, Joyce didn’t screw up here.
Eh I’m definitely #TeamJoyce for the specifics but this is a big messy scenario where she and Becky were using the same words to have two different conversations and the reason it got so bad is that Becky is a possessive nutbar having never been an indication not to be and Joyce treats her as a helpless damsel to protect from cruelty, so they built a relationship of deep emotional love and affection where neither of them could ever allow themselves to think a problem between them existed, let alone vocalize it.
their friendship became so important to the both of them while simultaneously being completely unable to talk about anything that could prove challenging, faith in particular, and it all bubbled over at once where Becky goes and stalks Joyce to assert herself as Joyce’s best friend because in any other scenario Joyce would think that was charming, and then once that part of their friendship finally proved problematic they get to the part where we find out they never realized they’ve approached religious belief differently than the other the whole time, but because they can’t conceive of the other believing differently than them they just keep insisting on their own points long enough that it all collapses and they pin the blame on the other as the true culprit.
They’ve been best friends their whole lives and it took them an entire 10 minutes to dismiss the other as bullheadedly stupid and wrong, because Joyce and Becky never learned how to think the other could make a mistake and then they learned the other was making the biggest, most wrong mistake imaginable.
“Screw-up” does feel descriptive of an immediate mistake and in that regard I agree, let alone that this is just a big ugly mess where it’s not about right or wrong.
Joyce, you don’t have to apologize for no longer believing. You need to apologize for being an insufferable asshole about it, and lying to your friend.
Okay the insufferable part I can get, but the lying?
Why’s Becky gotta know she’s an atheist now when Joyce understands so little about it that she’s twice been unable to call herself one?
Or like, if Joyce wants to keep it to herself for any reason, why does Becky have any say in that?
Yeah, that was kind of a lose/lose situation for Joyce: lie to Becky (and risk a worse fallout when the lie gets exposed) about believing or tell her she doesn’t really think her Mom is still there somewhere. She picked the one that seemed better in the moment, but, well…
Doesn’t mean she shouldn’t still apologize.
I don’t think Joyce should be held accountable, either in terms of responsibility for the current crisis or even clearing the air of strong feelings to calmly talk about it (because Joyce and Becky could never do this on the topic of theology), for having deeply complex thoughts about her upbringing and newfound shattered belief that Becky only learned because she thought being a clingy weirdo made her a huge badass and she and Dorothy cyberstalked Liz to find Joyce so they could insert themselves into her day.
Becky gets to have feelings on Joyce being an atheist. In particular, we learned that their friendship was completely and sincerely loving but with the subtext of emotional codependency where a sufficiently large fight about theology is enough to, seemingly and for the time being, shatter it, and that codependency is something Joyce and Becky nurtured in each other where Becky could do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted with her Joyce, and Joyce thought this was awesome and made Becky a cool rebel.
But Becky doesn’t deserve an apology for being lied to about something she doesn’t have the right to know in the first place, let alone when that something is of the utmost importance to Joyce and we just saw why Becky would never be able to handle it and especially not when Joyce herself barely understands her own feelings on atheism.
On the specific subject of Joyce lying about being an atheist, as in Joyce has been dodging the question a whole bunch and when she couldn’t do it on Bonnie’s birthday Becky demanded she pull the Joyce Nonsense out of her head right this second, Becky’s feelings don’t actually matter.
I’d apologize to my friend if I hurt them like Joyce did Becky by lying about believing her dead Mom is still around. Doesn’t matter if she deserves an apology, this isn’t about carmic debt, just, I would want my friend to know I’m sorry they’re hurting, and that I’m sorry I did that.
In my experience, that helps.
So I think that’s what Joyce should do.
Also, why’s Becky gotta know she’s an atheist, when the last time Joyce said anything in that vein Becky was super condescending about it.
I mean yeah.
Joyce’s own grappling with what it means to an atheist is both already hard enough and something she needs to think about on her own time, but Becky’s already proven herself to be someone who can’t handle Joyce questioning her on their beliefs.
Why? Because eventually something like this would happen and it’ll be worse than telling her upfront would be.
That’s not a moral judgment that Joyce had an obligation to tell her or anything, just that some scene like this is a predictable consequence of not doing so. Keeping secrets from close friends is risky. You need to weigh that risk.
It wasn’t risky at all because Becky could either react the same way or react the same way but maybe in a different shirt.
And she might be wearing a Cool Beans shirt instead and the argument would ruin it for her so she’d never be able to wear that shirt again. And that would be sad.
(It is a Gunnerkrigg Court reference.)
I understand you think that. I disagree.
Even when there is a fundamental disagreement, coming at it without starting with mockery and insults gives you a better chance of a decent response.
Ye, basically.
No, I don’t think she needs to apologize for lying there. Like, what was she gonna do, admit to being an atheist while attempting to make Becky feel better about her dead mom?
“Oh Becky, it’s terrible that your mom died and I really want to make you feel better about it.”
“That’s okay, my mom’s in heaven right now watching us.”
“Well actually, I’m pretty sure that’s not real, and also God is fake.”
Like, there is ZERO CHANCE that works well. It ends up being the opposite of what she’s attempting to do. Instead of helping her friend, she ends up in a throw down fight like what literally just happened, and makes her friend’s tragedy all about herself.
Lying is bad, but there was literally no other option in that situation. The most you can apologize for is “Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner so I didn’t have to lie.”
Bonus question: Does last-panel Joyce mean “she’ll come around [to my stance]” or “she’ll come around [to understanding my stance]”?
The former, 100%, based on the context.
Because if Joyce understood Becky’s stance, she’d know that Becky would not give a single solitary shit about any of her rant in Panel 5.
Yeah definitely the former.
Becky is smart and not an idiot, therefore Becky can definitely figure this out the Earth isn’t 6000 years old and once she does she’ll understand God isn’t real.
Much like how Joyce has morally failed in Becky’s eyes, because Becky thinks she only ever had faith to begin with because it made her better than other people when the reality is Joyce never had faith at all.
The first one. There’s a right position and Joyce has it. The brands just got swapped.
The former. She is parroting Liz’s stance and completely ignoring that Becky told her two minutes ago those parts were never the parts that were important to her. She is basically projecting by assuming these are the parts that matter as they mattered to her.
I sense people are going to be mad but I’m proud of her.
The thing is, regardless of what it’s about, Joyce has *no* give. She’s not renowned for her flexibility, whether it’s about food, or how a religious service should go or… well, you see it. So when she *does* change positions, it’ll be as iron clad as the last time, and also attacking herself for not always having thought that way.
Honestly, from a plot perspective I can see why the early stuff came in when it did, because if people didn’t feel protective of her, I couldn’t see them bothering with her.
I don’t think that’s what Becky wants, though. I don’t think Joyce’s beliefs are the point here, more like… the lying. And the unearned sense of superiority.
Honestly what hits me here is Sarah’s face. I am dealing with something like what she is saying in real life right now, a friend I trusted shared a story about me with a coworker I dislike and when I got mad at her replied with “I am sorry you got upset about that story but it was embarrassing for me too.”
My mom always taught me that if I am going to apologize, I can never follow it up with justification. Even if I *feel* justified that isn’t the time for it. Either you apologize and admit your part in the behaviors or if you can’t figure out the underlying issue you ask and adjust behavior.
I agree Becky has behaviors that *really* need adjusting, but honestly most of those are ones that she needs to be exposed to a wider friend group and that is starting. I have also been where Joyce is (not in the sense of religion but I used to be a rather… intellectual elitist *jerk*) and it took a close friend of mine to get hurt to make me re-evaluate. But I had the benefit of having a wider worldview that was flexible. Until Joyce learns to bend instead of snapping she will not be happy. She is angry, at her past self, at her family and at the world. And that just makes me sad for her.
Mmm, yeah. I’m kinda the same, I’m looking at Dorothy’s face here and going “…ah, so you’ve also met this flavor of Atheist…” and offering her a shot of rum.
I don’t think Joyce was “lying” because she wasn’t ready to open up about a serious inner conflict that was hurting her badly. I mean, if she was, then it should begin with Becky apologizing for the years she “lied” about her sexuality.
There’s plenty Joyce is doing wrong in this story, but not lying. She opened up to the people she felt safe around. While Joyce is figuring out what she did wrong, maybe Becky can sit with the question of why the friend she’s been leaning on for years was more comfortable going to people she’s known less than a year instead of her best friend.
I’m pretty sure it’s canonical that Becky wasn’t lying about her sexuality. She basically figured it out at Anderson. She said somewhere that it took some time away from Joyce to figure it out.
Yeah but she kept quiet about it the whole day visiting when she was super shaken up by getting forcibly outed, Katelin turning on her, her dad pulling her out of school to take her to conversion therapy, and then desperately escaping to IU so that she could live with Joyce forever since Joyce has also always been in love with Becky.
Which, obviously, makes her a fucking liar.
I know what you’re doing here, but really, could you just not.
For a single day, without actually hurting Joyce with those lies, in complete trauma, while she was working her courage up to tell Joyce. Which she did.
As opposed to concealing it for months, which required direct lies touching on Becky’s grief about her mom, as Becky discovered when she found Joyce mocking her religion behind her back – with no reason to think she hadn’t been doing so all along, even when supposedly comforting her.
But Becky’s the real problem here.
… Okay so I know “it was just a prank bro” is pretty much always an admission that a joke is not funny and badly told, I will take that L.
I just have no idea how you read that as anything but “yeah holy shit complicated feelings in the face of life-altering events are not a good mix and people who are currently going through significantly traumatic incidents can’t be expected to act like robots who need a second to compute the best answer possible.”
First of all, we don’t know exactly when Becky learned she was a lesbian. It has been suggested she only figured it out when she went to college, but ‘figuring it out’ could have also referred to her attraction to Joyce.
Secondly, even if you assume Becky was only lying for a day (or a few days, if her “experimentation” went on for a while before she was caught), there was significantly more pressure for her to tell the truth to Joyce… Ross could have shown up at any moment, which meant that she NEEDED to come clean as quickly as possible. There was no such pressure for Joyce… no risk of anyone dragging her from school or being arrested by the church police… which meant she could pick and choose the best time to raise the issue.
oh my god no come on
she ran away in a terrible panic
Yes, Becky did flee Anderson in panic. I’m not sure how that contradicts anything I said.
Its because of the panic that she should have told Joyce immediately on her arrival that she was gay and what had happened. Because a delay in telling Joyce that information would have risked everything. That’s why Becky’s lie was so significant (even if it lasted a shorter period than Joyce’s Christian/Atheist lie.)
can you not compare coming out of the closet to telling someone you’re an atheist
In some cases it’s a reasonable comparison. Becky coming out to her dad as an atheist wouldn’t have been much better than coming out as a lesbian.
I assumed that the “figuring it out” line wasn’t about Becky figuring out that she was lesbian (something she probably knew for some time), but that she was specifically interested in JOYCE.
Plus, in the cartoon that preceded that, Joyce points out that Becky never really had an interest in boys. (Which doesn’t automatically make her a lesbian, but it is sort of an indicator that she had an idea about her sexual preferences long before college.)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/jealous/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/away/
Oof, I forgot they both have a tendency to project themselves onto the other.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/hindsight/
“You have to feel the same way. You just have to” ended up being pretty damn prophetic, huh.
Possible, I suppose, though I’m not sure why you think she probably knew. Especially given the sexual repression she grew up programmed with.
I’m still not going to accuse her of lying for years over something she might or might not have known.
The birthday party with Becky’s mom put her into a situation where she either had to lie and say she believed in heaven, or come clean.
And frankly coming clean then would likely go over worse then how things went here
Yea, lying is not what’s wrong with Joyce right now. Faith is a highly personal thing and if your struggle is with being okay with not having faith going to someone whose super invested in it is the wrong person. That person will only advocate for the religion and never properly validate a non-religious perspective.
This is all so realistic! In my head I’m screaming to Dorothy to stay out of it interfering will only end badly for her. (Experience talking!)
I mean yeah that’s actually true.
Joyce and Becky just gotta be as rip roaring pissed as long as they need to be before the consequence of not having the other around anymore gets to them.
The one think that Dorothy could say that might really help, is to remind Joyce that when they met, Joyce was a christian that Dorothy accepted as a friend, despite her religious leanings.
And yet, Dorothy allowed YOU that courtesy from the moment you two met. And your friendship flourished. Oh Joyce, don’t lose the faith. I hope you reconcile what you once believed and keep an open mind. Becky – stay strong! Forgive Joyce and keep that friendship alive!
And the drifting starts where she starts seeing her friends as enemies. Both Joyce and Becky have been failed hard
I love that Wack’d did such a good job summarising that there’s basically little to be said about the strip, truly a masterful take if ever there was one
I feel for Becky. Becky’s faith and belief is a loving god has been an anchor for her whole life despite everything that’s happened to her. That faith in a loving god led her to toss out many of the hurtful beliefs her childhood church and family taught her because the god Becky knows wouldn’t hate or disown a child/ young person for being gay so therefore the church had to be wrong not her. Becky has already reconciled her childhood beliefs with her adult reality to find her truth and meaningful for her, and the hurt she feel seems more to do with Joyce being unable to do the same. It’s not that Joyce doesn’t believe in God that hurt, but that in her mind Joyce is unable to reconcile the idea of a god that could love Becky unconditionally with the things she was taught and therefore God can’t exist. That was my take away from their conversation and of course that’s painful. It’s not that Joyce doesn’t believe in God it’s that Joyce wasn’t able to believe in a God that would love Becky unconditionally. Joyce’s journey to Atheism makes perfect sense but so does Becky finding strength in her faith. I kinda hope Joyce and Becky are better able to talk things out because the hurt seems less about leaving religion and more about further personal rejection.
I agree 100% with you.
I wonder if Becky process involves her losing her faith, too…
Those glasses have really gone to her head.
Well yeah, that’s where they go.
That’s just what what Big Eyesight want you to believe.
noooooooooo
There’s a reason you get stressed and develop health issues when you’re not thinking right! People shouldn’t want to turn their friends into enemies, but that’s what ideology can do—atheism included.
(speaking as a guy who flip-flops between agnosticism and full atheism)
Niiiiice, absolutely everyone with a concerned or disappointed face, congratulation Joyce <3
Oy, no mocking. Upsetting a spectrum of personalities that includes Dorothy, Sarah, and Joe in a single move is pro-level stuff. That shit takes TALENT.
This phrase popped into my head right now when I started thinking about Joyce’s faith in inerrant facts versus Becky’s faith in God’s love for her, and I wanted to see what anyone else thought about it:
Becky’s continued faith in God exists because she had Joyce and friends to protect her over and over, thus reinforcing to Becky that God’s love worked through them and it’s the people doing wrong in Becky’s life who are full of shit.
As in the “unimportant stuff” only became as such to Becky once she had ultimate proof of the important stuff, she now had enough stability that she could start critically analyzing when reality got in the way of what she was told, and that stability allowed her to accept that reality mattered more and she could still be faithful to God, because she felt his presence through his miracles.
…and now that I think about it, I wonder if Joyce’s insistent on Factual Belief and that Becky herself needs to get with the times is, to Becky and that specific view of God’s love, an admission that Joyce didn’t actually do the things she did for the reasons Becky thinks they happened.
Like, Joyce saving her life isn’t all the evidence Becky needed that life is wonderful and miracles can happen, it’s just A Thing that Joyce did while she was getting her faith wrong, and maybe she otherwise wouldn’t have done it.
That feels like a bit too much extrapolation on my part, but I thought it sounded cool enough to say it.
Someone being rescued from an abusive father will have a different perspective than the rescuer who knew they couldn’t rely on their community and had to take action themselves.
In a strip that I cannot currently find FOR THE LIFE OF ME, early Joyce has, in fact, told Dorothy that all the good things she did was god acting through her. Dorothy’s reaction was the proper one at the ridiculous level of cringe involved in the statement.
Wasn’t it about the time we found Walky was in those Christian children’s videos?
Yep, right around there.
You are correct, and here it is:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/02-i-was-a-teenage-churchmouse/mysterious/
I don’t know about you but, despiste all drama, I’m loving new Joyce a lot.
New Joyce with kung-fu grip
Joe can only hope.
I love that second-to-last panel and the idea that she’s too smart to mentally tie herself in knots anymore.
Gonna be honest here, I don’t get how anyone thinks Joyce is the good guy in this. Her breaking point was that part of her faith is wrong, therefore all of it was wrong. She’s dealing in absolutes here, and who are the only people to deal in absolutes? That’s right, Sith. Joyce is a Sith and is therefore evil and in the wrong. QED.
Of course, “only a sith deals in absolutes” is, in itself, an absolute, so therefore you are also a Sith and, according to yourself, evil and in the wrong.
I think the point of the thing is that the only support for the content of the Bible is the Bible itself, and if one thing is a demonstrable deliberate lie, why would she believe the rest?
You take that back and stop taking this comment seriously or you’ll get a lightsaber somewhere unpleasant.
I will not and you can’t make me. YOU’RE NOT MY MUM!
We all had lightsabers somewhere unpleasant, anyway. Three somewheres, in fact. They’re called “the prequels”.
4 somewheres. You forgot Rise of Skywalker. And I’d argue that Revenge of the Sith mainly pulled it’s own weight.
If you haven’t read it, one of the earlier comments by Wack’d presents the viewpoint that this is less about who is wrong, and more about the mistakes that they’ve both made.
I’m unsure if this is a joke comment or not, but I recommend it either way.
Joyce being a Sith sounds like a pretty serious conclusion. You don’t toy with the Dark Side.
The thing is, when you are dealing with logic, reason, and facts, then absolutes do absolutely matter. The sky is blue, the earth goes around the sun, etc. The idea that “there is no proof that god exists and no reason to believe so” is an absolute because, well, its where evidence and logic take us.
And rejecting religion because “if part is wrong, all is wrong” is logical, because if you end up engaging in some sort of cafeteria-style religion, you can never know whether you are actually dealing with ‘god’ or not.
The main problem with Joyce is not that she ‘believes in absolutes’, but that she needs to 1) be able to explain herself better, and 2) accept that other people are going to believe in irrational things, regardless of the evidence
Hi, please fuck off with your attempt to start a religious debate. I’m not here for that. Thank you and goodbye.
Love that her comic alter ego is Julia Grey, since Joyce isn’t capable of seeing grey or nuances. Whatever she believes is right and others should get on board. She takes after her mother more than a bit. With any luck she’ll talk to her sister about this before it ends her friendship with Becky.
That’s how you know Julia is her idealized Mary Sue.
Julia sees nuance! She’s nothing like her mother! She’s cool under pressure! She doesn’t care if a pea rolls across her plate and touches her macaroni and cheese!
Congratulations! Your JOYCE has evolved into ANGRYATHEIST!
I can only hope she needs no special stones to evolve further.
Which class is up next, that Becky advised Joyce not to go to?
Pol-sci, the one Joyce is ditching so she can deliver her comic submission on time.
Political science, the one Robin is somehow teaching, for reasons.
(It’s so she can stick around in the plot.)
Damn!
My feelings for Joyce are also evolving.
A nitpick maybe, but Joyce would know that one of the genealogies is through Joseph and the other is through Mary. That’s why they don’t have to match up. The number of possible genealogies a person has doubles every generation you go back.
Joyce didn’t mention the genealogies. She’s talking about the census. The Roman-decreed census that sent Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Joseph’s supposed ancestral home of Bethlehem, where Jesus is stated to be born.
Though you probably don’t want to get into the genealogies either. Joyce has probably already wondered why one is half the length of the other and why a genealogy from anybody to Jesus’s adopted non-biological father even matters. (That one of them is actually for Mary is made up in order to explain why they’re different. Both claim in-text to be to Joseph.)
Had to take a break, this storyline hit me hard a bit. So when I lost my faith, I immediately came out to all my family. I was in the Navy at the time, away from my Christian friends. For me, more than anything else, it was the silence of God, the lack of explanation for the nonsense. So, when I came out to my mother, she kept trying to use Scripture to justify believing in Scripture. After a couple futile attempts at explaining how that doesn’t really work, I started laughing. That set her off, and she disowned me. Short version, she got over it and we have a good relationship now, though I can’t really talk about atheism without making her cry or get angry. What I’ve learned the hard way from that is that faith is deeply personal to people, and that just because you lose faith, doesn’t mean someone else will, with the same rationale. Because your atheism only means as much as it does to you, when you’ve had years of faith. You can’t push other people into an epiphany, no more than you would’ve been pushed at the height of your own faith. Joyce is wrong right now, but I truly relate to her, because that is how I was when I first became an atheist. Honesty with her close friends would’ve hurt them a lot less, even though Becky likely wouldn’t change her beliefs. Also just throwing this out there, Liz is terrible.
An archive trawl for another comment turned up this comic, which I think helps frame Becky’s mindset of “all the good things we do are God working through us”:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/remembrance/
(Content warning – Carol’s in this one.)
Ooh, and another good one highlighting Joyce’s reluctance to broach the subject with Becky!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/gaggle/
I must apologize if this has been covered already, but 545 comments are an awful lot to read.
Before I begin, I cannot emphasize this enough; Joyce and Becky have both experienced multiple extremely traumatic events closely related to their religious community in very recent history and are both comporting themselves far better than I could in such a situation. They’ve collectively been through an attempted rape by a preacher’s son, multiple abductions, and the violent, bloody murders of friends and loved ones; all in the span of a semester. Maybe cut the kids some damn slack if they aren’t at their very best right now.
Now, that being said, they way I read it, the conflict between Joyce and Becky has almost nothing at all to do with Joyce being mean. The entire conversation on the steps was superficial. The entire fight is subtext and even they might not realize that.
Joyce’s faith is (or was) one built on identity. Joyce was a Christian first and foremost and her beliefs followed from that identity. That is, she was not a Christian because she believed. She believed because she was a Christian. That Christian identity gave her a community. It gave her a family that loved and supported her. It gave her fellowship with other Christians. As long as she obeyed the rules and believed with all her heart, she would be a part of a strong community that gave her all the love and validation she could ever want.
Becky’s faith was far more personal. It had to be. She didn’t have the strong sense of community. She had an abusive Christian dad. She had a Christian church that either ignored or endorsed Ross’ abuse. She had a community that made her hide part of herself out of fear for her entire life until now. I can’t imagine Becky ever felt like Christians were her community. Instead, she had a personal faith, faith in a God that was there to love and protect her through the horrors of living with Ross. Her faith gave her comfort and hope when those things were hard to find. And, critically in all this, it brought her Joyce.
Joyce was Becky’s rock and sometimes her hard place, too (it can be hard to be so very gay for your best friend). She was a beacon of Godly love that Becky was often told about but seldom shown; a love that was earnest and excited and unconditional. Yes, Becky’s very possessive of that relationship and yes, that is a problem they need to work on; but we certainly can’t fault her for it.
This difference in faith has been highlighted before. When Becky came out, Joyce went looking for loopholes (she did this for Dorothy, too). She went looking for ways to change the requisite beliefs of her community. She clearly didn’t think Becky deserved Hell for being a lesbian, but she had to find a way to square it with her Christian identity. Becky was completely uninterested in Joyce’s exegesis. She had no need to conform to a Christian community. She was happy to say “Of course God doesn’t have a problem with lesbians. He wouldn’t have made me gay if he did.”
Little by little, Joyce’s Christian identity has been cracking, though. Every time her faith came into conflict with her compassion, it was her faith that yielded. It was slow going and her friends showed her much more patience than she deserved (the quest to turn Ethan straight was especially awful of her), but she was putting in the work. After the second abduction, though, it finally broke. Her mother, her brother, Ross, the church; they were no longer a community she wanted to be any part of. That Christian identity was no longer a source of anything good. So she cast it off and her beliefs along with it.
She wasn’t reasoned out of her beliefs. She couldn’t have been because she wasn’t reasoned into them. She didn’t see evidence that the Pentateuch wasn’t written by Moses and suddenly realize that the whole Bible must therefore be wrong. She lost her motivation to believe otherwise.
Becky never had that motivation to believe in the stories. “Those were never the important parts”. She was motivated to believe in the messages of love and compassion and grace. Her dad couldn’t take that away.
Hence the conflict. Joyce can’t understand why Becky would still believe when she sees those beliefs as a symbol of the people who tried to kill her. Becky is hurt because she sees Joyce’s rejection of faith as a rejection of the love and grace they have shown to each other all these years. Joyce want’s Becky to escape with her. Becky feels abandoned.
Now, like I said, that’s just the way I see it. I might be giving them both too much credit or reading a lot more into the text than is there. But I swear to a whole pantheon of gods I don’t even believe in that if Joyce starts reading Sam Harris I will absolutely shit. Her whole story has been about slowly becoming a better person and I would hate to see it all thrown away like that.
“Joyce want’s Becky to escape with her. Becky feels abandoned.”
Very well put.
Fuck yeah.
It is so weird to me to see so much commentary these last two weeks entirely focused on what’s happening at a surface level “Joyce is lashing out and being mean like an angry atheist” with zero understanding of how deeply, painfully personal all of this has gotten for the both of them on every level.
And this ain’t wild and destructive lashing out, not really, this is Joyce and Becky obliterating the foundations of their existing friendship and one day we’re gonna see them rebuild it a thousand times better than what it was before; where Joyce can trust Becky with shit instead of picturing her as made of glass and unable to support Joyce as she has Becky, where Becky doesn’t need Joyce to exist in a box that she can constantly cling to whenever the urge hits her, where the two of them can exist as individual people who can think differently than the other without it being indicative of a great wrong in the universe that has to be rejected and filed away to be forgotten.
‘Cause the real inerrant fact of these two is that they’d tear the sky down for each other, and they’re gonna see it too eventually.
I agree with all of this, I’d just like to emphasize that when you lose a loved one like Becky did with her mom, you hold onto faith to hold onto them as well. I’ve mentioned in a previous comment I’ve never been religious but I did believe in God until my late teens, because I lost my dad as a small child and needed there to be an afterlife for him to still be with me.
as someone who grew up in a mildly religious house (presbyterian, one of the more chill and boring denominations) and figured out as a teen that none of it was real, i find myself sticking to what i’ve heard called the first rule of athiesm, namely “don’t be an asshole”
i’ll argue politics all day long but arguing faith vs non-faith feels unseemly; the whole [i]point[/i] of “faith” is that it’s immune to argument
You ever get the impression that most peoples’ personalities are just one big trauma response?
Because this is one big trauma response.
… she’s not wrong, but
“she’ll come around”, really ?