Could have just used fermi estimation and been done with it easy
1+1=1 because 2 rounds down.
48+54=110
48 rounds down to 10, 54 rounds up to 100. 100 plus 10 is 110.
Quantum physics is virtually a religion. Most of it can’t really be proven or dis-proven, so you have to take on faith based on the teachings of its preachers that say it must be true because the math they created to explain it says so.
Oh, and by quantum physics, 1 is only probably equal to 1 … or not, and simultaneously. 🙂
Quantum mechanics is amazingly solid. It gives (mostly) probabilistic predictions rather that precise ones, but the probabilities it calculates are amazingly accurate. It explained a whole bunch of stuff that seemed bizarre and arbitrary (such as the bell-shaped thermal spectrum and the sharp lines in emission and absorption spectra), and it predicted a wide range of bizarre-sounding phenomena that turned out actually to occur and that we use to make transistors, microchips, diodes, LEDs, and lasers.
And it doesn’t say that 1 is only probably equal to 1.
I never said it didn’t work, just that it has many characteristics of a religion.
And as Dina might say, I must must have said the JOKE (whence the 🙂 ) wrong. It’s another version of “How many cats does Schrödinger have? One and zero … probably.”
Religions obfuscate reality rather then accurately predict its inner workings. Key word being accurate. It doesn’t matter if it’s bizarre as long as the end result lines up with objective, provable fact.
No, please.
I assume those people slip through the cracks from time to time and I just haven’t seen them, but they’re free to go elsewhere for entertainment.
Pretty sure they probably don’t slip through the comment moderation? I know first time commenters are moderated and I’m sure I remember Willis saying the comment section itself is read through and manually moderated. Which I gotta say, with comment threads of this size, is serious dedication to never leaving a computer.
Because math is more fundamental and it tends not to be completely disproven so easily. That’s why intelligent people tend to not like that everything they think they know is a lie (again), and that this time even math has broken.
The math isn’t broken, but our shortcuts for it are.
However, math IS incomplete, and NEVER can be complete. Godel proved that one. Although I don’t suggest reading his works, they have been shown to literally drive people insane. Like literally literally. Like, they read the book, brain goes “world does not compute,” they try to prove him wrong, fail, can’t accept it being right, spiral into a deranged madness, and get taken away by men in white coats. Literally insane.
On the flip side, if you want to learn what he taught without going insane, I suggest reading “Godel, Escher, Bach.” It does a good job of “slowly” preparing you for the Godel’s big reveal. (Every chapter is a paradigm shift). So when you finally get to the end, you can actually understand Godel without it shattering your brain, because you’ve already fixed a lot of the parts that you didn’t know were broken and so don’t go through the “everything I ever learned is a lie” mental breakdown.
Oh, goodness, 1000000 points for Gödel. He was required reading at my college, where the only required math class did not involve numbers. You would think that would be easy, but the math for a course where Calvinball was also required reading… well, I was pretty good at the math of quantum physics, but I literally got a headache in “IS2” every day. It was the best kind of brainhurt.
Actually, nothing incomplete in the underlying math here, it’s just all the answers I’ve read here that are, in one way or another. At least in Portugal, this kind of exercise is pretty typical in 9th grade math – whenever you want to divide by a non constant expression, you have to branch out in order to handle the zero case.
This statement is always true regardless of the truth value of (2 = 1 && a²-ab != 0). All this tells you is that you’ve reached a dead end in your proof, at least if you want to prove something other than ‘all values of b in the value set satisfy the condition when you solve for a’ and other than ‘all values of a in the value set satisfy the condition when you solve for b’
Full disclosure: I was a mediocre student in university math.
Don’t worry, you’ll most likely not have to use any math higher than algebra in the real world. Unless you’re studying to become something that requires higher math like physics or whatever.
And even then most use advanced expert systems to do the math for them. Like why reinvent the quadratic every time you do a little bit of particle physics?
At least until you get to calculus and/or statistical analysis. Once you learn either one, you may not directly use them often, but you quickly begin to use shortcut versions of them *everywhere*.
“Wait… if I do that… it’s going to progress asymptotically, but if I do this, it’ll be exponential… at least until I hit this limit… OK! Now I know how I’m going to manage my calorie intake for the next two months!”
That’s not a fallacy, the math is just messed up.
a=b
a²=ab
a²+a²=a²+ab
2a²=a²+ab
2a²-2ab=a²+ab-2ab
2(a²-ab)=a²-ab <<<HERE
2(a^2 – ab) = 2(0) = 0
0 = 0
As MatthewTheLucky pointed out, this proof that 2 = 1 is accomplished by dividing by zero. You can prove anything that way. It’s the step in Ana Chronistic’s math right after the step you marked with HERE.
Dude, at “HERE” there are no errors. On the right he’s factorizing (by 2) and on the left he’s doing ab-2ab which is -ab. no problems there. The idea of the falacy is something you missed in your conclusion. You just skipped to the reason why it’s a falacy: You ended up with zeroes. The math is flawless, it just doesn’t work that way. To isolate 2=1, you’d have to divide by (a^2-ab) on both sides. But that is 0. Which is to say, you’d have to divide by zero, which you can’t.
I understand that it’s a fallacy, and I know that it can’t be a real proof. However, I’m missing where it messes up. Where the logic disappears. Is it at a specific point along your equation development, or is a=b doomed to cause fallacies from the start?
I find it helps to plug in some value — say, 5 — for a and b, and see how each equation works out. That makes it more visible when you’re dividing by 0.
Basically, in mathematics, ab = ac means b = c only holds true IF (and only IF) a is non-zero. Think about it. If a = 0 then b could be 9 and c could be 5000 and it would still be true that ab = ac since 0 * anything = 0. But b is definitely not equal to c.
That’s what is being done in the last step to get 2 = 1 from 2(a²-ab)=a²-ab what is really happening is a division on both sides by the factor a²-ab, but that’s a²-a², which is 0. The statement is that 2 * 0 = 1 * 0, which is true.
b=c can hold true if a is zero. But ab=ac does not IMPLY b=c unless a is non-zero. In other words, reducing both sides by canceling will only be guaranteed to work when a is non-zero.
.
Nope, the equations Ana Chronistic has given are true for all numbers a and b which meet the condition a=b!
(Of course with the exception of the last one, as divison by zero).
The failure in logic comes from them not simplifying ab to a^2. math does tricksy things when you play with the names of variables. for example:
a^2=b
log(a)b=2
lnb/lna=2
lnb=2lna
lnb/2=lna
e^lnb/2=a
e=(lnb/2)root(a)
log(a)e=2/lnb
log(a)e*lnb=2
lne/lna*lnb=2
1/lna*lnb=2
now for the switcheroo
1/lna*2lna=2
2lna/lna=2
2=2
…i guess i failed to break logic.
I don’t think he’s upset. Somehow I doubt anyone familiar enough with xkcd to recognize such would frown upon math. It’s probably more of a ‘Seriously? xD’
Ah HA! 2a²=a²+ab and they’re both having 2ab subtracted from them. Therefore it’s 0 = 0! So a=0! So it works out fine! I get to keep my sanity for another day! ^^
It breaks because the square root function isn’t well-defined and continuous on the entirety of the complex plane, you have to cut a slit down the negative x axis to make a proper “function”. So it’s not a real proof, but disproving it is just a matter of knowing that sqrt(ab) = sqrt(a)sqrt(b) when a and b are positive.
Strictly this is only a proof by contradiction with an un-named existing set of beliefs, as 3) does not follow from prop. A. and there are no other propositions, ie. the ‘laws of mathematics’ are hidden propositions.
Here’s one for the college crowd. You know that the derivative of x^2 with respect to x is 2x, right? And the derivative of x is 1? Okay, let’s start with the identity
x^2 = x + x + … + x (there are x terms)
Obviously true for all x since the left hand side and the right hand side are both equal to x times x.
An identity stays true when you differentiate both sides with respect to x. Let’s do it.
2x = 1 + 1 + … + 1 (there are x ones)
But of course the right side is just x. So 2x = x, and since this is true for all x it’s true for x=1, therefore 2 = 1, QED.
Well, if you want to play that way, 1+1=1 when you’re equating 1 to a concept – something you can’t really assign a value towards.
We can bring logic into it and make all sorts of silly math equations.
Doesn’t make my correction less true, not his mistake more so.
Also Fermi estimations aren’t really math. They use math, yes, but they also use assumptions made in a very non-algebraic way. It’s simply a tool we use that happens to have math in it. You can’t use it to prove math equations.
tl;dr: Fermi estimations aren’t math. You can’t math with them.
The right side doesn’t make a lot of sense if x isn’t a natural number. Calculus doesn’t make a lot of sense if you are restricted to the natural numbers. Ergo, this proof doesn’t make a lot of sense.
That said, some might argue that calculus doesn’t make that much sense in the real numbers either…
a=b
a²=ab
a²+a²=a²+ab
2a²=a²+ab
2a²-2ab=a²+ab-2ab
2(a²-ab)=a²-ab <—– Since A=B, a²-ab = 0, so this is 2*0 = 0
2=1 <—- This step requires dividing the previous step by a²-ab, imposing a requirement that a²-ab≠0, which translates out to a requirement that a²≠ab which translates out further to a requirement that a≠b.
In other words, this is demonstration that:
Given A=B, and A≠B, anything you want can be true. 🙂
“no but you make: 2=(a^2-ab)/(a^2-ab) then you’d be saying 2=0/0, and as you probably know, 0/0 DOES NOT EQUAL 1, IT EQUALS ERROR. One does not simply divide by 0, even if he’s dividing 0.
He’s not saying a²-ab = 1. He’s taking
2(a²-ab)=a²-ab
and dividing both sides by a²-ab to get rid of the a²-ab, leaving
2*(a²-ab)/(a²-ab) = (a²-ab)/(a²-ab), which reduces to 2=1.
It breaks of course because he’s dividing by 0, but doing so in a complicated, non obvious way.
This is about how I’ve seen it:
Think of any number! Let’s call it a.
Set a=b
a-2b=-b
a²-2ab=-ab
2a²-2ab=a²-ab
2a(a-b)=a(a-b)
2a=a
a=0
I proved the number you were thinking of was 0. qed
That equation is zero equals zero. What you have in parentheses, given any number, equals zero. So it actually is true, IF you take into account the fact that ANY number multiplied by ZERO equals ZERO.
1 + 1 = 2 for exceptionally large values of 1 and/ or exceptionally small values of 2.
And of *course* religion is a lie. Like most other things of the sort, religion was intended as a form of control, to get people to do what those that came up with it wanted them to do. It might have even been intended for benevolent reasons (God says prepare your food in a certain way… So you don’t die of food poisoning, ya idiots!) But inevitability someone else figured out how to use it to their own benefit, and then the lying *really* starts.
I vote for a beach house with a tiny group of people who can manage to not make her feel significantly worse. Which might just be Ethan and Dorothy at this point.
(I majorly friend-ship Joyce and Ethan. After what they went through I really want to see them develope a deep and healthy friendship. Also is there a word for friend-shipping, is that a thing?)
This is the story of a small group of people who were picked to live in a house to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start being real.
If anything else bad happens to her this semester, it’ll need to be a long break in a place with soft walls and softer food.
Seriously, I went 50% bonkers just dealing with classes and homework. If I had to cope with attempted rape, gun-toting maniacs, and discovering almost everything I was raised to believe was a lie (all in the space of a few weeks, mind you), I’d flip out like that dude in Real Genius.
Not to mention the slow gradual chipping away of her entire worldview by interacting with reality, such as
Dating Ethan
Accepting Becky,
That flu shot strip with Dina,
Defending her Atheistic Best Friend
While going against her parents
Breaking up with Ethan to maintain psychological consistency
And pretty much facing, everyday, that the people she was taught to fear and look down seem perfectly unobjectionable.
It’s kinda like what she was telling Sarah, only the dark version.
It’s not just the big dramatic showcases.
It’s the sum of the little things.
Yeah, and today’s crisis of faith makes me want to give Willis a big hug.
I am sad that so many people are fed this substitute for thinking, and forced by the contradictory premises and discouragement of logic into narrower and narrower alleyways of twisted reason.
Ultimately, the end product of almost any rigid ideology is a fundamentalist implosion. We see this with Christian evangelicals, Mormon purists, Islamic terrorists, Leftist ideologues, bleeding-heart Liberals and hyper-Patriots.
When your belief system regards those who think differently from you as -THE ENEMY WHO SHOULD BE DESTROYED ™-, you should radically start to rethink your worldview. Joyce is just now starting on the path toward a renewed religious fundamentalism, and will likely (I’ve seen it happen, sadly) push away people she holds dear and regress. Since Willis was able to escape, Joyce will too, but not without doing damage to her loved ones.
There is no escape from a religious or ideological fundamentalist worldview without trauma.
I went through a similar crisis of faith when I left the church, and religion all together. I mean, while where she might go is a good place, it will be a painful ride for Joyce. Her world is threatening to crash down. And while a wider, more awesome world exists out there beyond her own… that crashing down does not happen without its scars.
This conversation restored my faith in God, actually. I believe in God because if he’s responsible for making the world a crappy place then we’re struggling against it and we don’t have to believe this is all something we’re supposed to be enduring for some weird blood punishment. Instead, it’s a test and we can overcome it ourselves. God WANTS us to overcome and we can.
This logic really dicks on people who, say, experienced child abuse. Like why do I need to overcome that and other people don’t? I believe in god but I think it’s more of a “I made this machine let’s watch it run” kinda way.
Yeah but what sorta clockmaker makes a clock that doesn’t tell time exactly as he wanted? Intelligent design screws everything over. Either God is dumb, willfully blind, or evil. Christians pick number 2, which is a real dick move for a supposedly loving God.
Also, if your hypothetical wasn’t hypothetical: my partner went through that (in extremes), and I love him more than anything. The truth is: Everything happens. Not for a reason. Just, everything happens. Even to you. Keep your head up, as much as you can.
And take all your life advice from Joss Whedon movies. (Dr Horrible, here, my favorite.)
You’re making an assumption that God was making robots, not people. Humanity is given the one benefit none of God’s creations truly possess, Free Will. God does not want people to simply obey him. He wants us to CHOOSE to obey him.
That’s why, when it all comes to a head and the prophecies are fulfilled, those that were human once, in Heaven, the angels will serve them. Because they chose God, chose Jesus as their Savior, because they wanted to, not because they had to.
But as a result of this great gift, if we don’t follow his exact plan for our life, (undercutting the entire concept of free will), he will ensure that we are eternally tortured.
Free will seems like a really awful gift that I have to awkwardly get excited about when my aunt is watching me open it.
Yet another reason why I don’t let anyone except my gf/bf or life-long friends give me any gifts. Exceptions can be made but it takes a lot to convince me otherwise. Moonshine and the occasional fluffy sock notwithstanding.
The one that I grew up with is that if you choose not to be with God, he allows that. It’s just that if all the “God is Love, God is Good, God is Joy” things are assumed to be true, that means that going without them sucks.
Pretty hard.
On the other other hand, solipsism, so how I know if anyone is even real.
“On the other other hand, solipsism” is a pretty good argument for everything forever. Damn, I’m too old to use it for homework at school! Opportunity missed! >.<
God doesn’t give an “exact plan for your life”. All he does is say, “Deny yourself” Which means put the needs of others over yours, “Pick up your cross” take responsibility for your actions “and follow Me” listen to what Jesus says and use the gifts he gave you to help other people.
God may have a plan for your life, but it’s something you have to look for and use to help others. This isn’t a game board.
Like, we’re talking about abuse, not ‘loving god’. But all that said, an omniscient deity who set everything up in advance and is responsible for the universe is completely responsible for the acts of his creations. You argue that he gave us free will, but he also did it knowing exactly what would come of his actions. And that carries with it a level of responsibility that doesn’t usually exist in creating shit.
I started going to a local Non-Denominational Church in 2004 or so and went every Sunday until My Mom started to have Heart problems and couldn’t really go anywhere any more.
After she died I found my faith in God slipping. I tried, and still do try sometimes, to hold onto the existence of God but paying attention to everything going on in the world and remembering when I was a teenager listen to my drunken Father yell at my Mom over everything and I prayed all the time he’d stop and things would calm down. But they were never answered.
Now I’m 25 and stuck with my drunk Dad who micro manages me and my Brothers lives. So yeah.
I would get up and move to some random location
in excess of a radius of 100 miles. Start a new life.
After a certain age, you are no longer property.
Seek freedom, and do not trap yourself with a flawed
perception of love. If it was me, I would ebay all my
expensive shit and use the money to GTFO of there, starting
back up a new place, establishing new friends, and a new
family.
I’m very sorry about all you’ve gone through. I can’t imagine losing my mother. I can too easily imagine a drunk micromanager, and that sucks. My family had those.
You need an out.
If you want to try engaging with the church, I wouldn’t go there just for faith, I’d actually bring needs to the support system that should exist there. One of the purposes of a church is to provide an extended family you can turn to when you cannot rely on your parents. They should be able to offer advice and support, and may have a favor network that can help with finding necessities like a job or a roommate.
There’s also option d – total apathy regarding the feelings of creations.
Completely cold, logical observation of the blood and horror. Makes more sense when taking into account the mythos, especially the ‘follow strict instructions for reward’ and ‘don’t and eternal punishment’ part. Sounds like a very vengeful scientist trying to make some rats follow a specific pattern. Oh, and then he adjusts parameters in volume II.
Amateur.
Can’t say about clock makers, but sometimes you just make things, let the go and see what happens. OR you make skynet and unintended consequences of not doing enough testing bites you.
You know, if there is a god and he’s roasting our ancestors because he feels like he has the right to do so, we WILL find the fucker and put our collective boot up his ass. We just need time… and a REALLY big boot.
This was actually something we discussed in a philosophy class. There was a Christian philosopher by the name of St. Augustine that tried to tackle the question of how a world created by a omnipotent and omnibenevolent god can have evil in it. Essentially the argument was that you have two kinds of evil in the world, evil in this case meaning more along the lines of pain and suffering rather than a moral judgement: The evil created by God (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, plague, natural disasters, etc.) which are supposedly used to carry out his will, punish the evil, etc., and the evil created as a result of human free-will, which was argued to exist, for if humanity didn’t have free will, there would be little point in creating us as rational thinking beings in the first place. So whenever someone suffers as a consequence of what someone else has done (in this case Toedad) that is an evil humanity has inflicted upon itself. So I guess in that case the only ones who are really screwed over by God directly are innocent natural disaster victims? Is that better? I don’t know if that’s better!
At any rate, I’m fine with people who want to say that God is the creator of the universe and that he was the one who set the natural world into order, but it’s when people start standing in the way of science and knowledge, and start actively contesting everything we are discovering about reality, saying ” my belief trumps your evidence” that I start to argue. Evolution happened. We KNOW this as certainly as we can know anything scientifically. If you want to say it’s part of God’s plan, that’s cool. . . But it happened.
So in short, I guess somebody talk to Joyce about the place of metaphorical language in scripture and give her a copy of the teachings of St Augustine of Hippo. And Thomas of Aquinas. He was actually pretty great about reconciling theology with observations of nature.
See, for me, the conversation with myself (read: desperate pleading with God, followed by horrifying realization) was about homosexuality. Basically, I came to three revelations just before my Joyce-moment: 1.) God is directly responsible for how every single human is (because being omnipotent and omniscient, he’d have to know exactly how they’ll turn out). 2.) God hates homosexuality (see all the verses the homophobes throw at the LGBT community all the time). 3.) God deliberately makes people who are by nature something he hates, meaning they have a choice to either suffer their entire lives on earth through no fault of their own and then spend eternity with a God who deliberately created them so he could hate them, or else spend an eternity being tortured in Hell.
Now, back before I had my conversation with myself, this thought hadn’t really bothered me because I didn’t know any gay people and was ignoring my own urges; I assumed (like I had been taught all my life) that gay people were monstrous perverts who deserved everything bad that happened to them. Then I met…we’ll call him “Ethan”, a wonderful man who was kind and supportive to me when no one else was. And I realized that this man, who was more Christ-like than most of the Christians I knew, was hated by God and would spend eternity being tormented in hell. And I had this conversation with myself, crying, while driving home in a torrential downpour, and I realized that the god I believed in was a horrible, horrible person by even his own standards, and if he were a human I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with him, let alone eternity…so if Christianity was real I basically had a choice to be tormented eternally by spending that time with God, or to be tormented eternally by spending that time in hell. I stayed in denial about the whole thing for another year or two, rationalizing with “well, my logic must be off somewhere” and “it’s an okay moral system if you don’t take it all too seriously” before I finally gave it up entirely, but that night is basically when I realized the brokenness of the system I’d bought into and started to come to terms with it maybe not being real.
Just my own experience, of course. But as you can imagine, these Joyce comics resonate VERY strongly with me because of it.
Thank you for sharing this. This illustrates how I’ve felt about religious dogma without my being able to clearly articulate it as you have. It has always seemed so bizarre to me that people believe god to be loving and wonderful when by his own standards he is knowingly hurting and creating so much suffering. I was never fed religion as “The Truth” as a child so it didn’t really bother me too much.
“I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with him, let alone eternity” – This is pretty much why most rockers and punk rockers, headbangers in general would rather be ripping up shit in Hell rather then spend any time in that sanctimonious shithole called Heaven. /rockon
Not just smart, but surprisingly not completely dependent on religion for her self identity or it would be nearly impossible for her to say these things out loud.
That said, I would love to see the look on Joyce’s face were she to utter something to the effect of: there is no god.
I’m not entirely sure that she’s not dependent on religion for her self-identity, based on that statement. It is almost exactly what Ken Ham himself argues. (My friend, who was given a book by Ham by his pastor, agreed with me that the awfulness of the core argument – you can’t believe in Evolution or else you can’t believe in this version of Christianity – is a really good way to solidify a belief that YEC seems off.)
Yeah, the downside of Joyce taking this particular logical path of unraveling the brainwashing is “I thought that everything was great, because of God, and it turns out that everything is not great, probably because of God, so I’m not feeling the whole ‘God is great’ thing right now” and everything is terrible.
On the one hand I hope that Joyce’s soul searching here doesn’t end in nihilism, but on the other hand it’s really up to her. Either way that girl seriously needs therapy. 🙁
I’ve long held that something doesn’t need to have inherent meaning in order to have subjective value. Cookies have value because they are tasty, meaning and “objective” value is unnecessary.
Objective value can be determined subjectively.
If I where to pay x amount for the cookies, they would have sed objective value to the one getting the money and whatever subjective value I assign to them. Never mind that money’s value is only objective within certain fixed parameters – pretty much like everying.
Because nothing has any intrinsic value, hence meaning, only
the quasi-objective value determined by subjectivity.
Everything is meaningless except for what we deem to have meaning, because we exist and can do that.
Because objective value determined by subjective point of view (in this case: I’m a human and I can think). Of course some manage to kill off whatever value they had via some really shitty actions – further proof that even intrinsic value is subjective and can change.
Yeah, it’s a shame that God isn’t there to keep us from the consequences of evil and incompetent and stupid and lazy people…except for all the good and competent and smart and industrious people.
Reminds me of a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon that thoroughly shows why God isn’t to blame for all the bad things that happen in our lives:
CALVIN: I thought about asking God why he allows so much evil things to happen in the world, but I changed my mind.
HOBBES: Why?
CALVIN: I was afraid he’d ask me the very same question.
That… is wholly unfamiliar to me, and I own every single C&H collection, so, um, I’m not sure that is a real comic rather than a clever photoshop.
Beyond my own unfamiliarity with the strip you’re describing, I also don’t think Calvin ever talked about talking to God nearly that directly (as if he was going to for sure get a response), and while I know Calvin was often not quite a literal six-year-old, it seems like a huge dick move for any God to ask him why he isn’t personally stopping evil.
There is no undo button for PTSD. There’s “pile stuff on top until you can no longer see/smell/sense it” and then there is “attempt to identify, control, and manage to dampen the effects to cause minimal issues for the long term”.
It’s also arguable that there’s no undoing long term brainwashing, either, because it affects the brain in a similar way to the way trauma does. Most people who “overcome” brainwashing often choose the path of hardline rejecting of what they were told to believe going from one extreme to the opposite, the severity of which mirrors the extremeness of the original brainwashing itself. It’s part of the coping mechanism that people latch on to as a means of taking control of their lives once they’ve come to realize that they had little to no control prior to that.
Hence why so many people who were raised and lived hyper-pious lives as evangelicals or other types of zealous beliefs go completely, or very close to, atheist. The harder or more painful the ‘escape’, the further people go to reject it.
There is no undo button, but therapy is really one of the only things that can HELP with PTSD (saying as a PTSD haver who tried all of the other options). You have the trauma forever because that’s how trauma works, but the “disorder” part of PTSD can shift in how it manifests and how much it controls a person’s life. There’s not exactly a “getting out the other side” of PTSD, but there is definitely a “change how you interact with your trauma.”
Therapy can help, but what kind of therapy helps is as much of a mixed bag as PTSD itself is, and then there’s the fact that some people start showing near instant benefits when they find the right therapy, whereas others may have to try for months or years. Our medical system, at its most caring and compassionate and well funded, wants results after weeks.
I imagine someone who has the epiphany that religious fanaticism is kind of screwed up is likely to reject religion altogether, but I doubt that applies to everyone.
*A-hem* Joyce, may I introduce you to a pair of concepts called “Calvinism” and “absolute sovereignty of God?” The theology can be a little hard to come to terms with at first, but it answers these questions.
Yes, I’m aware posting this will probably just earn me hate. Too bad.
Freaking Calvinism. When I was a Catholic, I decided I’d rather be an atheist than Calvinist, if it came to that. I refuse to believe that people can unwittingly be doomed to hell through no fault of their own making. Humans are beautiful, and if taken care of, have almost limitless potential. Rigging the dang pachinko machine of life against them is cruelty itself, and not the purview of a loving God.
So in the end, I ended up atheist, and much happier.
Regardless of its original intent as a theology, in practice Calvinism led to all sorts of looking at worldly success as evidence of heavenly reward, aka the sort of stuff that nowadays is Prosperity Gospel and punishing the poor.
Theodicy is one of those things that isn’t well covered by most religious instruction. If God is good, why do bad things happen to good people? Why is there evil at all? For some, this is a deal breaker and not just teenagers, but serious scholars, such as Bart Ehrman.
Oh it’s not so mysterious as all that. People talk about “evil” as if it were a force unto itself, but the response to that by many theists is that it’s not. Evil is analogous to cold; not a tangible force, but the sensation we experience due to the absence of good.
Good and evil aren’t equal, opposite forces in this framework. Asking, “why does evil exist” is a meaningless question. The real question is “Why is there less good in some lives than in others?” And that question also has its various perspectives. But in any even, I was exposed to this perspective during high school and I’m not inclined to think I operated in particularly elite intellectual circles.
Religion has been easy for Joyce so far. She has been a perfect girl. Follow the rules, avoid what challenges your worldview, take what is handed to you by those you trust. But Life / Marriage / Religion is hard. It ends up involving faith, not objective truth.
From Jill Phillips, a Christian (but not Fundie) singer.
Resurrection
The Good Things (2008)
My good friend Paul was lying in the backseat of a station wagon
Headed to New Mexico
Somewhere in the middle of the night the driver fell asleep
And hit the wall beside the road
My friend went through the window like a bullet through the glass
Dead before he ever hit the ground
Oh I believe though its hard sometimes
You are the resurrection and the life
Jody is a queen reigning prone upon a couch
For the past few years of numbered days
Because the virus in her body and the cancer in her brain
Are buying up the real estate
The medicine they give her trades nightmares for her dreams
Of memories too tragic to describe
Oh I believe though its hard sometimes
You are the resurrection and the life
I know the words of life to come are true
But sometimes they feel like salt upon the wound
When I’m asking in these moments where are you
Where are you?
Sometimes its like Lazarus, You come to roll the stone away
And watch him walk back out alive
Sometimes its like my good friend Paul, breathless on the interstate
Mother weeping at his side
Either way its something I will never understand
But I trust enough to take you at your word
So I believe though its hard sometimes
You are the resurrection and the life
It’s the long-awaited return of Joyce the Biblical scholar! Interesting to note that she seems to be examining the classic “Problem of Evil” and coming up not with the common “God does not exist” conclusion but rather “God exists and he’s a cruel piece of crap.” I’m quietly rooting for Joyce to find some version of faith more like Sierra’s, though at this point I’d settle for anything other than “atheist Mary.”
It’s weird because I’ve seen all sorts of answers to the dilemma. “God does not exist.” “God exists, he is evil.” “God is not all powerful.” “God is not a God.” But, by far, the most interesting one, and in fact one that Joyce may come to, is “Evil is an illusion, and does not come.”
I’d kinda like to see what’d happen if Joyce were exposed to a serious examination of Buddhism or Taoism; they completely explode the framework that she’s operating in – that dilemma is not a dilemma at all in those systems – but without flat out negating it.
To be fair, I think Joe would be the kind to be really careful about not getting any infections, because they screw up opportunities for future sex, and joe never risks future sex.
Best answer I have is that it arises from a conflict between competing goods: free will against the utter lack of evil, with free will being the greater of the two.
Of course, that answer poses a number of tricky logical conclusions that would make for a bitter pill for any fundie to swallow….
But is free will not negated or rendered irrelevant in a universe where an omniscient / omnipresent being exists and the factors of creation were defined by said force. In that I mean if God were truly all-knowing, then he would be able to percieve the nature of each individual resulting from the conditions of their creation, therefore capable of defining the choices that each individual would make resulting from said nature. Therefore our choices, being a consequence of our psyche established by an all-knowing God, were actually made by said God meaning God is responsible for the viability of our suffering just as much as our triumphs which counters our notion of a ‘good’ God.
Don’t forget the third “omni”, “omnipotent”. A lot of people don’t understand what “omnipotent” means, unless they’ve studied Latin. “Omnipotent” means basically “can do anything” (potent being the same root as “potential”) but a lot of people take that to mean “does everything”, hence a manufactured conflict. Just because you can write anything doesn’t mean you are writing everything.
But if by curing the disease, you are wiping out an entire species of microbes, which are also your creation, are you willing to settle with the death of millions or millions of bacteria to save the life of a couple of humans?
I have never heard of this “Evil is an illusion” theory. Please elaborate. Is this just the “God’s morality is incomprehensible to mere mortals, and thus it is Good when He allows a child to die in a burning building.” position? Because I always thought that was the most blatant and shameless bullshit of all.
I think the only theodicy that can possibly hold water (other than god being evil, which is a fun thought experiment, but still seems absurdly improbable) is that both evil and divine non-intervention are necessary for the continued existence of the universe. The idea being, we’re all existing inside a vastly flexible but nearly deterministic machine, and evil is just an emergent property of any universe with physical laws that can sustain intelligent life. Poking the machine to reduce the evil will just jam the metaphorical gears, like trying to keep one hand of a clock from moving while intending to let the others move freely. But that’s a strictly deist cosmology.
But then theodicy falls apart onthe “omnipotent” angle. If God can’t prevent the consequences of divine intervention, God isn’t all-powerful because there’s something God can’t do. We haven’t moved from “would help but can’t or could help but won’t.”
Well, I think it’s unfair to define omnipotence to broadly- like the whole “Can God make a rock so heavy he can’t pick it up?” paradox. God can’t make a true statement which is false, God can’t make 1 = 2, God can’t invert the arrow of time and make the concepts of cause and effect meaningless. When you demand those things of God you deny any framework for any possible God to even exist in, and I think it’s arguing in bad faith to require that the God that’s been demonstrated be a de-facto incomprehensible horror from beyond reality before the argument has even begun.
The problem isn’t so much the arguments, but in this case I’d point the proverbial finger to the one that’s making them. Or, rather, the problem has more to do with us not being able to resolve sed paradoxes. What if the problem is us, not the questions? Yes, I am postulating the idea that paradoxes can’t be solved because we – specifically we – are incapable of doing such.
In other words, the answer to all of the above should be ‘yes’ if a omni-deus could exist. Of course, that means that objective limits, such as paradoxes are a problem of the observer, not the object being observed. Meaning that reality isn’t as objective as we think it is. There are a few very interesting physics experiments in this ballpark.
But does it really matter? If what we experience is as it is, does it really matter if a omni-deus can or does exist?
The Grand Question, in my humble opinion, is the often unasked question, of weather or not worship of such a being is even appropriate – does such a god deserve worship, considering the world in which we live in? How much of it’s beauty is due to US and not this god?
Personally, I find that even if it would exist, I’d not bow to such a thing.
I will however feel patriotic about humanity – I will feel a distinct love for humankind.
We are far more deserving of it.
In some cases the child is more deserving then the father. If there even is one.
That depends partly on how you define “evil”. The Heathen world-view doesn’t have a Satanic figure (even Loki has his positive uses; he’s more of a bastard wildcard than out-and-out evil); it doesn’t have the concept of sin (certainly not original sin) as the Christians envision it; and it doesn’t really have a place of punishment in the afterlife (although you can upgrade to a nicer one if you are a very good warrior and die in battle, or are a woman or a kid when you die).
“Evil,” in the sense of a supernatural negative force, doesn’t exist for us. What we do have is external forces (like the weather) that just don’t care about humanity one way or another and can be terribly destructive; and the actions of people, which can also be terribly destructive, to themselves and to others.
Thus personal responsibility is very important. If you do something that affects others, yourself, or the environment in a negative way, it’s not enough to just feel bad and regret what you did; you need to work to make amends. Our modern concept of paying a fine in restitution comes from the Norse concept of weregild, where if you wrong someone, you pay a set fee in restitution.
There is pain and suffering in the world because that’s just how it is. If you break a leg it’s going to hurt, because we are an animal that feels hurt. If you get punched in the face it’s either because you provoked it (in which case the result of your actions was to get punched, so next time, maybe don’t try to provoke people to the point of punching you); or because the other person was an asshole (in which case they need to make restitution, usually but not always by paying a fee to you in recompense); or some combination of the two (in which case a fee may be paid, but probably not as large). In any case, it didn’t happen because some shadowy evil spirit was hovering behind your left shoulder driving you on against your will, any more than some shadowy evil spirit “made” him punch you. Nope. That’s all on you guys.
The flip side of that is that the gods aren’t particularly Good, either. It’s not so much that there’s no shadowy evil spirit, but that there’s no claim that there’s an all powerful perfectly good supreme being who still doesn’t keep people from suffering for reasons we can’t understand.
The problem is inherent in Christianity (and to some extent in any monotheism). Once you have an actual Supreme Being, it’s all his fault.
Yes, exactly. A world designed and run (for a given value of “designed” and “run”) by committee makes a lot more sense, given what we can see around us.
The gods are our ancestors, and are not perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent. They may or may not be willing or able to help us out with a given issue, the same as our parents or grandparents. You’re probably on your own and should do everything you can to sort it out yourself, but hey, asking if they can have some quiet influence behind the scenes won’t hurt.
–And none of that conflicts with Science, which is also nice.
Which means, you get the option of becoming a scientist and helping the universe run like usual! Cool! I wonder if they will allow me to move stars out of orbit? OOO or I know make them explode!
Remember that the problem of evil was formulated by Epicurus, a pagan, three centuries before Christ. The was certainly some feeling that God (Zeus) ought to be able and willing to prevent evil, and that he evidently doesn’t is a profound problem for doctrine.
Paganism. Yes. Pagan Joyce as a complete rejection of
her established faith. A rebellion that becomes a personal
truth when the rebellion fades, which happens when
the rebellion is allowed.
I think it’s the Eastern religion tack, where evil isn’t really a concept. Buddhism and Taoism. In Buddhism, suffering comes from within, from your own desires, and besides, if you draw an objectively raw deal, you reincarnate better next time, anyway. Sucks to suck in the meantime.
Taoism is much more beautiful, even though it gets a little crackpot away from the foundations. I’m unaware of anyone finding any immortal old masters roaming the mountains of China, at any rate.
Where Christianity has the Platonic view of good and evil: the sun is the ultimate good (here, God), everywhere the light reaches is good, and the absence of good is evil.
Taoism takes that same scene, and casts it onto a vast sea of hills, which is watched throughout the day. There are patterns that dance across, here is light, and there is darkness, later here is darkness, there is light. They’re part of a whole. If darkness is absence, half the beauty doesn’t exist, and it’s beautiful simply because it is. The duality in fact doesn’t even exist, as a result, because they both are, and, in being one being, contain each other, even as they oppose each other.
This is what the yin yang represents: on a literal level, the light and dark dancing across the hills. On a real level, they’re dualities being one both together and apart, within and without each other, part of a beautiful whole. The Way doesn’t take easy answers. That which can be called the Way isn’t the Way.
My personal view is god just sits around playing something akin spore all day and we’re the game. The dinosoars were either the game crashing or him getting bored and staring over.
Imagine Joyce discovering that the God of her universe is s a short man with rumpled hair and thick glasses who draws comics for a living. (Mind Blown)
I’d agree, except this version is based even more on Willis than in IW! On the path Joyce is going, I can’t ultimately see her do anything than reject Christianity completely. I think it’s intellectually dishonest for her character arc to go anywhere else.
Nah, there are a lot of Christian interpretations that allow for evolution. Like how the Fruit was a metaphor for evolving to the point of intelligence where humans could be moral agents, and that was where they could suddenly start being evil, ergo it’s our fault.
Never underestimate the capacity for rationalization as an element of dealing with coming face to face with the downsides of your religion.
Errr, I wouldn’t say it’s intellectually dishonest if she goes another way. It just makes her a little less autobiographical. AFAWK, Willis didn’t have a man crush, isn’t reasonably sociable, and hasn’t had guys kiss him while confessing they’re gay. Not every single detail is exactly alike.
She started from a strange place with all of this and got to a stranger one. Her conclusion isn’t at all necessary if she remembers free will. Has she never heard of allegories?
If the Bible is allegorical at all, then everything she was taught is still a lie, because she was taught the Fundamentalist view that everything in the Bible is literally true – that the universe is a mere six thousand years old, that all of Creation was done in six twenty-four-hour days, that we’re all descended from a horribly incestuous family (and don’t ask where the woman of Nod that Cain married came from), that Joshua literally stopped the sun in the sky so his guys would have more time to slaughter their enemies, all that. So either way, we’re still playing Break the Cutie. Damn it.
I heard she was a demon. Or was that Lilith? Mixed races. Maybe
Mixed races of human/demon/angel/animal/god turned out to be
the thing that, in a few generations, mangled and mutated the
gene pool into something other than physical immortality? There
are weirder things.
From the story I head, God had the brilliant idea to make Lilith in front of Adam as his first wife from a bone he took from him (from his foot, I think). Seeing a human being made from the inside-out really creeped the fuck out of Adam and he couldn’t get hard on Lilith. This upset Lilith as well and she walked away, being spurned by Adam.
Then God decided to make the second woman while Adam slept from his rib and that worked out fine boner-wise. Eventually Lilith came back and got jiggy with Adam and Eve’s children, because if she couldn’t have Adam she’ll damn well try for his kids.
Really, Adam had a frail constitution and was an asshole.
Lilith is pretty bongoin’ though. Pretty much told God to shove it and walked away to do her own shit. I like her.
Dayum, Willis. Didn’t know you were once a fundamentalist. I’m currently trying to talk some young-earth creationists out of the darkness, and its pretty interesting.
Ah, yes, I’m very very familiar with this progression of thought. Scared the hell out of me to start having to deal with the problem of evil as I was sliding out of the cult-ish fundie religion of my youth
I believe in God. I don’t believe in a God who would punish me for the sins of my ancestors. I would rather believe God put us in a hellish world of suffering, pain, starvation, and loss with the tools to make it a better place than one who would do it because we deserved it.
I find the notion that God created the world, looked at it and went, “Well, this sucks. How do I fix it? Oh, I know. Add little me’shumans,” strangely compelling.
I’m not sure anything is right with this world that isn’t us. It’s not like nature can stop to behold its own beauty, aesthetics is basically our wheelhouse. We create and then project beauty on nature, and then proceed to ruin it before it can ruin us.
Without us to pass judgment, there is neither right NOR wrong in the world. The world just is, and everyone else is able to accept that and live their lives to the fullest despite it. We’re the ones who pass judgment, and as such, make the world right or wrong in accordance with those judgments.
Perhaps “judge not lest ye be judged” should be applied to more than just human neighbors quarreling with each other.
Personally, i find the lack of evidence for anything really to draw any reasonable conclusion about anything, and i don’t subscribe to anything without proof which can be tested multiple times…
Yes, i was that kid driving every faith preacher/teacher crazy with all my questions xD
I was born an original sinner/I was born from original sin/And if I had a Dollar bill for every sin I’ve done/There’d be a mountain of money piled up to my chin–HEY!–The Eurthythmics, “Missionary Man”
At least now I understand why creationists are so adamant on staying creationists. “The God I love is responsible for the concept of misery” is a bitter pill to have to swallow.
And it’s largely due to the fact that the type of deity that sect expects its followers to worship kind of is an asshole, sending people to Hell for falling for incredibly well-faked evidence or acting on the feelings God gave them or believing one of the million other sects or religions out there. The sect’s strictness and literalism demands an idea of an abusive parent as point of worship, someone you placate to avoid their drunken wrath rather than someone deserving of worship.
And that seems to be the current divergence between Joyce and Becky. Becky came upon the Problem of Evil and decided that the deity she wants to worship is a chill dude who isn’t going to create elaborate mechanisms to be dicks to people and so isn’t overly concerned with caboodle noodling or touching giblets or even whether or not you even believe in him. And in doing so left behind the literalism and her raising and myths like the Garden of Eden.
Joyce is hitting the Problem of Evil but has decided that the deity she was told to worship is what she has to work with. So either he’s demanding impossible standards and hurting people for a good reason or everything she has ever been taught is wrong including the existence of said deity.
And that Joycian path sets up a lot of fundie kids to become atheists, because if the choice is between an immoral and provably false literalism and non-belief, then eventually the choice is to either deliberate ignore reality or fall out of faith (or like Becky, throw away the wrath and the literalism).
Even before reading your reply, I was giddy with excitement to read a, and I shall quote myself, “Cerberus reply! Cerberus reply!”. I feel my cheeks going flush. 😛
Ah, love these comments by you and many others – the math thread started by dear Fem-Cronus was particularly fun and endearing. Life is glorious to behold and experience first-hand! Places like this is what keeps my faith in humanity so damn high. /human pride
The main reconciliation of the two ideas I generally see is that ending suffering would involve curtailing free will and self-determination. I wonder if Joyce will come to that conclusion, abandon religion, or find another way to reconcile her faith with the world she finds herself in.
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
And I like it too. But if I was given that answer in a theological debate (which I don’t intend to start) then I would have to rebuke about how that doesn’t really solve any questions. It’s a super cool line though from a super intense show/book series.
To elaborate, it’s more theatrical than actually practical for answering the question. It’s there for effect. Think about it. “Because of men like you” …..Men who are somehow powerful enough to resist god? A god who, if he is both able and willing, should be preventing evil? If he is benevolent, therefore fighting evil, these “men like him” shouldn’t be alive anymore to cause this.
That’s not even to mention the fact that we’re talking specifically about the christian god here (and its ancestral versions as passed through history, all the way back to the Romans in the era where christianity’s roots were getting popularized). What I mean is that we’re jumping all the way to asking if the christian god is real, instead of first asking if any god or gods are real. If there was a supernatural being who created the universe, who says he had anything to do with creating morality? Good and Evil? Right and Wrong? Maybe he/she/it just built the damn thing (the universe) and we came up with everything else ourselves. Who knows.
The larger assumption is, of course, to the idea of what exactly is intervention. The free will argument often seems like a cop out but if God is omniscient and omnipotent, what is the level to be perfect everything and what is life if we’re to live it? If there’s no consequences to anything we do, everything is perfect and wonderful, and there is no “evil” then there’s no real “life” per say. Paradise can exist without suffering but the concept of strength and growth as a person is a consequence of struggle. Evil, though, is a choice to act upon natural struggles and make them worse. Then again, I subscribe to the view of the world as a test and God as a good being but also a somewhat alien one. Morality to a 50 billion year old Doctor Manhattan figure is going to be somewhat different than that of a limited human. Even if it also lives through us.
Joyce’s position essentially hinges on pain and suffering not being necessary or desirable states of existence. The Garden story essentially supports that position; things were perfect once, and then humans screwed it up and now they suck. And then going to, except they didn’t screw it up, it’s *always* sucked and was made that way, as a consequence of accepting evolution as legitimate.
She isn’t considering that her view of the role of suffering itself may be the thing at fault, just the implications of it’s source. The idea that suffering may not actually be a sign that things are terrible, that it may actually have a positive or valuable role, or that it may be necessary to create life itself, is a completely alien concept to her at the moment. And honestly, it’d shake different core beliefs to go there, because it’d completely bring into question the concepts of evil and sin in a very fundamental way, which would force her to completely re-examine her morality.
To me, free will and determinism can co-exist. The Norse concept of pre-determinism or fate was called wyrd; it’s where we get the word “weird” from. We see it in the sagas in things like “It was so-and-so’s wyrd to die in battle.”
To put it into a modern concept alongside of free will, it’s the broad strokes of your life (particularly your death; it seems to mostly be concerned with how you die) that may be planned out to a certain extent, but it doesn’t fill in the details. Yo may be fated to die of a gunshot wound when you’re 27, in which case nothing can change that; but it’s up to you whether you are shot robbing a bank or in a drug deal gone south, or as a police officer saving an innocent. Or, hell, you may just be a bookseller who’s stayed away from guns and violence their whole life and just happened to catch a stray bullet one day, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Fate” says what happens, and when. We say why, and how.
“Fate” says what happens, and when. We say why, and how.
I’m putting this in my list of awesome quotes (I’m serious, there actually is one – including who sed it and when). /respect
Oh good lord. “What’s life if nothing bad ever happens to you!?” Begs the question, don’t you t hink? There’s plenty of room for minor, and even major, drama without evil. Your life would be plenty interesting based purely from that, even before getting into the concept of art.
Putting that aside, when you get to ‘alien, not-understandable morality taht appears evil’, the actual *GOOD* choice is maltheistic. An evil deity, were it real, should, in fact, be opposed, at least while it was in the midst of evil acts.
I’ve never really understood why able+unwilling=malevolent. We don’t expect ants to think like us or have the same motivations, and if a God exists it would be infinitely more alien. I am not sure what my level of belief is in god, full stop, but if there is one I certainly don’t see any reason to think it would see our concerns or pains in the same way we would. Does that mean we shouldn’t worship it? I dunno, but then you are asking whether it is Man’s place to chastise the gods. I hear the Greeks had a few discussions on that, too.
I think it is man’s place. That’s why we have these brains after all.
I won’t cede my right to think and reason, even to God. Now, God’s smarter and knows much more than I do and I’d certainly be willing to listen to His arguments should He being willing to make them explicitly, but if I think He’s wrong I’ll tell Him so to His face.*
What else would a God worthy of worship want from His creations?
*Or I’d like think I would. More likely I’d cower in terror and beg for mercy, but that’s my failing.
On the other hand, sometimes when horribly evil things happen it leads to good outcomes. It could be argued, for instance (and I have), that without the Nazis and World War II, we wouldn’t have the Civil Rights Movement or gender equity. We needed to see the logical consequences of bigotry in order to start to move beyond it. (Note that we haven’t gotten completely past it yet – so far, we’ve just made it unfashionable. It’s a start, though.)
Any halfway decent omnipotent being should be able to arrange for the good outcomes without the horrors. Or just arrange for not having the centuries or millenia of sexism and racism to start with.
Sure, horribly evil things can lead to good outcomes, but for this argument you really have to claim the good things couldn’t happen without the horrors and that’s a much harder case to make.
It’s the explanation for an awful lot of why they’re so adamant about everything. Despite all their protestations that the faith is deep and all that, this particular brand of faith is spectacularly *fragile* for exactly the reasons Joyce is discovering, especially for anyone who takes it intellectually seriously like Joyce. If part of it cracks, it all shatters. So none of it can be allowed to crack. My own path of leaving the church looked exactly like this. (The problem of evil part, not the Becky-saving car chase part.)
It’s kinda sad really, but also a good thing. Yes, her faith is being broken but she’s growing as an individual. I gotta say Joyce is without a doubt having one of the best character developments I’ve been reading for a while.
The story of Adam and Eve with the apple from the Tree of Knowledge kinda shows you how they are enforcing ignorance and persecuting thinking right from the beginning. It’s pretty disgusting that the character in this story that is encouraging ignorance, even in the form of a metaphor, isn’t the antagonist. Especially in a work that is the be taken to heart.
It’s the fruit of the tree of knowledge -of good and evil-.
If you’ve read Call of Cthulhu, there’s a part where they talk about how the Old Ones will teach humanity new ways to exult in torture and murder. -That’s- what the tree is about.
Why God had a tree like that is an entirely different question, but given that Adam spent the time before the tree creating language puns for all the animals and for Eve, he’s clearly not meant to be brain-dead.
Please don’t deliberately misstate things to make a point.
It’s called the Tree of Knowledge, not the Tree of Horrible Murder. If your theory is correct, then God really fucked up on the name he chose to go with.
Also it doesn’t explain why A&E got all modest after munching on it. I never knew that knowledge of horrible murder makes you shy and awkward.
I’d like to mildly apologize on one point: I wasn’t aware of the full title of the tree. To be fair though, even the wikipedia article “Forbidden Fruit” only says “Tree of Knowledge” and never says the whole title.
On a related note, I’d like to bring up that I’m not “delibrately misstating things to make a point”. I’m an atheist, not an asshole. I don’t appreciate that you try to paint me as one.
(by which I mean that if “Tree of Knowledge” was in fact its whole name and it was entirely a metaphor relating to knowledge, then my negative-toned comment about how screwed-up that is would have been perfectly valid.)
I always had this whimsical notion that the story of the fall of man was originally a coming of age story. Adam and Eve live in their father’s house with no worries, no concerns, but obeying his rules. Then they reach adulthood and decide they’ve outgrown his rules, so they move out and live their own lives by their own effort and their own decisions. Maybe later generations turned it into a punishment story because living on your own is, like, totally hard man!
It happens. Sometimes people break, and the never really recover, and it really seems like Joyce is on her way to becoming a deeply angry and cynical person.
Joyce was an angry person the whole time. She just covered it up with her bubbly personality. A lifetime of repression will give you a lot of anger that tends to break through from time to time.
Just remember, Joyce is pretty much autobiographical for Willis, and he seems pretty happy nowadays. So I’m guessing she can have a happy outcome too.
… granted, he went through a few years of killing off parts of his psyche via webcomic proxy, so it might be a bit of a rough road for her, but eventual happiness is definitely a possibility.
I was trying very hard not to say this, but that’s the main reason I’m scared for her. Willis is a tremendous person with a strong sense of ethics and a drive to make the world better (just like Joyce), but I really don’t think he’s happy.
Really? You don’t see the way he talks about Maggie, or the twins, or heck, going to BotCon, finding out all of comedy is fundamentally Batman, you don’t think that looks happy? I think he’s rightfully resentful about a number of things, but that it’s turned positive on the whole. Not that I can really speak in his place, of course.
Next DOA-year, Joyce will start drawing cartoons about a character named Julia Baker who struggles to reconcile religion with her college experience while saving the world from interdimensional alien invaders.
I’m enjoying Angry Joyce, but yeah, hopefully she finds a healthy balance.
The old Joyce coming back would be terrifying, though, considering that it would involve rejecting a lot of things she’s come to accept.
Thing is, it’s not a valid reason, at all. The overwhelming evidence that evolution happens isn’t any less overwhelming just because someone would feel bad if they had to deal with the implications that evidence suggests; it’s the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going LALALALALALA really loud.
Indeed, it’s one of the classic logical fallacies. Concluding that something is false because of downstream consequences of its truth being (to the person making this conclusion) undesirable.
There’s some stress on those seams there. Poor Joyce…awakening to the full onslaught of reality is never easy for those who have learned to be hidebound, whatever the cause. And, realistically, it’ll be what-if flashes for a long, long time.
Yeah, but without death, evolution would get rather more complicated – the organisms best able to reproduce would still be passing on their heritable traits, but the less optimal would still be getting more chances to stay in the gene pool.
Hopefully that made something resembling sense; I’m kinda tired.
I want to hug this comment. I can’t decide if a basic doc class would blow Joyce’s mind more than gender studies did. She’s fairly compassionate, so I think she’d adjust pretty well.
Personally I look at evolution, at how amazingly, impressively, staggeringly…complex we are. How complex life itself is; things that can literally change themselves over generations to adapt to their environments..
When you consider how many cells humans have, consider how many parts make up a cell, and keep shrinking down to subatomic particles, then realize how many of those particles perfectly fit upward to form something as singular as an individual human being, then realize just how small we are in the universe, how BIG existence is…
It’s a little hard not to feel shaken by it and wonder at what set all that in motion, what keeps all that in motion…
It’s quite possible to believe in both evolution and God.
I’m sure that Joyce wasn’t brought up to believe both, though.
The version of the story she and her community studied is very specific, HAS to be very specific, because they decided on a version long ago and they can’t go back on their word. Because changing your mind is a weakness to them.
And I imagine that accepting only religion over science is a way of strengthening religion’s grip on them.
You can only throw away a piece if you are willing to throw away everything and the community makes sure it is painfully clear that “throwing away everything” means everything (i.e. being cut off from family, any form of financial safety net, all your friends (because you are groomed from childhood to only make friends with other “good Christians”), any type of social support network, and so on).
It creates a system of emotional blackmail where it’s easy to just start believing impossible things simply to try and avoid having to deal with the possibility of losing that much.
And it’s probably also why Becky is much more chill about this crisis of faith. She was already fucked on all of that simply because of who she was attracted to and her inability to view her deity as the type of cruel motherfucker who’d give her her loves just to torture and punish he and so it was easy to accept that demand and just adapt her faith to her lived experiences and the world around her.
And it’s why Joyce is likely going to lose her entire faith whereas Becky’s is easily adapted to all the cool new things she’s learning about the world. As she notes, her God is not threatened by evolution being definitely true, because she doesn’t need her God to have literally created humanity in a literal Garden of Eden unlike Joyce.
And this is one of the reasons intelligent design makes me so angry.
“In order to stay with the community you have to deny science, believe a flimsy pile of lies in it’s place (eyes can’t evolve, evolution is driven by catastrophes, whatever) and you will never know the joy of 9000 year old corn.
Google “Conway’s Game of Life.” A grid of black and white dots. A few very simple rules – a short paragraph’s worth – for how the dots change color over time based on their neighbors.
And, with a sufficiently large grid and enough time, you can run any computer program you can write. You can run Google’s speech recognition algorithm, and the even-more-awesome version they will have in 50 years.
There’s no intelligence there whatsoever. But start a program running, and it can do anything that any computer can do.
Physics is like that. A few simple rules playing out in a near-infinite grid.
If there’s no God in Conway’s grid, I don’t see any need for God in nature either.
But someone created the rules by which the game operates. If there’s a God, what’s to say he didn’t whip up the rules by which the universe operates and start it spinng?
Always felt everyone gets that story wrong. (besides it being figurative)
It’s about free will and intelligence. There was no threat. No punishment. It was a warning. There was no kicking out of Eden. It wasn’t eat from the tree and get kicked out. It was become intelligent and it would stop being Eden. Eden is still there. It is everywhere. It just stopped being Eden to us. Eden was ignorance and ignorance is bliss. “Choose” to become intelligent but you’ll never see the world the same again. The cost is high but the rewards are great.
When you are a child, the world looks sunny and wonderful and overall fair or at least devoid of too bad problems, but with age, you see the cracks in society. You notice the inequality, the fear, the mistreatment behind closed doors, the reality you remained ignorant too and you can’t go back and that knowledge can be painful, but one can’t turn a blind eye to what’s real forever…
Yeah, I can see that being the intended metaphor of that story.
And in that metaphor, we really really see what’s going on with Joyce. She can no longer remain in ignorance of what she grew up with and what the real world is like and the cost of the morals she was told were strong and true. She cannot go back to the ignorance of Eden, nor should she. But that comes with the pain of having to deal with the real, but that also comes with life and change and transformation.
Her note about the stasis of her mythical world is telling. That world is lifeless because life is all about change, about growth, about diversity, and yes about decay to make room for new development. Eden is a shell devoid of things actually living much like the bigotries she was raised in made it impossible for those like Becky to truly live.
But now, life. Uncertain and sometimes painful. But allowing the possibility of something genuinely alive in every glorious meaning of the term.
It’s perfect because we talk about how Adam and Eve ate from “the fruit”, but it wasn’t just the fruit of “the tree” – it was a Tree of Knowledge, and more specifically, it was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 2:17). And when they ate from the tree, the direct consequence (aside from God’s punishments) was that now they knew of Good and Evil (Gen. 3:22). (So it seems that there *was* already Evil around before then, but they did not know about it, and eating was when they became *aware* of it.)
Sure, that is one possible way to read the story – a really good way to read the story, but it clashes with a lot of doctrine in various churches.
If that’s the intended read, then original sin has to be a metaphor as well (for responsibility), and if it’s just a metaphor it’s not something to atone for and if it’s not something to atone for then you kinda loose the idea of humanity as something fundamentally flawed that has to be saved. “All the good things we do are God working through us”
Well seeing how a lot of fundamentalists and other types of Christianity few the Pope and the Vatican as the Anti-Christ, that probably isn’t very comforting to Joyce.
Her world is collapsing all around her and she’s trying to cling to what’s left of it, and it’s really not working. She’s got the awareness to know that there’s not just a small chance that it is all a goddamned lie. And she’s not handling it well.
Well, Duh! Glad Joyce is finally realizing that while faith is a wonderfully powerful thing, religion is a bunch of mind control that often leads to more serious problems than reading books with magicians in them. That said, the people who translate and wrote religious texts were quite imaginative with their allegorical story-telling.
Mike has always respected Joyce more than the others. Also, he is probably in favor of her being in a state of mind where she is more likely to deck people at random.
That’s a very anthropocentric viewpoint. There’s plenty of animals smart enough to make choices that they’re genuinely responsible for. Many of the primates are extremely clever and emotionally and socially complex, and we don’t even know enough about cetaceans to say for sure that all of them are less intelligent than us.
I had a hard time coming to terms with this as well, but have found my own way of believing that both can happen. I feel for Joyce, but why can’t God have created evolution, knowing that things can’t be the same forever?
Joyce is still clinging to the faith if her youth. Hitting rock bottom is going to be a real problem when that last tie hold crumbles. I hope at least one if her friends knows enough to get her into therapy. If not, the Joyce we know and love may cease to exist.
No no it actually works perfectly.
Adam was created first. When god took out Adam’s “rib” that was the first division, creating Eve…
Ya know I meant that as a joke but from a Christian perspective that actually makes perfect sense.
Welp.
… where did Joyce get the idea that there wasn’t death in the Garden of Eden? I don’t recall ever hearing that presented as a thing.
As far as I was aware, the idea of the Garden of Eden was that it was separate from the “real world”, meaning that there could have been evolution and dinosaurs and stuff over in the real world while humans were in their Garden limbo. And then humans got kicked out into the already existing real world.
There wasn’t death, apparently, at least to some readings, and in fact, theologians point to the shortening of life expectancy through the genealogy in Genesis as being caused by the expansion of sinfulness among humans.
I think we should make that argument to get the craziest fundamentalist Christians that the social progressiveness we’ve been engaging in is actually pleasing God since we’ve been living longer as it advances. It’s worth a shot.
But see, that’s only if you use secular statistics. Real proof is ANECDOTAL proof, and anecdotal proof has baby autism punishing evil vaccine use, baby AIDS punishing evil homosexuality, etc etc
Because it’s portrayed as the perfect world. No deaths, no famine, no sickness, no starvation or drought, nothing that could possibly go wrong. It’s never stated because it’s kinda implied in the whole context of “pre sin”.
The bible talks about there being animals in the garden. IIRC, God actually made them before he made Adam. Anyway, some fundamentalists claim that because Eden was perfect and without suffering, that this meant the animals who lived there did not suffer either. Adam and Eve were both vegetarians, basically.
The Eden stories specifically give animals permission to eat plants, but nothing is stated about them being given permission to eat each other. God allowing carnivores doesn’t happen until after the Flood.
I feel like it’s more he doesn’t want to take dude, depending on who you are, anything can taste like chicken. I heard a guy say armadillo tastes like chicken.
I haven’t tried armadillo, but I have tried rattlesnake. It’s tougher than chicken, good chicken anyway, but it does have the same basic taste. Some would call it lack of taste. If you ever try it, make sure it’s been thoroughly deboned. There’s a million little bones in the meat.
Ahh!
I see. Yeah, some Christians (particularly those who aren’t well read on the subject) tend to forget that.
My confusion likely stems from the fact that my old testament knowledge is mostly based on the Torah. Two of my ex-girlfriends were Jewish. One got kinda serious, and she introduce me to her rabbi. The other was Israeli and was into theology. Between the two, I learned a lot about Jewish mysticism. It was actually kinda neat.
On an unrelated topic, I think the real problem here is that Joyce needs to learn the difference between literal and metaphysical. Something can be true and not be literal.
In this case, much of the suffering in the world is caused by humans. Original Sin, at its core, is just a metaphor that makes that clear. People suffer because of other people.
I have never understood why people get so bent out of shape about religious stuff being literally true. I am a very religious person (pagan), but I also understand that none of my beliefs are literally true. Zeus didn’t literally knock up random humans, for example. But they are metaphysically true. The traits that made Zeus a strong leader and good father also made him a disloyal husband. That is something that actually happens in the world. I mean, aside from the swan-rape or pee shower. Zeus was a weird guy.
Look at it this way Joyce, if it makes you feel better:
As you say, in a world where nothing can die, there is no room for evolution. But if god is really as omniscient and powerful as you believe, he would have planned two separate paths: one where adam and eve behaved, and one where they didn’t. The framework for evolution was there; the original sin just activated it.
I don’t know if I am ready to live in a world where Joyce questions her faith. We could be heading for one of the biggest character shifts in Dumbiverse history. I’m scared and excited.
I’m absolutely convinced that Joyce is going to end up being an atheist in the end. Mainly because Joyce is partly autobiographical, but also because we are already seeing the story of the person who comes from that repressive faith to a gentler, more accepting faith in Becky.
Well not that it matters but another Joyce at another place had her faith surviving after actually meeting a Physical God who had the souls of every dead being in it.
Though that is another story for another time.
You don’t have to assume either God doesn’t exist or God is a jerk if you’re willing to allow God to be something less than omnipotent, subject God to the same laws of the universe everything else is. Then death is just a consequence of the physical laws, and God can’t do anything about it.
I was in her position. I had to choose which of those qualities I wanted in my God. I prioritized good over omnipotent, so I just treat God as not having the power to affect the world where it requires a change in physical laws. And really, that’s fine, certainly at least for the purposes of my faith.
I find it odd to keep running into people who say their “beliefs” are based on an arbitrary set of things they pick and choose from. To me, this is not belief, it’s simply fantasizing. Belief means sorting out what does exist from what doesn’t exist, and has nothing whatsoever to do with what any of us thinks would be cool.
Well, there is the point where literally all the world around us that we perceive is merely a projection in our consciousness anyway
so belief is not really sorting out what exists and what doesn’t exist, it merely gives order to that projection
…I’m agonistic, okay?
I agree very much. I don’t choose things to believe, or at least my subjective experience is not of doing so. I believe what seems to be true, and reject what seems to be false, and when fresh evidence comes in I change my mind. Believing doesn’t seem to be a voluntary act to me, and I can’t imagine believing something by choosing to. But I have friends, intelligent, well-educated friends, who tell me that that is what they have done with respect to their gods.
Belief in the context of faith is inherently irrational, and that’s at least partially the point. Certainly that’s the case for me. I need to hold onto it, it’s something I value, something which makes up a big part of me. But I also have to rationalize it with my understanding of how the physical universe works, or else it would get in the way of my job, you know, understanding the physical universe. So I adjust my faith to fit so I can keep it.
Basically, if I am to continue to believe in a god-like power, it has to fit my experiential worldview and my knowledge of physical observations, and this is where it fits. Besides, we all make choices on how we see the world and process information, whether or not we realize it. It’s naive to think any of our perspectives are genuinely objective. We just do the best we can, combine and reconcile as many different perspectives as possible, and try to wash out the individual biases, and we honestly do it pretty well across the scientific fields.
That is such a hard thing to rationalize to me that I don’t know how the fundamentalists do it. If God is omniscient then he could have seen the Original Sin and done something more than just warn against it, if he is omnipresent then he could have been always on guard to guilt trip Eve to not do it and if he is omnipresent he could have just made a perfect being who would not falter and still be different than angels (not that they didn’t falter, hello demons).
Either God is a dick or we just can’t comprehend his motives. I prefer to go with the second and just try to be a good person to others.
Or He does have the power to intervene over every little thing, but also has the omniscience to see when the intervention might be even worse.
“Please, God, don’t let Grandpa die!”
“Kid, Grandpa’s ninety years old. He hasn’t been able to pee straight for the last ten. His body’s breaking down – they do that, you know, I had to build entropy into the universe or there wouldn’t be time. It’d be pretty mean to make him keep living like this, don’t you think?”
It’s probably a No to the idea that God allows bad things to happen because it’s for the best. This quickly breaks down when you consider that such a God doesn’t just kill grandpas. It’s not ‘for the best’ that your kid gets cancer or your baby dies in its crib. Plus, that God also sends diseases and tsunamis to kill thousands of people for no discernable reason. It’s weird, impossible, and insulting to try to twist and manipulate away these problematic tragedies.
Oops so it seems that Joyce is on the branch of Christianity that takes Genesis literally.
I rather like the interpretation that each “day” for God was millions of years, because why would a cosmic being measure time by the standards of when a small planet faces the star it’s orbiting?
And that death existed in Eden before humans gained knowledge. But the difference was that death was not sad, not something that inspired existential horror, because all the creatures before man did not understand death or life. So “death”, horrible death and the fear of oblivion; that was only created when humans gained knowledge to understand it.
Seriously though, I had to explain this to a friend of mine a few years ago, and I was not nearly as articulate. Good for you dude.
“Knowledge is fear, because we know better,” is what I came up with at the time.
That branch of Christianity has a severe allergy to metaphor and to mythic language. The idea that the Genesis account could be simultaneously a myth and true just does not compute in that worldview. But to argue that Genesis must be literally-if-you-had-been-there-with-your-phone-you-could-have-gotten-pix-of-everything true is to torture human reason to the snapping point.
Frankly I think that Biblical literalism has made more atheists of Christians than anything else in the past hundred years.
That reminds me of a really good scifi movie I watched a while ago, 2014’s
<abbr title="SPOILERS, kind of: The world seems perfect, without pain, suffering, or death–except that it's still there; they just aren't aware of it. They are unable to perceive it, because they are given daily injections which remove this ability to differentiate good and evil.”>”The Giver”. It’s excellent; you should all see it. Also, I wonder if Eden and the Tree of Knowledge was like that? Sometimes, perception really is everything.
Ah, bugger; where’d I mess the HTML up?! Hmm, looks like there might be an issue with the quotes somehow. –Nope, wait, lost my close. Let me try again:
That reminds me of a really good scifi movie I watched a while ago, 2014’s
”The Giver”. It’s excellent; you should all see it. Also, I wonder if Eden and the Tree of Knowledge was like that? Sometimes, perception really is everything.
Joyce’s entire reality seems to be unraveling and rewriting itself in front of her. While inevitable it is really sad at the same time. I hope she finds something to fill the void left by her now incompatible old worldview.
Or maybe just “man” as an independent, perfect being rather than specifically Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The primordial man becomes degenerate through original sin, and must gradually evolve back to his “perfect form”. I bet you could find the right combination of radical fundies and fringe theories to support it with people who don’t care about reason. Be sure to throw in racist overtones by making the perfect being white. Nephilhim are big nowadays, so toss them in. Maybe some ancient aliens….
There’s a deranged argument for every strange religious or philosophical position.
The really fascinating part is that there is some (not much) archaeological evidence that the religion that became Christianity, back in the day (we’re talking around the development of cuneiform writing), actually had a female Goddess as well, sort of like the Wiccan idea of the God and Goddess, both equal partners, with one being the Old Testament God and the other representing the other half of the spectrum of emotions, and genders.
But what seems to have happened, as near as we can tell, is that there was some sort of upheaval that seems to have resulted in a systematic effort to completely stamp out any trace of the Goddess’s existence. For some reason, the priests got really, really angry with the priestesses, wiped them all out, and then went and destroyed every record of the Goddess they could find. We only even know that much because they weren’t quiiiiite completely successful. But they got really, really close.
YHWH makes a lot more sense when you factor in a second, equal deity, and him being male makes sense in the context of also having a female God in there, as does the thing about humans being “made in His image”.
History, including the history of religions (and not just history as recounted by religions) is fascinating.
I have honestly heard the claim that some animals were created to kill and eat others because the original sin affected things both after and before it happened.
That’s… actually not unreasonable a notion if you accept an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent deity created them. Time being linear only has meaning to beings who don’t already have absolute mastery over it. In essence, Original sin was built in because it was always going to be.
How much credulity you assign that and what it implies depends entirely on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. Is the creation a single “painting”, an unchanging composition that has no surprises for someone viewing all of it at once? Is the creation we experience part of an infinite divine “gallery”, each unchanging but presenting variations on the same theme of creation? Is it turtles all the way down?
That’s actually pretty fascinating, considering Creation from a nonlinear perspective. (Disclaimer: I’m an atheist) It would also do a bit to reconcile the concept that no animals were carnivorous until the Flood (which is a later time point, I know) that Willis mentioned above, with the existence of carnivores in most conceptions of the Ark.
It’s kind of like the fan theory in DW that the Master’s drums are both entirely a product of the time war and yet also there from the very beginning of their lifetimes. Under this theory, all pre-2005 incarnations of the Master did not have the drumbeat, but when Rassilon implanted the drumbeat in the Master’s head (as shown in The End of Time), it was retroactively given to all the Masters, so that if Simm!Master or any prior regenerations during the Time War recalled a pre-Time War experience, they would recall the drums being present. (This theory is a bit complicated by the fact that the drums are entirely an RTD-era thing which have not been mentioned since Gomez!Master first appeared last season.)
The cause only has to precede the effect if you’re bound by linearity. There is no “It hasn’t happened yet” to our hypothetical omnicubed God, because there isn’t a “yet”.
The real question is that would this mean the reality we experience is a single deterministic entity (or as the great Sarda put it: “you can’t do something you haven’t done yet different from how it will come to be done.”) or if it is just a single iteration in an infinite series of possible outcomes based on different variables? If god built in the need to slap man down by flood, famine, plague into this facet of creation, is there another facet where everything is rainbows and butterlies and instead of getting nailed to a tree Jesus gets a highly rated talk show, or does God maybe need some serious antidepressants?
…Does the division of the first single-celled organism into multi-cellular organisms constitute “original sin”? Seeing as its evolution defied God’s plan for creation?
Or maybe it was sometime after evolving into Neanderthal Man that Eveish offered Adamish the apple-like thing and got them tossed out of the Garden of Pangeia?
I have had no use for organized religion since I was 12 years old. I find it surprising how serious people take it. I don’t understand it, but I understand the passion of the belief.
I’m glad she’s not putting a hate on Becky personally. And at least she is letting all the frustration out. As much as I dislike her sometimes, Joyce can face up to facts she does not want to – when she is forced to do so. And she IS a fighter.
I think she has a good chance to come out of this a ‘nicer’ person, in that she will recognize there are other beliefs than hers in this world – and that they aren’t evil just because they are different.
I became nicer when I became an atheist, not just because I have more respect for people, but also because I no longer feel obligated to be good, and because there’s a god-shaped hole that I used to rely on to help the world.
It comes down to the fundamental belief in Christianity that human beings are flawed beings, and that we brought that on ourselves by eating from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden. That’s original since, which Jesus was supposed to have suffered and died to absolve us from. From a mythological standpoint, it’s kind of a cool story. God takes human form and walks among man and all that. For most of history, No one took the stories of the old testament as literal truth. They were just stories to explain why things were the way they were. One could argue that they do have some fundamental truth to them. The eating of the fruit of knowledge representing the moment in history that humanity as a species went from being just really smart apes to being sentient beings. With the surge of scientific progress during the early industrial age, the evangelical movement was born as a reaction to science’s precise way of defining the world. Suddenly, stories that were meant as parables and allegories were taken as literal history in attempt to give religion legitimacy in the face of scientific knowledge.
For modern fundamentalist Christians, acknowledging that most of the Bible is not and was never meant to be a literal history book is admitting that the whole thing is a sham, a hoax in the face of cold hard facts. Which is why you now have junk “science” like young earth creationism and intelligent design. It’s an attempts to refute a few centuries of scientific advances and shore up their belief system. And humans are good enough at compartmentalization that they can deny science at Tue same time they are using an electronic device made possible by science to tell the world that scientists are wrong on the internet.
Figured this was it. I heard the exact same argument against evolution on religious talk radio once spinning through the dial. The two hosts were borderline hysterical because of the argument Joyce is making right here. It was enlightening to see it spelled out like that and to understand the fundamentalist mindset. At the time I think I still mostly believed, but had adopted the Deist “cosmic watchmaker” view of creation with plenty of room for evolution to fit in. God made the universe, set it in motion and stepped back to watch it run. Now I guess I’m agnostic bordering on atheistic. But I’ve kind of been where Joyce is at, trying to reconcile the conflict between years of early indoctrination with what I’d learned about science.
I find that atheism only benefits from the idea God is inactive or behind everything. I see him as more the figure who maintains a complicated machine and helps it motion. Likewise, if God were to fear anything we discover about the universe, he wouldn’t be much of a God would he?
SF author David Brin came up with an interesting metaphor. He said that the way the laws of physics and chemistry all lock together like that, it’s almost as if some Great Designer laid out the blueprints for the universe, then left them lying around the workshop for His apprentices to one day discover and start working with…
I’m thinking that the defining characteristic of the common atheist, what really sets him apart from your theists, basically, is all the not believing there is a God. At all.
There are lots of forms of atheism. Some of them are a form of belief (“I am absolutely certain there is not a God”), some of them are more along the lines of “I think there’s a God but I don’t worship him” / “I don’t know if there’s a God and don’t think there’s a way to find out” / “I don’t know if there’s a God but wouldn’t give a fuck about him even if I knew he existed” / etc
For many atheists, it goes beyond that – there’s not believing there is a God, and then there’s believing there is not a God, which still requires making a leap of faith without evidence (after all, the job description calls for Him to be supernatural, to exist beyond nature, so He might not even leave any evidence to be discussed).
On one hand, I feel bad for Joyce because of all the realizations she’s basically being hit in the face with at once, but on the other hand… that sweet, sweet character growth. Even if it’s not necessarily a positive or negative growth, she’s still shifting and changing, and I absolutely love seeing that.
Joyce’s core is made of iron. Iron is strong, but untempered it is also very brittle and will break under extreme stress. This is the moment Joyce’s iron core is being forged into steel. Steel is as strong as iron, but once properly tempered will flex and bend under pressure. If she doesn’t break, Joyce will come out much stronger and will be far more mentally and spirituality flexible after this is all said and done.
I mean, you can always rationalize it as “Before man there were no animals with he cognitive abilities to comprehend the precepts of God’s teachings, thus were incapable of knowingly rejecting them, thus there was no sin before man. Mankind introduces sin when they develop the abstract thought capable becoming aware of God and His directions, and then knowingly rejecting that direction. “Sin”, therefore, can be understood to be the choice of committing anti-social behavior, and original sin refers to man’s innate disposition towards anti-social behavior even when being cognizant of the “wrongness” of their actions.
That should tide her over until she takes a psych, soc, or anthro course and has to deal with cultural relativism, socialization, and behavioral disorders.
Joyce reminds me a lot of my boyfriend in high school. We used to argue about carbon dating. But, her arc is going in one direction, and his went in the other.
…Huh. I’m a Christian, I was raised Christian, and…I’ve NEVER thought this. I believe in evolution whole-heartedly. That is to say, I accept evolution as actual scientific fact. Andthe original sin thing never really came up. But, I wasn’t raised fundamentalist, so that wasn’t really emphasized anyway.
Cheer up, Joyce. There’s plenty of room for evolution in Christianity. The latter just needs to bend a bit.
Yeah people have many beliefs. I’m Catholic and yet I believe in evolution. Personally I believe that god was the impetus for the Big Bang and then let science take over.
Though if Joyce ends up rejecting religion entirely, that’s perfectly fine. We all have freedom of choice in our beliefs.
There’s also the fact God forbid Adam from eating from the Tree of Life lest he be immortal. Which he wouldn’t need to worry about unless he wasn’t to begin with.
Not entirely true. Official Catholic doctrine is “We leave science to the scientists, but there’s no reason you can’t believe in evolution.” It’s just that every Pope for the past however long has believed in evolution and so do most Catholics
Oh I just put in that part to clarify it cuz I know that sometimes people when they here the word, “Catholic” they just roll their eyes and go, “Oh you’re one of them aren’t you?” because of how the crazier sects get all the attention and color people’s perception.
Not in the version she’s been raised on. Willis has commented about how people raised in very fundamentalist environments are that much more likely to completely discard religion later in life precisely because there’s no wiggle room in it – if one thing is wrong, you have to throw the entire thing out.
It’s the same hoodie she had two days ago; Willis probably figured that Beckie was blocking enough of Joyce in yesterday’s strip that he didn’t need to bother doing the IU logo on it.
God left that shotgun lying around so that Toedad could grab it and use it to enforce his will! That’s not negligent at all! In fact, God ensured that the shotgun would be invented, just to be sure that Toedad would have it when needed. Clearly.
God casting mortals out of the Garden of Eden to cause death, pain, and suffering has been kind of the point from the beginning, Joyce. He was always the guy behind it. Yes, it was a punishment but he’s also omniscient so he knew the results beforehand.
But I wrestled with the problem of evil pretty early on and the idea of God damning people in general for all eternity didn’t work out for me. Torture is evil, God is not evil, therefore God does not torture.
After that, I stopped listening to a lot of people on religion.
Correct me if I’m wrong (I’m a Hindu), but isn’t the way hell works (at least for Catholics) is that literally anybody, no matter how bad they were in real life, can avoid if they repent of their sins? And then you go to purgatory to work off your sin before you go into heaven. So the punishment of hell isn’t for the crime, it’s refusing to accept that what you did was a crime.
Purgatory’s purpose is extremely vague. Sometimes it’s also where people who didn’t get a chance are tested (those who died during infancy, for instance).
But if you accept what you did after going to hell, welp, doesn’t matter. You’re there forever.
Niven and Pournelle worked through this in the novel Inferno (a science fiction writer dies of his own arrogance and pride, goes to Hell which turns out to be the Dante version, and gets guided through by a fellow named Benito). The eventual conclusion, which Carpentier reached by considering the ramblings of a psychiatrist who tortured some patients and who was punished with insanity, was that Hell was God’s last-ditch effort to get your attention. Eventually, you’d have to come to the conclusion that He exists; at that point, repent your sins in sincerity (as opposed to the version of “repentance” in the Bolgia of the Flatterers) and He will forgive you and welcome you to Heaven.
I have to admit, if your faith requires a Hell, this is the only version that makes sense to me.
Yeah, I may be letting my snarky atheism show, but that myth, read literal, like many other myths that particular sect tell doesn’t tell a story of a loving God “forced” to punish us sinful mortals.
It tells the story of an abusive asshole who like all other abusers concocts handy “excuses” for why his less powerful victims “deserved” to be hurt with disproportionate violence. Oh, did you break a dish eat the apple you had no concept of morality yet to know was wrong? Well, then I have no choice but to hit you with my belt punish you with mortality, painful childbirth, and nasty, brutish, short lives.
Hell, that refrain of God as abuser shows up a lot in that sect. Even their particular flavor of Jesus feels like some sort of sick Purple Man shtick. Look, mortals, you made me kill my own son by sending him to be beaten and tortured to death by a handful of you. You better be grateful for that and worship only me or I’ll have to hurt you for all eternity.
To be fair, all God did was kick them out of his house. You shouldn’t steal from the fridge of guy you’re staying with if it’s the only rule he says is not to steal from the fridge.
Yeah, but if they didn’t know that disobeying God was wrong until after they ate from the Tree, then it’s hard to blame then for not listening.
Your metaphor relies on Adam and Eve being on a functionally-similar plane as God; basically they’re all adults. But if they don’t have that knowledge yet, because they didn’t eat the fruit yet, then they are going to be closer to a child than an adult.
Sure, if your buddy goes and eats that one thing you told him not to (“Hey, Steve, help yourself to whatever but leave the fruit platter alone, okay?”) then I can see being upset (“Jesus, Steve, that was for my meeting this afternoon!”), but sending him to stay in the hotel forever seems a bit harsh, unless Steve is kind of a jerk anyways. But don’t forget the roommate (Satan, who Steve doesn’t know is a psycho) told him that it was fine, go ahead, God is just testing to see whether Steve will just blindly do what God says, or can think for himself.
But if you tell Stevie (age 4) that now he needs to move out forever and ever because he broke a rule, that’s pretty goddamned harsh, actually irresponsible, the moreso if you aren’t just his buddy but his actual parent.
“Stevie, I told you to not eat this, didn’t I?”
“Uh huh. But Crawley said I could! He said you’d be impressed!”
“Well, Crawley lied, didn’t he?”
“Uh huh.”
“So now you need to get out. Get the hell out of my house, Stevie, and never come back! I mean it! See Aziraphael, here? He’s gonna stand right here by the front door with his flaming sword, and if you even try to come back, he’s gonna kill you! Isn’t that right, Aziraphael?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So get the fuck out, Stevie, and think about what you’ve done.”
This works if you think of God as another person – perhaps more powerful, but a person. And as a person yourself, it makes sense.
On the other hand, if you’re willing to go for the Theist ride for a moment, defining God as more than a person – as the fundamental anchor of reality itself – the value judgment comes off a little ridiculous. God doesn’t damn someone to hell so much as reality is what it is. It’d be like saying Gravity smushed the guy that jumped off a tall building.
My favorite version of this story comes from the novel Ishmael, in which an intelligent gorilla discusses theology with a guy who responded to a classified add. It’s a theological work disguised as a novel. Anyway Ishmael, the Gorilla, posits that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Good and Evil, since they were only human and not divine they didn’t actually gain any new knowledge, just an unjustified belief that they now knew what was good an evil. In his telling the Adam and Eve and Cain and Able story was originally a story told by hunter-gatherers being driven out and killed by farmers as an explination of where these nutty people digging in the dirt all the time came from. Once you THINK you know how things should be you can justify actions that hunter-gatherers never could. Follow this logic. “I know good from evil. Being hungry is uncomfortable and therefor evil. I like to eat this plant, but only a little of it grows here. I have a nice cave here, that is good, I shouldn’t have to wander somewhere else to find food, that is evil. So I need to kill all these other plants that I don’t like to eat so I can just grow this one. Oh no, now rabbits and bugs are eating my crops, that is evil, I must kill as many of them as I can. Hmm, the rabbits are tastey, but hard to catch out in the open, I must pen them in. Foxes are tring to eat my rabbits, I must kill all the foxes. Several thousand years later we have massive mono-crops sucepitable to sudden blights, factory farms for pigs and chickens, and most of the alpha predators on the planet on the edge of extinction, huge areas of rain forest gone, strip mining, holes in the ozone layer… again, this is presented in a work of fiction but compelling reading. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwidssTis8_JAhUBJCYKHU82CiIQFggdMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FIshmael_(novel)&usg=AFQjCNEEwqfe88eH_08AQwvfs6G-w8_CCw&sig2=DQ-bZLSu5JOW6VYNV3kydQ
Interesting train of though. So God created pain/death/suffering and never intended to use it (a major violation of Chekov’s Rifle) or he created it on the spot.
Or did he invent it for the War in Heaven which I think happened before Eve ate the apple.
AIUI in normal readings of the bible there was always death for animals (why punish them for what humans did?) – the punishments actually inflicted were death for humans and belly-crawling for snakes (which I guess they could fly before?) and that’s it.
I know Joyce’s devolving relationship to her faith is taking center stage, but I gotta say, I just love Becky in Panels 1 and 2 here.
That Panel 1 where she a) takes the time to emphasize that her personal development and education is not intended to antagonize or tease Joyce, b) demonstrates the hard work she is putting in to catch up on her science education and do what is necessary to be able to fulfill the promise/insult to her dad about becoming a scientist, and c) hits me where I live. I was never religious, but I had a similar before-college speedbump in my education. I always loved Biology, but I grew up and went to school in a VERY fundamentalist neighborhood where the teachers refused to teach even the basics of evolution and so instead, I had to teach myself from nothing but textbooks and whatever resources I could get my hands on. And as such, I know that’s not an easy road to travel. And Becky is doing this with the additional stressors of having to jump through all the hoops to be accepted into IU to begin with, being homeless, and trying to simultaneously kickstart a sustainable living. That’s mad impressive.
And Panel 2… well, besides just how clearly it speaks to her version of faith where the literalness of any myth takes a back seat every time to reality and the moral character of the deity she chooses to worship, it’s just such an amazing moment. The ease with which she has shed so much terrible she has been force-fed since childhood is impressive and the raw curiosity she is brimming with that is unwilling to let pride ever get in the way of finding out a cool new fact about what is real. She has only been informed about evolution as it actually is for about a week, but she already understands it enough to know it’s definitely true and not really questionable and that doesn’t cause her much in consternation.
And yes, that informs her faith. Her God as she sees it, does not hinge itself on giblet touching or denying reality. Her God must be sustained and enriched by things that exist and is much more loving and caring for it. It’s a much more enriching faith than that which she was raised in.
Her God answers lesbian prayers and saves her from Toedad kidnappings and doesn’t really give a fuck about atheists or pre-marital hanky-panky and that’s enough for her.
Yeah, Becky’s probably going to be able to come out of this with the kind of functional relationship with faith Walkyverse Joyce got and other people manage – after all, she does in fact have evidence God answers lesbian prayers and that things can work out for the best, whereas Joyce has really only had religion come back to bite her in the ass – after all, her first big introductions were Mary using it to be awful and Ryan’s “nice preacher’s boy” facade, and since then it’s been confrontations like Roz and Dina and her “trial” with Ethan that turned out to be wrong, or things that very much hurt her like her nightmare/repressed sexuality and, most recently, the Toedad/Mom punch. The only time it helped her was when she stood up against her parents for Dorothy – and even then, she was siding against THEIR religion and using scripture to widen her worldview.
This is probably because I’m very sleepy, but how does Joyce’s argument get from the 4th panel to the 5th? Why can’t her community be wrong about the moment that sin/pain/death began, but right about other things?
That’s not how fundamentalism works. Richard Dawkins and Fundamentalists agree you have to believe everything or nothing. It’s why they reject Catholics and Mormens. Both of them having “Living Testaments.”
Having rejected patristic tradition and the writings of the Church Fathers and everything other than the authority of the Bible, these extreme Protestants have nothing to their religion except the Bible. If it’s not literal and true and sufficient for salvation — if any part that you rely upon to make a decision might turn out to be a figure of speech, a scribal error, or just a flight of fancy by a human author and you having no clear standard for telling that that was the case — then nothing would be certain nor any religious truth confidently discernible.
Because original sin is literally the entire basis for that Christianity. If there’s no original sin, there’s no need for the sacrifice of Jesus to wash that sin away. At best, if the story of original sin is a metaphor, then God is punishing all of humanity for a metaphor that they had no actual say in. Sin and death exist then not because we screwed up, like Joyce points out, but because God made it. Which makes him, well, monstrous. If you’re going to pretend to take the whole story literally, this is an all-or-nothing part of it. You could get away with excising, say, Job, if you really had to. The necessity of Jesus’ sacrifice doesn’t depend on Job. It does depend on this. You can’t get away with excising this part.
For something that is “literally the entire basis” of Christianity, a surprising number of Christian theologians don’t think it needs to be a literal event as depicted.
My mistake! I’m not forgetting that – it was sort of my point – or really part of that y’all. I just misread “Christianity” where Halcyon42 said “that Christianity.
Of course, Fundamentalists often completely ignore the Bible they’re ostensibly taking literally:
[[22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:]]
Humans weren’t immortal even in the parable (which I believe it was always intended to be anyway).
Anybody pick up on the line “…the man is become as one of us…”?
Kind of like the Lord God was the chairman talking to a board meeting, and there’s (*gasp*) more than one god??
huh. i always thought fundamentalist christians didn’t believe in evolution because it didn’t have a good-enough sounding explanation for the origin of life, and they were after the origin/meaning of life. and granted, yes, evolution is about how life adapts and changes, not the origin of it. but i didn’t realize that evolution necessitated a cruel god.
Very interesting comments this time. Good reading.
It’s possible to be religious and not think that your religion is The One Truth and all other beliefs are therefore False.
I’m in favor of all religions being equally true (this is where atheists smirk and say that much, at least, they can agree on).
I believe there is a realm of reality where rules are followed, where logic works, where cause precedes effect, where things can be observed, predicted, and proven. This is the realm that cannot be denied. Its reality persists no matter what you believe, and this fact has caused great pain for religious people when it contradicts their beliefs.
But I also believe there is another realm of existence — where things are not predictable, observable, or repeatable. Where nothing can be proven by observation or experiment, and thus cannot be said by Science at all. If it cannot be proven, if it cannot be predicted and tested, as far as Science is concerned, it doesn’t exist. But that is an assumption — the most basic and fundamental assumption of science. It does not allow for the existence of the unprovable. If something unprovable DOES exist, science is therefore useless for understanding it.
The first realm is that of science, and the second that of spirit. Never the two shall meet. They can’t. If it’s provable, it’s science. If it can only be believed, it’s spirit.
That leads back to my previous statement — that all religions are equally true. That is a statement that contradicts logic. Multiple religions that all claim to know the truth about the fundamental nature of existence, and which all say very different things, cannot logically all be true. But that is wrong thinking — this is applying logic to something spiritual. Never the two shall meet. You can’t do it.
Religion and spirituality and belief and faith thrive on paradox and logical contradiction. This is not where they are disproven, it is where they are most true.
It’s an interesting point. There are things that are not disprovable by science as we know it. Science is ever trying to test its hypotheses and models to disprove them, the concept of disprovability is central to science. So your theorie is … If this wasn’t so, how would we be able to know?
I don’t know though, if I would attribute anything not potentialley disprovable with scientific methods to the spirit realm.
What always gets me confused is why some people try to take the bible (or other monotheistic religious text of their choice) as literal truth, not as a story that is teaching a concept, never mind the trappings.
If you see religious texts as literal truth, you
a) get disprovable quite fast
b) you really have a conflict between different monotheistic religions whereas in essence, minus the trappings, monotheistic religions do not differ that much
Is’s a human condition to need some kind of spiritual connection to other people. The world’s just too overwhelming without it. In former times, religions were how people got organized in larger grops to deal with the world and grow. Without religion, what we know as civilization would not exist.
But for some reason, modern fundamentalist groups are rather trying to destroy civilization, destroy the options to move into the future not only for their own lives but for everybody else.
I don’t know if we have to blame monotheism for that. Squabbling Greek Gods never implied the concept of just one truth for all, though.
Yeah, and in the Norse literature there’s actually a bit about how other peoples have other gods and standards of behaviour, so don’t go expecting them to react the same way you would to the same things. For example, if you swear an oath, you’re supposed to fulfil it or die trying; there’s a special section of Niflhelm that is particularly cold and cheerless for oath-breakers. Nithlings are heavily looked down upon.
But other cultures don’t necessarily feel the same way, or agree it applies equally to oaths sworn to outsiders (Heathen Norse didn’t feel any compunction to keep oaths sworn to Christians, either). So don’t take them at their word; they may not be making the same implications that you would.
So obviously, the Norse were fully aware that other societies had other gods and other mores and weren’t too concerned with that from a theological point of view.
–Mind you, even the Bible admits the existence of other gods in the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” Doesn’t even say you can’t follow others as well; just that you’re supposed to primarily be Christian.
Me, I like the idea of a world with multiple pantheons of gods. It’s friendlier, a more enjoyably diverse neighbourhood, than one with just this one big loud guy stomping around going, “ME! IT’S JUST ME! ALL MEEE!” 😀
These kinds of arguments always bug me because they always devolve into “Either my beliefs are 100% correct or EVERYTHING IS A LIE!” Being mostly or even slightly wrong is not an option. Not saying this reaction is undeserved, since Joyce/Willis’ teachings probably emphasized infallibility, but my atheist brother’s pulled this on me as well. What is it about religion that erases the possibility of a reasonable middle ground?
Yes. and in this case it’s not the bond between Joyce and the Bible that is under strain, but the bond between Joyce and the people who insisted on the literal interpretation of Genesis. Since Joyce was brought up in an environment in which religion was not only homogenous but pervasive, and in which even such quotidian actions as choosing a TV program to watch were suffused with religious significance, that means that pretty much everyone whom Joyce ever trusted is a liar.
A reasonable middle ground is a place for rational thoughts and ideas, which is exactly what the kind of hardcore religious groups like Joyce belongs to want to avoid. They don’t want you to think they want you to do as your told, live how you’re told and fulfill your role to maintain the religion machine.
Remember, Becky and Joyce weren’t sent to college to learn, they were sent to find a husband to marry, that’s all. And their curriculum was chosen for them so they could better homechool their future children to think exactly like they do.
Speaking from experience, Joyce’s worldview always framed religion as a search for the truth. But when faith entered the picture, truth became a distant concern. Instead, feelings were confused with facts, and the whole institution became dominated by a snowball of embellishments on one metaphor after another.
It never set well with me when preachers would gloat. “Look at that crazy old world out there! So full of lies. Good thing we have the unvarnished truth!”. Is it? Are you sure? Because people are getting ripped off all the time. People are dying, killing themselves, murdering each other, for things that only exist in their head. What makes your headcanon more real than any of those other ones? A funny feeling? That’s not evidence, despite what the occasional hymn would tell you.
So when you notice these things, and truth is your highest value, the point of everything that matters, and you’ve got to get it right or else, you start to pick at your assumptions. And you just keep picking, and picking, until you’re looking up archaeology and getting into basic biology and… oh. Oh. There’s… really no stops on this train, is there? Everyone who looks to a higher power is making some kind of assumption that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Once you realize this, you’ve stared into the abyss. There’s no going back. And you can either seize the chance to reinvent yourself, or fall back into old habits…
The problem isn’t the lies. The problem is the lies mixed in with the truths. The good exists with the bad. People are complex and even Toedad had something human in him, once. It just became twisted into something horrible long ago.
One thing that worries me here is that Joyce losing her euphemisms. She is saying “goddamned”, which is a big deal in her background. Much bigger than all those words about biological bits and functions that are merely obscene but not blasphemous.
This, by the way, is why I keep in mind that even if the Almighty did hand down absolute truth sometime at the dawn of anatomically modern humans, it’s had humans tampering with it ever since.
I guess this is what happens when you don’t have to deal with “If there’s a God, why did He put me into a life where I’m so miserable that I pray every night to die before I wake?” at the age of seven and eight years old.
Part of why I hate fundamentalism is the complete lack of comfort their interpretation of God is supposed to provide. God doesn’t offer Heaven as a respite for those who have suffered and endured but as a reward for being on his Baseball team.
Or a constant and utter terror of hell and death that takes you years to strip away until you start considering baptism and realize that you don’t really have this belief or love of God everyone’s saying you should have before being baptized, just fear, from about the same age.
I always thought Eden was just supposed to be Adam and Eve? So if they didn’t sin no one else would exist? Which should have had me thanking them for my life instead of hating them, but since when do preteen fundies have common sense?
It can be two things, Joyce. Or maybe three? Or none…
That being said, I now know the dire implication of evolution and religion now thanks to this strip. But I learned to rationalize the existence of both together with the help of Futurama (not kidding that’s true).
I was raised Catholic, so this level of……I don’t even know what to call it, but it is new to me. If people believe that death wasn’t a thing until the Original Sin, then how did all of the carnivores eat?
If anyone doubts this truth, I invite you to come to the state of Washington. Take a trip up State Route 410 (wait until next spring, though, because the snow level’s been dropping these past couple of weeks) to Federation Forest State Park. There’s some wonderful paths there with little signs describing what’s going on. Look especially for “nurse logs”. These are formerly mighty trees that have died and fallen; more trees are growing from their corpses, along with shelf fungi and a number of insect species.
Joyce’s response here nails what always confused me about religion. I was raised as atheist as you can be in the US. No one in may family believed in god and it was a huge surprise to me in my early 20’s when I got online and discovered how many people took religion seriously. The logical contradictions are… vast to say the least.
Remember that what she thinks of as “religion” isn’t all of religion or even all of Christianity. Or most of it. Or even half of it. Christianity didn’t get along for 2,000 years with the kind of thing Joyce was raised to believe.
To be honest, what Joyce is talking about is pretty much my beginning and ending with all religion. Except maybe Greek mythology – I love the hell out of that stuff. It’s fun and bonkers.
Joyce, Joyce, Joyce. A story can be new and tell the tale of 4 billion years. I can draw the stars on a canvas before me. If God decided to put humans in a world governed by death and change, don’t you think he’d have been able to create this world in balance, as if it had existed that way forever?
If he’d created you just yesterday with all your memories and history, could you tell the difference? If he created the world 6000 years ago, with all its memories and history, could science tell the difference? Science is finding out how the world you have been given works which includes the history it has been given. it does not tell you why you have it.
It might not be David’s argument, but it is one that has been put forward since before Darwin, because there are other signs of the antiquity of the Universe than evolutionary ones. It’s called the Omphalos Hypothesis, and has been mocked as the argument that an omnipotent creator might have made us all last Thursday, complete with fake memories and the holes in our socks.
It sounds to me like David’s argument is that science is about facts and the reality in front of and around us, but why those reality and facts are in the first place is not something science includes.
Yup. That’s the most straightforward way of reconciling science and religion – they are about different things, there’s no point at which they contradict each other, because they answer different questions. When they start infringing on one another, you are doing one of them wrong, possibly both.
(This discussion is mostly about people doing /religion/ wrong, but oh man, there are so many ways of doing science wrong, too)
This argument is actually why I couldn’t keep to Creationism in spite of it being fed to me as Undeniable Truth for most of my formative years. Under this argument, God created the stars and the galaxies and the set speed of light and the observable laws of physics and fossils and radioactive isotopes and… everything… as a direct, deliberate lie to humanity, to trick us into ceasing to believe in God – the same God who, should we fail to believe, will condemn us all to a lake of eternal fire where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
If God is not a liar, the word of God written in the stars and the galaxies and the fossils and the radioactive isotopes must be true – and for that to be the case, the universe must be very, very old, while humanity as we know it is quite young.
My interpretation is that even if God really did create us last Thursday complete with the entire history, it doesn’t mean that history is a lie
becayse like… the fact that that’s how it was created is still truth that we can use to figure out how our world works further
maybe it’s not the truth we can use to figure out purpose in life, philosophy etc, but SCIENCE ISN’T SUPPOSED TO DO THAT ANYWAY
Joyce, you’ve found out that much of what you’ve been taught about your faith *is* wrong. I don’t just mean that as an atheist. I mean that you’ve found out that a lot of what your parents have taught you was counter to Christian values.
Maybe, just maybe, you owe it to yourself to take that risk and be ready for things to be a lot more complex than you’ve been allowed to imagine so far.
That… and even if Genesis is factual history, God’s the one that did it anyway. Really, if you take the stories of the bible without first presuming that God is morally perfect, he comes out quite evil a lot of the time.
You know Joyce, maybe you should look up either Maimonides or maybe St. John Paul. Neither are baptists but both had different philosophies that do meld the ideas of Creation to the sciences that were being discovered at the time as well evolution that would be discovered later.
…. I realize I’m talking to a fictional character.
I’ve been looking at nature documentaries on youtube of late and have wondered why creationists were so adamant about attacking the theory of evolution. This cartoon sheds a lot of light on that subject.
Yeah, that’s true, but I still… I dunno, if the shoe fits, I guess. I mean, all the evidence points to evolution and thus everything being a lie. I’m more inclined to follow evidence at this point in my life, but I can understand why she’s not. I hadn’t considered this aspect of the perspective before, but I’m glad I can now. Thanks, Willis.
Hmmm. What Joyce says in panel 3 doesn’t *quite* agree with what I learned in Sunday School, or what I’ve read in the past 30-odd years of bible studyin’.
I mean, I know some of the weirder Christian sects believe that kind of nonsense, but it’s hardly biblical…
“Where the Bible speaks, we speak. Where the Bible is silent, we are silent.” That’s the basic motto of the Church of Christ – or, at least, the branch of it I grew up in.
A little too much #NotAllChristians in this comment section. Not that I think all Christians are anything like the kind that Joyce was raised by – just that I don’t think the fact that more reasonable sects of Christianity exist is gonna do much for her in the long run.
Willis has commented about how people raised in very fundamentalist environments are that much more likely to completely discard religion later in life precisely because there’s no wiggle room in it – if one thing is wrong, you have to throw the entire thing out. And Joyce’s crisis of faith is based on his own, and we all know how he turned out. (Hint: He ain’t Christian anymore.)
I think religion has only and will only do harm to Joyce. And I think she deserves to be free of it.
Well, we are talking about our own faith, not about what Joyce should believe. I think every time Joyce’s future has been brought up, people agreed she’d end up atheist, with Becky making use of ‘reasonable faith’ instead.
… That… actually explains to me why one would hold to that story in the face of all evidence. If death and pain aren’t a part of life, but something that has a blame, then you have to believe it wasn’t God putting them in for the sake of it, you have to believe it was a punishment because otherwise God punished everyone for no reason and you’re hitting essentially the same problem a lot of survivors of tragedies go through (“No sane and loving God would allow this to happen, any god that did isn’t worth my time.”)
It’s interesting that just when her innocence has almost completely shattered she Needs to believe in the mythical time of innocence in the garden. If she believes Adam and Eve were happy only because they hadn’t sinned then that train of logic might lead to concluding that her current unhappiness is somehow the appropriate result of her own sinning. Which, I realise, is classic Christian guilt. Nope. Don’t head that way, Joyce. Anger is productive, self-loathing and guilt aren’t.
So what you’re saying, Willis, is that Joyce is going to get reconciled to actual science three years earlier than you did, if she just keeps hanging out with Becky and Dorothy?
Embrace paganism, Joyce! Our gods are/can be dicks, and we’re okay with that! (J/K…I’d honestly rather Joyce come to terms with her own faith and what it means to have faith/spirituality WITHOUT believing what your parents and their crappy pastor shoved down your throat. Yep, your parents/religious teachers lied to you…welcome to the world of power politics! Now, let’s give faith a go, instead. 🙂 )
What people ignores is that science isn’t the absolute truth since it’s 100% empiric (it only considers and studies nature, nothing out of that can be studied with science), which means that everything that is related to rationalism is just ignored by science, science just explains half of the existence
Also, by the same principle that there can’t be an unstopable object at the same time than an immovable object, if God STARED something, that something is fated to END, so evolution or not, Eden or not, life on earth was fated to dieat some point in any scale
Joyce seems to be placing unnecesary weight on the concepts of “pain” and “death” predating humanity’s sin as a dealbreaker to her beliefs, but that’s her own interpretation. Nowhere does the Bible say that. The closest things that are mentioned is that humans, as God first created them would not die, but that was more of their “created in God’s image” package than a statement that death did not exist. Similarly, it is mentioned that childbirth pain and having to go through pains to gain one sustenance was introduced as a punishment of sin, but it’s never implied that pain was non-existent until then.
So yeah, if you are to believe the Bible, God was the one who introduced pain and death to His creation. Thing is that neither concept is inherently bad. Death is just part of the cycle of life, and pain is just a helpful warning system that makes the body recoil from sources of harm and avoid it in the future.
So basically Joyce is challenging her big religious beliefs by getting hung up on her own small wishful thinking about the nature of the world pre-sin.
note: this post isn’t by me, but it had an unclosed italics tag which i tried to fix but sometimes when i edit posts wordpress decides to put MY NAME ON THEM and that’s super annoying
Not “her own interpretation” or “her own small wishful thinking”, but the theology she was taught. The “literal” Biblical interpretation she’s been fed all her life.
Does it match yours? Apparently not.
Is it “correct”? Damned if I know. I’m an atheist and don’t really have a stake in Biblical interpretation.
Mostly though the point is that it’s not her interpretation or her wishful thinking. She’s been taught this as Truth and denying that breaks with her church and her faith. Not to mention her family and probably everyone she knew before college.
If I recall, it doesn’t remove death from Any animal, humans included. There’s a Tree of Life™ in the garden that allowed humans to live forever, which is the reason they got kicked out.
Obviously, Joyce is raised with a more fundamentalist view…
Recognizing god’s impotence and malevolence is the first step towards realizing he doesn’t even exist and what is seen is man’s impotence and malevolence reflected in a mirror.
I find it strangely odd that people follow a book that depicts the supposed “Son of God” using parables and allegories to educate, but every bit of the rest of the book is supposed to be solid, carved in stone fact.
Oh, Joyce. That same creation story says that God created humans in God’s own image… and you still think it makes a difference whether humans, or God, unleashed sin and death on the world. Sorry, kid, you’re about to figure out that “God” sucks.
Same. As a Christian who’s had to figure this sort of thing out a long time ago, my reaction to Joyce’s conundrum here was “IS THIS THE ONLY PROBLEM YOU HAVE WITH THAT STORY”…
A good reminder that Joyce is not stupid. She understands evolution just fine but she doesn’t like the implications.
This is why I feel so bad for creationists. Their entire faith is hung up on the most flimsy, easily contradicted piece of evidence. There are so many very faithful, very spiritual people of all religions who don’t feel the need to make up stories about natural history to justify their faith. I just wish the creationists would listen to them.
And if your faith NEEDS evolution not to be true to work, the alternative is intelligent design – a laughably stupid, obviously false explanation, but presented to be credible enough if you squint, and it gives you the hope that your faith might not be in jeopardy after all. If you need a lie badly enough it doesn’t have to be a good lie.
Really, I agree with most of that – she’s not stupid, and it is very hard for someone like her.
But no, Joyce does not understand evolution at all. The vaccination comics proved that. She learned from biased sources, and is not willing to learn what the science actually has to say about that (precisely because of how her faith depends on it just not being true).
“There is no room for evolution in a world where nothing can die” implies a pretty good understanding of natural selection.
But regardless, my point is that Joyce is against evolution because of incompatible systems of beliefs, not lack of knowledge. It’s not like Becky who went from “yeah right, carbon dating” to “ooooh, 9000 years old corn” after a few hours with a cute dinosaur chick and a textbook.
I don’t doubt that Joyce has a flawed understanding of how evolution works – after all, she received the same science education as Becky, and we know from her conversations with Dina how that was handled. Her struggle with it here, however, doesn’t really stem from any misconceptions but instead with how intwined YEC and a benevolent God are in her personal beliefs. She’s seen enough bad recently that she desperately needs the latter of the two, which means clinging harder to the former.
“Intelligent Design” vs. some sort of intelligent design is something to keep in mind.
I mean, it makes a lot of sense that some sort of intelligence, programming in a quaternary language (DNA) developed a system for change and advancement. Saying that random magic happened that made us all eventually appear is almost as bad as “Spontaneous Generation”, which is essentially the argument on the other side.
Of course, this kicks the can down the road, but when I start looking at the biggest picture, my head begins to hurt.
Yeah, I’m talking about the Intelligent Design movement, specifically the one that writes textbooks and lobbies to be taught in school.
But to think of the emergence of life as “Spontaneous Generation” is a gross oversimplification. The best models we have are much better described as chemical evolution that eventually turn into biological evolution.
Also, given all the data we have nowadays, some ancient DNA-programmer would answer fewer questions than chemical-biological evolution, even without asking questions about the programmer itself.
There’s nothing “random” about the formation of DNA. Chemicals can only combine in certain ways; proteins can only have so many folds. It’s not “random” in the least.
This is not to say there had to be a Programmer to get it all started, just that, for instance, water isn’t random, it’s the most stable configuration in which hydrogen and oxygen can mix. And while the chemical compounds in DNA are at least an order of magnitude more complex than atomic elements, they’re still limited in exactly how they can link together.
The famed 747 in a tornado becomes much easier to “randomly” assemble if you limit how the parts can impact one another…
I also think it’s important and beautiful that Becky makes sure to point out that this is not her trying to make a funny Joyce-face. Come to think of it, I don’t think Becky has done that since here http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/established/
None of the Dina-smooches or evolution thing has been a joke on Joyce’s expense. It is all Becky being Becky.
Walky: “Um, we should cross the street too, to get to our lecture…”
Bille: “Shut it, don’t spoil the visual metaphor.”
Speaking of, this strip is beautiful . Joyce’s expressions are perfect and the colors of her jacket, Becky’s hair and the leaves make a wonderful scene.
The interesting thing about Joyce here is, surprisingly enough, her integrity. She recognizes that an ad-hoc modification to justify inconsistencies is… well, ad-hoc. Not reliable, not trustworthy, not honest, and in the end introducing more inconsistencies than it resolves. It would be a very easy route for her to take to avoid a lot of pain and hard truths, and a lot of people have taken it, but she knows better.
Can I just say that… Well…
The idea of Orginal Sin that I grew up with was that there was no pain or death *in Eden* and as punishment for disobeying, Man had to leave paradise.
To say that God inflicted death on the entire world because of what humans did makes God seem like kind of a dick.
Why is death not good? Genesis 3:22 makes it pretty clear that Death was natural to Man and only eating from the tree of life would cause him to live forever. Would God create carnivores if death wasn’t part of the natural plan?
Similar logic problems killed my faith. It got to the point where I felt I was either dealing with an insane, evil god or no god at all. Given those two options, I picked ‘no god.’
I tend to go with a less…. literal approach. As we evolved, as we gained knowledge/ate from the tree, we became aware of good and evil and suffering.
Things have always sucked, at times. It’s part of life. Just. Now we’re actually capable of being aware of that suckage. But that also mans we can make it better!!!!
My wife has a Masters in Theology, and often says that the Bible was written in a very allegorical style. It was in the nature of the writers to not write in such a literal fashion.
My take on God and Evil (as a non-religious dude, raised in a Christian dominated culture).
Consider camping in the back yard as a kid. You take your tent, some supplies, and hang out with your buddies in the back yard. Imagine you’ve got one of those big backyards. More of a track of land, some trees, some good space. You set up your tent, unpack your food, and have a grand ol’ time. But it’s still camping. There are bugs. It’s colder than you expected, there are rocks, your friend trips and scrapes up his knee pretty bad. It might rain.
And in the morning, you pack it all up and head back inside to the warm house where your parents are waiting with food and proper blankets and can bandaid what needs bandaging.
Are your parents bad parents for letting you sleep on rocks because you wanted the experience of camping outside?
Now consider that the soul is supposed to be immortal. If it’s a soul’s choice to incarnate on earth, to experience the mortal world, and all its aches and pains and suffering, and if at the end of it they return to Heaven where they’re perfectly fine, and everything that happened on Earth is just an experience and learning opportunity… Can you consider God evil for letting us go camping outside?
Never tried actually writing it all out before, so no idea if it makes any sense…
….that actually sounds like a good basis for a new religeon. I don’t think ANY of the existing ones have quite that chilled an attitude to the soul, not even Buddhism.
This is why you adapt things into your religious beliefs and fit them in where you can. One of the common ones I’ve heard on this issue is that the seven day period of Earth’s creation wasn’t seven days as we know them now. The meaning of a “day” conveyed a different span of time or some such.
Of course, there’s also the idea of rejecting the exact religious beliefs you were raised with and either converting to a different set or just modifying them to fit your worldview. Though with this seeming to just be essentially Willis’s religious journey, I’m pretty sure we can guess where this ends up going.
My own walk out of fundamentalist Christianity didn’t involve this step – but I wasn’t born into fundamentalist Christianity either. My parents converted when I was a child, and didn’t really radicalize until I was 10 or 11. So I had at least some background in the secular world before being immersed in the Church of Christ, and Creationism never really sat right with me.
I’ve struggled with God, but I’ve never felt myself trapped between Christianity and maltheism. Poor, poor Joyce.
I’m a Christian, and I believe in Evolution. Look at the creation story. Then know that the original translation of it had 5 ‘periods of time’ rather than ‘days’. Then compare what happened up until man was created to the things God did in those periods, they match surprisingly well. And then there’s the kicker – SPIRITUAL pain and death did not exist before original sin happened. Physical pain, yus.
And when you throw in Einstein’s theory of relativity, “six days” vs “13 billion years” boils down to a matter of how fast a given observer is moving and how far inside a gravity well the observer is.
They match surprisingly well except how Genesis 1 goes earth, then land plants, then the sun and moon, then the fish and birds, then the land animals.
Where science goes sun, earth, moon, fish, land plants and animals, birds. So it actually doesn’t match up at all, beyond the score you would expect from chance.
She’s starting to say “damn” a bit more now, isn’t she?
Also, I appreciate the comic from stating a fundamental issue some Christians have with evolution, that goes beyond “God created stuff, so evolution doesn’t happen!” Something that educated atheist me! Thank you.
I have my own theory for the original sin… Adam and Eve ate fruit from the tree of knowledge.
Biblical “knowledge” and “knowing” someone is having sex with them.
If knowledge is sex, then the story of Adam and Eve is about two innocents who hit puberty and had sex.
The kicking out of Eden is them no longer being able to live like children where everything is happy and warm and fuzzy. Now you’ve had sex, you have responsibilities,and you have face the realities of being an adult.
Your innocence is gone. You now have boobies and pubic hair. It is now important to keep your private parts private. You can’t run around shirtless anymore or take baths with your fellow kiddies. If you have knowledge of sex, then you also have to have knowledge about diseases. You now have to work hard to make a living. Build your own homes. Farm your own food; it’s no longer just given to you.
Life is dangerous. Wolves and other predators are no longer distant concerns, but close and a threat to your health and safety because you’re no longer sheltered in your father’s home.
Take note that depictions of Adam and Eve usually show a large snake… usually a Python, and a round piece of fruit, usually an apple. Incidentally, the apples are round and fit into a man’s hand. Any 14 year old will giggle hysterically over “one eyed pythons” and “apples.” If the snake is “talking” to you (and perhaps standing proud) and encouraging you to eat the fruit (aka have sex) you can attribute this to the raging hormones of a teenager.
That’s actually a pretty traditional reading– the text has the immediate result of the action a realization and shame of nakedness, and as a distant result childbirth and harvesting the land. And some of the body-shamey bits of Christianity can be traced back to augustine going “ORIGINAL SIN= SEXY DESIRES”
I’ve read that Charles Darwin himself lost his faith over a similar line of reasoning. Roughly:
“1. Natural Selection shapes the living world by means of premature death on a massive scale.
2. If this is how God went about creating life, He must be a cruel God.
3. I refuse to believe in a cruel God.”
… made more personal by the fact that three of his own children had died young.
This is why I have Deist leanings. I’m not entirely in their camp, but I
m certainly not in the predestination camp either. I truly believe that the being I refer to as God wants us to grow and become better, and is pretty non-interventionist about it.
This is both really sad (on the character level) and legit helpful for me. I’ve never been much of one for studying the rationale behind the things that young-earth creationists say, but this comic helped bridge that gap in the thought process. It explains WHY this argument is a hill that they seem ready to die on. Before this, I thought that they were really attached to an arbitrary timeline.
As for an European, this comics is quite interesting to read, we do not have many fundamentalist christians here.
It really puzzles me, I come from the area, which was more-or-less the heart of the reformation in 15th century, leading in various religious wars in the later centuries. Nowadays, most people around are both roman catholic, protestant, atheist, greek-catholic and orthodox. The protestants here are usualy the most relaxed about the religion and whatnot. As I understand it, most of the fundamentalist guys in US are some sort of protestants. How did this happen? Here in the europe, protestants are the “progressive” guys (I meant, they were the reformists, after all…)
:(. Sad Joyce makes me sad. Is it weird that I want her to widen her world view without losing her faith? There’s something precious and naive about Joyce, you just want to keep her in a box.
I firmly believe that God intended for us to commit the first sin. That the temptation was there to help us develop free will. Who would want to live their lives as a little sheep, with nothing more to worry about than whether or not to eat the apple or the orange for breakfast?
Joyce, looking crazy there. The idea of any scientific theory is to predict. Evolution also predicts. God may as well have created the world 7000 years ago in such a way as to give us hints how it will develop from now on. Though, lucky for us, current Catholic dogma says God created the world much earlier, and going by that dogma, indeed everybody lied to you.
I don’t want to keep her in a box, I want her to find a good, progressive mainline protestant or Catholic church. Or at Minimum, go read Fred Clark at Patheos/Slacktivist. This is exactly kind of crisis he talks about a lot over there. When the whole fundamentalist edifice crumbles down on it’s own contradictions….
Science does NOT preclude the existence of a “Creator”.
At the beginning, there weren’t even mathematical concepts like random number theory, Calculus, etc.
Heck, TIME itself didn’t even exist. Nor did SPACE.
This all came out as a result of the Initial Moment.
Whether it was through the intersection of two or more other, older universes, a singularity that just exploded, or, even “God” saying “Let there be light”, we just DON’T really know.
In fact, we may NEVER know.
As Carl Sagan Implied in his book “Contact”, some things you just have to take on faith.
Faith in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. Just how some people become so obsessed with their faith to preclude anyone else’s belief. THAT’s when things go horribly wrong.
All the evil in the world, we blame on God or the Devil, that’s a cop out.
The evil in the world, WE do to ourselves.
We have a limited life span which makes us appreciate what we have all the more so, because, sooner or later, we know it, and eventually WE, will be gone, but hopefully not forgotten.
Faith in a creator is NOT an evil in itself. When it becomes an all consuming obsession that turns to radicalism, THAT’s when the line is crossed.
Whether or not there IS a creator, I don’t honestly know. I believe that there is, as there are just too many wierd things that happen that science simply can’t explain at present.
And as I said before, when the Universe was formed, Math didn’t even exist, yet Chaos mathematics came out of this, and we’ve discovered, to our astonishment, random numbers aren’t really random.
They form bell curves and fractals and appear to be the basis of DNA and even nautilis shells.
For some reason my mind jumped to anyurisms, and I thought, ‘well, that is definitely true!’, and then I saw what you actually said, and was like ‘well, it still works’.
Raised Catholic, sorta agnostic/religio-anarchist personally. I belive there is something behind reality, and there is something after death; but A) Humans aren’t yet capable of fully understanding it yet, and lack the clues needed to fully suss it out and B) All Religions are like the man in Plato’s cave, trying to suss out what a three dimensional object is by looking at its flickering shadow cast on a rough stone wall by a dieing fire (or those blind guys trying to figure out what an elephant is by touching different parts and violently disagreeing with each other). This results in C) Religious texts which often seem to agree on certain moral issues (i.e. Maybe we shouldn’t kill each other for every little thing? Stealing shit is wrong) but diverge on details and application. This is not the result of one God getting it right and everyone else being wrong, it is humanity trying to understand something greater than itself. So we anthropomorphize a fundamentally non-human entity. Finally D) Science, when practiced and applied properly is fundamentally non-moral, it is a bull-shit detector. It is also the most reliable holy book in the universe. If there is a God, Goddess, Flying Spaghetti Monster, what have you the language He/She/It/Them wrote in was not Latin, Hebrew, Hindi, Sanstrik, or any other human speech. It was math, DNA, geologic strata, star dust, protons and neutrons, fossils, tides, gravity… hang on I have a link that applies here… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-vDhYTlCNw I first heard this song when I was about Joyce’s age, in my first year at college (back in the heady days of Napster no less, yes I’m old shut up you whipper snappers, get off my lawn)
All that said, in day to day life just try to be pleasant, don’t be a jerk, try not to do anything stupid. Some things are just ineffable, trying to eff them just Fs yourself in the end.
My first time commenting here. I’ve been lurking, reading DOA for about a year now. As is my wont, once I ‘discover’ a new webcomic, I usually go to the first one and depending on how long it’s been around, spend days and weeks even to get up to the current page.
Today’s comic is particularly emotional and iconic to me, as I had that revelation albeit at a much younger age than Joyce. Like MutantSentry, I was raised catholic and am currently very much agnostic/religio-anarchist (thanks, love that description and I have purloined it for my lexicon). I am also a serious science freak, for lack of a better word. If it paid money, I’d be a professional college student, taking ALL the science courses. That an understanding of the very basic operating principles of life is sadly considered only the province of the socially awkward and presumably intellectually gifted aka nerds is one of the greatest ‘sins’ of humanity. What I consider the penultimate ‘sin’ (for lack of a better word) is willful ignorance or the refusal to learn because it is hard. What I consider the ULTIMATE ‘sin’ is to encourage and enforce this willful ignorance upon others as a means to control them. This is one of my main gripes with the Church, although they claim they have reformed their ways, in my mind it is unforgivable that they ever did in the first place. Yes, I am still that angry all these decades later.
That youtube link MutantSentry posted I had never seen before, I watched and listened, with tears in my eyes. I practically knew the lyrics before they were sung or captioned. It just may be one of the best songs I’ve ever heard that summed up how I feel about the amazing mysteries that the world, life, science et al. Thank you for posting that, and thank the rest of you for your interesting comments that kept me reading until I came across that link. It made my day.
Hey Raul, no problem. Can you belive I found that song originally by looking for Doctor Demento stuff? Which lead me to filk, which lead me to that (and a lot more, if you like space you should good Leslie Fish Eagle has Landed).
And I guess I should make it clear, I believe there is more to reality than we know, possibly more than we CAN know. So I have spiritual beliefs, but all religions are flawed because they are based on mankind’s imperfect understanding. (So when I say religio-anarchist I’m saying I mostly reject organized churches and dogma—that said the current Pope is awesome). The best way to approach the divine is to learn about the universe we live in.
As an ex-catholic you may find it interesting that the Medievals basically held the same view of science you do– nature was discussed in terms of scripture and if you read it like you do scripture, if you investigated it like you would the meaning of a text in a book, you could come to true knowledge of its author.
Unfortunatly when investigations and observations started to lead to answers that questioned the Church’s teachings they clamped down. re: Galileo. That said the Catholic Church is actually down with most mainstream science these days, even Evolution. They get a bit leery about physicists poking around the first moments of the Big Bang.
Note carefully that she is NOT to the point of “God is either evil or not real”. She HAS found the contradiction in dogma she was taught – that Man is responsible for all sin through the Original Sin. Hence the eternal shame which must be forgiven even in a newborn. This a view adopted by Catholicism and rejected by most mainstream Protestant faiths. Whether Joyce will find her way to the essential existential crisis and how she responds to it is TBV – To Be Revealed.
Losing your faith is always difficult I think. It doesn’t help when people who you care about seem to be moving away from it.
It certainly doesnt help that Joyces situation after Ross likely makes it harder, and she definantely seems more cynical and angry.
I remember when I lost faith. Not the exact date but I remember it for several reasons.
I wasn’t a super bible thumper by any means but knowing there was some other power out there looking out for us made me feel better.
My parents really only baptised me so I could get into primary school (this was in Ireland at like 1996 or 1997 i dont remember (i was born in 1995 and wasnt baptised when I was a baby). Most schools were still run pretty much by the church and you were required to be baptised before going to school. but while neither me nor my family were super religious I always felt happier knowing that god was there looking after me.
As time went and I reached 13 years old I started questioning my sexuality.
At the time i went to an all boys catholic school.
You can imagine the homophobia in an all boys irish catholic secondary school (or high school for you americans) so naturally I denied it like an embarrassing christmas photo. And even then I didn’t even believe I was gay I just thought they were dumb thoughts.
Over time I came to the realization that I was gay.
During this course of time was the first I had even heard of the bible being against homosexuality and it didn’t make me want to come out any faster.
It made me hate myself and other LGBTQ people and even today those internilized feelings show there ugly head from time to time despite trying to change.
At some point I came to the conclusion that nothing was wrong with me, and couldn’t believe in a religion that despite claiming to be about love and how god loves everyone, woudl discriminate against anyone especially for WHO they love.
As I stopped believing both a weight was lifted and another as added. I was happy I know longer had to be so ashamed of myself (though I didnt come out for a while after) but the prospect of death terrified me, as I went my whole life believing that when I die my soul would go to heaven, So I was terrified of the smallest things. Things my brain decided to play out complex scenarios of how this pencil could kill me.
So I was angry and upset and just impossible to approach at the time.
I like to think I have finally moved passed it, but sometimes I feel inklings of that fear during my depressive episodes.
I don’t think anyone stops thinking about death. It’s why the prospect of death is a ‘specter’. It’s all I can do to avoid nialism.
What did it for me when I was little was ‘animals have no souls.’, while watching the other kindergarteners act like the animals we all clearly are. hat fundamental denial of our nature was jarring, and I thought a lot about death after that. So much so that my parents bought me Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey! It I was going to be obsessed with death, I might as well have a sense of humor about it.
A is for Anna who fell down the stares.
B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.
C is for Clara who wasted away.
D is for Desmond, thrown out of a sleigh.
Don’t feel bad for them, one died from swallowing tacks. Plural! He had to have just been eating them!
The Bible only says that Original Sin put Death upon Man. It doesn’t say anything about the mortality of other life.
Also, there was that whole world outside of Eden, which, based upon the hardships Adam and Eve (and their descendants unto this day) had to endure, already had plenty of death in it.
That’s the benefit of being brought up to not cuss as a kid. When you do start cussing as an adult, they have meaning in your speech and aren’t like white noise
which is part of the reason why, while I see nothing wrong with adults cussing as they see fit, I get irked by little kids doing it…
(the other part is habit, duh)
Do people really belive that a woman was created from man’s rib?
And that a woman lured by a snake made the guy eat special apple which was a big taboo?
Or that there was special garden where God created humanity?
C’mon!
I could belive in Bible history if the days of creation were a shortcut version of hundred millions years of evolution written like that for pleb.
I belive in some bigger force which created this universe and that as humans our mind goes somewhere else as higher being into another dimension of some sort which trascends body limitation when we die, but nothing more 😉
Yes, there are people who believe that sort of thing.
Also, thinking that the ‘days of creation’ are metaphors for various eras of creation (i.e. 1 day=millions of years) doesn’t quite work either, because you’d also have to rearrange the order to make it make sense.
There are, in fact, people who believe (in defiance of the evidence) that male skeletons have one less rib than female skeletons because Eve was made from Adam’s rib. Fundamentalists can really screw things around just to make themselves feel happier about their worldview.
This comic makes me itch.
I feel like a hell of a lot of religious thought and worldview and study is being flattened out, robbed of all context and being presented as a hollow mockery of itself.
and the fact that lots of people, including the creator of the comic, actually hold this precise view or have in the past DOES NOT MAKE ME FEEL A SINGLE IOTA BETTER ARRRGGGGH
nah. It’s one person or one group version of what the bible is and which parts is more relevant than others.
Like I know of certain groups in India who are fiercely catholic and yet also believe that since Men wrote the bible and Men is born with sin, you can’t take what is written in the Bible as absolute fact even though they still believe the bible is written by Men guided by God and God’s agents.
and then I know of other groups in India who would get violent if they heard that.
But, the problem is still there. If you accept that the world would be better without death or the necessity of farming or childbirth pain or many many other things, you have to wonder why it is so. And if we didn’t cause it, couldn’t have, who did? What God would hand us Pandora’s Box?
Also, it’s really, really great that Pandora is the exact parallel to the second creation story of Genesis. Woman created separate from man by divine, yep. Woman given ability to unleash evil, yep. Woman given curiosity, whoops. Box opened, fruit eaten, shit. One virtue hidden inside the sudden flood of evil, check. I prefer hope to knowledge, but still, the message is there.
Wait a second…
Joyce is around 18 or 19 years old. According to the alt-text, Willis didn’t start to actually rationally consider evolution until he was 22. If this comic is autobiographical, Joyce has 3 years before she herself rationally considers evolution.
Given the pacing of the comic, that means we won’t see Joyce change her position on evolution until after the heat death of the universe.
At this rate, Joyce will have evolution ‘proven’ to her because she’ll actually see it happen.
I’m pretty sure that you were just starting from that premise to get to the joke about the comic’s time-scale, but you understand that just because parts of this comic are autobiographical doesn’t mean that everything has to be, right? I’m pretty sure David Willis never had a gay friend named Becky with an unhinged dad who shot a gun in public and caused him to reexamine his own basic beliefs either- maybe if he did he would have started to reconsider evolution at age 19 too?
That is from his book Songs of Innocence and Experience. Tyger from the latter part, but is has a related poem in the Innocence sections, and in light of what Joyce is going through seems appropriate here.
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
In a very real way this poem is where Joyce was at the start of the strip,
now she is in that “forest of the night” from Tyger…
Yeah, Joyce, the Gnostics thought everything God said was a lie, too. Well, everything the fake God said. Everything Jesus said was still true because Jesus was still sent by the REAL God.
Anyway, I’m not sure that’ll help her, but it might help to know other people have had the same stresses.
… Huh. I hadn’t really thought about it like that before. Adamant opposition to evolution never really made sense to me. Guess I can empathize a bit more when something presented as a “fact” can literally overturn your entire concept of how you approach the world.
… dammit, now I feel like I have to go apologize to a lot of people.
Thanks for being so honest, Willis. I didn’t grow up with any religion (mostly just asked questions and went to church a couple times with friends when I was younger, to try it out) so it’s always interesting to see how everyone deals with it in different ways. My wife had a total BACKLASH, and is mildly disgusted with a lot of it (though this all happened when she was younger, before I met her). My Mom also had a bad time with it (hence the reason I didn’t grow up with any of it, though her Bible was still around the house for me to peruse).
It’s really interesting to see her thought process (and as you said in your hover text, your own thought process). I sorta ran across these problems as I asked questions of my religious friends. I never knew anyone that was CRAZY about it, so it was always in the vein of a theological discussion, I guess. The major point I always run across is the fact that MULTIPLE religions exist, so how do they all compensate for each other? Do they all go to their own respective afterlives? Is one clearly right and the rest wrong? How do people live with one “truth” while having full knowledge that various other people have also found a “truth?” It’s mind boggling.
Come on, Joyce. Clearly the cause doesn’t matter, since sin and pain and death is all part of God’s plan, since an all-powerful and all-loving God wouldn’t allow such things to exist. What crazy church teaches that humans are capable of defying God? That comes awfully close to making us responsible for our own lives.
That made a lot more sense than I expected: ‘I deeply need to believe that G_d is good, so all the “bad” stuff – or stuff that implies “bad” stuff happened – must be from us. And we’re off the hook iff we apologize to G_d super hard for being misguided by “light bringer”.’
I learned something from this. Not something that makes any sense in my conception of the universe, but something that sure explains a lot of people who seemed significantly weirder ten minutes ago than they do now.
This is more of a crisis of faith than I originally thought for Joyce. I was chalking most of her anger up to jealousy over Dina as Becky’s new #1. It’s a bit surprising, but to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever had something so foundational in my life be openly challenged the way that Joyce is, and thus, it’s harder to understand what she’s going through.
One question, though, coming from someone outside the Christian faith – if God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and has a plan for everyone and everything, shouldn’t He have everything worked into his Plan, and despite free will and juggling a near-infinite amount of plates all at the same time running this Universe, shouldn’t He be able to influence events in such a way that he gets his desired outcome despite Free Will? (Ok, that’s two questions… but it’s a complex subject.)
And the follow up question would be similar to that which others asked previously – if that’s the case, then, wouldn’t it have to be believed that He intended for things to be playing out the way they are, including sin, free will, and all those things believers often believe are “against God”?
Third, why are we as humans so bent on believing that we know all that is going on in the workings of an omnipotent, omnipresent being and how all of this is unfolding around us in this Universe we call home? It’s like there’s a belief that that which humanity has written in the various holy texts which surround God is the one and only truth, despite that the very nature of an omnipotent, omnipresent being would preclude the concept of being able to record the one and only truth in any sort of medium at all.
And finally, if you believe in the concept of duality – that light cannot exist without darkness, right without wrong, etc. – then in displaying the nature of these things through events, either God has a different set of criteria for choosing those who suffer and those who don’t than we humanly do, or He is pretty arbitrary in how He runs things here.
It’s interesting, though, to someone outside the faith, that despite the belief that God created this Universe and everything in it, that there’s so much conflict about what is true and what isn’t between faith and science. If the source of existence is all the same, couldn’t it be either said by the faithful that either a) our understanding of the Universe is flawed as we can’t understand everything (and therefore, why worry about the fact that science doesn’t mirror faith), or b) this is a Universe that is not static, and God is just patching it as time passes, like a giant computer program, and therefore our understanding of faith also needs to be patched?
Someone mistook mythology for literal history, is that really a lie? I’ve said before that anyone who claims the earth is 6000 years old HAS to be lying because recorded history goes back 10,000 years, but its only lying if you hold to the mistake after its been pointed out.
I’ve heard Young Earth Creationists claim, with a straight face and I am sure total conviction that God created the things we think predate their Creation timeline with an appearance of age. So stars that we see in the sky that are billions of light years away, which logically means the Universe must be billions of years old for the light to have had time reach us, were in their world view created instantaneously along with light already in place traveling to us. And Fossil Fuels, which require much more than 6000 years to be created by biomass under heat and pressure were created fully formed and waiting for use to tap into them by God. And if you can accept that you should just go home and never read anything, since even your memories of yesterday could have been created a second ago by God. It literally destroys all basis for logical thought.
Yes, YECs call God a liar to His face. And don’t even see the contradiction inherent therein. (Except the ones who claim Satan planted all that evidence – which makes him a power coequal to God…)
The mistake isn’t. Confident insistence that your interpretation is uniquely correct and necessary for God’s love, while having no sound basis for that confidence, is a lie.
Nope. If you earnestly believe something is true, and turn out to be wrong, you weren’t lying. The evidence (or lack thereof) you used to arrive at your belief is immaterial. No intent to deceive, no lying.
Knowledge is a justified, true belief. If one says that one knows something when one’s belief is not justified then one is lying.
Joyce is discovering not only that they things that were told her by everyone she trusted were not true, but that the evidence of their untruth is abundant and widely understood, and that the people she trusted systematically strove to isolate her from the evidence and from other, more common interpretations of the Bible. That does not look the least bit like an honest mistake. At best they were wilfully ignorance. They asserted that they were certain of knowledge; a deceit.
I’m liking the symbolism of the last panel, showing Joyce walking further apart from the group of friends she’s been hanging out with.
On first impression, I was inclined to think that putting Joyce in a room with Christians who actually acknowledge science and have reconciled their beliefs with science would help.
But then I remember that Joyce was holding up fine until the people she looked up to turned out to be so horribly flawed. Intellectual stimulation in examining her faith would do her good in the future, but right now what’s hurting is her faith in people, in loved ones from her past and authority figures. She could use a priest or a nun to talk to. Or Jocelyn. Hell, I’d put faith in Hank doing her some good.
Um…I’m pretty sure sin existed anyway. All Adam and Eve got from eating the fruit was KNOWLEDGE of good and evil. They didn’t make evil start existing. Figure if the serpent was Satan, HE EXISTED BEFORE THEY ATE.
The original sin, if one exists at all, was the Morningstar disobeying God and starting a war in Heaven. What we puny mortals do is pretty much a peccadillo in comparison.
Eh, it’s arguable whether Adam & Eve happened before or after the Fall, anyway. Satan/Lucifer appears all over the Old Testament, in some cases, as a minion of God. In Job, he’s still serving God, but as a ‘devil’s advocate’, questioning God’s opinion that Job is perfectly faithful. It’s arguable that if the serpent was Satan, then he was still in service to God at the time of Adam & Eve. What does THAT say about a good God?
Huh. In the version of Job I was taught, Satan was just…sort of there in Heaven. It was implied (maybe stated outright?) that dudebro had the power to go between Hell, Earth, and Heaven more or less at will.
The best description of Satan in Job I’ve heard described him as a slightly over-eager crown prosecutor/District Attorney/whatever the equivalent is in your legal system. He’s there to accuse people and prove them guilty — that’s his job (pun not intentional). The accusation is that their faith is’t solid, so he goes about proving his point by punishing and/or tempting them. Hence with Jesus in the desert, he’s still just doing his job, which in that case is to double-check that the son of God hasn’t got too human.
I concept of a Devil was built over centuries with bits of it comeing from various traditions, including various pagan religions of the Middle East, Zoorastrianism, Judism, Egyptian myths, Greek myths, etc. Christianity took the idea and ran with it. So when the various Hebrew oral stories were collected into the various books that became the old testement, at different periods in history no less, different ideas about evil and and arch evil figure were incorporated. Later Christians went back and tried to build a coherent narative for the Devil out of these scraps. The Adversary was a servent of God, the procesuter metioned above. The Serpent was…a talking snake (keep in mind talking animals are common in acient myths and serpents are often associated with dragons, sea monsters, and a host of pagan Gods and Goddesses, including some of the ones Hebrew high preists were competing with).
The Christian stories them bounced around in bits and pieces until we get to Dante and Milton, who again synthesized pagan traditions, stuff from the Old Testment, and stuff from revelations to, in Dante, build a map of the afterlife (with Inferno being the most interesting bit because its full of ironic punishments worth of the Se7en or the SAW series) and in Milton a lifestory for Satan.
Much of my personal library is taken up with books on the whole creationism/evolution/intelligent design argument (as a hobby, I’m not a scientist). I have to say that this cartoon is a rather lovely and succinct summary of many people’s objection to evolution. Oh, there are variations of course (e.g. without the Fall there is no need for a redeeming Christ, etc.), but you have delightfully outlined one of the big ones. I predict that this strip is going to be referenced in more than a few undergrad research papers. Nicely done sir.
The theodicy is interesting and all, but Joyce’s issue at this point is not the non-existence or non-omnipotence or injustice of God. It’s that everyone she’s loved through her childhood has been systematically lying to her.
They told her that the first three chapters of Genesis (all of Genesis, actually) was literally true and that its contents and belief in its literal truth are crucially important. She trusted them. They were lying. Even if God does exist, and Genesis is “true, from a certain point of view” that doesn’t mean that they weren’t lying. Because they said, and insisted upon, “literally”. If everything else were true in its way, but with the substitution of “allegorical” for “literal”, then it is still the case that everyone Joyce trusted until a month ago was lying.
If Joyce accepted some other denomination’s harmonisation of the Problem of Evil, if she accepted some other religion that makes the problem nugatory (Buddhism, say), or even if she accepted that no gods of any sort exist nor souls, then she would still be facing the reality that everyone she ever trusted before she came to university was confidently and vociferously insisting upon an untruth. Her parents, her older brothers, her pastor, her friend’s parents, the responsible adults who supervised joint activities of her homeschooling group (such as trips to Seven Flags), older kids whom she admired — they all told her (or at least condoned others telling her) that the young Earth creation as described in Genesis 1:1 to 3:24 is literally true and that believing that is a condition of having God’s love. If it turns out that there are no gods that’s a lie. If there is at least one god but the account is confabulation it’s a lie. If there is a loving God and the account is true, but expressed allegorically? — it is still the case that everything that Joyce has been told in her religious upbringing was a god-damned lie.
Theodicy is not going to get Joyce out of this one. She’s not upset about the probable non-existence of God (at least not now). She’s upset about the untenable-ness of the particular interpretation of Genesis insisted upon by everyone she ever trusted. It’s about her trust for them, not the existence of God.
That’s a very good point and I agree to a large part, but it is ALSO a crisis of faith. Those things are not unrelated. For Joyce God is the greatest authority figure of all, and her parents and Becky’s parents had part of that authority.
Now it turns out that fathers can point guns at children, mothers can say horrible things and God can create death and evolution all on his own.
Sure, the two issues are intimately connected. But I think that “I have no reason to believe in God or the value of the Bible other than that I trusted liars” is one logical step further down the slippery slope, and I expect that Joyce’s reaction when she gets that will be more in the horror-dread ballpark. Right now she is angry about lies, not recoiling in dread and horror from the existential and moral abyss.
I’m having so many feels about this one. I was in Joyce’s exact place 11 years ago. The realization hit me like a ton of bricks, and I fought it tooth and nail to hang on to a faith that was rapidly slipping away. Losing the one thing that kept you going your whole life, the one thing you were ever really certain of, it is jarring. It’s terrifying and infuriating and deeply disturbing in those first few turbulent moments, and for me they lasted for months.
It never truly stopped either. I still have occasional panic attacks that the end days are coming, and that I chose wrong and that I will suffer the consequences for my sins. Religious brainwashing runs deep, but you just have to keep pushing forward.
I’ve been an atheist for eight or so years, but I’ve still got moments of fear and anxiety about dying and burnin’ in Hell. That shit freaked me out so hard when I was a kid and I don’t think it really ever went away, just got buried under a lot of other crap.
Apparently this was the Church of England’s problem with evolution when Charles Darwin first published his book. Christianity promotes a view of nature that is peaceful, evolution shines a light on how this is far from true.
The Church of England is divided on everything, consisting as it does of a group of all-but-Lutherans and a group of all-but Catholics told that they have to be the same Church or else. There are even evangelical congregations within the Church of England. Within a year of The Origin of Species being published it had received both enthusiastic endorsement and furious condemnation by various senior clerics of the Church of England.
I honestly don’t understand how anyone could read Genesis and think that death didn’t exist before Eve ate the apple. 3:22 clearly states that Adam and Eve were not immortal, because they hadn’t yet eaten from the Tree of Life.
Christians would frustrate me a whole lot less if more of them actually read their own dang book…
As a (non-fundamentalist non-literal-interpretation) Christian, honestly #same
I used to think I was ignorant because I didn’t read the entire original Bible (IT’S BORING AND UNREADABLE AND BADLY WRITTEN IN A VERY BASIC SENSE I REFUSE), just a retelling, but then I found out even that gives me more knowledge and understanding than most Christians, and that’s kind of terrifying
I get that Joyce has been through some shit. SERIOUS shit. ToeDad, Becky coming out, etc. etc. She has every right to be upset, seeing as her upbringing is slowly being taken apart.
But this kind of behavior just strikes me as inappropriate. Again, I acknowledge that she’s had a lot of issues recently with religion, and I can understand why that might piss her off. But the way she’s taking it out on
Becky doesn’t seem right.
Joyce needs to understand that Becky’s changed more than in just her orientation. If she’s turned to believing in evolution…Well, it’s like what Becky said ‘So what?’ That’s her opinion. I mean, Joyce knew that Becky’s been hanging with Dina for a while now. She should expect talk about evolution.
Simply put, Joyce needs to be careful about how she talks about religion to Becky especially. She may very well start coming off as what she hated in ToeDad (and to a far lesser extent, her mom) to Becky.
Good point. Big Toe Daddy has just given a ghastly lesson in where doing things to save Becky’s soul leads to. It’s starts with a Bible-bashing chastisement….
For years I have been running across bumper-stickers and what have you that say “3:16”, and I have always presumed that they are coded references to John 3:16. But now I have suddenly realised that they are probably coded references to Genesis 3:16 instead. Yuck!
Here’s a scary thought, in 2000 years will there be a religion based on the teachings of Willis as discussed by his apostles in the epistles known as “The DoA Comments”? (Found after the next mass extinction on a SD card by a shepherd throwing rocks into a cave, of course.)
You are forgetting the flame wars launched between the faction that holds the timeline of Roomies/It’sWalky/Shortpacked to be the one true word and those that hold Dumbing of Age as the true Revelation. And the heretical sect that holds both are true, and their internal inconsistencies is proof of their divine nature
I thought that Eden was also the place that didn’t have the evil and the death in it and the rest of the world… and then Adam and Eve got dumped out into it because of original sin. Possibly to live among the humans who weren’t the chosen types who were already there. (I dunno I’m not that big on theology.)
But wasn’t there a woman turned demon named Lillith who had some hand in the original story? I’m a really lax Christain and I know I heard that somewhere. Don’t remember where though.
I belive that is from Jewish texts that weren’t part of the Talmud, and didn’t get included in the works that became the Old Testament for Christians. You might have heard it any number of places, Lilith is a popular character for horror stories and comics, she is a Vampire in the Marvel Universe. I think she might be the ancestor of Grendel in Beowulf, unless that was Cain…
Yeah, I might be interpreting it a bit but that part people complain about sometimes about god creating humanity twice and then Adam and Eve (Or their children?) running into other people. It always seemed like the bible was trying to say that A&E were the special chosen Eden people who were created without sin for Eden and all the rest were the ones who… well weren’t. It would make sense with the whole Jewish people are the chosen people stuff and that then being minimised in the Christian versions of the text. But again, I might be way off about this stuff since I don’t really feel like I’ve got any dogs in this paradise.
Genesis is composed of various different stories that were carried in the oral tradition before being collected and set down on scrolls. There are two creation stories back to back, the “On the first day…” list, then the more personal story with Adam and Eve. The God in the first story is very distant and does stuff just with his voice (Let there be light). The God in the second book walks around, builds Adam out of Mud (so get down and dirty as it was), chats with his creation, does some impromptu surgery…it has a much more folk story feel. And the order of events are different. Creating Mankind was the last thing before kicking back for a day of rest in the list version, but Adam was created before animals in the second. What I learned was that, at the time, these two stories were probably circulating in different regions of Canaan/Israel/Judea/whatever they were calling it at the time and were so well known they couldn’t leave one or the other out, so they put both in. The Old Testament is full of this. So in the new Testament actually. Mark was written first, Mathew and Luke were basically rewrites using Mark as a source (and a lost work called Q). John is radically different from the other three gospels and seems to be a more original work (or at least one built using different sources).
Let it break, Joyce. If it’s worth anything it won’t need you to protect it.
This is similar to what broke me: I was done in by the concept of hell and sin, the lack of godly assistance in the suffering world, and the similarities between god and my flawed human father… It dead. It very dead.
There’s a bit of a false dichotomy here, though I can forgive Joyce (and Willis) for focusing on the two main narratives. And everything Joyce’s been taught is a goddamned lie either way, because the fundie narrative isn’t internally logically consistent.
Its sad to watch someone struggle with the implications of something that doesn’t even exist
I mean I sit here and I think about what shes gone through (Ryan and Ross specifically) which is real, which happened and yet shes struggling with this concept
I’m just so glad of the way I was raised, to quote Ricky Gervais: “thank god I’m an atheist”
Joyce’s religious perspective is her lens through which she conceptualizes the rest of the world. Regardless of weather god exists or not in reality, god and religion are very real to Joyce. Joyce is struggling with her own identity and her conception of the entirety of the world. The two (isolated) violent experiences could be arguably smaller by comparison. I think the incidents are a reflection of the evil in the world. It is exponentially more scary to face the world especially without the comfort of familiar dogma.
ughhhh I know Joyce is like a repressed uneducated uber-fundie but Christians dealt with this by like the fourth century. I mean come on read some augustine.
Augustine is SUPER COOL READING but I mean… Joyce isn’t coming from that place y’know? She’s coming from Non-Denominational home-schooled fundamentalism which… a lot of the time… the lay people are only aware of what they learn in Bible studies and praise songs. Not gonna get high level theological philosophy out of that.
Yeah I mean my own parents thought similarly. My comment is less the typical “Willis must not know REAL christianity!” and more “God the nondemoninational fundies don’t even know the thought of the dudes that founded protestantism let alone the single most important dude to all the protestant reformers let alone the single most important thinker in Christian history who was explicitly addressing and dealing with problems like this over a thousand years ago.”
Though, depending on your faith, the goal could be different – to be reincarnated into something/someone better, to live in eternal paradise (with or without the virgins), or to hop off the reincarnation wheel into annihilation. Take your pick.
This is one of the attitudes that makes me detest religion. Children can give up the idea of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny with only a slight twinge about Mother and Father lying to them for years. But propose the notion that there isn’t an invisible being watching you to see if you’re naughty or nice and they undergo a fury and/or terror so great they’re willing to attack you for it. Oh brother.
When I grew up, nobody in my church treated the Adam and Eve story as anything but a myth. We were all told that it wasn’t what actually happened, it was just a story to teach us about sin. I don’t remember ever believing in that story. My church was super chill about most things, tbh. My grandma, grandpa, and aunt are hardcore fundies, and when they revealed that side…it was shocking. Evolution and God went hand in hand in my mind, and we were supposed to love everyone no matter what! Their brand of Christianty was mostly used to guilt trip and hurt me, and it made me distance myself from the church as a result. What made me leave was when my pastor wanted to make it public that our church was LGBT friendly, and half the congregation was against it. I couldn’t be apart of a church where I didn’t feel welcomed anymore.
In the world we live in, it’s rare to have unquestioning faith. In anything, I mean, not just religion. People, and the world at large, tend to let us down; betray our trust. To have real faith in something, and suddenly have that faith ripped apart…is worse than death.
For a while at least.
Sometimes it can really be like dying, because you stop being the person you were; the ethics and morality that form your idea of “you”, based on faith, become ashes, and in their place a predatory kind of anger grows, one that seeks to tear the world down.
Losing faith can make you a monster.
I doubt anyone will read this, since this strip is 5 days old and there are already a huge number of comments… but, here goes.
1) Assume that there is an Immortal Soul.
2) Assume there is not reincarnation.
3) Assume an Omni-Benevolent God.
1 and 2 tell us that Human existence is thus, most likely, the larval stage of the Soul’s Journey (see Kabbalah). Larval are children… no matter how old they are. 3 tells us then that everything we perceive as Evil is no more than the bickering of children… to God. God’s perceptions of Evil and our perception of Evil are two different things. God gives rules and if we break those rules, we are punished with time out which, to our current perception, is in the most horrible nasty place ever and lasts for eternity, but again, to God, it is merely a place where we can consider what we did wrong for a few… periods of time. A Kalpa or two.
Yes, I am aware that (and I’m a Jewish Rabbi saying this) that this compares the Genocide of 6 million of my fellows to a 6 year old punching his sister because she took his truck… but the only way those three statments actually make sense is if God has an utterly different perspective on the nature of actual evil than mankind does. And that’s fair. God has far vaster frame of reference. I say all this, even though Judaism doesn’t believe in eternal damnation, original sin, or the Omni-Benevolence of God. The God of our fathers has made mistakes and all the tree of knowledge gave us was knowledge of good and evil. We became able to percieve it and thus prey to all its temptations. We also don’t believe in the Devil. The closest we have is Yetzer-Hara… the Wicked Impulse, the temptation to do wrong… but Yetzer-Hara is essentially a Shoulder Devil, a personal wickedness… and balanced by Yetzer-Tov. We all have the capacity to do good or ill because only in that can we grow, mature, understand love and grace, pain and forgiveness. But all the laws of Judaism are punished in this world, not the next. God gives the laws, the commandments, in the form of Mitzvot. Good Deeds. To fail at them is not to be evil… it is to be Human. To succeed is to be a Good Person… but to try is also to be a Good Person, even if you fail. Faith is a Journey, and if God Judges anything, he’ll judge how much you’ve grown when you stand before her throne.
I don’t know if you will come back to read this reply, but I keep coming back to this thread so here goes.
I agree with your position that God has a vastly different reference. I think a lot of religious thought is high colored by a natural human impulse to anthropomorphism the Divine. As I said elsewhere in these comments, I am spiritual, Christian leaning, but I belive humans wrote the bible and all organized religions are full of falibue human beings and any given dogma will have centuries of confusion, misunderstanding, and dozens of cultural biases built into it; many of which don’t make sense in the modern world. So I used the term agnostic/religio-anarchist. I am very interested in the idea of Yetzer-Hara and Yetzer-Tov, but confused by comment about Judisim not having a Devil. The Adversary appears as a major character in the book of Job. In the Christian Tradition he has been lumped into the character of the Devil (along with the Serpent from Eden, and a few other Old Testament figures). I know the modern idea of the Devil has scant biblical president (outside of Revelations and other end time sections like in Daniel), but some of the seeds are there. I am curious in the Jewish tradition regarding the Serpent and the Adversary from Job. Is The Serpent just a talking animal? Or was it Eve’s Yetzer-Hara? I have heard that the Adversary was sort of God’s quality control agent, keeping him honest in his assessment of creation.
I’m pretty sure the relevant Biblical chapters just say that Adam and Eve were allowed to eat the fruit of eternal life in the Garden of Eden, not that nothing else could die, so a lot of what you just said is wrong anyway Dorothy.
For that matter, you won’t even find the term “Original Sin” in the Bible.
You do find the phrase “the wages of sin is death,” however, which would be the foundation of Joyce’s Christian belief system. “Original sin,” even if those two words aren’t used next to each other in English translations, is still an important component of Paul’s teachings. It’s like saying that “the separation of church and state” isn’t an idea presented in the Bill of Rights because those specific words aren’t used, even though the First Amendment lays out that idea pretty clearly using different words.
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“uh well, at least 1+1=2? THAT’S NOT A LIE”
a=b
a²=ab
a²+a²=a²+ab
2a²=a²+ab
2a²-2ab=a²+ab-2ab
2(a²-ab)=a²-ab
2=1
“SHIT“
Hey! Stop dividing by zero!
But it is such a beautiful lie.
Could have just used fermi estimation and been done with it easy
1+1=1 because 2 rounds down.
48+54=110
48 rounds down to 10, 54 rounds up to 100. 100 plus 10 is 110.
Shit, I messed up on the second thing. Its supposed to equal 100 total.
You know, fermi estimation is very much like religion. It’s not proper math, but damnit if it won’t try to pretend like it is!
Quantum physics is virtually a religion. Most of it can’t really be proven or dis-proven, so you have to take on faith based on the teachings of its preachers that say it must be true because the math they created to explain it says so.
Oh, and by quantum physics, 1 is only probably equal to 1 … or not, and simultaneously. 🙂
And yet it works. Quantum physics is actually pretty solid. We just don’t understand it. The world is stranger than we can imagine.
String theory, on the other hand…
Quantum mechanics is amazingly solid. It gives (mostly) probabilistic predictions rather that precise ones, but the probabilities it calculates are amazingly accurate. It explained a whole bunch of stuff that seemed bizarre and arbitrary (such as the bell-shaped thermal spectrum and the sharp lines in emission and absorption spectra), and it predicted a wide range of bizarre-sounding phenomena that turned out actually to occur and that we use to make transistors, microchips, diodes, LEDs, and lasers.
And it doesn’t say that 1 is only probably equal to 1.
I never said it didn’t work, just that it has many characteristics of a religion.
And as Dina might say, I must must have said the JOKE (whence the 🙂 ) wrong. It’s another version of “How many cats does Schrödinger have? One and zero … probably.”
Another characteristic of a religion is the reaction that occurs when perceived heresy is spoken/typed. Did I just witness quantum fundamentalists? 🙂
Religions obfuscate reality rather then accurately predict its inner workings. Key word being accurate. It doesn’t matter if it’s bizarre as long as the end result lines up with objective, provable fact.
For those following along at home, here is the wikipedia article on Fermi estimates.
Neat, but I’ve got a trick to make 2+2=whatever the fuck I decide it is.
2+2=5
for extremely large values of 2
“There . . . are . . . *four* lights!”
Ugh. Naked Picard. You made me remember. Goddamn you.
the ballad of jean-luc and the four lights
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NFITME0zI8
If we’re not careful, someone here is going to prove black is white and Joyce is going to get run over at a zebra crossing!
White is the absence of color on paper. Black is the absence of color in light.
White is light’s black.
Black is solid’s white.
Black is white, just seen from a difference perspective.
By the way, Darth Vader killed your father.
Pink is just the abscense of green pigment.
Unless it’s also invisible. And a unicorn.
White pigment is the absorption of nothing. Black is nothing. Black pigment is the absorption of everything.
Fish? FAIRY GOD PARENTS!
Is it a gun?
Is it safe?
Oh it’s perfectly safe. It’s us who are in trouble.
[inb4 UR OPPRESSING MAH CHRISTIAN FREEDUMS not reading the alt-text]
[[or the FAQ]]
No, please.
I assume those people slip through the cracks from time to time and I just haven’t seen them, but they’re free to go elsewhere for entertainment.
Pretty sure they probably don’t slip through the comment moderation? I know first time commenters are moderated and I’m sure I remember Willis saying the comment section itself is read through and manually moderated. Which I gotta say, with comment threads of this size, is serious dedication to never leaving a computer.
Yeah, but if someone’s first comment is fine but they later go off the deep end I imagine their comment would still be up at first.
Math, why is it always math?
Because math is more fundamental and it tends not to be completely disproven so easily. That’s why intelligent people tend to not like that everything they think they know is a lie (again), and that this time even math has broken.
Math. Math never changes.
The math isn’t broken, but our shortcuts for it are.
However, math IS incomplete, and NEVER can be complete. Godel proved that one. Although I don’t suggest reading his works, they have been shown to literally drive people insane. Like literally literally. Like, they read the book, brain goes “world does not compute,” they try to prove him wrong, fail, can’t accept it being right, spiral into a deranged madness, and get taken away by men in white coats. Literally insane.
On the flip side, if you want to learn what he taught without going insane, I suggest reading “Godel, Escher, Bach.” It does a good job of “slowly” preparing you for the Godel’s big reveal. (Every chapter is a paradigm shift). So when you finally get to the end, you can actually understand Godel without it shattering your brain, because you’ve already fixed a lot of the parts that you didn’t know were broken and so don’t go through the “everything I ever learned is a lie” mental breakdown.
Oh, goodness, 1000000 points for Gödel. He was required reading at my college, where the only required math class did not involve numbers. You would think that would be easy, but the math for a course where Calvinball was also required reading… well, I was pretty good at the math of quantum physics, but I literally got a headache in “IS2” every day. It was the best kind of brainhurt.
Actually, nothing incomplete in the underlying math here, it’s just all the answers I’ve read here that are, in one way or another. At least in Portugal, this kind of exercise is pretty typical in 9th grade math – whenever you want to divide by a non constant expression, you have to branch out in order to handle the zero case.
a = b
( … )
2(a²-ab) = a²-ab
(2(a²-ab) = a²-ab && a²-ab != 0) || (2(a²-ab) = a²-ab && a²-ab = 0)
(2 = 1 && a²-ab != 0) || (2*0 = 0)
(2 = 1 && a²-ab != 0) || (0 = 0)
(2 = 1 && a²-ab != 0) || true
This statement is always true regardless of the truth value of (2 = 1 && a²-ab != 0). All this tells you is that you’ve reached a dead end in your proof, at least if you want to prove something other than ‘all values of b in the value set satisfy the condition when you solve for a’ and other than ‘all values of a in the value set satisfy the condition when you solve for b’
Full disclosure: I was a mediocre student in university math.
Don’t worry, you’ll most likely not have to use any math higher than algebra in the real world. Unless you’re studying to become something that requires higher math like physics or whatever.
And even then most use advanced expert systems to do the math for them. Like why reinvent the quadratic every time you do a little bit of particle physics?
I have trouble wrapping my head around Physics.
But I know buzz words like “Quantum” and “Q-Bit”.
At least until you get to calculus and/or statistical analysis. Once you learn either one, you may not directly use them often, but you quickly begin to use shortcut versions of them *everywhere*.
“Wait… if I do that… it’s going to progress asymptotically, but if I do this, it’ll be exponential… at least until I hit this limit… OK! Now I know how I’m going to manage my calorie intake for the next two months!”
Yep. Very true.
It’s a box full of sharp and handy intellectual tools.
Integers… Very dangerous.
You go first.
I got this reference.
Maths.
Numbers are shiny.
So. Very. SHINY!
So are tin-foil hats! And those who find security in tin-foil hats OR shiny math are a few steps further removed from reality.
That’s not a fallacy, the math is just messed up.
a=b
a²=ab
a²+a²=a²+ab
2a²=a²+ab
2a²-2ab=a²+ab-2ab
2(a²-ab)=a²-ab <<<HERE
2(a^2 – ab) = 2(0) = 0
0 = 0
Or am I missing a joke somewhere?
As MatthewTheLucky pointed out, this proof that 2 = 1 is accomplished by dividing by zero. You can prove anything that way. It’s the step in Ana Chronistic’s math right after the step you marked with HERE.
It’s very handy to be able to prove anything.
Dude, at “HERE” there are no errors. On the right he’s factorizing (by 2) and on the left he’s doing ab-2ab which is -ab. no problems there. The idea of the falacy is something you missed in your conclusion. You just skipped to the reason why it’s a falacy: You ended up with zeroes. The math is flawless, it just doesn’t work that way. To isolate 2=1, you’d have to divide by (a^2-ab) on both sides. But that is 0. Which is to say, you’d have to divide by zero, which you can’t.
I understand that it’s a fallacy, and I know that it can’t be a real proof. However, I’m missing where it messes up. Where the logic disappears. Is it at a specific point along your equation development, or is a=b doomed to cause fallacies from the start?
It’s because you divide by zero (a^2-ab is 0), which doesn’t work.
You get problems when you try to say that (X•0)/0 = X.
I find it helps to plug in some value — say, 5 — for a and b, and see how each equation works out. That makes it more visible when you’re dividing by 0.
The reason is that a + a != a unless a = 0. Take a look at this line:
2(a²-ab)=a²-ab
Now substitute a for b
2(a²-a²)=a²-a²
a² – a² = 0, therefore 2 * 0 = 1 * 0, i.e. this sequence of operations only holds true when a = b = 0.
It is not saying that 2 = 1 but that 2 * (something) = 1 * (the same thing) can be true, and it is only true when a = b = 0
Basically, in mathematics, ab = ac means b = c only holds true IF (and only IF) a is non-zero. Think about it. If a = 0 then b could be 9 and c could be 5000 and it would still be true that ab = ac since 0 * anything = 0. But b is definitely not equal to c.
That’s what is being done in the last step to get 2 = 1 from 2(a²-ab)=a²-ab what is really happening is a division on both sides by the factor a²-ab, but that’s a²-a², which is 0. The statement is that 2 * 0 = 1 * 0, which is true.
b=c can hold true if a is zero. But ab=ac does not IMPLY b=c unless a is non-zero. In other words, reducing both sides by canceling will only be guaranteed to work when a is non-zero.
.
Nope, the equations Ana Chronistic has given are true for all numbers a and b which meet the condition a=b!
(Of course with the exception of the last one, as divison by zero).
The failure in logic comes from them not simplifying ab to a^2. math does tricksy things when you play with the names of variables. for example:
a^2=b
log(a)b=2
lnb/lna=2
lnb=2lna
lnb/2=lna
e^lnb/2=a
e=(lnb/2)root(a)
log(a)e=2/lnb
log(a)e*lnb=2
lne/lna*lnb=2
1/lna*lnb=2
now for the switcheroo
1/lna*2lna=2
2lna/lna=2
2=2
…i guess i failed to break logic.
Damnit ya’all, you guys try turn this place into a xkcd area? You seriously start sounding that way>_<"
Ah, the ONLY time I get to feel like all those hours of math in school had any point to them – comic comment sections.
Dude, you gots no problems when someone fills a page with a rant about child abuse or sexism, but get upset when it’s about math?
It’s just math, dude. Nothin’ but numbers. Don’t be afraid.
I don’t think he’s upset. Somehow I doubt anyone familiar enough with xkcd to recognize such would frown upon math. It’s probably more of a ‘Seriously? xD’
You guys should read Lewis Carrol’s “A Game of Logic”. I’m
pretty sure you can find it for free in multiple places if you
Google it.
Oh, cool! I love Dodgson!
These New Cakes are Not Nice. Some Old Cakes are Nice.
Therefore, No New Cakes are Nice.
Ah HA! 2a²=a²+ab and they’re both having 2ab subtracted from them. Therefore it’s 0 = 0! So a=0! So it works out fine! I get to keep my sanity for another day! ^^
1 = sqrt(1) = sqrt(-1*-1) = sqrt(-1) * sqrt(-1) = i * i = -1
Therefore, 1 = -1.
Interesting. Haven’t seen that one before either.
It breaks because the square root function isn’t well-defined and continuous on the entirety of the complex plane, you have to cut a slit down the negative x axis to make a proper “function”. So it’s not a real proof, but disproving it is just a matter of knowing that sqrt(ab) = sqrt(a)sqrt(b) when a and b are positive.
It’s… confusing ya.
Definitely more complicated than division by 0.
sqrt(1) = -1
Teach the Controversy
Add one pile of sand to one pile of sand. You get one pile of sand. 1 + 1 = 1.
*mindsplosion*
Actually, according to Boolean algebra, 1+1 does =1.
And according to Fermi estimation, I have one eye, one limb, 10 ribs, 100 bones, and 10+10=10, 43+50 is 110. 1+1=1
And 0.999~ = 1 too, right?
Correct, but that’s more a case of the completeness of the reals and having two different ways of writing a single number.
0.99999999… = summation(9*10^-k) from k=1 to n where n approaches infinity.
This math problem angers me … something about modifying one side of an equation without modifying the other just tweaks something in my brain.
You can do that, as long as the sum total of the mods equals 0.
Eg, you can go from
x^2 + bx/a + c/a = 0
to
x^2 + bx/a + b^2/4a^2 – b^2/4a^2 = 0
Because the last two terms equal 0.
(This is from a stage in finding the roots of a generic quadratic equation, eg deriving the quadratic formula.)
(Whoops, left out the ‘+ c/a’ in that last equation. My bad.)
> 2=1
Statement: Ana Cronistic is a smelly liar. Proof by contradiction:
1.) Ana Cronistic is not a smelly liar. (proposition A)
2.) 2=1 (see above lemma)
3.) 2!=1 (trivial)
4.) Contradiction between 2.) and 3.)
Given proposition A, we are able to prove a contradiction, therefore A is false, and Ana Cronistic is a smelly liar.
Strictly this is only a proof by contradiction with an un-named existing set of beliefs, as 3) does not follow from prop. A. and there are no other propositions, ie. the ‘laws of mathematics’ are hidden propositions.
Everyone in this cluster of threads is my people.
(also X/0= infinity)
/]
brohoof
or brofist if you’d rather
Brohoof is fine.
😀
Of course I smell! I have a working nose!
I’ll tell Ana Cronistic that she’s a smelly liar, tho.
Here’s one for the college crowd. You know that the derivative of x^2 with respect to x is 2x, right? And the derivative of x is 1? Okay, let’s start with the identity
x^2 = x + x + … + x (there are x terms)
Obviously true for all x since the left hand side and the right hand side are both equal to x times x.
An identity stays true when you differentiate both sides with respect to x. Let’s do it.
2x = 1 + 1 + … + 1 (there are x ones)
But of course the right side is just x. So 2x = x, and since this is true for all x it’s true for x=1, therefore 2 = 1, QED.
x^2=2x >>> There’s your problem.
x^2=xx >>> FIXED
xx = 1 + 1 + … + 1 (there are x ones)
=>
1*1=1 (there are 1 one’s)
MATH.
Damnit, forgot to gloat with 1=1. It was so obvious I forgot to write it! xD
1+1=1
Fermi estimation mother fucker.
Well, if you want to play that way, 1+1=1 when you’re equating 1 to a concept – something you can’t really assign a value towards.
We can bring logic into it and make all sorts of silly math equations.
Doesn’t make my correction less true, not his mistake more so.
Also Fermi estimations aren’t really math. They use math, yes, but they also use assumptions made in a very non-algebraic way. It’s simply a tool we use that happens to have math in it. You can’t use it to prove math equations.
tl;dr: Fermi estimations aren’t math. You can’t math with them.
But I want to use it as a real math.
*rolls up newspaper* No! Bad!
The math is good. The PENIS… I mean, the fermi is evil!
Alt text:
Isn’t that cuuute? BUT IT’S WROOONG!!
(extra math points if you know where that’s from 😛 )
didn’t Roger Daltry and Pete Townsend cover that in “Behind Blue Eyes”
which is sort of apropos given the hue of Joyce’s orbs 🙂
The issue is that you have x 1s, thus adding another variable which you are ignoring.
The right side doesn’t make a lot of sense if x isn’t a natural number. Calculus doesn’t make a lot of sense if you are restricted to the natural numbers. Ergo, this proof doesn’t make a lot of sense.
That said, some might argue that calculus doesn’t make that much sense in the real numbers either…
a=b
a²=ab
a²+a²=a²+ab
2a²=a²+ab
2a²-2ab=a²+ab-2ab
2(a²-ab)=a²-ab <—– Since A=B, a²-ab = 0, so this is 2*0 = 0
2=1 <—- This step requires dividing the previous step by a²-ab, imposing a requirement that a²-ab≠0, which translates out to a requirement that a²≠ab which translates out further to a requirement that a≠b.
In other words, this is demonstration that:
Given A=B, and A≠B, anything you want can be true. 🙂
Thus, rainbows.
Now all we need is a way to do make A equal to and not equal to B and then we can
conquer the universemake the universe a better place.Just like with religion!
For Willis, 1+1=twins.
Actually that equation is simply wrong, let me make you spot the issue:
a=b
a²=ab
a²+a²=a²+ab
2a²=a²+ab
2a²-2ab=a²+ab-2ab
2(a²-ab)=a²-ab
UP UNTIL THIS POINT RIGHT:
2=1
AND HERE’S THE FUCKUP:
a^2-ab does not equal 1, it equals 0. In the same way 1-1 equals 0
As such the result is 0=0, so everything else is wrong.
And before people say:
“no but you make: 2=(a^2-ab)/(a^2-ab) then you’d be saying 2=0/0, and as you probably know, 0/0 DOES NOT EQUAL 1, IT EQUALS ERROR. One does not simply divide by 0, even if he’s dividing 0.
It’s not simply wrong. It’s complexly wrong.
He’s not saying a²-ab = 1. He’s taking
2(a²-ab)=a²-ab
and dividing both sides by a²-ab to get rid of the a²-ab, leaving
2*(a²-ab)/(a²-ab) = (a²-ab)/(a²-ab), which reduces to 2=1.
It breaks of course because he’s dividing by 0, but doing so in a complicated, non obvious way.
I think you dropped this -2ab
This is about how I’ve seen it:
Think of any number! Let’s call it a.
Set a=b
a-2b=-b
a²-2ab=-ab
2a²-2ab=a²-ab
2a(a-b)=a(a-b)
2a=a
a=0
I proved the number you were thinking of was 0. qed
If my math is right, and both a=1 and b=1, then
2(1-1)=1-1X1
which comes out to 2-2=1-1, or more simply, 0=0.
And now I see someone else already posted this but I already typed it all out so too bad.
That equation is zero equals zero. What you have in parentheses, given any number, equals zero. So it actually is true, IF you take into account the fact that ANY number multiplied by ZERO equals ZERO.
1 + 1 = 2 for exceptionally large values of 1 and/ or exceptionally small values of 2.
And of *course* religion is a lie. Like most other things of the sort, religion was intended as a form of control, to get people to do what those that came up with it wanted them to do. It might have even been intended for benevolent reasons (God says prepare your food in a certain way… So you don’t die of food poisoning, ya idiots!) But inevitability someone else figured out how to use it to their own benefit, and then the lying *really* starts.
I screwed that up. Should be 2 + 2 = 3, for small values of 2 and/ or larger values of 3. :p
Correcting Ana Chronostic mathematics (sorry, can’t let it pass…)
2a²-2ab=a²+ab-2ab -> OK until that point
2a²-2ab=a²-2ab+b² (as a=b)
2(a²-ab)=(a-b)²
Ayup. She’s got it about right now.
Foreshadowing! The truck! THE TRUCK WILL RETURN!!!!
Also, sad Joyce 🙁
Yeah, Joyce wandering into the road without the others is rather foreboding
I was just about to say “TRUCK MOMENT!!1!!”…
…. She really just needs to take break after the semester she,s been having.
And go back to her mom after what happened with Toedad and what she said? Heck no.
I vote for a beach house with a tiny group of people who can manage to not make her feel significantly worse. Which might just be Ethan and Dorothy at this point.
(I majorly friend-ship Joyce and Ethan. After what they went through I really want to see them develope a deep and healthy friendship. Also is there a word for friend-shipping, is that a thing?)
Don’t know, but yeah I get what you mean. I just call it friendshipping, really.
BroTP
This is the story of a small group of people who were picked to live in a house to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start being real.
…while our camera crew pokes them with sticks.
If anything else bad happens to her this semester, it’ll need to be a long break in a place with soft walls and softer food.
Seriously, I went 50% bonkers just dealing with classes and homework. If I had to cope with attempted rape, gun-toting maniacs, and discovering almost everything I was raised to believe was a lie (all in the space of a few weeks, mind you), I’d flip out like that dude in Real Genius.
Joyce is goddamned resilient.
Either that or she’s really good at schoolwork.
Not to mention the slow gradual chipping away of her entire worldview by interacting with reality, such as
Dating Ethan
Accepting Becky,
That flu shot strip with Dina,
Defending her Atheistic Best Friend
While going against her parents
Breaking up with Ethan to maintain psychological consistency
And pretty much facing, everyday, that the people she was taught to fear and look down seem perfectly unobjectionable.
It’s kinda like what she was telling Sarah, only the dark version.
It’s not just the big dramatic showcases.
It’s the sum of the little things.
Yeah, and today’s crisis of faith makes me want to give Willis a big hug.
I am sad that so many people are fed this substitute for thinking, and forced by the contradictory premises and discouragement of logic into narrower and narrower alleyways of twisted reason.
Ultimately, the end product of almost any rigid ideology is a fundamentalist implosion. We see this with Christian evangelicals, Mormon purists, Islamic terrorists, Leftist ideologues, bleeding-heart Liberals and hyper-Patriots.
When your belief system regards those who think differently from you as -THE ENEMY WHO SHOULD BE DESTROYED ™-, you should radically start to rethink your worldview. Joyce is just now starting on the path toward a renewed religious fundamentalism, and will likely (I’ve seen it happen, sadly) push away people she holds dear and regress. Since Willis was able to escape, Joyce will too, but not without doing damage to her loved ones.
There is no escape from a religious or ideological fundamentalist worldview without trauma.
But it’s only been ONE MONTH!
Yyyyyep. I had this conversation with myself back in the day. Can confirm, was not a fun one to have.
I went through a similar crisis of faith when I left the church, and religion all together. I mean, while where she might go is a good place, it will be a painful ride for Joyce. Her world is threatening to crash down. And while a wider, more awesome world exists out there beyond her own… that crashing down does not happen without its scars.
This conversation restored my faith in God, actually. I believe in God because if he’s responsible for making the world a crappy place then we’re struggling against it and we don’t have to believe this is all something we’re supposed to be enduring for some weird blood punishment. Instead, it’s a test and we can overcome it ourselves. God WANTS us to overcome and we can.
This logic really dicks on people who, say, experienced child abuse. Like why do I need to overcome that and other people don’t? I believe in god but I think it’s more of a “I made this machine let’s watch it run” kinda way.
Yeah but what sorta clockmaker makes a clock that doesn’t tell time exactly as he wanted? Intelligent design screws everything over. Either God is dumb, willfully blind, or evil. Christians pick number 2, which is a real dick move for a supposedly loving God.
Also, if your hypothetical wasn’t hypothetical: my partner went through that (in extremes), and I love him more than anything. The truth is: Everything happens. Not for a reason. Just, everything happens. Even to you. Keep your head up, as much as you can.
And take all your life advice from Joss Whedon movies. (Dr Horrible, here, my favorite.)
You’re making an assumption that God was making robots, not people. Humanity is given the one benefit none of God’s creations truly possess, Free Will. God does not want people to simply obey him. He wants us to CHOOSE to obey him.
That’s why, when it all comes to a head and the prophecies are fulfilled, those that were human once, in Heaven, the angels will serve them. Because they chose God, chose Jesus as their Savior, because they wanted to, not because they had to.
But as a result of this great gift, if we don’t follow his exact plan for our life, (undercutting the entire concept of free will), he will ensure that we are eternally tortured.
Free will seems like a really awful gift that I have to awkwardly get excited about when my aunt is watching me open it.
Yet another reason why I don’t let anyone except my gf/bf or life-long friends give me any gifts. Exceptions can be made but it takes a lot to convince me otherwise. Moonshine and the occasional fluffy sock notwithstanding.
Eh, that’s one interpretation of it.
The one that I grew up with is that if you choose not to be with God, he allows that. It’s just that if all the “God is Love, God is Good, God is Joy” things are assumed to be true, that means that going without them sucks.
Pretty hard.
On the other other hand, solipsism, so how I know if anyone is even real.
“On the other other hand, solipsism” is a pretty good argument for everything forever. Damn, I’m too old to use it for homework at school! Opportunity missed! >.<
God doesn’t give an “exact plan for your life”. All he does is say, “Deny yourself” Which means put the needs of others over yours, “Pick up your cross” take responsibility for your actions “and follow Me” listen to what Jesus says and use the gifts he gave you to help other people.
God may have a plan for your life, but it’s something you have to look for and use to help others. This isn’t a game board.
Like, we’re talking about abuse, not ‘loving god’. But all that said, an omniscient deity who set everything up in advance and is responsible for the universe is completely responsible for the acts of his creations. You argue that he gave us free will, but he also did it knowing exactly what would come of his actions. And that carries with it a level of responsibility that doesn’t usually exist in creating shit.
So God had to give this Free Will to volcanoes also?
I started going to a local Non-Denominational Church in 2004 or so and went every Sunday until My Mom started to have Heart problems and couldn’t really go anywhere any more.
After she died I found my faith in God slipping. I tried, and still do try sometimes, to hold onto the existence of God but paying attention to everything going on in the world and remembering when I was a teenager listen to my drunken Father yell at my Mom over everything and I prayed all the time he’d stop and things would calm down. But they were never answered.
Now I’m 25 and stuck with my drunk Dad who micro manages me and my Brothers lives. So yeah.
I would get up and move to some random location
in excess of a radius of 100 miles. Start a new life.
After a certain age, you are no longer property.
Seek freedom, and do not trap yourself with a flawed
perception of love. If it was me, I would ebay all my
expensive shit and use the money to GTFO of there, starting
back up a new place, establishing new friends, and a new
family.
I’m very sorry about all you’ve gone through. I can’t imagine losing my mother. I can too easily imagine a drunk micromanager, and that sucks. My family had those.
You need an out.
If you want to try engaging with the church, I wouldn’t go there just for faith, I’d actually bring needs to the support system that should exist there. One of the purposes of a church is to provide an extended family you can turn to when you cannot rely on your parents. They should be able to offer advice and support, and may have a favor network that can help with finding necessities like a job or a roommate.
There’s also option d – total apathy regarding the feelings of creations.
Completely cold, logical observation of the blood and horror. Makes more sense when taking into account the mythos, especially the ‘follow strict instructions for reward’ and ‘don’t and eternal punishment’ part. Sounds like a very vengeful scientist trying to make some rats follow a specific pattern. Oh, and then he adjusts parameters in volume II.
Amateur.
Can’t say about clock makers, but sometimes you just make things, let the go and see what happens. OR you make skynet and unintended consequences of not doing enough testing bites you.
You know, if there is a god and he’s roasting our ancestors because he feels like he has the right to do so, we WILL find the fucker and put our collective boot up his ass. We just need time… and a REALLY big boot.
We will need to achieve a level III civilization first.
Look up Dr. Kaku and “The Physics of the Impossible”.
Oh, I KNOW. Long road ahead, but worth walking.
This was actually something we discussed in a philosophy class. There was a Christian philosopher by the name of St. Augustine that tried to tackle the question of how a world created by a omnipotent and omnibenevolent god can have evil in it. Essentially the argument was that you have two kinds of evil in the world, evil in this case meaning more along the lines of pain and suffering rather than a moral judgement: The evil created by God (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, plague, natural disasters, etc.) which are supposedly used to carry out his will, punish the evil, etc., and the evil created as a result of human free-will, which was argued to exist, for if humanity didn’t have free will, there would be little point in creating us as rational thinking beings in the first place. So whenever someone suffers as a consequence of what someone else has done (in this case Toedad) that is an evil humanity has inflicted upon itself. So I guess in that case the only ones who are really screwed over by God directly are innocent natural disaster victims? Is that better? I don’t know if that’s better!
At any rate, I’m fine with people who want to say that God is the creator of the universe and that he was the one who set the natural world into order, but it’s when people start standing in the way of science and knowledge, and start actively contesting everything we are discovering about reality, saying ” my belief trumps your evidence” that I start to argue. Evolution happened. We KNOW this as certainly as we can know anything scientifically. If you want to say it’s part of God’s plan, that’s cool. . . But it happened.
So in short, I guess somebody talk to Joyce about the place of metaphorical language in scripture and give her a copy of the teachings of St Augustine of Hippo. And Thomas of Aquinas. He was actually pretty great about reconciling theology with observations of nature.
See, for me, the conversation with myself (read: desperate pleading with God, followed by horrifying realization) was about homosexuality. Basically, I came to three revelations just before my Joyce-moment: 1.) God is directly responsible for how every single human is (because being omnipotent and omniscient, he’d have to know exactly how they’ll turn out). 2.) God hates homosexuality (see all the verses the homophobes throw at the LGBT community all the time). 3.) God deliberately makes people who are by nature something he hates, meaning they have a choice to either suffer their entire lives on earth through no fault of their own and then spend eternity with a God who deliberately created them so he could hate them, or else spend an eternity being tortured in Hell.
Now, back before I had my conversation with myself, this thought hadn’t really bothered me because I didn’t know any gay people and was ignoring my own urges; I assumed (like I had been taught all my life) that gay people were monstrous perverts who deserved everything bad that happened to them. Then I met…we’ll call him “Ethan”, a wonderful man who was kind and supportive to me when no one else was. And I realized that this man, who was more Christ-like than most of the Christians I knew, was hated by God and would spend eternity being tormented in hell. And I had this conversation with myself, crying, while driving home in a torrential downpour, and I realized that the god I believed in was a horrible, horrible person by even his own standards, and if he were a human I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with him, let alone eternity…so if Christianity was real I basically had a choice to be tormented eternally by spending that time with God, or to be tormented eternally by spending that time in hell. I stayed in denial about the whole thing for another year or two, rationalizing with “well, my logic must be off somewhere” and “it’s an okay moral system if you don’t take it all too seriously” before I finally gave it up entirely, but that night is basically when I realized the brokenness of the system I’d bought into and started to come to terms with it maybe not being real.
Just my own experience, of course. But as you can imagine, these Joyce comics resonate VERY strongly with me because of it.
…holy cheese, did not mean for that to be so long. >_< Sorry!
Thank you for sharing this. This illustrates how I’ve felt about religious dogma without my being able to clearly articulate it as you have. It has always seemed so bizarre to me that people believe god to be loving and wonderful when by his own standards he is knowingly hurting and creating so much suffering. I was never fed religion as “The Truth” as a child so it didn’t really bother me too much.
“I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with him, let alone eternity” – This is pretty much why most rockers and punk rockers, headbangers in general would rather be ripping up shit in Hell rather then spend any time in that sanctimonious shithole called Heaven. /rockon
That explains the angry face then.
She’s smarter than I think I gave her credit for.
Not just smart, but surprisingly not completely dependent on religion for her self identity or it would be nearly impossible for her to say these things out loud.
That said, I would love to see the look on Joyce’s face were she to utter something to the effect of: there is no god.
In fairness, she kind of just did say that.
I’m not entirely sure that she’s not dependent on religion for her self-identity, based on that statement. It is almost exactly what Ken Ham himself argues. (My friend, who was given a book by Ham by his pastor, agreed with me that the awfulness of the core argument – you can’t believe in Evolution or else you can’t believe in this version of Christianity – is a really good way to solidify a belief that YEC seems off.)
Joyce is losing it, someone needs to get her into therapy, to undo the PTSD and undo the brainwashing.
On the bright side it looks like the anxiety induced by PTSD is already doing a pretty good job of unraveling the brainwashing.
So… yay?
Yeah, the downside of Joyce taking this particular logical path of unraveling the brainwashing is “I thought that everything was great, because of God, and it turns out that everything is not great, probably because of God, so I’m not feeling the whole ‘God is great’ thing right now” and everything is terrible.
On the one hand I hope that Joyce’s soul searching here doesn’t end in nihilism, but on the other hand it’s really up to her. Either way that girl seriously needs therapy. 🙁
Come to the nihilist side. We have cookies.
The cookies are meaningless, but they’re there.
I’ve long held that something doesn’t need to have inherent meaning in order to have subjective value. Cookies have value because they are tasty, meaning and “objective” value is unnecessary.
Objective value can be determined subjectively.
If I where to pay x amount for the cookies, they would have sed objective value to the one getting the money and whatever subjective value I assign to them. Never mind that money’s value is only objective within certain fixed parameters – pretty much like everying.
Because nothing has any intrinsic value, hence meaning, only
the quasi-objective value determined by subjectivity.
Everything is meaningless except for what we deem to have meaning, because we exist and can do that.
*everything
Would you say humans have intrinsic value?
Because objective value determined by subjective point of view (in this case: I’m a human and I can think). Of course some manage to kill off whatever value they had via some really shitty actions – further proof that even intrinsic value is subjective and can change.
“I’m a nihilist. I don’t believe in anything, not even nihilism.”
-Johnny Black, The Anarchist Cookbook(Movie)
Yeah, it’s a shame that God isn’t there to keep us from the consequences of evil and incompetent and stupid and lazy people…except for all the good and competent and smart and industrious people.
Reminds me of a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon that thoroughly shows why God isn’t to blame for all the bad things that happen in our lives:
CALVIN: I thought about asking God why he allows so much evil things to happen in the world, but I changed my mind.
HOBBES: Why?
CALVIN: I was afraid he’d ask me the very same question.
That… is wholly unfamiliar to me, and I own every single C&H collection, so, um, I’m not sure that is a real comic rather than a clever photoshop.
Beyond my own unfamiliarity with the strip you’re describing, I also don’t think Calvin ever talked about talking to God nearly that directly (as if he was going to for sure get a response), and while I know Calvin was often not quite a literal six-year-old, it seems like a huge dick move for any God to ask him why he isn’t personally stopping evil.
Let’s call it a wash?
“Joyce is losing it, someone needs to get her into therapy” Out with the old priests and in with the new!
There is no undo button for PTSD. There’s “pile stuff on top until you can no longer see/smell/sense it” and then there is “attempt to identify, control, and manage to dampen the effects to cause minimal issues for the long term”.
It’s also arguable that there’s no undoing long term brainwashing, either, because it affects the brain in a similar way to the way trauma does. Most people who “overcome” brainwashing often choose the path of hardline rejecting of what they were told to believe going from one extreme to the opposite, the severity of which mirrors the extremeness of the original brainwashing itself. It’s part of the coping mechanism that people latch on to as a means of taking control of their lives once they’ve come to realize that they had little to no control prior to that.
Hence why so many people who were raised and lived hyper-pious lives as evangelicals or other types of zealous beliefs go completely, or very close to, atheist. The harder or more painful the ‘escape’, the further people go to reject it.
There is no undo button, but therapy is really one of the only things that can HELP with PTSD (saying as a PTSD haver who tried all of the other options). You have the trauma forever because that’s how trauma works, but the “disorder” part of PTSD can shift in how it manifests and how much it controls a person’s life. There’s not exactly a “getting out the other side” of PTSD, but there is definitely a “change how you interact with your trauma.”
Therapy can help, but what kind of therapy helps is as much of a mixed bag as PTSD itself is, and then there’s the fact that some people start showing near instant benefits when they find the right therapy, whereas others may have to try for months or years. Our medical system, at its most caring and compassionate and well funded, wants results after weeks.
I imagine someone who has the epiphany that religious fanaticism is kind of screwed up is likely to reject religion altogether, but I doubt that applies to everyone.
Oh, Joyce.
Hello, Theodicy.
More like theidiocy
I’ll just show myself out
Whenever I hear that name I wonder what Theiliad is.
Theiliad is an epic poem
Theodicy is also an epic poem. By the same guy, too.
*A-hem* Joyce, may I introduce you to a pair of concepts called “Calvinism” and “absolute sovereignty of God?” The theology can be a little hard to come to terms with at first, but it answers these questions.
Yes, I’m aware posting this will probably just earn me hate. Too bad.
In that it defines them out of existance, sure.
Freaking Calvinism. When I was a Catholic, I decided I’d rather be an atheist than Calvinist, if it came to that. I refuse to believe that people can unwittingly be doomed to hell through no fault of their own making. Humans are beautiful, and if taken care of, have almost limitless potential. Rigging the dang pachinko machine of life against them is cruelty itself, and not the purview of a loving God.
So in the end, I ended up atheist, and much happier.
As Geddy Lee said, “I will choose free will.”
Regardless of its original intent as a theology, in practice Calvinism led to all sorts of looking at worldly success as evidence of heavenly reward, aka the sort of stuff that nowadays is Prosperity Gospel and punishing the poor.
I prefer Calvin-and-Hobbesism. The downside is that usually the sign that you shouldn’t do something comes right after you do it…
I hereby subscribe to Calvin-and-Hobbesism. I’ll start handing out the tigers.
*like*
Theodicy is one of those things that isn’t well covered by most religious instruction. If God is good, why do bad things happen to good people? Why is there evil at all? For some, this is a deal breaker and not just teenagers, but serious scholars, such as Bart Ehrman.
Some viewpoints at
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/theodicy
I’m just finishing re-reading Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow / Children of God, where theodicy is one of the main themes.
Oh it’s not so mysterious as all that. People talk about “evil” as if it were a force unto itself, but the response to that by many theists is that it’s not. Evil is analogous to cold; not a tangible force, but the sensation we experience due to the absence of good.
Good and evil aren’t equal, opposite forces in this framework. Asking, “why does evil exist” is a meaningless question. The real question is “Why is there less good in some lives than in others?” And that question also has its various perspectives. But in any even, I was exposed to this perspective during high school and I’m not inclined to think I operated in particularly elite intellectual circles.
Religion has been easy for Joyce so far. She has been a perfect girl. Follow the rules, avoid what challenges your worldview, take what is handed to you by those you trust. But Life / Marriage / Religion is hard. It ends up involving faith, not objective truth.
From Jill Phillips, a Christian (but not Fundie) singer.
Resurrection
The Good Things (2008)
My good friend Paul was lying in the backseat of a station wagon
Headed to New Mexico
Somewhere in the middle of the night the driver fell asleep
And hit the wall beside the road
My friend went through the window like a bullet through the glass
Dead before he ever hit the ground
Oh I believe though its hard sometimes
You are the resurrection and the life
Jody is a queen reigning prone upon a couch
For the past few years of numbered days
Because the virus in her body and the cancer in her brain
Are buying up the real estate
The medicine they give her trades nightmares for her dreams
Of memories too tragic to describe
Oh I believe though its hard sometimes
You are the resurrection and the life
I know the words of life to come are true
But sometimes they feel like salt upon the wound
When I’m asking in these moments where are you
Where are you?
Sometimes its like Lazarus, You come to roll the stone away
And watch him walk back out alive
Sometimes its like my good friend Paul, breathless on the interstate
Mother weeping at his side
Either way its something I will never understand
But I trust enough to take you at your word
So I believe though its hard sometimes
You are the resurrection and the life
It’s the long-awaited return of Joyce the Biblical scholar! Interesting to note that she seems to be examining the classic “Problem of Evil” and coming up not with the common “God does not exist” conclusion but rather “God exists and he’s a cruel piece of crap.” I’m quietly rooting for Joyce to find some version of faith more like Sierra’s, though at this point I’d settle for anything other than “atheist Mary.”
I suppose another reason for the four-day time-skip is to also help Joyce’s bitterness settle in.
I can’t imagine a conclusion like Joyce’s here was reached very quickly.
It’s weird because I’ve seen all sorts of answers to the dilemma. “God does not exist.” “God exists, he is evil.” “God is not all powerful.” “God is not a God.” But, by far, the most interesting one, and in fact one that Joyce may come to, is “Evil is an illusion, and does not come.”
I’d kinda like to see what’d happen if Joyce were exposed to a serious examination of Buddhism or Taoism; they completely explode the framework that she’s operating in – that dilemma is not a dilemma at all in those systems – but without flat out negating it.
Putting Joyce in a Comparative Religion class strikes me as bad an idea as putting Joe in a Gender Studies class.
So…. an awesome idea?
Yes. Though have we seen any signs of personal growth* in Joe?
(*No, not that kind. Can’t show that in the main comic.)
Well the only personal growth from Joe is of the STD variety….>.>
To be fair, I think Joe would be the kind to be really careful about not getting any infections, because they screw up opportunities for future sex, and joe never risks future sex.
Best answer I have is that it arises from a conflict between competing goods: free will against the utter lack of evil, with free will being the greater of the two.
Of course, that answer poses a number of tricky logical conclusions that would make for a bitter pill for any fundie to swallow….
I go with that one.
It also completely fails to explain things like natural disasters and lethal genetic defects.
But is free will not negated or rendered irrelevant in a universe where an omniscient / omnipresent being exists and the factors of creation were defined by said force. In that I mean if God were truly all-knowing, then he would be able to percieve the nature of each individual resulting from the conditions of their creation, therefore capable of defining the choices that each individual would make resulting from said nature. Therefore our choices, being a consequence of our psyche established by an all-knowing God, were actually made by said God meaning God is responsible for the viability of our suffering just as much as our triumphs which counters our notion of a ‘good’ God.
Don’t forget the third “omni”, “omnipotent”. A lot of people don’t understand what “omnipotent” means, unless they’ve studied Latin. “Omnipotent” means basically “can do anything” (potent being the same root as “potential”) but a lot of people take that to mean “does everything”, hence a manufactured conflict. Just because you can write anything doesn’t mean you are writing everything.
But if you could, say, cure a horrific disease by willing that it be cured and don’t, you lose omnibenevolence.
But if by curing the disease, you are wiping out an entire species of microbes, which are also your creation, are you willing to settle with the death of millions or millions of bacteria to save the life of a couple of humans?
Omnibenevolence is a fraud. Being God is -HARD-.
If you value the lives of a virus as much as that of human beings, that’s not “benevolence,” that’s Plaguefather Nurgle. Words mean things.
I have never heard of this “Evil is an illusion” theory. Please elaborate. Is this just the “God’s morality is incomprehensible to mere mortals, and thus it is Good when He allows a child to die in a burning building.” position? Because I always thought that was the most blatant and shameless bullshit of all.
I think the only theodicy that can possibly hold water (other than god being evil, which is a fun thought experiment, but still seems absurdly improbable) is that both evil and divine non-intervention are necessary for the continued existence of the universe. The idea being, we’re all existing inside a vastly flexible but nearly deterministic machine, and evil is just an emergent property of any universe with physical laws that can sustain intelligent life. Poking the machine to reduce the evil will just jam the metaphorical gears, like trying to keep one hand of a clock from moving while intending to let the others move freely. But that’s a strictly deist cosmology.
But then theodicy falls apart onthe “omnipotent” angle. If God can’t prevent the consequences of divine intervention, God isn’t all-powerful because there’s something God can’t do. We haven’t moved from “would help but can’t or could help but won’t.”
Well, I think it’s unfair to define omnipotence to broadly- like the whole “Can God make a rock so heavy he can’t pick it up?” paradox. God can’t make a true statement which is false, God can’t make 1 = 2, God can’t invert the arrow of time and make the concepts of cause and effect meaningless. When you demand those things of God you deny any framework for any possible God to even exist in, and I think it’s arguing in bad faith to require that the God that’s been demonstrated be a de-facto incomprehensible horror from beyond reality before the argument has even begun.
The problem isn’t so much the arguments, but in this case I’d point the proverbial finger to the one that’s making them. Or, rather, the problem has more to do with us not being able to resolve sed paradoxes. What if the problem is us, not the questions? Yes, I am postulating the idea that paradoxes can’t be solved because we – specifically we – are incapable of doing such.
In other words, the answer to all of the above should be ‘yes’ if a omni-deus could exist. Of course, that means that objective limits, such as paradoxes are a problem of the observer, not the object being observed. Meaning that reality isn’t as objective as we think it is. There are a few very interesting physics experiments in this ballpark.
But does it really matter? If what we experience is as it is, does it really matter if a omni-deus can or does exist?
The Grand Question, in my humble opinion, is the often unasked question, of weather or not worship of such a being is even appropriate – does such a god deserve worship, considering the world in which we live in? How much of it’s beauty is due to US and not this god?
Personally, I find that even if it would exist, I’d not bow to such a thing.
I will however feel patriotic about humanity – I will feel a distinct love for humankind.
We are far more deserving of it.
In some cases the child is more deserving then the father. If there even is one.
“The law that cannot be broken can surely be bent”
Very true, because results matter.
That depends partly on how you define “evil”. The Heathen world-view doesn’t have a Satanic figure (even Loki has his positive uses; he’s more of a bastard wildcard than out-and-out evil); it doesn’t have the concept of sin (certainly not original sin) as the Christians envision it; and it doesn’t really have a place of punishment in the afterlife (although you can upgrade to a nicer one if you are a very good warrior and die in battle, or are a woman or a kid when you die).
“Evil,” in the sense of a supernatural negative force, doesn’t exist for us. What we do have is external forces (like the weather) that just don’t care about humanity one way or another and can be terribly destructive; and the actions of people, which can also be terribly destructive, to themselves and to others.
Thus personal responsibility is very important. If you do something that affects others, yourself, or the environment in a negative way, it’s not enough to just feel bad and regret what you did; you need to work to make amends. Our modern concept of paying a fine in restitution comes from the Norse concept of weregild, where if you wrong someone, you pay a set fee in restitution.
There is pain and suffering in the world because that’s just how it is. If you break a leg it’s going to hurt, because we are an animal that feels hurt. If you get punched in the face it’s either because you provoked it (in which case the result of your actions was to get punched, so next time, maybe don’t try to provoke people to the point of punching you); or because the other person was an asshole (in which case they need to make restitution, usually but not always by paying a fee to you in recompense); or some combination of the two (in which case a fee may be paid, but probably not as large). In any case, it didn’t happen because some shadowy evil spirit was hovering behind your left shoulder driving you on against your will, any more than some shadowy evil spirit “made” him punch you. Nope. That’s all on you guys.
The flip side of that is that the gods aren’t particularly Good, either. It’s not so much that there’s no shadowy evil spirit, but that there’s no claim that there’s an all powerful perfectly good supreme being who still doesn’t keep people from suffering for reasons we can’t understand.
The problem is inherent in Christianity (and to some extent in any monotheism). Once you have an actual Supreme Being, it’s all his fault.
Yes, exactly. A world designed and run (for a given value of “designed” and “run”) by committee makes a lot more sense, given what we can see around us.
The gods are our ancestors, and are not perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent. They may or may not be willing or able to help us out with a given issue, the same as our parents or grandparents. You’re probably on your own and should do everything you can to sort it out yourself, but hey, asking if they can have some quiet influence behind the scenes won’t hurt.
–And none of that conflicts with Science, which is also nice.
Which means, you get the option of becoming a scientist and helping the universe run like usual! Cool! I wonder if they will allow me to move stars out of orbit? OOO or I know make them explode!
Well, stars do that every now and then. Usually only once per star though. If you’re popular enough… maybe?
Remember that the problem of evil was formulated by Epicurus, a pagan, three centuries before Christ. The was certainly some feeling that God (Zeus) ought to be able and willing to prevent evil, and that he evidently doesn’t is a profound problem for doctrine.
Paganism. Yes. Pagan Joyce as a complete rejection of
her established faith. A rebellion that becomes a personal
truth when the rebellion fades, which happens when
the rebellion is allowed.
I think it’s the Eastern religion tack, where evil isn’t really a concept. Buddhism and Taoism. In Buddhism, suffering comes from within, from your own desires, and besides, if you draw an objectively raw deal, you reincarnate better next time, anyway. Sucks to suck in the meantime.
Taoism is much more beautiful, even though it gets a little crackpot away from the foundations. I’m unaware of anyone finding any immortal old masters roaming the mountains of China, at any rate.
Where Christianity has the Platonic view of good and evil: the sun is the ultimate good (here, God), everywhere the light reaches is good, and the absence of good is evil.
Taoism takes that same scene, and casts it onto a vast sea of hills, which is watched throughout the day. There are patterns that dance across, here is light, and there is darkness, later here is darkness, there is light. They’re part of a whole. If darkness is absence, half the beauty doesn’t exist, and it’s beautiful simply because it is. The duality in fact doesn’t even exist, as a result, because they both are, and, in being one being, contain each other, even as they oppose each other.
This is what the yin yang represents: on a literal level, the light and dark dancing across the hills. On a real level, they’re dualities being one both together and apart, within and without each other, part of a beautiful whole. The Way doesn’t take easy answers. That which can be called the Way isn’t the Way.
My personal view is god just sits around playing something akin spore all day and we’re the game. The dinosoars were either the game crashing or him getting bored and staring over.
Ah! Optimism.
We don’t get a lot of that since Dr. Pangloss.
Well, it only makes sense that Joyce would default to maltheism. She *is* in a David Willis comic, after all.
Imagine Joyce discovering that the God of her universe is s a short man with rumpled hair and thick glasses who draws comics for a living. (Mind Blown)
Replace “comics” with “pornographiques” and you’ve got a real breakthrough.
I quite honestly came to the same conclusion when I was younger.
I’d agree, except this version is based even more on Willis than in IW! On the path Joyce is going, I can’t ultimately see her do anything than reject Christianity completely. I think it’s intellectually dishonest for her character arc to go anywhere else.
Nah, there are a lot of Christian interpretations that allow for evolution. Like how the Fruit was a metaphor for evolving to the point of intelligence where humans could be moral agents, and that was where they could suddenly start being evil, ergo it’s our fault.
Never underestimate the capacity for rationalization as an element of dealing with coming face to face with the downsides of your religion.
Joyce is clearly demonstrating in this very strip she doesn’t have such a capacity!
Not yet! Give her another month to process things.
Errr, I wouldn’t say it’s intellectually dishonest if she goes another way. It just makes her a little less autobiographical. AFAWK, Willis didn’t have a man crush, isn’t reasonably sociable, and hasn’t had guys kiss him while confessing they’re gay. Not every single detail is exactly alike.
She started from a strange place with all of this and got to a stranger one. Her conclusion isn’t at all necessary if she remembers free will. Has she never heard of allegories?
If the Bible is allegorical at all, then everything she was taught is still a lie, because she was taught the Fundamentalist view that everything in the Bible is literally true – that the universe is a mere six thousand years old, that all of Creation was done in six twenty-four-hour days, that we’re all descended from a horribly incestuous family (and don’t ask where the woman of Nod that Cain married came from), that Joshua literally stopped the sun in the sky so his guys would have more time to slaughter their enemies, all that. So either way, we’re still playing Break the Cutie. Damn it.
I heard she was a demon. Or was that Lilith? Mixed races. Maybe
Mixed races of human/demon/angel/animal/god turned out to be
the thing that, in a few generations, mangled and mutated the
gene pool into something other than physical immortality? There
are weirder things.
From the story I head, God had the brilliant idea to make Lilith in front of Adam as his first wife from a bone he took from him (from his foot, I think). Seeing a human being made from the inside-out really creeped the fuck out of Adam and he couldn’t get hard on Lilith. This upset Lilith as well and she walked away, being spurned by Adam.
Then God decided to make the second woman while Adam slept from his rib and that worked out fine boner-wise. Eventually Lilith came back and got jiggy with Adam and Eve’s children, because if she couldn’t have Adam she’ll damn well try for his kids.
Really, Adam had a frail constitution and was an asshole.
Lilith is pretty bongoin’ though. Pretty much told God to shove it and walked away to do her own shit. I like her.
bongoin’? The fuck? I wrote bongoin’!
Oooohhh… Willis-filter detected. Bongoing it is.
Dayum, Willis. Didn’t know you were once a fundamentalist. I’m currently trying to talk some young-earth creationists out of the darkness, and its pretty interesting.
Yup. He’s said multiple times that this version of joyce is “autobiographical” So willis likely writing joyce from experience here.
Alt-text confirms the notion.
Joyce’s face in panel 3 is drawn suuuper cute omg
Extra flashy for dramatic effect.
Ah, yes, I’m very very familiar with this progression of thought. Scared the hell out of me to start having to deal with the problem of evil as I was sliding out of the cult-ish fundie religion of my youth
I believe in God. I don’t believe in a God who would punish me for the sins of my ancestors. I would rather believe God put us in a hellish world of suffering, pain, starvation, and loss with the tools to make it a better place than one who would do it because we deserved it.
Neil Gaiman had a similar opinion.
I find the notion that God created the world, looked at it and went, “Well, this sucks. How do I fix it? Oh, I know. Add
little me’shumans,” strangely compelling.I’m not sure anything is wrong with this world that’s *not* us (or our doing).
I’m not sure anything is right with this world that isn’t us. It’s not like nature can stop to behold its own beauty, aesthetics is basically our wheelhouse. We create and then project beauty on nature, and then proceed to ruin it before it can ruin us.
We are very much not the only species who has and creates aesthetics in our environment. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/not-bad-science/what-makes-bowerbirds-such-good-artists/
Without us to pass judgment, there is neither right NOR wrong in the world. The world just is, and everyone else is able to accept that and live their lives to the fullest despite it. We’re the ones who pass judgment, and as such, make the world right or wrong in accordance with those judgments.
Perhaps “judge not lest ye be judged” should be applied to more than just human neighbors quarreling with each other.
Personally, i find the lack of evidence for anything really to draw any reasonable conclusion about anything, and i don’t subscribe to anything without proof which can be tested multiple times…
Yes, i was that kid driving every faith preacher/teacher crazy with all my questions xD
I was born an original sinner/I was born from original sin/And if I had a Dollar bill for every sin I’ve done/There’d be a mountain of money piled up to my chin–HEY!–The Eurthythmics, “Missionary Man”
–Eurythmics. (Faster than the machines, but slower than a hardcopy!)
A band fit for all occasions.
God, yessss.
Uh,
Well at least she’s not repressing, or putting all of her anger on Becky like some commenters feared.
Oh damn, Joyce. Having the foundations of your world rocked sucks.
“You’re a nice girl, Joyce. I’ll be sad when the weight of the world crushes you.” ~Sarah
And now I’m sad.
At least now I understand why creationists are so adamant on staying creationists. “The God I love is responsible for the concept of misery” is a bitter pill to have to swallow.
And it’s largely due to the fact that the type of deity that sect expects its followers to worship kind of is an asshole, sending people to Hell for falling for incredibly well-faked evidence or acting on the feelings God gave them or believing one of the million other sects or religions out there. The sect’s strictness and literalism demands an idea of an abusive parent as point of worship, someone you placate to avoid their drunken wrath rather than someone deserving of worship.
And that seems to be the current divergence between Joyce and Becky. Becky came upon the Problem of Evil and decided that the deity she wants to worship is a chill dude who isn’t going to create elaborate mechanisms to be dicks to people and so isn’t overly concerned with caboodle noodling or touching giblets or even whether or not you even believe in him. And in doing so left behind the literalism and her raising and myths like the Garden of Eden.
Joyce is hitting the Problem of Evil but has decided that the deity she was told to worship is what she has to work with. So either he’s demanding impossible standards and hurting people for a good reason or everything she has ever been taught is wrong including the existence of said deity.
And that Joycian path sets up a lot of fundie kids to become atheists, because if the choice is between an immoral and provably false literalism and non-belief, then eventually the choice is to either deliberate ignore reality or fall out of faith (or like Becky, throw away the wrath and the literalism).
Even before reading your reply, I was giddy with excitement to read a, and I shall quote myself, “Cerberus reply! Cerberus reply!”. I feel my cheeks going flush. 😛
Ah, love these comments by you and many others – the math thread started by dear Fem-Cronus was particularly fun and endearing. Life is glorious to behold and experience first-hand! Places like this is what keeps my faith in humanity so damn high. /human pride
Now to actually read the comment! 😀
The main reconciliation of the two ideas I generally see is that ending suffering would involve curtailing free will and self-determination. I wonder if Joyce will come to that conclusion, abandon religion, or find another way to reconcile her faith with the world she finds herself in.
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
-Epicurus
I like Catelyn Stark’s answer to Jaime saying the same question.
“Why does evil exist if the gods are real?”
“Because of men like you.”
And I like it too. But if I was given that answer in a theological debate (which I don’t intend to start) then I would have to rebuke about how that doesn’t really solve any questions. It’s a super cool line though from a super intense show/book series.
To elaborate, it’s more theatrical than actually practical for answering the question. It’s there for effect. Think about it. “Because of men like you” …..Men who are somehow powerful enough to resist god? A god who, if he is both able and willing, should be preventing evil? If he is benevolent, therefore fighting evil, these “men like him” shouldn’t be alive anymore to cause this.
That’s not even to mention the fact that we’re talking specifically about the christian god here (and its ancestral versions as passed through history, all the way back to the Romans in the era where christianity’s roots were getting popularized). What I mean is that we’re jumping all the way to asking if the christian god is real, instead of first asking if any god or gods are real. If there was a supernatural being who created the universe, who says he had anything to do with creating morality? Good and Evil? Right and Wrong? Maybe he/she/it just built the damn thing (the universe) and we came up with everything else ourselves. Who knows.
The larger assumption is, of course, to the idea of what exactly is intervention. The free will argument often seems like a cop out but if God is omniscient and omnipotent, what is the level to be perfect everything and what is life if we’re to live it? If there’s no consequences to anything we do, everything is perfect and wonderful, and there is no “evil” then there’s no real “life” per say. Paradise can exist without suffering but the concept of strength and growth as a person is a consequence of struggle. Evil, though, is a choice to act upon natural struggles and make them worse. Then again, I subscribe to the view of the world as a test and God as a good being but also a somewhat alien one. Morality to a 50 billion year old Doctor Manhattan figure is going to be somewhat different than that of a limited human. Even if it also lives through us.
Joyce’s position essentially hinges on pain and suffering not being necessary or desirable states of existence. The Garden story essentially supports that position; things were perfect once, and then humans screwed it up and now they suck. And then going to, except they didn’t screw it up, it’s *always* sucked and was made that way, as a consequence of accepting evolution as legitimate.
She isn’t considering that her view of the role of suffering itself may be the thing at fault, just the implications of it’s source. The idea that suffering may not actually be a sign that things are terrible, that it may actually have a positive or valuable role, or that it may be necessary to create life itself, is a completely alien concept to her at the moment. And honestly, it’d shake different core beliefs to go there, because it’d completely bring into question the concepts of evil and sin in a very fundamental way, which would force her to completely re-examine her morality.
To me, free will and determinism can co-exist. The Norse concept of pre-determinism or fate was called wyrd; it’s where we get the word “weird” from. We see it in the sagas in things like “It was so-and-so’s wyrd to die in battle.”
To put it into a modern concept alongside of free will, it’s the broad strokes of your life (particularly your death; it seems to mostly be concerned with how you die) that may be planned out to a certain extent, but it doesn’t fill in the details. Yo may be fated to die of a gunshot wound when you’re 27, in which case nothing can change that; but it’s up to you whether you are shot robbing a bank or in a drug deal gone south, or as a police officer saving an innocent. Or, hell, you may just be a bookseller who’s stayed away from guns and violence their whole life and just happened to catch a stray bullet one day, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Fate” says what happens, and when. We say why, and how.
“Fate” says what happens, and when. We say why, and how.
I’m putting this in my list of awesome quotes (I’m serious, there actually is one – including who sed it and when). /respect
Oh good lord. “What’s life if nothing bad ever happens to you!?” Begs the question, don’t you t hink? There’s plenty of room for minor, and even major, drama without evil. Your life would be plenty interesting based purely from that, even before getting into the concept of art.
Putting that aside, when you get to ‘alien, not-understandable morality taht appears evil’, the actual *GOOD* choice is maltheistic. An evil deity, were it real, should, in fact, be opposed, at least while it was in the midst of evil acts.
I’ve never really understood why able+unwilling=malevolent. We don’t expect ants to think like us or have the same motivations, and if a God exists it would be infinitely more alien. I am not sure what my level of belief is in god, full stop, but if there is one I certainly don’t see any reason to think it would see our concerns or pains in the same way we would. Does that mean we shouldn’t worship it? I dunno, but then you are asking whether it is Man’s place to chastise the gods. I hear the Greeks had a few discussions on that, too.
I think it is man’s place. That’s why we have these brains after all.
I won’t cede my right to think and reason, even to God. Now, God’s smarter and knows much more than I do and I’d certainly be willing to listen to His arguments should He being willing to make them explicitly, but if I think He’s wrong I’ll tell Him so to His face.*
What else would a God worthy of worship want from His creations?
*Or I’d like think I would. More likely I’d cower in terror and beg for mercy, but that’s my failing.
On the other hand, sometimes when horribly evil things happen it leads to good outcomes. It could be argued, for instance (and I have), that without the Nazis and World War II, we wouldn’t have the Civil Rights Movement or gender equity. We needed to see the logical consequences of bigotry in order to start to move beyond it. (Note that we haven’t gotten completely past it yet – so far, we’ve just made it unfashionable. It’s a start, though.)
Any halfway decent omnipotent being should be able to arrange for the good outcomes without the horrors. Or just arrange for not having the centuries or millenia of sexism and racism to start with.
Sure, horribly evil things can lead to good outcomes, but for this argument you really have to claim the good things couldn’t happen without the horrors and that’s a much harder case to make.
It’s the explanation for an awful lot of why they’re so adamant about everything. Despite all their protestations that the faith is deep and all that, this particular brand of faith is spectacularly *fragile* for exactly the reasons Joyce is discovering, especially for anyone who takes it intellectually seriously like Joyce. If part of it cracks, it all shatters. So none of it can be allowed to crack. My own path of leaving the church looked exactly like this. (The problem of evil part, not the Becky-saving car chase part.)
That can count as an argument for the idea that God is Evil.
The snake told the truth!
The Penis Never Lies!
I was rather thinking to this kind of snake.But I guess what you said works as well.
It’s kinda sad really, but also a good thing. Yes, her faith is being broken but she’s growing as an individual. I gotta say Joyce is without a doubt having one of the best character developments I’ve been reading for a while.
Seconded. I went through this not too long ago, and it sucked, but I’m much happier now.
Well, I never thought she was looking at it that way.
Yep, that’s pretty much right.
A god sounds hatefull and foolish if it punishes a disire to learn.
The story of Adam and Eve with the apple from the Tree of Knowledge kinda shows you how they are enforcing ignorance and persecuting thinking right from the beginning. It’s pretty disgusting that the character in this story that is encouraging ignorance, even in the form of a metaphor, isn’t the antagonist. Especially in a work that is the be taken to heart.
*to be taken
It’s the fruit of the tree of knowledge -of good and evil-.
If you’ve read Call of Cthulhu, there’s a part where they talk about how the Old Ones will teach humanity new ways to exult in torture and murder. -That’s- what the tree is about.
Why God had a tree like that is an entirely different question, but given that Adam spent the time before the tree creating language puns for all the animals and for Eve, he’s clearly not meant to be brain-dead.
Please don’t deliberately misstate things to make a point.
Look, specifying the type of ignorance isn’t making it better, in any real terms.
It’s called the Tree of Knowledge, not the Tree of Horrible Murder. If your theory is correct, then God really fucked up on the name he chose to go with.
Also it doesn’t explain why A&E got all modest after munching on it. I never knew that knowledge of horrible murder makes you shy and awkward.
I’d like to mildly apologize on one point: I wasn’t aware of the full title of the tree. To be fair though, even the wikipedia article “Forbidden Fruit” only says “Tree of Knowledge” and never says the whole title.
On a related note, I’d like to bring up that I’m not “delibrately misstating things to make a point”. I’m an atheist, not an asshole. I don’t appreciate that you try to paint me as one.
(by which I mean that if “Tree of Knowledge” was in fact its whole name and it was entirely a metaphor relating to knowledge, then my negative-toned comment about how screwed-up that is would have been perfectly valid.)
I always had this whimsical notion that the story of the fall of man was originally a coming of age story. Adam and Eve live in their father’s house with no worries, no concerns, but obeying his rules. Then they reach adulthood and decide they’ve outgrown his rules, so they move out and live their own lives by their own effort and their own decisions. Maybe later generations turned it into a punishment story because living on your own is, like, totally hard man!
I like the way you think.
Little known fact, God didn’t want them to wear clothes because those damn kids refused to do the laundry.
And because leafs were easier to create.
But can’t play hockey worth a damn.
Warning: your avatar is clearly about to murder your username.
I really like new Joyce.
And I’m not just saying that because of panel 4’s face.
Get real – It’s because of panel 3’s face.
So Joyce is beautiful when she’s angry? [ducks]
I said this the other day and got slammed. [still cowering behind my arm…]
If your arm was sufficient cover, you didn’t get slammed all that bad.
Maybe it’s the kind of slamming Mike does for a nickle. To your mom.
An arm isn’t sufficient cover for that, either.
Ain’t it great? : P
I don’t. I really freaking want old Joyce back.
I want to see how this pans out and hope she ends up in a better place.
Guess whose gonna get his wish?
I’m not convinced that’s she’s ever going to be a happy person again, and that makes me sad.
That’s a patently absurd thing to say.
It happens. Sometimes people break, and the never really recover, and it really seems like Joyce is on her way to becoming a deeply angry and cynical person.
Joyce was an angry person the whole time. She just covered it up with her bubbly personality. A lifetime of repression will give you a lot of anger that tends to break through from time to time.
Just remember, Joyce is pretty much autobiographical for Willis, and he seems pretty happy nowadays. So I’m guessing she can have a happy outcome too.
… granted, he went through a few years of killing off parts of his psyche via webcomic proxy, so it might be a bit of a rough road for her, but eventual happiness is definitely a possibility.
I was trying very hard not to say this, but that’s the main reason I’m scared for her. Willis is a tremendous person with a strong sense of ethics and a drive to make the world better (just like Joyce), but I really don’t think he’s happy.
Really? You don’t see the way he talks about Maggie, or the twins, or heck, going to BotCon, finding out all of comedy is fundamentally Batman, you don’t think that looks happy? I think he’s rightfully resentful about a number of things, but that it’s turned positive on the whole. Not that I can really speak in his place, of course.
Well that’s just disgustingly rude.
Seems pretty accurate, honestly. Willis doesn’t strike me as all that happy. There are times when he is happy, but I’m not so sure that’s his default.
Have you ever read him talking about his youth? It doesn’t paint the picture of a happy person. Scared and self-loathing, yes. Happy, not so much.
Youth passes. Sometimes hard times are necessary.
Next DOA-year, Joyce will start drawing cartoons about a character named Julia Baker who struggles to reconcile religion with her college experience while saving the world from interdimensional alien invaders.
And later on, Joyce will become a, uh, pornlady? (I guess that’s the feminine form of pornlord).
Porndame?
“Don’t make this weird, God.”
http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp09292011.shtml
We preffer the term PornGoddess
I knew I didn’t imagine that S*P comic.
And Julia Baker starts drawing cartoons as part of this reconciliation, causing the universe to collapse into a recursive loop.
So Willis WILL cause the apocalypse?
I KNEW IT!
I’m enjoying Angry Joyce, but yeah, hopefully she finds a healthy balance.
The old Joyce coming back would be terrifying, though, considering that it would involve rejecting a lot of things she’s come to accept.
Which old Joyce? The Pre-Ryan Joyce? The pre-acceptance-of-gays Joyce?
That’s the only logical reason for not believing in evolution I’ve ever seen before.
Ditto.
Thing is, it’s not a valid reason, at all. The overwhelming evidence that evolution happens isn’t any less overwhelming just because someone would feel bad if they had to deal with the implications that evidence suggests; it’s the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going LALALALALALA really loud.
Indeed, it’s one of the classic logical fallacies. Concluding that something is false because of downstream consequences of its truth being (to the person making this conclusion) undesirable.
There’s some stress on those seams there. Poor Joyce…awakening to the full onslaught of reality is never easy for those who have learned to be hidebound, whatever the cause. And, realistically, it’ll be what-if flashes for a long, long time.
That’s an intriguing way of looking at it… Never occurred to me before.
It makes a lot of sense. Poor Joyce; that’s gotta hurt.
And thus begins the Breaking of the Joyce.
“Begins”?
This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. It is, however, the end, of the beginning.
(Ripping off Winston Churchill and an unrelated bad movie.)
First line of Spider Robinson’s short story, “Satan’s Children”:
“A beginning is the ending of something, always.”
Last line:
“An ending is the beginning of something, always.”
You’re calling Millennium a bad movie?
Pistols at dawn, sir!
There’s our answer to what people were wondering about last time. This is why she is mad… Knowing isn’t making me any happier. Damn you Willis!
But…death’s not a bad thing. He likes cats!
and curry. Now I’m sad.
Yeah, but without death, evolution would get rather more complicated – the organisms best able to reproduce would still be passing on their heritable traits, but the less optimal would still be getting more chances to stay in the gene pool.
Hopefully that made something resembling sense; I’m kinda tired.
Death mostly likes volcanoes, though. As detailed (eventually) in this. http://www.thebrightsidecomic.com/beginning-p1/
Cool comic, thanks.
The gospel of The Bright Side is one gospel I am willing to spread.
Aaaand new comic I’m reading. Right up my alley. Thanks RRabbit. 🙂
Where did Joyce even find such an angry-looking hoodie? Did Sarah buy it for her?
Get her into a Sociology class, cuz she’s about to get a serious dose of anomie.
I want to hug this comment. I can’t decide if a basic doc class would blow Joyce’s mind more than gender studies did. She’s fairly compassionate, so I think she’d adjust pretty well.
Doc=Soc of course. Stupid autocorrect.
Hmm, I say start her with some “sociology of the family.” Avoid Durkheim until she’s through her rough patch though.
You know things are bad when someone other than Amazi-Girl can change the font style.
Personally I look at evolution, at how amazingly, impressively, staggeringly…complex we are. How complex life itself is; things that can literally change themselves over generations to adapt to their environments..
When you consider how many cells humans have, consider how many parts make up a cell, and keep shrinking down to subatomic particles, then realize how many of those particles perfectly fit upward to form something as singular as an individual human being, then realize just how small we are in the universe, how BIG existence is…
It’s a little hard not to feel shaken by it and wonder at what set all that in motion, what keeps all that in motion…
It’s quite possible to believe in both evolution and God.
I’ve honestly been considering the idea. Course, I dunno enough, about either honestly, so it ain’t something I’m concrete on.
I’m sure that Joyce wasn’t brought up to believe both, though.
The version of the story she and her community studied is very specific, HAS to be very specific, because they decided on a version long ago and they can’t go back on their word. Because changing your mind is a weakness to them.
And I imagine that accepting only religion over science is a way of strengthening religion’s grip on them.
This.
You can only throw away a piece if you are willing to throw away everything and the community makes sure it is painfully clear that “throwing away everything” means everything (i.e. being cut off from family, any form of financial safety net, all your friends (because you are groomed from childhood to only make friends with other “good Christians”), any type of social support network, and so on).
It creates a system of emotional blackmail where it’s easy to just start believing impossible things simply to try and avoid having to deal with the possibility of losing that much.
And it’s probably also why Becky is much more chill about this crisis of faith. She was already fucked on all of that simply because of who she was attracted to and her inability to view her deity as the type of cruel motherfucker who’d give her her loves just to torture and punish he and so it was easy to accept that demand and just adapt her faith to her lived experiences and the world around her.
And it’s why Joyce is likely going to lose her entire faith whereas Becky’s is easily adapted to all the cool new things she’s learning about the world. As she notes, her God is not threatened by evolution being definitely true, because she doesn’t need her God to have literally created humanity in a literal Garden of Eden unlike Joyce.
Yup,
And this is one of the reasons intelligent design makes me so angry.
“In order to stay with the community you have to deny science, believe a flimsy pile of lies in it’s place (eyes can’t evolve, evolution is driven by catastrophes, whatever) and you will never know the joy of 9000 year old corn.
I, for one prefer my corn FRESH!
I think I be very joyful to be a corn plant that lived to be 9000 years old.
Google “Conway’s Game of Life.” A grid of black and white dots. A few very simple rules – a short paragraph’s worth – for how the dots change color over time based on their neighbors.
And, with a sufficiently large grid and enough time, you can run any computer program you can write. You can run Google’s speech recognition algorithm, and the even-more-awesome version they will have in 50 years.
There’s no intelligence there whatsoever. But start a program running, and it can do anything that any computer can do.
Physics is like that. A few simple rules playing out in a near-infinite grid.
If there’s no God in Conway’s grid, I don’t see any need for God in nature either.
But someone created the rules by which the game operates. If there’s a God, what’s to say he didn’t whip up the rules by which the universe operates and start it spinng?
That’s not the rules they know though. And if their rules are wrong, what the hell have they been playing all this time?
Always felt everyone gets that story wrong. (besides it being figurative)
It’s about free will and intelligence. There was no threat. No punishment. It was a warning. There was no kicking out of Eden. It wasn’t eat from the tree and get kicked out. It was become intelligent and it would stop being Eden. Eden is still there. It is everywhere. It just stopped being Eden to us. Eden was ignorance and ignorance is bliss. “Choose” to become intelligent but you’ll never see the world the same again. The cost is high but the rewards are great.
…oh. Yeah, that’s. Damn.
“Eden is still there”.
Holy shit.
woooooooaaah…..And thats oddly…appropriate here it seems….
When you are a child, the world looks sunny and wonderful and overall fair or at least devoid of too bad problems, but with age, you see the cracks in society. You notice the inequality, the fear, the mistreatment behind closed doors, the reality you remained ignorant too and you can’t go back and that knowledge can be painful, but one can’t turn a blind eye to what’s real forever…
Yeah, I can see that being the intended metaphor of that story.
And in that metaphor, we really really see what’s going on with Joyce. She can no longer remain in ignorance of what she grew up with and what the real world is like and the cost of the morals she was told were strong and true. She cannot go back to the ignorance of Eden, nor should she. But that comes with the pain of having to deal with the real, but that also comes with life and change and transformation.
Her note about the stasis of her mythical world is telling. That world is lifeless because life is all about change, about growth, about diversity, and yes about decay to make room for new development. Eden is a shell devoid of things actually living much like the bigotries she was raised in made it impossible for those like Becky to truly live.
But now, life. Uncertain and sometimes painful. But allowing the possibility of something genuinely alive in every glorious meaning of the term.
10 points for Questionor!
It’s perfect because we talk about how Adam and Eve ate from “the fruit”, but it wasn’t just the fruit of “the tree” – it was a Tree of Knowledge, and more specifically, it was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 2:17). And when they ate from the tree, the direct consequence (aside from God’s punishments) was that now they knew of Good and Evil (Gen. 3:22). (So it seems that there *was* already Evil around before then, but they did not know about it, and eating was when they became *aware* of it.)
So yes, I agree with your interpretation 🙂
Sure, that is one possible way to read the story – a really good way to read the story, but it clashes with a lot of doctrine in various churches.
If that’s the intended read, then original sin has to be a metaphor as well (for responsibility), and if it’s just a metaphor it’s not something to atone for and if it’s not something to atone for then you kinda loose the idea of humanity as something fundamentally flawed that has to be saved. “All the good things we do are God working through us”
> Eden is still here.
In pill form.
Out of all the interpretations on that story, I like this one the best.
Important things are happening.
FWIW, The Vatican has no problem acknowledging evolution.
That’s not likely to be much comfort to Joyce.
Well seeing how a lot of fundamentalists and other types of Christianity few the Pope and the Vatican as the Anti-Christ, that probably isn’t very comforting to Joyce.
Oh Joyce. Oh Joyce.
Her world is collapsing all around her and she’s trying to cling to what’s left of it, and it’s really not working. She’s got the awareness to know that there’s not just a small chance that it is all a goddamned lie. And she’s not handling it well.
The idea of god/creative force is actually more robust than people realise.
But Joyce’s idea of one isn’t at all that robust, and that’s what’s at stake here.
That’s because she is used to thinking diagonally.
I mean “isn’t”
Robust how?
I can’t say I’d blame someone for rejecting evolution because it contradicts (almost) everything they think they know. That’s not a fun feeling. :/
Well, Duh! Glad Joyce is finally realizing that while faith is a wonderfully powerful thing, religion is a bunch of mind control that often leads to more serious problems than reading books with magicians in them. That said, the people who translate and wrote religious texts were quite imaginative with their allegorical story-telling.
Not pictured: Walky’s internal struggle to avoid making a smartass response to Joyce’s last line.
Mike’s silence is even more impressive.
Mike has always respected Joyce more than the others. Also, he is probably in favor of her being in a state of mind where she is more likely to deck people at random.
I firmly believe that to be The Sound of Mike’s (Barely Repressed) Lust for Joyce.
Also not pictured: Billie’s H.C.: P. S. wheels turning, as she remembers that Ruth wants her to have that one-to-one talk with Joyce…
I think he’s into her, but lust is far from a primary motivator for Mike
He has been remarkably good at that since Big Sis glared at him.
Also, he doesn’t want to be part of FEEEEEEEEEELS
Good news Joyce, humans DID unleash sin. Because sin is just “bad or hurtful choices” really. So of course every instance of that involved humans.
Bad news Joyce, that still doesn’t require God to fill in a blank, actually.
That’s a very anthropocentric viewpoint. There’s plenty of animals smart enough to make choices that they’re genuinely responsible for. Many of the primates are extremely clever and emotionally and socially complex, and we don’t even know enough about cetaceans to say for sure that all of them are less intelligent than us.
I had a hard time coming to terms with this as well, but have found my own way of believing that both can happen. I feel for Joyce, but why can’t God have created evolution, knowing that things can’t be the same forever?
Joyce is still clinging to the faith if her youth. Hitting rock bottom is going to be a real problem when that last tie hold crumbles. I hope at least one if her friends knows enough to get her into therapy. If not, the Joyce we know and love may cease to exist.
Pride goeth before destruction.
So My Mum had a similar conundrum. But came to believe that Adam and Eve were Amoebae
Must have taken a while to eat that fruit.
NanoFruit
its Adam and Eve! not…well really just Adam. Amoeba reproduce asexually, using binary fission.
No no it actually works perfectly.
Adam was created first. When god took out Adam’s “rib” that was the first division, creating Eve…
Ya know I meant that as a joke but from a Christian perspective that actually makes perfect sense.
Welp.
… where did Joyce get the idea that there wasn’t death in the Garden of Eden? I don’t recall ever hearing that presented as a thing.
As far as I was aware, the idea of the Garden of Eden was that it was separate from the “real world”, meaning that there could have been evolution and dinosaurs and stuff over in the real world while humans were in their Garden limbo. And then humans got kicked out into the already existing real world.
There wasn’t death, apparently, at least to some readings, and in fact, theologians point to the shortening of life expectancy through the genealogy in Genesis as being caused by the expansion of sinfulness among humans.
So are we getting more holy now since life expectancy is going up?
I think we should make that argument to get the craziest fundamentalist Christians that the social progressiveness we’ve been engaging in is actually pleasing God since we’ve been living longer as it advances. It’s worth a shot.
But see, that’s only if you use secular statistics. Real proof is ANECDOTAL proof, and anecdotal proof has baby autism punishing evil vaccine use, baby AIDS punishing evil homosexuality, etc etc
Because it’s portrayed as the perfect world. No deaths, no famine, no sickness, no starvation or drought, nothing that could possibly go wrong. It’s never stated because it’s kinda implied in the whole context of “pre sin”.
The bible talks about there being animals in the garden. IIRC, God actually made them before he made Adam. Anyway, some fundamentalists claim that because Eden was perfect and without suffering, that this meant the animals who lived there did not suffer either. Adam and Eve were both vegetarians, basically.
The Eden stories specifically give animals permission to eat plants, but nothing is stated about them being given permission to eat each other. God allowing carnivores doesn’t happen until after the Flood.
Plants are always getting a bum wrap…
A wrap huh? Would you say it’s a lettuce wrap?
.
.
.
I’ll see myself out.
http://i.imgur.com/m6mL4aK.gif
The Fruit of Life thing just gets ignored because it would mean God had ambrosia and only PAGANS have that.
It sounds like the existence of carnivorous plants before the Flood could be the subject of a Ph.D. thesis in theology.
Sadly, vegetarianism is the root of all evil in the world. If Adam and Eve had eaten the snake instead of the apple, we’d all still be living in Eden.
Snake is incredibly chewy and tasteless, though, so I can’t really blame them.
It depends on the snake. Rattlesnake tastes a lot like chicken.
I feel like it’s more he doesn’t want to take dude, depending on who you are, anything can taste like chicken. I heard a guy say armadillo tastes like chicken.
K, so that was a combination with of a comment I abandoned with a comment I actually sent in… My bad.
I haven’t tried armadillo, but I have tried rattlesnake. It’s tougher than chicken, good chicken anyway, but it does have the same basic taste. Some would call it lack of taste. If you ever try it, make sure it’s been thoroughly deboned. There’s a million little bones in the meat.
The version of the story I had been told was that there always was death in Eden but it was animal death so it didn’t matter.
It’s actually from a bit in the bible where Jesus refers to death having entered the world through that act.
It comes from thinking that the bible is a single text written all at once (or at least forgetting that it very much isn’t).
Ahh!
I see. Yeah, some Christians (particularly those who aren’t well read on the subject) tend to forget that.
My confusion likely stems from the fact that my old testament knowledge is mostly based on the Torah. Two of my ex-girlfriends were Jewish. One got kinda serious, and she introduce me to her rabbi. The other was Israeli and was into theology. Between the two, I learned a lot about Jewish mysticism. It was actually kinda neat.
On an unrelated topic, I think the real problem here is that Joyce needs to learn the difference between literal and metaphysical. Something can be true and not be literal.
In this case, much of the suffering in the world is caused by humans. Original Sin, at its core, is just a metaphor that makes that clear. People suffer because of other people.
I have never understood why people get so bent out of shape about religious stuff being literally true. I am a very religious person (pagan), but I also understand that none of my beliefs are literally true. Zeus didn’t literally knock up random humans, for example. But they are metaphysically true. The traits that made Zeus a strong leader and good father also made him a disloyal husband. That is something that actually happens in the world. I mean, aside from the swan-rape or pee shower. Zeus was a weird guy.
Look at it this way Joyce, if it makes you feel better:
As you say, in a world where nothing can die, there is no room for evolution. But if god is really as omniscient and powerful as you believe, he would have planned two separate paths: one where adam and eve behaved, and one where they didn’t. The framework for evolution was there; the original sin just activated it.
In other words, the possibility of evolution was god’s failsafe.
Scuse me, gonna go scrape the pieces of my blown mind off the walls.
Bear in mind, I’m an atheist/agnostic (depends on my mood)
I love this idea so much!
This broke my heart.
Well, time for the standby.
DAMN YOU, WILLIS!
I’m finding commenters’ different interpretations of scripture fascinating.
Bless you, Willis.
Long time listener, first time caller.
I don’t know if I am ready to live in a world where Joyce questions her faith. We could be heading for one of the biggest character shifts in Dumbiverse history. I’m scared and excited.
I don’t know if I am ready to live in a world where Joyce never smiles.
Wow, I didn’t realize how long it had been until I started scrolling back just now. I gave up way before I found a Joyce smile.
Joyce actually last smiled not too long ago.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/sweetie/
Before that her last smile was here.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/disagreement/
However that wasn’t really a happy smile but more of an awkward “let’s make peace” smile, so I wouldn’t really count it.
So before talking to her mom, and having a conversation that will presumably keep her from smiling for a year in comic time, her last real smile was here.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/hatecha/
Just a few days shy of two months back. But I think it’ll be much more than another two months before she smiles again :/
But two of these three smiles are ‘forced’ smiles, and none of them are her famous “Triangle Grin”™.
I’m absolutely convinced that Joyce is going to end up being an atheist in the end. Mainly because Joyce is partly autobiographical, but also because we are already seeing the story of the person who comes from that repressive faith to a gentler, more accepting faith in Becky.
Well not that it matters but another Joyce at another place had her faith surviving after actually meeting a Physical God who had the souls of every dead being in it.
Though that is another story for another time.
I also think she’ll go heathen, because she reminds me of myself and I did. And yeah, that Christian -> atheist perspective needs to be filled here.
You don’t have to assume either God doesn’t exist or God is a jerk if you’re willing to allow God to be something less than omnipotent, subject God to the same laws of the universe everything else is. Then death is just a consequence of the physical laws, and God can’t do anything about it.
Difficult place for Joyce. Her God is definitely supposed to be omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and still good!
I was in her position. I had to choose which of those qualities I wanted in my God. I prioritized good over omnipotent, so I just treat God as not having the power to affect the world where it requires a change in physical laws. And really, that’s fine, certainly at least for the purposes of my faith.
I find it odd to keep running into people who say their “beliefs” are based on an arbitrary set of things they pick and choose from. To me, this is not belief, it’s simply fantasizing. Belief means sorting out what does exist from what doesn’t exist, and has nothing whatsoever to do with what any of us thinks would be cool.
Well, there is the point where literally all the world around us that we perceive is merely a projection in our consciousness anyway
so belief is not really sorting out what exists and what doesn’t exist, it merely gives order to that projection
…I’m agonistic, okay?
AGNOSTIC I MEANT AGNOSTIC WHAT THE FUCK FINGERS
I agree very much. I don’t choose things to believe, or at least my subjective experience is not of doing so. I believe what seems to be true, and reject what seems to be false, and when fresh evidence comes in I change my mind. Believing doesn’t seem to be a voluntary act to me, and I can’t imagine believing something by choosing to. But I have friends, intelligent, well-educated friends, who tell me that that is what they have done with respect to their gods.
Belief in the context of faith is inherently irrational, and that’s at least partially the point. Certainly that’s the case for me. I need to hold onto it, it’s something I value, something which makes up a big part of me. But I also have to rationalize it with my understanding of how the physical universe works, or else it would get in the way of my job, you know, understanding the physical universe. So I adjust my faith to fit so I can keep it.
Basically, if I am to continue to believe in a god-like power, it has to fit my experiential worldview and my knowledge of physical observations, and this is where it fits. Besides, we all make choices on how we see the world and process information, whether or not we realize it. It’s naive to think any of our perspectives are genuinely objective. We just do the best we can, combine and reconcile as many different perspectives as possible, and try to wash out the individual biases, and we honestly do it pretty well across the scientific fields.
That is such a hard thing to rationalize to me that I don’t know how the fundamentalists do it. If God is omniscient then he could have seen the Original Sin and done something more than just warn against it, if he is omnipresent then he could have been always on guard to guilt trip Eve to not do it and if he is omnipresent he could have just made a perfect being who would not falter and still be different than angels (not that they didn’t falter, hello demons).
Either God is a dick or we just can’t comprehend his motives. I prefer to go with the second and just try to be a good person to others.
Or He does have the power to intervene over every little thing, but also has the omniscience to see when the intervention might be even worse.
“Please, God, don’t let Grandpa die!”
“Kid, Grandpa’s ninety years old. He hasn’t been able to pee straight for the last ten. His body’s breaking down – they do that, you know, I had to build entropy into the universe or there wouldn’t be time. It’d be pretty mean to make him keep living like this, don’t you think?”
No.
No? No to what, exactly? Please expand.
It’s probably a No to the idea that God allows bad things to happen because it’s for the best. This quickly breaks down when you consider that such a God doesn’t just kill grandpas. It’s not ‘for the best’ that your kid gets cancer or your baby dies in its crib. Plus, that God also sends diseases and tsunamis to kill thousands of people for no discernable reason. It’s weird, impossible, and insulting to try to twist and manipulate away these problematic tragedies.
Oops so it seems that Joyce is on the branch of Christianity that takes Genesis literally.
I rather like the interpretation that each “day” for God was millions of years, because why would a cosmic being measure time by the standards of when a small planet faces the star it’s orbiting?
And that death existed in Eden before humans gained knowledge. But the difference was that death was not sad, not something that inspired existential horror, because all the creatures before man did not understand death or life. So “death”, horrible death and the fear of oblivion; that was only created when humans gained knowledge to understand it.
+1
Seriously though, I had to explain this to a friend of mine a few years ago, and I was not nearly as articulate. Good for you dude.
“Knowledge is fear, because we know better,” is what I came up with at the time.
That branch of Christianity has a severe allergy to metaphor and to mythic language. The idea that the Genesis account could be simultaneously a myth and true just does not compute in that worldview. But to argue that Genesis must be literally-if-you-had-been-there-with-your-phone-you-could-have-gotten-pix-of-everything true is to torture human reason to the snapping point.
Frankly I think that Biblical literalism has made more atheists of Christians than anything else in the past hundred years.
Kind of ironic for a group which worships a guy who constantly spoke in parables to be allergic to metaphor.
Yeeeep.
That reminds me of a really good scifi movie I watched a while ago, 2014’s
<abbr title="SPOILERS, kind of: The world seems perfect, without pain, suffering, or death–except that it's still there; they just aren't aware of it. They are unable to perceive it, because they are given daily injections which remove this ability to differentiate good and evil.”>”The Giver”. It’s excellent; you should all see it. Also, I wonder if Eden and the Tree of Knowledge was like that? Sometimes, perception really is everything.
Ah, bugger; where’d I mess the HTML up?! Hmm, looks like there might be an issue with the quotes somehow. –Nope, wait, lost my close. Let me try again:
That reminds me of a really good scifi movie I watched a while ago, 2014’s
”The Giver”. It’s excellent; you should all see it. Also, I wonder if Eden and the Tree of Knowledge was like that? Sometimes, perception really is everything.
Joyce’s entire reality seems to be unraveling and rewriting itself in front of her. While inevitable it is really sad at the same time. I hope she finds something to fill the void left by her now incompatible old worldview.
Couldn’t you just argue that evolution was a consequence of Original Sin?
Not unless homo sapiens existed at the dawn of time.
Or maybe just “man” as an independent, perfect being rather than specifically Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The primordial man becomes degenerate through original sin, and must gradually evolve back to his “perfect form”. I bet you could find the right combination of radical fundies and fringe theories to support it with people who don’t care about reason. Be sure to throw in racist overtones by making the perfect being white. Nephilhim are big nowadays, so toss them in. Maybe some ancient aliens….
There’s a deranged argument for every strange religious or philosophical position.
This and the next one just got there, too:
straight white dude
It’ll be centuries before we fully shake off the stink of victorian white Jesus.
The really fascinating part is that there is some (not much) archaeological evidence that the religion that became Christianity, back in the day (we’re talking around the development of cuneiform writing), actually had a female Goddess as well, sort of like the Wiccan idea of the God and Goddess, both equal partners, with one being the Old Testament God and the other representing the other half of the spectrum of emotions, and genders.
But what seems to have happened, as near as we can tell, is that there was some sort of upheaval that seems to have resulted in a systematic effort to completely stamp out any trace of the Goddess’s existence. For some reason, the priests got really, really angry with the priestesses, wiped them all out, and then went and destroyed every record of the Goddess they could find. We only even know that much because they weren’t quiiiiite completely successful. But they got really, really close.
YHWH makes a lot more sense when you factor in a second, equal deity, and him being male makes sense in the context of also having a female God in there, as does the thing about humans being “made in His image”.
History, including the history of religions (and not just history as recounted by religions) is fascinating.
I have honestly heard the claim that some animals were created to kill and eat others because the original sin affected things both after and before it happened.
That’s… actually not unreasonable a notion if you accept an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent deity created them. Time being linear only has meaning to beings who don’t already have absolute mastery over it. In essence, Original sin was built in because it was always going to be.
How much credulity you assign that and what it implies depends entirely on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. Is the creation a single “painting”, an unchanging composition that has no surprises for someone viewing all of it at once? Is the creation we experience part of an infinite divine “gallery”, each unchanging but presenting variations on the same theme of creation? Is it turtles all the way down?
That works, but saying it was always built in and then blaming the people for it doesn’t work as well.
That’s actually pretty fascinating, considering Creation from a nonlinear perspective. (Disclaimer: I’m an atheist) It would also do a bit to reconcile the concept that no animals were carnivorous until the Flood (which is a later time point, I know) that Willis mentioned above, with the existence of carnivores in most conceptions of the Ark.
It’s kind of like the fan theory in DW that the Master’s drums are both entirely a product of the time war and yet also there from the very beginning of their lifetimes. Under this theory, all pre-2005 incarnations of the Master did not have the drumbeat, but when Rassilon implanted the drumbeat in the Master’s head (as shown in The End of Time), it was retroactively given to all the Masters, so that if Simm!Master or any prior regenerations during the Time War recalled a pre-Time War experience, they would recall the drums being present. (This theory is a bit complicated by the fact that the drums are entirely an RTD-era thing which have not been mentioned since Gomez!Master first appeared last season.)
The cause only has to precede the effect if you’re bound by linearity. There is no “It hasn’t happened yet” to our hypothetical omnicubed God, because there isn’t a “yet”.
The real question is that would this mean the reality we experience is a single deterministic entity (or as the great Sarda put it: “you can’t do something you haven’t done yet different from how it will come to be done.”) or if it is just a single iteration in an infinite series of possible outcomes based on different variables? If god built in the need to slap man down by flood, famine, plague into this facet of creation, is there another facet where everything is rainbows and butterlies and instead of getting nailed to a tree Jesus gets a highly rated talk show, or does God maybe need some serious antidepressants?
…Does the division of the first single-celled organism into multi-cellular organisms constitute “original sin”? Seeing as its evolution defied God’s plan for creation?
Or maybe it was sometime after evolving into Neanderthal Man that Eveish offered Adamish the apple-like thing and got them tossed out of the Garden of Pangeia?
I have had no use for organized religion since I was 12 years old. I find it surprising how serious people take it. I don’t understand it, but I understand the passion of the belief.
I’m glad she’s not putting a hate on Becky personally. And at least she is letting all the frustration out. As much as I dislike her sometimes, Joyce can face up to facts she does not want to – when she is forced to do so. And she IS a fighter.
I think she has a good chance to come out of this a ‘nicer’ person, in that she will recognize there are other beliefs than hers in this world – and that they aren’t evil just because they are different.
I prefer my religion distinctly disorganized myself.
I became nicer when I became an atheist, not just because I have more respect for people, but also because I no longer feel obligated to be good, and because there’s a god-shaped hole that I used to rely on to help the world.
I’ll be honest, I can barely follow what she’s saying. Hyper-Christianity’s reasons for hating things confuse me.
Even without having context for panel 3, reading panel 4 carefully will show you Joyce’s main point.
It comes down to the fundamental belief in Christianity that human beings are flawed beings, and that we brought that on ourselves by eating from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden. That’s original since, which Jesus was supposed to have suffered and died to absolve us from. From a mythological standpoint, it’s kind of a cool story. God takes human form and walks among man and all that. For most of history, No one took the stories of the old testament as literal truth. They were just stories to explain why things were the way they were. One could argue that they do have some fundamental truth to them. The eating of the fruit of knowledge representing the moment in history that humanity as a species went from being just really smart apes to being sentient beings. With the surge of scientific progress during the early industrial age, the evangelical movement was born as a reaction to science’s precise way of defining the world. Suddenly, stories that were meant as parables and allegories were taken as literal history in attempt to give religion legitimacy in the face of scientific knowledge.
For modern fundamentalist Christians, acknowledging that most of the Bible is not and was never meant to be a literal history book is admitting that the whole thing is a sham, a hoax in the face of cold hard facts. Which is why you now have junk “science” like young earth creationism and intelligent design. It’s an attempts to refute a few centuries of scientific advances and shore up their belief system. And humans are good enough at compartmentalization that they can deny science at Tue same time they are using an electronic device made possible by science to tell the world that scientists are wrong on the internet.
Figured this was it. I heard the exact same argument against evolution on religious talk radio once spinning through the dial. The two hosts were borderline hysterical because of the argument Joyce is making right here. It was enlightening to see it spelled out like that and to understand the fundamentalist mindset. At the time I think I still mostly believed, but had adopted the Deist “cosmic watchmaker” view of creation with plenty of room for evolution to fit in. God made the universe, set it in motion and stepped back to watch it run. Now I guess I’m agnostic bordering on atheistic. But I’ve kind of been where Joyce is at, trying to reconcile the conflict between years of early indoctrination with what I’d learned about science.
I find that atheism only benefits from the idea God is inactive or behind everything. I see him as more the figure who maintains a complicated machine and helps it motion. Likewise, if God were to fear anything we discover about the universe, he wouldn’t be much of a God would he?
So you’re saying God is physics? :p
Can’t break the laws of physics, now can we?
Not yet, but we’re working on it.
All we can do is extend the laws of physics.
SF author David Brin came up with an interesting metaphor. He said that the way the laws of physics and chemistry all lock together like that, it’s almost as if some Great Designer laid out the blueprints for the universe, then left them lying around the workshop for His apprentices to one day discover and start working with…
I’m thinking that the defining characteristic of the common atheist, what really sets him apart from your theists, basically, is all the not believing there is a God. At all.
Which is still a form of belief.
No, it isn’t. “Bald” is not a hair colour.
There are lots of forms of atheism. Some of them are a form of belief (“I am absolutely certain there is not a God”), some of them are more along the lines of “I think there’s a God but I don’t worship him” / “I don’t know if there’s a God and don’t think there’s a way to find out” / “I don’t know if there’s a God but wouldn’t give a fuck about him even if I knew he existed” / etc
For many atheists, it goes beyond that – there’s not believing there is a God, and then there’s believing there is not a God, which still requires making a leap of faith without evidence (after all, the job description calls for Him to be supernatural, to exist beyond nature, so He might not even leave any evidence to be discussed).
On one hand, I feel bad for Joyce because of all the realizations she’s basically being hit in the face with at once, but on the other hand… that sweet, sweet character growth. Even if it’s not necessarily a positive or negative growth, she’s still shifting and changing, and I absolutely love seeing that.
As a devout Lutheran, I gotta agree with everything Joyce said, right to the disheartened “god damn lie”
So is this it? Is this where the strong willed and faithful at herisk rock…Question now is can show pull through all this?
Joyce’s core is made of iron. Iron is strong, but untempered it is also very brittle and will break under extreme stress. This is the moment Joyce’s iron core is being forged into steel. Steel is as strong as iron, but once properly tempered will flex and bend under pressure. If she doesn’t break, Joyce will come out much stronger and will be far more mentally and spirituality flexible after this is all said and done.
The Jocelyne avatar makes this.
I was glad to get Joycelyn as a random avatar.
*her rock bottom.
Maybe this is just crazy old Mr. Mendo talking, but I think Joyce might be trying to avoid confronting certain things…
Here comes the sun
DooDooDooDooDoo
Here comes the sun
DooDooDooDooDoo
And I say
It’s allright …
I mean, you can always rationalize it as “Before man there were no animals with he cognitive abilities to comprehend the precepts of God’s teachings, thus were incapable of knowingly rejecting them, thus there was no sin before man. Mankind introduces sin when they develop the abstract thought capable becoming aware of God and His directions, and then knowingly rejecting that direction. “Sin”, therefore, can be understood to be the choice of committing anti-social behavior, and original sin refers to man’s innate disposition towards anti-social behavior even when being cognizant of the “wrongness” of their actions.
That should tide her over until she takes a psych, soc, or anthro course and has to deal with cultural relativism, socialization, and behavioral disorders.
And then she gets hit by a truck…
So she hasn’t read Preacher then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(comics)
I don’t think she’s quite prepared for that XD At this stage, it could still blow her brain up. In an unpleasantly literal way.
Am i a horrible person for hoping that Mike walks by and offers some of his patented cutting insight right now?
Honestly I do too.
Wish granted.
Joyce reminds me a lot of my boyfriend in high school. We used to argue about carbon dating. But, her arc is going in one direction, and his went in the other.
🙁
Your ex boyfriend joined a British boy band?
Joyce eyebrow game is too strong in this comic. Too damn strong.
…Huh. I’m a Christian, I was raised Christian, and…I’ve NEVER thought this. I believe in evolution whole-heartedly. That is to say, I accept evolution as actual scientific fact. Andthe original sin thing never really came up. But, I wasn’t raised fundamentalist, so that wasn’t really emphasized anyway.
Cheer up, Joyce. There’s plenty of room for evolution in Christianity. The latter just needs to bend a bit.
Joyce’s theology is really, really flawed.
Jesus came promising eternal life. So far, no one following Him has avoided the grave. But that’s because He meant eternal life in God.
The death following the disobedience in the genesis myth refers to the death of separation from God and loss of Grace.
This is why literalism fucks you up. Because ancient Jews understood the concept of metaphor and allegory, and you should too.
Yeah people have many beliefs. I’m Catholic and yet I believe in evolution. Personally I believe that god was the impetus for the Big Bang and then let science take over.
Though if Joyce ends up rejecting religion entirely, that’s perfectly fine. We all have freedom of choice in our beliefs.
There’s also the fact God forbid Adam from eating from the Tree of Life lest he be immortal. Which he wouldn’t need to worry about unless he wasn’t to begin with.
This doesn’t really need ‘and yet’ – Catholic doctrine is that ‘yes, Evolution is correct, just God-guided’.
Not entirely true. Official Catholic doctrine is “We leave science to the scientists, but there’s no reason you can’t believe in evolution.” It’s just that every Pope for the past however long has believed in evolution and so do most Catholics
Oh I just put in that part to clarify it cuz I know that sometimes people when they here the word, “Catholic” they just roll their eyes and go, “Oh you’re one of them aren’t you?” because of how the crazier sects get all the attention and color people’s perception.
Not in the version she’s been raised on. Willis has commented about how people raised in very fundamentalist environments are that much more likely to completely discard religion later in life precisely because there’s no wiggle room in it – if one thing is wrong, you have to throw the entire thing out.
“No user serviceable parts inside.”
I’m not going lie, I’ve been where she’s been and it ain’t fun.
“And by “we” I mean us women. We just keep f@cking up.”
So who wants to play a rousing game of Break The Cutie? It appears we’re already nearly to the lightning round!
In yesterday strip Joyce wore other hoodie? This one has a pattern
It’s the same hoodie she had two days ago; Willis probably figured that Beckie was blocking enough of Joyce in yesterday’s strip that he didn’t need to bother doing the IU logo on it.
I thought God did everything…
At the very least, God would be found to be a negligent deity by a court of law the same way a parent might for leaving a loaded gun around.
God left that shotgun lying around so that Toedad could grab it and use it to enforce his will! That’s not negligent at all! In fact, God ensured that the shotgun would be invented, just to be sure that Toedad would have it when needed. Clearly.
Joyce could always go with the smbc theory. There is evil in the world because without evil there can be no batman
Well you’ve convinced me.
This theory is my new religion. And I’m not even a big Batman fan.
You can start worshiping.
No, wait this one has some extra text.
God casting mortals out of the Garden of Eden to cause death, pain, and suffering has been kind of the point from the beginning, Joyce. He was always the guy behind it. Yes, it was a punishment but he’s also omniscient so he knew the results beforehand.
But I wrestled with the problem of evil pretty early on and the idea of God damning people in general for all eternity didn’t work out for me. Torture is evil, God is not evil, therefore God does not torture.
After that, I stopped listening to a lot of people on religion.
Problem is, theres no crime you can commit that would warrant eternal torture. No matter how bad you were, you would eventually work of any karma
Yeah, the concept of hell is inherently vile.
Correct me if I’m wrong (I’m a Hindu), but isn’t the way hell works (at least for Catholics) is that literally anybody, no matter how bad they were in real life, can avoid if they repent of their sins? And then you go to purgatory to work off your sin before you go into heaven. So the punishment of hell isn’t for the crime, it’s refusing to accept that what you did was a crime.
yep, thats pretty much it.
Pretty much, yeah. Recognize your faults, strive to be good, and your sins will be forgiven.
I don’t know how legitimate Purgatory is. It was a concept invented by a pope centuries after Jesus Christ (right?).
I think he idea was to justify bad people going to heaven by making them work for it.
Avoid, yes. Escape, no. Most doctrines (and all the ones I’ve been in) hold that once you’re in hell, you’re in it forever.
Purgatory’s purpose is extremely vague. Sometimes it’s also where people who didn’t get a chance are tested (those who died during infancy, for instance).
But if you accept what you did after going to hell, welp, doesn’t matter. You’re there forever.
Niven and Pournelle worked through this in the novel Inferno (a science fiction writer dies of his own arrogance and pride, goes to Hell which turns out to be the Dante version, and gets guided through by a fellow named Benito). The eventual conclusion, which Carpentier reached by considering the ramblings of a psychiatrist who tortured some patients and who was punished with insanity, was that Hell was God’s last-ditch effort to get your attention. Eventually, you’d have to come to the conclusion that He exists; at that point, repent your sins in sincerity (as opposed to the version of “repentance” in the Bolgia of the Flatterers) and He will forgive you and welcome you to Heaven.
I have to admit, if your faith requires a Hell, this is the only version that makes sense to me.
Yeah, I may be letting my snarky atheism show, but that myth, read literal, like many other myths that particular sect tell doesn’t tell a story of a loving God “forced” to punish us sinful mortals.
It tells the story of an abusive asshole who like all other abusers concocts handy “excuses” for why his less powerful victims “deserved” to be hurt with disproportionate violence. Oh, did you
break a disheat the apple you had no concept of morality yet to know was wrong? Well, then I have no choice but tohit you with my beltpunish you with mortality, painful childbirth, and nasty, brutish, short lives.Hell, that refrain of God as abuser shows up a lot in that sect. Even their particular flavor of Jesus feels like some sort of sick Purple Man shtick. Look, mortals, you made me kill my own son by sending him to be beaten and tortured to death by a handful of you. You better be grateful for that and worship only me or I’ll have to hurt you for all eternity.
It was honestly one of the creepier things to me.
To be fair, all God did was kick them out of his house. You shouldn’t steal from the fridge of guy you’re staying with if it’s the only rule he says is not to steal from the fridge.
🙂
Now you have to stay in a hotel.
Isn’t the hotel usually better? 😀
Only if you’re wealthy xD
Yeah, but if they didn’t know that disobeying God was wrong until after they ate from the Tree, then it’s hard to blame then for not listening.
Your metaphor relies on Adam and Eve being on a functionally-similar plane as God; basically they’re all adults. But if they don’t have that knowledge yet, because they didn’t eat the fruit yet, then they are going to be closer to a child than an adult.
Sure, if your buddy goes and eats that one thing you told him not to (“Hey, Steve, help yourself to whatever but leave the fruit platter alone, okay?”) then I can see being upset (“Jesus, Steve, that was for my meeting this afternoon!”), but sending him to stay in the hotel forever seems a bit harsh, unless Steve is kind of a jerk anyways. But don’t forget the roommate (Satan, who Steve doesn’t know is a psycho) told him that it was fine, go ahead, God is just testing to see whether Steve will just blindly do what God says, or can think for himself.
But if you tell Stevie (age 4) that now he needs to move out forever and ever because he broke a rule, that’s pretty goddamned harsh, actually irresponsible, the moreso if you aren’t just his buddy but his actual parent.
“Stevie, I told you to not eat this, didn’t I?”
“Uh huh. But Crawley said I could! He said you’d be impressed!”
“Well, Crawley lied, didn’t he?”
“Uh huh.”
“So now you need to get out. Get the hell out of my house, Stevie, and never come back! I mean it! See Aziraphael, here? He’s gonna stand right here by the front door with his flaming sword, and if you even try to come back, he’s gonna kill you! Isn’t that right, Aziraphael?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So get the fuck out, Stevie, and think about what you’ve done.”
Woooow.
This works if you think of God as another person – perhaps more powerful, but a person. And as a person yourself, it makes sense.
On the other hand, if you’re willing to go for the Theist ride for a moment, defining God as more than a person – as the fundamental anchor of reality itself – the value judgment comes off a little ridiculous. God doesn’t damn someone to hell so much as reality is what it is. It’d be like saying Gravity smushed the guy that jumped off a tall building.
My favorite version of this story comes from the novel Ishmael, in which an intelligent gorilla discusses theology with a guy who responded to a classified add. It’s a theological work disguised as a novel. Anyway Ishmael, the Gorilla, posits that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Good and Evil, since they were only human and not divine they didn’t actually gain any new knowledge, just an unjustified belief that they now knew what was good an evil. In his telling the Adam and Eve and Cain and Able story was originally a story told by hunter-gatherers being driven out and killed by farmers as an explination of where these nutty people digging in the dirt all the time came from. Once you THINK you know how things should be you can justify actions that hunter-gatherers never could. Follow this logic. “I know good from evil. Being hungry is uncomfortable and therefor evil. I like to eat this plant, but only a little of it grows here. I have a nice cave here, that is good, I shouldn’t have to wander somewhere else to find food, that is evil. So I need to kill all these other plants that I don’t like to eat so I can just grow this one. Oh no, now rabbits and bugs are eating my crops, that is evil, I must kill as many of them as I can. Hmm, the rabbits are tastey, but hard to catch out in the open, I must pen them in. Foxes are tring to eat my rabbits, I must kill all the foxes. Several thousand years later we have massive mono-crops sucepitable to sudden blights, factory farms for pigs and chickens, and most of the alpha predators on the planet on the edge of extinction, huge areas of rain forest gone, strip mining, holes in the ozone layer… again, this is presented in a work of fiction but compelling reading. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwidssTis8_JAhUBJCYKHU82CiIQFggdMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FIshmael_(novel)&usg=AFQjCNEEwqfe88eH_08AQwvfs6G-w8_CCw&sig2=DQ-bZLSu5JOW6VYNV3kydQ
Interesting train of though. So God created pain/death/suffering and never intended to use it (a major violation of Chekov’s Rifle) or he created it on the spot.
Or did he invent it for the War in Heaven which I think happened before Eve ate the apple.
Holy shit I actually nailed it.
P.S. For the love of pizza keep Walky away from her for a while.
So keep walky away by not bringing pizza near her?
I’ve never actually heard of this specific conflict between evolution and Christianity before.
Is THAT why evolution is such a big deal to some denomination? Wow, I never thought of it like that. I can see how that would be hard to let go of.
AIUI in normal readings of the bible there was always death for animals (why punish them for what humans did?) – the punishments actually inflicted were death for humans and belly-crawling for snakes (which I guess they could fly before?) and that’s it.
I know Joyce’s devolving relationship to her faith is taking center stage, but I gotta say, I just love Becky in Panels 1 and 2 here.
That Panel 1 where she a) takes the time to emphasize that her personal development and education is not intended to antagonize or tease Joyce, b) demonstrates the hard work she is putting in to catch up on her science education and do what is necessary to be able to fulfill the promise/insult to her dad about becoming a scientist, and c) hits me where I live. I was never religious, but I had a similar before-college speedbump in my education. I always loved Biology, but I grew up and went to school in a VERY fundamentalist neighborhood where the teachers refused to teach even the basics of evolution and so instead, I had to teach myself from nothing but textbooks and whatever resources I could get my hands on. And as such, I know that’s not an easy road to travel. And Becky is doing this with the additional stressors of having to jump through all the hoops to be accepted into IU to begin with, being homeless, and trying to simultaneously kickstart a sustainable living. That’s mad impressive.
And Panel 2… well, besides just how clearly it speaks to her version of faith where the literalness of any myth takes a back seat every time to reality and the moral character of the deity she chooses to worship, it’s just such an amazing moment. The ease with which she has shed so much terrible she has been force-fed since childhood is impressive and the raw curiosity she is brimming with that is unwilling to let pride ever get in the way of finding out a cool new fact about what is real. She has only been informed about evolution as it actually is for about a week, but she already understands it enough to know it’s definitely true and not really questionable and that doesn’t cause her much in consternation.
And yes, that informs her faith. Her God as she sees it, does not hinge itself on giblet touching or denying reality. Her God must be sustained and enriched by things that exist and is much more loving and caring for it. It’s a much more enriching faith than that which she was raised in.
Her God answers lesbian prayers and saves her from Toedad kidnappings and doesn’t really give a fuck about atheists or pre-marital hanky-panky and that’s enough for her.
Yeah, Becky’s probably going to be able to come out of this with the kind of functional relationship with faith Walkyverse Joyce got and other people manage – after all, she does in fact have evidence God answers lesbian prayers and that things can work out for the best, whereas Joyce has really only had religion come back to bite her in the ass – after all, her first big introductions were Mary using it to be awful and Ryan’s “nice preacher’s boy” facade, and since then it’s been confrontations like Roz and Dina and her “trial” with Ethan that turned out to be wrong, or things that very much hurt her like her nightmare/repressed sexuality and, most recently, the Toedad/Mom punch. The only time it helped her was when she stood up against her parents for Dorothy – and even then, she was siding against THEIR religion and using scripture to widen her worldview.
Absolutely! Becky is awesome and THIS is the life she wants to have…. oh, and her best friend without a crisis of faith would be nice to.
Or in other words if only Joyce weren’t changing so much so fast.
Couldn’t you argue that evolution means you don’t need a God to unleash sin and evil?
Yes, but God would still have had to permit it (He’s omnipotent, he would know).
And there it goes.
This is probably because I’m very sleepy, but how does Joyce’s argument get from the 4th panel to the 5th? Why can’t her community be wrong about the moment that sin/pain/death began, but right about other things?
That’s not how fundamentalism works. Richard Dawkins and Fundamentalists agree you have to believe everything or nothing. It’s why they reject Catholics and Mormens. Both of them having “Living Testaments.”
Having rejected patristic tradition and the writings of the Church Fathers and everything other than the authority of the Bible, these extreme Protestants have nothing to their religion except the Bible. If it’s not literal and true and sufficient for salvation — if any part that you rely upon to make a decision might turn out to be a figure of speech, a scribal error, or just a flight of fancy by a human author and you having no clear standard for telling that that was the case — then nothing would be certain nor any religious truth confidently discernible.
Because original sin is literally the entire basis for that Christianity. If there’s no original sin, there’s no need for the sacrifice of Jesus to wash that sin away. At best, if the story of original sin is a metaphor, then God is punishing all of humanity for a metaphor that they had no actual say in. Sin and death exist then not because we screwed up, like Joyce points out, but because God made it. Which makes him, well, monstrous. If you’re going to pretend to take the whole story literally, this is an all-or-nothing part of it. You could get away with excising, say, Job, if you really had to. The necessity of Jesus’ sacrifice doesn’t depend on Job. It does depend on this. You can’t get away with excising this part.
For something that is “literally the entire basis” of Christianity, a surprising number of Christian theologians don’t think it needs to be a literal event as depicted.
It isn’t the entire basis of Christianity. It’s the entire basis of the particular blend of Christianity she’s following.
Christ, it’s like y’all forget you’re bloody sectarian as hell the second anyone else comments.
My mistake! I’m not forgetting that – it was sort of my point – or really part of that y’all. I just misread “Christianity” where Halcyon42 said “that Christianity.
Ah, I see. Well, that happens too.
Of course, Fundamentalists often completely ignore the Bible they’re ostensibly taking literally:
[[22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:]]
Humans weren’t immortal even in the parable (which I believe it was always intended to be anyway).
Anybody pick up on the line “…the man is become as one of us…”?
Kind of like the Lord God was the chairman talking to a board meeting, and there’s (*gasp*) more than one god??
Just thought I’d throw that into the mix.
well, god is three persons
God suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder. Explains a lot, really…
I’m going to have to start referring to “the three alters of the Holy Trinity”.
There are three persons, but only one patient.
Yeah, but sin has been around for so long….its hard to find a truly original sin these days.
huh. i always thought fundamentalist christians didn’t believe in evolution because it didn’t have a good-enough sounding explanation for the origin of life, and they were after the origin/meaning of life. and granted, yes, evolution is about how life adapts and changes, not the origin of it. but i didn’t realize that evolution necessitated a cruel god.
Very interesting comments this time. Good reading.
It’s possible to be religious and not think that your religion is The One Truth and all other beliefs are therefore False.
I’m in favor of all religions being equally true (this is where atheists smirk and say that much, at least, they can agree on).
I believe there is a realm of reality where rules are followed, where logic works, where cause precedes effect, where things can be observed, predicted, and proven. This is the realm that cannot be denied. Its reality persists no matter what you believe, and this fact has caused great pain for religious people when it contradicts their beliefs.
But I also believe there is another realm of existence — where things are not predictable, observable, or repeatable. Where nothing can be proven by observation or experiment, and thus cannot be said by Science at all. If it cannot be proven, if it cannot be predicted and tested, as far as Science is concerned, it doesn’t exist. But that is an assumption — the most basic and fundamental assumption of science. It does not allow for the existence of the unprovable. If something unprovable DOES exist, science is therefore useless for understanding it.
The first realm is that of science, and the second that of spirit. Never the two shall meet. They can’t. If it’s provable, it’s science. If it can only be believed, it’s spirit.
That leads back to my previous statement — that all religions are equally true. That is a statement that contradicts logic. Multiple religions that all claim to know the truth about the fundamental nature of existence, and which all say very different things, cannot logically all be true. But that is wrong thinking — this is applying logic to something spiritual. Never the two shall meet. You can’t do it.
Religion and spirituality and belief and faith thrive on paradox and logical contradiction. This is not where they are disproven, it is where they are most true.
The way that can be known is not the true way.
It’s an interesting point. There are things that are not disprovable by science as we know it. Science is ever trying to test its hypotheses and models to disprove them, the concept of disprovability is central to science. So your theorie is … If this wasn’t so, how would we be able to know?
I don’t know though, if I would attribute anything not potentialley disprovable with scientific methods to the spirit realm.
What always gets me confused is why some people try to take the bible (or other monotheistic religious text of their choice) as literal truth, not as a story that is teaching a concept, never mind the trappings.
If you see religious texts as literal truth, you
a) get disprovable quite fast
b) you really have a conflict between different monotheistic religions whereas in essence, minus the trappings, monotheistic religions do not differ that much
Is’s a human condition to need some kind of spiritual connection to other people. The world’s just too overwhelming without it. In former times, religions were how people got organized in larger grops to deal with the world and grow. Without religion, what we know as civilization would not exist.
But for some reason, modern fundamentalist groups are rather trying to destroy civilization, destroy the options to move into the future not only for their own lives but for everybody else.
I don’t know if we have to blame monotheism for that. Squabbling Greek Gods never implied the concept of just one truth for all, though.
Yeah, and in the Norse literature there’s actually a bit about how other peoples have other gods and standards of behaviour, so don’t go expecting them to react the same way you would to the same things. For example, if you swear an oath, you’re supposed to fulfil it or die trying; there’s a special section of Niflhelm that is particularly cold and cheerless for oath-breakers. Nithlings are heavily looked down upon.
But other cultures don’t necessarily feel the same way, or agree it applies equally to oaths sworn to outsiders (Heathen Norse didn’t feel any compunction to keep oaths sworn to Christians, either). So don’t take them at their word; they may not be making the same implications that you would.
So obviously, the Norse were fully aware that other societies had other gods and other mores and weren’t too concerned with that from a theological point of view.
–Mind you, even the Bible admits the existence of other gods in the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” Doesn’t even say you can’t follow others as well; just that you’re supposed to primarily be Christian.
Me, I like the idea of a world with multiple pantheons of gods. It’s friendlier, a more enjoyably diverse neighbourhood, than one with just this one big loud guy stomping around going, “ME! IT’S JUST ME! ALL MEEE!” 😀
These kinds of arguments always bug me because they always devolve into “Either my beliefs are 100% correct or EVERYTHING IS A LIE!” Being mostly or even slightly wrong is not an option. Not saying this reaction is undeserved, since Joyce/Willis’ teachings probably emphasized infallibility, but my atheist brother’s pulled this on me as well. What is it about religion that erases the possibility of a reasonable middle ground?
a deep trust bond was broken. People reacts badly.
Yes. and in this case it’s not the bond between Joyce and the Bible that is under strain, but the bond between Joyce and the people who insisted on the literal interpretation of Genesis. Since Joyce was brought up in an environment in which religion was not only homogenous but pervasive, and in which even such quotidian actions as choosing a TV program to watch were suffused with religious significance, that means that pretty much everyone whom Joyce ever trusted is a liar.
A reasonable middle ground is a place for rational thoughts and ideas, which is exactly what the kind of hardcore religious groups like Joyce belongs to want to avoid. They don’t want you to think they want you to do as your told, live how you’re told and fulfill your role to maintain the religion machine.
Remember, Becky and Joyce weren’t sent to college to learn, they were sent to find a husband to marry, that’s all. And their curriculum was chosen for them so they could better homechool their future children to think exactly like they do.
Speaking from experience, Joyce’s worldview always framed religion as a search for the truth. But when faith entered the picture, truth became a distant concern. Instead, feelings were confused with facts, and the whole institution became dominated by a snowball of embellishments on one metaphor after another.
It never set well with me when preachers would gloat. “Look at that crazy old world out there! So full of lies. Good thing we have the unvarnished truth!”. Is it? Are you sure? Because people are getting ripped off all the time. People are dying, killing themselves, murdering each other, for things that only exist in their head. What makes your headcanon more real than any of those other ones? A funny feeling? That’s not evidence, despite what the occasional hymn would tell you.
So when you notice these things, and truth is your highest value, the point of everything that matters, and you’ve got to get it right or else, you start to pick at your assumptions. And you just keep picking, and picking, until you’re looking up archaeology and getting into basic biology and… oh. Oh. There’s… really no stops on this train, is there? Everyone who looks to a higher power is making some kind of assumption that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Once you realize this, you’ve stared into the abyss. There’s no going back. And you can either seize the chance to reinvent yourself, or fall back into old habits…
Wow. Nice.
well I think Joyce already knows that it is indeed a goddamned lie, wonder when she’ll accept it now.
The problem isn’t the lies. The problem is the lies mixed in with the truths. The good exists with the bad. People are complex and even Toedad had something human in him, once. It just became twisted into something horrible long ago.
One thing that worries me here is that Joyce losing her euphemisms. She is saying “goddamned”, which is a big deal in her background. Much bigger than all those words about biological bits and functions that are merely obscene but not blasphemous.
Now you’re getting it, Joyce.
This, by the way, is why I keep in mind that even if the Almighty did hand down absolute truth sometime at the dawn of anatomically modern humans, it’s had humans tampering with it ever since.
People just gotta tamper with everything man…
I guess this is what happens when you don’t have to deal with “If there’s a God, why did He put me into a life where I’m so miserable that I pray every night to die before I wake?” at the age of seven and eight years old.
Part of why I hate fundamentalism is the complete lack of comfort their interpretation of God is supposed to provide. God doesn’t offer Heaven as a respite for those who have suffered and endured but as a reward for being on his Baseball team.
Or a constant and utter terror of hell and death that takes you years to strip away until you start considering baptism and realize that you don’t really have this belief or love of God everyone’s saying you should have before being baptized, just fear, from about the same age.
NExt panel, Joyce gets run over by a truck.
Come on, give the truck rider a break.
It’s a full time job.
And because the readers of DoA had sinned, Willis caused the heavens to open, and it rained theology for forty days and forty nights.
…Oh my gosh, we broke Joyce…. 0_o
How could you have a world without death? It’d get completely overpopulated.
Fundamentalists believe the Garden would be infinite like Heaven I presume.
Well if you don’t hafta worry about dying it becomes much easier to colonize other planets so I think we’d manage.
And fight with invading aliens, if there’s any….but I hope it won’t come to that.
Not if it was also a world without sex.
Then why did they have full anatomy?
That’s where the meteor comes into place.
I always thought Eden was just supposed to be Adam and Eve? So if they didn’t sin no one else would exist? Which should have had me thanking them for my life instead of hating them, but since when do preteen fundies have common sense?
200+ comments in and not a single INXS reference? Shame. 🙂
It can be two things, Joyce. Or maybe three? Or none…
That being said, I now know the dire implication of evolution and religion now thanks to this strip. But I learned to rationalize the existence of both together with the help of Futurama (not kidding that’s true).
Both could exist together, it’s religion that draws the line of absolutes.
Yeah religion can be awfully all-or-nothing.
Goddamn it Joyce!! Look before crossing the road! Otherwise you’ll get hit by a car and end up in Something*Positive!
I was raised Catholic, so this level of……I don’t even know what to call it, but it is new to me. If people believe that death wasn’t a thing until the Original Sin, then how did all of the carnivores eat?
They probably ate vegetables, which was perfectly fine, because plants aren’t alive. *eyeroll*
Life survives by consuming life…
“Life survives by consuming life…”
If anyone doubts this truth, I invite you to come to the state of Washington. Take a trip up State Route 410 (wait until next spring, though, because the snow level’s been dropping these past couple of weeks) to Federation Forest State Park. There’s some wonderful paths there with little signs describing what’s going on. Look especially for “nurse logs”. These are formerly mighty trees that have died and fallen; more trees are growing from their corpses, along with shelf fungi and a number of insect species.
ALL life feeds on other life. Even the plants.
I went to catholic school and we learned original sin and evolution and I don’t…remember this being an issue…
Admittedly I was reading a lot of comic books in the back of class but still.
Considering I went through a similar phase as Joyce is going through now a few years ago I’d say that this was really spot on.
Joyce’s response here nails what always confused me about religion. I was raised as atheist as you can be in the US. No one in may family believed in god and it was a huge surprise to me in my early 20’s when I got online and discovered how many people took religion seriously. The logical contradictions are… vast to say the least.
Remember that what she thinks of as “religion” isn’t all of religion or even all of Christianity. Or most of it. Or even half of it. Christianity didn’t get along for 2,000 years with the kind of thing Joyce was raised to believe.
To be honest, what Joyce is talking about is pretty much my beginning and ending with all religion. Except maybe Greek mythology – I love the hell out of that stuff. It’s fun and bonkers.
Wait. Nothing died? Nothing? What did carnivores eat? Or grazers?
Fruit.
Joyce, Joyce, Joyce. A story can be new and tell the tale of 4 billion years. I can draw the stars on a canvas before me. If God decided to put humans in a world governed by death and change, don’t you think he’d have been able to create this world in balance, as if it had existed that way forever?
If he’d created you just yesterday with all your memories and history, could you tell the difference? If he created the world 6000 years ago, with all its memories and history, could science tell the difference? Science is finding out how the world you have been given works which includes the history it has been given. it does not tell you why you have it.
So, your argument is that science can’t really figure out the past because God might be lying with the evidence?
It might not be David’s argument, but it is one that has been put forward since before Darwin, because there are other signs of the antiquity of the Universe than evolutionary ones. It’s called the Omphalos Hypothesis, and has been mocked as the argument that an omnipotent creator might have made us all last Thursday, complete with fake memories and the holes in our socks.
That’s scary me a lot actually.
It sounds to me like David’s argument is that science is about facts and the reality in front of and around us, but why those reality and facts are in the first place is not something science includes.
Yup. That’s the most straightforward way of reconciling science and religion – they are about different things, there’s no point at which they contradict each other, because they answer different questions. When they start infringing on one another, you are doing one of them wrong, possibly both.
(This discussion is mostly about people doing /religion/ wrong, but oh man, there are so many ways of doing science wrong, too)
This argument is actually why I couldn’t keep to Creationism in spite of it being fed to me as Undeniable Truth for most of my formative years. Under this argument, God created the stars and the galaxies and the set speed of light and the observable laws of physics and fossils and radioactive isotopes and… everything… as a direct, deliberate lie to humanity, to trick us into ceasing to believe in God – the same God who, should we fail to believe, will condemn us all to a lake of eternal fire where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
If God is not a liar, the word of God written in the stars and the galaxies and the fossils and the radioactive isotopes must be true – and for that to be the case, the universe must be very, very old, while humanity as we know it is quite young.
My interpretation is that even if God really did create us last Thursday complete with the entire history, it doesn’t mean that history is a lie
becayse like… the fact that that’s how it was created is still truth that we can use to figure out how our world works further
maybe it’s not the truth we can use to figure out purpose in life, philosophy etc, but SCIENCE ISN’T SUPPOSED TO DO THAT ANYWAY
I always figured it was no pain, no sin, some death but not for sapients. Or, you know, an allegory.
Joyce needs the biggest hug.
Oh.
I see.
Joyce, you’ve found out that much of what you’ve been taught about your faith *is* wrong. I don’t just mean that as an atheist. I mean that you’ve found out that a lot of what your parents have taught you was counter to Christian values.
Maybe, just maybe, you owe it to yourself to take that risk and be ready for things to be a lot more complex than you’ve been allowed to imagine so far.
That… and even if Genesis is factual history, God’s the one that did it anyway. Really, if you take the stories of the bible without first presuming that God is morally perfect, he comes out quite evil a lot of the time.
You know Joyce, maybe you should look up either Maimonides or maybe St. John Paul. Neither are baptists but both had different philosophies that do meld the ideas of Creation to the sciences that were being discovered at the time as well evolution that would be discovered later.
…. I realize I’m talking to a fictional character.
I’ve been looking at nature documentaries on youtube of late and have wondered why creationists were so adamant about attacking the theory of evolution. This cartoon sheds a lot of light on that subject.
I just wanna say that I had never considered this explanation. I now understand Creationists just a little bit better.
Yeah, that’s true, but I still… I dunno, if the shoe fits, I guess. I mean, all the evidence points to evolution and thus everything being a lie. I’m more inclined to follow evidence at this point in my life, but I can understand why she’s not. I hadn’t considered this aspect of the perspective before, but I’m glad I can now. Thanks, Willis.
Hmmm. What Joyce says in panel 3 doesn’t *quite* agree with what I learned in Sunday School, or what I’ve read in the past 30-odd years of bible studyin’.
I mean, I know some of the weirder Christian sects believe that kind of nonsense, but it’s hardly biblical…
ha ha ha ha ha
“Where the Bible speaks, we speak. Where the Bible is silent, we are silent.” That’s the basic motto of the Church of Christ – or, at least, the branch of it I grew up in.
They were never very good at it.
A little too much #NotAllChristians in this comment section. Not that I think all Christians are anything like the kind that Joyce was raised by – just that I don’t think the fact that more reasonable sects of Christianity exist is gonna do much for her in the long run.
Willis has commented about how people raised in very fundamentalist environments are that much more likely to completely discard religion later in life precisely because there’s no wiggle room in it – if one thing is wrong, you have to throw the entire thing out. And Joyce’s crisis of faith is based on his own, and we all know how he turned out. (Hint: He ain’t Christian anymore.)
I think religion has only and will only do harm to Joyce. And I think she deserves to be free of it.
Well, we are talking about our own faith, not about what Joyce should believe. I think every time Joyce’s future has been brought up, people agreed she’d end up atheist, with Becky making use of ‘reasonable faith’ instead.
Joyce has been listening to a lot of A Simple Plan lately.
… That… actually explains to me why one would hold to that story in the face of all evidence. If death and pain aren’t a part of life, but something that has a blame, then you have to believe it wasn’t God putting them in for the sake of it, you have to believe it was a punishment because otherwise God punished everyone for no reason and you’re hitting essentially the same problem a lot of survivors of tragedies go through (“No sane and loving God would allow this to happen, any god that did isn’t worth my time.”)
It’s interesting that just when her innocence has almost completely shattered she Needs to believe in the mythical time of innocence in the garden. If she believes Adam and Eve were happy only because they hadn’t sinned then that train of logic might lead to concluding that her current unhappiness is somehow the appropriate result of her own sinning. Which, I realise, is classic Christian guilt. Nope. Don’t head that way, Joyce. Anger is productive, self-loathing and guilt aren’t.
So what you’re saying, Willis, is that Joyce is going to get reconciled to actual science three years earlier than you did, if she just keeps hanging out with Becky and Dorothy?
Or get pulled out by her parents.
Embrace paganism, Joyce! Our gods are/can be dicks, and we’re okay with that! (J/K…I’d honestly rather Joyce come to terms with her own faith and what it means to have faith/spirituality WITHOUT believing what your parents and their crappy pastor shoved down your throat. Yep, your parents/religious teachers lied to you…welcome to the world of power politics! Now, let’s give faith a go, instead. 🙂 )
What people ignores is that science isn’t the absolute truth since it’s 100% empiric (it only considers and studies nature, nothing out of that can be studied with science), which means that everything that is related to rationalism is just ignored by science, science just explains half of the existence
Also, by the same principle that there can’t be an unstopable object at the same time than an immovable object, if God STARED something, that something is fated to END, so evolution or not, Eden or not, life on earth was fated to dieat some point in any scale
Joyce seems to be placing unnecesary weight on the concepts of “pain” and “death” predating humanity’s sin as a dealbreaker to her beliefs, but that’s her own interpretation. Nowhere does the Bible say that. The closest things that are mentioned is that humans, as God first created them would not die, but that was more of their “created in God’s image” package than a statement that death did not exist. Similarly, it is mentioned that childbirth pain and having to go through pains to gain one sustenance was introduced as a punishment of sin, but it’s never implied that pain was non-existent until then.
So yeah, if you are to believe the Bible, God was the one who introduced pain and death to His creation. Thing is that neither concept is inherently bad. Death is just part of the cycle of life, and pain is just a helpful warning system that makes the body recoil from sources of harm and avoid it in the future.
So basically Joyce is challenging her big religious beliefs by getting hung up on her own small wishful thinking about the nature of the world pre-sin.
note: this post isn’t by me, but it had an unclosed italics tag which i tried to fix but sometimes when i edit posts wordpress decides to put MY NAME ON THEM and that’s super annoying
anyway this post is by Pylgrim
Have I said before that your manic-grin, two-thumbs-up avatar goes with EVERY POST that you can ever possibly make?
soon all will become Willis.
He is Willis. He is Legion.
I’m Willis, and so is my wife!
Not “her own interpretation” or “her own small wishful thinking”, but the theology she was taught. The “literal” Biblical interpretation she’s been fed all her life.
Does it match yours? Apparently not.
Is it “correct”? Damned if I know. I’m an atheist and don’t really have a stake in Biblical interpretation.
Mostly though the point is that it’s not her interpretation or her wishful thinking. She’s been taught this as Truth and denying that breaks with her church and her faith. Not to mention her family and probably everyone she knew before college.
If I recall, it doesn’t remove death from Any animal, humans included. There’s a Tree of Life™ in the garden that allowed humans to live forever, which is the reason they got kicked out.
Obviously, Joyce is raised with a more fundamentalist view…
Breathe Joyce, breathe!
Recognizing god’s impotence and malevolence is the first step towards realizing he doesn’t even exist and what is seen is man’s impotence and malevolence reflected in a mirror.
Yeah, pretty much.
Huh. Joyce is being wilfully ignorant, but her argument is sound. Incorrect, but sound. I can see how that would be a problem for her.
I find it strangely odd that people follow a book that depicts the supposed “Son of God” using parables and allegories to educate, but every bit of the rest of the book is supposed to be solid, carved in stone fact.
Oh, Joyce. That same creation story says that God created humans in God’s own image… and you still think it makes a difference whether humans, or God, unleashed sin and death on the world. Sorry, kid, you’re about to figure out that “God” sucks.
Same. As a Christian who’s had to figure this sort of thing out a long time ago, my reaction to Joyce’s conundrum here was “IS THIS THE ONLY PROBLEM YOU HAVE WITH THAT STORY”…
A good reminder that Joyce is not stupid. She understands evolution just fine but she doesn’t like the implications.
This is why I feel so bad for creationists. Their entire faith is hung up on the most flimsy, easily contradicted piece of evidence. There are so many very faithful, very spiritual people of all religions who don’t feel the need to make up stories about natural history to justify their faith. I just wish the creationists would listen to them.
And if your faith NEEDS evolution not to be true to work, the alternative is intelligent design – a laughably stupid, obviously false explanation, but presented to be credible enough if you squint, and it gives you the hope that your faith might not be in jeopardy after all. If you need a lie badly enough it doesn’t have to be a good lie.
Really, I agree with most of that – she’s not stupid, and it is very hard for someone like her.
But no, Joyce does not understand evolution at all. The vaccination comics proved that. She learned from biased sources, and is not willing to learn what the science actually has to say about that (precisely because of how her faith depends on it just not being true).
She’s not stupid, but she’s still ignorant.
“There is no room for evolution in a world where nothing can die” implies a pretty good understanding of natural selection.
But regardless, my point is that Joyce is against evolution because of incompatible systems of beliefs, not lack of knowledge. It’s not like Becky who went from “yeah right, carbon dating” to “ooooh, 9000 years old corn” after a few hours with a cute dinosaur chick and a textbook.
I don’t doubt that Joyce has a flawed understanding of how evolution works – after all, she received the same science education as Becky, and we know from her conversations with Dina how that was handled. Her struggle with it here, however, doesn’t really stem from any misconceptions but instead with how intwined YEC and a benevolent God are in her personal beliefs. She’s seen enough bad recently that she desperately needs the latter of the two, which means clinging harder to the former.
“Intelligent Design” vs. some sort of intelligent design is something to keep in mind.
I mean, it makes a lot of sense that some sort of intelligence, programming in a quaternary language (DNA) developed a system for change and advancement. Saying that random magic happened that made us all eventually appear is almost as bad as “Spontaneous Generation”, which is essentially the argument on the other side.
Of course, this kicks the can down the road, but when I start looking at the biggest picture, my head begins to hurt.
Yeah, I’m talking about the Intelligent Design movement, specifically the one that writes textbooks and lobbies to be taught in school.
But to think of the emergence of life as “Spontaneous Generation” is a gross oversimplification. The best models we have are much better described as chemical evolution that eventually turn into biological evolution.
Also, given all the data we have nowadays, some ancient DNA-programmer would answer fewer questions than chemical-biological evolution, even without asking questions about the programmer itself.
There’s nothing “random” about the formation of DNA. Chemicals can only combine in certain ways; proteins can only have so many folds. It’s not “random” in the least.
This is not to say there had to be a Programmer to get it all started, just that, for instance, water isn’t random, it’s the most stable configuration in which hydrogen and oxygen can mix. And while the chemical compounds in DNA are at least an order of magnitude more complex than atomic elements, they’re still limited in exactly how they can link together.
The famed 747 in a tornado becomes much easier to “randomly” assemble if you limit how the parts can impact one another…
I also think it’s important and beautiful that Becky makes sure to point out that this is not her trying to make a funny Joyce-face. Come to think of it, I don’t think Becky has done that since here
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/established/
None of the Dina-smooches or evolution thing has been a joke on Joyce’s expense. It is all Becky being Becky.
Walky: “Um, we should cross the street too, to get to our lecture…”
Bille: “Shut it, don’t spoil the visual metaphor.”
Speaking of, this strip is beautiful . Joyce’s expressions are perfect and the colors of her jacket, Becky’s hair and the leaves make a wonderful scene.
*watches Willis’ tumblrs for the upcoming deleted posts*
Right? I thought I was the only one.
The interesting thing about Joyce here is, surprisingly enough, her integrity. She recognizes that an ad-hoc modification to justify inconsistencies is… well, ad-hoc. Not reliable, not trustworthy, not honest, and in the end introducing more inconsistencies than it resolves. It would be a very easy route for her to take to avoid a lot of pain and hard truths, and a lot of people have taken it, but she knows better.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into this.
i lost religion kinda like this, too. cuz, yaknow, it is a big goddamned lie. curious to see how joyce handles this knowledge.
Don’t worry, Joyce. There’s always the Kalam Argument.
Can I just say that… Well…
The idea of Orginal Sin that I grew up with was that there was no pain or death *in Eden* and as punishment for disobeying, Man had to leave paradise.
To say that God inflicted death on the entire world because of what humans did makes God seem like kind of a dick.
Then why did God see fit to inflict death on all the rest of his creation, which he made and saw it was good?
Why is death not good? Genesis 3:22 makes it pretty clear that Death was natural to Man and only eating from the tree of life would cause him to live forever. Would God create carnivores if death wasn’t part of the natural plan?
Now you are getting it Joyce!
Okay Joyce….the problem is where exactly?
Similar logic problems killed my faith. It got to the point where I felt I was either dealing with an insane, evil god or no god at all. Given those two options, I picked ‘no god.’
Joyce. 🙁
I tend to go with a less…. literal approach. As we evolved, as we gained knowledge/ate from the tree, we became aware of good and evil and suffering.
Things have always sucked, at times. It’s part of life. Just. Now we’re actually capable of being aware of that suckage. But that also mans we can make it better!!!!
My wife has a Masters in Theology, and often says that the Bible was written in a very allegorical style. It was in the nature of the writers to not write in such a literal fashion.
My take on God and Evil (as a non-religious dude, raised in a Christian dominated culture).
Consider camping in the back yard as a kid. You take your tent, some supplies, and hang out with your buddies in the back yard. Imagine you’ve got one of those big backyards. More of a track of land, some trees, some good space. You set up your tent, unpack your food, and have a grand ol’ time. But it’s still camping. There are bugs. It’s colder than you expected, there are rocks, your friend trips and scrapes up his knee pretty bad. It might rain.
And in the morning, you pack it all up and head back inside to the warm house where your parents are waiting with food and proper blankets and can bandaid what needs bandaging.
Are your parents bad parents for letting you sleep on rocks because you wanted the experience of camping outside?
Now consider that the soul is supposed to be immortal. If it’s a soul’s choice to incarnate on earth, to experience the mortal world, and all its aches and pains and suffering, and if at the end of it they return to Heaven where they’re perfectly fine, and everything that happened on Earth is just an experience and learning opportunity… Can you consider God evil for letting us go camping outside?
Never tried actually writing it all out before, so no idea if it makes any sense…
….that actually sounds like a good basis for a new religeon. I don’t think ANY of the existing ones have quite that chilled an attitude to the soul, not even Buddhism.
Illusions by Richard Bach. Possibly my favorite book of all time, and I’m one of those nerds that was reading Verne and Tolkien in elementary school.
Fine, except souls do get damaged out here, souls get traumatized, and we don’t even all get the same shot at mental equality or ability or resources…
Being outside really, really sucks sometimes.
Nooooow you get it.
This is why you adapt things into your religious beliefs and fit them in where you can. One of the common ones I’ve heard on this issue is that the seven day period of Earth’s creation wasn’t seven days as we know them now. The meaning of a “day” conveyed a different span of time or some such.
Of course, there’s also the idea of rejecting the exact religious beliefs you were raised with and either converting to a different set or just modifying them to fit your worldview. Though with this seeming to just be essentially Willis’s religious journey, I’m pretty sure we can guess where this ends up going.
Oh, Joyce. Joyce, Joyce, Joyce.
Poor girl.
My own walk out of fundamentalist Christianity didn’t involve this step – but I wasn’t born into fundamentalist Christianity either. My parents converted when I was a child, and didn’t really radicalize until I was 10 or 11. So I had at least some background in the secular world before being immersed in the Church of Christ, and Creationism never really sat right with me.
I’ve struggled with God, but I’ve never felt myself trapped between Christianity and maltheism. Poor, poor Joyce.
Joyce is the titular “Perfect girl”, isn’t she?
Hurts my soul watching her go through this. Really does.
I didn’t follow the same path, but crises of faith… hurt. Like, physically.
I’m a Christian, and I believe in Evolution. Look at the creation story. Then know that the original translation of it had 5 ‘periods of time’ rather than ‘days’. Then compare what happened up until man was created to the things God did in those periods, they match surprisingly well. And then there’s the kicker – SPIRITUAL pain and death did not exist before original sin happened. Physical pain, yus.
And when you throw in Einstein’s theory of relativity, “six days” vs “13 billion years” boils down to a matter of how fast a given observer is moving and how far inside a gravity well the observer is.
*High-fives*
They match surprisingly well except how Genesis 1 goes earth, then land plants, then the sun and moon, then the fish and birds, then the land animals.
Where science goes sun, earth, moon, fish, land plants and animals, birds. So it actually doesn’t match up at all, beyond the score you would expect from chance.
It’s okay, Joyce. Even outside of religion, almost everything ELSE you ever have or ever will be taught is ALSO a goddamned lie.
Joyce needs a hug
She’s starting to say “damn” a bit more now, isn’t she?
Also, I appreciate the comic from stating a fundamental issue some Christians have with evolution, that goes beyond “God created stuff, so evolution doesn’t happen!” Something that educated atheist me! Thank you.
Hopefully Joyce can salvage some of her sense of faith in a more moderate church/denomination/whatever.
I have my own theory for the original sin… Adam and Eve ate fruit from the tree of knowledge.
Biblical “knowledge” and “knowing” someone is having sex with them.
If knowledge is sex, then the story of Adam and Eve is about two innocents who hit puberty and had sex.
The kicking out of Eden is them no longer being able to live like children where everything is happy and warm and fuzzy. Now you’ve had sex, you have responsibilities,and you have face the realities of being an adult.
Your innocence is gone. You now have boobies and pubic hair. It is now important to keep your private parts private. You can’t run around shirtless anymore or take baths with your fellow kiddies. If you have knowledge of sex, then you also have to have knowledge about diseases. You now have to work hard to make a living. Build your own homes. Farm your own food; it’s no longer just given to you.
Life is dangerous. Wolves and other predators are no longer distant concerns, but close and a threat to your health and safety because you’re no longer sheltered in your father’s home.
Take note that depictions of Adam and Eve usually show a large snake… usually a Python, and a round piece of fruit, usually an apple. Incidentally, the apples are round and fit into a man’s hand. Any 14 year old will giggle hysterically over “one eyed pythons” and “apples.” If the snake is “talking” to you (and perhaps standing proud) and encouraging you to eat the fruit (aka have sex) you can attribute this to the raging hormones of a teenager.
That’s actually a pretty traditional reading– the text has the immediate result of the action a realization and shame of nakedness, and as a distant result childbirth and harvesting the land. And some of the body-shamey bits of Christianity can be traced back to augustine going “ORIGINAL SIN= SEXY DESIRES”
Man, getting some “Wubba-Lubba-Dub-Dub” vibes from Joyce.
I’ve read that Charles Darwin himself lost his faith over a similar line of reasoning. Roughly:
“1. Natural Selection shapes the living world by means of premature death on a massive scale.
2. If this is how God went about creating life, He must be a cruel God.
3. I refuse to believe in a cruel God.”
… made more personal by the fact that three of his own children had died young.
This is why I have Deist leanings. I’m not entirely in their camp, but I
m certainly not in the predestination camp either. I truly believe that the being I refer to as God wants us to grow and become better, and is pretty non-interventionist about it.
…I can’t.
Too sad.
This is both really sad (on the character level) and legit helpful for me. I’ve never been much of one for studying the rationale behind the things that young-earth creationists say, but this comic helped bridge that gap in the thought process. It explains WHY this argument is a hill that they seem ready to die on. Before this, I thought that they were really attached to an arbitrary timeline.
One of the many MANY reasons I love dinosaurs and evolution.
As for an European, this comics is quite interesting to read, we do not have many fundamentalist christians here.
It really puzzles me, I come from the area, which was more-or-less the heart of the reformation in 15th century, leading in various religious wars in the later centuries. Nowadays, most people around are both roman catholic, protestant, atheist, greek-catholic and orthodox. The protestants here are usualy the most relaxed about the religion and whatnot. As I understand it, most of the fundamentalist guys in US are some sort of protestants. How did this happen? Here in the europe, protestants are the “progressive” guys (I meant, they were the reformists, after all…)
A lot of the nonrelaxed Protestants left Europe for the colonies where they could live the Utopian dream.
:(. Sad Joyce makes me sad. Is it weird that I want her to widen her world view without losing her faith? There’s something precious and naive about Joyce, you just want to keep her in a box.
Statistically, looking at that comment section? It’s really, really not weird
I firmly believe that God intended for us to commit the first sin. That the temptation was there to help us develop free will. Who would want to live their lives as a little sheep, with nothing more to worry about than whether or not to eat the apple or the orange for breakfast?
Joyce, looking crazy there. The idea of any scientific theory is to predict. Evolution also predicts. God may as well have created the world 7000 years ago in such a way as to give us hints how it will develop from now on. Though, lucky for us, current Catholic dogma says God created the world much earlier, and going by that dogma, indeed everybody lied to you.
Oh, hey! I know you!
wut.
This isn’t even the first time somebody tells me “Oh, hey! I know you!” It feels really weird.
Not Joyce’s fault…
Yes, Joyce, you’ve finally figured it out!
I don’t want to keep her in a box, I want her to find a good, progressive mainline protestant or Catholic church. Or at Minimum, go read Fred Clark at Patheos/Slacktivist. This is exactly kind of crisis he talks about a lot over there. When the whole fundamentalist edifice crumbles down on it’s own contradictions….
Look, I’m going to put it quite plainly.
Science does NOT preclude the existence of a “Creator”.
At the beginning, there weren’t even mathematical concepts like random number theory, Calculus, etc.
Heck, TIME itself didn’t even exist. Nor did SPACE.
This all came out as a result of the Initial Moment.
Whether it was through the intersection of two or more other, older universes, a singularity that just exploded, or, even “God” saying “Let there be light”, we just DON’T really know.
In fact, we may NEVER know.
As Carl Sagan Implied in his book “Contact”, some things you just have to take on faith.
Faith in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. Just how some people become so obsessed with their faith to preclude anyone else’s belief. THAT’s when things go horribly wrong.
All the evil in the world, we blame on God or the Devil, that’s a cop out.
The evil in the world, WE do to ourselves.
We have a limited life span which makes us appreciate what we have all the more so, because, sooner or later, we know it, and eventually WE, will be gone, but hopefully not forgotten.
Faith in a creator is NOT an evil in itself. When it becomes an all consuming obsession that turns to radicalism, THAT’s when the line is crossed.
Whether or not there IS a creator, I don’t honestly know. I believe that there is, as there are just too many wierd things that happen that science simply can’t explain at present.
And as I said before, when the Universe was formed, Math didn’t even exist, yet Chaos mathematics came out of this, and we’ve discovered, to our astonishment, random numbers aren’t really random.
They form bell curves and fractals and appear to be the basis of DNA and even nautilis shells.
So I ask myself, “How the heck did THAT happen?”
Me? I got no answers.
I just take it on faith that it all just works.
Round of applause for this. Smartest thing I’ve read all day.
Some epiphanies are more painful than others.
For some reason my mind jumped to anyurisms, and I thought, ‘well, that is definitely true!’, and then I saw what you actually said, and was like ‘well, it still works’.
Raised Catholic, sorta agnostic/religio-anarchist personally. I belive there is something behind reality, and there is something after death; but A) Humans aren’t yet capable of fully understanding it yet, and lack the clues needed to fully suss it out and B) All Religions are like the man in Plato’s cave, trying to suss out what a three dimensional object is by looking at its flickering shadow cast on a rough stone wall by a dieing fire (or those blind guys trying to figure out what an elephant is by touching different parts and violently disagreeing with each other). This results in C) Religious texts which often seem to agree on certain moral issues (i.e. Maybe we shouldn’t kill each other for every little thing? Stealing shit is wrong) but diverge on details and application. This is not the result of one God getting it right and everyone else being wrong, it is humanity trying to understand something greater than itself. So we anthropomorphize a fundamentally non-human entity. Finally D) Science, when practiced and applied properly is fundamentally non-moral, it is a bull-shit detector. It is also the most reliable holy book in the universe. If there is a God, Goddess, Flying Spaghetti Monster, what have you the language He/She/It/Them wrote in was not Latin, Hebrew, Hindi, Sanstrik, or any other human speech. It was math, DNA, geologic strata, star dust, protons and neutrons, fossils, tides, gravity… hang on I have a link that applies here… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-vDhYTlCNw I first heard this song when I was about Joyce’s age, in my first year at college (back in the heady days of Napster no less, yes I’m old shut up you whipper snappers, get off my lawn)
All that said, in day to day life just try to be pleasant, don’t be a jerk, try not to do anything stupid. Some things are just ineffable, trying to eff them just Fs yourself in the end.
My first time commenting here. I’ve been lurking, reading DOA for about a year now. As is my wont, once I ‘discover’ a new webcomic, I usually go to the first one and depending on how long it’s been around, spend days and weeks even to get up to the current page.
Today’s comic is particularly emotional and iconic to me, as I had that revelation albeit at a much younger age than Joyce. Like MutantSentry, I was raised catholic and am currently very much agnostic/religio-anarchist (thanks, love that description and I have purloined it for my lexicon). I am also a serious science freak, for lack of a better word. If it paid money, I’d be a professional college student, taking ALL the science courses. That an understanding of the very basic operating principles of life is sadly considered only the province of the socially awkward and presumably intellectually gifted aka nerds is one of the greatest ‘sins’ of humanity. What I consider the penultimate ‘sin’ (for lack of a better word) is willful ignorance or the refusal to learn because it is hard. What I consider the ULTIMATE ‘sin’ is to encourage and enforce this willful ignorance upon others as a means to control them. This is one of my main gripes with the Church, although they claim they have reformed their ways, in my mind it is unforgivable that they ever did in the first place. Yes, I am still that angry all these decades later.
That youtube link MutantSentry posted I had never seen before, I watched and listened, with tears in my eyes. I practically knew the lyrics before they were sung or captioned. It just may be one of the best songs I’ve ever heard that summed up how I feel about the amazing mysteries that the world, life, science et al. Thank you for posting that, and thank the rest of you for your interesting comments that kept me reading until I came across that link. It made my day.
Hey Raul, no problem. Can you belive I found that song originally by looking for Doctor Demento stuff? Which lead me to filk, which lead me to that (and a lot more, if you like space you should good Leslie Fish Eagle has Landed).
And I guess I should make it clear, I believe there is more to reality than we know, possibly more than we CAN know. So I have spiritual beliefs, but all religions are flawed because they are based on mankind’s imperfect understanding. (So when I say religio-anarchist I’m saying I mostly reject organized churches and dogma—that said the current Pope is awesome). The best way to approach the divine is to learn about the universe we live in.
I love that song. I found it years ago, when I went through a filk phase. I should hunt down some more. 🙂
In a way it harkens back to an older approach: A lot of early scientists were very religious, trying to understand the wonders of God’s Creation.
As an ex-catholic you may find it interesting that the Medievals basically held the same view of science you do– nature was discussed in terms of scripture and if you read it like you do scripture, if you investigated it like you would the meaning of a text in a book, you could come to true knowledge of its author.
Unfortunatly when investigations and observations started to lead to answers that questioned the Church’s teachings they clamped down. re: Galileo. That said the Catholic Church is actually down with most mainstream science these days, even Evolution. They get a bit leery about physicists poking around the first moments of the Big Bang.
Note carefully that she is NOT to the point of “God is either evil or not real”. She HAS found the contradiction in dogma she was taught – that Man is responsible for all sin through the Original Sin. Hence the eternal shame which must be forgiven even in a newborn. This a view adopted by Catholicism and rejected by most mainstream Protestant faiths. Whether Joyce will find her way to the essential existential crisis and how she responds to it is TBV – To Be Revealed.
Losing your faith is always difficult I think. It doesn’t help when people who you care about seem to be moving away from it.
It certainly doesnt help that Joyces situation after Ross likely makes it harder, and she definantely seems more cynical and angry.
I remember when I lost faith. Not the exact date but I remember it for several reasons.
I wasn’t a super bible thumper by any means but knowing there was some other power out there looking out for us made me feel better.
My parents really only baptised me so I could get into primary school (this was in Ireland at like 1996 or 1997 i dont remember (i was born in 1995 and wasnt baptised when I was a baby). Most schools were still run pretty much by the church and you were required to be baptised before going to school. but while neither me nor my family were super religious I always felt happier knowing that god was there looking after me.
As time went and I reached 13 years old I started questioning my sexuality.
At the time i went to an all boys catholic school.
You can imagine the homophobia in an all boys irish catholic secondary school (or high school for you americans) so naturally I denied it like an embarrassing christmas photo. And even then I didn’t even believe I was gay I just thought they were dumb thoughts.
Over time I came to the realization that I was gay.
During this course of time was the first I had even heard of the bible being against homosexuality and it didn’t make me want to come out any faster.
It made me hate myself and other LGBTQ people and even today those internilized feelings show there ugly head from time to time despite trying to change.
At some point I came to the conclusion that nothing was wrong with me, and couldn’t believe in a religion that despite claiming to be about love and how god loves everyone, woudl discriminate against anyone especially for WHO they love.
As I stopped believing both a weight was lifted and another as added. I was happy I know longer had to be so ashamed of myself (though I didnt come out for a while after) but the prospect of death terrified me, as I went my whole life believing that when I die my soul would go to heaven, So I was terrified of the smallest things. Things my brain decided to play out complex scenarios of how this pencil could kill me.
So I was angry and upset and just impossible to approach at the time.
I like to think I have finally moved passed it, but sometimes I feel inklings of that fear during my depressive episodes.
Sorry for rambling just wanted to share.
I don’t think anyone stops thinking about death. It’s why the prospect of death is a ‘specter’. It’s all I can do to avoid nialism.
What did it for me when I was little was ‘animals have no souls.’, while watching the other kindergarteners act like the animals we all clearly are. hat fundamental denial of our nature was jarring, and I thought a lot about death after that. So much so that my parents bought me Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey! It I was going to be obsessed with death, I might as well have a sense of humor about it.
A is for Anna who fell down the stares.
B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.
C is for Clara who wasted away.
D is for Desmond, thrown out of a sleigh.
Don’t feel bad for them, one died from swallowing tacks. Plural! He had to have just been eating them!
Well you can’t have just one…
Either there is no beginning or there’s more to nothing than we know.
*Glass shatters*
The Bible only says that Original Sin put Death upon Man. It doesn’t say anything about the mortality of other life.
Also, there was that whole world outside of Eden, which, based upon the hardships Adam and Eve (and their descendants unto this day) had to endure, already had plenty of death in it.
I’m finally starting to like Joyce.
I like that while Joyce is swearing now, they’re appropriate swears. “Goddamned” is exactly correct, in this context.
That’s the benefit of being brought up to not cuss as a kid. When you do start cussing as an adult, they have meaning in your speech and aren’t like white noise
which is part of the reason why, while I see nothing wrong with adults cussing as they see fit, I get irked by little kids doing it…
(the other part is habit, duh)
OR . . .
maybe there really was a big bang and evolution occurred just like most of the proof shows, and
the Garden of Eden never existed except in the mind of whoever wrote that section of the bible, because
the bible was written by men, who are by definition, fallible and imperfect.
Do people really belive that a woman was created from man’s rib?
And that a woman lured by a snake made the guy eat special apple which was a big taboo?
Or that there was special garden where God created humanity?
C’mon!
I could belive in Bible history if the days of creation were a shortcut version of hundred millions years of evolution written like that for pleb.
I belive in some bigger force which created this universe and that as humans our mind goes somewhere else as higher being into another dimension of some sort which trascends body limitation when we die, but nothing more 😉
Yes, there are people who believe that sort of thing.
Also, thinking that the ‘days of creation’ are metaphors for various eras of creation (i.e. 1 day=millions of years) doesn’t quite work either, because you’d also have to rearrange the order to make it make sense.
There are, in fact, people who believe (in defiance of the evidence) that male skeletons have one less rib than female skeletons because Eve was made from Adam’s rib. Fundamentalists can really screw things around just to make themselves feel happier about their worldview.
People believe in god. Nothing sounds crazy to me if you assume the existence of god because nothing sounds crazier to me than the existence of god.
(This is not to say I’m a strong disbeliever in the supernatural. The world doesn’t make sense with or without it.)
This comic makes me itch.
I feel like a hell of a lot of religious thought and worldview and study is being flattened out, robbed of all context and being presented as a hollow mockery of itself.
and the fact that lots of people, including the creator of the comic, actually hold this precise view or have in the past DOES NOT MAKE ME FEEL A SINGLE IOTA BETTER ARRRGGGGH
“Alright, folks, simmer down, listen up, and I am going to teach you how to be TRUE Scotsmen if it’s the LAST GODDAMNED THING I DO”
nah. It’s one person or one group version of what the bible is and which parts is more relevant than others.
Like I know of certain groups in India who are fiercely catholic and yet also believe that since Men wrote the bible and Men is born with sin, you can’t take what is written in the Bible as absolute fact even though they still believe the bible is written by Men guided by God and God’s agents.
and then I know of other groups in India who would get violent if they heard that.
But, the problem is still there. If you accept that the world would be better without death or the necessity of farming or childbirth pain or many many other things, you have to wonder why it is so. And if we didn’t cause it, couldn’t have, who did? What God would hand us Pandora’s Box?
Also, it’s really, really great that Pandora is the exact parallel to the second creation story of Genesis. Woman created separate from man by divine, yep. Woman given ability to unleash evil, yep. Woman given curiosity, whoops. Box opened, fruit eaten, shit. One virtue hidden inside the sudden flood of evil, check. I prefer hope to knowledge, but still, the message is there.
I never, ever, ever thought about it that way. OMG. I get the anger now.
Obvious flaw on the a=b thing – a-b=0
Exactly so. And since the last step is dividing by (a-b)….
In the beginning, there was nothing….
Then God said “let there be light”.
There was still nothing… but you could see it better.
Or, from a (slightly) more scientific point of view:
“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.” — Terry Pratchett.
So stuff randomly exploded in the beginning? Man, Michael Bay started his film career friggin’ early then, huh?
That is a fantastic summation of the Big Bang… I kinda want to go reread Good Omens now…
Sometimes, Willis, you write my life.
Wait a second…
Joyce is around 18 or 19 years old. According to the alt-text, Willis didn’t start to actually rationally consider evolution until he was 22. If this comic is autobiographical, Joyce has 3 years before she herself rationally considers evolution.
Given the pacing of the comic, that means we won’t see Joyce change her position on evolution until after the heat death of the universe.
At this rate, Joyce will have evolution ‘proven’ to her because she’ll actually see it happen.
I’m pretty sure that you were just starting from that premise to get to the joke about the comic’s time-scale, but you understand that just because parts of this comic are autobiographical doesn’t mean that everything has to be, right? I’m pretty sure David Willis never had a gay friend named Becky with an unhinged dad who shot a gun in public and caused him to reexamine his own basic beliefs either- maybe if he did he would have started to reconsider evolution at age 19 too?
Was David M. Willis ever a blue-eyed girl?
Blake wrote something of that sort.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Wow. Thanks.
That is from his book Songs of Innocence and Experience. Tyger from the latter part, but is has a related poem in the Innocence sections, and in light of what Joyce is going through seems appropriate here.
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
In a very real way this poem is where Joyce was at the start of the strip,
now she is in that “forest of the night” from Tyger…
Well, Joyce… Welcome to the wonderful, messy world of theodicy.
Or she could just accept that there isn’t a god and feel so much better about everything…
Having said that, I suppose technically their universe DOES have Willis as their god, but then that would be more than a little narcissistic…
Yes, because the tossing out the foremost influence on your life is super easy.
She’ll get there, but she’s not ready.
Yeah, Joyce, the Gnostics thought everything God said was a lie, too. Well, everything the fake God said. Everything Jesus said was still true because Jesus was still sent by the REAL God.
Anyway, I’m not sure that’ll help her, but it might help to know other people have had the same stresses.
Waiting for the Mike Summation on this one.
… Huh. I hadn’t really thought about it like that before. Adamant opposition to evolution never really made sense to me. Guess I can empathize a bit more when something presented as a “fact” can literally overturn your entire concept of how you approach the world.
… dammit, now I feel like I have to go apologize to a lot of people.
Subjective truth; theology’s greatest conundrum. Ain’t it wonderful?
And Joyce touches on the truth; religion is a form of control based on a whole lot of lies.
Thanks for being so honest, Willis. I didn’t grow up with any religion (mostly just asked questions and went to church a couple times with friends when I was younger, to try it out) so it’s always interesting to see how everyone deals with it in different ways. My wife had a total BACKLASH, and is mildly disgusted with a lot of it (though this all happened when she was younger, before I met her). My Mom also had a bad time with it (hence the reason I didn’t grow up with any of it, though her Bible was still around the house for me to peruse).
It’s really interesting to see her thought process (and as you said in your hover text, your own thought process). I sorta ran across these problems as I asked questions of my religious friends. I never knew anyone that was CRAZY about it, so it was always in the vein of a theological discussion, I guess. The major point I always run across is the fact that MULTIPLE religions exist, so how do they all compensate for each other? Do they all go to their own respective afterlives? Is one clearly right and the rest wrong? How do people live with one “truth” while having full knowledge that various other people have also found a “truth?” It’s mind boggling.
Come on, Joyce. Clearly the cause doesn’t matter, since sin and pain and death is all part of God’s plan, since an all-powerful and all-loving God wouldn’t allow such things to exist. What crazy church teaches that humans are capable of defying God? That comes awfully close to making us responsible for our own lives.
*wouldn’t allow such things to exist for no reason
That made a lot more sense than I expected: ‘I deeply need to believe that G_d is good, so all the “bad” stuff – or stuff that implies “bad” stuff happened – must be from us. And we’re off the hook iff we apologize to G_d super hard for being misguided by “light bringer”.’
I learned something from this. Not something that makes any sense in my conception of the universe, but something that sure explains a lot of people who seemed significantly weirder ten minutes ago than they do now.
Thanks, Willis!
Hmmm… I stand corrected.
This is more of a crisis of faith than I originally thought for Joyce. I was chalking most of her anger up to jealousy over Dina as Becky’s new #1. It’s a bit surprising, but to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever had something so foundational in my life be openly challenged the way that Joyce is, and thus, it’s harder to understand what she’s going through.
One question, though, coming from someone outside the Christian faith – if God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and has a plan for everyone and everything, shouldn’t He have everything worked into his Plan, and despite free will and juggling a near-infinite amount of plates all at the same time running this Universe, shouldn’t He be able to influence events in such a way that he gets his desired outcome despite Free Will? (Ok, that’s two questions… but it’s a complex subject.)
And the follow up question would be similar to that which others asked previously – if that’s the case, then, wouldn’t it have to be believed that He intended for things to be playing out the way they are, including sin, free will, and all those things believers often believe are “against God”?
Third, why are we as humans so bent on believing that we know all that is going on in the workings of an omnipotent, omnipresent being and how all of this is unfolding around us in this Universe we call home? It’s like there’s a belief that that which humanity has written in the various holy texts which surround God is the one and only truth, despite that the very nature of an omnipotent, omnipresent being would preclude the concept of being able to record the one and only truth in any sort of medium at all.
And finally, if you believe in the concept of duality – that light cannot exist without darkness, right without wrong, etc. – then in displaying the nature of these things through events, either God has a different set of criteria for choosing those who suffer and those who don’t than we humanly do, or He is pretty arbitrary in how He runs things here.
It’s interesting, though, to someone outside the faith, that despite the belief that God created this Universe and everything in it, that there’s so much conflict about what is true and what isn’t between faith and science. If the source of existence is all the same, couldn’t it be either said by the faithful that either a) our understanding of the Universe is flawed as we can’t understand everything (and therefore, why worry about the fact that science doesn’t mirror faith), or b) this is a Universe that is not static, and God is just patching it as time passes, like a giant computer program, and therefore our understanding of faith also needs to be patched?
Just some thoughts.
Someone mistook mythology for literal history, is that really a lie? I’ve said before that anyone who claims the earth is 6000 years old HAS to be lying because recorded history goes back 10,000 years, but its only lying if you hold to the mistake after its been pointed out.
I’ve heard Young Earth Creationists claim, with a straight face and I am sure total conviction that God created the things we think predate their Creation timeline with an appearance of age. So stars that we see in the sky that are billions of light years away, which logically means the Universe must be billions of years old for the light to have had time reach us, were in their world view created instantaneously along with light already in place traveling to us. And Fossil Fuels, which require much more than 6000 years to be created by biomass under heat and pressure were created fully formed and waiting for use to tap into them by God. And if you can accept that you should just go home and never read anything, since even your memories of yesterday could have been created a second ago by God. It literally destroys all basis for logical thought.
Yes, YECs call God a liar to His face. And don’t even see the contradiction inherent therein. (Except the ones who claim Satan planted all that evidence – which makes him a power coequal to God…)
Some do. Some think all the science is wrong or the scientists are liars or some combination of nonsense.
Yeah. I was raised young earth Creationist. The last blow to that was when I did the measurements myself.
The mistake isn’t. Confident insistence that your interpretation is uniquely correct and necessary for God’s love, while having no sound basis for that confidence, is a lie.
Nope. If you earnestly believe something is true, and turn out to be wrong, you weren’t lying. The evidence (or lack thereof) you used to arrive at your belief is immaterial. No intent to deceive, no lying.
Knowledge is a justified, true belief. If one says that one knows something when one’s belief is not justified then one is lying.
Joyce is discovering not only that they things that were told her by everyone she trusted were not true, but that the evidence of their untruth is abundant and widely understood, and that the people she trusted systematically strove to isolate her from the evidence and from other, more common interpretations of the Bible. That does not look the least bit like an honest mistake. At best they were wilfully ignorance. They asserted that they were certain of knowledge; a deceit.
I’m liking the symbolism of the last panel, showing Joyce walking further apart from the group of friends she’s been hanging out with.
On first impression, I was inclined to think that putting Joyce in a room with Christians who actually acknowledge science and have reconciled their beliefs with science would help.
But then I remember that Joyce was holding up fine until the people she looked up to turned out to be so horribly flawed. Intellectual stimulation in examining her faith would do her good in the future, but right now what’s hurting is her faith in people, in loved ones from her past and authority figures. She could use a priest or a nun to talk to. Or Jocelyn. Hell, I’d put faith in Hank doing her some good.
Almost there, Joyce.
Horrible revelation as far as Joyce is concerned I think
GOD’S A LIAR LIAR,
SENDS YOU TO AN ETERNAL FIRE
Does He wear pants?
That’s where the eternal fire is. God hasn’t gotten laid in over two thousand years, you know…
Um…I’m pretty sure sin existed anyway. All Adam and Eve got from eating the fruit was KNOWLEDGE of good and evil. They didn’t make evil start existing. Figure if the serpent was Satan, HE EXISTED BEFORE THEY ATE.
The original sin, if one exists at all, was the Morningstar disobeying God and starting a war in Heaven. What we puny mortals do is pretty much a peccadillo in comparison.
Eh, it’s arguable whether Adam & Eve happened before or after the Fall, anyway. Satan/Lucifer appears all over the Old Testament, in some cases, as a minion of God. In Job, he’s still serving God, but as a ‘devil’s advocate’, questioning God’s opinion that Job is perfectly faithful. It’s arguable that if the serpent was Satan, then he was still in service to God at the time of Adam & Eve. What does THAT say about a good God?
Huh. In the version of Job I was taught, Satan was just…sort of there in Heaven. It was implied (maybe stated outright?) that dudebro had the power to go between Hell, Earth, and Heaven more or less at will.
The best description of Satan in Job I’ve heard described him as a slightly over-eager crown prosecutor/District Attorney/whatever the equivalent is in your legal system. He’s there to accuse people and prove them guilty — that’s his job (pun not intentional). The accusation is that their faith is’t solid, so he goes about proving his point by punishing and/or tempting them. Hence with Jesus in the desert, he’s still just doing his job, which in that case is to double-check that the son of God hasn’t got too human.
I concept of a Devil was built over centuries with bits of it comeing from various traditions, including various pagan religions of the Middle East, Zoorastrianism, Judism, Egyptian myths, Greek myths, etc. Christianity took the idea and ran with it. So when the various Hebrew oral stories were collected into the various books that became the old testement, at different periods in history no less, different ideas about evil and and arch evil figure were incorporated. Later Christians went back and tried to build a coherent narative for the Devil out of these scraps. The Adversary was a servent of God, the procesuter metioned above. The Serpent was…a talking snake (keep in mind talking animals are common in acient myths and serpents are often associated with dragons, sea monsters, and a host of pagan Gods and Goddesses, including some of the ones Hebrew high preists were competing with).
The Christian stories them bounced around in bits and pieces until we get to Dante and Milton, who again synthesized pagan traditions, stuff from the Old Testment, and stuff from revelations to, in Dante, build a map of the afterlife (with Inferno being the most interesting bit because its full of ironic punishments worth of the Se7en or the SAW series) and in Milton a lifestory for Satan.
Much of my personal library is taken up with books on the whole creationism/evolution/intelligent design argument (as a hobby, I’m not a scientist). I have to say that this cartoon is a rather lovely and succinct summary of many people’s objection to evolution. Oh, there are variations of course (e.g. without the Fall there is no need for a redeeming Christ, etc.), but you have delightfully outlined one of the big ones. I predict that this strip is going to be referenced in more than a few undergrad research papers. Nicely done sir.
The theodicy is interesting and all, but Joyce’s issue at this point is not the non-existence or non-omnipotence or injustice of God. It’s that everyone she’s loved through her childhood has been systematically lying to her.
They told her that the first three chapters of Genesis (all of Genesis, actually) was literally true and that its contents and belief in its literal truth are crucially important. She trusted them. They were lying. Even if God does exist, and Genesis is “true, from a certain point of view” that doesn’t mean that they weren’t lying. Because they said, and insisted upon, “literally”. If everything else were true in its way, but with the substitution of “allegorical” for “literal”, then it is still the case that everyone Joyce trusted until a month ago was lying.
If Joyce accepted some other denomination’s harmonisation of the Problem of Evil, if she accepted some other religion that makes the problem nugatory (Buddhism, say), or even if she accepted that no gods of any sort exist nor souls, then she would still be facing the reality that everyone she ever trusted before she came to university was confidently and vociferously insisting upon an untruth. Her parents, her older brothers, her pastor, her friend’s parents, the responsible adults who supervised joint activities of her homeschooling group (such as trips to Seven Flags), older kids whom she admired — they all told her (or at least condoned others telling her) that the young Earth creation as described in Genesis 1:1 to 3:24 is literally true and that believing that is a condition of having God’s love. If it turns out that there are no gods that’s a lie. If there is at least one god but the account is confabulation it’s a lie. If there is a loving God and the account is true, but expressed allegorically? — it is still the case that everything that Joyce has been told in her religious upbringing was a god-damned lie.
Theodicy is not going to get Joyce out of this one. She’s not upset about the probable non-existence of God (at least not now). She’s upset about the untenable-ness of the particular interpretation of Genesis insisted upon by everyone she ever trusted. It’s about her trust for them, not the existence of God.
That’s a very good point and I agree to a large part, but it is ALSO a crisis of faith. Those things are not unrelated. For Joyce God is the greatest authority figure of all, and her parents and Becky’s parents had part of that authority.
Now it turns out that fathers can point guns at children, mothers can say horrible things and God can create death and evolution all on his own.
Sure, the two issues are intimately connected. But I think that “I have no reason to believe in God or the value of the Bible other than that I trusted liars” is one logical step further down the slippery slope, and I expect that Joyce’s reaction when she gets that will be more in the horror-dread ballpark. Right now she is angry about lies, not recoiling in dread and horror from the existential and moral abyss.
She at least knows that people can be good without religious belief, at least. Her friendship with Dotty is helpful in that regard.
You and I agree that that’s a helpful “at least”. But it’s probably another thing that everyone she used to trust lied to her about.
I’m having so many feels about this one. I was in Joyce’s exact place 11 years ago. The realization hit me like a ton of bricks, and I fought it tooth and nail to hang on to a faith that was rapidly slipping away. Losing the one thing that kept you going your whole life, the one thing you were ever really certain of, it is jarring. It’s terrifying and infuriating and deeply disturbing in those first few turbulent moments, and for me they lasted for months.
It never truly stopped either. I still have occasional panic attacks that the end days are coming, and that I chose wrong and that I will suffer the consequences for my sins. Religious brainwashing runs deep, but you just have to keep pushing forward.
I’ve been an atheist for eight or so years, but I’ve still got moments of fear and anxiety about dying and burnin’ in Hell. That shit freaked me out so hard when I was a kid and I don’t think it really ever went away, just got buried under a lot of other crap.
Apparently this was the Church of England’s problem with evolution when Charles Darwin first published his book. Christianity promotes a view of nature that is peaceful, evolution shines a light on how this is far from true.
The Church of England is divided on everything, consisting as it does of a group of all-but-Lutherans and a group of all-but Catholics told that they have to be the same Church or else. There are even evangelical congregations within the Church of England. Within a year of The Origin of Species being published it had received both enthusiastic endorsement and furious condemnation by various senior clerics of the Church of England.
Hoo boy, Joyce. That crisis of faith is gonna be a doozy.
Hope you pull through alright, no matter how your faith turns out in the end.
Oh oh oh oooooh! I have a speech for this! *poofs into the comic world to give Joyce a hug and a talking to*
I honestly don’t understand how anyone could read Genesis and think that death didn’t exist before Eve ate the apple. 3:22 clearly states that Adam and Eve were not immortal, because they hadn’t yet eaten from the Tree of Life.
Christians would frustrate me a whole lot less if more of them actually read their own dang book…
As a (non-fundamentalist non-literal-interpretation) Christian, honestly #same
I used to think I was ignorant because I didn’t read the entire original Bible (IT’S BORING AND UNREADABLE AND BADLY WRITTEN IN A VERY BASIC SENSE I REFUSE), just a retelling, but then I found out even that gives me more knowledge and understanding than most Christians, and that’s kind of terrifying
Okay, I’m just going to be brutal here.
I get that Joyce has been through some shit. SERIOUS shit. ToeDad, Becky coming out, etc. etc. She has every right to be upset, seeing as her upbringing is slowly being taken apart.
But this kind of behavior just strikes me as inappropriate. Again, I acknowledge that she’s had a lot of issues recently with religion, and I can understand why that might piss her off. But the way she’s taking it out on
Becky doesn’t seem right.
Joyce needs to understand that Becky’s changed more than in just her orientation. If she’s turned to believing in evolution…Well, it’s like what Becky said ‘So what?’ That’s her opinion. I mean, Joyce knew that Becky’s been hanging with Dina for a while now. She should expect talk about evolution.
Simply put, Joyce needs to be careful about how she talks about religion to Becky especially. She may very well start coming off as what she hated in ToeDad (and to a far lesser extent, her mom) to Becky.
Good point. Big Toe Daddy has just given a ghastly lesson in where doing things to save Becky’s soul leads to. It’s starts with a Bible-bashing chastisement….
Joyce crossing the street = SYMBOLISM
“Why did the Fundie cross the road?
To get to a new belief.”
Oh!
For years I have been running across bumper-stickers and what have you that say “3:16”, and I have always presumed that they are coded references to John 3:16. But now I have suddenly realised that they are probably coded references to Genesis 3:16 instead. Yuck!
Its all right Joyce just think of it as a godpertunity
Here’s a scary thought, in 2000 years will there be a religion based on the teachings of Willis as discussed by his apostles in the epistles known as “The DoA Comments”? (Found after the next mass extinction on a SD card by a shepherd throwing rocks into a cave, of course.)
Well of course. The interesting question is what will the sects be arguing about?
Eating cereal is a sacred duty for the Dinarains.
The rites of the Joeians cannot be discussed in a family comment thread …
You are forgetting the flame wars launched between the faction that holds the timeline of Roomies/It’sWalky/Shortpacked to be the one true word and those that hold Dumbing of Age as the true Revelation. And the heretical sect that holds both are true, and their internal inconsistencies is proof of their divine nature
That is some of the most broken and irrational theology I’ve ever heard.
Sadly, it’s far from the most broken and irrational theology I’ve heard.
This, at least, is internally consistent.
No, no, Joyce, you’re forgetting that God created the animals before he created us.
It was the dinosaurs, Joyce. The dinosaurs brought sin into this world.
The satanistic, homosexual dinosaurs.
Did God create the animals before he created us? Genesis 1:24–27 says so, but Genesis 2:18–19 says that Adam was created before the beasts.
Eh, one out of x (for any x) is good enough for bible interpretation. 😉
I thought that Eden was also the place that didn’t have the evil and the death in it and the rest of the world… and then Adam and Eve got dumped out into it because of original sin. Possibly to live among the humans who weren’t the chosen types who were already there. (I dunno I’m not that big on theology.)
That’s the version I was taught, but in our version the only humans anywhere were Adam and Eve.
But wasn’t there a woman turned demon named Lillith who had some hand in the original story? I’m a really lax Christain and I know I heard that somewhere. Don’t remember where though.
I belive that is from Jewish texts that weren’t part of the Talmud, and didn’t get included in the works that became the Old Testament for Christians. You might have heard it any number of places, Lilith is a popular character for horror stories and comics, she is a Vampire in the Marvel Universe. I think she might be the ancestor of Grendel in Beowulf, unless that was Cain…
Yeah, I might be interpreting it a bit but that part people complain about sometimes about god creating humanity twice and then Adam and Eve (Or their children?) running into other people. It always seemed like the bible was trying to say that A&E were the special chosen Eden people who were created without sin for Eden and all the rest were the ones who… well weren’t. It would make sense with the whole Jewish people are the chosen people stuff and that then being minimised in the Christian versions of the text. But again, I might be way off about this stuff since I don’t really feel like I’ve got any dogs in this paradise.
Genesis is composed of various different stories that were carried in the oral tradition before being collected and set down on scrolls. There are two creation stories back to back, the “On the first day…” list, then the more personal story with Adam and Eve. The God in the first story is very distant and does stuff just with his voice (Let there be light). The God in the second book walks around, builds Adam out of Mud (so get down and dirty as it was), chats with his creation, does some impromptu surgery…it has a much more folk story feel. And the order of events are different. Creating Mankind was the last thing before kicking back for a day of rest in the list version, but Adam was created before animals in the second. What I learned was that, at the time, these two stories were probably circulating in different regions of Canaan/Israel/Judea/whatever they were calling it at the time and were so well known they couldn’t leave one or the other out, so they put both in. The Old Testament is full of this. So in the new Testament actually. Mark was written first, Mathew and Luke were basically rewrites using Mark as a source (and a lost work called Q). John is radically different from the other three gospels and seems to be a more original work (or at least one built using different sources).
Let it break, Joyce. If it’s worth anything it won’t need you to protect it.
This is similar to what broke me: I was done in by the concept of hell and sin, the lack of godly assistance in the suffering world, and the similarities between god and my flawed human father… It dead. It very dead.
…that’s me in the corner, losing my religion.
Classic.
I dunno, send me a sign, an angel, anything.
There’s a bit of a false dichotomy here, though I can forgive Joyce (and Willis) for focusing on the two main narratives. And everything Joyce’s been taught is a goddamned lie either way, because the fundie narrative isn’t internally logically consistent.
Its sad to watch someone struggle with the implications of something that doesn’t even exist
I mean I sit here and I think about what shes gone through (Ryan and Ross specifically) which is real, which happened and yet shes struggling with this concept
I’m just so glad of the way I was raised, to quote Ricky Gervais: “thank god I’m an atheist”
Joyce’s religious perspective is her lens through which she conceptualizes the rest of the world. Regardless of weather god exists or not in reality, god and religion are very real to Joyce. Joyce is struggling with her own identity and her conception of the entirety of the world. The two (isolated) violent experiences could be arguably smaller by comparison. I think the incidents are a reflection of the evil in the world. It is exponentially more scary to face the world especially without the comfort of familiar dogma.
.
whoops, my computer spazzed out and I posted a dot somehow :/
ughhhh I know Joyce is like a repressed uneducated uber-fundie but Christians dealt with this by like the fourth century. I mean come on read some augustine.
Augustine is SUPER COOL READING but I mean… Joyce isn’t coming from that place y’know? She’s coming from Non-Denominational home-schooled fundamentalism which… a lot of the time… the lay people are only aware of what they learn in Bible studies and praise songs. Not gonna get high level theological philosophy out of that.
Her family’s Old School.
This is based on his family’s brand of Christianty, you know that, right?
if you could go back 36 years and clue my mom in that’d be great
Yeah I mean my own parents thought similarly. My comment is less the typical “Willis must not know REAL christianity!” and more “God the nondemoninational fundies don’t even know the thought of the dudes that founded protestantism let alone the single most important dude to all the protestant reformers let alone the single most important thinker in Christian history who was explicitly addressing and dealing with problems like this over a thousand years ago.”
I mean the “come on read some augustine” was a sassy remark directed at the character, not the author
That could have a lot of consequences. I’ll ask Mike if it’s cool before I hop in the time machine.
Poor Joyce. I hope she reconciles with her faith soon.
oops, does the new one go up at 12:01 Indiana time? I’m sitting here hitting refresh and then like a frisbee in the distance getting bigger it hit me.
*
You only live once, unless theres a heaven in which case you live one and then eternally, or if we reincarnated in which case you life a bunch
Though, depending on your faith, the goal could be different – to be reincarnated into something/someone better, to live in eternal paradise (with or without the virgins), or to hop off the reincarnation wheel into annihilation. Take your pick.
Where is it??
Rollover is very slow tonight.
The first stage of grief, Denial
I remember this feel…
This is one of the attitudes that makes me detest religion. Children can give up the idea of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny with only a slight twinge about Mother and Father lying to them for years. But propose the notion that there isn’t an invisible being watching you to see if you’re naughty or nice and they undergo a fury and/or terror so great they’re willing to attack you for it. Oh brother.
When I grew up, nobody in my church treated the Adam and Eve story as anything but a myth. We were all told that it wasn’t what actually happened, it was just a story to teach us about sin. I don’t remember ever believing in that story. My church was super chill about most things, tbh. My grandma, grandpa, and aunt are hardcore fundies, and when they revealed that side…it was shocking. Evolution and God went hand in hand in my mind, and we were supposed to love everyone no matter what! Their brand of Christianty was mostly used to guilt trip and hurt me, and it made me distance myself from the church as a result. What made me leave was when my pastor wanted to make it public that our church was LGBT friendly, and half the congregation was against it. I couldn’t be apart of a church where I didn’t feel welcomed anymore.
In the world we live in, it’s rare to have unquestioning faith. In anything, I mean, not just religion. People, and the world at large, tend to let us down; betray our trust. To have real faith in something, and suddenly have that faith ripped apart…is worse than death.
For a while at least.
Sometimes it can really be like dying, because you stop being the person you were; the ethics and morality that form your idea of “you”, based on faith, become ashes, and in their place a predatory kind of anger grows, one that seeks to tear the world down.
Losing faith can make you a monster.
…did anyone else think about The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight when reading this… I kinda want to see Joyce-as-Joker art now…
I doubt anyone will read this, since this strip is 5 days old and there are already a huge number of comments… but, here goes.
1) Assume that there is an Immortal Soul.
2) Assume there is not reincarnation.
3) Assume an Omni-Benevolent God.
1 and 2 tell us that Human existence is thus, most likely, the larval stage of the Soul’s Journey (see Kabbalah). Larval are children… no matter how old they are. 3 tells us then that everything we perceive as Evil is no more than the bickering of children… to God. God’s perceptions of Evil and our perception of Evil are two different things. God gives rules and if we break those rules, we are punished with time out which, to our current perception, is in the most horrible nasty place ever and lasts for eternity, but again, to God, it is merely a place where we can consider what we did wrong for a few… periods of time. A Kalpa or two.
Yes, I am aware that (and I’m a Jewish Rabbi saying this) that this compares the Genocide of 6 million of my fellows to a 6 year old punching his sister because she took his truck… but the only way those three statments actually make sense is if God has an utterly different perspective on the nature of actual evil than mankind does. And that’s fair. God has far vaster frame of reference. I say all this, even though Judaism doesn’t believe in eternal damnation, original sin, or the Omni-Benevolence of God. The God of our fathers has made mistakes and all the tree of knowledge gave us was knowledge of good and evil. We became able to percieve it and thus prey to all its temptations. We also don’t believe in the Devil. The closest we have is Yetzer-Hara… the Wicked Impulse, the temptation to do wrong… but Yetzer-Hara is essentially a Shoulder Devil, a personal wickedness… and balanced by Yetzer-Tov. We all have the capacity to do good or ill because only in that can we grow, mature, understand love and grace, pain and forgiveness. But all the laws of Judaism are punished in this world, not the next. God gives the laws, the commandments, in the form of Mitzvot. Good Deeds. To fail at them is not to be evil… it is to be Human. To succeed is to be a Good Person… but to try is also to be a Good Person, even if you fail. Faith is a Journey, and if God Judges anything, he’ll judge how much you’ve grown when you stand before her throne.
I don’t know if you will come back to read this reply, but I keep coming back to this thread so here goes.
I agree with your position that God has a vastly different reference. I think a lot of religious thought is high colored by a natural human impulse to anthropomorphism the Divine. As I said elsewhere in these comments, I am spiritual, Christian leaning, but I belive humans wrote the bible and all organized religions are full of falibue human beings and any given dogma will have centuries of confusion, misunderstanding, and dozens of cultural biases built into it; many of which don’t make sense in the modern world. So I used the term agnostic/religio-anarchist. I am very interested in the idea of Yetzer-Hara and Yetzer-Tov, but confused by comment about Judisim not having a Devil. The Adversary appears as a major character in the book of Job. In the Christian Tradition he has been lumped into the character of the Devil (along with the Serpent from Eden, and a few other Old Testament figures). I know the modern idea of the Devil has scant biblical president (outside of Revelations and other end time sections like in Daniel), but some of the seeds are there. I am curious in the Jewish tradition regarding the Serpent and the Adversary from Job. Is The Serpent just a talking animal? Or was it Eve’s Yetzer-Hara? I have heard that the Adversary was sort of God’s quality control agent, keeping him honest in his assessment of creation.
I’m pretty sure the relevant Biblical chapters just say that Adam and Eve were allowed to eat the fruit of eternal life in the Garden of Eden, not that nothing else could die, so a lot of what you just said is wrong anyway Dorothy.
For that matter, you won’t even find the term “Original Sin” in the Bible.
You do find the phrase “the wages of sin is death,” however, which would be the foundation of Joyce’s Christian belief system. “Original sin,” even if those two words aren’t used next to each other in English translations, is still an important component of Paul’s teachings. It’s like saying that “the separation of church and state” isn’t an idea presented in the Bill of Rights because those specific words aren’t used, even though the First Amendment lays out that idea pretty clearly using different words.
funny thing, in the garden of eden evil came from god
eve’s “sin” was curiosity, and maybe naivety and credulity (which could be blamed on innocence), Adam’s was listening to his wife (silly egg)
but god created evil and put it in the garden.
which is oddly reminiscent of the story of epimetheus where zeus created evil/misfortune and had Pandora release it.
stop being me joyce
staaaaaaahhhhhhppppppppp
too many memories, but it hurts so good
ugh why do i even like feeling things that hurt
Heeeyyyy, she’s finally getting it! Good girl! Have cookie.
Things don’t need to die in order for evolution to work… Things just need to be able to breed. And some things out-breed each other.