I’m just curious how one leaps from “the god my parents raised me to believe isn’t real” to “I’m positive there is no god.” Not that I doubt someone can make that leap – Joyce IS semi-autobiographical – I just wish I saw the reasoning. One would think you’d stop by agnostic or deist first.
My sister and I were raised as Methodists by our parents…these days my sister identifies as a Deist/Spiritualist (believes in a god, not quite sure what god), while I’m an Atheist. And yes, I do say “I’m positive there are no gods”, so there’s that too.
I hear this conversation all the time and this line of reasoning kinda bugs me. I don’t really see the difference between the level of belief of someone who says they’re positive that god exists and one who says they don’t believe there’s a god. I’m in the latter category, but honestly, I don’t know that I could make myself believe that a god exists if I tried. I mean, yeah, if god physically appeared and there was consensus on some series of tests to validate his godhood and he passed those tests in a public and provable way, I would probably change my mind. I’m pretty confident in saying that’s not going to happen, though.
The whole “gnostic->agnostic axis vs theist->atheist” paradigm creates four “quadrants” of belief, but assumes the existence of gnostic atheists, which…well, I’m sure there are a couple of those out there, but I feel like that’s such an insignificant proportion of people that maybe there’s not really a point in giving them their own category? Yes, I would absolutely change my mind in the face of overwhelming evidence that says god exists, but I’m so confident that is NOT going to happen, it doesn’t really make sense that there’s some mostly-empty category of “atheists, but like, even more sure about their atheism than is reasonable.”
The difference is, not believing is not making a claim. It’s rejecting a claim. It’s up to the believers to support their claim. Stating a positive belief that god doesn’t exist is making a claim and you should be ready to back it up. You’ve shifted the burden of proof to yourself. And, yes, it’s possible to back up a claim that the Christian god doesn’t exist, but that still leaves a lot of gods.
Yes exactly. However, any backup of a claim of non-existence other than the lack of evidence for existence is rather weak. re: Russel’s Teapot. A lack of any evidence is sufficient to fully discard an idea put forth. I can imagine and propose all sorts of ludicrous ideas that any reasonable person can confidently say do not exist, and the burden is not on them to discredit my claim. Since non-existence is not proovable, it is a faulty hypothesis. The only way to resolve and test, is an existence hypothesis. Thus regardless of my claim of non-existence, the burden of proof remains on those who claim existence.
Pink elephants, flying spaghetti monsters, god, allah, yahweh, osiris, zeus, thetans, cthulhu, mother nature, magical witchcraft, ancestral spirits, ghosts, poltergeists, posession, angels, demons, pixies, faeries, trolls, giants etc… All fail the test of evidence, and I’m quite comfortable with that.
The backup for the nonexistence of the Christian god is, boiled way the hell down, that the universe looks nothing like what you would expect it to look like if said character was real. For an entire unboiled book on this, see _God, the failed hypothesis_, by physicist Victor Stenger (Prometheus Books, 2007).
For me, I say “I don’t believe the Christian god exists” in the same way I say “I don’t believe there is an invisible, telepathic flying unicorn named George flying above my head that silently judges everything I think”. Sure, strictly speaking I can’t rigorously PROVE the flying unicorn is not there, but my unbelief is really closer to an active belief-in-nonexistence than to a sort of milquetoast “maybe there is, and maybe there ain’t”.
As an agnostic, I have been asked by so many atheists why I don’t take the leap from saying “a being of even a fraction of the power of god could vamboozle me with ease” to saying “there is absolutely, positively no god, damnit!” that I’m pretty sure I’d remember if some atheists simply accepted me in that mix. It’d be so different. And positive.
But I don’t recall that happening since around 2008 or so. Admittedly, I’ve stopped saying I’m agnostic in public spaces.
Personally, to me, it feels like to say one has conviction that there is no god is a tremendous leap to make from agnosticism. It feels like a much smaller leap to make from being a believer in monotheism. Actually, not a leap at all: just the “denial” step in dealing with loss, just with a different spin on it than “I’m not having a crisis in faith.” It’s less about there actually not being a god, and more about doing something one feels will be emotionally harmful to that one true god that one still believes, deep down, actually does exist, and you’re just mad at them for not actually existing.
Positive conviction there is no god isn’t standard atheism. It’s called “hard atheism,” and it’s a small percentage of all atheists. Your personal experience notwithstanding. Standard atheism is saying, “Oh, you say God is real? I don’t believe you. Show me the evidence.” It isn’t a position, it’s the lack of a position. Agnosticism isn’t saying, “I don’t know.” That’s soft atheism. Agnosticism is saying, “It can’t be known.”
I really don’t think this terminology is as widely used as you imply. I’m sure there’s a community of people who discuss these things and like to assign such points on a spectrum. And for sociological purposes, that might be useful. But those of us who sorted it out without such a group tended to rely on what googling “atheism definition” and “agnostic definition” gets you. Or, in pre-internet days, what the etymologies imply.
This community exists and it’s huge. They have conventions. They have many, many blogs, including a large presence on Patheos (under “nonreligious”). They have clubs at most universities. They have books and nationally circulated magazines. Join us. It’s great over here.
For books, I recommend George H. Smith, _Atheism: The Case Against God_, Nash, 1974. A highly philosophical treatment without getting bogged in obscure arguments.
No disrespect meant, BarerMinder: you’re clearly quite knowledgeable here. But I finally left church because I was too much of a free-thinker to have someone else tell me what I believed*, so I don’t think I’d do well at a convention that began by telling me “no no, your so-called agnosticism is ACTUALLY soft atheism.” I recognize language changes over time, and maybe you’re on the cusp of that, but I’d maintain it hasn’t happened yet for the general public.
My position is not that “it cannot be known”, but rather, “I do not have the ability to know.” I know what my capabilities are. I don’t know what yours are.
As far as the other things you suggest, there’s nothing inherent about their definition that precludes knowledge of. We just happen to not have knowledge of.
All powerful, all knowing beings are categorically different in this regard. It wouldn’t have to be “the Christian God”, “the Jewish God”, or “the Muslim God” to be within the area of definitive uncertainty that I’ve worked out I have. Vishnu, Shiva, Adi Parashakti, YISUN, and many others would undoubtedly qualify.
In general, it’s possible to misconstrue any particular idea to be the idea you want it to be. It’s easier with ideas that are close, such as “I don’t know” and “I can’t know”.
But I believe I was pretty clear enough in saying my belief is “I can’t know” for you to need to be willful to misconstrue what I’ve declared my position to be. And, by so doing, have proven that even “soft atheists” such as yourself can’t stand the idea that somebody can categorically declare themselves unable to know about this particular topic.
I don’t see the merit of that question, personally. I know it’s very common in the atheist community, but it’s an unnecessary reduction to absurdity, and a maligned one at that. If someone says they’re agnostic, they’re not saying nothing can be known (not by default). That’s Nihilism.
If we’re not going by the narrow definition that agnostic means “God”, the Christian God, can’t be known to exist, then the technical definition is only saying “superhuman beings or spirits worshiped as having power over nature or human fortunes” can’t be known to exist. That’s what the neutral definition of a god is.
Leprechauns would only fall into that if they are worshiped. Gray aliens as a concept aren’t spirits (per se) and aren’t necessarily superhuman either. More advanced than current Earth societies, sure. And almost no one refers to them in a context of worship or controlling human fortunes. Kitsune are closer to gods than anything else on your list.
But my point is that you appear to be making the position sound foolish by listing various “fictional” creatures and implying equivalency. Well, either that or you’re just having a laugh.
I’m making the position sound foolish because the distinction *is* foolish to my eyes. There is no difference between my lack of belief in aliens, space teapots, or Trump’s empathy, and my lack of belief in God, Zeus, a divine Jesus, or the angel Moroni. Why should doubt in beings of worship get a special label?
Leprechauns, or fairies in general, were probably closer to kitsune before Christianity changed things. Even in today’s Christian Iceland, there seems to be a belief in fairies not far off from pagan propitiation.
It’s subtler than that and it’s hard to argue that only specific beings that have been worshiped are relevant to atheism/agnosticism. Many theistic arguments lead only to “Creator God” and not to “who is the Christian God as described in the Bible”, though they often imply that follows.
A hypothetical all powerful creator as suggested by the usual design arguments doesn’t have to be the God of Abraham or the father of Jesus or any other specific deity worshiped by humans, but would still fall into the usual atheist and agnostic categories.
Beyond that though, I tend to agree with drs – I don’t see why a supernatural being that was worshiped is fundamentally different than one that was not. Especially as you go back in history and belief in such creatures/spirits looks more like part of religion than of fiction. Do you really stick with agnosticism when it comes to old pagan gods or cultic figures?
But even more, why do gods get their own special category of doubt that we don’t apply to anything else?
I think God gets their own category of doubt we don’t assign to anything else because God isn’t like anything else. Vampires and werewolves and what-have-you may be undisprovable, but their presence or absence don’t have significance on a cosmological or personal scale. If I learned vampires were real (really learned, had it proven), then I might have a couple questions for the Red Cross; if I learned God was real (really learned, had it proven) and learned what God LIKED, then virtually everything about my own life would change.
Jtbc, if scale/power/significance over our lives were what makes gods special, then wouldn’t that category also include speculative but entirely naturalistic (and therefore orders of magnitude more likely) phenomena, such as living in a computer simulation, or the existence of a galaxy-spanning alien civilization with technology so advanced to be indistinguishable from magic, operating on level of understanding that compares to ours as ours does to that of ants? (Ancient Aliens can make for okay scifi, but those cranks tend to think disappointingly small on the Kardashev scale, smh…)
Many ex-believer atheists did pass through an ‘agnostic’ self-identification stage. Doesn’t mean all did. Also doesn’t mean the stage lasted very long. Joyce has had months.
When you’re that deep into your faith, you have already done whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to utterly dismiss any other branch of Christianity as being wrong.
It’s designed to keep you in your branch, and it succeeds at making the act of having doubts difficult. But once you find the strength to actually address your doubts and leave your branch, there’s not much reason to not just chuck the whole thing.
Yeah. Joyce already disbelieved in a myriad of gods from Amaterasu to Zeus, not only thought that their existence was untrue but absurd. Once the God of her mother was exposed as a farrago of human fantasies and lies, its commandments as the self-service of an authoritarian patriarchy, why should she think “but maybe true anyway” rather than “just like all the others”.
Certainly possible. But I would have thought that it is equally possible to look at the church, teachings, and Bible and say “there is no reason to believe any of this”. “If not this church and teaching, why any?” And there’s no good answer.
Yeah, Joyce has been previously established as
– having an all-or-nothing approach to her doctrine – the evolution thing being a prime example. Probably why she had to start in accepting Becky with ‘okay the church’s INTERPRETATION is wrong but the Bible isn’t!’ as well.
– being actively triggered by songs from her own congregation since the first Toedad incident.
– struggling to ‘feel God’ at all once removed from the trappings of the church she grew up in, and
– questioning, as a result, if she ever felt God at all or if it was the ceremony and routine of church she took comfort in.
I can’t entirely remember if it was established in-strip or something Willis has said in Roomies/It’s Walky commentary that they went through and that I resonated with, but there also seems to be an element of adherence to the doctrine being less about faith and more about a crushing fear of hell, and I can see the ‘realizing that under that fear, there is nothing’ step I went through as well. (Having been raised in a liberal household but internalizing that fear from society as a whole. I think it’s an anxiety disorder thing, or a more generalized neurodivergence thing.)
Studies (for which I don’t have a link handy) have shown that people who are deeply religious tend to jump from one extreme to the other when changing beliefs. Gradual change is less likely. This is probably because having an extreme belief system requires almost 100% commitment. When that commitment is gone (shattered), it goes away completely and a new, usually opposite, 100% commitment fills the hole.
As a moderate who took their dear sweet time coming around I can see this. It was probably 5 years from the point where I realized praying made no sense if god could see all to the point where I was actually ready to say I didn’t believe in god at all.
Certainly helped that my moderate church and moderate parents weren’t giving me any strong reasons to go bounding off too fast either. I think if I had people actively advocating to harm gay people in my community my conversion would have been a bit more sudden.
Likewise–I came from a sincere, but moderate and tolerant religious background (Episcopal Church, in a racially diverse area, with a strong social conscience). As a result, I took a long time to come around to atheism, and even now I lack the innate animus that a lot of former fundie atheists have towards religion–I’ve known too many Hanks and Jacobs to be completely soured on the notion that religion provides an outlet for some folks to do good.
Agnostic and atheist aren’t mutually exclusive, even though a lot of people use the terms as if they were. Atheism is for the question, “do you believe any gods exist?” Agnosticism is for the question, “are you certain one or more gods do/don’t exist. There is such a thing as agnostic theists, but because doubt tends to be taboo among religious people, they don’t usually identify themselves that way.
In my experience, the main difference between people who identify as atheist vs “I’m not an atheist, I’m agnostic” is a willingness to say, “probably no gods, stigma be damned”.
Honestly the difference seems to come mostly from internet arguments with theists trying to show atheists are also relying on faith since they can’t prove there is no god.
As a committed Atheist I agree with us having faith. I can no better prove there is no god than a believer can prove there is one. We both rely on unsubstantiated beliefs (i.e. faith).
Agnostics are more correct and logical. They acknowledge they don’t know.
By that argument, I also have “faith” that plenty of other things with no evidence for their existence don’t exist. Russel’s Teapot being the classic example, but there are literally an infinite number of others – most of which have never even been imagined.
It’s not a useful definition. To hold to that, agnostics must admit they don’t know anything for certain. Which in the strictest of senses, I will agree with, but it’s not a rigor that is applied to anything other than the existence of a God. (Is it merely a matter of faith that I believe there is a person calling themself OBBWFG on the other side of this discussion and the whole thing isn’t merely being fed to me through some elaborate hoax? A brain in a vat scenario? Or some version of Last Thursdayism?)
I’m with thejeff here. It’s not possible even in principle to refute even solipsism with the rigour with which I can prove the the square root of two is not rational. Since no-one can prove that the phenomenological universe even exists, asking that I prove that there is no teapot orbiting the Sun between the Earth and Mars to the same standard as that to which I prove that there is no largest prime number is just the wrong standard. But no-one would say that I have faith that there is no Rolls-Royce in my carport, or that I have faith that the crown came of one of my molars at lunchtime yesterday.
GRW59 is not in my carport. There is no Rolls-Royce in my carport. Sure, someone could have secretly swapped out my Subaru overnight. It’s logically possible that I was driving a Rolls yesterday and only hallucinated the Subaru. But I can be sufficient sure that didn’t happen to get on with my day.
First, I am a real person (which is exactly what a ‘bot would say).
The key word in my previous post was “unsubstantiated” beliefs. “Unsupported” may have been a better word. Reduced to its most basic premise, scientific theory says there is no way to know anything with absolute certainty. As Descartes noted, “cognito, ergo sum” may be the only thing one is absolutely certain of.
Fortunately, most beliefs have some substance, support or basis. One can reasonably conclude that there is no largest prime number based on what we know of number theory. One can conclude with high probability that the sun will rise tomorrow or that your car, not a Rolls, is still in your garage. Most things in life have a reasonable level of support for their belief. (Or, like Pizzagate, can be reasonably disproven.)
The existence or non-existence of God, however, is virtually impossible to prove without actual divine intervention. To assert either that God exists or does not exist is to make an unsupportable statement. What you see as proof of God, I see as proof of coincidence or chance.
Regarding Russel’s teapot: Right now a car is in orbit around the sun. It is too small to be seen by telescopes. Does it exist? Yes. We saw it launch. But in 10,000 years it becomes a myth. All records of its launch are gone. One day, someone finds it (or evidence of its launch or something). Proof can be had.
“Faith”, and I meant it in the more narrow religious sense, is believing something that there is no way to reasonably prove or disprove either by science, logic or reason. I, as an Atheist, actively assert there is no god. As per Russell, it is my duty to support that statement. (For simplicity, ignore proving a negative.) I cannot support this statement by science, reason or logic. Therefore, it is an unsupported belief. The same applies to those who claim God exists.
There are specific things that I can reasonably disprove, like the Earth is 6024 years old or creationism. I can even argue against a Christian god, especially if you believe the Bible is literal. But I cannot successfully argue against the existence of supreme being. That belief is faith.
Proof of God is certainly possible. The Christian God is supposedly omnipotent. Such a being could proof its existence without trouble.
Disproof is not, but then proving a negative is generally impossible. Does it really make a difference if you think that someday in the future we might be able to disprove something, even though we can’t now? Is that sufficient to decide that it’s not real? We could in theory go look for Russel’s teapot, therefore I don’t have to suspend judgement on whether or not it exists?
Seems an easy leap to me. Whatever made you decide that your family’s religion is wrong had to be strong enough to overcome nostalgia and would probably sour you on religion in general. Next step would be needing something to be proven to you before you believe. Atheism would be the go to until something could be proven to you.
Proof does not need to be scientific, someone’s life story could be proof to you.
Long story short, there’s a handful of subtly different definitions for the word “atheist” floating around out there, and not all of them require a firm belief that no gods exist. Google “strong atheism vs weak atheism” for more.
Yeah, there is a long history of defining “atheism” to win debates instead of asking people who use it as a self-identifier what their position actually is.
The same is true of a lot of other words, of course.
Many religions – perhaps especially those with magic sky beings – look pretty silly from the outside. If you’re in one of them, and you then disbelieve in that religion, why would you want to believe in another religion that you always knew was silly?
TLDR: Monotheists already disbelieve in every god except one.
As Stephen Roberts put it, “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
It ain’t necessarily true though, lots of monotheists (at least, I’ve heard this from christians, muslims and Hindus) believe that all religions are just different ways of worshipping the same thing. ‘Course evangelicals of all stripes would disagree
Well, in the case of a person who believes that all gods are the same, becoming convinced that one is baloney would seem to take them all in one fell swoop.
I admit, I converted to Catholicism from Presbyterianism because I did research on miracles. I was annoyed by this since I was seeking a fact based religion and this was the only one who was investigating it but didn’t agree with the church itself on a bunch of things.
When one finds one has been systematically lied to by a source that has provided a lot of information, the correct thing to do is to throw out all of the things that source has provided.
That’s very difficult to do.
There are some people who do this. But I feel like it’s really rare.
In college, I met many who had rejected the religion that they’d been brought up in, and had gone looking for other religions. But most of them were pretty quick to pick one. They’d thrown out “this god is the one true god”, but not the “god exists” idea.
The few who seemed more successful in throwing out all of the crap were generally a lot slower to choose anything. They’d research all of the major religions, and then at least a few minor ones, before deciding on anything for certain. If they were in a rush to do this, it was usually because of the sudden awareness of so much other information out there on the possibility of other religions. Of course, that data is a bit skewed, because I’m categorizing all of the people who rushed to find the actual true religion because their immortal soul depended on it as in the set of people who didn’t reject everything they’d been told by their former church.
Personally, I took less time, though I’m not sure I properly belong in the set of people who discounted all the information from their church. For me, it was just a matter of realizing that I could be fooled by someone who was just a mere human being such as myself. It didn’t take great cosmic power. When any good con man could pull the wool over my eyes on this matter, how can I possibly figure out what is actually the one true religion?
On the other hand, when it runs this deep and basically everything has come to you through that source, then you really can’t throw everything out.
All of Joyce’s morals come from her parents and her church – the wacky abusive ones along with the more standard ones we all agree with. Thou shall not steal is right in there with homosexuals are evil.
You can’t throw it all away. You’ve got to try to figure out what’s just from the messed up cult and what actually makes sense. And that’s a long process.
Which leads back to rejecting God along with the cult. Is that one of the lies just from the cult to throw out? Or something more general?
Just wanted to say thanks to y’all for weighing in; this actually helped me a great deal.
I realize that tags like “Atheist” and “Agnostic” can mean something different to different people. One person may identify as atheist and believe, strongly, that all religions are man-made social constructs used to control people. Another may call themselves ‘atheist’ and simply mean that I don’t believe in God, or a god, but sure, I could be wrong. Another person may have that same exact mindset, yet identify as agnostic. I’m not quite sure what divides the two, but imagine it’s personal to the individual.
Either way, I can now see how someone can say “I’m an athiest” while acknowledging that there might actually be something out there. After all, I can say that I believe that my wife and daughter are real, though acknowledge that there IS a possibility that I’m sitting alone in a dark, abandoned building, wiggling my fingers, pretending that there’s a computer in front of me, completely insane, talking to people who only exist in my mind. Or that I live, suspended in goo, in a bio-pod tended to by giant mechanical spiders while they pump the Matrix into my brain. Yet the fact that I acknowledge this to be a possibility doesn’t mean that I’m as-of yet undecided on the whole ‘reality’ debate.
There’s also difference in what “strongly” means. “I have a logical proof” or “I think there’s overwhelming evidence and probability”?
Outside of math, you generally can’t prove the non-existence of *anything*. God, Zeus, fairies, aliens, the Illuminati, deep space teapots. But absence of evidence, and absence of reasonably predicted consequences, are compelling. Most of the time most people are quite comfortable saying they don’t believe in things they don’t believe in. It’s just God that gets a special label for lack of total certainty, which is appropriate if one is actively undecided/waffling, but a lot of people who say they’re agnostics don’t seem conflicted, they just don’t want to call themselves ‘atheist’.
I believe in the existence of hurricanes, Asia, continental drift, and other galaxies, even though I personally have not observed any of those things. But other people, who I consider reputable authorities, have; and I trust that if I were to reproduce their work, so would I.
> I’m not quite sure what divides the two, but imagine it’s personal to the individual.
I think a lot of it is connotations.
I’ve always been ‘atheist’ from a very young age (with some early complications.) But one time in middle school, I got asked on the school bus, and I said “agnostic”, because it felt less confrontational. Most of the kids didn’t know what that meant, but one boy said “it’s what atheists call themselves when they don’t have the courage of their convictions”, or some such.
Now, looking back, he was not universally correct. But he was entirely correct with respect to me in that moment, and you won’t be surprised to hear that I felt shamed into never backing down again.
Meanwhile, someone else might associate ‘atheist’ with Sam Harris and Dawkins at their worst, and thus find the label toxic to them, even though their beliefs and practices are indistinguishable from atheism.
My experience is that American Christians, and probably others, will often feel attacked or confronted by “I’m an atheist”, to a degree that doesn’t happen with “I’m an agnostic”. It’s like the latter seems to be at least *respecting* the God-question, and hey, Christians are often used to wrestling with doubt on their side. But someone who is a comfortable non-believer, who doesn’t even find the God issue worth engaging with if not surrounded by vocal believers… that’s threatening.
I think “I’m an agnostic” is less antagonistic towards Christians because there is a fairly strong precedent within the Christian faith of declaring that their god is beyond their ability to comprehend. Agnostic tends to come off as merely a stronger statement to the same effect.
But it’s also more confrontational to atheists, because it’s basically telling them, “Flag on the play: you can’t actually determine that.”
I mean, a lot of people tend to see agnosticism as “uncertain of the existence of God”, and under this definition, a lot of atheists who previously followed other religions claim to have spent some time as one.
But for those of us who firmly stand as agnostics, we point to the dictionary definition, which states that we believe that we can’t know if there is a god or not.
My personal stance of agnosticism is that I personally can’t know. But following the logic of Descartes, if I can’t know that you exist, how can I know what you can or cannot know? Personally, I’m less confident than Descartes, however: Yeah, there is something that’s doing the thinking. But is that actually me? Or is it just something else thinking about what I’d think if I existed? I’m fairly confident that I wouldn’t be able to figure out that one, either.
I can confirm from my own experience here. I ultimately left Christianity because I realized I was holding it to a lower standard than other religions; that is, I already rejected every non-Christian religion, and when I applied the same standards to Christianity that applied to them, I had to reject Christianity as well. (Note that this makes the whole processed sound a great deal more detached and clean than it actually was; you probably don’t want my whole life story here.)
I think she’s past the crisis, but just doesn’t want to break Becky’s heart. Also, she might feel guilty that Becky kept her faith after coming out, both parents dying, and being kidnapped at gunpoint (yayyyy impostor syndrome)
The thing is, spirituality is a need, a need to feel a connection to the world and the people in it. Some people fill it with organized religion that holds no extreme views, some fill it with organized religion with extreme views, some fill it with spiritual practices from various places all over the world, some fill it with YouTube, fandoms, …
I‘m not sure human beings can live very long without any sense of connection.
Plenty of non-theistic religions. I feel religion is a fundamental human part but what form it takes depends on the needs of the community as well as the truths they hold.
For example, Vulcans are the most religious Star Trek race but also the most logical.
I figured that given the massive number of real life religions that follow this philosophy and the sheer obviousness of their existence that no one would actually question their existence.
A sense of connection to the world doesn’t require religion or spirituality. I’m not sure how Youtube or fandoms fit in. I doubt either are particularly filled with non-religious people.
Non-religious people do need connection, but other than not having religion itself, I doubt they’re much different than religious people in how they seek it.
I vote Danny. Not because he’s lost an eye or anything, it’s just his new thing. Now that the hat is gone, he’s ditched the ukulele and reinvented himself as a pirate.
Mike has a vision problem so needs to wear an eyepatch? I had a double vision problem for a while after I got hit in the head. I didn’t need an eyepatch because I wasn’t walking yet so any vision problems were inconsequential.
Not just cartoons! On the show Halt and Catch Fire, Mackenzie Davis’s character managed to keep the same short hairstyle for the entire first season set over the course of a year. She had to shoplift to get by so she’s probably not paying for constant haircuts. After a timeskip, it’s shoulder length, and stays that way until another timeskip.
I was reading about the popular ’60s TV series My Three Sons the other day. Fred MacMurray filmed all his parts for each season out of sequence, in one stretch of filming. So the other actors on the show would have to have their hair cut every week so it looked the same in the scenes they filmed when he was absent. Apparently this didn’t go so well in the 10th season, when the actress playing Dodie, stepdaughter to his Steve Douglas character, started to have her front teeth grow in. So the way her mouth looked could change from scene to scene in the same episode.
It’s not super-clear what exactly *Joyce* means by it. She might just mean it as a form of weak agnosticism where she’s uncertain about God’s existence. She might also mean it as the disbelief that God is good, rather than non-existent.
There’s a ton of possible nuance, since “atheist” is the main umbrella term that people expect an areligious person to use, but sorta like queerness, there’s an entire glossary of distinctions that can be made.
I’m pretty sure what Joyce meant by it is “that category of Satan-people that I and my entire community spent my whole life vilifying without any understanding of who and what they were, and regardless of whether I actually meet any technical requirements for falling into the category I’m allergic to the word so shutupshutupshutup!”
I knew someone in Boston who wore a bandana over her hair a lot. I can visualize though not identify some guy. I’ve played with it, might go for when I go more bald. “Out of style” isn’t “no one does”.
People seem to be putting them on dogs…. I saw a dog yesterday with a polka-dot bandana around her neck and a harness with large plastic butterfly wings.
Having had a Lab, I have to, nay I must! agree;
Labrador: I weigh 125 lbs. If they are having fun, then I will have fun with them. If I swamp the canoe, I will retrieve them and it will still be fun.
I’ve seen people wearing them for masks, recently. (Not advised, unless you don’t have anything else. Not as effective as surgical masks or even most of the cloth ones. )
I wear one occasionally – when I’m hiking and it’s windy or some such. If I’m outside and hair won’t stay in a ponytail for long
I wear them all the time. I have thick wavy/curly hair that doesn’t stay in ponytails very well, so a bandana is the best and most comfortable way to keep everything in place and out of my eyes.
Also, in the current ongoing hellscape, I’ve been wrapping things up in an extra bandana to cover ALL my hair. Keeps everything firmly locked down so I definitely don’t have to brush hair away and thus touch my face, and also means I can wash the bandanas when I get home in case somebody coughed on me. (At-risk parents, hypochondriac dad, aunt in health care who’s been making dire and grumpy predictions about the second wave. We’ve been more than commonly paranoid.)
… Plus I live in an area with high cowboy AND biker populations. That probably factors in to bandana availability and fashionability.
As a black person with natural but straightened hair who works out and used to work in a hot warehouse, a bandana is a cheap but effective way of keeping your hair out of your face and scalp dry – particularly around your edges, which tend to sweat out first.
Also Ive seen a lot of ppl sporting them in the yard during quarantine. I live in the midsouth for reference
I call myself an agnostic because while I believe there’s no god, the one thing I am sure of is that no one – myself included – has all the answers. Especially not that question.
“I don’t know, and you don’t either. We’re all just guessing, all of us.”
The weird thing about that approach is that we only take it for God. No one ever applies that level of pedanticism to belief or disbelief in other non-religious things.
Personally, in that most pedantic of senses, I’m agnostic about nearly everything – Last Thursdayism is not disprovable and pretty much makes everything else false. But in everyday use, I don’t hold to those standards for belief or disbelief. I don’t believe in God. I do believe in the moon landings.
And nobody calls me out for it, except when it comes to God.
Do you disbelieve in Santa Claus? The Easter Bunny? Zeus? How sure are you? Well, I’m just exactly that sure that your god doesn’t exist, and for just exactly the same reason.
I won’t say mean things about agnostics here – but I will say that calling someone craven for disbelieving in Allah, Jesus, and Yahweh, when you yourself disbelieve in Thor, says a lot about you.
In the strictest of possible terms, I’m agnostic about all of those. And a whole bunch of other things we don’t commonly think of as in doubt. After all, I could just be a brain in a vat being fed false sensory data.
In common parlance though, I describe that level of not being completely 100% sure as “disbelief”. Or “belief” in the other direction.
Just because something’s a reference to a funny piece of comedy doesn’t mean that it should be quoted verbatim without any context. First blush on reading that, I was rearing up for a “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on” rant, don’t expect that everyone’s seen all the same shit you have, because yeah, a fuckton of people don’t get the difference between athiesm and agnosticism and it gets a bit tiresome after a while.
She did have a traumatic time with every one of the people that drilled Jesus into her skull failing and betraying her utterly. That’s instant critical mass.
Lower-case father as in Hank? Noooo… well kinda with how he initially treated Dorothy, meaning no but emotionally it might have felt a little like that.
Capital-case Father as in God? Oooof that’s a lot to unpack there.
…. I’m pretty sure you just hit the shift key as a typo, but it’s hard to tell for sure in this case.
I don’t think I ever had an agnostic phase, though I was never a fundamentalist Christian. I pretty much went from apathetic monotheist to atheist shortly after I became aware of the existence of atheism.
I actually tend more towards agnostic in that hey, for all I know there could be gods out there, but I have no particular belief and am of the opinion that any god worth worshipping would understand that organized religion was historically Very Bad for my mental health. So I’ve called myself ‘atheist’ at some periods and agnostic at others, but either way I’m basically ambivalent.
Wait, why would Becky have any problem with Joyce being an atheist? Isn’t Becky in full on “revolt” mode anyhow? And is dating Dina, who is giving scientific corrections to certain fundamentalist beliefs Becky grew up with?
Apparently Becky has found a middle ground where she can believe in god without believing all the cultish extremism her church toted. Joyce might have stayed religious if that middle ground had been her starting point rather than the total worldview whiplash she got from her experiences
Becky is still Christian, she’s just stopped being a fundigelical. She has no problem with atheists in general (Dina is one), but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t feel weird about Joyce being an atheist. At least, that’s what Joyce clearly fears; even if she turns out to be wrong, it’s still a valid way to feel
Yes, but that’s not really how Joyce sees it. She’s probably still not fully okay with herself being an atheist, so she’s understandably (if unnecessarily) worried about how Becky will take it.
That’s how it went for me. When I knew my faith was gone I was terrified at first and even tried to force it back briefly. Even once I accepted it, it took a while before I was comfortable telling people in my life who were still religious (mostly my family).
Becky may well have chosen to reject the fundamentalist aspects of her upbringing while holding onto the faith parts. It’s not uncommon.
And while I don’t think she’d necessarily judge Joyce for abandoning her faith, she’d probably at the least be hurt or disappointed, which is something I imagine Joyce would rather avoid.
Ya can’t really have Non-Overlapping Magesteria if your religion makes claims about reality that science can test.. Fortunately (sadly?) Becky has some high profile NOMO pals to look up to like Stephen J. Gould.
Becky might understand but I suspect Joyce is scared of her reaction. After all, Becky and Joyce were not on the same page of tossing everything they learned out, like sex before marriage. And Becky might be in revolt mode to a certain extent regarding what she was taught but she still believes in god and stuff.
It was a while back, but Becky got very upset that Joyce was having doubts about the whole “God” thing just because of conflict with her family, especially since Becky has dealt with so much worse and not had any doubts.
I read that more as Becky being worried about Joyce loosing part of her Joyciness rather than her religion, that Joyce is going through a personal crisis where goofy jokes won’t help.
But I can see why Joyce would read it as being upset about Joyce loosing her religion.
The process both of them are going through right now is forming identities that aren’t “I’m the child of ____ and ____, and I’m a _____ just like them.” That includes figuring out and declaring who/what they are aside from (or if not) “Christian”.
In addition to all this, and perhaps a lot of denial on Joyce’s part, it’s the REASON that Joyce and Dina, respectively, are atheists.
Dina is an atheist because she was never raised in the religion and hasn’t encounter solid reasons to adopt a religious belief. (At least… I think? I’m starting to question whether we’ve had much of Dina’s religious background spelled out for us.)
Joyce is an atheist because bad stuff happened to her and she rejected (the idea of) God because of that. Oh, and the bad stuff wasn’t as bad as what happened to Becky, and Becky’s faith is still unshaken, so what the hell Joyce?
I am not sure that Joyce is atheist because bad things happened to her. I think maybe she is atheist because the religious beliefs she was raised in were exposed as hypocrisy, nonsense, and cant, while the other beliefs that she was raised to reject still look absurd to her.
Also the part where a lot of the people she trusted (her mother, Ross) either did or justified doing horrible things to her friends because of their faith. Joyce believed in a good God that wants people to do good. It’s pretty hard to keep that up when you see people use that God as a reason to do things that you know are wrong.
The full switch to atheism instead of agnosticism might also be (in part) a result of her fundamentalist upbringing, making it hard for her to compromise. Joyce was raised with an absolute vision of God as the only truth. Now that vision is demonstrably false, she doesn’t have anything left to believe in. (Whereas Becky is flexible enough to adapt her vision of God to one that does match her moral views).
(1) The bad things were central to the chain of causation. Yes, Joyce seems to have become an atheist because she came face-to-face with her faith’s cruelty, hypocrisy, bigotry, and self-absorbed arrogance (in the sense that everyone is 100% certain that the voice in their head that they are obeying must be God, rather than their own internal id or something similar). But it was the bad things happening that forced her to come face-to-face with the cruelty, hypocrisy, bigotry, and arrogance, shined a bright light on them, and forced her to see them for what they were. So the bad things happening weren’t the direct or proximate cause, but they were part of the journey.
And also (2) BECKY will see it that way and Joyce doesn’t want to have that talk right now, or ever.
Agreed to all this. I think Joyce is also realizing she didn’t feel God at all, when she strips the routines she knew and the bad parts that come with the church away, and can’t evoke that feeling now that she’s seeking it… but it’s a really difficult feeling to describe, that lack, and again, Becky’s likely going to see it as ‘well, I managed this, why can’t you?’
Becky is one of those Christians who grew MORE faithful with her tribulation. The evils she went through had her connection to God grow stronger as a source of comfort against what she viewed (correctly) as against her God.
Leslie, by contrast, in Shortpacked and presumably here viewed God as a weapon against her.
But also was able to shift her conception of that God to drop the parts that wouldn’t fit with her new understanding of herself. “God answers lesbian prayers.” As well as purging out all the nonsense “science” she’d been taught. Her faith didn’t just grow stronger, it changed to be more convenient for her. Though oddly, the sexual purity part has stayed intact, even while the homophobia dropped away.
I’m not sure it became more convenient for her given that it required her to actively work against what she perceived as an unjust system. Mind you, a lot of the lessons I was taught about faith began with, “It is worthless if it is not actively inconvenient for you to do good and push yourself to do better.”
In the sense that it allowed her to accept her homosexuality and retain her faith in God. It certainly would have been worse for her to keep to the tenets of faith she was taught.
I don’t actually see anyway in which Becky was required by her faith to work against an unjust system.
I think this might be the first time Sarah’s hair has ever been different. I don’t think it ever changed in the old It’s Walky verse. Though I could be wrong.
I LOVE Sarah’s new look! Also I’m pretty surprised Joyce jumped to that point already – but I know she’s semi-autobio so maybe that’s how it works with some folks? I wasn’t raised by fundie parents so from a distance I can see how that just shuts any sort of faith in a higher power down. If I had been raised thinking God was an almighty judgemental asshole I’d probably shun it too.
Now, the question I’m interested in: Did Joyce leave the faith because it all fell apart for her or because she’s angry at God and the Church? Her creationism was very much a house of cards, but she held onto it for at least a few months and didn’t seem willing to waver. But if she went full misotheist, I’d be expecting her to be more obvious about it. This has me very interested.
I’m guessing she went more the route of “I don’t think God ever was talking to me, it was just my church teaching me to imitate their arrogance in believing God was talking to them, and that internal voice I was mistaking for God combined with trusting the people in my church were really the only reasons I had for believing.” Something along the line of the theme in the strips from (to name a few examples): Mar. 5, 2019; Mar. 6, 2019; Apr. 5, 2019; and Apr. 6, 2019.
I think it dates back to Joyce’s “original sin” point. If God made a terrible word and it’s not our fault then God sucks and the whole faith is silly. Evolution actually attacks Joyce’s house of cards.
For Becky, the specifics don’t matter and God is in her heart.
Well of course a healthy dose does, just like an unhealthy dose doesn’t. 😉 You can be sort of agnostic and atheist, though. “I don’t know but here’s my working assumption.”
Eh, Becky won’t mind (other than being super worried about Joyce). Her relationship with God doesn’t depend on other people’s belief. She knew from young age that the people who told her to respect her father were wrong (I mean, obviously), so she formed her own beliefs.
Joyce trusted them, and just recently found out that everything they told her was a godamned lie.
You sure about that? Because when Joyce said it was all lies anyway so might as well throw sexual purity on the pile of lies at the party, Becky legit got annoyed at her for not being her religious conscience and said that Joyce was having a stupid phase she needed to grow out of. The last time they talked of religion honestly, where Joyce was having a crisis of faith, they were in conflict.
Nope, not sure, but I am sure we will ge a good story out of it 🙂
I think Becky’s reaction back at the party was more about Joyce being a bummer – i.e. loosing her optimism and hapines – and Becky freaked out about not being able to help her friend in a crisis of faith. But I’m sure there are many layers to it.
If Becky was specifically concerned about Joyce’s crisis of faith or that she was in a very upset and nihilistic mood in my mind, I feel like she would have stuck by her and tried to help her recenter… not wandered off back to Dina and left her to suffer her bad mood???
I dunno, it just struck me personally as Becky having a moment of selfishness where she wanted the same old Joyce that would freak out over it and remind her of the bible and all that. It reminds me of the discussion Joyce had with Sal about how people get weird if you stop a habit and how it would sting when you were slowly becoming a different person that all people wanted was more of the person that you were becoming less of.
And it felt like Becky was kind of going ‘shutting out your faith because of bad adults is a phase you need to grow out of’ instead of fully recognising that for Joyce, much of her faith and her trust in the adults who taught her were interlinked so intricately, that the faltering of one tears apart the other with it. That she’s not like Becky where her faith is flexible and Becky just expected it to be flexible like her own but for Joyce it never was flexible and couldn’t bend to fit into her reality.
Welcome to the club, Joyce, though I can be an atheist/agnostic/naytheist depending on my mood. I think God could be a cosmic machinery that self creates.
The schedule for the atheist secret society is secularizing all democracies, do actvism for human rights, drinking wine like snobs, doing crappy youtube channels, create underwater cities, defy detsiny and making starbucks cups that will offend fundies.
Yeah, I always figured if there WAS anything out there that consciously created the universe it was probably more concerned with maintaining the fundamental laws of physics to ensure it all doesn’t break than worrying about the morality of itty bitty lifeforms that spawned in well after the fact.
but that would make us, and our little personal dramas and crises and occasional ethical dilemmas, NOT the most important thing in all existence!
UNACCEPTABLE!
That is why we see human problems from a human perspective. From the perspective of a god like being watching ove the universe, our little planet is as important as all other planets were life exists.
… kind of worried now that I’m looking closer at that banner and not seeing Ethan. Seems like if he’s not here then the Mike-looking silhouette is more likely to be one of Amber’s figments.
I’ve developed a new belief system called everytheism, where I follow every possible faith, just in case. I always start with the Abrahamic god which techically solves the who “you shall have no other gods before me thing.” I do end up burning a lot of food thou when you add up all the gods I have to sacrifice to, also I may have had to do a few human sacrifices, you know just in case the Aztecs got it right.
….Have you ever ended up in a lifeboat in the Atlantic with a Bengal tiger who may or may not be your deceased mother for a couple of months by any chance?
I’m gonna be honest, I COMPLETELY forgot about any of that stuff with the animals representing people, I honestly just remembered it as a story about a kid on a boat with a tiger.
I forgot a lot of it because honestly, a book about being trapped on the Atlantic for months on end shouldn’t be as mouth dryingly, fuckoff BORING as being trapped on the Atlantic for months on end.
Well, if you’re merging religions, just do the whole every-sperm-is-people thing from the more wacko corners of Catholicism and human sacrifice is easy and a lot more morally acceptable.
Or if you prefer something non-sexual, embrace Hindu reincarnation as true and kill a few mosquitoes.
With those loud face blushes, Sarah looks almost… cheerful? Almost. (I love the new look!)
Looking at Walky revealed in the cast image makes me feel silly. I now realize I had taken parts of the ‘D’ and ‘U’ (in “Dumbing of Age”) to be part of his silhouette, making his fair look much floofier
I LOVE Sarah and Joyce and their dynamic, but having been Joyce at one time in my life, I’m really not feeling Sarah in this strip. Joyce doesn’t need to be ribbed about it right now. She needs to know that there is a place for her on the other side.
Which is not to say that anybody OWES it to her to make that space for her, but my hope would be that Sarah would be the one to give her that space.
I wonder if Joyce even went home over winter break.
She could have decided that she didn’t want to be exposed to her mother (assuming her parents are still together), so spent the holiday with Becky, or maybe joycelyn (or even her long-lost brother… Maybe he was ostracized from the family because he became an atheist too.)
Oh, damn. Did she switch from doubtful to just straight dumping religion over the break? She is a stand-in for Willis, so it was inevitable, but I didn’t know it’d be this soon.
Well, there was a 2-3 month time skip in the comic. Plus, there were hints that she was having doubts before (like skipping church when invited by Billie’s new roommate). So plenty of time to have her alter her religious views.
Congratulations, little atheist, on choosing sanity over the comfort of an omniscient invisible playmate. Oh, the blasphemies we’ll commit! Oh the joyful heresies!
Well, it’s finally happened. Been halfway expecting it, I guess, although I didn’t think it would be this soon (in real-life time), and doesn’t mean I’m not a little sad for it. As a recovering fundamentalist more in line with Becky, I’m disappointed that Joyce finds it necessary to completely reject all semblance of belief but, I completely understand why she would do so, and it is absolutely her right.
Anybody else notice the double meaning of the title? I think Joyce has “gotta finish unpacking” more than just boxes…
Eh, not to dismiss how you feel, but it was pretty much inevitable. Joyce probably isn’t a 1-for-1 on Willis, but she’s still a Rule 63 fictional stand-in of sorts and the “plot” of her story will probably match points in Willis’s life where he changed (though with more dramatic catalysts, unless he had got kidnapped by a supervillain and some Mario-looking dadguy). So far, they already share “religious background”, “more understanding father and holy terror of a mother”, and now “a departure from faith”. Yet to be seen are “bisexuality realization” (although sexualities are supposed to carry over from the Walkyverse, I suppose there was never a hard statement on whether or not Joyce was actually straight) and “becoming a comic writer that gleefully torments their readers”.
I feel like Danny’s arc in DoA proved that “sexualities carry over from previous comics” is a loose rule at least in that straight characters won’t suddenly become gay and vice-versa, but characters who previously appeared to display a more binary exclusive sexuality may over time realize it was not the sum of their identity.
tl;dr Like many bi people, Joyce May have thought she was straight but was bi all along and just took a while to realize it (tbh I would love this storyline if it goes that way, as someone who spent 30 years insisting I was totally straight and was very obviously in denial about being bi with some Joyce-esque obsessing over female friends or actresses I thought were “really pretty and cool.”)
Though not all of Willis is in Joyce. Parts are in other characters. She got the religious family upbringing part. The bisexuality bit may have gone elsewhere.
I feel a bit that way. Joyce’s deconversion seems ordinary but profound, whereas the superhero and supervillain stuff is extraordinary but I don’t believe in it enough to care.
Then we saw her acting on her misconceptions about atheism – part of the thing with Jacob was “since they don’t believe in God, atheists don’t worry about consequences and just do what they want.” Followed by her realization that it doesn’t work that way.
And then her “do whatever” advice to Becky’s question about sex at the party.
We didn’t necessarily recognize it all as it happened and I don’t think she described herself with the word, but her atheist shift has been visible for awhile now.
Yeah, the trajectory’s been really clear for a while, this is just Sarah putting it explicitly and confirming it wasn’t just a crisis of faith brought on by circumstances. The kidnapping killed any chance of reconciliation with the congregation, but she hadn’t had that faith and certainty for a while. Now we have confirmation it’s continued since.
Ok, I did not expect her to go full Atheist, like maybe agnostic but wow. Maybe she went the full 9 yards and will come out as Bisexual and form a super power couple with Sarah. They would make a super cute couple and really do have great chemistry. also the fact that Sarah knows about this atheist thing before anybody else does.
I really like how this new arc is going so far.
Wow. Big step. I feel bad for Joyce because it was a source of comfort for her but this was Willis’ autobiography so I knew it was coming. I remember going through my own crisises of faith and how painful they were. I came out with a different result but I wouldn’t wish them on anyone.
Honestly, Sarah’s giddiness over the subject rubs me the wrong way.
Yay! When I became an atheist, I had a Becky-like response of telling everyone. I felt like people would feel worse about it later if they didn’t hear it from me. But I totally get the fear the your close family and friends might not accept it. I was disowned by my mother, but that was the worst phone call. Didn’t help that I am not socially adept. Everyone else in my religious family accepted it, and my mother and I made up within a week. But knowing other people, like those in the LGBT community, some families and friends are worse. I was in the Navy when I became an atheist, so I had a support network even if everyone abandoned me. Not everyone is in that situation.
I’m thrilled, absolutely chuffed. Having followed Joyce’s antics since Roomies, that it only took like a few months of in comic time (sure like, ten years for us) for her to lose her religion this time is fantastic. This is definitely not the end of her time fighting with her faith, but it is absolutely progress that she acknowledges there’s a core problem with her belief system enough to no longer be comfortable calling herself christian. Way to go Joyce! Way to observe reality and let it affect you, rather than pulling in and shoring up your denial.
My hot take: Joyce doesn’t consider herself an atheist yet.
Not that this isn’t where it’s going eventually, but I don’t think Willis would just jump right to that end result. I think this is more, well, Sarah teasing/trolling her little sister because Joyce has explicitly moved away from “God is definitely real and my friend and I love him” territory, but is still trying to figure out where she’s at with it. That a major part of her next arc is going to be her figuring out where she stands with the whole religion thing, while also not doing some of the more performative aspects of religion because she can’t fake her heart being in it anymore.
If only because I hate Hate HATE the “religious person goes through massive traumatic event and that makes them atheist” trope. Yeah, that can happen, but in execution it’s usually feels like “This person had Faith, and now doesn’t anymore, they’ve lost something”, instead of the actual work of growing something new to replace that faith in an Omnipresent Authority Figure.
It was a fairly smooth transition though. Ever since she started going to college things started pushing her religious views past the breaking point, proving to her that a lot of what she was taught was wrong, sure it took her a while to fully grasp it, but over several arcs she became less and less faithful, stopped going to church, fully excepted her lesbian best friend, lied to try and get a guy she was emotionaly and sexualy attracted to.
It wasnt the trope you claim it could be, it wasnt caused by the traumatic event, more that she was allowed to see the world outside of her little religous bubble her mother put her into. If anything the final push could have been a possible divorce of her parents, or at the very least seeing her parent’s marriage falling apart like it was before the break.
While she might not consider herself Atheist yet, its most likely because her mom probably told her its as bad as saying you worship satan her whole life, and she doesnt like the word, same reason she probably wont start cussing a lot, only a select few times when it is deemed appropriate.
after that Traumatic event, she was probably one of the most fine out of all the ones involved, when bad things happen she tends to get pissed off from what I have seen, willing to throw a punch, and not the type to curl up in a ball and need therapy for several months.
It still feels only destructive, though. She’s no longer a Super Evangelical God-Is-Awesome Christian, but that doesn’t mean anything’s grown to replace it.
I’m agnostic as fuck, but I still have faith, elements and aspects to it that drive me beyond reason, even when the rational world seems to conflict with it. Faith doesn’t mean religion, and what Joyce has channeled her nearly boundless faith into is something that is absolutely worth exploring, something I’d love to see.
I just hope we didn’t skip all of that stuff in the months between and Joyce has an entirely new core of belief that she developed off-screen, ya know?
She can’t reconcile ‘everything we’ve been taught is wrong, and the people who taught us are terrible’ with a conception of God, because ‘no one is perfect. Except Jesus Christ.’ from the strip immediately prior is a sentiment she doesn’t resonate with either and it was so core to her belief system. (Probably at least in part because her anxious striving to be a Good Christian was to be Good Enough For Jesus, and now that she’s getting some space from that belief she’s realizing how harmful that was to her psyche. It’s where we get things like her shame at having sexual urges whatsoever, too.) The whole CONCEPT of ‘I will die for you (because you are impure and I will save you)’ is also triggering to her since Ross said it to her at gunpoint – we’ve seen that explicitly. (Since I can only link one strip, that one’s June 25, 2016.) Given that’s… basically key to Christianity as a whole, I suspect that’s a significant part of her deciding not to keep trying.
I do suspect she hasn’t built up a solid faith in humanity sort of thing the way Dorothy did, not yet and not fully, since she’s not at terms with it yet. But we already saw every step of her journey to atheism, and the start of her realization it didn’t mean she no longer had a sense of ethics and rightness (the fallout of the Jacob incident at the birthday party, someone linked Becky questioning her upthread so I’m not going to link that one.) What we missed in the months in between was the slow confirmation that this wasn’t a short-term thing brought on by stress, it wasn’t just the trauma, this is real.
This more in-depth exploration of Joyce going out into the real world and realizing her previously held beliefs were messed up and mistaken is weirdly cathartic even as someone who didn’t go through this specific transition but has had a lot of “the world is not the shiny happy place I thought it was” moments in coming of age.
Im pretty sure we wont see very much of her from now on unless she comes back as a villain, would be very surprised if there wasnt a Divorce (or atleast talk of one) that pushed Joyce further down the path of atheism. Carol probably would have taken her out of college if she still had a effect on Joyce’s life at all.
I was raised in a split family, Mom’s Side was Christian and my Dad’s side was mostly Jewish, so I experienced both religions growing up (I enjoyed the Jewish side more to be clear, they had good food). I went on to then research several other religions on my own, and then decided to be Agnostic. Telling my family that I wasnt religious anymore was hell, Half my family wont talk to me anymore and the other half will try to push me back to being in their religion or will make comments about how my views are wrong and people who have my views will go to hell. (mostly coming from the christian side, as im still fairly fond of my time being jewish and the temple I went to was filled with some really good people who were rather excepting.) I cant have a conversation with my father without Religion or Politics (he is rather far right wing and has coverted to christianity through the last 8 years.) becoming the main topic, super passive aggressive about it. My mom is the only person I can have a normal conversation with sometimes, while she does try to convince me to convert sometimes, she backs off quickly, mostly just a off hand comment when I bring up something she doesnt believe in.
I hope everything goes well for Joyce.
nice to hear Joyce has grown a brain. learn to think for herself and realize just how fucking stupid the life she lived up to that point was. also i hope her dad divorces that bongo wife of his. like seriously, working with a mobster to bail out the craziest of your church group so he can go back to beating the gay out of his daughter? fucking wack. and then they both wind up getting killed. wack
Personally I’m an Evangelical Agnostic. I want to convince people they really don’t know if there’s God or not. I supposed if included my Asperger’s I’d be an Autistic Evangelical Agnostic which has a certain ring to it 🙂
All of the “not revealed yet” people are the same shades they were in the previous versions of the group poster. The only changes made are the full colour versions being added in as we see them in the strip
As do I, and undoubtedly a lot of other people who follow a Bible-based religion like Roman Catholicism.
Back when I was Tricycle Bill, I attended a Catholic parochial school from K through my sophomore year in high school, being taught by nuns and priests (with the odd lay person thrown into the mix). I cannot ever remember being told that the universe – and by extension, the world – was less than tens of millions of years old, or that dinosaurs were ‘fake’, or that evolution did not and was not still happening. We were also taught that the earth was more-or-less round and not a flat disc carried on the backs of elephants standing on a cosmic chelonian, and, as posited by Galileo and proved by Copernicus, that the world orbited the sun and not the other way around. The one thing that was drilled into us was the fact that God’s ways were not something that could be known or understood by mere man, and while it said in the Bible that God created the World in six days, we were reminded that nowhere did it say that God’s day was a 24-hour day as we measure it now.
So my take on this matter is that you can believe modern scientific teachings and still be a believer in religion. You just have to learn to blow off people like this guy, because Jesus himself taught us to “Take heed that no one deceives you. Many false prophets will rise up and deceive many” (Matt 22:4, 11). See also 1 Timothy 4:1–2, 2 Peter 2:1–3, 1 John 4:1, and Jude 1:3–4.
So if Joyce sees herself as anything along the scale of ‘devoutly religious’ to ‘Godless atheist’, the closest term would probably have to be ‘heretic’.
Basically as long as you’re not a Biblical “literalist” it’s pretty easy to do. And that does cover most Christians, just not the loudest, most political American variety.
But I do like the idea that Joyce is now an atheist, but still believes the Earth is 6000 years old and dinosaurs breathed fire.
JOYCE IS AN ATHEIST!
JOOYCE IIS AN ATHEIST!
JOOYCE IIIS AN AATHEIIST NOOOW!
SHE’S AN A-A-ATHEIST
SHE’S AN A-A-ATHEIIIIST!!!
And Sarah new hairstyle is really great.
Can I say that, I LOVE the way ALL the students in DoA always use boxes where the “This Side UP” arrow is pointing down? It’s one of those minor rebellions I love seeing in these characters.
I’m not as upset by this development as I expected to be, but with all due respect to anyone waving pom-poms for Team Atheism, I am a little sad. But then, perhaps I’m supposed to be. Surely Joyce herself, who’s reacting to it much the same way she reacted to her parents’ mutual estrangement (“don’t say the WORD”), is not yet ready to retweet Nihilist Arby’s with a triangle grin.
Full disclosure: I’m an agnostic, but when I was in college, I spent a good deal of time in social circles that were atheist or pagan. They tended not to believe that the kindness-driven species of Christianity I grew up with was even possible and to mock anyone who thought otherwise. I clammed up about any views I had on the subject pretty damn fast. I carried my frustration with that sentiment into creating a few characters of faith one could respect, and it’s why the earlier version of Joyce appealed to me. She wrestled many doubts but never lost her faith or ability to find joy in life, and the one trait always seemed to reinforce the other.
Becky’s faith–and oddly, Dorothy’s humanism–are probably big reasons I feel this loss less keenly than I otherwise might. Becky (like Sierra, but more prominently) embodies both the love for all humanity and the willingness to accept contradictions that I consider part of my religious heritage. Dorothy’s hope for a better tomorrow represents a lot of the rest: Becky’s often hopeful too, but Dorothy is better informed, and so she maintains that hope in the face of what tired cynics and doomers would consider “evidence.” Joyce is likely to continue to follow her in this, which means still having faith without strict proof in something.
Basically, so long as the strip continues to acknowledge that religion doesn’t NECESSARILY make ya stupid or evil (despite the heavy Venn overlap of those three traits among the series’ antagonists), I think I’ve come around to Joyce’s journey more closely mimicking David’s own. Not that he needs my permission, but you know what I mean. I’m on board and intrigued.
For what it’s worth, some of the debate-happy, Dawkins-obsessed, hyper-critical atheists in college have become chill agnostics with age and perspective.
I was one of those folks and now find arguing with the sort of people I was in college utterly exhausting. I went from “religion is the source of all evil in the world” to “I couldn’t care less what folks believe in terms of spirituality as long as they’re not beliefs that contribute to harming others because I believe in empathy above all else but as far as the nature of the universe goes, I can’t prove anything and I have no idea.”
Some people go full extreme in the other direction when their worldview is shattered, rather than gradually shifting their beliefs (sometimes more gradual tempering comes later). I went from “new age didn’t really question much about how I was raised” to “angry atheist” in college, and then settled in a “shrugs at the mysteries of life agnosticism” frame of mind as I got older & further into adulthood.
we have seen some of her reactions to the church being wrong though, and assertion that if one thing’s wrong, it must all be a lie.
which doesn’t mean we didn’t miss interesting stuff, like some of her conversations (maybe with certain siblings??) that helped her fully reach this conclusion, but it is fairly consistent
I’m not crazy about missing some key conversations from 3 months. The whole thing with Joyce’s mom was left unresolved… and there had to be fallout from that. Probably a long talk about whether or not to even let Joyce go back.
And dangit… We don’t get no Halloween shenanigans!
Before i begin ill say this So youll even listen Im a Mexican Demisexual Pasifist Chatolic in the Spectrum.
I have no problem with Joice becoming an atheist, everyone can do whatever they want
But i gues people in the USA and specially people in this readership who decider that robin had to quit her political career because of her political afiliation cause that made her a vilian (my god)
That they Belive that the range of faith goes from Insane Christian to Atheist
In normal countries
first there arent as insane people as in the usa in general (im including obsesive atheists and evangelicalchristians here)
People can be really religuios kinda, go once in a while, do faith in their own way, be agnostic, dont suport the church but belive in god, be atheist , etc etc etc….
God i studied biology, i lived in both mexico and the UK, i have come to express my asperger and Demisexuality openly…to the world…and i can tell you that while there are soooo many asholes in the the usa political right, no one is as anoying and as pushy as the USA political left even when i agrree with you guys in so many things your psycholoogycal obsecion with the “other” is as inmature as your oponent, but you asure you in the moral superiority while attacking averything you disagree
My religion being fair target aparently, the only one that is fair game.
Its quite hypocrite
Hell im glad that im not straight or white cause the amount of hate its ridiculous
Why im saying all this here?
Cause the readers here. Are some of the most radical at that. And even at the times when i agree with something i end up angry at your attitude
Why i keep reading? i like the comic, i like the characters, im tired of the audience if i didnt have asperger i wouldnt pay it no mind .
Also F you if you only read what i wrote cause of who i am, that Is really bigoted of you.
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going straight for the jugular, huh Sarah
also, nice hair!
That’s our Sarah! *canned laughter*
i am absolutely reveling in everyone’s new looks so far
I like everyone’s but Becky’s. It just looks WAY to big to me? Like she’d have to be wearing hair extensions.
Wouldn’t put it past her to have discovered hair extensions
Hey, the Cameron Esposito is a classic.
As a person with that exact hair (might or might not be inspired by hers), yes it does look weird and yes it does look exactly like that.
I need a haircut, just like Becky does!
And she smiles in the last panel. That is … unusual.
She’s freaking Joyce out by forcing her to confront uncomfortable things about her faith and upbringing. That usually brings a smile to her face.
I was wondering what that… SHAPE on Sarah’s face was…. She must’ve gotten to murder someone she really dislikes over the break.
I now worry for Raidah’s safety.
She’s blunt and comes out swinging with hard-hitting questions. No wonder the baseball bat is her weapon of choice.
I need an upvote button for this comment, please.
+1
So, crisis of faith, but not ready to put a name to it.
I *was* gonna ask if that wasn’t more agnostic, but honestly that feels more “crisis of faith but there’s no crisis, meh is fine”
Problem is, I’m conditioned so that any time I hear an event described as a “Crisis” I just wonder which DC hero is going to die.
Could be a Green Lantern, we got spares.
In this case: Bibleman
As long as it’s not Larry-Boy, we’re good.
Who cares, they’ll just come back in the next one.
And every time I hear that word I can’t help but wonder if it’ll run on my computer system.
No way Joyce ends up Agnostic or Deist. That girl COMMITS.
I’m just curious how one leaps from “the god my parents raised me to believe isn’t real” to “I’m positive there is no god.” Not that I doubt someone can make that leap – Joyce IS semi-autobiographical – I just wish I saw the reasoning. One would think you’d stop by agnostic or deist first.
It’s a rare atheist who will say, “I’m positive there is no god.” The standard atheist position is, “I don’t believe there’s a god.” Big difference.
My sister and I were raised as Methodists by our parents…these days my sister identifies as a Deist/Spiritualist (believes in a god, not quite sure what god), while I’m an Atheist. And yes, I do say “I’m positive there are no gods”, so there’s that too.
I hear this conversation all the time and this line of reasoning kinda bugs me. I don’t really see the difference between the level of belief of someone who says they’re positive that god exists and one who says they don’t believe there’s a god. I’m in the latter category, but honestly, I don’t know that I could make myself believe that a god exists if I tried. I mean, yeah, if god physically appeared and there was consensus on some series of tests to validate his godhood and he passed those tests in a public and provable way, I would probably change my mind. I’m pretty confident in saying that’s not going to happen, though.
The whole “gnostic->agnostic axis vs theist->atheist” paradigm creates four “quadrants” of belief, but assumes the existence of gnostic atheists, which…well, I’m sure there are a couple of those out there, but I feel like that’s such an insignificant proportion of people that maybe there’s not really a point in giving them their own category? Yes, I would absolutely change my mind in the face of overwhelming evidence that says god exists, but I’m so confident that is NOT going to happen, it doesn’t really make sense that there’s some mostly-empty category of “atheists, but like, even more sure about their atheism than is reasonable.”
The difference is, not believing is not making a claim. It’s rejecting a claim. It’s up to the believers to support their claim. Stating a positive belief that god doesn’t exist is making a claim and you should be ready to back it up. You’ve shifted the burden of proof to yourself. And, yes, it’s possible to back up a claim that the Christian god doesn’t exist, but that still leaves a lot of gods.
Yes exactly. However, any backup of a claim of non-existence other than the lack of evidence for existence is rather weak. re: Russel’s Teapot. A lack of any evidence is sufficient to fully discard an idea put forth. I can imagine and propose all sorts of ludicrous ideas that any reasonable person can confidently say do not exist, and the burden is not on them to discredit my claim. Since non-existence is not proovable, it is a faulty hypothesis. The only way to resolve and test, is an existence hypothesis. Thus regardless of my claim of non-existence, the burden of proof remains on those who claim existence.
Pink elephants, flying spaghetti monsters, god, allah, yahweh, osiris, zeus, thetans, cthulhu, mother nature, magical witchcraft, ancestral spirits, ghosts, poltergeists, posession, angels, demons, pixies, faeries, trolls, giants etc… All fail the test of evidence, and I’m quite comfortable with that.
The backup for the nonexistence of the Christian god is, boiled way the hell down, that the universe looks nothing like what you would expect it to look like if said character was real. For an entire unboiled book on this, see _God, the failed hypothesis_, by physicist Victor Stenger (Prometheus Books, 2007).
Notice, I didn’t say anything about the Christian God. I said that I positively believe there are NO gods. None at all.
But this is not the place to start a long drawn-out theological debate, I’m sure.
For me, I say “I don’t believe the Christian god exists” in the same way I say “I don’t believe there is an invisible, telepathic flying unicorn named George flying above my head that silently judges everything I think”. Sure, strictly speaking I can’t rigorously PROVE the flying unicorn is not there, but my unbelief is really closer to an active belief-in-nonexistence than to a sort of milquetoast “maybe there is, and maybe there ain’t”.
As an agnostic, I have been asked by so many atheists why I don’t take the leap from saying “a being of even a fraction of the power of god could vamboozle me with ease” to saying “there is absolutely, positively no god, damnit!” that I’m pretty sure I’d remember if some atheists simply accepted me in that mix. It’d be so different. And positive.
But I don’t recall that happening since around 2008 or so. Admittedly, I’ve stopped saying I’m agnostic in public spaces.
Personally, to me, it feels like to say one has conviction that there is no god is a tremendous leap to make from agnosticism. It feels like a much smaller leap to make from being a believer in monotheism. Actually, not a leap at all: just the “denial” step in dealing with loss, just with a different spin on it than “I’m not having a crisis in faith.” It’s less about there actually not being a god, and more about doing something one feels will be emotionally harmful to that one true god that one still believes, deep down, actually does exist, and you’re just mad at them for not actually existing.
Positive conviction there is no god isn’t standard atheism. It’s called “hard atheism,” and it’s a small percentage of all atheists. Your personal experience notwithstanding. Standard atheism is saying, “Oh, you say God is real? I don’t believe you. Show me the evidence.” It isn’t a position, it’s the lack of a position. Agnosticism isn’t saying, “I don’t know.” That’s soft atheism. Agnosticism is saying, “It can’t be known.”
I really don’t think this terminology is as widely used as you imply. I’m sure there’s a community of people who discuss these things and like to assign such points on a spectrum. And for sociological purposes, that might be useful. But those of us who sorted it out without such a group tended to rely on what googling “atheism definition” and “agnostic definition” gets you. Or, in pre-internet days, what the etymologies imply.
This community exists and it’s huge. They have conventions. They have many, many blogs, including a large presence on Patheos (under “nonreligious”). They have clubs at most universities. They have books and nationally circulated magazines. Join us. It’s great over here.
For books, I recommend George H. Smith, _Atheism: The Case Against God_, Nash, 1974. A highly philosophical treatment without getting bogged in obscure arguments.
For major magazines, Google the Secular Directory.
No disrespect meant, BarerMinder: you’re clearly quite knowledgeable here. But I finally left church because I was too much of a free-thinker to have someone else tell me what I believed*, so I don’t think I’d do well at a convention that began by telling me “no no, your so-called agnosticism is ACTUALLY soft atheism.” I recognize language changes over time, and maybe you’re on the cusp of that, but I’d maintain it hasn’t happened yet for the general public.
My position is not that “it cannot be known”, but rather, “I do not have the ability to know.” I know what my capabilities are. I don’t know what yours are.
As far as the other things you suggest, there’s nothing inherent about their definition that precludes knowledge of. We just happen to not have knowledge of.
All powerful, all knowing beings are categorically different in this regard. It wouldn’t have to be “the Christian God”, “the Jewish God”, or “the Muslim God” to be within the area of definitive uncertainty that I’ve worked out I have. Vishnu, Shiva, Adi Parashakti, YISUN, and many others would undoubtedly qualify.
In general, it’s possible to misconstrue any particular idea to be the idea you want it to be. It’s easier with ideas that are close, such as “I don’t know” and “I can’t know”.
But I believe I was pretty clear enough in saying my belief is “I can’t know” for you to need to be willful to misconstrue what I’ve declared my position to be. And, by so doing, have proven that even “soft atheists” such as yourself can’t stand the idea that somebody can categorically declare themselves unable to know about this particular topic.
Are you agnostic about the existence of leprechauns, Gray aliens abducting people, or centuries old foxes who can turn into people?
I don’t see the merit of that question, personally. I know it’s very common in the atheist community, but it’s an unnecessary reduction to absurdity, and a maligned one at that. If someone says they’re agnostic, they’re not saying nothing can be known (not by default). That’s Nihilism.
If we’re not going by the narrow definition that agnostic means “God”, the Christian God, can’t be known to exist, then the technical definition is only saying “superhuman beings or spirits worshiped as having power over nature or human fortunes” can’t be known to exist. That’s what the neutral definition of a god is.
Leprechauns would only fall into that if they are worshiped. Gray aliens as a concept aren’t spirits (per se) and aren’t necessarily superhuman either. More advanced than current Earth societies, sure. And almost no one refers to them in a context of worship or controlling human fortunes. Kitsune are closer to gods than anything else on your list.
But my point is that you appear to be making the position sound foolish by listing various “fictional” creatures and implying equivalency. Well, either that or you’re just having a laugh.
I’m making the position sound foolish because the distinction *is* foolish to my eyes. There is no difference between my lack of belief in aliens, space teapots, or Trump’s empathy, and my lack of belief in God, Zeus, a divine Jesus, or the angel Moroni. Why should doubt in beings of worship get a special label?
Leprechauns, or fairies in general, were probably closer to kitsune before Christianity changed things. Even in today’s Christian Iceland, there seems to be a belief in fairies not far off from pagan propitiation.
It’s subtler than that and it’s hard to argue that only specific beings that have been worshiped are relevant to atheism/agnosticism. Many theistic arguments lead only to “Creator God” and not to “who is the Christian God as described in the Bible”, though they often imply that follows.
A hypothetical all powerful creator as suggested by the usual design arguments doesn’t have to be the God of Abraham or the father of Jesus or any other specific deity worshiped by humans, but would still fall into the usual atheist and agnostic categories.
Beyond that though, I tend to agree with drs – I don’t see why a supernatural being that was worshiped is fundamentally different than one that was not. Especially as you go back in history and belief in such creatures/spirits looks more like part of religion than of fiction. Do you really stick with agnosticism when it comes to old pagan gods or cultic figures?
But even more, why do gods get their own special category of doubt that we don’t apply to anything else?
I think God gets their own category of doubt we don’t assign to anything else because God isn’t like anything else. Vampires and werewolves and what-have-you may be undisprovable, but their presence or absence don’t have significance on a cosmological or personal scale. If I learned vampires were real (really learned, had it proven), then I might have a couple questions for the Red Cross; if I learned God was real (really learned, had it proven) and learned what God LIKED, then virtually everything about my own life would change.
Jtbc, if scale/power/significance over our lives were what makes gods special, then wouldn’t that category also include speculative but entirely naturalistic (and therefore orders of magnitude more likely) phenomena, such as living in a computer simulation, or the existence of a galaxy-spanning alien civilization with technology so advanced to be indistinguishable from magic, operating on level of understanding that compares to ours as ours does to that of ants? (Ancient Aliens can make for okay scifi, but those cranks tend to think disappointingly small on the Kardashev scale, smh…)
(Raises hand) There are different ways to phrase it. Mine is “I am pretty damn sure there is no god.”
“I have no need of that hypothesis”.
–Diderot.
Attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace, but not well attested.
Joyce has said before that if one part is a lie, then it’s all a lie.
Many ex-believer atheists did pass through an ‘agnostic’ self-identification stage. Doesn’t mean all did. Also doesn’t mean the stage lasted very long. Joyce has had months.
Well, it has been a few months. Maybe she passed through all those phases already.
When you’re that deep into your faith, you have already done whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to utterly dismiss any other branch of Christianity as being wrong.
It’s designed to keep you in your branch, and it succeeds at making the act of having doubts difficult. But once you find the strength to actually address your doubts and leave your branch, there’s not much reason to not just chuck the whole thing.
Yeah. Joyce already disbelieved in a myriad of gods from Amaterasu to Zeus, not only thought that their existence was untrue but absurd. Once the God of her mother was exposed as a farrago of human fantasies and lies, its commandments as the self-service of an authoritarian patriarchy, why should she think “but maybe true anyway” rather than “just like all the others”.
Does she believe that? One would think that she’d believe her church is a horrible betrayal of the religion first.
Certainly possible. But I would have thought that it is equally possible to look at the church, teachings, and Bible and say “there is no reason to believe any of this”. “If not this church and teaching, why any?” And there’s no good answer.
I think that’s more Becky’s path. For Joyce though, it’s all tied together. Break one piece and the whole thing unravels.
See her bit awhile back about how if evolution is true, everything they’ve been taught is a lie. Evolution->no Eden->no Fall->no Original Sin
Yeah, Joyce has been previously established as
– having an all-or-nothing approach to her doctrine – the evolution thing being a prime example. Probably why she had to start in accepting Becky with ‘okay the church’s INTERPRETATION is wrong but the Bible isn’t!’ as well.
– being actively triggered by songs from her own congregation since the first Toedad incident.
– struggling to ‘feel God’ at all once removed from the trappings of the church she grew up in, and
– questioning, as a result, if she ever felt God at all or if it was the ceremony and routine of church she took comfort in.
I can’t entirely remember if it was established in-strip or something Willis has said in Roomies/It’s Walky commentary that they went through and that I resonated with, but there also seems to be an element of adherence to the doctrine being less about faith and more about a crushing fear of hell, and I can see the ‘realizing that under that fear, there is nothing’ step I went through as well. (Having been raised in a liberal household but internalizing that fear from society as a whole. I think it’s an anxiety disorder thing, or a more generalized neurodivergence thing.)
Studies (for which I don’t have a link handy) have shown that people who are deeply religious tend to jump from one extreme to the other when changing beliefs. Gradual change is less likely. This is probably because having an extreme belief system requires almost 100% commitment. When that commitment is gone (shattered), it goes away completely and a new, usually opposite, 100% commitment fills the hole.
As a moderate who took their dear sweet time coming around I can see this. It was probably 5 years from the point where I realized praying made no sense if god could see all to the point where I was actually ready to say I didn’t believe in god at all.
Certainly helped that my moderate church and moderate parents weren’t giving me any strong reasons to go bounding off too fast either. I think if I had people actively advocating to harm gay people in my community my conversion would have been a bit more sudden.
Likewise–I came from a sincere, but moderate and tolerant religious background (Episcopal Church, in a racially diverse area, with a strong social conscience). As a result, I took a long time to come around to atheism, and even now I lack the innate animus that a lot of former fundie atheists have towards religion–I’ve known too many Hanks and Jacobs to be completely soured on the notion that religion provides an outlet for some folks to do good.
Agnostic and atheist aren’t mutually exclusive, even though a lot of people use the terms as if they were. Atheism is for the question, “do you believe any gods exist?” Agnosticism is for the question, “are you certain one or more gods do/don’t exist. There is such a thing as agnostic theists, but because doubt tends to be taboo among religious people, they don’t usually identify themselves that way.
In my experience, the main difference between people who identify as atheist vs “I’m not an atheist, I’m agnostic” is a willingness to say, “probably no gods, stigma be damned”.
As a strict agnostic atheist, I approve this message.
Honestly the difference seems to come mostly from internet arguments with theists trying to show atheists are also relying on faith since they can’t prove there is no god.
As a committed Atheist I agree with us having faith. I can no better prove there is no god than a believer can prove there is one. We both rely on unsubstantiated beliefs (i.e. faith).
Agnostics are more correct and logical. They acknowledge they don’t know.
By that argument, I also have “faith” that plenty of other things with no evidence for their existence don’t exist. Russel’s Teapot being the classic example, but there are literally an infinite number of others – most of which have never even been imagined.
It’s not a useful definition. To hold to that, agnostics must admit they don’t know anything for certain. Which in the strictest of senses, I will agree with, but it’s not a rigor that is applied to anything other than the existence of a God. (Is it merely a matter of faith that I believe there is a person calling themself OBBWFG on the other side of this discussion and the whole thing isn’t merely being fed to me through some elaborate hoax? A brain in a vat scenario? Or some version of Last Thursdayism?)
I’m with thejeff here. It’s not possible even in principle to refute even solipsism with the rigour with which I can prove the the square root of two is not rational. Since no-one can prove that the phenomenological universe even exists, asking that I prove that there is no teapot orbiting the Sun between the Earth and Mars to the same standard as that to which I prove that there is no largest prime number is just the wrong standard. But no-one would say that I have faith that there is no Rolls-Royce in my carport, or that I have faith that the crown came of one of my molars at lunchtime yesterday.
GRW59 is not in my carport. There is no Rolls-Royce in my carport. Sure, someone could have secretly swapped out my Subaru overnight. It’s logically possible that I was driving a Rolls yesterday and only hallucinated the Subaru. But I can be sufficient sure that didn’t happen to get on with my day.
First, I am a real person (which is exactly what a ‘bot would say).
The key word in my previous post was “unsubstantiated” beliefs. “Unsupported” may have been a better word. Reduced to its most basic premise, scientific theory says there is no way to know anything with absolute certainty. As Descartes noted, “cognito, ergo sum” may be the only thing one is absolutely certain of.
Fortunately, most beliefs have some substance, support or basis. One can reasonably conclude that there is no largest prime number based on what we know of number theory. One can conclude with high probability that the sun will rise tomorrow or that your car, not a Rolls, is still in your garage. Most things in life have a reasonable level of support for their belief. (Or, like Pizzagate, can be reasonably disproven.)
The existence or non-existence of God, however, is virtually impossible to prove without actual divine intervention. To assert either that God exists or does not exist is to make an unsupportable statement. What you see as proof of God, I see as proof of coincidence or chance.
Regarding Russel’s teapot: Right now a car is in orbit around the sun. It is too small to be seen by telescopes. Does it exist? Yes. We saw it launch. But in 10,000 years it becomes a myth. All records of its launch are gone. One day, someone finds it (or evidence of its launch or something). Proof can be had.
“Faith”, and I meant it in the more narrow religious sense, is believing something that there is no way to reasonably prove or disprove either by science, logic or reason. I, as an Atheist, actively assert there is no god. As per Russell, it is my duty to support that statement. (For simplicity, ignore proving a negative.) I cannot support this statement by science, reason or logic. Therefore, it is an unsupported belief. The same applies to those who claim God exists.
There are specific things that I can reasonably disprove, like the Earth is 6024 years old or creationism. I can even argue against a Christian god, especially if you believe the Bible is literal. But I cannot successfully argue against the existence of supreme being. That belief is faith.
Proof of God is certainly possible. The Christian God is supposedly omnipotent. Such a being could proof its existence without trouble.
Disproof is not, but then proving a negative is generally impossible. Does it really make a difference if you think that someday in the future we might be able to disprove something, even though we can’t now? Is that sufficient to decide that it’s not real? We could in theory go look for Russel’s teapot, therefore I don’t have to suspend judgement on whether or not it exists?
Seems an easy leap to me. Whatever made you decide that your family’s religion is wrong had to be strong enough to overcome nostalgia and would probably sour you on religion in general. Next step would be needing something to be proven to you before you believe. Atheism would be the go to until something could be proven to you.
Proof does not need to be scientific, someone’s life story could be proof to you.
huh, maybe I should have put my comment here instead of further down… *shrug*
It’s more a “there is no reason to believe that there are any gods”.
Oy.
Long story short, there’s a handful of subtly different definitions for the word “atheist” floating around out there, and not all of them require a firm belief that no gods exist. Google “strong atheism vs weak atheism” for more.
Yeah, there is a long history of defining “atheism” to win debates instead of asking people who use it as a self-identifier what their position actually is.
The same is true of a lot of other words, of course.
Many religions – perhaps especially those with magic sky beings – look pretty silly from the outside. If you’re in one of them, and you then disbelieve in that religion, why would you want to believe in another religion that you always knew was silly?
TLDR: Monotheists already disbelieve in every god except one.
As Stephen Roberts put it, “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
It ain’t necessarily true though, lots of monotheists (at least, I’ve heard this from christians, muslims and Hindus) believe that all religions are just different ways of worshipping the same thing. ‘Course evangelicals of all stripes would disagree
Well, in the case of a person who believes that all gods are the same, becoming convinced that one is baloney would seem to take them all in one fell swoop.
I admit, I converted to Catholicism from Presbyterianism because I did research on miracles. I was annoyed by this since I was seeking a fact based religion and this was the only one who was investigating it but didn’t agree with the church itself on a bunch of things.
My atheist friends were confused as hell at this.
When one finds one has been systematically lied to by a source that has provided a lot of information, the correct thing to do is to throw out all of the things that source has provided.
That’s very difficult to do.
There are some people who do this. But I feel like it’s really rare.
In college, I met many who had rejected the religion that they’d been brought up in, and had gone looking for other religions. But most of them were pretty quick to pick one. They’d thrown out “this god is the one true god”, but not the “god exists” idea.
The few who seemed more successful in throwing out all of the crap were generally a lot slower to choose anything. They’d research all of the major religions, and then at least a few minor ones, before deciding on anything for certain. If they were in a rush to do this, it was usually because of the sudden awareness of so much other information out there on the possibility of other religions. Of course, that data is a bit skewed, because I’m categorizing all of the people who rushed to find the actual true religion because their immortal soul depended on it as in the set of people who didn’t reject everything they’d been told by their former church.
Personally, I took less time, though I’m not sure I properly belong in the set of people who discounted all the information from their church. For me, it was just a matter of realizing that I could be fooled by someone who was just a mere human being such as myself. It didn’t take great cosmic power. When any good con man could pull the wool over my eyes on this matter, how can I possibly figure out what is actually the one true religion?
On the other hand, when it runs this deep and basically everything has come to you through that source, then you really can’t throw everything out.
All of Joyce’s morals come from her parents and her church – the wacky abusive ones along with the more standard ones we all agree with. Thou shall not steal is right in there with homosexuals are evil.
You can’t throw it all away. You’ve got to try to figure out what’s just from the messed up cult and what actually makes sense. And that’s a long process.
Which leads back to rejecting God along with the cult. Is that one of the lies just from the cult to throw out? Or something more general?
Just wanted to say thanks to y’all for weighing in; this actually helped me a great deal.
I realize that tags like “Atheist” and “Agnostic” can mean something different to different people. One person may identify as atheist and believe, strongly, that all religions are man-made social constructs used to control people. Another may call themselves ‘atheist’ and simply mean that I don’t believe in God, or a god, but sure, I could be wrong. Another person may have that same exact mindset, yet identify as agnostic. I’m not quite sure what divides the two, but imagine it’s personal to the individual.
Either way, I can now see how someone can say “I’m an athiest” while acknowledging that there might actually be something out there. After all, I can say that I believe that my wife and daughter are real, though acknowledge that there IS a possibility that I’m sitting alone in a dark, abandoned building, wiggling my fingers, pretending that there’s a computer in front of me, completely insane, talking to people who only exist in my mind. Or that I live, suspended in goo, in a bio-pod tended to by giant mechanical spiders while they pump the Matrix into my brain. Yet the fact that I acknowledge this to be a possibility doesn’t mean that I’m as-of yet undecided on the whole ‘reality’ debate.
There’s also difference in what “strongly” means. “I have a logical proof” or “I think there’s overwhelming evidence and probability”?
Outside of math, you generally can’t prove the non-existence of *anything*. God, Zeus, fairies, aliens, the Illuminati, deep space teapots. But absence of evidence, and absence of reasonably predicted consequences, are compelling. Most of the time most people are quite comfortable saying they don’t believe in things they don’t believe in. It’s just God that gets a special label for lack of total certainty, which is appropriate if one is actively undecided/waffling, but a lot of people who say they’re agnostics don’t seem conflicted, they just don’t want to call themselves ‘atheist’.
yup.
I believe in the existence of hurricanes, Asia, continental drift, and other galaxies, even though I personally have not observed any of those things. But other people, who I consider reputable authorities, have; and I trust that if I were to reproduce their work, so would I.
> I’m not quite sure what divides the two, but imagine it’s personal to the individual.
I think a lot of it is connotations.
I’ve always been ‘atheist’ from a very young age (with some early complications.) But one time in middle school, I got asked on the school bus, and I said “agnostic”, because it felt less confrontational. Most of the kids didn’t know what that meant, but one boy said “it’s what atheists call themselves when they don’t have the courage of their convictions”, or some such.
Now, looking back, he was not universally correct. But he was entirely correct with respect to me in that moment, and you won’t be surprised to hear that I felt shamed into never backing down again.
Meanwhile, someone else might associate ‘atheist’ with Sam Harris and Dawkins at their worst, and thus find the label toxic to them, even though their beliefs and practices are indistinguishable from atheism.
My experience is that American Christians, and probably others, will often feel attacked or confronted by “I’m an atheist”, to a degree that doesn’t happen with “I’m an agnostic”. It’s like the latter seems to be at least *respecting* the God-question, and hey, Christians are often used to wrestling with doubt on their side. But someone who is a comfortable non-believer, who doesn’t even find the God issue worth engaging with if not surrounded by vocal believers… that’s threatening.
I think “I’m an agnostic” is less antagonistic towards Christians because there is a fairly strong precedent within the Christian faith of declaring that their god is beyond their ability to comprehend. Agnostic tends to come off as merely a stronger statement to the same effect.
But it’s also more confrontational to atheists, because it’s basically telling them, “Flag on the play: you can’t actually determine that.”
I mean, a lot of people tend to see agnosticism as “uncertain of the existence of God”, and under this definition, a lot of atheists who previously followed other religions claim to have spent some time as one.
But for those of us who firmly stand as agnostics, we point to the dictionary definition, which states that we believe that we can’t know if there is a god or not.
My personal stance of agnosticism is that I personally can’t know. But following the logic of Descartes, if I can’t know that you exist, how can I know what you can or cannot know? Personally, I’m less confident than Descartes, however: Yeah, there is something that’s doing the thinking. But is that actually me? Or is it just something else thinking about what I’d think if I existed? I’m fairly confident that I wouldn’t be able to figure out that one, either.
I can confirm from my own experience here. I ultimately left Christianity because I realized I was holding it to a lower standard than other religions; that is, I already rejected every non-Christian religion, and when I applied the same standards to Christianity that applied to them, I had to reject Christianity as well. (Note that this makes the whole processed sound a great deal more detached and clean than it actually was; you probably don’t want my whole life story here.)
I think she’s past the crisis, but just doesn’t want to break Becky’s heart. Also, she might feel guilty that Becky kept her faith after coming out, both parents dying, and being kidnapped at gunpoint (yayyyy impostor syndrome)
The thing is, spirituality is a need, a need to feel a connection to the world and the people in it. Some people fill it with organized religion that holds no extreme views, some fill it with organized religion with extreme views, some fill it with spiritual practices from various places all over the world, some fill it with YouTube, fandoms, …
I‘m not sure human beings can live very long without any sense of connection.
The question of the existence of a (or several) gods might be related to that need or not, but the need exists wether your answer is yes or no.
Plenty of non-theistic religions. I feel religion is a fundamental human part but what form it takes depends on the needs of the community as well as the truths they hold.
For example, Vulcans are the most religious Star Trek race but also the most logical.
They are also, if I may point out, fictional.
And so is Joyce.
I figured that given the massive number of real life religions that follow this philosophy and the sheer obviousness of their existence that no one would actually question their existence.
A sense of connection to the world doesn’t require religion or spirituality. I’m not sure how Youtube or fandoms fit in. I doubt either are particularly filled with non-religious people.
Non-religious people do need connection, but other than not having religion itself, I doubt they’re much different than religious people in how they seek it.
Ah yes, new haircuts for everybody!
Cartoon reality’s method of showing that time has passed.
At least one person needs to show up with an eye-patch. Every timeskip results in at least one eye-patch.
Carla is an obvious candidate. Not that she’ll be wearing one because she has an injured eye, but just because she thinks it looks cool.
Every few days, the patch switches eyes.
Mike would be the most likely candidate the only problem being we would all know how he got it depriving us of the mystery
Plot twist, he’s completely fine, he just wants to fuck with people
As long as the topic is Mike, isn’t that his silhouette in the back row to the left (viewer’s right) of Sarah?
That is Danny with a new hat. Mike is third from right. There is no shadow of Ethen I wonder.
Nope, it is Mike – the third from the right is Danny.
Yep, Ethan is missing – also Jacob (so Joyce probably did not get him)
Easy explanation would be some eye damage following his fall.
I vote Danny. Not because he’s lost an eye or anything, it’s just his new thing. Now that the hat is gone, he’s ditched the ukulele and reinvented himself as a pirate.
Does that mean he plays a concertina now?
That might be worse than the ukulele.
And is also dangerous because it can lead to accordions.
You say that, like it’s a bad thing…
(HUGE Weird Al fan, here, btw)
I, too, greatly enjoyed Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
Mike has a vision problem so needs to wear an eyepatch? I had a double vision problem for a while after I got hit in the head. I didn’t need an eyepatch because I wasn’t walking yet so any vision problems were inconsequential.
We haven’t seen the other side of Fuckface yet.
Yeah, what kind of coiffeur will fuckface be wearing?
Beatles mop ca. 1963? Or Rapunzel-like fall? Dreads? Crew cut?
Not just cartoons! On the show Halt and Catch Fire, Mackenzie Davis’s character managed to keep the same short hairstyle for the entire first season set over the course of a year. She had to shoplift to get by so she’s probably not paying for constant haircuts. After a timeskip, it’s shoulder length, and stays that way until another timeskip.
I was reading about the popular ’60s TV series My Three Sons the other day. Fred MacMurray filmed all his parts for each season out of sequence, in one stretch of filming. So the other actors on the show would have to have their hair cut every week so it looked the same in the scenes they filmed when he was absent. Apparently this didn’t go so well in the 10th season, when the actress playing Dodie, stepdaughter to his Steve Douglas character, started to have her front teeth grow in. So the way her mouth looked could change from scene to scene in the same episode.
I just assumed the the changing looks were an evil plot to sell more magnets.
Penny, in a nod to Walkyverse.
Yay, big sis returns and looks fabulous!
Ya know, it just occured to m… do you guys think we’ll whatshisnamed from Shortpackd as a new character? Ya know… Sagat! Yeah, good ol’ Sagat!
We’ve seen Ken around, in the background mostly.
Maybe he ended up with Danny’s hat!
Only if his eyepatch switches sides depending on which way he’s facing. Have people remark on that.
That’s already been done in web cartoons…. http://www.bncritters.com/images/comicstrips/2014/bncritters_03-14-14.jpg
Ah,good ol’ sprite-flipping – nothin’ highlights it better (as well as the lack of flipping) than asymmetric characters!
Wait, seriously?
That’s a BIG jump.
Well, It’s been three months,
Not really. She’s had over two months. When something cracks your faith wall hard, it can crumble incredibly quickly.
And she was already starting to question it before the jump.
More than starting to question.
It’s interesting that Sarah knows though. Did we see them talking about it before the jump?
It’s not super-clear what exactly *Joyce* means by it. She might just mean it as a form of weak agnosticism where she’s uncertain about God’s existence. She might also mean it as the disbelief that God is good, rather than non-existent.
There’s a ton of possible nuance, since “atheist” is the main umbrella term that people expect an areligious person to use, but sorta like queerness, there’s an entire glossary of distinctions that can be made.
I’m pretty sure what Joyce meant by it is “that category of Satan-people that I and my entire community spent my whole life vilifying without any understanding of who and what they were, and regardless of whether I actually meet any technical requirements for falling into the category I’m allergic to the word so shutupshutupshutup!”
AH WE LOVE TO SEE IT
I like Sarah’s hair but… does that mean no more bandanas???
Yes we have no bandanas.
We have no bandanas today.
No, we have yes bandanas.
Well does anybody really wear bandanas these days, out in public? They seem to be out of style. (Love the new hair!)
I knew someone in Boston who wore a bandana over her hair a lot. I can visualize though not identify some guy. I’ve played with it, might go for when I go more bald. “Out of style” isn’t “no one does”.
People seem to be putting them on dogs…. I saw a dog yesterday with a polka-dot bandana around her neck and a harness with large plastic butterfly wings.
I’m sorry you had to see that. The Dog probably is too.
Dunno. She seemed to be having an outrageously good time. Labradors are cool with being un-cool, just so long as everyone is having fun.
Having had a Lab, I have to, nay I must! agree;
Labrador: I weigh 125 lbs. If they are having fun, then I will have fun with them. If I swamp the canoe, I will retrieve them and it will still be fun.
I wear them during the summer months, but I shave my head and need to cover it.
I’ve seen people wearing them for masks, recently. (Not advised, unless you don’t have anything else. Not as effective as surgical masks or even most of the cloth ones. )
I wear one occasionally – when I’m hiking and it’s windy or some such. If I’m outside and hair won’t stay in a ponytail for long
I wear them all the time. I have thick wavy/curly hair that doesn’t stay in ponytails very well, so a bandana is the best and most comfortable way to keep everything in place and out of my eyes.
Also, in the current ongoing hellscape, I’ve been wrapping things up in an extra bandana to cover ALL my hair. Keeps everything firmly locked down so I definitely don’t have to brush hair away and thus touch my face, and also means I can wash the bandanas when I get home in case somebody coughed on me. (At-risk parents, hypochondriac dad, aunt in health care who’s been making dire and grumpy predictions about the second wave. We’ve been more than commonly paranoid.)
… Plus I live in an area with high cowboy AND biker populations. That probably factors in to bandana availability and fashionability.
As a black person with natural but straightened hair who works out and used to work in a hot warehouse, a bandana is a cheap but effective way of keeping your hair out of your face and scalp dry – particularly around your edges, which tend to sweat out first.
Also Ive seen a lot of ppl sporting them in the yard during quarantine. I live in the midsouth for reference
Thanks. I live in Delaware and I don’t really see them here (not that I get out much).
SARAH!
Sarah! Storms are brewing in your eyes….
She’ll probably keep it on the down low until she’s done with college… gotta keep that arental tuition money flowing :p
something makes me think Hank might not be in such a different place, honestly
I was expecting an agnostic phase, although we may have just skipped over that part since it has been 3 months
that’s just the lazy man’s atheism
Preach
Hey, I’m agnostic and that’s absolutely true. Don’t look down on us lazy people.
We’re all judging you.
We are? What’s our verdict?
Guilty.
Of what, I’m not sure. But definitely guilty.
Doesn’t matter. He gets fed to the Sharkticons anyway.
I credit intelligently applied laziness for much human progress.
Can’t tell if you’re referencing Community or not.
considering nearly exact wording, i’d say yes
somebody’s streets ahead.
No, lazy men just go with apathism, not caring if god exists or not.
Apatheists represent! Or don’t, whatever.
I’d hand out leaflets, but I can’t be bothered and we didn’t get around to making them yet.
Not to be confused with ignosticism, the belief that the question was meaningless anyway.
I adhere to that one!
I call myself an agnostic because while I believe there’s no god, the one thing I am sure of is that no one – myself included – has all the answers. Especially not that question.
“I don’t know, and you don’t either. We’re all just guessing, all of us.”
That’s called hard agnosticism. (Soft is “I don’t know”, hard is “nobody knows, it’s unknowable”.)
The weird thing about that approach is that we only take it for God. No one ever applies that level of pedanticism to belief or disbelief in other non-religious things.
Personally, in that most pedantic of senses, I’m agnostic about nearly everything – Last Thursdayism is not disprovable and pretty much makes everything else false. But in everyday use, I don’t hold to those standards for belief or disbelief. I don’t believe in God. I do believe in the moon landings.
And nobody calls me out for it, except when it comes to God.
Yup.
Per other comment above, there’s a whole lot of things whose existence I have not personally observed or verified, but take on faith.
An atheist is just an intellectually craven agnostic. 😛
Quoth the craven, never more.
…Said the theist.
Do you disbelieve in Santa Claus? The Easter Bunny? Zeus? How sure are you? Well, I’m just exactly that sure that your god doesn’t exist, and for just exactly the same reason.
I won’t say mean things about agnostics here – but I will say that calling someone craven for disbelieving in Allah, Jesus, and Yahweh, when you yourself disbelieve in Thor, says a lot about you.
Zeus exists, but only in Olympus. The Easter Bunny exists, but only on Easter Island. Santa Claus exists, but only in Virginia.
Let’s not talk about where Satna Claus exists, that topic can get pretty polarizing.
On Easter morning, ALL bunnies are Easter bunnies.
In the strictest of possible terms, I’m agnostic about all of those. And a whole bunch of other things we don’t commonly think of as in doubt. After all, I could just be a brain in a vat being fed false sensory data.
In common parlance though, I describe that level of not being completely 100% sure as “disbelief”. Or “belief” in the other direction.
My god is the existence of love.
So if you don’t think that exists, that says a lot about you.
Just because something’s a reference to a funny piece of comedy doesn’t mean that it should be quoted verbatim without any context. First blush on reading that, I was rearing up for a “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on” rant, don’t expect that everyone’s seen all the same shit you have, because yeah, a fuckton of people don’t get the difference between athiesm and agnosticism and it gets a bit tiresome after a while.
i would love to hear your rant
She did have a traumatic time with every one of the people that drilled Jesus into her skull failing and betraying her utterly. That’s instant critical mass.
Her Father hasn’t betrayed her has he?
It’s possible she feels like he should have stood up to her mother (or maybe the church?) sooner/harder.
Lower-case father as in Hank? Noooo… well kinda with how he initially treated Dorothy, meaning no but emotionally it might have felt a little like that.
Capital-case Father as in God? Oooof that’s a lot to unpack there.
…. I’m pretty sure you just hit the shift key as a typo, but it’s hard to tell for sure in this case.
Agnostic phases can be really short. Mine lasted a week.
Most phases wax and wane over the course of roughly 3.5 days.
Source?
(Pun based on lunar phases.)
A calendar?
I don’t think I ever had an agnostic phase, though I was never a fundamentalist Christian. I pretty much went from apathetic monotheist to atheist shortly after I became aware of the existence of atheism.
I actually tend more towards agnostic in that hey, for all I know there could be gods out there, but I have no particular belief and am of the opinion that any god worth worshipping would understand that organized religion was historically Very Bad for my mental health. So I’ve called myself ‘atheist’ at some periods and agnostic at others, but either way I’m basically ambivalent.
Honestly, I want to hear about the “D” word. What’s happening on that front?!
Danny? Death? Divorce?
D-I-V-O-R-C-E
Should I add it to the list? It doesn’t feel like a mystery.
Did the Whiteboard Dingdong Bandit have to come out of retirement for one last dick?
Wait, why would Becky have any problem with Joyce being an atheist? Isn’t Becky in full on “revolt” mode anyhow? And is dating Dina, who is giving scientific corrections to certain fundamentalist beliefs Becky grew up with?
Apparently Becky has found a middle ground where she can believe in god without believing all the cultish extremism her church toted. Joyce might have stayed religious if that middle ground had been her starting point rather than the total worldview whiplash she got from her experiences
Becky is still Christian, she’s just stopped being a fundigelical. She has no problem with atheists in general (Dina is one), but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t feel weird about Joyce being an atheist. At least, that’s what Joyce clearly fears; even if she turns out to be wrong, it’s still a valid way to feel
“fundigelical”
This word made me imagine a Christianized production of Cats and now my eye won’t stop twitching.
Sounds more like fancy dessert to me.
like orange trifle, but with a quarter cup of sand added.
Fundigelical cats come out tonight
And get rad haircuts and dinosaur girlfriends
I mean, it’s not hard to interpret the present form as Christian.
That’s too much of a cutesy nickname for what’s essentially an eldritch cult
Well said.
They are indeed a death cult. You have made a good point that I shall consider further. Thank you.
Yes, but that’s not really how Joyce sees it. She’s probably still not fully okay with herself being an atheist, so she’s understandably (if unnecessarily) worried about how Becky will take it.
That’s how it went for me. When I knew my faith was gone I was terrified at first and even tried to force it back briefly. Even once I accepted it, it took a while before I was comfortable telling people in my life who were still religious (mostly my family).
Becky may well have chosen to reject the fundamentalist aspects of her upbringing while holding onto the faith parts. It’s not uncommon.
And while I don’t think she’d necessarily judge Joyce for abandoning her faith, she’d probably at the least be hurt or disappointed, which is something I imagine Joyce would rather avoid.
Becky is going the Accommodationist/Compartmentalisation route and ignoring all the bits she doesn’t like so she can hold on to her beliefs.
Ya can’t really have Non-Overlapping Magesteria if your religion makes claims about reality that science can test.. Fortunately (sadly?) Becky has some high profile NOMO pals to look up to like Stephen J. Gould.
Once you drop fundamentalist literalism, it’s not really that hard.
Becky might understand but I suspect Joyce is scared of her reaction. After all, Becky and Joyce were not on the same page of tossing everything they learned out, like sex before marriage. And Becky might be in revolt mode to a certain extent regarding what she was taught but she still believes in god and stuff.
It was a while back, but Becky got very upset that Joyce was having doubts about the whole “God” thing just because of conflict with her family, especially since Becky has dealt with so much worse and not had any doubts.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/beeessin/
I read that more as Becky being worried about Joyce loosing part of her Joyciness rather than her religion, that Joyce is going through a personal crisis where goofy jokes won’t help.
But I can see why Joyce would read it as being upset about Joyce loosing her religion.
I read it the same way Jack did, but I agree it’s very open to interpretation. These two have a lotta history.
The process both of them are going through right now is forming identities that aren’t “I’m the child of ____ and ____, and I’m a _____ just like them.” That includes figuring out and declaring who/what they are aside from (or if not) “Christian”.
I’d forgotten that. I can see why Joyce would be reluctant to tell Becky.
And if she does get that upset, I could see her trying to blame it on Dorothy influencing her or something and then things’ll get really messy
In addition to all this, and perhaps a lot of denial on Joyce’s part, it’s the REASON that Joyce and Dina, respectively, are atheists.
Dina is an atheist because she was never raised in the religion and hasn’t encounter solid reasons to adopt a religious belief. (At least… I think? I’m starting to question whether we’ve had much of Dina’s religious background spelled out for us.)
Joyce is an atheist because bad stuff happened to her and she rejected (the idea of) God because of that. Oh, and the bad stuff wasn’t as bad as what happened to Becky, and Becky’s faith is still unshaken, so what the hell Joyce?
I am not sure that Joyce is atheist because bad things happened to her. I think maybe she is atheist because the religious beliefs she was raised in were exposed as hypocrisy, nonsense, and cant, while the other beliefs that she was raised to reject still look absurd to her.
Also the part where a lot of the people she trusted (her mother, Ross) either did or justified doing horrible things to her friends because of their faith. Joyce believed in a good God that wants people to do good. It’s pretty hard to keep that up when you see people use that God as a reason to do things that you know are wrong.
The full switch to atheism instead of agnosticism might also be (in part) a result of her fundamentalist upbringing, making it hard for her to compromise. Joyce was raised with an absolute vision of God as the only truth. Now that vision is demonstrably false, she doesn’t have anything left to believe in. (Whereas Becky is flexible enough to adapt her vision of God to one that does match her moral views).
Agreed. What I mean to say is…
(1) The bad things were central to the chain of causation. Yes, Joyce seems to have become an atheist because she came face-to-face with her faith’s cruelty, hypocrisy, bigotry, and self-absorbed arrogance (in the sense that everyone is 100% certain that the voice in their head that they are obeying must be God, rather than their own internal id or something similar). But it was the bad things happening that forced her to come face-to-face with the cruelty, hypocrisy, bigotry, and arrogance, shined a bright light on them, and forced her to see them for what they were. So the bad things happening weren’t the direct or proximate cause, but they were part of the journey.
And also (2) BECKY will see it that way and Joyce doesn’t want to have that talk right now, or ever.
Agreed to all this. I think Joyce is also realizing she didn’t feel God at all, when she strips the routines she knew and the bad parts that come with the church away, and can’t evoke that feeling now that she’s seeking it… but it’s a really difficult feeling to describe, that lack, and again, Becky’s likely going to see it as ‘well, I managed this, why can’t you?’
Becky is one of those Christians who grew MORE faithful with her tribulation. The evils she went through had her connection to God grow stronger as a source of comfort against what she viewed (correctly) as against her God.
Leslie, by contrast, in Shortpacked and presumably here viewed God as a weapon against her.
Interesting contrast.
But also was able to shift her conception of that God to drop the parts that wouldn’t fit with her new understanding of herself. “God answers lesbian prayers.” As well as purging out all the nonsense “science” she’d been taught. Her faith didn’t just grow stronger, it changed to be more convenient for her. Though oddly, the sexual purity part has stayed intact, even while the homophobia dropped away.
“Changed to be more convenient.” I like it.
I’m not sure it became more convenient for her given that it required her to actively work against what she perceived as an unjust system. Mind you, a lot of the lessons I was taught about faith began with, “It is worthless if it is not actively inconvenient for you to do good and push yourself to do better.”
In the sense that it allowed her to accept her homosexuality and retain her faith in God. It certainly would have been worse for her to keep to the tenets of faith she was taught.
I don’t actually see anyway in which Becky was required by her faith to work against an unjust system.
I’m reminded of the Dork Tower strip when somebody says “come here and see the SATANIST!”
http://www.dorktower.com/tag/satanists/
WHAT
That’s a very knowing tone from Sarah. Could Joyce have confided in her about her faith crisis?
Well it isn’t like she could tell Becky or her dad, that would be too much. So I suspect she talked about it with Sarah and possibly Dorothy.
I suspect it came up with her, yeah. Wouldn’t be surprised if Joe and Dorothy know, too.
It was inevitable that Sarah would realize she’d stopped going to church.
Good point. We’d already seen her notice, and if Joyce kept it up it would be obvious.
Did Becky not bother going to a local church for her own reasons? Otherwise you’d think she’d noticed Joyce not going with her.
Yeah, that’s surprising. That first weekend there was an excuse, but it’s unlikely for Joyce to have lucked out every Sunday.
Maybe she just went and went through the motions.
Joyce copped to being a godless heathen with Sarah. Got ice cream. Sarah thought it was a pretty sweet deal.
I think this might be the first time Sarah’s hair has ever been different. I don’t think it ever changed in the old It’s Walky verse. Though I could be wrong.
I don’t think she wore the bandana there.
“If I can’t be there, will you record it for me?”
Yay, Sarah is back and has awesome hair. I hope during the eventual Gravatar shift that I know is coming one day, that I get Sarah again, or Sal.
Also Willis can you confirm or deny that anyone in Dumbing of Age is a robot/android? Jeph’s latest comic has me curious.
Everybody’s secretly a robot. Except Carla, obviously.
If Carla was a robot, she wouldn’t keep it secret.
Jeph Jerkface just confirmed today that Robot College exists, and that it was DoA, so yes!
(Carla probably just didn’t see a reason to mention it, it was so obvious)
I was disquieted that college is segregated in the Questionverse. It might be necessary, I suppose, if the learning requirements are very different.
Melon and Beepatrice would fit right in on Billie’s floor at Forest
They’re too normal for Forest.
Pintsize and Joe’s Dad.
Now that May has mellowed, she kind of reminds me of Sarah. But I don’t know if they’d get along.
Spookybot and Fuckface, of course.
Bubbles is just Amber/Amzi-Gril after she got cyborgized. That’s the real reason her memories were erased.
Would Sarah get along with Sarah?
I kinda want to see a few strips of Jeph Jacques doing DoA Robot College
DOA is just Robot College for humans.
Willis, this may have to be your next Patreon bonus comic.
Sarah looks great. I’m happy for her
I LOVE Sarah’s new look! Also I’m pretty surprised Joyce jumped to that point already – but I know she’s semi-autobio so maybe that’s how it works with some folks? I wasn’t raised by fundie parents so from a distance I can see how that just shuts any sort of faith in a higher power down. If I had been raised thinking God was an almighty judgemental asshole I’d probably shun it too.
Sometimes when you’re raised with a super strict, narrow interpretation of your religion, your faith can’t bend very easily.
And, well, we all know what happens to things that don’t bend.
Now, the question I’m interested in: Did Joyce leave the faith because it all fell apart for her or because she’s angry at God and the Church? Her creationism was very much a house of cards, but she held onto it for at least a few months and didn’t seem willing to waver. But if she went full misotheist, I’d be expecting her to be more obvious about it. This has me very interested.
I’m guessing she went more the route of “I don’t think God ever was talking to me, it was just my church teaching me to imitate their arrogance in believing God was talking to them, and that internal voice I was mistaking for God combined with trusting the people in my church were really the only reasons I had for believing.” Something along the line of the theme in the strips from (to name a few examples): Mar. 5, 2019; Mar. 6, 2019; Apr. 5, 2019; and Apr. 6, 2019.
(Can’t link, spam filter will eat me. Can’t link, spam filter will eat me.)
I think it dates back to Joyce’s “original sin” point. If God made a terrible word and it’s not our fault then God sucks and the whole faith is silly. Evolution actually attacks Joyce’s house of cards.
For Becky, the specifics don’t matter and God is in her heart.
Dammit, I wanted to see it happen!
Striaght to Athiest? Personally I think a healthy dose of Agnosticism does a body good.
Well of course a healthy dose does, just like an unhealthy dose doesn’t. 😉 You can be sort of agnostic and atheist, though. “I don’t know but here’s my working assumption.”
*compressed, louder-than-usual video of John Mulaney*
“NOW WE DONT HAVE TIME TO UNPACK ALL OF THAT”
Eh, Becky won’t mind (other than being super worried about Joyce). Her relationship with God doesn’t depend on other people’s belief. She knew from young age that the people who told her to respect her father were wrong (I mean, obviously), so she formed her own beliefs.
Joyce trusted them, and just recently found out that everything they told her was a godamned lie.
You sure about that? Because when Joyce said it was all lies anyway so might as well throw sexual purity on the pile of lies at the party, Becky legit got annoyed at her for not being her religious conscience and said that Joyce was having a stupid phase she needed to grow out of. The last time they talked of religion honestly, where Joyce was having a crisis of faith, they were in conflict.
Nope, not sure, but I am sure we will ge a good story out of it 🙂
I think Becky’s reaction back at the party was more about Joyce being a bummer – i.e. loosing her optimism and hapines – and Becky freaked out about not being able to help her friend in a crisis of faith. But I’m sure there are many layers to it.
If Becky was specifically concerned about Joyce’s crisis of faith or that she was in a very upset and nihilistic mood in my mind, I feel like she would have stuck by her and tried to help her recenter… not wandered off back to Dina and left her to suffer her bad mood???
I dunno, it just struck me personally as Becky having a moment of selfishness where she wanted the same old Joyce that would freak out over it and remind her of the bible and all that. It reminds me of the discussion Joyce had with Sal about how people get weird if you stop a habit and how it would sting when you were slowly becoming a different person that all people wanted was more of the person that you were becoming less of.
And it felt like Becky was kind of going ‘shutting out your faith because of bad adults is a phase you need to grow out of’ instead of fully recognising that for Joyce, much of her faith and her trust in the adults who taught her were interlinked so intricately, that the faltering of one tears apart the other with it. That she’s not like Becky where her faith is flexible and Becky just expected it to be flexible like her own but for Joyce it never was flexible and couldn’t bend to fit into her reality.
I think maybe Becky might have been more upset at Joyce’s nihilistic negativity than at her disbelief in the religion. Maybe.
Becky believed that they were being righteous in the face of Evil.
Joyce believed that righteousness as she knew it was a lie.
I really love Sarah’s hair.
Also, OMG!
In hindsight, I’m surprised no one predicted this. (I’m not surprised I didn’t.)
I’m also surprised no one predicted this. By which I mean I’m pretty sure a lot of us did. Or do you mean in regard to the time jump specifically?
I love the winter display on the door – complete with the witch-Sarah from Mary
Yes! It’s so cute that she kept that drawing there!!
Mary meant it as an insult.
Sarah loves it, of course.
Welcome to the club, Joyce, though I can be an atheist/agnostic/naytheist depending on my mood. I think God could be a cosmic machinery that self creates.
The schedule for the atheist secret society is secularizing all democracies, do actvism for human rights, drinking wine like snobs, doing crappy youtube channels, create underwater cities, defy detsiny and making starbucks cups that will offend fundies.
Yeah, I always figured if there WAS anything out there that consciously created the universe it was probably more concerned with maintaining the fundamental laws of physics to ensure it all doesn’t break than worrying about the morality of itty bitty lifeforms that spawned in well after the fact.
but that would make us, and our little personal dramas and crises and occasional ethical dilemmas, NOT the most important thing in all existence!
UNACCEPTABLE!
That is why we see human problems from a human perspective. From the perspective of a god like being watching ove the universe, our little planet is as important as all other planets were life exists.
Only people can help or hurt other people.
This is the reason the Avatar is born as a human.
She’s non-religious, Sarah, don’t be crude
Dang that’s definitely an update. Liking Sarah’s new look
Sarah’s hair looks great!
… kind of worried now that I’m looking closer at that banner and not seeing Ethan. Seems like if he’s not here then the Mike-looking silhouette is more likely to be one of Amber’s figments.
I… I love this strip so much.
I’ve developed a new belief system called everytheism, where I follow every possible faith, just in case. I always start with the Abrahamic god which techically solves the who “you shall have no other gods before me thing.” I do end up burning a lot of food thou when you add up all the gods I have to sacrifice to, also I may have had to do a few human sacrifices, you know just in case the Aztecs got it right.
….Have you ever ended up in a lifeboat in the Atlantic with a Bengal tiger who may or may not be your deceased mother for a couple of months by any chance?
Dammit, the orangutang was the mom. Shows how much I cared about that book.
I think Richard Parker was the cook.
Behind one of these doors is a Bengal tiger; behind the other door is Homer Simpson.
Nah, that would make the book actually entertaining and that sure wasn’t allowed in that book.
The tiger apparently symbolized the main character.
I’m gonna be honest, I COMPLETELY forgot about any of that stuff with the animals representing people, I honestly just remembered it as a story about a kid on a boat with a tiger.
I forgot a lot of it because honestly, a book about being trapped on the Atlantic for months on end shouldn’t be as mouth dryingly, fuckoff BORING as being trapped on the Atlantic for months on end.
I think that’s called omnitheism.
Is your real name Benny?
Well, if you’re merging religions, just do the whole every-sperm-is-people thing from the more wacko corners of Catholicism and human sacrifice is easy and a lot more morally acceptable.
Or if you prefer something non-sexual, embrace Hindu reincarnation as true and kill a few mosquitoes.
With those loud face blushes, Sarah looks almost… cheerful? Almost. (I love the new look!)
Looking at Walky revealed in the cast image makes me feel silly. I now realize I had taken parts of the ‘D’ and ‘U’ (in “Dumbing of Age”) to be part of his silhouette, making his fair look much floofier
Yeah, I think I did that with the D, which made his hair look a lot more triangular… almost Asher-esque.
Same. Kinda disappointed we were wrong!
I LOVE Sarah and Joyce and their dynamic, but having been Joyce at one time in my life, I’m really not feeling Sarah in this strip. Joyce doesn’t need to be ribbed about it right now. She needs to know that there is a place for her on the other side.
Which is not to say that anybody OWES it to her to make that space for her, but my hope would be that Sarah would be the one to give her that space.
Looking great, Sarah!
Joyce considering atheism was a long time coming. Maybe Carol pushed too hard during winter break?
I wonder if Joyce even went home over winter break.
She could have decided that she didn’t want to be exposed to her mother (assuming her parents are still together), so spent the holiday with Becky, or maybe joycelyn (or even her long-lost brother… Maybe he was ostracized from the family because he became an atheist too.)
I doubt it. Hank called him “still a good kid” back when he was telling Joyce to stay away from atheist Dorothy. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/takeafter/
Never assume that Sarah does not have popcorn at her disposal.
okay, sometimes she might have to take a couple of minutes to microwave it first, but
Oh My No God, Joyce.
That’s not unexpected.
Sarah with short hair. I like it.
Oh, damn. Did she switch from doubtful to just straight dumping religion over the break? She is a stand-in for Willis, so it was inevitable, but I didn’t know it’d be this soon.
Well, there was a 2-3 month time skip in the comic. Plus, there were hints that she was having doubts before (like skipping church when invited by Billie’s new roommate). So plenty of time to have her alter her religious views.
Sarah looks much happier now, weird. Is it the blush stickers? did she have the before?
Yeah, she had rosy cheeks all along. But they ARE very cute.
Same rosy cheeks but her lips are a different colour now.
Is she wearing lipstick? I looked at a few past strips in ordinary lighting but can’t tell.
The new hairstyle is very nice.
Sarah looks lovely
*gasp* Sarah looks so cute!
Gossip aside, Sarah looks fantastic.
Forget all the stuff with Blaine and Toedad, *this* is the biggest twist in DoA history!
Congratulations, little atheist, on choosing sanity over the comfort of an omniscient invisible playmate. Oh, the blasphemies we’ll commit! Oh the joyful heresies!
So Joyce has a new a-word, but does she have a new b-word?
WHAAAT?!? What the heck happened during that timeskip?!?
We kinda saw this happening prior when she started skipping church
Well, it’s finally happened. Been halfway expecting it, I guess, although I didn’t think it would be this soon (in real-life time), and doesn’t mean I’m not a little sad for it. As a recovering fundamentalist more in line with Becky, I’m disappointed that Joyce finds it necessary to completely reject all semblance of belief but, I completely understand why she would do so, and it is absolutely her right.
Anybody else notice the double meaning of the title? I think Joyce has “gotta finish unpacking” more than just boxes…
Eh, not to dismiss how you feel, but it was pretty much inevitable. Joyce probably isn’t a 1-for-1 on Willis, but she’s still a Rule 63 fictional stand-in of sorts and the “plot” of her story will probably match points in Willis’s life where he changed (though with more dramatic catalysts, unless he had got kidnapped by a supervillain and some Mario-looking dadguy). So far, they already share “religious background”, “more understanding father and holy terror of a mother”, and now “a departure from faith”. Yet to be seen are “bisexuality realization” (although sexualities are supposed to carry over from the Walkyverse, I suppose there was never a hard statement on whether or not Joyce was actually straight) and “becoming a comic writer that gleefully torments their readers”.
So when is Joyce going to meet and marry her wife? 🙂
I feel like Danny’s arc in DoA proved that “sexualities carry over from previous comics” is a loose rule at least in that straight characters won’t suddenly become gay and vice-versa, but characters who previously appeared to display a more binary exclusive sexuality may over time realize it was not the sum of their identity.
tl;dr Like many bi people, Joyce May have thought she was straight but was bi all along and just took a while to realize it (tbh I would love this storyline if it goes that way, as someone who spent 30 years insisting I was totally straight and was very obviously in denial about being bi with some Joyce-esque obsessing over female friends or actresses I thought were “really pretty and cool.”)
Though not all of Willis is in Joyce. Parts are in other characters. She got the religious family upbringing part. The bisexuality bit may have gone elsewhere.
Or not, of course.
Joyce is also becoming an author of porn.
So good for her!
HUH
kinda wish we saw that revelation
saw someone elseboard saying “wait, he spent all that time on the superhero stuff and now he’s just skipping the part I actually cared about?”
I think we already saw the part where it happened.
Rich Mullins, a guy Joyce still thinks is pretty awesome, didn’t bring her the comfort she needed.
I feel a bit that way. Joyce’s deconversion seems ordinary but profound, whereas the superhero and supervillain stuff is extraordinary but I don’t believe in it enough to care.
We saw it dude. We saw it a year and a half ago: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/03-sometimes-the-sky-was-so-far-away/ultimately/
“You’re not really there. You weren’t ever really there.”
She’s an atheist for over one year (our time) now.
Then we saw her acting on her misconceptions about atheism – part of the thing with Jacob was “since they don’t believe in God, atheists don’t worry about consequences and just do what they want.” Followed by her realization that it doesn’t work that way.
And then her “do whatever” advice to Becky’s question about sex at the party.
We didn’t necessarily recognize it all as it happened and I don’t think she described herself with the word, but her atheist shift has been visible for awhile now.
Yeah, the trajectory’s been really clear for a while, this is just Sarah putting it explicitly and confirming it wasn’t just a crisis of faith brought on by circumstances. The kidnapping killed any chance of reconciliation with the congregation, but she hadn’t had that faith and certainty for a while. Now we have confirmation it’s continued since.
Sarah looks happy. It suits her.
A happy Sarah? Impossible. Check under the bed for pods.
There’s a very large dust-bunny consisting mostly of cobwebs and dog-hair…. Close enough?
This is actually her identical twin sister Haras, taking her place for as yet unrevealed reasons.
(gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasp)
I too would like to have some popcorn ready for when that happens.
Ok, I did not expect her to go full Atheist, like maybe agnostic but wow. Maybe she went the full 9 yards and will come out as Bisexual and form a super power couple with Sarah. They would make a super cute couple and really do have great chemistry. also the fact that Sarah knows about this atheist thing before anybody else does.
I really like how this new arc is going so far.
Oh this is gonna be good. Also I really love Sarah’s new design she feels… brighter and livelier.
nice hair, Sarah <3
I like the dreadlock. Remind me a bit of Grace, from infinity Train.
Wow. Big step. I feel bad for Joyce because it was a source of comfort for her but this was Willis’ autobiography so I knew it was coming. I remember going through my own crisises of faith and how painful they were. I came out with a different result but I wouldn’t wish them on anyone.
Honestly, Sarah’s giddiness over the subject rubs me the wrong way.
Yay! When I became an atheist, I had a Becky-like response of telling everyone. I felt like people would feel worse about it later if they didn’t hear it from me. But I totally get the fear the your close family and friends might not accept it. I was disowned by my mother, but that was the worst phone call. Didn’t help that I am not socially adept. Everyone else in my religious family accepted it, and my mother and I made up within a week. But knowing other people, like those in the LGBT community, some families and friends are worse. I was in the Navy when I became an atheist, so I had a support network even if everyone abandoned me. Not everyone is in that situation.
Get’s a metric fucktonne of popcorn
YOSSSSS
I’m thrilled, absolutely chuffed. Having followed Joyce’s antics since Roomies, that it only took like a few months of in comic time (sure like, ten years for us) for her to lose her religion this time is fantastic. This is definitely not the end of her time fighting with her faith, but it is absolutely progress that she acknowledges there’s a core problem with her belief system enough to no longer be comfortable calling herself christian. Way to go Joyce! Way to observe reality and let it affect you, rather than pulling in and shoring up your denial.
I’ve been excited about this possibility for a long time.
I, for one, welcome our atheist Joyces.
My hot take: Joyce doesn’t consider herself an atheist yet.
Not that this isn’t where it’s going eventually, but I don’t think Willis would just jump right to that end result. I think this is more, well, Sarah teasing/trolling her little sister because Joyce has explicitly moved away from “God is definitely real and my friend and I love him” territory, but is still trying to figure out where she’s at with it. That a major part of her next arc is going to be her figuring out where she stands with the whole religion thing, while also not doing some of the more performative aspects of religion because she can’t fake her heart being in it anymore.
If only because I hate Hate HATE the “religious person goes through massive traumatic event and that makes them atheist” trope. Yeah, that can happen, but in execution it’s usually feels like “This person had Faith, and now doesn’t anymore, they’ve lost something”, instead of the actual work of growing something new to replace that faith in an Omnipresent Authority Figure.
It was a fairly smooth transition though. Ever since she started going to college things started pushing her religious views past the breaking point, proving to her that a lot of what she was taught was wrong, sure it took her a while to fully grasp it, but over several arcs she became less and less faithful, stopped going to church, fully excepted her lesbian best friend, lied to try and get a guy she was emotionaly and sexualy attracted to.
It wasnt the trope you claim it could be, it wasnt caused by the traumatic event, more that she was allowed to see the world outside of her little religous bubble her mother put her into. If anything the final push could have been a possible divorce of her parents, or at the very least seeing her parent’s marriage falling apart like it was before the break.
While she might not consider herself Atheist yet, its most likely because her mom probably told her its as bad as saying you worship satan her whole life, and she doesnt like the word, same reason she probably wont start cussing a lot, only a select few times when it is deemed appropriate.
after that Traumatic event, she was probably one of the most fine out of all the ones involved, when bad things happen she tends to get pissed off from what I have seen, willing to throw a punch, and not the type to curl up in a ball and need therapy for several months.
It still feels only destructive, though. She’s no longer a Super Evangelical God-Is-Awesome Christian, but that doesn’t mean anything’s grown to replace it.
I’m agnostic as fuck, but I still have faith, elements and aspects to it that drive me beyond reason, even when the rational world seems to conflict with it. Faith doesn’t mean religion, and what Joyce has channeled her nearly boundless faith into is something that is absolutely worth exploring, something I’d love to see.
I just hope we didn’t skip all of that stuff in the months between and Joyce has an entirely new core of belief that she developed off-screen, ya know?
I suspect she’s still struggling to come to terms with it, but the moment of realization really was the Rich Mullins dream. (‘Maybe I never really did’ being the key moment there, but the entire dream sequence is revealing.) https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/03-sometimes-the-sky-was-so-far-away/notaste/
She can’t reconcile ‘everything we’ve been taught is wrong, and the people who taught us are terrible’ with a conception of God, because ‘no one is perfect. Except Jesus Christ.’ from the strip immediately prior is a sentiment she doesn’t resonate with either and it was so core to her belief system. (Probably at least in part because her anxious striving to be a Good Christian was to be Good Enough For Jesus, and now that she’s getting some space from that belief she’s realizing how harmful that was to her psyche. It’s where we get things like her shame at having sexual urges whatsoever, too.) The whole CONCEPT of ‘I will die for you (because you are impure and I will save you)’ is also triggering to her since Ross said it to her at gunpoint – we’ve seen that explicitly. (Since I can only link one strip, that one’s June 25, 2016.) Given that’s… basically key to Christianity as a whole, I suspect that’s a significant part of her deciding not to keep trying.
I do suspect she hasn’t built up a solid faith in humanity sort of thing the way Dorothy did, not yet and not fully, since she’s not at terms with it yet. But we already saw every step of her journey to atheism, and the start of her realization it didn’t mean she no longer had a sense of ethics and rightness (the fallout of the Jacob incident at the birthday party, someone linked Becky questioning her upthread so I’m not going to link that one.) What we missed in the months in between was the slow confirmation that this wasn’t a short-term thing brought on by stress, it wasn’t just the trauma, this is real.
This more in-depth exploration of Joyce going out into the real world and realizing her previously held beliefs were messed up and mistaken is weirdly cathartic even as someone who didn’t go through this specific transition but has had a lot of “the world is not the shiny happy place I thought it was” moments in coming of age.
I hope this broke Carol in twain.
Im pretty sure we wont see very much of her from now on unless she comes back as a villain, would be very surprised if there wasnt a Divorce (or atleast talk of one) that pushed Joyce further down the path of atheism. Carol probably would have taken her out of college if she still had a effect on Joyce’s life at all.
Ayyy, congrats, Joyce!
I was raised in a split family, Mom’s Side was Christian and my Dad’s side was mostly Jewish, so I experienced both religions growing up (I enjoyed the Jewish side more to be clear, they had good food). I went on to then research several other religions on my own, and then decided to be Agnostic. Telling my family that I wasnt religious anymore was hell, Half my family wont talk to me anymore and the other half will try to push me back to being in their religion or will make comments about how my views are wrong and people who have my views will go to hell. (mostly coming from the christian side, as im still fairly fond of my time being jewish and the temple I went to was filled with some really good people who were rather excepting.) I cant have a conversation with my father without Religion or Politics (he is rather far right wing and has coverted to christianity through the last 8 years.) becoming the main topic, super passive aggressive about it. My mom is the only person I can have a normal conversation with sometimes, while she does try to convince me to convert sometimes, she backs off quickly, mostly just a off hand comment when I bring up something she doesnt believe in.
I hope everything goes well for Joyce.
That’s rough, Buddy *shoulder pat*
Well, well… Joyce is atheist now? I must admit, that’s a leap I didn’t expect her to take.
Also, I like Sarah’s new hairstyle. 😀
Ahhh! Sarah’s hair! I’m in absolute love!! 💚💚😍🥰
nice to hear Joyce has grown a brain. learn to think for herself and realize just how fucking stupid the life she lived up to that point was. also i hope her dad divorces that bongo wife of his. like seriously, working with a mobster to bail out the craziest of your church group so he can go back to beating the gay out of his daughter? fucking wack. and then they both wind up getting killed. wack
Personally I’m an Evangelical Agnostic. I want to convince people they really don’t know if there’s God or not. I supposed if included my Asperger’s I’d be an Autistic Evangelical Agnostic which has a certain ring to it 🙂
So we did decide to go full atheist. Can’t say I’m not disappointed even if the writing was on the wall.
I like Sarahs new look. Dunno why.
When your religious edifice is built on sand, it can collapse all at once. But this wasn’t even all at once; it’s been a long time coming.
But Joyce had a LOT invested in Christianity. She’s dealing with the profound loss of that investment. Ain’t no walking on water that rough.
We’re just gonna find out this is part of Joyce’s Single White Female plan to be more like Dorothy.
The group poster has three figures grayed out. Are those the three featured in tomorrow’s strip? If so, nice touch.
Foreground/background I think. There are actually 3 shades.
All of the “not revealed yet” people are the same shades they were in the previous versions of the group poster. The only changes made are the full colour versions being added in as we see them in the strip
Oh I LOVE Sarah’s hair!
Huh, that’s not what I expected Joyce to be in the closet about
Sometimes there’s closets inside of closets
So, to recap, Joyce has lost her faith but doesn’t believe science
While Becky still has her faith but believes science.
As do I, and undoubtedly a lot of other people who follow a Bible-based religion like Roman Catholicism.
Back when I was Tricycle Bill, I attended a Catholic parochial school from K through my sophomore year in high school, being taught by nuns and priests (with the odd lay person thrown into the mix). I cannot ever remember being told that the universe – and by extension, the world – was less than tens of millions of years old, or that dinosaurs were ‘fake’, or that evolution did not and was not still happening. We were also taught that the earth was more-or-less round and not a flat disc carried on the backs of elephants standing on a cosmic chelonian, and, as posited by Galileo and proved by Copernicus, that the world orbited the sun and not the other way around. The one thing that was drilled into us was the fact that God’s ways were not something that could be known or understood by mere man, and while it said in the Bible that God created the World in six days, we were reminded that nowhere did it say that God’s day was a 24-hour day as we measure it now.
So my take on this matter is that you can believe modern scientific teachings and still be a believer in religion. You just have to learn to blow off people like this guy, because Jesus himself taught us to “Take heed that no one deceives you. Many false prophets will rise up and deceive many” (Matt 22:4, 11). See also 1 Timothy 4:1–2, 2 Peter 2:1–3, 1 John 4:1, and Jude 1:3–4.
So if Joyce sees herself as anything along the scale of ‘devoutly religious’ to ‘Godless atheist’, the closest term would probably have to be ‘heretic’.
Basically as long as you’re not a Biblical “literalist” it’s pretty easy to do. And that does cover most Christians, just not the loudest, most political American variety.
But I do like the idea that Joyce is now an atheist, but still believes the Earth is 6000 years old and dinosaurs breathed fire.
Joyce is a falt earth atheist then? If she follows conspiracy theories I will be pissed.
JOYCE IS AN ATHEIST!
JOOYCE IIS AN ATHEIST!
JOOYCE IIIS AN AATHEIIST NOOOW!
SHE’S AN A-A-ATHEIST
SHE’S AN A-A-ATHEIIIIST!!!
And Sarah new hairstyle is really great.
To the tune of Maniac?
To the tune of “Sheena is a Punk Rocker”
Love Sarah’s new hairstyle.
*grabs popcorn, prepares to read comments section*
Dis gun be gud
Is it weird that I want to put Christmas decorations in Sarah’s hair?
Can I say that, I LOVE the way ALL the students in DoA always use boxes where the “This Side UP” arrow is pointing down? It’s one of those minor rebellions I love seeing in these characters.
Also noticed that the DoA banner shows an as-yet-unpublished DoA scene! Looking forward to it!
It’s a Willisism dating back to the Walkyverse – probably to Roomies.
Joyce’s eyes are always a treat, but today how those big baby blues jump from panel 2 to 3 to 4 are chef’s kiss. Shows soooo much going on inside her.
Really like the dreads on Sarah!
So here we are.
I’m not as upset by this development as I expected to be, but with all due respect to anyone waving pom-poms for Team Atheism, I am a little sad. But then, perhaps I’m supposed to be. Surely Joyce herself, who’s reacting to it much the same way she reacted to her parents’ mutual estrangement (“don’t say the WORD”), is not yet ready to retweet Nihilist Arby’s with a triangle grin.
Full disclosure: I’m an agnostic, but when I was in college, I spent a good deal of time in social circles that were atheist or pagan. They tended not to believe that the kindness-driven species of Christianity I grew up with was even possible and to mock anyone who thought otherwise. I clammed up about any views I had on the subject pretty damn fast. I carried my frustration with that sentiment into creating a few characters of faith one could respect, and it’s why the earlier version of Joyce appealed to me. She wrestled many doubts but never lost her faith or ability to find joy in life, and the one trait always seemed to reinforce the other.
Becky’s faith–and oddly, Dorothy’s humanism–are probably big reasons I feel this loss less keenly than I otherwise might. Becky (like Sierra, but more prominently) embodies both the love for all humanity and the willingness to accept contradictions that I consider part of my religious heritage. Dorothy’s hope for a better tomorrow represents a lot of the rest: Becky’s often hopeful too, but Dorothy is better informed, and so she maintains that hope in the face of what tired cynics and doomers would consider “evidence.” Joyce is likely to continue to follow her in this, which means still having faith without strict proof in something.
Basically, so long as the strip continues to acknowledge that religion doesn’t NECESSARILY make ya stupid or evil (despite the heavy Venn overlap of those three traits among the series’ antagonists), I think I’ve come around to Joyce’s journey more closely mimicking David’s own. Not that he needs my permission, but you know what I mean. I’m on board and intrigued.
For what it’s worth, some of the debate-happy, Dawkins-obsessed, hyper-critical atheists in college have become chill agnostics with age and perspective.
I was one of those folks and now find arguing with the sort of people I was in college utterly exhausting. I went from “religion is the source of all evil in the world” to “I couldn’t care less what folks believe in terms of spirituality as long as they’re not beliefs that contribute to harming others because I believe in empathy above all else but as far as the nature of the universe goes, I can’t prove anything and I have no idea.”
I feel like agnosticism is a better fit, but maybe Joyce is having a much harsher reaction to the loss of faith than I did.
Some people go full extreme in the other direction when their worldview is shattered, rather than gradually shifting their beliefs (sometimes more gradual tempering comes later). I went from “new age didn’t really question much about how I was raised” to “angry atheist” in college, and then settled in a “shrugs at the mysteries of life agnosticism” frame of mind as I got older & further into adulthood.
Are you me? Except I was “vaguely Christian” and my atheist phase lasted about 5 minutes before I just shrugged.
I LOVE SARAH’S NEW LOOOOOOOK 😀
SHE’S A WHAT??
HOLY HELL THIS IS HUGE
😍 Sarah
Wow, we missed some soul searching
There is no soul!
we have seen some of her reactions to the church being wrong though, and assertion that if one thing’s wrong, it must all be a lie.
which doesn’t mean we didn’t miss interesting stuff, like some of her conversations (maybe with certain siblings??) that helped her fully reach this conclusion, but it is fairly consistent
I welcome Joyce to the A-team.
Is Sarah herself atheist? Do we know? I feel someone cataloged the characters’ religion evidence but I don’t have a link saved.
Good job Joyce, applauds
I’m not crazy about missing some key conversations from 3 months. The whole thing with Joyce’s mom was left unresolved… and there had to be fallout from that. Probably a long talk about whether or not to even let Joyce go back.
And dangit… We don’t get no Halloween shenanigans!
Honestly im not surpised
Before i begin ill say this So youll even listen Im a Mexican Demisexual Pasifist Chatolic in the Spectrum.
I have no problem with Joice becoming an atheist, everyone can do whatever they want
But i gues people in the USA and specially people in this readership who decider that robin had to quit her political career because of her political afiliation cause that made her a vilian (my god)
That they Belive that the range of faith goes from Insane Christian to Atheist
In normal countries
first there arent as insane people as in the usa in general (im including obsesive atheists and evangelicalchristians here)
People can be really religuios kinda, go once in a while, do faith in their own way, be agnostic, dont suport the church but belive in god, be atheist , etc etc etc….
God i studied biology, i lived in both mexico and the UK, i have come to express my asperger and Demisexuality openly…to the world…and i can tell you that while there are soooo many asholes in the the usa political right, no one is as anoying and as pushy as the USA political left even when i agrree with you guys in so many things your psycholoogycal obsecion with the “other” is as inmature as your oponent, but you asure you in the moral superiority while attacking averything you disagree
My religion being fair target aparently, the only one that is fair game.
Its quite hypocrite
Hell im glad that im not straight or white cause the amount of hate its ridiculous
Why im saying all this here?
Cause the readers here. Are some of the most radical at that. And even at the times when i agree with something i end up angry at your attitude
Why i keep reading? i like the comic, i like the characters, im tired of the audience if i didnt have asperger i wouldnt pay it no mind .
Also F you if you only read what i wrote cause of who i am, that Is really bigoted of you.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Yay.
Do we know that’s actually Sarah, and not her evil twin? I mean, she’s wearing a turtleneck and lipstick…
Sarah looks pretty!