You misunderstand, she isn’t losing her love of scalps(particularly Dina’s,) she is simply adding new ones to her list, today’s addition was shoulders.
I’d suspect it correlation rather than causation… I would say the environment where burqas are mostly popular (to use your wording) is pretty toxic for man/woman relations: burqas are seen as necessary to prevent the objectification of women, and are not really a choice on their part, in those parts of the world. Though I have nothing against burqas themselves (and I know some women actually chose to wear them in other places), the culture that makes them mandatory seems quite toxic to me.
I mean, I’m a leg man myself. The fact that showing legs in public is acceptable gives me no end of joy. I consider it a very worthwhile fetish to have cultivated.
Forgive my “actually” evangelism, but point of interest, fetishes (technical term paraphilias) are both innate and something you can’t be aroused without; if Becky had a shoulder fetish she’d have to be touching or thinking about them all the time. I think she’s just in affectionate lust with Dina and thus likes every part of her, especially the suddenly naked ones, but it IS possible she’s developing a “shoulder” kink; kinks being the ones that can develop and are malleable. Fetishes basically saddle you from birth with somethin’ weirrrrd and permanent.
That’s the psychiatric definition. And yes, the fact that there is a psychiatric definition of the words “fetish” and “kink” is itself relying on some very strange logic.
As a lesbian I’ve noticed non-genitals are often a bigger source of arousal. For me hands and shoulders. Also necks. Ever been next to a girl when she pushes her hair over her shoulder and exposes her neck? Or exactly what Dina’s doing here…. I reckon she knows what she’s doing… she’s doing it for science.
More likely that it will change but the guilt and shame will follow it and she will be racked with the negative emotions that come from beliefs she no longer has.
source: life experience
Well, at least Joyce is using the meme correctly, even if she is lacking a bat to drive the point home. She should find herself a horny bat, it stops them pretty well from what I’ve seen.
Shoulders are fine and all, but really nice wrists presented right… jebus.
Meanwhile, it’s been generally accepted wisdom as long as I can remember that just about any body part accentuated right by clothing that properly highlights it or by the act of removing clothing that normally hides it is significantly hotter than just seeing that body part fully exposed on it’s own.
EXACTLY. Honestly when it comes to lewd stuff I kinda lose a lot of interest after the clothes come off. It’s the taking OFF of the clothes that makes it sexy! A naked person is just…naked. But a person with clothes on taking them off? Beautiful.
It was a super esoteric one, so I’m not surprised nobody got it. It’s from the Fire Emblem series.
Basically, haughty and sheltered Princess/Healer offers to heal a more martial prince, who’s like “Oh, awesome. I injured my shoulder earlier. Here, let me remove part of my armor.” and she flips out like he flashed her.
i remember at the time on twitter at one point some of my friends/acquaintances within the same social circle/fandom was really into collarbones at the time lol
Tbh their church growing up probably slut shamed girls for showing shoulder, like American public schools do. And Becky did say that the insane amount of modesty they were taught programmed her brain to think anything covered up = sexy
It’s literally free on my end so go for it lol.
Alternatively, Emma Blackery used to have a series on YouTube reading through the series with guests. Idk if its still up but you can look into it. Ravished by the Triceratops is my personal favourite
hahaha ok thanks for the recommendation XD
yeah, i think it comes “free” with a Kindle subscription? i don’t have that, but also it seems to be available elsewhere, well anyway i’ll look into it =D
There is, of course, a somewhat well-known Hassidic midrash to that effect, with the tl;dr of it being, more or less, “G-d made atheists to remind people to do good things because you know them to be good, rather than because you believe G-d has commanded them”
i mean… that explanation begs more questions than it answers. Like, if a lack of knowledge is what produced religion in the first place then why are religions going so strong today? how did the invention of gods help with the lack of explanations about the world exactly, like what was so convincing about invisible beings that it didn’t feel like a transparent cop-out and just-so story? why do religions seem to revolve so much around social behaviour, rather than natural phenomena?
i don’t know. i feel like that narrative is a bit convenient from the point of view of modern scientifically literate atheists.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “explain things they didn’t have the science to understand”, but it’s not that far off.
There’s a strong psychological need for there to be meaning. For things that happen to make sense. Especially bad things. We see this often in abuse victims, who can blame the abuse on their own bad behavior. This is a way of taking some illusory control, rather than just accepting that it’s completely beyond you and you can be hurt at a whim and there’s nothing you can do about it.
It’s easy to see how in a past with so much less knowledge about and so much more dependence on things like weather and wild game and flooding and similar natural events that the same psychological need would apply. Personifying those things doesn’t just explain them, it means you can try to propitiate them.
Even today, the same kind of need exists, it’s just more abstract and less tied to natural features. We don’t want to believe that the world is just impersonal and random. It’s comforting to think that there is meaning behind it all and maybe a way to keep the bad stuff from happening to us, just by following the rules.
I’ve been kind of thinking about this because I was talking to my Mom about our sailing experiences when I was a kid and particularly about our first offshore passage from North Carolina down to Puerto Rico (though we were trying to get to St. Thomas). I was young and don’t really remember it clearly or really understood it at the time, but talking to her and reading some bits from the journals she and Dad kept at the time, it was kind of a hell passage. Rough weather, constantly shifting winds so they had to be changing or at least adjusting sails at all hours, some gear failures and other troubles mostly tied to a newly refitted boat and their inexperience. About two weeks with minimal sleep and constant stress. Finally getting down to the Caribbean, where the balmy trade winds were supposed to be waiting, to be hit by another storm blowing basically from our destination and blocking out sight of land.
The journals talk a lot about their state of mind and despite being modern educated atheists with a good understanding of weather patterns, in the stress of those last days they’d moved well into the “more than coincidence, something doesn’t want us to get to St. Thomas, we’re being punished for thinking we could do this” mindset.
It went away when we’d arrived, gotten some sleep and heard stories of other people’s hell trips through the same storms, but I can easily see those same attitudes leading to those beliefs hardening in a time with less knowledge. Especially when it all didn’t turn out well.
hmm, yeah i see what you mean. this strong desire and sense that there’s got to be someone, some sentient, powerful “thing” we can appeal to when we’re going through scary times, might be a really deep instinct in a social species such as we.
i still think the “humans invented gods to explain nature because they didn’t know better” narrative feels like it obfuscates more than it explains, probably because it’s such a common trope at this point. maybe it’s because i’ve heard it repeated so many times, and used to believe it unquestioningly myself, i’m more interested in deconstructing it and challenging it than in consolidating it at this point.
But yeah, i get your point, i don’t think i’ve ever been in the kind of situation you describe but certainly when you’re literaly fearing for your life for an extended period of time, you are more likely to turn to religion.
maybe what has contributed to the spread of atheism in western industrialized nations isn’t so much science per se, as much as a fairly sturdy social structure and the sense that we are more or less sheltered from the possibilty of random catastrophe or violence.
i mean, that’s a very simplistic narrative as well, there are certainly many other factors.
I’m sure that Dina would be happy to explain the evolutionary history of shoulders, including brachiation and throwing. Perhaps even demonstrating the relative range of motion at each step in the process. Of course she’ll wait until she’s somewhere private with Becky, because she knows Joyce doesn’t want to hear it.
Joyce might want to hear about that now, though I don’t think Dina is aware of how Joyce has changed yet. And Becky definitely would want to hear about it, though she’d probably be too distracted by the horny to be fully paying attention if Dina’s demonstrating with her own shoulders.
I’m actually happy with this line of thought from Becky.
Mainly because . . . I’ve run into a *lot* of other people on the left, especially years ago when I began to shift from my moderately conservative upbringing to where I am now, that believed and LOUDLY professed that anyone believing in god was an idiot, that religion is a scam, and spirituality is for the less evolved.
Despite my myself not being all that religious, like I’ve *never* been a believer and never had faith, but even then I believed that *Something* was out there, it really **really** got one my nerves.
I think the last time I saw this attitude by someone I respected, it was during a Mass Effect Andromeda stream where the streamer mocked Suvi’s believe in a God and believing in science. This combined with mocking Ashley’s own religion as being out of place in a sci-fi setting by the same and other streamers.
Well that attitude has forever been stuck in my craw.
But yes I rambled a bit there. Strip funny, Becky go to Repressed Horny Jail.
o3o I concur. I’ve never believed in god but I don’t fault people for having SOME sort of spirituality or religious belief. Just cuz I don’t believe doesn’t make me superior.
I think that Dina’s tolerance for Becky’s insistence that God created science is going to erode. Becky’s already extremely passive-aggressive about it (i.e. “Dina will be mad heaven exists”), and Dina has made it more than clear on one occasion that Becky’s beliefs heavily upset her.
That’s…that’s not passive-aggressive??? It might have been if she’s said that TO Dina. But she said that to Joyce, as an aside, and it was mostly a joke anyway.
I like to think that science tries to answer “how the world works” while religion tries to answer “why the world works.”
One of my favorite quotations is:
“It appeared to me that there were two paths to truth, and I decided to follow both of them.” — Georges Lemaître, Catholic priest and cosmologist who first theorized that the universe was expanding
That point is actually how someone got me to understand how the hell Richard Dawkins ended up becoming… well, who he is these days. I mean, beyond the “white Oxford male” thing. Namely that the only thing he can see in religion is a way of explaining how the world works, and since science does a better job of that, religion is *insert idiotic Dawkins rant here* He’s completely incapable of conceiving the possibility that religion might offer other, different things as well. (Note: I say this as an utter atheist.)
No, it’s just the “white Oxford male who went to a creepy boarding school” thing. He appreciates things like poetry just fine – in fact his favorite poet is, in his words, “the confused Irish mystic William Butler Yeats”.
Yeah, besides offering a false explanation of how the world works, religion is offering more things: for example currently religion is offering lots of tyranny, sexism, and homophobia as well.
More respectfully, it offers a community. A sense of belonging with other people who are part of that community. Ideally, in a well managed church, it serves as an extra social safety net- when a member of the congregation is ill, or has an accident, or has a new child, the preacher will, at the end of the prayer session, frequently send around a collection for donations to send to the family in question, to help them through that time.
Religion provides ritual, history, social bonds. You hear religion and you think of the cruelties, the foolishness, the obscenities- you don’t think of an entire community gathering to celebrate a new child, congratulating the parents on a safe birth. You don’t think of a grandpa lifting a toddler to light the menorah as he tells the story of why they still do this. You don’t think of the simple pleasure of a child running through wet grass, looking for colorfully painted eggs, because somewhere down the line we decided that religious celebration deserved to be a Celebration and Fun.
You don’t think of the hope it gives to a grieving mother, holding the pictures of her dead daughter and holding onto the belief that she will see her again, someday, after everything.
And really, that’s a shame, because even as an atheist, I can see that there’s something really beautiful in that.
That division breaks down as soon as you touch it. Every “why” question is really a “what” question. Why did it happen – what caused it to happen, what influenced the process, did it happen at random (i.e. because it could)? Why did it happen – what do things do under what circumstances?
Regardless of how you phrase it, you don’t think that science and religion answer different questions, or the way i like to think of it, start from a different set of presuppositions?
I think the difference is that any scientist worth their mettle is at least willing to acknowledge that we might be completely wrong about everything we know. The sticking point of religion is this “You’re not wrong. Don’t even consider that this might be wrong. Absolutely no reflection and course correction is allowed” element. I wish Religion could be a bit more flexible.
i don’t think what you’re describing is true of religion as a whole. There are entire academic fields, within the various world religions, dedicated to discussing the doctrine. people can disagree with regards to religious practice and belief. and they can argue for or against a position, with sound logic, at least as sound as any argument in say, literary criticism.
Conversely, a lot of high-school and pop science can be wildly dogmatic. so, i don’t think that what you said is really a fundamental difference between science and religion taken as a whole.
That’s just people though. People, even scientists, have a lot of trouble admitting they’re wrong. Religion and philosophy have long and often quite rigorous traditions of argument and logic. Sometimes this leads us somewhere, but often it just winds up chasing its tail in logical circles.
The brilliance of the scientific method isn’t that good scientists admit they could be wrong, it’s the idea that logic is only the starting point. That conclusions are worthless unless they can be tested.
oh for sure! but the tentative separation of ethics and science is a historical process (and as such always partial and adversarial) that runs both ways. Scientists are people, yes, and they belong to structures of authority and legitimacy. Science also needs to be kept in check.
By coincidence, here’s a line i just came across in a Stephen Jay Gould book i’m reading:
“The canonical attitude of scientists … holds that science and religion operate in equally legitimate but separate areas. …In exchange for freedom to follow nature down all her pathways, scientists relinquish the temptation to base moral inferences and pronouncements upon the physical state of the world—an excellent and proper arrangement, since the facts of nature embody no moral claims in any case”.
now this is more of an ideal programme than a description of reality, but i think it’s an important tenet. obviously ethics doesn’t have to be religious, but the point is that ethics and science belong to different regimes of discourse.
Now, religion and science really REALLY don’t answer different questions.
“Where did humanity come from? Where did life come from?”
Religion had an answer about that, and it proved itself a WRONG answer.
Saying that religion is answering different questions, is a mere excuse in response to having all its verifiable answers so far having turned out wrong.
“Oh, it wasn’t that we were wrong, we were just answering a different question.”
No!!
RELIGION WASN’T “ANSWERING A DIFFERENT QUESTION”, RELIGION WAS SIMPLY WRONG.
Say it simply like that, because it’s the simple truth.
There’s something of a point there, though that’s not at all what people who say religion and science answer different questions actually mean.
Some religious people do try to use religion to answer the science kind of questions and that inevitably fails. Creationists are simply the most obvious example.
But the people who do that, don’t agree with the non-overlapping magisteria approach.
Yeah, as i said above the “non overlapping magisteria” thing is not so much a reality as it is an ideal horizon. i don’t believe it’s likely to ever be a reality, because both science and religion in their own way have a lot of political/ cultural influence and there will always be this pushmi-pullyou of legitimate discourse.
of course creationism “fails” to produce real science, but it still has a massive impact on public discourse and policy in the US, so i think it might actually pretty successful at its own aims, which aren’t so much to value science as a worthy toolkit to examine their own hypotheses in good faith, but rather to hijack scientific discourse and disrupt its authority.
and like i said science is also frequently guilty of this sort of overstepping and produce their own prescriptive monstrosities, like, say, eugenics.
anyway there is something of a point to aelfwine’s rants, but it’s always the same, namely that religion has done and continues to do a whole lot of harm, and that’s true. religion contains many terrible people: yes, that’s true.
but while i think that’s simply not the whole truth, they insist that it is. they have proved again and again that they are not interested in discussing religion from any other angle and like, cool but i don’t have to be interested in engaging with them.
If god were somehow ever proven real the existence of god WOULD just become science. In the same way that, if we lived in a world where magic was an established element of the world, the study of that magic would be science.
In the Northern Midwest, some people wear knitted caps year-round as a fashion statement more than for practicality, so it’s hard to say if she’d even take it off if it were warm.
Scientists have done FAR crazier things to their bodies.
For instance, Isaac Newton stared into the sun to see the effects, and don’t even ask me about the kind of stuff David Hahn did before building his homemade nuclear reactor.
The most I ever did myself along those lines was experimenting with bug zappers when I was a kid. Little shock here and there. Good times.
I know you said not to, but I really want to ask what David Hahn did to himself. Still better than a lot of scientist in history though who did some pretty questionable experiments on other people (such as Edward Jenner testing his vaccine by deliberately infecting an eight year old boy with smallpox, which had something like a 25% fatality rate).
I’m guessing this is what Amber said about horny jail. “Just tie your shirt around your waste and you’ll send Becky to horny jail”. That’s why she double checked with Joyce before pulling this on Becky.
Um…she is flirting with her girlfriend? I know it’s non obvious because it’s Dina, but if we saw, say, Billie pull this in front of Asher, we would know *exactly* why it was done.
Interesting given Dina hasn’t really pressed on this issue much.
See i assumed you winter-experiencing countries had internal heating in your buildings. Between this and people freaking out over booster in a cropped hoodie i think i was wrong
I think Willis at least is setting it up well; instead of relying on the
zeitgeist and dropping in the meme unannounced, he sets it up via Dina first before introducing it. That way even if you didn’t know the meme beforehand you at least have context.
I mean galaxy brain and horny bonk have been around for a while, in terms of modern memes. It’s not like…well basically any given 2016 meme where it’s funny for a few weeks and then beyond cringe to look back on. They’ll die out eventually but i think it’ll be fine.
Plus we’ve used memes in the comic before. Joe referenced “they’re good dogs, Brent” to amber, and Walky made a surprised chipmunk joke in like 2018 way after it died
I would pay for an entire book of Joyce whacking other characters on the head with a satisfying “BONK.” The last page, of course, would be Joyce whacking herself on the head.
In which this strip gets printed put by those many schools I keep hearing about going: see?? See?? We were right to ban tank tops! People do get distracted by shoulders!
i don’t know that everyone thinks she’s hot in-comic. while there’s a bit of a cult of Dina in the comments (because we’re all weirdos who were bullied at school) other characters have expressed bafflement that Becky could be into her.
Anyone know why Becky uses urban slang and speaks with a southern drawl (“peeps”, “bestest”, “li’l”…) but Joyce does not?
They were raised as neighbors & friends from childhood and homeschooled together, so their language education was similar. (Joyce mentions her family attended several different churches before her current one, though, so perhaps they weren’t always church buds, although flashbacks show them playing together since they were small.)
Is it just an affectation? Hip / nonconforming / rebel = informal use of English? ToeDad didn’t speak in that vernacular. Maybe her mother did?
I mean. I wouldn’t call that vernacular southern. But yeah she’s just more informal because she considers herself more casual and irreverent. Also, being real, she probably picked it up off the internet.
Just mentioned this comic to a friend, had a brief discussion about religion, and then officially recommended that they read it.
So, Cass, I am recording for prosperity, this is the strip from the day I linked you this comic.
I really wish Beck could shut up about god, maybe. It’s like. Extremely obnoxious.
People keep ripping on Joyce and her new atheism but like. How utterly obonoxious is it for a christian who’s all high-and-mighty to show up around nonbelievers and purposefully just refuse to shut up about jesus in their presence.
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JOYCE NO
…it’s a bat in the FAAAAAAACE (preferably a foam one, not Sarah’s)
granted, the instinct is so strong that it’s hard NOT to jinx the alt-text
maybe Sarah’s bat actually is foam, she just swings incredibly hard
Easier than that, just soak it in water, then freeze it.
It went “bonk”. It’s allowed.
Scientific Progress Goes Bonk
It is the head first not the face, then shoulders
knees and toes, knees and toes
**Then** the eyes, ears, mouth and nose!
Just because Dina is AAAACCCCEEE doesn’t mean she’d appreciate a bat in the FAAAACCCCE!
What’s the matter Becky? Science is fun!!!!
😈 👾 🌀 🧬
Also this little thingy I just cooked up….
https://imgur.com/a/ZgRkp3K
now expecting https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1640960-dr-stone
RIP Becky, killed by a chop to the back of the head, she never saw it coming
Bonk with inutegrity, no regrets
At least she’s moved south from scalps.
Little further, Becky, and you’re fetishes will be at normal.
You misunderstand, she isn’t losing her love of scalps(particularly Dina’s,) she is simply adding new ones to her list, today’s addition was shoulders.
So she’ll eventually develop a 100% Dina fetish?
Or just a fetish for every body part in general? That could get awkward.
So like Mob Psycho 100? Yeah I can see that…
Every body part that is usually covered by clothes, of course. Will feet be next? Keep reading to find out!
Dina: I am now wearing a full burqa with face veil. There’s nothing her that can turn you on.
Becky: Eyelids… so sexy…
Joyce: *BONK*
As though there aren’t high incidences of rape where burqas are popular 🙄
I’d suspect it correlation rather than causation… I would say the environment where burqas are mostly popular (to use your wording) is pretty toxic for man/woman relations: burqas are seen as necessary to prevent the objectification of women, and are not really a choice on their part, in those parts of the world. Though I have nothing against burqas themselves (and I know some women actually chose to wear them in other places), the culture that makes them mandatory seems quite toxic to me.
If it was normal it wouldn’t be a worthwhile fetish, would it 😛
You said it bruh!!!
I mean, there are weirder ones…
YOU DO NOT GET TO JUDGE ME.
I mean, I’m a leg man myself. The fact that showing legs in public is acceptable gives me no end of joy. I consider it a very worthwhile fetish to have cultivated.
I just like most parts of girls. Girls are fun to look at. 😛
Forgive my “actually” evangelism, but point of interest, fetishes (technical term paraphilias) are both innate and something you can’t be aroused without; if Becky had a shoulder fetish she’d have to be touching or thinking about them all the time. I think she’s just in affectionate lust with Dina and thus likes every part of her, especially the suddenly naked ones, but it IS possible she’s developing a “shoulder” kink; kinks being the ones that can develop and are malleable. Fetishes basically saddle you from birth with somethin’ weirrrrd and permanent.
I don’t think that a fetish is something you can’t be aroused without. Never seen that qualifier. Besides kink sounds so dinky.
That’s the psychiatric definition. And yes, the fact that there is a psychiatric definition of the words “fetish” and “kink” is itself relying on some very strange logic.
As a lesbian I’ve noticed non-genitals are often a bigger source of arousal. For me hands and shoulders. Also necks. Ever been next to a girl when she pushes her hair over her shoulder and exposes her neck? Or exactly what Dina’s doing here…. I reckon she knows what she’s doing… she’s doing it for science.
Wait, why is Joyce helping Becky send herself back to mental “jail”? You’d think she’d want to encourage Becky’s errant feelings.
I think its more “behave yourself” Bonk or “dont change into Tex Avery wolf” bonk
I think this is more of a percussive maintenance bonk. Joyce knows Becky is needs a hard reset after these kinds of things.
I don’t think Joyce’s attitude towards hanky-panky is going to change just because she’s an atheist now. It’s too deeply ingrained.
It’ll probably change eventually, in that Joyce is probably gonna have sex at some point during the course of the comic.
More likely that it will change but the guilt and shame will follow it and she will be racked with the negative emotions that come from beliefs she no longer has.
source: life experience
I’d think it was more like sending Becky to horny jail.
Well, at least Joyce is using the meme correctly, even if she is lacking a bat to drive the point home. She should find herself a horny bat, it stops them pretty well from what I’ve seen.
After the last few years, I’d rather not have bats reproducing in a dorm room.
See, Becky, even with the sweet, sweet payoff, you never go horny on main.
Passive-Aggressively-done-with-everyone’s-shit Joyce is Best Joyce
I know what you’re saying, but physically hitting someone is the opposite of passive.
passive-aggressively aggressive
Go to horny jail, yes?
Right to jail.
Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.
it’s 2022, you’d be lucky if you got 20.
Jesus Fucking Christ, she’s freaking out about the sight of shoulders? Becky, just fuck your girlfriend already!!!
Shoulders are sexy. Show me a good shoulder and I don’t know what to do with myself.
But what makes them sexier is if they’re covered up by something and then revealed through the removal of a jacket or something.
No I’m not joking.
Thank you, Yotomoe! Shoulders are hot and people can fight me over it if they want.
Of course they are hot, hence the clothing removal.
Shoulders are fine and all, but really nice wrists presented right… jebus.
Meanwhile, it’s been generally accepted wisdom as long as I can remember that just about any body part accentuated right by clothing that properly highlights it or by the act of removing clothing that normally hides it is significantly hotter than just seeing that body part fully exposed on it’s own.
You’re absolutely right, Yotomoe – getting there is half the fun. It’s like unwrapping your birthday present until you get to the good stuff inside.
EXACTLY. Honestly when it comes to lewd stuff I kinda lose a lot of interest after the clothes come off. It’s the taking OFF of the clothes that makes it sexy! A naked person is just…naked. But a person with clothes on taking them off? Beautiful.
Take your pretend upvote.
that might result in a psychotic break or something like that… she hyperventilated when she woke up chastely next to Dina
she’d probably behave similarly to Liz, only with the added guilt because she actually loves Dina
Might as well call her L’arachel at this point.
… Context?
who is L’arachel Context? A cousin of La, daughter of Rachel and Conquest?
It was a super esoteric one, so I’m not surprised nobody got it. It’s from the Fire Emblem series.
Basically, haughty and sheltered Princess/Healer offers to heal a more martial prince, who’s like “Oh, awesome. I injured my shoulder earlier. Here, let me remove part of my armor.” and she flips out like he flashed her.
Immortalized in art: https://twitter.com/erlmaiden/status/1271163457174413312
Hey that actually looks pretty cool! Thanks for sharing!
I am so happy you made this reference. I love Fire Emblem.
And I, in turn, am so happy somebody got it.
i remember at the time on twitter at one point some of my friends/acquaintances within the same social circle/fandom was really into collarbones at the time lol
Collarbones are sexy!
Tbh their church growing up probably slut shamed girls for showing shoulder, like American public schools do. And Becky did say that the insane amount of modesty they were taught programmed her brain to think anything covered up = sexy
… with consent, of course.
You know I was expecting drama but if this is the dynamic between these 3 I don’t mind
Becky compartmentalizing atheism and science (not even getting into Dina vs. Joyce) is super drama.
Becky is a drama pressure cooker.
Now all Joyce has to do is constantly be around Dina and Becky will never have the brain power to care about anything but Dina
Joyce is helping.
There was a Garrison Keillor monologue about this, somehow meshed with the soundtrack of the movie Windjammer. I wonder…
The best horny jail meme is still the guillotine one. 😛
God made atheists
Just like atheists made God!
Wait, that’s not right.
This is unrelated, but absolutely love your guy’s avatars.
God creates dinosaurs.
God destroys dinosaurs.
God creates man.
Man creates science.
Science destroys God.
Science creates dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs destroy man?
Dinosaur destroys woman, but in a sexy way.
There’s a series of books about that available for free on Amazon
I think one was Taken by T-Rex?
omg there is
listen, the cover is incredible. the summary sounds amazing. i don’t know, i might buy it
I was very saddened to discover that is a real book.
you do realize that anyone can publish their random weird erotica as an ebook on amazon right
There’s no evidence dinosaurs weren’t sapient, so as far as we know it’s completely ethical
It’s literally free on my end so go for it lol.
Alternatively, Emma Blackery used to have a series on YouTube reading through the series with guests. Idk if its still up but you can look into it. Ravished by the Triceratops is my personal favourite
hahaha ok thanks for the recommendation XD
yeah, i think it comes “free” with a Kindle subscription? i don’t have that, but also it seems to be available elsewhere, well anyway i’ll look into it =D
Well, my search history is now trash. I dread what youtube will recommend now.
There is, of course, a somewhat well-known Hassidic midrash to that effect, with the tl;dr of it being, more or less, “G-d made atheists to remind people to do good things because you know them to be good, rather than because you believe G-d has commanded them”
Or maybe prehistoric people made gods to explain things they didn’t have the science to understand back then.
And we have a winner!
i mean… that explanation begs more questions than it answers. Like, if a lack of knowledge is what produced religion in the first place then why are religions going so strong today? how did the invention of gods help with the lack of explanations about the world exactly, like what was so convincing about invisible beings that it didn’t feel like a transparent cop-out and just-so story? why do religions seem to revolve so much around social behaviour, rather than natural phenomena?
i don’t know. i feel like that narrative is a bit convenient from the point of view of modern scientifically literate atheists.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “explain things they didn’t have the science to understand”, but it’s not that far off.
There’s a strong psychological need for there to be meaning. For things that happen to make sense. Especially bad things. We see this often in abuse victims, who can blame the abuse on their own bad behavior. This is a way of taking some illusory control, rather than just accepting that it’s completely beyond you and you can be hurt at a whim and there’s nothing you can do about it.
It’s easy to see how in a past with so much less knowledge about and so much more dependence on things like weather and wild game and flooding and similar natural events that the same psychological need would apply. Personifying those things doesn’t just explain them, it means you can try to propitiate them.
Even today, the same kind of need exists, it’s just more abstract and less tied to natural features. We don’t want to believe that the world is just impersonal and random. It’s comforting to think that there is meaning behind it all and maybe a way to keep the bad stuff from happening to us, just by following the rules.
I’ve been kind of thinking about this because I was talking to my Mom about our sailing experiences when I was a kid and particularly about our first offshore passage from North Carolina down to Puerto Rico (though we were trying to get to St. Thomas). I was young and don’t really remember it clearly or really understood it at the time, but talking to her and reading some bits from the journals she and Dad kept at the time, it was kind of a hell passage. Rough weather, constantly shifting winds so they had to be changing or at least adjusting sails at all hours, some gear failures and other troubles mostly tied to a newly refitted boat and their inexperience. About two weeks with minimal sleep and constant stress. Finally getting down to the Caribbean, where the balmy trade winds were supposed to be waiting, to be hit by another storm blowing basically from our destination and blocking out sight of land.
The journals talk a lot about their state of mind and despite being modern educated atheists with a good understanding of weather patterns, in the stress of those last days they’d moved well into the “more than coincidence, something doesn’t want us to get to St. Thomas, we’re being punished for thinking we could do this” mindset.
It went away when we’d arrived, gotten some sleep and heard stories of other people’s hell trips through the same storms, but I can easily see those same attitudes leading to those beliefs hardening in a time with less knowledge. Especially when it all didn’t turn out well.
hmm, yeah i see what you mean. this strong desire and sense that there’s got to be someone, some sentient, powerful “thing” we can appeal to when we’re going through scary times, might be a really deep instinct in a social species such as we.
i still think the “humans invented gods to explain nature because they didn’t know better” narrative feels like it obfuscates more than it explains, probably because it’s such a common trope at this point. maybe it’s because i’ve heard it repeated so many times, and used to believe it unquestioningly myself, i’m more interested in deconstructing it and challenging it than in consolidating it at this point.
But yeah, i get your point, i don’t think i’ve ever been in the kind of situation you describe but certainly when you’re literaly fearing for your life for an extended period of time, you are more likely to turn to religion.
maybe what has contributed to the spread of atheism in western industrialized nations isn’t so much science per se, as much as a fairly sturdy social structure and the sense that we are more or less sheltered from the possibilty of random catastrophe or violence.
i mean, that’s a very simplistic narrative as well, there are certainly many other factors.
I’m sure that Dina would be happy to explain the evolutionary history of shoulders, including brachiation and throwing. Perhaps even demonstrating the relative range of motion at each step in the process. Of course she’ll wait until she’s somewhere private with Becky, because she knows Joyce doesn’t want to hear it.
Joyce might want to hear about that now, though I don’t think Dina is aware of how Joyce has changed yet. And Becky definitely would want to hear about it, though she’d probably be too distracted by the horny to be fully paying attention if Dina’s demonstrating with her own shoulders.
Don’t worry Becky. This one got me a little too. And I’m not even all that into Dina!
I’m actually happy with this line of thought from Becky.
Mainly because . . . I’ve run into a *lot* of other people on the left, especially years ago when I began to shift from my moderately conservative upbringing to where I am now, that believed and LOUDLY professed that anyone believing in god was an idiot, that religion is a scam, and spirituality is for the less evolved.
Despite my myself not being all that religious, like I’ve *never* been a believer and never had faith, but even then I believed that *Something* was out there, it really **really** got one my nerves.
I think the last time I saw this attitude by someone I respected, it was during a Mass Effect Andromeda stream where the streamer mocked Suvi’s believe in a God and believing in science. This combined with mocking Ashley’s own religion as being out of place in a sci-fi setting by the same and other streamers.
Well that attitude has forever been stuck in my craw.
But yes I rambled a bit there. Strip funny, Becky go to Repressed Horny Jail.
o3o I concur. I’ve never believed in god but I don’t fault people for having SOME sort of spirituality or religious belief. Just cuz I don’t believe doesn’t make me superior.
I think that Dina’s tolerance for Becky’s insistence that God created science is going to erode. Becky’s already extremely passive-aggressive about it (i.e. “Dina will be mad heaven exists”), and Dina has made it more than clear on one occasion that Becky’s beliefs heavily upset her.
That’s…that’s not passive-aggressive??? It might have been if she’s said that TO Dina. But she said that to Joyce, as an aside, and it was mostly a joke anyway.
It’s hardly an insistence. Dina asked a question. Becky gave a response, not an unsolicited preaching session.
I like to think that science tries to answer “how the world works” while religion tries to answer “why the world works.”
One of my favorite quotations is:
“It appeared to me that there were two paths to truth, and I decided to follow both of them.” — Georges Lemaître, Catholic priest and cosmologist who first theorized that the universe was expanding
science tries to answer “who gets to be respected and famous”. religion tries to answer “who gets to be obeyed”.
the correct answer, of course, is “plutocrats”.
That point is actually how someone got me to understand how the hell Richard Dawkins ended up becoming… well, who he is these days. I mean, beyond the “white Oxford male” thing. Namely that the only thing he can see in religion is a way of explaining how the world works, and since science does a better job of that, religion is *insert idiotic Dawkins rant here* He’s completely incapable of conceiving the possibility that religion might offer other, different things as well. (Note: I say this as an utter atheist.)
No, it’s just the “white Oxford male who went to a creepy boarding school” thing. He appreciates things like poetry just fine – in fact his favorite poet is, in his words, “the confused Irish mystic William Butler Yeats”.
Yeah, besides offering a false explanation of how the world works, religion is offering more things: for example currently religion is offering lots of tyranny, sexism, and homophobia as well.
More respectfully, it offers a community. A sense of belonging with other people who are part of that community. Ideally, in a well managed church, it serves as an extra social safety net- when a member of the congregation is ill, or has an accident, or has a new child, the preacher will, at the end of the prayer session, frequently send around a collection for donations to send to the family in question, to help them through that time.
Religion provides ritual, history, social bonds. You hear religion and you think of the cruelties, the foolishness, the obscenities- you don’t think of an entire community gathering to celebrate a new child, congratulating the parents on a safe birth. You don’t think of a grandpa lifting a toddler to light the menorah as he tells the story of why they still do this. You don’t think of the simple pleasure of a child running through wet grass, looking for colorfully painted eggs, because somewhere down the line we decided that religious celebration deserved to be a Celebration and Fun.
You don’t think of the hope it gives to a grieving mother, holding the pictures of her dead daughter and holding onto the belief that she will see her again, someday, after everything.
And really, that’s a shame, because even as an atheist, I can see that there’s something really beautiful in that.
That division breaks down as soon as you touch it. Every “why” question is really a “what” question. Why did it happen – what caused it to happen, what influenced the process, did it happen at random (i.e. because it could)? Why did it happen – what do things do under what circumstances?
Regardless of how you phrase it, you don’t think that science and religion answer different questions, or the way i like to think of it, start from a different set of presuppositions?
Both science and religion are based on faith that people have the smarts to even ask the right questions. Talk about blind optimism.
and you’re right there with them, using words like you actually believe you can make yourself understood! what raving hubris!
I think the difference is that any scientist worth their mettle is at least willing to acknowledge that we might be completely wrong about everything we know. The sticking point of religion is this “You’re not wrong. Don’t even consider that this might be wrong. Absolutely no reflection and course correction is allowed” element. I wish Religion could be a bit more flexible.
i don’t think what you’re describing is true of religion as a whole. There are entire academic fields, within the various world religions, dedicated to discussing the doctrine. people can disagree with regards to religious practice and belief. and they can argue for or against a position, with sound logic, at least as sound as any argument in say, literary criticism.
Conversely, a lot of high-school and pop science can be wildly dogmatic. so, i don’t think that what you said is really a fundamental difference between science and religion taken as a whole.
That’s just people though. People, even scientists, have a lot of trouble admitting they’re wrong. Religion and philosophy have long and often quite rigorous traditions of argument and logic. Sometimes this leads us somewhere, but often it just winds up chasing its tail in logical circles.
The brilliance of the scientific method isn’t that good scientists admit they could be wrong, it’s the idea that logic is only the starting point. That conclusions are worthless unless they can be tested.
oh for sure! but the tentative separation of ethics and science is a historical process (and as such always partial and adversarial) that runs both ways. Scientists are people, yes, and they belong to structures of authority and legitimacy. Science also needs to be kept in check.
By coincidence, here’s a line i just came across in a Stephen Jay Gould book i’m reading:
“The canonical attitude of scientists … holds that science and religion operate in equally legitimate but separate areas. …In exchange for freedom to follow nature down all her pathways, scientists relinquish the temptation to base moral inferences and pronouncements upon the physical state of the world—an excellent and proper arrangement, since the facts of nature embody no moral claims in any case”.
now this is more of an ideal programme than a description of reality, but i think it’s an important tenet. obviously ethics doesn’t have to be religious, but the point is that ethics and science belong to different regimes of discourse.
Now, religion and science really REALLY don’t answer different questions.
“Where did humanity come from? Where did life come from?”
Religion had an answer about that, and it proved itself a WRONG answer.
Saying that religion is answering different questions, is a mere excuse in response to having all its verifiable answers so far having turned out wrong.
“Oh, it wasn’t that we were wrong, we were just answering a different question.”
No!!
RELIGION WASN’T “ANSWERING A DIFFERENT QUESTION”, RELIGION WAS SIMPLY WRONG.
Say it simply like that, because it’s the simple truth.
oh, go away
There’s something of a point there, though that’s not at all what people who say religion and science answer different questions actually mean.
Some religious people do try to use religion to answer the science kind of questions and that inevitably fails. Creationists are simply the most obvious example.
But the people who do that, don’t agree with the non-overlapping magisteria approach.
Yeah, as i said above the “non overlapping magisteria” thing is not so much a reality as it is an ideal horizon. i don’t believe it’s likely to ever be a reality, because both science and religion in their own way have a lot of political/ cultural influence and there will always be this pushmi-pullyou of legitimate discourse.
of course creationism “fails” to produce real science, but it still has a massive impact on public discourse and policy in the US, so i think it might actually pretty successful at its own aims, which aren’t so much to value science as a worthy toolkit to examine their own hypotheses in good faith, but rather to hijack scientific discourse and disrupt its authority.
and like i said science is also frequently guilty of this sort of overstepping and produce their own prescriptive monstrosities, like, say, eugenics.
anyway there is something of a point to aelfwine’s rants, but it’s always the same, namely that religion has done and continues to do a whole lot of harm, and that’s true. religion contains many terrible people: yes, that’s true.
but while i think that’s simply not the whole truth, they insist that it is. they have proved again and again that they are not interested in discussing religion from any other angle and like, cool but i don’t have to be interested in engaging with them.
If god were somehow ever proven real the existence of god WOULD just become science. In the same way that, if we lived in a world where magic was an established element of the world, the study of that magic would be science.
Well, at least it was only one nerve.
I can’t judge. This is basically me any time my crush lets her hair down.
But apparently Joyce can. And its Guilty. Off to jail.
Naw I totally get that <3
Can’t really blame you there.
Now both of them are in Horny Jail.
isn’t it the middle of winter? why is Dina doing this?
…we’re indoor. Assumedly they keep the heating up
Can’t be that warm, Becky still has a knitted cap on.
She just came in, but also appears to be wearing it for style, not warmth
Dina may just be hot-blooded. Some people are like that.
Everybody knows dinosaurs are endothermic.
In the Northern Midwest, some people wear knitted caps year-round as a fashion statement more than for practicality, so it’s hard to say if she’d even take it off if it were warm.
Is it snowing inside the building?
It doesn’t need to be subzero weather for it to be very uncomfortably cold in sleeveless shirts
It also doesn’t have to be much above zero for someone to be very comfortable in sleeveless shirts. Just depends on the person.
Depends, are we discussing Celsius or Fahrenheit? Because I’m quite comfortable naked at 18C, but I have to be in heavy clothes at 18F.
Scientists have done FAR crazier things to their bodies.
For instance, Isaac Newton stared into the sun to see the effects, and don’t even ask me about the kind of stuff David Hahn did before building his homemade nuclear reactor.
The most I ever did myself along those lines was experimenting with bug zappers when I was a kid. Little shock here and there. Good times.
I know you said not to, but I really want to ask what David Hahn did to himself. Still better than a lot of scientist in history though who did some pretty questionable experiments on other people (such as Edward Jenner testing his vaccine by deliberately infecting an eight year old boy with smallpox, which had something like a 25% fatality rate).
Hahn was the infamous “Nuclear Boy Scout“.
Very cool. Thanks for the link.
Because she is indoors.
I’m indoors in winter and I’m wearing a minimum of three layers at all times
She was performing an experiment to see how Becky would react.
For science!!! 🧪
(see my Dr. Stone meme above)
I’m guessing this is what Amber said about horny jail. “Just tie your shirt around your waste and you’ll send Becky to horny jail”. That’s why she double checked with Joyce before pulling this on Becky.
“This is not an actual jail right? I would not want to have my girlfriend incarcerated for a bit of teasing.
Um…she is flirting with her girlfriend? I know it’s non obvious because it’s Dina, but if we saw, say, Billie pull this in front of Asher, we would know *exactly* why it was done.
Interesting given Dina hasn’t really pressed on this issue much.
She’s an endotherm.
I’m assuming it’s warmer inside the building than outside.
See i assumed you winter-experiencing countries had internal heating in your buildings. Between this and people freaking out over booster in a cropped hoodie i think i was wrong
The last time I was in a winter country I found the inside of buildings uncomfortably warm since I could only easily remove my winter jacket…
so it doesn’t have to be a dog after all
Of course not, Joyce doesn’t believe in dog.
lookit me! i believe in an invisible skydoggy!
I think the other name for invisible skydoggy is updog.
He gave us his son, Down Dog, who got really good at yoga.
If shoulders turn her on so much, I wonder what will happen if Becky sees Dina’s ankles.
She’ll have a heart attack and die
Excellent Youtube person Kaz Rowe has a video about this
Joyce reminds me of her sister in that last panel, honestly.
We’ve entered post modern DOA
there’s current day memes that’ll probably age poorly
I think Willis at least is setting it up well; instead of relying on the
zeitgeist and dropping in the meme unannounced, he sets it up via Dina first before introducing it. That way even if you didn’t know the meme beforehand you at least have context.
Even if you don’t know the meme, the strip is still funny.
Eh, sort of expected with a sliding time scale comic
Embrace being a product of the time I say. Everything becomes a period piece eventually
I mean galaxy brain and horny bonk have been around for a while, in terms of modern memes. It’s not like…well basically any given 2016 meme where it’s funny for a few weeks and then beyond cringe to look back on. They’ll die out eventually but i think it’ll be fine.
Plus we’ve used memes in the comic before. Joe referenced “they’re good dogs, Brent” to amber, and Walky made a surprised chipmunk joke in like 2018 way after it died
I had no idea that this was a meme and it still worked fine, so.
haha, bonk.
classic
As though Joyce did not have a similar reaction when Joe answered the door in his boxers, lol
true! Joyce and Becky have a lot in common after all.
like being mad repressed.
and yet, when she saw Walky early, nothing
Go to horny jail, Becky!
Your gravatar either makes that comment contra-effective or extremely effective.
Cool your tits, Becky. It’s not like she’s not wearing a hat
HER SHOULDERS AREN’T WEARING HATS!
OH NO!
Go directly to horny jail. Do not pass doge. Do not collect 200 internets.
How do you upvote comments? >_<
Shoulders, they exist to Tempt Us!
BONK
I would pay for an entire book of Joyce whacking other characters on the head with a satisfying “BONK.” The last page, of course, would be Joyce whacking herself on the head.
That would be lawesome
men ippon!
Becky is mire and more desperate.
Joyce should dig up Becky’s mom and go three for three with the MacIntyres.
I had to memorize the Krebs cycle back in the day. That thing’s got nothing to do with God.
No, of course not. Nature is the temple of Satan.
Horny jail for becky
Horny jail for a thousand years!
All we need is Dorothy and Dina to be in the same room with their shoulders bare. Joyce and Becky will be unable to think of anything else.
DoA Book 12: Shoulders
Alternatively, DoA Book 12: Bonk
In which this strip gets printed put by those many schools I keep hearing about going: see?? See?? We were right to ban tank tops! People do get distracted by shoulders!
people get distracted by the randomest things, especially teenagers. As i always say, less banning, more banging.
Panels 1 and 2 are the Golden Age of Arabic Science in a nutshell.
I totally get you Becky. Dina looks so cute like this!
love that dynamic
Followed by Knees and Toes
I really can’t blame Becky for this. One of the hottest gals in the hall just removed a layer. Who among us wouldn’t need a quick BONK to reset?
i don’t know that everyone thinks she’s hot in-comic. while there’s a bit of a cult of Dina in the comments (because we’re all weirdos who were bullied at school) other characters have expressed bafflement that Becky could be into her.
When they flirted for the first time, some characters said Dina was too childlike and it was creepy to think of her in a sexual way.
I believe each characters in DoA, in a way or another, get at least one thing that turn it attractive.
I wonder what Raidah is up to
And thus Joyce has learned the true function of the Horny Jail
“Nothing wrong with figuring out why God made made things the way he did” is the motive for alot of scientific advancement historically
And thus, a new meme picture was born.
BONK!
Anyone know why Becky uses urban slang and speaks with a southern drawl (“peeps”, “bestest”, “li’l”…) but Joyce does not?
They were raised as neighbors & friends from childhood and homeschooled together, so their language education was similar. (Joyce mentions her family attended several different churches before her current one, though, so perhaps they weren’t always church buds, although flashbacks show them playing together since they were small.)
Is it just an affectation? Hip / nonconforming / rebel = informal use of English? ToeDad didn’t speak in that vernacular. Maybe her mother did?
I mean. I wouldn’t call that vernacular southern. But yeah she’s just more informal because she considers herself more casual and irreverent. Also, being real, she probably picked it up off the internet.
sometimes I forget just how YOUNG these people are, still fetishising things the school dress code forbids…
GO TO HORNY JAIL!
(Girl Genius-styler) 🙂
https://i.redd.it/hkun0fu43gf81.png
Dina knows exactly what she’s doing.
Just mentioned this comic to a friend, had a brief discussion about religion, and then officially recommended that they read it.
So, Cass, I am recording for prosperity, this is the strip from the day I linked you this comic.
Meant posterity, but it’s meant as a joke anyway, so maybe I should just lean into it.
For posterior-ity?
How about for a posteriori?
For a poster?
I read “Figgerin” as “Fingering”.
I don’t think that in the Bonking she wants right now.
I really wish Beck could shut up about god, maybe. It’s like. Extremely obnoxious.
People keep ripping on Joyce and her new atheism but like. How utterly obonoxious is it for a christian who’s all high-and-mighty to show up around nonbelievers and purposefully just refuse to shut up about jesus in their presence.