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Oh holy shit yes.
People are all like “oh nooooo, I’m so sorry about that stuff that happened to you!” and I’m like, “it’s… fine? I mean, it’s NOT fine, but it’s what I’m used to and I’m really not upset and please stop making that face.”
I even get it from my husband, I was telling him about this realisation I had during counselling about how my past is affecting my sleep and he was like “oh no poor hubby I want to hug you forever” which was not remotely the point of talking about it. Because to me, all this shit is just a fact of my life.
Eh. I don’t mind so much being made to believe stuff like the world was 6,000 years old and all the other creationist crap as I mind all the shows and movies I wasn’t allowed to watch. The real crime isn’t brainwashing them to believe nonsense, it’s isolating them from the broader culture.
philip: I can absolutely see someone who has left that sort of background taking that point of view–that’s how you were most affected, personally. From the viewpoint of someone like Dina, however, raised in rational though and respect for knowledge and truth above all else, this is a ‘sin’ unto itself–a violation of everything she holds dear, and it happened to the one person outside her family whom she has a strong emotional connection to.
That said, Dina needs to get into a comparative religion course. If she’s going to be dealing with this stuff constructively, she’ll need to get the sociological background that could make it more comprehensible to her.
It probably won’t help. Those of us raised within the Jude-Christian traditions are quite blind to the utter insanity of those traditions. Our parents and teachers scoffed at at the tales recast by Herodotus and Ovid, but the shit in the Bobly is Judy as irrational as any other mythology.
Early Christian Priest: “Ok, guys, now drink this wine -which is actually blood- and eat this bread -which is the flesh of the guy we worship- and you will go to heaven!”
Random Roman Passerby: “Holy shit, these guys are cannibals!”
That’s actually one of the stronger arguments for the whole “communion” bit at the last supper never having happened.
Jesus (or more properly, Yessus bin Yusefi) and his friends were Jews, and cannibalism is specifically mentioned and quite strictly banned in Jewish law, and has been since well before that period. He might as well have told them it was his piss and shit, and their reactions would be the same.
Frankly telling someone to symbolically drink your blood and eat your body ought to be pretty disgusting to anybody of any culture; it’s just we were introduced to it as young kids (and told we weren’t allowed to drink the wine until we were older, just to dangle that carrot) and by the time we were old enough to to question it, we’d done it 500 times already and had no reason to.
Personally, if these were people I knew in real life, I would suggest some books on religious abuse, both to Becky, and to everyone planning on sticking this out with Becky and/or Joyce. There’s some very good ones out there, written by people who escaped the kind of life Becky’s just gotten away from, and written from the point of view of how to recover from a religious abuse type background, and they would be incredibly helpful in letting Becky know she’s not alone, and some of the steps for her to take, and helping everyone understand what Becky’s going through, and maybe some hints on how to help her. It would be so much easier if they had a better understanding of the mindset these girls are coming from.
There’s also a huge amount of useful information contained in a few websites made by people recovering from just this kind of upbringing. I’m not good with links on an iPad, so let’s see if this works:
And one of my favorites, containing the story of Libby Anne who grew up a sheltered homeschooler like Joyce…and then she went to college and everything changed. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/
I think I even originally found Dumbing of Age through a link on Love Joy Feminism, and I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of Willis fans in the LJF commentariat.
As someone who grew up in a cultural bubble with a very different kind of brainwashing (totally vehemently areligious, at least twice as much “you’re worthless and can do nothing right”) I, personally, feel very strongly the opposite. I can find my own things that make me happy and I don’t mind that TV and movies, having never been part of my life, never really will be. But all the shit that I was taught? That has had the sort of knock-on effect that has effective stopped me from actually building a complete life for myself. That’s way worse, to me.
Not trying to diminish your experience, just… talk about another experience I guess.
“The real crime isn’t brainwashing them to believe nonsense, it’s isolating them from the broader culture.”
Quite honestly — I disagree. The real crime is, in fact, people being taught to simply believe what they’re told — and not being taught how to think critically or evaluate evidence.
Pop culture comes and goes. And honestly, you can catch up on it if you need to. But there are windows of development in which the habit of critical thinking and the importance of evidence can be taught, and people don’t tend to pick them up so much after that.
And the lack of those things, now — that’s why and how we have the current political situation among other things. And also, why and how so many people end up getting conned by quack medical claims, which really has the potential to hurt lives a lot, or even kill.
That’s from Enoch, I believe? The Watchers and the Nephilim, all that? I read Enoch on a lark in high school, but since then I’ve mostly seen references to the Watchers in Ars Magica books, so I may be a mite confused on this point.
If basketball had predated cosmic rays then we would have needed bigger courts. I think they had cricket, though. It’s hard to explain without the longevity.
Me too! I want more crazy knowledge! I mean, I’ve got plenty of my own crazy stuff from when my family tried to make me a Christian (southern baptist), but I love new ones ^_^
Dina and Becky definitely aren’t taller than your average Neanderthal.
Somewhat related, can anybody point me to a creationist explanation for old geology? I need to come up with a couple of sedimentary myths for a flat world. Over here in Europe we don’t get any exposure to such wild tales, having sent our religious fanatics across the pond for centuries.
Catastrophism I think is a big thing in that. You’ll have to forgive me I don’t have the details. But something about the world wide flood also having volcanoes and that explains everything apparently.
Huh, the answer I got was, “Non-Christians are so desperate to justify their rebellion, and driven so insane with sin, that they will see whatever they want to see. Evolutionistic scientists will grasp at the silliest of straws.”
Different creationists have different explanations.
But usually, everything is explained by the Flood. And/or Satan.
Different sedimentary layers? Laid down by the churning chaos of the Flood and/or put there by Satan.
Fossils? Lots of animals died in the Flood, and/or put there by Satan.
Certain animals only located in certain strata? Uh… either some animals were more dense than others and so floated to different levels of the mud before dying, or some were better at running to higher ground, or Satan.
They tend to use the flood disturbing things as their excuse for some criticisms of their idiot beliefs. In other cases they just flat out lie and claim that dinosaur fossils have been found in layers above hominid fossils.
The operate off of the ‘convenience factor.’ If they can find a scientific source which supports their beliefs, no matter how thoroughly it is debunked, retracted, or corrected later, they will cling to it and continue to cite it endlessly. Because it is convenient for them to do so.
Don’t laugh, I’m sure the creationists will be using your stunning scientific discovery in their next peer reviewed treatise on how God made Eve out of a rib.
“The esteemed Dr. Reltzik has published a publicly available paper confirming that dinosaurs bones have been found above hominid bones. He claims that the dinosaurs can run very fast, which is why ancient men found them useful as riding animals.”
That’s the ones that believe dinosaurs existed – there are others who think they didn’t but that they were put there by God to test one’s faith or by Satan to lead people astray, depending on the sect.
Now I went and googled “height of Adam and Eve” first article I saw said 12 feet, second said 90 feet scrolling down I saw one that said 900 feet… I didn’t realize Neon Genisis Evangelion was so biblically accurate.
Well, I was just going to link the Castlevania song by that name, but after around an hour of listening to music I haven’t found the version I sought. Oh well, let’s go with an acapella cover instead.
I’m saying it’s the ultimate test. Will she watch it and see the science is right or side with the creationist? It would be a good gauge to see if she could really become a scientist like she told her dad she wanted to be. She could need to hold off on it until she can reeducate herself and feel more comfortable with her ingrained bias or perhaps look for a different field (or at least a science field that will not constantly be at odds with how she was raised).
Wait, but, Moses is stated to live to 120, that’s well after the Flood but would have been just about as ridiculously impossible to the writers as 500 or 900+. If the firmament was enabling super-aging, but then the firmament fell down, how do they get Moses living to 120?
Oh, yes, that would work. I’d have to look up and see if his cohort are mentioned living super long.
I do remember that Sarah (wife of Abraham) is stated to have lived “all the days and nights of her life”, which my mom really likes and interprets as living her life to the fullest.
Yep, Isaac. An angel told her they would have a child, and Sarah laughed, because how could that happen, when her husband is so old? And Abraham was like “what’s so funny” and God is all “she laughed because she thinks she’s too old”, which is interpreted that God is okay with white lies to protect peace in the home.
–oh wait Sarah totally lives into Isaac’s adulthood (she sees Abraham go off the sacrifice him, at which point Isaac was in his early 30s, she dies when she sees Abraham coming back without him), so she gets to be 100+, too. Longevity for everyone!
This is just off the top of my head, but how old is the tradition of passing down names to the first born son? Could the figure of Moses actually have been several men in a row, all with the same name? Of course this is assuming that there was actually anything of substance for the writers to misinterpret in the first place.
In the modern era, that won’t happen very often, because Jewish tradition is to only name children after the dead. Naming a child after a living person is tantamount to saying you wish they were dead, and thus is extremely rude.
But I don’t know how far back that custom goes.
(I know this because as a child of a mixed marriage, I was named after two relatives, one dead and one living.)
It differs between communities. In Ashkenazic communities you would name a child after a dead relative, but in Sephardic communities naming after a live relative isn’t unheard of.
Yeah, I was at a baby-naming a month or two ago and the father was explaining how they named their daughter after the mother’s mother and then he pointed to her and the Ashkenazim in the room all freaked out for a second. The family was Sephardic so there was no issue, but it was a weird mini-culture shock.
Oh, I heard that one a lot. It’s pretty much the big theory in at least a certain flavor of pre-millennial dispensationalist Rapturist Evangelical Christianity. It’s the main theory for the flood presented at Ken Ham’s Creationism Museum.
Biblical Literalism isn’t actually…literal. It’s more like guidelines to making up whatever they want to justify why the world works solely the way their specific church believes and everyone else is a liar.
It tries to be, but since the Bible is a collection of oral traditions and cultural myths that were never supposed to be taken as literal, trying to reconcile 6,000-year-old cosmology, mythical and poetic language, and contrdictory accounts, not to mention the bizarre symbolic craziness in Revelation, results in a crazy contorted bag of nonsense.
No one actually takes the Bible literally. No matter how much they claim to or even think they do.
It’s a complex text and requires interpretation to reach any meaning. Even just turning the 4 Gospels into a coherent narrative requires interpretation. It’s just that most people who claim “literalism” got taught an interpretation practically from the cradle so that their take seems obvious to them.
No, it’s really not. It’s a big pile of selective reading and dubious interpretations and stuff taken out of context and entire elaborate structures of mythology with no basis in the text that try to explain away the shortcomings of their worldview when compared to actual reality.
A lot of those cults discourage “unguided” reading of the Bible, as their approved interpretations of some bits of text are not the way a reasonable person reading them in context without “guidance” would read them.
I’m sure it started out as just some poetic language or mythology, but then certain sects tried to interpret scattered sections “literally” and thus, that bit of poetry now becomes proof of a sky sea responsible for making ten other poetic statements or mythologies into “literal” truths.
Look up “Canopy Theory”. It’s the sort of thing that would be absolutely hilarious if a lot of people didn’t take it seriously, although even in YEC circles it’s got some heavy criticism.
Nowadays, “firmament” is acceptably poetic way to refer to the night sky (not the day sky, though), but if you are capable of reading Latin or Ancient Greek, you can see that in the older translations of the Bible they understood that it was LITERALLY a “sea in the sky”
(Not to odd, after all. Greco-Roman Religion had its wonky concepts already, especially when you add in the fact they tended to integrate the myths of beliefs of any culture they entered in contact with.)
Depends on how much of a Biblical Literalist you’re asking. If I had paid attention to that sort of thing when I was a Christian, I probably would have argued that that’s what it meant. Full-on Literalists would tell you that, as Becky said, it was an ocean in the sky and the source of the rain from the Great Flood. (Probably, that’s a theory I just came up with due to Becky’s statement about ages and the fact that the whole shortened-lifespan dealy happened right around the time of the flood)
Before I heard the water canopy theory, I originally just learned it as the clouds. They’re water in the air. The firmament is the sky that separates them.
Through about 1500, many cultures, and especially Mideast and Western ones, believed in a three tier universe. Heavens above for the god(s), earth for humans and the level below associated with death. Romans and Greeks lived in such universe. Jesus comes down and goes back up. Astronomy put some holes in that, but people still have “heavens above” in their minds and hell as down below, even though that only makes sense in a flat three layered universe.
Thus floods from the Almighty could only come from above and then go back there.
Genesis 1: 6-8 (KJV) …
6 Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”
7 Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.
For what it’s worth, I actually had heard that one. If I remember right, the idea was that it made the entire world have what we’d call a tropical climate. Also, that was where a lot of the water from the Flood came from, was the vapor canopy collapsing and coming down as rain.
This was all at least 20 years ago, so I could be misremembering, but I think that was the basic idea.
Yeah, that’s it. If I remember correctly it’s one of those things that if it actually existed would make life as we know it impossible, as the atmospheric pressure at sea level would be ridiculously high.
Before I broke free of religion I was taught to believe the sky was originally a bunch of water. It took me getting a BS in Biology and a lot of reprogramming to figure this stuff out. If I still believed in God I would thank him for being an unwitting Christian thinking I could learn biology without falling to its evil sciences lol
Search for some Kent Hovind videos, and have medical professionals standing by for when your brain starts oozing out of your ears.
The Bible, particularly in Genesis 1, describes the Waters Above (which I guess is that blue stuff above us?) being separated from the Waters Below, so obviously there must be water above us. The Firmament is also explicitly mentioned in Genesis 1, in which God places the stars the sun, and the moon. It’s not explicitly described, but it’s historically viewed as being a crystal dome (over a flat earth) or a sphere (around a round earth). During the Flood incident, windows are opened up in the Firmament causing the water to come through as rain, clearly implying that the firmament is what’s holding the Waters Above up.
One of the things Biblical literalists like to do is find ways to try (and fail) to explain how this can be scientific. Kent Hovind, whom I mentioned earlier, decided that the Firmament and the Waters Above were a giant shell of ice that completely encompassed the Earth, and the flood happened when God caused it to melt. He’s mum on how it could have lasted so long in direct sunlight without melting before then, or how the miles of thickness required by his theory would have let any light through beyond the occasional stray proton, resulting in an Earth that was dark and very, very, very cold. But he does say that the ice’s pressure upon the atmosphere, combined with the shielding it provided against cosmic rays, allowed everyone and everything to be gigantic. Lizards could be dinosaurs, elephants could be mammoths, and humans could be giants.
Thanks for all the reference, been wanting to know where this came from in the Bible.
I’m Catholic, I remember growing up and being told we don’t take all that’s passed in the Bible in face value without taking into account the history behind it. Guess I got lucky enough some of our teachers were a little more practical about it.
Then when we spoke to a priest about it, the answer that we got was that God being so perfect had to work with imperfect man to convey his teachings. And that meant us being imperfect beings aren’t going to get the whole Bible right from the start. Because if we somehow did find God’s Truth there, angels will descend, grab us and take us to straight to heaven, like Mary did.
Up until now, I’m not sure if he was encouraging or discouraging us to read the bible.
That’s pretty standard for catholics, honestly. Which is why you don’t find a lot of creationist catholics. Science is the system through which we are supposed to discover the miracles of god’s universe. So evolution/physics/all of it is real and set up and we’re supposed to be figuring it out to understand things.
Which is also probably why like, 90 percent of the old testament isn’t really taught as anything but a story in catholic school anymore. Or it wasn’t when I went.
You are right. From that point of view, the Catholic Church is doing relatively well (an important turning point was when John Paul II “pardoned” Galileo, making an official statement that implies the Vatican accepts that the Earth revolves around the Sun and it’s not at the center of the universe).
A common figure of speech here in Italy is “Science explains HOW, Religions explains WHY”, which implies that Religion is, mostly, metaphysics and shouldn’t be taken at face value for understanding physical laws. It’s a… decent compromise, I’d say.
(Of course, the Catholic Church is horrible in many other ways, but at least they aren’t as anti-science as they used to be)
I remember how the Old Testament were taught as stories or background to what is essentially the more important part of the bible which was Christ and his teachings (which compared to the Old Testament were pretty forgiving).
I honestly never heard of Creationists until I was much older and they were often spoken in tones one uses to not disturb the crazy people.
Sadly I can say I have had exposure to that idea, the Lutheran Church I went to subscribed heavily to biblical realism and would often have literature from creationist sources on the table out in the common area, one was on the pre-flood world and how the world changed after the flood. Luckily I loved studying my science before that point and was able to call BS on it, which was the first nail in the coffin for religion in general for me.
Actually I’m pretty sure this WAS science at one point, back when the guy who thought the sun was the center of the universe was taking the world by storm some of his stuff was actually added into the bible to make it more scholarly. Thus why Galileo was in a debated amount of trouble in the church when his work countered it. Or so the story goes it’s 1 and I’m not checking.
Oh hey, that’s pretty much what my mom did when I came out to meet her at the end of my first and only day at a Christian school, and showed her my science textbook that said that Darwin was wrong to question the Lord’s creation.
That’s pretty much all there was, to that story anyway.
I was a bookish child who got bullied (as bookish children usually are), and when we moved from one town to a slightly bigger one, my mother (who I take after) tried various alternative schools for a bit. That was one, because she was trying to be open-minded and all. As I said, it didn’t work out.
After that, I spent most of a year at a place that I liked a lot – really encouraged my imagination – but in some ways it wasn’t too much removed from day-care, and I was one of the oldest students there. Which left me very unprepared when I got dropped back into the public school system for the rest of middle school. I’d already skipped one grade back in elementary, and I was in the gifted program, but my social development wouldn’t catch up until… college, maybe? So I was still reacting to a lot of things like a child. For someone who was so smart, to the point where it formed a lot of my identity, I did a lot of stupid things. (Which is why I’ve been watching Walky’s antics with an uncomfortable mix of recognition and frustration.)
K gonna be honest, never knew what the fermament was. Just heard it, went “meh”, moved on with the day. Was that what the explanation for the 100+ year old man thing was?
It’s definitely not the original explanation, since cosmic rays weren’t even discovered until the 20th century. It sounds like an idea invented by young earth creationists to try to rationalize Biblical ages while tying it into modern science.
There…. was no explanation. The Bible just describes human lifespans getting shorter and shorter, with God occasionally explicitly saying that humans won’t live past any given age, such as 70.
…. yes, anyone over the age of 70 is quite literally living in defiance of God’s word. At least if you read the Bible literally.
And 100+ doesn’t quite cover it. The oldest human age recorded in the Bible is 969.
I’ve wondered if some of that might be mixing up ages in months with ages in years. 969 months is about 80 years, which is a respectable but not extraordinary age.
No. It’s myth. There’s no need for pseudo-logical explanations like that. Things were better in the old days when people were closer to their creation by God and less affected by the corruption of the world. That’s probably the closest to a real theological explanation.
Myths of ancestors being more impressive than people of today, including lifespan, are common throughout the world.
It’s only when modern people try to both take the Bible literally and somehow reconcile it with science that you need these weird pseudo-sciencey rationalizations. If you want to take the Bible literally, then own it. People lived that long because it was God’s will, not because of protection from cosmic rays or some such nonsense.
I seem to remember something about the Angels complaining about humans living so long so we got nerfed to not live past 120 (I always interpreted it as not living past 129). I always found it one of the funnier little parts.
I never actually heard of the firmament, but my household didn’t really go to church so much as read the Bible and apply common sense. I went to a Christian school and briefly believed that the world was 4000 years old because I saw a timeline from 2000 BC to 2000 AD and I was a very easily confused kid. I got it all sorted out around middle school though. I had a science teacher who kindly explained to me that evolution was real and other stuff. Didn’t take much convincing since it made more sense to me anyways XD.
As for the carnivores eating plants, I think they told me that animals didn’t have souls and therefore no death and no killing never applied to them since Adam and Eve ate animals. I tend to go back and forth on whether or not Heaven is real (even as just dying hallucinations) but if it is, I feel like my dogs would have more right to be there than me.
Then again, I have trouble identifying with a lot of Christian beliefs. Probably since most my family has always treated the Bible as 90% figurative and 10% Psalms.
I wonder if at some point they were just using months instead of years, because if you divide that by 13 (roughly how many moons in a year) you get a more reasonable 70-75 year old range.
Tigers didn’t eat Fruit Loops! They love suger coated corn starch! Do you know nothing of the cereal wars! The leprechaun embargos! Why do you think Trix are only for kids while rabbits die of starvation in the streets! So many tucans and tiny tree elves died!
It was a field promotion! The original captain of the Guppy was killed in combat, and the rest of her crew slowly dwindled in the harrowing limp back to port. By the time she got home, only the Cap’m remained.
Can it be one of those love letters to nineties seinen?
I saw someone do that with Danny Phantom once…
It. Was. Amazing.
Not sure how you’d manage that with cereal?
There already was one. You missed it. It was awesome. I wish I could remember the URL but I think it went offline soon after it finished because of all the trademark violations.
And it is a list of bat shit crazy the things that Willis talks about believing in his youth in the comments coming out of Becky’s mouth! I love this strip so much ^_^
Also, how many posts do yall think he will have to leave a link a link under for the FAQ or do you just think he will start mass deleting them? XD
That’s what it means in English, also. Even in the sky canopy “theory.” The scripture says the firmament separates the waters above from the water below. Becky may be simplifying, may actually have learned it wrong, or it even may be taught wrong by fundamentalists, especially the KJV-only set that often get the meaning of old words wrong.
But, yeah, it is interesting. Because it came about because of a mistranslation. The original Hebrew raqia means something like “expanse.” But, in Syriac, it means “To make firm or solid.” The Greek translation used stereoma meaning “firm or solid structure.” This was adapted into Latin as firmamentum, which literally means “a strong support.”
But what is described Genesis is clearly the sky. So firmamentum changed to mean “sky.” And that meaning is the one that stuck, as people were reluctant to change “church words.” Both English and Spanish get their words from Latin.
Man it must be awkward for the real life folks who learn this stuff and try to casually discuss it and everyone else just stares at them like they are a weirdo.
I was not aware that’s what people considered the firmament to be. I always thought it was the atmosphere itself that separated the sea from the sky sea. Interesting.
That’s what I thought, too. The Bible does say that the firmament divides the water above from the water below.
But then look at verse 14:
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
Yes, as clarified in verse 17, those are the sun and the moon. And they are in the firmament. So it’s not the atmosphere, per se. It’s the sky. In
If we use modern astronomy, it would seem the waters above must be somewhere beyond the sun. And, depending on how you read “God created the stars also,” which is said while God is making the sun and moon, it could be beyond them, too.
So a better definition might be “outer space.” But, if we go by what the word means today, it just means “sky.” As in, that blue thing you see during the day or black thing you see at night.
Except none of it makes sense if you use modern astronomy, which the writers certainly weren’t using.
Sure, firmament today means sky, but that’s because it came from the Biblical term and they didn’t have the same conception of the stars and the solar system that we do. In Greek cosmology, which seems a close parallel, the fixed stars were part of a crystal sphere revolving around the earth. The sun, moon and planets moved within that. The waters above would have been outside that. The whole thing, stars and all, being basically a bubble in the cosmic ocean.
Grew up in a possibly literal Christian household (well, dad is an atheist, he just supported mom in at least letting her brainwash without interfering), no. They’re really not.
No, no, no, you go to hell for not accepting Jesus as your savior. Except, you can’t do that unless you do it for their exact specific denomination of Christianity. Catholicism doesn’t count or most other Protestant churches. Or Mormons. Accepting evolution is just one element of that.
Which kind of summarizes where they get Jesus wrong in that they WANT it to be a small elitist group.
I admit, I thought the Prosperity Gospel was a funny joke when I first heard about it as “Seriously, no actual person could think this applies to Christianity.” Then I found out it was a huge massive movement and I considered converting to Cthulhuism.
It’s actually kind of impressive how creative creationists get when trying to justify their beliefs.
They are so set on the idea that their set of axioms must be 100% literally true that it does not matter how ridiculous any other assumption is, it is acceptable if it justifies the axiom.
This is the main reason why Creationism is not accepted as a possible theory like evolution is. Science is inherently based on the idea that anything that is valid must also be falsifiable, that all of our most widely accepted theories and understandings of the universe could be disproved in a second. Tomorrow the sun could rise in the West and our understanding would have to radically change, but it is only by being open to this potential change that it is scientific.
But Creationism refuses to accept that any part of the bible be taken as metaphor or exaggeration, if anything contradicts the bible, it must be false. Until creationists are willing to allow genesis to be subjected to the same standards as every other theory, they cannot claim any sort of validity for it.
Oh, none of this is in the Bible. It’s the funny thing about fundamentalism that they SAY it is an inerrant 100% true document but cherry pick or interpret it to fit their views. It’s not uncommon, really, or even that radical. Jesus was all about poverty and peace so it’s kind of hard for the rich warmongers to accept it–so they just phrase it differently.
The Firmament, the Waters Above, the worldwide Flood, and someone living to be over 900 are all in the Bible. Carnivores being created as vegetarians and the explanation of cosmic rays being blocked are not.
Yes, but the waters above being a literal water canopy that made everyone live longer by protecting us from the sun’s rays (or, alternatively, kept a higher level of oxygen on the surface–I’ve heard both) and came down when Noah’s flood happened is not in the Bible. It’s a relatively recent idea–at least from the 20th century.
But Biblical literalism only dates from the 19th, and Fundamentalism from the 20th, so that’s not surprising.
(There was something similar to the literalist interpretation among the common people before the Renaissance, but it wasn’t the same thing we call Biblical literalism today. Even as early as 400 AD there were Biblical scholars saying that the Creation story was not literally true.)
But much of it’s derived from the Bible: carnivores had to be vegetarian while living in the Garden, since death didn’t enter the world until the Fall, so what could they eat?
Not literal, but logical extrapolation.
Of course, logical extrapolation from false premises leaves you in bad places.
Adam and Eve were not supposed to be able to die before the Fall, but it’s not clear that was ‘true’ of the animals Adam found and named. Of course, God lies like a rug all through Genesis, so it’s kinda weird to be taking anything He supposedly said ‘literally’.
I wonder how the literalists cope with the two contradictory accounts of the creation in Genesis 1.1-2? Pick one and defend it, merge them to something that isn’t supported by either text?
Or the number of animals Noah was supposed to collect? Genesis 6:19 specifies two of each animal; Genesis 7:2 specifies seven pairs of each ritually “clean” animal, and two pairs of each “unclean”. Which one is the literal and inerrant truth, again?
They don’t see it as contradictory. Everything happens in the order specified in Genesis 1, since it describes the time. Some argue that God set down Adam in a portion of the Earth that didn’t yet have plants, and then created Eden afterwards. But that’s all still on the sixth day, after God had created everything else. And, either way, Eve is created on the sixth day.
As for Noah–their explanation is that he had two of each unclean animal, and either seven or fourteen of each clean animal. The earlier statement is just considered incomplete. It leave out “But also take 5 (or 12) more of every clean animal.”
Yes, I am well versed in all this. I’m not sure I would call my upbringing “fundamentalist,” (as I didn’t have the home schooling and such) but I definitely was taught Biblical literalism. Not just what they taught, but how to actually handle any contradiction I might stumble upon.
Knew about the firmament thing (thank you reading the Divine Comedy) but did not know the 900 years old part of the propaganda…just where in the world did THAT originate from…
The bible claims that people had a lifespan of around 800 or 900 years until after the Great Flood. I’ve never heard it have anything to do with the firmament, though.
Although the idea that the Great Flood was actually the Firmament falling down… is kind of fucking amazing. See, this is why I like to view Judeo-Christian texts as another mythology, because it always sounds AWESOME when you’re not thinking about the people who actually believe it.
Those numbers become a lot less extraordinary if the years are actually lunar months. Divide by 13 and you get long but somewhat realistic life spans for extraordinarily old individuals.
A similar non-distinction between years and months has been discussed for Plato’s Atlantis myth attributed to Solon interviewing Egyptian priests, leading to the Thera hypothesis.
Of course if you take that approach and still take everything literally, you shorten the infamous 6500 year estimate pretty drastically. Knock a couple thousand years off, most likely.
Another mythology is basically what they are. And if you dig into comparative myth and religion, you can see a lot of parallels and traces sources for some of the story. Noah & the flood being perhaps the most obvious.
Genesis mentions several people living really long. IIRC Adam was 900+ and Noah 500+. A professor of mine said it’s part of a general trend that our ancestors were totally super awesome and we are kinda progressively less awesome each generation, in contrast to, say, Babylonians, who said they were progressively more awesome each generation.
Alright–that explains it, thanks. I was lucky, the church I went to as a kid, the pastor focused on…almost nothing related to the standard dogma or the insane aspects of the Bible (or I was just a kid and didn’t remember/listen). So a lot of the really nonsense stuff, I didn’t have an introduction to.
Yeah…there are parts of myth that are epic in scale until you realize people believe all of it…*heavy sigh*
An aunt of mine is horrified at the concept of her children being in a room with my atheist father for any length of time. Her children are teens. The real-world parts of the crazy, yeah, I’ve been exposed to it…
The crazy element of American religion is a minority but it’s a big minority which is larger than the population of many countries because America is a big nation.
Not gonna lie, that description of the firmament sounds pretty cool. You could put that into some kind of fantasy world and it wouldn’t look out of place.
Sky pirates, sailing through the firmament, hunting leviathans and searching for the treasure of the stars…
I’m trying to figure out the physics/anatomy of Dina’s pose in the last panel and my conclusion is that her scientist-rage-and-despair is giving her ridiculous core strength to hold herself up like that. (I guess she’s leaning a little on Becky too.)
I thought that the firmament was the divisor between the physical world and celestial heaven — ie, the vacuum of outer space with heaven being “beyond the stars”?
the firmament is basically whatever your particular branch of christianity teaches you. for example, the mormon branch a buddy of mine was part of taught them that the firmament was what divided them from the planets they’d get to rule over when they died (paraphrased) and what kept folks like us away from ’em in a realm where we live as the SONS OF PERDITION (sadly, less paraphrased. happily, a SWEET NAME FOR A METAL BAND)
It’s written along the lines of “God parted the waters of land from the waters of the sky” so, like basically every other sentence in the Bible, it’s kind of up in the air as to what exactly was meant. Biblical Literalists in particular take it as meaning “oh look der’s an ocean up dere”.
Jesus at one point said, “The only way to Heaven is through me.” Which the Creationalists use as the reason why everyone is damned if they don’t believe in their (various) version of the faith. Nevermind everything else Jesus ever said.
Also a few of the SDAs believed that the last dinosaurs were wiped out by over-zellous medieval knights, but to be fair that was considered a pretty controversial theory.
Becky had come to the conclusion already that what she was taught as a kid was mostly bullshit. Dina, however, had no idea of the depths to which the bullshit ran.
Not from a literal reading of Genesis. The stars are lights fixed IN the firmament… the same firmament that holds the sun and the moon and the planets. Though later interpretations viewed these as inter-nested firmaments, a literal reading does not. UP through the middle ages the firmament was thought of as internested crystal spheres, with each sphere getting a planet (which included the sun and the moon, but not Neptune or Uranus or Earth) and the outer-most sphere containing all of the “fixed” stars. The spheres would rotate freely with respect to one another, causing the stars and planets and sun and moon to rise and set and move with respect to one another. Supposedly, the crystal spheres would occasionally rub together, creating the fabled “Harmony of the Spheres”.
So the sphere with the stars on them would be just inside Saturn’s sphere, so they could, well, grind on each other.
Also, in the Bible, stars are small enough for all of them to literally fall to Earth at once, and for people to stomp them out once they’re on the ground, and they can then can get into brawls with people once they’re here on Earth, but they prefer to gang up, I guess because a single star is no match for a human.
Ok, gonna have to look that one up. Never heard of “blood play” in my life, but I have a sinking suspicion of what it is.
….
Yep. Just what I thought. How is it that I keep finding myself surprised by these things? I’m in my 20s dammit I should have heard about this by now.
but that’s the thing! I could handle it, if it was just looks. But there are parts of her personality that I like. Mainly the parts that draw and like anime.
She draws Ronald Reagan fanart and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog prostrated before a cross. (I’m taking Willis’s reply to me here as the canonical Word of God.)
Ok even though I know for a fact these are usually based word-for-word on Willis’ own personal experience… is this real???
oh man I was raises Catholic and went to catechism school for years and this still sounds like utter insanity.
This is the part where I’d normally make a joke about insulting the wrong thing, but man, Liefeld. I can’t do it, not for all the pouches in the world.
Hmmm, now I’m wondering who’s worse. Leifield, who was always kind of a joke, or Miller, who turned himself into a joke by doubling down on the grim dark. Anyone want to weigh in?
Leifield seems like a fun guy who’s just never seen a human body and never drawn a foot, while Miller is a guy with some real chops who’s just unable to write about anything besides his huge issues with masculinity and women.
OTOH, Leifield never had any real talent while Miller did some incredible work in his early days. Miller’s a tragic case of Creator Breakdown, while Leifield was just a lousy artist becoming inexplicably popular.
It helped a lot that, despite being a terrible artist, Leifield is apparently very reliable, and easy to work with. Apparently he will meet deadlines every time, and responds well to criticism, so when other artists don’t get done on time, or don’t want to change what they’ve done, they can give the pages to Liefield, and he will happily churn them out and get them done for you, and if you need him to change something, he just goes, “Okay!” and happily changes it for you.
So he’s still working because he’s reliable and not a douche, despite everyone now realizing he’s pretty awful as an artist.
Neil Gaiman said, in a commencement address (it’s on the Intertubes somewhere, I just can’t be bothered to look it up) that a freelancer only needs two of three things: reliable, pleasant, and good. And only two of those, any two, are needed.
America is kind of an interesting place when you take a moment to examine it as it was a nation invaded by a bunch of religious fanatics who were considered weird and deranged by the people who banished them here. Then you get the fact plenty of religious groups make up stuff to justify whatever beliefs they want to hold, all the while claiming the Bible backs them up.
Only New England, really. The rest mostly came here for money or were forced here.
I’m still not sure how New England Puritanism managed to become dominant in the South.
I think you’re looking for the Borderers. Who were weird, very violent people from a horrible neighborhood of Europe, and pretty much became a big part of Southern culture. But living in a Southern Baptist town, it is *not*Puritanism, it’s a very different sect.
I had a somewhat religious upbringing, but I’m really counting my lucky stars that it wasn’t to the point where I’d honestly lost track of what was a science thing and what was a religion thing. I mean, there was some cognitive dissonance trying to believe both at once, but I at least knew which was which. Poor Becky.
Oh god. Do american christians REALLY believe this bullshit? I know a lot of christians here in my country but none are THIS far in denial. Please tell me its an exageration for the sake of comedy. I need to hear read it
To use a simile: Christians are like “gamers.” Becky’s group is like asking the guys who dox female game developers as representative of all people who have ever sat down at a console. It’s not so much there’s not a book to talking about Christianity (there is a rather famous one) but what people get out of it or say what it means varies wildly.
But to be honest, growing up in Rural Kentucky, there are some crazy ass beliefs. My dad’s secretary grew up in a compound which had very similar beliefs. Also, the general reaction to me believing in science and Christianity was “You can do that?” from at least a couple of my ex-fundamentalist friends.
Nope, no exaggeration. Various American Christians do believe that stuff. Unfortunately this probably includes some Catholics and what are called mainline Protestants in the US whose churches in general accept the conclusions of science.
Catholics are actually very good about siding with science against crazy beliefs–at least since the whole “Sun revolves around the Earth” thing. I know because I attended 12 years of Catholic school and they brought it up constantly.
There are a few people like that, but the majority of christians here mostly accept mainstream science too and aren’t bible literalists. But in certain places, especially low population, rural countryside in the midwest and the south, there will be more of them.
The most common thing people will dispute is evolution and the age of the earth
Also those sort of anti-science beliefs are really only found in “Christian” congregations that I would personally define as “cultish” or “elaborate scams”, but you can find plenty of non-christian themed variants of those too
What Papaya said. But unfortunately, they tend to get into office. And right-wing politicians court their votes. So they try to infect it into the education system, use it to argue that climate change is a hoax (and so the US shouldn’t do anything about it)… and they’re Senators and Representatives.
One question often asked of candidates for office is how old they think the Earth is, because it’s a good way to tell if they’re part of this wacky mindset. If they say less than a million years, you know that they’re part of the crazy. It’s…. somewhere between laughable and lamentable how many dodge the question.
Holy crap…the Firmament sounds AWESOME! I’d never heard of that before! Sounds like a hell of a story idea. Like the good future in the second Echo the Dolphin game.
Wait, pretty sure that as a kid I was taught there was an ozone layer protecting us from the sun, but pollution was making holes in the ozone layer. Not in religious school, like, public school and Captain Planet. The holes were bigger at the poles, I think? Or was it the other way around, with the greenhouse effect magnifying the sun, and methane from cow farts? What was going on in my fevered childhood mind?
There is a layer of ozone, and it reduces the solar radiation that reaches the surface. Chemicals released into the air have reduced the ambient ozone in the atmosphere, especially around the poles.
Other chemicals in the atmosphere are retaining heat, which causes climate change as the average temperature increases.
There is no big layer of water above the planet. That’s silly.
Crazy argumentation is not something only religious groups do. Just recently I heard someone say that the closing again of the ozone layer hole proves that there was no need to ban the chlorofluorocarbons. Or all the energy to avoid the y2k-bug was wasted, because no catastrophe occurred. Your hear other circular thinking like this whenever you ask people to do something they don’t like or stop doing something that’s convenient for them to prevent disaster.
Btw: to most Germans I know, Firmamant is just a fancy word for the night sky. I didn’t realize it had any biblical connections or that it might mean anything but the night sky as perceived by romantic rather then scientific eyes.
Holy shit, this is like horrifying nostalgia central. I remember all these fucked up theories. I’m gonna have to break some of these down for the folks lucky enough to never spend time hanging around in the “literalist interpretation of the Bible” swamp pits.
Panel 1: Okay, I love love love Becky in these, because she has such a good scientific way of approaching the world even though her formal training is low. Like, she recognizes her potential biases owing to the way information has been filtered to her for so long but doesn’t just throw them away willy-nilly.
Instead she checks each one with someone who knows better, especially as this is also a good way to check what all the cobwebs are, knowing that there might be some she doesn’t even recognize as cobwebs yet.
It’s all so methodical and thorough and well-thought out that I just know that she’s actually going to reach her dream, become the sort of lesbian scientist her dad would despise and find happiness in that career and calling. That in the end, she’s going to be okay no matter what shit she’s going to continue to go through in the short term.
Panel 2-3: Okay, there’s a reason why this comes immediately after the flood and a lot of it has to do with a man named Ken Ham. Ken Ham is the designer of the Creationist Museum. He’s also in love with dinosaurs and the idea that dinosaurs actually existed and coexisted with man.
So basically The Flintstones taken as documentary sort of thing. So, to justify this, he came up with the idea that they were all drowned in The Flood, which is why none exist today. One of my creationist friends growing up had a version of this and argued that the “dragons” that are mentioned in the King James version are actually surviving dinosaurs that escaped The Flood.
Now, part of this is he argues that all the mean meat-eating dinosaurs and indeed all predators used to eat only fruit and vegetables and coexist peacefully with all other animals up until man introduced sin into the world by eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Thus his museum is full of humans feeding giant death beasts fruit while existing in harmony in the Garden.
Now, most Rapture-believing types don’t hold truck with that largely because they are convinced that dinosaurs are an evil hoax created by Satan. But the carnivores all ate fruit one is definitely wide held, largely because the idea is that everyone was at peace until the Fruit and by being cast out of the garden, all the creatures learned savagery and sin.
Interestingly, these were also groups who believed that being vegetarian made you gay and thus a sinner and the only way to fight that was to eat meat for every meal, so consistency wasn’t exactly a strong value in this equation.
I grew up in Appalachia, Cerberus and in my part of Kentucky, I can name 15 different individual churches with absolutely insane but completely contradictory belief structures. This in addition to completely normal churches. I can’t help but wonder about Papa Joyce because if he actually switched churches as much as he did, his children must have been exposed to all manner of bizarre and different beliefs.
I also feel like I come off as prejudiced but my faith is deeply personal to me and I feel personally betrayed by those who indoctrinated me to believe in some of this stuff.
If my faith was threatened by the idea God can’t exist because of the strangeness of one small spec in the universe of infinite grandeur then I didn’t have much faith to begin with. It’s not scientific to believe without evidence but it’s stupid to dismiss science as it reinforces my love of the universe and humanity.
Of course, I’m very well acquainted with taking the good and fighting the bad. I write about the awesomeness of interracial relationships in my Cthulhu novels, for example.
I know, right. Becky is such a great scientist. She also is able to sort out some of the things she has been told that probably are not true. You just know that some of those have been niggling in the back of her mind.
Wait… Ken Ham said that… but dinosaurs… did they what? DID THEY WHAT??????
I’d assumed the dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden thing was just a ploy to grab the minds of little kids. Because lots of little kids love dinosaurs. So if you put them in the Bible it reinforces their faith, while if you don’t they might be tempted in secularist damnation by dinosaurian coolness. Like Mary says, if evil wasn’t nice no one would bother with it.
(Should I tell the story again about the carefully mutilated dinosaur book I saw in a tire store waiting area once?)
I was at a tire store killing time waiting on my car repair. I wandered over to the empty play area and looked through the kids’ books on the table. One of them was about dinosaurs, so I started looking through it, since I was a dinosaur geek back in the day.
There were a lot of pages torn out, but I just assumed that was little kids being rough on books. Until I noticed something. In the reduced version of the book there was nothing left that would be inconsistent with young earth creationism. No mention of “Dinosaurs existed during the three periods of the Mezozoic Era between 252 and 66 million years ago”, or “An Allosaurus could not have ever met a Tyrannosaurs Rex because they had been extinct for over 70 million years” or “Dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago, due to volcanos, an asteroid impact, or by having their eggs eaten by mammals that later evolved into people and other animals.”
And the places you would expect to see that sort of thing by the table of contents just happened to be on pages that were missing. So either there was a very odd coincidence in kid damage, or someone carefully read through the book and ripped out the pages they didn’t like.
Same. I usually get either flat-out disbelief (and accusations of lying) or I get someone getting really upset in the line of Dina when I talk about shit I grew up with (I am the kid of a right-wing libertarian atheist in the mold of Trump on the women and racism fronts and a fundie Biblical literalist in the mold of Carol. Without even throwing in the shit I got from being bullied in school all 12 years of schooling, stuff that was genuinely normal to me growing up – including, among other things, dinner table conversation along the lines of what Trump would brush off as “locker room banter” – is horrifying to a lot of people)
“Wait no, they WILL say stupid things, there will always be stupid people who say stupid things, but together we will bean them in the head with tire irons from far away.”
Panel 3-4: I love Dina’s face progressions in these. The curiosity of Panel 2 fading into the stunned disbelief of Panel 3 to the distressed panic of Panel 4 with the shimmering eyes starting to fill with tears.
I also love the casual way Becky is rolling with these. Like, she doesn’t try to push back or argue anything, she just checks and discards as needed and then moves on down the checklist.
Like, she’s being very methodical, but these are things she was raised to believe would be sins to discard, the only things she was ever taught and all things she was lovingly taught by a mother she still misses deeply. Like, she’s lost her faith connection to these pieces, but it’s still gotta carry some deep psychic resonance she’s weathering like a goddamn trooper.
And hoo boy, firmament. So, this lovely bit of howdoyoudo comes care of the attempts to resolve three things. One, the idea that firmament existed above the Earth in Genesis, two, the way characters in many of the old stories are suggested to survive hundreds of years, and three, the flood itself.
The idea being what Becky says, all the water of the world sat in a giant sea bubble around the Earth blocking all the bad stuff and thus letting people grow like giants and build giant arcs and live for up to a thousand years or more on the regular. Creationists who believe in dinosaurs like Ken Ham also use this to get around dino bones being super buried, arguing that the giant drop of flood layers aren’t counted in the layers of the Earth.
It’s also used to explain things like the Grand Canyon, arguing that the Flood Waters rushing through eroded it very quickly thus confusing foolish secular scientists (overheard that one when visiting the Grand Canyon).
Panel 5: Oof, this one hits hard. Cause I’ve been Becky in so many situations, talking about rough stuff that’s happened to me or that I’ve grown up with and then ending up having to comfort a loved one about that stuff as its so alien and upsetting to them that it’s practically traumatic.
Like, I don’t think Dina is necessarily a perfect analog, seeing as how her instinct is to death cuddle Becky and show her love and comfort rather than to demand emotional care from Becky. And that matters a shit-ton because Becky definitely could use some care and support and tight cuddles from the woman she loves.
And of course this is upsetting to Dina. She knew she could save this one. She has saved this one. But here she’s getting more and more of a glimpse of what she saved her from. The depth of the lies she was fed.
And for someone like Dina, that must hurt. The idea that someone so precious to her as her Becky grew up being lied to everyday. About the sinfulness of her natural attractions. About evolution being a lie. About dinosaurs not being real. About the age of the planet. About everything and anything.
For Dina, who uses the facts of events millions of years ago to ground her, this amount of deliberate lying and culture is alien and upsetting and seemingly the worst.
And the beauty of this moment is that she genuinely doesn’t want to dump that upset feeling on Becky. She’s biting her lip, she’s screwing her eyes up to try not to cry, she’s hugging Becky. She’s freaking the fuck out and not okay, but she’s trying her damndest to not dump that on Becky’s plate and that…
That part is beautiful to me and healing. I love their relationship so much and just want these two queer weirdos to be happy.
I’m staying out of this one as much as possible due to that and very much connected and related things… and also because I know that people here are more or less not those people and not in a situation where they need to hear otherwise.
You are spot on about Dina. How much it hurts that Becky – her perfect, marvelous, wonderful precious Becky who she wishes for to have everything that is good in the world – has been lied to her entire life – has been denied the things that are so important for Dina.
Dina thinks back of how she was a child, hiding under her blanket, reading about Qianzhousaurus for the first time. The pleasure she felt every time she asked a question and got and answer that comfortably slid in with the rest, forming the fundaments of her understanding of the world…. and she realizes that her Becky never had any of that.
Her last panel response the only one she can think of. Hug her Becky and never let anyone lie to her again.
I think part of what upsets Dina so much is that she knows what Becky is missing, from experience.
Becky, for her part… she never had it. She’s starting to see how much she’s behind the 8-ball on stuff, but she’s not like Joyce (or me for that matter) – she’s not the type to get bitter about stuff. She gets angry, sure (we saw that when she confronted her father), but she doesn’t tend to get bitter… So she won’t stew in it. So in her mind, it’s not a huge emotional thing, she’s just cleaning out her brain-closet.
Dina knows what Becky’s missing. Dina understands, better than Becky is able to at the moment, what Becky could have had as a kid – and what she was missing out on. Dina sees the full depth of the educational deprivation that Creationist children are missing out on.
Cuz, like, for me: I always thought evolution, and physics and stuff like that was so much more awesome than the myths I was taught in Church (my mother tried to religionify me and my sibs – stuck with my sib a bit, but I honestly believe it’s just simply not in my mental makeup to be able to take things on faith, because “faith” and “worship” are concepts which are completely alien to me).
Like, think about it: A giant fucking space rock comes out of the sky, crashes into the Gulf of Mexico so catastrophically that The Gulf itself is a fucking impact crater. Parts of the Earth’s crust were ejected dozens to hundreds of kilometers into space. It peeled some of the crust away as if it was a fucking orange, with such force that the friction alone melted millions of tons of solid rock. When the ejecta crashed down to Earth, it heated the atmosphere so much that trees on the other side of the planet likely spontaneously combusted. The entire world was a fucking firestorm.
… and life survived that.
And we know what happened because we can find evidence in the geological record. There’s huge carbon deposits from the fire storms, and deposits of solid glass near the impact where the impact heated the crust so much that the silica melted and fused into glass (fyi: Happens between 1400°C-1800°C depending on the morphology of the silica), and ash deposits and and and and….
Is that not fucking amazing?! This amazing disaster, this catastrophic apocalypse actually happened and we can prove it did, and the entire world burned but somehow life survived and that’s how Mammalia was able to become the dominant force on the fucking planet.
Or look at chemistry: The stuff of matter. Everything you can see and touch and breathe is chemicals (welll technically seeing is an interaction between a photon which isn’t really chemical with light receptors in your eye which are chemical but that’s not really my point here), and we can’t even build anything even 0.01% as complicated as the average membrane protein, but your body produces them every day like it’s nothing.
Or maybe we could look at physics: How stuff moves. That giant space rock? We can prevent our own species from meeting the same end as the Dinosaurs with math. Because as big as it is and as mind-bogglingly huge or small different parts of the universe are… they have rules. And they follow the rules. And through careful study and experimentation, we can figure out what those rules are and use them to our advantage. When you think about it: physics is cracking the code of the Universe itself.
Is that not fucking awesome?!
To me, science has always been so much cooler than anything else. I don’t get the myth of the dry and dusty passionless scientist – I’m a scientist because science is the coolest fucking thing humans have ever made.
And I’m 100% certain Dina feels the same way about it as I do. And she’s so angry because not only was Becky denied the experience of being able to crack the universe with your mind, but she was also fed watered-down fairy-tale bullshit and told that was what science was. It’s just so wrong of a thing to do to someone.
The really cool part is that humans are able to figure this shit out. By ourselves. We don’t need any magic omniscient being to do it, we can. Because we are smart, and inventive, and stubborn.
We’re glorified hairless apes who have such a strong drive for exploration and discovery that we strap ourselves to hundreds of tonnes of energetic material and launch ourselves into space despite the very real risk of death. We travel to the bottom of the sea, even though the pressures there would crush us like a bug. We figure out how to make it work.
Think about it: We’re able to send stuff from Earth to other planets. Why do we do this? Just to see what’s there. 1000 years ago, most of the planet didn’t even have plumbing… and now we’re sending spacecraft to go land on comets just to see what’s on it.
I’m young, but in my life time, we’ve gone from the infancy of personal computing to a world where almost everyone is connected to a vast network of computing resources that spans the globe, where I can and do video-chat on a regular basis with people in Australia and China etc, in real time and without loss of fidelity – and I do it because it helps me to advance knowledge in my field. But that’s not the cool thing. The cool thing is that we’ve designed this network so well that an average toddler can figure out how to use it.
Speaking of space rocks…. About 3.5 billion years ago there were most likely life on earth. There are even fossilised… something that might be cells (geologist tend to yell a lot about those 3.5 billion year old blobs, and I tend to not get into a pissing contest with people who wield hammers for a living). About 3.8 billion years ago there is a pretty strong reason to believe there were life on earth, based on chemical inbalance hinted at in minerals from the time. There are even hints of life 3.9 billion years ago. 3.95 years ago however…
SPACE-ROCKS!!!!! ALL THE MOTHER-EFFIN SPACE-ROCKS AT THE SAME TIME. And with space-rocks I mean the LATE FRIGGIN’ HEAVY BOMBARDMENT, also known as ROCKS FALL AND EVERYTHING, YES EVERYTHING, DIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Which means that there is a first possible date for life on earth, and in just a few measly million years this fine planet went from not having life to having life.
I could talk about this stuff all day (come to think of it, usually I do), but it all boils down to how right you are – how incredibly amazing the world is.
Oh Becky. How brave you are.
You’re tearing up Dina.
Which is good? Dina wants to interact with people and learn about them. Hard facts to face on this one, but a hellofa lesson.
Never have I felt more grateful for my upbringing than in this moment. Because I was brought up in an environment that said this was all, and I quote, “Mass bunkum.” So, I didn’t have to be unbrainwashed. Of course now I feel guilty because I didn’t get creationist brainwashed and other people here. Because I can’t possibly think of a reason for why I got so lucky in that department.
Ooooh this was always a fun game to play with my friends in college. The fun games make you sad. This was shortly before I started drinking.
I had Dina’s reaction the first time a newly-atheist friend asked me very, very sincerely, “Did we really come from chimpanzees?”, because they’d never had a real science lesson and had no idea how to untangle fact from stuff-their-Youth-Pastor-said. It was not even funny.
For real, they told them “SCIENTISTS say we came from chimpanzees”. Like, they literally meant modern-day chimpanzees. Literal. They built a strawman, and he came from a strawchimp.
And yeah, they would “teach” about how “scientists said” such and such about Lucy, Neanderthals, & other hominids AND also the thing about chimpanzees and no one at the time really thought about why scientists would say such contradictory things bc obviously they were wrong.
Nope, “to” is correct. It’s a particle of the infinitive form of the verb “fast”. The intention was to draw attention to the pun by making it clear that “fast” was not an adverb.
Jokes aside, lots of stuff about influences from older Ugaritic and Canaanite myths. Cool if you’re bored and into comparative mythology, but not a riveting read. It might have just been cause I was exhausted and hungry, but I kept falling asleep.
for some reason the whole “im gonna start listin’ stuff and you tell me if it’s real or not” line made me think of Hunger Games ha ha. Dina and Becky Hunger Games AU?
It’s mentioned in Genesis 1:6–“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Almost anyone who’s ever cracked open a Bible has probably gotten to that verse, though different translations render “firmament” differently–NIV just says “vault”.
Oooooh the firmament. That’s a good one. Functionally belief that there’s a big dome over the earth that separates the earth from the sea of the heavens. A vast dome with tiny windows in it that allows rain to pass through and some light from Heaven to pass through known as the stars.
The firmament is a special kind of crazy, backward, non-scientific religious lack of understanding of basic physics.
Nah, it’s a perfectly reasonable and fairly common attempt at understanding the structure of the world from some 3000 years ago. Non-scientific? Of course. We hadn’t invented science yet. And knew an awful lot less of even basic physics.
Holding on to it and pretending it somehow makes sense with modern science? That’s just batshit crazy.
Not in public schools*, only in some private schools (paid for by the parents), or in some home schooling (like what Joyce and Becky got).
Or at least it isn’t supposed to be, because it violates the Constitution’s stuff about religious freedom. I’ve got friends with kids out in rural public schools who say that the rules about religious neutrality get ignored a lot there.
* Schools run by the local government and free for everyone up to age 18. Yes, this is the opposite of what “public school” means in England.
Not in our for-real, state-accredited schools. Only in a few “Christian” “schools” scattered here and there, and of course in places where people can home-school their children without state supervision of any kind.
Too many years ago, that was me. I was in my late teens to early twenties and I found myself stripping away the last vestiges of my ruined faith. It isn’t fun. It hurts. It is terrifying. You don’t know what’s worth saving or how to rebuild after. The community you used to rely on for support has either abandoned you or are actively attacking you for your apostasy. Eventually it will feel liberating, but when you’re in the thick of it, it just feels like the end of the world. I so desperately want to give her a hug right now. No other character has made my heart ache quite like Becky.
To be honest, I never went through the “trauma” phase of tossing out some things like this.
Like, in terms of the actual message of Jesus, questions of whether there was a global flood, or whether the Earth is old or young, or whether evolution (as defined by biologists) was a mechanism in the rise of humanity…all those questions seemed superfluous and irrelevant. So it wasn’t a big deal to let those things go.
Like, I still have my faith, but I mean, if my faith ever hinged on whether or not there was ever a “firmament”…I imagine I would have needed to revisit my theology, you know?
I always had those questions, I just knew not to voice them with parents and such. Grew away from them, and now when I mention my religious beliefs, it’s mainly “I walk a different path…”
Do people actually believe this kind of stuff ? Serious question here. I live in France and we don’t have this kind of Christians here. Or we do I never met one of them.
In France, if I’m correct, you’re mostly meeting Catholics. The Catholic Church has generally been pro-science. In America, this kind of Creationist lunacy has been the domain of extreme Protestants.
South-west France (and even the king Henry IV), and some part of eastern France were and are lands of vast protestant parishes. But it’s another kind of protestantism. Evangelical churches are nevertheless coming through, especially in lumpenproletariat layers (new migrants from Congo or Roumany, suburbian populations – suburbs in the french sens of “banlieue”, not petit-bourgeois suburbs).
In the catholic church, the Opus Dei influence is still present, and Saint Nicolas du Chardonneret is an example of a creationnism nest “inside” (depends of the pope and of the time of the month) the apostolical catholic Church. You can find more and more “tradi” (conservative christians) among both protestants and catholics as the global number of church-goers sink, some of those have really strange ideas about literacy and science.
Oh, and it’s one of the few european countries were homeschooling is allowed (contrary to germany or spain).
Tu dois habiter dans une zone pas trop urbaine, parce que les évangélistes sont, de loin, les plus susceptibles de balancer ce genre de trucs, et c’est actuellement le groupe religieux qui progresse le plus au niveau fidèles. Beaucoup de congrégations différentes, donc peu de visibilté, mais je t’assure, y en a des tonnes, surtout en Alsace-Moselle à cause des lois concordataires.
Donc j’ai déjà eu des élèves (de LP, entre 15 et 21 ans) qui croient dur comme fer que les licornes existent parce que “c’est dans le coran” (ou plutôt dans une interprétation d’une école soufie particulière), que l’homme ne peut pas descendre du singe parce que sinon eh ben on le saurait ( c’est ça de regarder TF1), ou qu’effectivement l’homme chassait le dino à la sagaie. Je passe les histoires de taille et d’âge parce que ça finalement c’est du détail, vu que certains croient que les vaches hibernent sans l’aide d’aucun texte religieux.
English summary: those churches appear in France too, and are growing.
Something I’ve always wondered . . . why do the fundies still question Darwin, but not the “controversial” theories before him? Like back in Darwin’s day, they were still arguing that a species couldn’t go extinct at all. I mean yeah blah blah overwhelming evidence and all, but it’s not like overwhelming evidence stopped ’em from arguing for the earth being 6000 years old.
I think Darwin really pissed them off because his theories weren’t difficult to understand and could be appreciated by the layman. Also, Darwin was a faithful Christian himself and that seemed to make it more threatening.
Note that, from what I gather, “species” isn’t something that fundies accept exists – they use “kinds,” which, from the little understanding I couldn’t avoid getting, are far more broad categories. So, say, the Siberian Tiger going poof wouldn’t be an issue for them, because there’s other tigers, and, for them, that’s the same.
It’s the like how they keep pretending macroevolution and microevolution are different things, when in fact neither of them is a thing.
1: With the exception of birds alive today… You’ve never seen the look of a feathered dinosaur. You’ve seen artists interpretation of what a feathered dinosaur would look like. Even had dinosaurs been reptiles, they wouldn’t look like we initially thought we they did, because we gave them, like, zero muscle and fat, and just sort of had the skin of the animal where the bone was. Which is pretty silly. Feathers or no feathers, coloration, fat and muscle are things we barely have any idea about, and can only venture guesses.
2: Why would you refuse to accept a facet of reality becase it seems silly? Lots of real things seem silly to human beings. That does not make them less real.
3: Different perspective, but… a Velociraptor was 1.6 ft (0.5 m) tall, significantly smaller than the average american chicken, and they could jump 6 feet into the air, drive their claws into the flesh of a prey, and hang on until it keeled over. Having feathers does not make velociraptors not be terrifying machines of death. (Admitedly, I also like the idea of adorable predators, but still. Results.)
Some of the guesses look really sensible and good, though. If KingOfGreyfell thinks feathered dinosaurs look ridiculous, he needs to look for better art.
Even had dinosaurs been reptiles, they wouldn’t look like we initially thought we they did, because we gave them, like, zero muscle and fat, and just sort of had the skin of the animal where the bone was.
They ARE reptiles. They need to be reptiles for the reptile clade to make sense – if you exclude dinosaurs, crocodilians and turtles need to be excluded too.
They’re not squamata, though, so ‘terrible lizards’ is still a misnomer.
And…actually, old reconstructions were generally better about shrinkwrapping than more modern ones…the anatomy was very, very wrong, but aside from a few bits of weirdness (most of the ones I can think of were not dinosaurs, actually, but…), generally respectably fleshy.
They need to be reptiles for the reptile clade to make any sense, but the idea that reptiles should be a clade is new. In many older books, they’re intended to be a grade (like fish or monkeys), from which both birds and mammals were thought to descend.
I think some of the feathered dinosaurs are really pretty and elegant.
I also believe that dinosaurs survived until humans were around. In fact, I’m watching one of the smaller feathered ones eat seeds from a feeder outside my window right now.
And that’s merely taking the opposite of ‘ridiculous’ to be ‘badass’, and not ‘beautiful’, ‘striking’, or even ‘kind of boring’ (all of which have extant dinosaurs who fit the description…though there is also ‘ridiculous’).
#1 might actually be open to debate, depending on how you look at things. During the late Cretaceous, for example, the Earth was much hotter than it is now, hot enough for the polar ice caps to disappear completely. Such a massive increase in sea levels could TECHNICALLY be called a global flood, and it would have displaced many species and wiped out a lot of habitats, but it clearly didn’t destroy all life on the planet.
There isn’t even enough water for an actual worldwide flood. Melt the icecaps and all glaciers and whatever you got in the freezer and the Earth would still only be like 80% covered in water, up from the usual 70%.
Sea level would be about 70 meters / 230 feet higher, but and it would have destroyed lots of habitats, but considering it would still have happened over thousands of years and left much of the Earth unaffected, calling it a ”global flood” would be a stretch.
Like, here’s a map National Geographic made projecting what the world would look like if it happened today:
Don’t worry! Those latitudes are unlikely to remain habitable if climate change reaches that point! We’ll probably take meaningful action soon to avert that though. I mean, only fringe crazies would deny the obvious at this point, and not hundreds of thousands of people in a developed nation! People are just too consistently rational for that.
Seriously though we are hosed and I hope whatever rises in our place actually figures out ”not being cruel, selfish assholes to one another”. And that they don’t touch my stuff.
Well, technically creationism only covers how the universe was made: hand of God vs Big Bang.
This sounds more like they’re literalists (aka Fundies) – every word of the Bible is 100% truth, with no exaggeration, metaphors, mistranslations, or parts left out. It’s a bonkers way to live.
Except Creationism, in practice, is focused as much on creation of humans (and other creatures) as much as the creation of the universe. About 99% of what Creationists talk about is attacking evolution, not attacking early universe physics cosmology.
That this was allowed to pass as “education” should be legal grounds for Becky to sue her family, her church, her government, and everyone else involved in the shitshow.
Unfortunately she can’t. Children are legally considered property in the US, so you can teach them whatever the hell you want.
I know most states have regulations on home school educators, but they only ensure that kids are taught the basics. There’s no laws against faith-based “science” and history.
Hey, it’s not like lawmakers haven’t tried controlling every other sort of property a person could have. Cars, houses, guns, dildos, you name it, someone’s at least tried to make a law saying who can and can’t have it.
They’re not literally considered property. However, until they turn 18, children have very few legal rights or protections that their parents can’t override.
If a child requires medical treatment and their parents refuse on religious grounds, someone basically has to sue for custody to override the parents, even if the child consents.
There are also exceptions in labor laws that allow children to work for family at a younger age, for more hours and less pay than would otherwise be allowed.
OTOH, you wouldn’t want children to be determining their own medical care with out the parent being able to override either: “Nope. No shots. Shots hurt.”
Or applying labor laws to ban chores.
There aren’t simple, clear overriding rules to apply to get the results we want. It’s complicated and we’re just muddling through. Parents can’t have unquestioned total control, but kids can’t actually be treated as adults independent of parents either.
Actually, there is geological evidence for a massive, worldwide flood in our distant past; specifically when the last ice age ended, suddenly and catastrophically. It’s just all the rest of the story that’s bonkers.
I kinda figured as much. I’m into myths & folklore of various origins, and I always thought it too much of a coincidence that most have some version of a “flood myth”. They all differ on the reason and how survivors escaped, but the one thing they agree on is that there was a global flood at some point in distant memory.
This is easy to explain – early cultures were, for obvious reasons, mostly founded either on the coast on near large rivers. That’s where all the food was, and it also allowed people to move fast. They all have flood myths because they all got flooded. This didn’t happen at the same time (mostly – when the Mediterranean water level went up, A LOT of people became very fond of boats very fast), but back then, “the world” was like 3 villages in either direction.
My understanding is the Mediterranean finished drying and flooding before there were Homo sapiens. There weren’t boats in response and there aren’t stories about it.
The Black Sea was much more recent, so maybe from that, though I still doubt anyone actually remembers it in any form. River floods that people thought were the whole world, or quickly became it in the retelling, seem much more likely to me.
Some folk believe only *their* interpretation of an interpretation of an interpretation of a mistranslation of an interpretation of an interpretation of the Word of God [as written down by humans] is the One True Word that *everyone* should follow -all other views are incorrect. …At some point, things become ridiculous (but I won’t suggest which point it is, as folks would yell at me).
“The base code of your freckled redhead is good to go, but the previous users seem to have purposefully installed the F.U.N.D.I.E. virus. You’re going to have to run realitycheck.exe so you can install the ScienceIsAwesome app.”
Ironically enough, a lot of scientists are coming around to the idea that the world was once totally covered in water. It just wasn’t LIQUID water. The “snowball Earth” hypothesis argues that there was a super Ice Age where the glaciers made it all the way to the equator, and it lasted until volcanic activity pumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere to greenhouse things back to normal.
That was around 600 million years ago, and the melting of the ice released massive ammounts of free oxygen and allowed the multicellular animals of the “Cambrian explosion” to develop.
Something seems to be amiss here. You already HAD massive amounts of free oxygen, from photosynthetic single-cell organisms. It’s what caused the first (and possibly greatest) mass extinction.
It was definitely already aerobic, but oxygen levels do go up and down. The massive forests of the Carboniferous, for instance, produced an unusually high level of oxygen (and unusually low level of CO2, which I’ve heard blamed for the ice ages they had then).
They do – a lot (relatively speaking). Besides the forests, the high O2 composition of the Carboniferous atmosphere also got you the giant bugs. Non-aquatic arthropods only get oxygen by diffusion, which means their body size is effectively limited by how “deep” the oxygen goes through their tracheal network – it’s sort of like if you didn’t have lungs, but your skin pores were huge, and that was the only way your cells could get oxygen.
Technically, its is not that they produced more O2 or less CO2. It is that underdeveloped fungi made trees rot too slowly (which releases a lot of CO2) and got buried, and thus the “books were unbalance” so to speak. Assuming the slow decrease is CO2 eventually led to a severe ice age seems reasonable.
The idea is that there were two major jumps in oxygen levels — the first from photosynthetic bacteria, and then another at the end of the snowball period.
The theory is still somewhat controversial, and the wikipedia article doesn’t explain it the same way that several documentaries on paleozoology I’ve watched did. Is the hypothesis true? I’m not really in a position to offer expert opinion — not my field of scholarship, I’m just an interested amateur.
You can convince a child almost anything is true. You can keep them believing in the tooth fairy their entire lives if you also teach them not to trust science, that there’s lots of things that don’t make any sense because God is beyond our comprehension and you have doubts and don’t it on faith that’s because the devil is trying to corrupt them.
Sheltering them from outside influences and teaching them to believe they are inherently sinful and that the Angry Sky Man will look for any excuse to burn them for eternity and you can create a mindset with its own sense of self-preservation, which will try to defend itself when threatened by logic, evidence and even actual human suffering.
Think of fundie interpretations as a sort of Biblical fanfic. Stuff gets twisted all sorts of ways to make stories that were first told around fires before writing was even developed into some kind of accurate historical record.
I find that I have to keep reminding people that what we think of as “history” didn’t even exist until the 1700s – before that, legend and fact were pretty much intermingled, and nobody really cared what the “truth” was. Folks actually believed in a historical King Arthur ruling over a peaceful England with a group of handpicked knights errant, St. George slaying literal dragons to save Europe, and St. Patrick chasing snakes out of Ireland.
Rejection of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, it seems, leads quickly back into that same morass…
Oh my, yes. Did you know there are full textbooks of this stuff? The best ones try to find “alternate” explanations that seem to flow along with reality, the worst ones just say the opposite of reality. I’ve a few uni colleagues who collect the books and prop them up in their office’s clerestory windows, so the titles are visible from the hallway- just to mess with folks walking past.
I think though Becky’s context and “No but can you help me blast out the creationist cobwebs” means Dina will at least not get angry AT Becky, just the lies themselves.
An obvious lie. The Invisible Unicorn is, as everyone knows, Purple (which is the superior colour anyway, so I don’t know why the Invisible Unicorn would want to be any other).
Is it better? Like JBento says, I don’t think anyone actually believes in the FSM, but supposing someone did I’m not sure there is anything preventing them from understanding the whole of history and the natural world like this.
Setp 1: binge watch Aaronra’s and Thunderfoot’s youtube videos, specifically the Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism and Why do People Laugh at Creationists playlists.
..Well, now that I’ve had time to think about it, I suppose that “sky canopy that keeps out radiation & stuff” could be considered a primitive description for the atmosphere. (Assuming it even comes from the actual Bible and not some shit Christian “scientists” made up.)
The firmament is meant to separate the earth from Heaven. Some bible literalists decided it was made of water that dropped during the flood, hence why people didn’t live to be 900 afterwards and explaining the whole ‘world covering flood’ deal.
I am beside myself with rage and sadness, but the words come from inside us.
Actually, I wonder if Dina has ever felt strongly enough to be this speechless before. It’s wondrous thing, this pain of learning, of life. Even if it’s also sad.
I wouldn’t put Scientology and the FSM in the same sentence, this suggest they are in any way comparable. But’s that’s like saying the Sith (if they were real) and the film “the life of Brian” were in any way comparable.
The Scientologist have all the hallmarks of a cult and want their followers to believe even more rubbish than fundi Christians do. The stuff really makes your brain hurt.
Where FSM is concerned- in the last year or so I started to get the impression that some people have not caught on the the fact that FSM is a satire to show how crazy some religious ideas are. Which kind of proves their point though…
Oh, and since we’re on the topic, I’ve got to mention this one, because it cracks me up every time. It’s from either Hovind or Ham (one of the head kooks, at any rate):
Dinosaurs went extinct because the O2 ratio in the atmosphere started going down, but their nostrils didn’t enlarge, which meant that they had to breathe harder and faster to compensate, and then their nostrils caught fire from all the friction and that’s where you get fire-breathing dragons from.
These people are not in a mental institution, and that makes me sad. And then I remember that mental health resources aren’t all that many, and become glad that they’re not being wasted on this lot.
It isn’t, actually. “Firmament” literally means a solid crystal sphere, or set of nested spheres, on which the fixed stars and planets (the latter term includes the sun and moon, but not Neptune or Uranus) are mounted. It comes from the same Latin root as “firm”.
The idea behind the “separating the waters above and waters below” is that the entire habitable world is a bubble in the vast cosmic ocean, inside a crystal sphere – the firmament – that keeps the cosmic waters from flooding in and drowning everything.
The cosmology here is obviously wrong, but it’s at least an honest attempt to explain what was at the time unexplained.
The idea that the firmament itself is a dome of water held up by God magic is retconning and fanwanking by so-called literalists, in an attempt to explain how that bit of Genesis is really actually right despite being completely and obviously wrong in light of newer information.
“The idea that the firmament itself is a dome of water held up by God magic is retconning and fanwanking by so-called literalists, in an attempt to explain how that bit of Genesis is really actually right despite being completely and obviously wrong in light of newer information.”
We are pleased to say that We find this particular description particularly apt, as well as humorous. Carry on, please.
It’s also an attempt to push some greek flights of fancy in there for good measure. Because we can’t actually have Aristoteles be wrong about anything now, can we?
I grew up in a Christian household, and I’ve never heard of half of this stuff. But that might be because I’m Lutheran, which is like the laziest form of Christianity.
All you really got to do is show up to church maybe every so often and bring some hotdish to the Wednesday potluck and you’re set for eternal salvation.
Oddly it is probably true that most carnivores were, at one point in time, bacteria that gained energy through chemical reaction. From a certain point of view all were once carnivores until they developed symbiosis with the organelle that does that sunlight to energy thing.
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well that worked well -_-
Nice Dina face recreation, like damn
I see a frowny Dina on mobile…
I think it’s 11/10
real version
It’s okay, she just doesn’t have any eyes right now. The bare sockets are not too graphic in this resolution.
Eh, still works.
Honestly, this version seems more accurate.
Gotta replace the spaces with windows rune #255 if you don’t want websites to ignore them as whitespace.
Does the <code> tag help with fixed horizontal spacing? Well, I guess I’ll find out.
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“Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.”
Or to deer.
I understood that reference.
(BTW, If you don’t get it, you should definitely check out “Alice Grove” it’s another pretty good webcomic made by the creator of “Questionable Content” .)
O Man, o god, O man
*gives you a hug for the effort*
It kiiiiinda looks like Dina’s dino-hat is roaring, maaaaybe that’s what you were going for?
It’s not what you were going for.
thank you for giving me the best damn laugh i’ve had all week o m y gdo
The happiness to educate her is being replaced with a sadness of what she never had.
Yeah, it’s kind of funny that Becky is eliciting a LOT of emotion from Dina.
She’s seeing exactly what she’s saving her from.
I get similar reactions when I tell people stories from my childhood.
Oh holy shit yes.
People are all like “oh nooooo, I’m so sorry about that stuff that happened to you!” and I’m like, “it’s… fine? I mean, it’s NOT fine, but it’s what I’m used to and I’m really not upset and please stop making that face.”
I even get it from my husband, I was telling him about this realisation I had during counselling about how my past is affecting my sleep and he was like “oh no poor hubby I want to hug you forever” which was not remotely the point of talking about it. Because to me, all this shit is just a fact of my life.
Eh. I don’t mind so much being made to believe stuff like the world was 6,000 years old and all the other creationist crap as I mind all the shows and movies I wasn’t allowed to watch. The real crime isn’t brainwashing them to believe nonsense, it’s isolating them from the broader culture.
philip: I can absolutely see someone who has left that sort of background taking that point of view–that’s how you were most affected, personally. From the viewpoint of someone like Dina, however, raised in rational though and respect for knowledge and truth above all else, this is a ‘sin’ unto itself–a violation of everything she holds dear, and it happened to the one person outside her family whom she has a strong emotional connection to.
That said, Dina needs to get into a comparative religion course. If she’s going to be dealing with this stuff constructively, she’ll need to get the sociological background that could make it more comprehensible to her.
It probably won’t help. Those of us raised within the Jude-Christian traditions are quite blind to the utter insanity of those traditions. Our parents and teachers scoffed at at the tales recast by Herodotus and Ovid, but the shit in the Bobly is Judy as irrational as any other mythology.
Even Herodotus scoffed at some of his tales! (In at least one famous case, possibly wrongly.)
Early Christian Priest: “Ok, guys, now drink this wine -which is actually blood- and eat this bread -which is the flesh of the guy we worship- and you will go to heaven!”
Random Roman Passerby: “Holy shit, these guys are cannibals!”
That’s actually one of the stronger arguments for the whole “communion” bit at the last supper never having happened.
Jesus (or more properly, Yessus bin Yusefi) and his friends were Jews, and cannibalism is specifically mentioned and quite strictly banned in Jewish law, and has been since well before that period. He might as well have told them it was his piss and shit, and their reactions would be the same.
Frankly telling someone to symbolically drink your blood and eat your body ought to be pretty disgusting to anybody of any culture; it’s just we were introduced to it as young kids (and told we weren’t allowed to drink the wine until we were older, just to dangle that carrot) and by the time we were old enough to to question it, we’d done it 500 times already and had no reason to.
Until you’re so hot you want to dive into a lake of molten glass to cool off, you won’t get, won’t really understand, Herodotus
BOBLY!
Personally, if these were people I knew in real life, I would suggest some books on religious abuse, both to Becky, and to everyone planning on sticking this out with Becky and/or Joyce. There’s some very good ones out there, written by people who escaped the kind of life Becky’s just gotten away from, and written from the point of view of how to recover from a religious abuse type background, and they would be incredibly helpful in letting Becky know she’s not alone, and some of the steps for her to take, and helping everyone understand what Becky’s going through, and maybe some hints on how to help her. It would be so much easier if they had a better understanding of the mindset these girls are coming from.
There’s also a huge amount of useful information contained in a few websites made by people recovering from just this kind of upbringing. I’m not good with links on an iPad, so let’s see if this works:
Homeschoolers Anonymous
homeschoolersanonymous.org
No Longer Quivering
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nolongerquivering/
And one of my favorites, containing the story of Libby Anne who grew up a sheltered homeschooler like Joyce…and then she went to college and everything changed.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/
I think I even originally found Dumbing of Age through a link on Love Joy Feminism, and I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of Willis fans in the LJF commentariat.
As someone who grew up in a cultural bubble with a very different kind of brainwashing (totally vehemently areligious, at least twice as much “you’re worthless and can do nothing right”) I, personally, feel very strongly the opposite. I can find my own things that make me happy and I don’t mind that TV and movies, having never been part of my life, never really will be. But all the shit that I was taught? That has had the sort of knock-on effect that has effective stopped me from actually building a complete life for myself. That’s way worse, to me.
Not trying to diminish your experience, just… talk about another experience I guess.
“The real crime isn’t brainwashing them to believe nonsense, it’s isolating them from the broader culture.”
Quite honestly — I disagree. The real crime is, in fact, people being taught to simply believe what they’re told — and not being taught how to think critically or evaluate evidence.
Pop culture comes and goes. And honestly, you can catch up on it if you need to. But there are windows of development in which the habit of critical thinking and the importance of evidence can be taught, and people don’t tend to pick them up so much after that.
And the lack of those things, now — that’s why and how we have the current political situation among other things. And also, why and how so many people end up getting conned by quack medical claims, which really has the potential to hurt lives a lot, or even kill.
I see it as not so much “sadness of what she never had”, and more “absolute horror that people are being taught such things.”
Dina is attempting the Dinosaurian mind meld.
My scales are becoming your scales.
My feathers are becoming your feathers.
My thoughts are becoming your thoughts.
Of course, doing that right requires scalp to scalp contact…
becky would like that
If a Slipshine is ever made, am I alone in figuring a line in it would be Becky saying to Dina “Leave the Hat on”?
Did you see her reaction to the triceratops hoodie?
Sadly, I don’t recall it.
I couldn’t find the exact thing I was looking for, but the general point was Becky appears to really dig the dino clothing on Dina.
Since I think, like, an easy third of Becky’s comments seem to be the comments section, that makes sense.
Maybe this one:
Cuteness
that works
This one? http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/04-walking-with-dina/edmontosaurus/
That entire set of strips is filled with adorable-ness.
“Open your eyes, Becky – embrace Dino-ternity!”
“WHAT DID THEY DO TO YOU”
Wait until she finds out that Adam and Eve were like 12 foot tall.
That’s a new one for me.
Not for me, that was what I was taught in Sabbath School so many decades ago.
Huh, what I’d heard was that the giants were half-angels, and that’s why God caused the flood. Not as a kid, but from a local Baptist preacher.
Cains daughters were pretty hot and angels were all about tapping that bootay!
That’s from Enoch, I believe? The Watchers and the Nephilim, all that? I read Enoch on a lark in high school, but since then I’ve mostly seen references to the Watchers in Ars Magica books, so I may be a mite confused on this point.
The In Nomine RPG could add even more confusion on top of that.
Just leave the Apocalypse Codex out of it. That’s crazy talk.
Madeleine L’Engle’s “Many Waters” for me.
Never heard that one. Why would they be so tall, they didn’t even have basketball yet
If basketball had predated cosmic rays then we would have needed bigger courts. I think they had cricket, though. It’s hard to explain without the longevity.
Same reason dinosaurs were so big. The firmament.
Me too! I want more crazy knowledge! I mean, I’ve got plenty of my own crazy stuff from when my family tried to make me a Christian (southern baptist), but I love new ones ^_^
The dinosaur saddles someone brought up the other day would probably break her.
Like, on multiple levels.
Next you will be telling me that The Flintstones wasn’t a doco.
Or the Jetsons.
You mean Alley Oop riding Dinny wasn’t on the level either?
…I now want to see a dino saddle! That just made me laugh XD
It was hoff1991 who posted this before:
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-there-a-person-riding-on-a-saddle-on-top-of-a-dinosaur-at-the-Creationist-Museum-in-Kentucky
That isn’t even a good looking saddle for a dino XD
So if there were all those dino saddles, why is there no evidence of a good fitting dino saddle? XD
Here is a video on YouTube of The Thinking Atheist and friends walking through it and commenting as well
https://youtu.be/xVHWq0ZGE_Y
To this day she can’t bring herself to pick Yoshi in Mario Kart.
Wait, What?
SDA education was something else I can tell you
“No. Hominid heights vary down through the fossil record, but the largest in our direct descent is us.”
“…. wait, we come from apes? I thought that was just them lying to me about what non-Christians really believe.”
“No, that is well established through multiple cross-verified chains of evidence, from fossils to morphology to genetics.”
“So does that mean Adam and Eve were that tall because they were Neanderthals?”
“WE’RE TALLER THAN NEANDERTHALS!”
Dina and Becky definitely aren’t taller than your average Neanderthal.
Somewhat related, can anybody point me to a creationist explanation for old geology? I need to come up with a couple of sedimentary myths for a flat world. Over here in Europe we don’t get any exposure to such wild tales, having sent our religious fanatics across the pond for centuries.
Is there any other explanation but God making a joke of non-believers?
Catastrophism I think is a big thing in that. You’ll have to forgive me I don’t have the details. But something about the world wide flood also having volcanoes and that explains everything apparently.
The usual, almost stereotypical answer to any kind of evidence older than 6,000 years old is “Put there by Satan to fool non-believers.”
Huh, the answer I got was, “Non-Christians are so desperate to justify their rebellion, and driven so insane with sin, that they will see whatever they want to see. Evolutionistic scientists will grasp at the silliest of straws.”
“Put there by Satan to fool non-believers.” is a cousin marriage to “Put there by God to test our faith.”
Functionally equivalent to Last Thursdayism.
The entire universe was created Last Thursday, complete with everything in place and in motion including all our past memories.
Impossible to disprove, but completely useless.
Different creationists have different explanations.
But usually, everything is explained by the Flood. And/or Satan.
Different sedimentary layers? Laid down by the churning chaos of the Flood and/or put there by Satan.
Fossils? Lots of animals died in the Flood, and/or put there by Satan.
Certain animals only located in certain strata? Uh… either some animals were more dense than others and so floated to different levels of the mud before dying, or some were better at running to higher ground, or Satan.
They tend to use the flood disturbing things as their excuse for some criticisms of their idiot beliefs. In other cases they just flat out lie and claim that dinosaur fossils have been found in layers above hominid fossils.
The operate off of the ‘convenience factor.’ If they can find a scientific source which supports their beliefs, no matter how thoroughly it is debunked, retracted, or corrected later, they will cling to it and continue to cite it endlessly. Because it is convenient for them to do so.
Technically, dinosaur fossils HAVE been found in layers above hominid fossils.
… granted, they were avian dinosaurs.
*runs away really fast*
Don’t laugh, I’m sure the creationists will be using your stunning scientific discovery in their next peer reviewed treatise on how God made Eve out of a rib.
It’ll look like this:
“The esteemed Dr. Reltzik has published a publicly available paper confirming that dinosaurs bones have been found above hominid bones. He claims that the dinosaurs can run very fast, which is why ancient men found them useful as riding animals.”
Or what Becky was probably told happened to all the dinosaurs. XD
Spoiler warning: They survived the flood but then were hunted to extinction by humans O_O
That’s the ones that believe dinosaurs existed – there are others who think they didn’t but that they were put there by God to test one’s faith or by Satan to lead people astray, depending on the sect.
considering that her dad did not recognize the triceratops hoodie as being a dinosaur, i believe he taught her the latter
Now I went and googled “height of Adam and Eve” first article I saw said 12 feet, second said 90 feet scrolling down I saw one that said 900 feet… I didn’t realize Neon Genisis Evangelion was so biblically accurate.
I am the LORD, your GOD
get in the fucking robot
That was awesome. Thanks for that.
Only at first, then they drag in Lilith.
well you stole my comment right down to punctuation. hey, wanna decide this means we’re geniuses and think alike, rather than unoriginal?
I actually didn’t think Dina could make a face like that.
Neither did she.
Apparently she’s been practicing.
Careful Dina, if you frown any harder, bloody tears will ooze from your eyes.
Well, I was just going to link the Castlevania song by that name, but after around an hour of listening to music I haven’t found the version I sought.
Oh well, let’s go with an acapella cover instead.
Looking for this?</a?
Screw it, close enough.
Dina’s doesn’t feel anger, she has trained herself to feel only pity
unless they’re asshats, then she can get ANGRY
*Dina
Woo boy evolution is going to blow Becky’s mind
It blew Dina’s mind when she first learned about it. Hence the hat.
Dina is one blown mind away from being Saitama.
“We need to start you on Bill Nye and work up from there?”
“Bill Nye? The satanist?”
“…We need to start you on Sesame Street and work up from there.”
“Ooh, good one! I was told Bert and Ernie would turn me gay. Guess it can’t do any harm now, huh.”
I would just like to compliment this.
In for a penny…
Then work up to Bill Nye debating a Creationist XD
I’d hardly call that a debate. Verbally banging your head against a brick wall, maybe.
I’m saying it’s the ultimate test. Will she watch it and see the science is right or side with the creationist? It would be a good gauge to see if she could really become a scientist like she told her dad she wanted to be. She could need to hold off on it until she can reeducate herself and feel more comfortable with her ingrained bias or perhaps look for a different field (or at least a science field that will not constantly be at odds with how she was raised).
Jesus, she can probably taste copper right now.
“They can’t hurt you anymore.”
THIS is the best assessment for this strip.
You win all the internetz tonight.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/03-the-butterflies-fly-away/radiometric/
I feel for Dina, deeply.
*plays Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “From the Beginning” on the hacked Muzak*
I live for these comments <3
despite all my exposure to religion and such i never heard of a sky sea.
Me neither. I thought the firmament was a weird poetic translation.
Definitely did not hear of it being a literal thing, least of all a “sky sea” that did stuff like enable the biblical folks’ super aging.
And apparently how the whole world flooded so fast. The sky literally fell O_O
Amazing.
IMT …
Made The Sky …
FALL!!
Remember Thor Five.
Someday I’ll find a reference too obscure for anyone…
Hah! Never!
(Cities in Flight was one of the first books I got from the Science Fiction Book Club. Hmm, does that still exist? *websearch* Huh, it does.)
Wait, but, Moses is stated to live to 120, that’s well after the Flood but would have been just about as ridiculously impossible to the writers as 500 or 900+. If the firmament was enabling super-aging, but then the firmament fell down, how do they get Moses living to 120?
Divine intervention. He had to lead his people to freedom, regardless as to how long it took, but couldn’t entire paradise with them. I think.
Oh, yes, that would work. I’d have to look up and see if his cohort are mentioned living super long.
I do remember that Sarah (wife of Abraham) is stated to have lived “all the days and nights of her life”, which my mom really likes and interprets as living her life to the fullest.
Didn’t she have a son when she was like 80 or 90?
Yep, Isaac. An angel told her they would have a child, and Sarah laughed, because how could that happen, when her husband is so old? And Abraham was like “what’s so funny” and God is all “she laughed because she thinks she’s too old”, which is interpreted that God is okay with white lies to protect peace in the home.
–oh wait Sarah totally lives into Isaac’s adulthood (she sees Abraham go off the sacrifice him, at which point Isaac was in his early 30s, she dies when she sees Abraham coming back without him), so she gets to be 100+, too. Longevity for everyone!
Sarah lived to 127 years old.
This is just off the top of my head, but how old is the tradition of passing down names to the first born son? Could the figure of Moses actually have been several men in a row, all with the same name? Of course this is assuming that there was actually anything of substance for the writers to misinterpret in the first place.
He’s definitely presented as the same person, it’s not, like, a Dread Pirate Roberts type of deal.
Thank you for making me think of a Dread Prophet Moses first thing in the morning. My day is now made.
In the modern era, that won’t happen very often, because Jewish tradition is to only name children after the dead. Naming a child after a living person is tantamount to saying you wish they were dead, and thus is extremely rude.
But I don’t know how far back that custom goes.
(I know this because as a child of a mixed marriage, I was named after two relatives, one dead and one living.)
It differs between communities. In Ashkenazic communities you would name a child after a dead relative, but in Sephardic communities naming after a live relative isn’t unheard of.
Yeah, I was at a baby-naming a month or two ago and the father was explaining how they named their daughter after the mother’s mother and then he pointed to her and the Ashkenazim in the room all freaked out for a second. The family was Sephardic so there was no issue, but it was a weird mini-culture shock.
I remember being told it caused something weird with the weather, humidity, and oxygen levels. Not blocking out cosmic rays.
Oh, I heard that one a lot. It’s pretty much the big theory in at least a certain flavor of pre-millennial dispensationalist Rapturist Evangelical Christianity. It’s the main theory for the flood presented at Ken Ham’s Creationism Museum.
Biblical Literalism isn’t actually…literal. It’s more like guidelines to making up whatever they want to justify why the world works solely the way their specific church believes and everyone else is a liar.
“Biblical Literalism isn’t actually…literal.”
It’s literal all right! That’s literally what it is. LITERALISM.
It tries to be, but since the Bible is a collection of oral traditions and cultural myths that were never supposed to be taken as literal, trying to reconcile 6,000-year-old cosmology, mythical and poetic language, and contrdictory accounts, not to mention the bizarre symbolic craziness in Revelation, results in a crazy contorted bag of nonsense.
I wish I could have told my grandparents that. They seemed to take the bible at it’s word.
One Religious Education teacher said that the drugs the writers took explained Revelations.
God told them not to eat that fruit. Maybe that was why.
No one actually takes the Bible literally. No matter how much they claim to or even think they do.
It’s a complex text and requires interpretation to reach any meaning. Even just turning the 4 Gospels into a coherent narrative requires interpretation. It’s just that most people who claim “literalism” got taught an interpretation practically from the cradle so that their take seems obvious to them.
“It’s really more guidelines.”
Bloody pirates.
No, it’s really not. It’s a big pile of selective reading and dubious interpretations and stuff taken out of context and entire elaborate structures of mythology with no basis in the text that try to explain away the shortcomings of their worldview when compared to actual reality.
A lot of those cults discourage “unguided” reading of the Bible, as their approved interpretations of some bits of text are not the way a reasonable person reading them in context without “guidance” would read them.
I think it just started as a the Myth from where rain comes from.
“the waters above”
But i think these are two different Hebrew concepts her fundie group just combined.
I think “the Firmament” is just the name for the Celestial Sphere.
The Imaginary outer globe that the stars are hung on
I’m sure it started out as just some poetic language or mythology, but then certain sects tried to interpret scattered sections “literally” and thus, that bit of poetry now becomes proof of a sky sea responsible for making ten other poetic statements or mythologies into “literal” truths.
Well, it is *blue*. And water occasionally falls out of it. Sounds like sky sea to me.
Using the bible to justify biblicle “science”. Always foolproof logic.
Look up “Canopy Theory”. It’s the sort of thing that would be absolutely hilarious if a lot of people didn’t take it seriously, although even in YEC circles it’s got some heavy criticism.
Nowadays, “firmament” is acceptably poetic way to refer to the night sky (not the day sky, though), but if you are capable of reading Latin or Ancient Greek, you can see that in the older translations of the Bible they understood that it was LITERALLY a “sea in the sky”
(Not to odd, after all. Greco-Roman Religion had its wonky concepts already, especially when you add in the fact they tended to integrate the myths of beliefs of any culture they entered in contact with.)
Same here. I don’t think I ever heard a definition of “firmament” at all, actually, but I heard the word a few times.
I just thought that firmament was a fancy name for the ground.
That’s what I thought too.
According to The Other Wiki the Firmament is the “water of the sky that separates the heavens from the earth” or something along those lines.
So, like, the ozone layer?
Depends on how much of a Biblical Literalist you’re asking. If I had paid attention to that sort of thing when I was a Christian, I probably would have argued that that’s what it meant. Full-on Literalists would tell you that, as Becky said, it was an ocean in the sky and the source of the rain from the Great Flood. (Probably, that’s a theory I just came up with due to Becky’s statement about ages and the fact that the whole shortened-lifespan dealy happened right around the time of the flood)
Before I heard the water canopy theory, I originally just learned it as the clouds. They’re water in the air. The firmament is the sky that separates them.
Also I need to test somethingInteresting.I ended up catching myself in my own TVTropes trap. Did you know there’s a moe mascot of Wikipedia named Wikipe-tan?
Yes, yes I did.
And Trope-tan!
(Over on the Megatokyo forums we had our own Rescript-tan.)
Through about 1500, many cultures, and especially Mideast and Western ones, believed in a three tier universe. Heavens above for the god(s), earth for humans and the level below associated with death. Romans and Greeks lived in such universe. Jesus comes down and goes back up. Astronomy put some holes in that, but people still have “heavens above” in their minds and hell as down below, even though that only makes sense in a flat three layered universe.
Thus floods from the Almighty could only come from above and then go back there.
Genesis 1: 6-8 (KJV) …
6 Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”
7 Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.
6 Then God said, “Yo dawg, I heard you like water so I put water in your water so you can divide the water from the water.”
7 There is water at the bottom of the ocean.
“Of course there is. Where the hell else would it be?”
(Songwriter who is not a fan of that particular song; his take on it was hilarious.)
Creatures Of Light And Darkness flashback!
Ahhhh, I miss old Roger Z. More than Creatures, I liked Dworkin’s patterns in the Courts of Chaos.
Once but never in the Catholic school I went or church.
You never heard of a sky sea? Where do you think flying fish came from?
For what it’s worth, I actually had heard that one. If I remember right, the idea was that it made the entire world have what we’d call a tropical climate. Also, that was where a lot of the water from the Flood came from, was the vapor canopy collapsing and coming down as rain.
This was all at least 20 years ago, so I could be misremembering, but I think that was the basic idea.
Yeah, that’s it. If I remember correctly it’s one of those things that if it actually existed would make life as we know it impossible, as the atmospheric pressure at sea level would be ridiculously high.
Unfallen and Newly Fallen Man was not subject to nitrogen narcosis. Or maybe they were, that might explain a lot of the weird stuff in the Bible….
I’ve heard several variations on the vapour canopy=firmament idea over the years.
Before I broke free of religion I was taught to believe the sky was originally a bunch of water. It took me getting a BS in Biology and a lot of reprogramming to figure this stuff out. If I still believed in God I would thank him for being an unwitting Christian thinking I could learn biology without falling to its evil sciences lol
Search for some Kent Hovind videos, and have medical professionals standing by for when your brain starts oozing out of your ears.
The Bible, particularly in Genesis 1, describes the Waters Above (which I guess is that blue stuff above us?) being separated from the Waters Below, so obviously there must be water above us. The Firmament is also explicitly mentioned in Genesis 1, in which God places the stars the sun, and the moon. It’s not explicitly described, but it’s historically viewed as being a crystal dome (over a flat earth) or a sphere (around a round earth). During the Flood incident, windows are opened up in the Firmament causing the water to come through as rain, clearly implying that the firmament is what’s holding the Waters Above up.
One of the things Biblical literalists like to do is find ways to try (and fail) to explain how this can be scientific. Kent Hovind, whom I mentioned earlier, decided that the Firmament and the Waters Above were a giant shell of ice that completely encompassed the Earth, and the flood happened when God caused it to melt. He’s mum on how it could have lasted so long in direct sunlight without melting before then, or how the miles of thickness required by his theory would have let any light through beyond the occasional stray proton, resulting in an Earth that was dark and very, very, very cold. But he does say that the ice’s pressure upon the atmosphere, combined with the shielding it provided against cosmic rays, allowed everyone and everything to be gigantic. Lizards could be dinosaurs, elephants could be mammoths, and humans could be giants.
I swear, I’m not the one making this up.
Wow. Fundie mythology is gloriously bonkers.
At least it doesn’t involve Zeus peeing through a sieve to make rain.:)
To be fair, all mythology is. It’s a feature, apparently.
DID THEY WHAT??????
Thanks for all the reference, been wanting to know where this came from in the Bible.
I’m Catholic, I remember growing up and being told we don’t take all that’s passed in the Bible in face value without taking into account the history behind it. Guess I got lucky enough some of our teachers were a little more practical about it.
Then when we spoke to a priest about it, the answer that we got was that God being so perfect had to work with imperfect man to convey his teachings. And that meant us being imperfect beings aren’t going to get the whole Bible right from the start. Because if we somehow did find God’s Truth there, angels will descend, grab us and take us to straight to heaven, like Mary did.
Up until now, I’m not sure if he was encouraging or discouraging us to read the bible.
That’s pretty standard for catholics, honestly. Which is why you don’t find a lot of creationist catholics. Science is the system through which we are supposed to discover the miracles of god’s universe. So evolution/physics/all of it is real and set up and we’re supposed to be figuring it out to understand things.
Which is also probably why like, 90 percent of the old testament isn’t really taught as anything but a story in catholic school anymore. Or it wasn’t when I went.
You are right. From that point of view, the Catholic Church is doing relatively well (an important turning point was when John Paul II “pardoned” Galileo, making an official statement that implies the Vatican accepts that the Earth revolves around the Sun and it’s not at the center of the universe).
A common figure of speech here in Italy is “Science explains HOW, Religions explains WHY”, which implies that Religion is, mostly, metaphysics and shouldn’t be taken at face value for understanding physical laws. It’s a… decent compromise, I’d say.
(Of course, the Catholic Church is horrible in many other ways, but at least they aren’t as anti-science as they used to be)
I remember how the Old Testament were taught as stories or background to what is essentially the more important part of the bible which was Christ and his teachings (which compared to the Old Testament were pretty forgiving).
I honestly never heard of Creationists until I was much older and they were often spoken in tones one uses to not disturb the crazy people.
Sadly I can say I have had exposure to that idea, the Lutheran Church I went to subscribed heavily to biblical realism and would often have literature from creationist sources on the table out in the common area, one was on the pre-flood world and how the world changed after the flood. Luckily I loved studying my science before that point and was able to call BS on it, which was the first nail in the coffin for religion in general for me.
Dina remains the best. The BEST.
I thought I tabbed over from the Jon Stewart reruns about the stupid shit anti-science people make up, but apparently I can’t escape.
It’s like locusts or something.
Actually I’m pretty sure this WAS science at one point, back when the guy who thought the sun was the center of the universe was taking the world by storm some of his stuff was actually added into the bible to make it more scholarly. Thus why Galileo was in a debated amount of trouble in the church when his work countered it. Or so the story goes it’s 1 and I’m not checking.
Oh hey, that’s pretty much what my mom did when I came out to meet her at the end of my first and only day at a Christian school, and showed her my science textbook that said that Darwin was wrong to question the Lord’s creation.
“Do I have to do this?”
“No.”
And that was that.
The story behind you going to, and only being at, a Christian school; I’d read that.
Forgot the “for only a day” part there.
That’s pretty much all there was, to that story anyway.
I was a bookish child who got bullied (as bookish children usually are), and when we moved from one town to a slightly bigger one, my mother (who I take after) tried various alternative schools for a bit. That was one, because she was trying to be open-minded and all. As I said, it didn’t work out.
After that, I spent most of a year at a place that I liked a lot – really encouraged my imagination – but in some ways it wasn’t too much removed from day-care, and I was one of the oldest students there. Which left me very unprepared when I got dropped back into the public school system for the rest of middle school. I’d already skipped one grade back in elementary, and I was in the gifted program, but my social development wouldn’t catch up until… college, maybe? So I was still reacting to a lot of things like a child. For someone who was so smart, to the point where it formed a lot of my identity, I did a lot of stupid things. (Which is why I’ve been watching Walky’s antics with an uncomfortable mix of recognition and frustration.)
Still a nice story.
Story time? *all snuggled up with stuffed animals and some milk*
I’VE BECOME SO NUMB
I CAN’T FEEL YOU THERE
DON’T TOUCH ME THERE!
Woof. Sometimes I forget the woo some people buy into.
K gonna be honest, never knew what the fermament was. Just heard it, went “meh”, moved on with the day. Was that what the explanation for the 100+ year old man thing was?
I was told that people stopped living 700-900 years once they started eating meat.
Thankfully, vegans don’t live that long anymore.
It’s definitely not the original explanation, since cosmic rays weren’t even discovered until the 20th century. It sounds like an idea invented by young earth creationists to try to rationalize Biblical ages while tying it into modern science.
There…. was no explanation. The Bible just describes human lifespans getting shorter and shorter, with God occasionally explicitly saying that humans won’t live past any given age, such as 70.
…. yes, anyone over the age of 70 is quite literally living in defiance of God’s word. At least if you read the Bible literally.
And 100+ doesn’t quite cover it. The oldest human age recorded in the Bible is 969.
I’ve wondered if some of that might be mixing up ages in months with ages in years. 969 months is about 80 years, which is a respectable but not extraordinary age.
No. It’s myth. There’s no need for pseudo-logical explanations like that. Things were better in the old days when people were closer to their creation by God and less affected by the corruption of the world. That’s probably the closest to a real theological explanation.
Myths of ancestors being more impressive than people of today, including lifespan, are common throughout the world.
It’s only when modern people try to both take the Bible literally and somehow reconcile it with science that you need these weird pseudo-sciencey rationalizations. If you want to take the Bible literally, then own it. People lived that long because it was God’s will, not because of protection from cosmic rays or some such nonsense.
During the bronze age, 80 years would indeed be extraordinary.
I seem to remember something about the Angels complaining about humans living so long so we got nerfed to not live past 120 (I always interpreted it as not living past 129). I always found it one of the funnier little parts.
I never actually heard of the firmament, but my household didn’t really go to church so much as read the Bible and apply common sense. I went to a Christian school and briefly believed that the world was 4000 years old because I saw a timeline from 2000 BC to 2000 AD and I was a very easily confused kid. I got it all sorted out around middle school though. I had a science teacher who kindly explained to me that evolution was real and other stuff. Didn’t take much convincing since it made more sense to me anyways XD.
As for the carnivores eating plants, I think they told me that animals didn’t have souls and therefore no death and no killing never applied to them since Adam and Eve ate animals. I tend to go back and forth on whether or not Heaven is real (even as just dying hallucinations) but if it is, I feel like my dogs would have more right to be there than me.
Then again, I have trouble identifying with a lot of Christian beliefs. Probably since most my family has always treated the Bible as 90% figurative and 10% Psalms.
I wonder if at some point they were just using months instead of years, because if you divide that by 13 (roughly how many moons in a year) you get a more reasonable 70-75 year old range.
Tigers ate Fruit Loops, apparently they were GRRRREAAAAAT!
Tigers didn’t eat Fruit Loops! They love suger coated corn starch! Do you know nothing of the cereal wars! The leprechaun embargos! Why do you think Trix are only for kids while rabbits die of starvation in the streets! So many tucans and tiny tree elves died!
And that Captain wasn’t even a real Captain! Just fraud and theft all around!
It was a field promotion! The original captain of the Guppy was killed in combat, and the rest of her crew slowly dwindled in the harrowing limp back to port. By the time she got home, only the Cap’m remained.
Not gonna lie, I know really want to see a comic or manga entitled “Cereal Wars” because you just made it sound awesome enough to blow my mind.
Can it be one of those love letters to nineties seinen?
I saw someone do that with Danny Phantom once…
It. Was. Amazing.
Not sure how you’d manage that with cereal?
There already was one. You missed it. It was awesome. I wish I could remember the URL but I think it went offline soon after it finished because of all the trademark violations.
Ah, now I remember: “Breakfast of the Gods.” Google it.
That’s the one. It was truly epic.
Soggies may rule.
And it is a list of bat shit crazy the things that Willis talks about believing in his youth in the comments coming out of Becky’s mouth! I love this strip so much ^_^
Also, how many posts do yall think he will have to leave a link a link under for the FAQ or do you just think he will start mass deleting them? XD
Dina, you need to move her head a little lower for full effect!
No no no, HIGHER.
*HIGHER
NOT HIGH ENOUGH!
Huh “firmamento” in spanish is just one of the names we use for the sky in here… how curious
Sure, just lord it over us, why don’t you…
Well that’s crystal-clear.
That’s what it means in English, also. Even in the sky canopy “theory.” The scripture says the firmament separates the waters above from the water below. Becky may be simplifying, may actually have learned it wrong, or it even may be taught wrong by fundamentalists, especially the KJV-only set that often get the meaning of old words wrong.
But, yeah, it is interesting. Because it came about because of a mistranslation. The original Hebrew raqia means something like “expanse.” But, in Syriac, it means “To make firm or solid.” The Greek translation used stereoma meaning “firm or solid structure.” This was adapted into Latin as firmamentum, which literally means “a strong support.”
But what is described Genesis is clearly the sky. So firmamentum changed to mean “sky.” And that meaning is the one that stuck, as people were reluctant to change “church words.” Both English and Spanish get their words from Latin.
I always thought that it was restricted to the stars or the night sky, not sky in general
you and me both, dina
Man it must be awkward for the real life folks who learn this stuff and try to casually discuss it and everyone else just stares at them like they are a weirdo.
I was not aware that’s what people considered the firmament to be. I always thought it was the atmosphere itself that separated the sea from the sky sea. Interesting.
*referring to the atmosphere itself
That’s what I thought, too. The Bible does say that the firmament divides the water above from the water below.
But then look at verse 14:
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
Yes, as clarified in verse 17, those are the sun and the moon. And they are in the firmament. So it’s not the atmosphere, per se. It’s the sky. In
If we use modern astronomy, it would seem the waters above must be somewhere beyond the sun. And, depending on how you read “God created the stars also,” which is said while God is making the sun and moon, it could be beyond them, too.
So a better definition might be “outer space.” But, if we go by what the word means today, it just means “sky.” As in, that blue thing you see during the day or black thing you see at night.
Except none of it makes sense if you use modern astronomy, which the writers certainly weren’t using.
Sure, firmament today means sky, but that’s because it came from the Biblical term and they didn’t have the same conception of the stars and the solar system that we do. In Greek cosmology, which seems a close parallel, the fixed stars were part of a crystal sphere revolving around the earth. The sun, moon and planets moved within that. The waters above would have been outside that. The whole thing, stars and all, being basically a bubble in the cosmic ocean.
You’ve.. You’ve got to be joking.
Grew up in a possibly literal Christian household (well, dad is an atheist, he just supported mom in at least letting her brainwash without interfering), no. They’re really not.
They aren’t joking. Also you go to hell if you believe in evolution.
No, no, no, you go to hell for not accepting Jesus as your savior. Except, you can’t do that unless you do it for their exact specific denomination of Christianity. Catholicism doesn’t count or most other Protestant churches. Or Mormons. Accepting evolution is just one element of that.
Which kind of summarizes where they get Jesus wrong in that they WANT it to be a small elitist group.
Well if just ANYBODY can get in it’ll just get super crowded and you’ll never be able to find anywhere to park
“St. Peter, what’s over in that section with the high walls over there?”
‘Shh… That’s the [intolerant_religious_sect]. They think they’re the only ones here.’
I admit, I thought the Prosperity Gospel was a funny joke when I first heard about it as “Seriously, no actual person could think this applies to Christianity.” Then I found out it was a huge massive movement and I considered converting to Cthulhuism.
Yeah, that shit is just vile, and knowing that people actually buy into that harmful, transparent scam is deeply troubling.
At least in Judaism, when they say to tithe on order to get more money they mean give to the poor, not to the clergy.
If you have your choice, go to Catholic heaven, with Homer. My favorite Simsons episode.
https://youtu.be/idLQ26P9dpQ
Poe’s Law. It is so not a joke.
It’s actually kind of impressive how creative creationists get when trying to justify their beliefs.
They are so set on the idea that their set of axioms must be 100% literally true that it does not matter how ridiculous any other assumption is, it is acceptable if it justifies the axiom.
This is the main reason why Creationism is not accepted as a possible theory like evolution is. Science is inherently based on the idea that anything that is valid must also be falsifiable, that all of our most widely accepted theories and understandings of the universe could be disproved in a second. Tomorrow the sun could rise in the West and our understanding would have to radically change, but it is only by being open to this potential change that it is scientific.
But Creationism refuses to accept that any part of the bible be taken as metaphor or exaggeration, if anything contradicts the bible, it must be false. Until creationists are willing to allow genesis to be subjected to the same standards as every other theory, they cannot claim any sort of validity for it.
Oh, none of this is in the Bible. It’s the funny thing about fundamentalism that they SAY it is an inerrant 100% true document but cherry pick or interpret it to fit their views. It’s not uncommon, really, or even that radical. Jesus was all about poverty and peace so it’s kind of hard for the rich warmongers to accept it–so they just phrase it differently.
The Firmament, the Waters Above, the worldwide Flood, and someone living to be over 900 are all in the Bible. Carnivores being created as vegetarians and the explanation of cosmic rays being blocked are not.
Yes, but the waters above being a literal water canopy that made everyone live longer by protecting us from the sun’s rays (or, alternatively, kept a higher level of oxygen on the surface–I’ve heard both) and came down when Noah’s flood happened is not in the Bible. It’s a relatively recent idea–at least from the 20th century.
But Biblical literalism only dates from the 19th, and Fundamentalism from the 20th, so that’s not surprising.
(There was something similar to the literalist interpretation among the common people before the Renaissance, but it wasn’t the same thing we call Biblical literalism today. Even as early as 400 AD there were Biblical scholars saying that the Creation story was not literally true.)
But much of it’s derived from the Bible: carnivores had to be vegetarian while living in the Garden, since death didn’t enter the world until the Fall, so what could they eat?
Not literal, but logical extrapolation.
Of course, logical extrapolation from false premises leaves you in bad places.
Where does the Bible say that death didn’t enter the world until the Fall?
It’s definitely not Genesis, but is there some later passage somewhere that says that or something?
Adam and Eve were not supposed to be able to die before the Fall, but it’s not clear that was ‘true’ of the animals Adam found and named. Of course, God lies like a rug all through Genesis, so it’s kinda weird to be taking anything He supposedly said ‘literally’.
“God’s Word is immutable and unchanging except the stuff that kinda is.”
Jesus was entirely in line with the Old Testament, especially in the places he wasn’t.
I wonder how the literalists cope with the two contradictory accounts of the creation in Genesis 1.1-2? Pick one and defend it, merge them to something that isn’t supported by either text?
Or the number of animals Noah was supposed to collect? Genesis 6:19 specifies two of each animal; Genesis 7:2 specifies seven pairs of each ritually “clean” animal, and two pairs of each “unclean”. Which one is the literal and inerrant truth, again?
They don’t see it as contradictory. Everything happens in the order specified in Genesis 1, since it describes the time. Some argue that God set down Adam in a portion of the Earth that didn’t yet have plants, and then created Eden afterwards. But that’s all still on the sixth day, after God had created everything else. And, either way, Eve is created on the sixth day.
As for Noah–their explanation is that he had two of each unclean animal, and either seven or fourteen of each clean animal. The earlier statement is just considered incomplete. It leave out “But also take 5 (or 12) more of every clean animal.”
Yes, I am well versed in all this. I’m not sure I would call my upbringing “fundamentalist,” (as I didn’t have the home schooling and such) but I definitely was taught Biblical literalism. Not just what they taught, but how to actually handle any contradiction I might stumble upon.
So the Bible is literally true and inerrant in every particular, except for the stuff they got wrong and/or left out?
Exactly what you said, but without being sarcastic.
It’s always kind of depressed me, personally.
If God exists, then our intellect is the greatest gift he gave us.
Why do people think they’re following him by refusing to use it, except to concoct increasingly convoluted ways to call him a liar?
Knew about the firmament thing (thank you reading the Divine Comedy) but did not know the 900 years old part of the propaganda…just where in the world did THAT originate from…
The bible claims that people had a lifespan of around 800 or 900 years until after the Great Flood. I’ve never heard it have anything to do with the firmament, though.
Although the idea that the Great Flood was actually the Firmament falling down… is kind of fucking amazing. See, this is why I like to view Judeo-Christian texts as another mythology, because it always sounds AWESOME when you’re not thinking about the people who actually believe it.
All kinds of neat stuff in there, burning bushes, staves turning into snakes, parting seas…
Those numbers become a lot less extraordinary if the years are actually lunar months. Divide by 13 and you get long but somewhat realistic life spans for extraordinarily old individuals.
A similar non-distinction between years and months has been discussed for Plato’s Atlantis myth attributed to Solon interviewing Egyptian priests, leading to the Thera hypothesis.
take all the dang mystery and wonder out of it, why doncha
Of course if you take that approach and still take everything literally, you shorten the infamous 6500 year estimate pretty drastically. Knock a couple thousand years off, most likely.
Another mythology is basically what they are. And if you dig into comparative myth and religion, you can see a lot of parallels and traces sources for some of the story. Noah & the flood being perhaps the most obvious.
That one’s actually in the text of the Bible. Check the tail end of Genesis with the flood story.
Lol the flood happens toward the beginning
Genesis mentions several people living really long. IIRC Adam was 900+ and Noah 500+. A professor of mine said it’s part of a general trend that our ancestors were totally super awesome and we are kinda progressively less awesome each generation, in contrast to, say, Babylonians, who said they were progressively more awesome each generation.
Alright–that explains it, thanks. I was lucky, the church I went to as a kid, the pastor focused on…almost nothing related to the standard dogma or the insane aspects of the Bible (or I was just a kid and didn’t remember/listen). So a lot of the really nonsense stuff, I didn’t have an introduction to.
Yeah…there are parts of myth that are epic in scale until you realize people believe all of it…*heavy sigh*
An aunt of mine is horrified at the concept of her children being in a room with my atheist father for any length of time. Her children are teens. The real-world parts of the crazy, yeah, I’ve been exposed to it…
The crazy element of American religion is a minority but it’s a big minority which is larger than the population of many countries because America is a big nation.
Not gonna lie, that description of the firmament sounds pretty cool. You could put that into some kind of fantasy world and it wouldn’t look out of place.
Sky pirates, sailing through the firmament, hunting leviathans and searching for the treasure of the stars…
Things to remember for a possible show premise.
Didn’t I see that anime?
Maintained to protect the world below from solar flares.
So no cross over with Dragon Ball, good.
I brought you a thing
(Not exactly the same, but similar jumping off point?)
Beat me to it.
Thank you for the thing. I shall treasure it always.
This just made me think of Treasure Planet.
I’m trying to figure out the physics/anatomy of Dina’s pose in the last panel and my conclusion is that her scientist-rage-and-despair is giving her ridiculous core strength to hold herself up like that. (I guess she’s leaning a little on Becky too.)
Very strong intrinsic back muscles from all that standing behind doors
My thought was wow, Dina has great core strength!
Same!
Hold on to her, Dina! Hold on to her tight!
Huh, I didn’t think Dina was capable of making that face. She probably didn’t think so either.
I thought that the firmament was the divisor between the physical world and celestial heaven — ie, the vacuum of outer space with heaven being “beyond the stars”?
the firmament is basically whatever your particular branch of christianity teaches you. for example, the mormon branch a buddy of mine was part of taught them that the firmament was what divided them from the planets they’d get to rule over when they died (paraphrased) and what kept folks like us away from ’em in a realm where we live as the SONS OF PERDITION (sadly, less paraphrased. happily, a SWEET NAME FOR A METAL BAND)
It’s written along the lines of “God parted the waters of land from the waters of the sky” so, like basically every other sentence in the Bible, it’s kind of up in the air as to what exactly was meant. Biblical Literalists in particular take it as meaning “oh look der’s an ocean up dere”.
Jesus at one point said, “The only way to Heaven is through me.” Which the Creationalists use as the reason why everyone is damned if they don’t believe in their (various) version of the faith. Nevermind everything else Jesus ever said.
Also a few of the SDAs believed that the last dinosaurs were wiped out by over-zellous medieval knights, but to be fair that was considered a pretty controversial theory.
Surprisingly less controversial? Halley finished them off, and just swings by periodically to make sure no more have popped up.
DID THEY WHAT??????
TBF, there’s more evidence for “knights killed dragons” than “radiation-blocking firmament.”
Becky had come to the conclusion already that what she was taught as a kid was mostly bullshit. Dina, however, had no idea of the depths to which the bullshit ran.
You need a Bobcat to scoop up that level of shit.
Bobcat, hell. You need a Caterpillar D-7.
dina, dog, i have got a mormon friend and i have been there.
Oh Dina, I have some questions too. On the Flintstones, what species of dinosaur was Dino?
I think you’d either get a *twitch* or a *hiss* out of her.
In the show it’s called a “Snorkasaurus” (invented), being some sort of plateosaurid (early long necks)
Never heard the Firmament one before.
Wait, so all that apparently billions and billions of year old light that God created already en route, was that outside of the firmament?
He just slapped together what he had lying around, s`why it only took 6 days to make the entire universe.
Looking around at it, I’m inclined to think he goofed off for 5 days and then pulled an all-nighter.
Not from a literal reading of Genesis. The stars are lights fixed IN the firmament… the same firmament that holds the sun and the moon and the planets. Though later interpretations viewed these as inter-nested firmaments, a literal reading does not. UP through the middle ages the firmament was thought of as internested crystal spheres, with each sphere getting a planet (which included the sun and the moon, but not Neptune or Uranus or Earth) and the outer-most sphere containing all of the “fixed” stars. The spheres would rotate freely with respect to one another, causing the stars and planets and sun and moon to rise and set and move with respect to one another. Supposedly, the crystal spheres would occasionally rub together, creating the fabled “Harmony of the Spheres”.
So the sphere with the stars on them would be just inside Saturn’s sphere, so they could, well, grind on each other.
Also, in the Bible, stars are small enough for all of them to literally fall to Earth at once, and for people to stomp them out once they’re on the ground, and they can then can get into brawls with people once they’re here on Earth, but they prefer to gang up, I guess because a single star is no match for a human.
DID THEY WHAT??????
Do you guys have any DOA characters your attracted to but feel bad begin attracted to
Cause I kinda feel like a part of me has a crush on Mary, thankfully balanced out by having a crush on Carla.
Look, she’s a cute girl who can draw and likes anime!
Propose a threesome. What’s the worst that could happen?
Some1 better be real into bloodplay in that threesome.
Ok, gonna have to look that one up. Never heard of “blood play” in my life, but I have a sinking suspicion of what it is.
….
Yep. Just what I thought. How is it that I keep finding myself surprised by these things? I’m in my 20s dammit I should have heard about this by now.
I beg to differ.
That is not the worst that could happen.
I just love the things we call stuff sometimes…
I think about 203 more people may agree with you…
hey, marys cute! horrible personality aside.
but that’s the thing! I could handle it, if it was just looks. But there are parts of her personality that I like. Mainly the parts that draw and like anime.
She draws Ronald Reagan fanart and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog prostrated before a cross. (I’m taking Willis’s reply to me here as the canonical Word of God.)
The power of Carl Sagan compels you!
“So…. snakes had legs once upon a time, right?”
“Yes! … well their ancestors did.”
“And that was, what, 6 to 12 thousand years ago?”
“….”
“Clams got legs!”
Clams got legs!
“Great. Now we have to kill him.”
I heard they had wings.
Only down Mexico way…
Please leave Kukulkan out of this. He doesn’t like getting involved with Christian fights since the 1520s.
Not a very good year.
No, those were banales AKA baby geese
Ok even though I know for a fact these are usually based word-for-word on Willis’ own personal experience… is this real???
oh man I was raises Catholic and went to catechism school for years and this still sounds like utter insanity.
Google it. Google all of it. Then come back to comment when you either run away from Google screaming or recover from shock.
I’m afraid to.
Then how about starting off with watching the video I linked up above of atheists visiting the creation museum in Kentucky? So many dinosaurs! XD
I’m still not recovered from the shock
Yep, those are beliefs held in various versions of Young Earth Creationism.
Firmaments are as crazy stupid as they are crazy AWESOME.
Firmaments are the kind of shit that would be so much fun on a heavy metal cover or in a D&D campaign.
Cosmic Ray and the Firmaments is the name of my next psychedelic rock band.
What were the names of the previous ones?
I’m pissed off that we don’t have a firmament now. That sounds ultra rad.
Ultra radiation proof.
Dina’s so shocked HER SPINE BROKE, ROB LIEFELD STYLE.
Run if you see pouches.
Whoa whoa whoa now. Comparing the work of an actual, professional artist to Rob Liefeld seems super mean.
This is the part where I’d normally make a joke about insulting the wrong thing, but man, Liefeld. I can’t do it, not for all the pouches in the world.
Hmmm, now I’m wondering who’s worse. Leifield, who was always kind of a joke, or Miller, who turned himself into a joke by doubling down on the grim dark. Anyone want to weigh in?
Slashfic of a bunch of pouches saying “Whores”?
Leifield seems like a fun guy who’s just never seen a human body and never drawn a foot, while Miller is a guy with some real chops who’s just unable to write about anything besides his huge issues with masculinity and women.
OTOH, Leifield never had any real talent while Miller did some incredible work in his early days. Miller’s a tragic case of Creator Breakdown, while Leifield was just a lousy artist becoming inexplicably popular.
It helped a lot that, despite being a terrible artist, Leifield is apparently very reliable, and easy to work with. Apparently he will meet deadlines every time, and responds well to criticism, so when other artists don’t get done on time, or don’t want to change what they’ve done, they can give the pages to Liefield, and he will happily churn them out and get them done for you, and if you need him to change something, he just goes, “Okay!” and happily changes it for you.
So he’s still working because he’s reliable and not a douche, despite everyone now realizing he’s pretty awful as an artist.
There’s a life lesson in there somewhere.
Neil Gaiman said, in a commencement address (it’s on the Intertubes somewhere, I just can’t be bothered to look it up) that a freelancer only needs two of three things: reliable, pleasant, and good. And only two of those, any two, are needed.
Science fiction writer Eric Flint talks about how the actor Robert Urich got so much work because he was reliable, hardworking, and not a dick.
America is kind of an interesting place when you take a moment to examine it as it was a nation invaded by a bunch of religious fanatics who were considered weird and deranged by the people who banished them here. Then you get the fact plenty of religious groups make up stuff to justify whatever beliefs they want to hold, all the while claiming the Bible backs them up.
Only New England, really. The rest mostly came here for money or were forced here.
I’m still not sure how New England Puritanism managed to become dominant in the South.
Turns out, a lot of people love having a bunch of excuses to judge others.
I think you’re looking for the Borderers. Who were weird, very violent people from a horrible neighborhood of Europe, and pretty much became a big part of Southern culture. But living in a Southern Baptist town, it is *not*Puritanism, it’s a very different sect.
Good lord, I thought I’ve heard it all. And then “firmament”?!
Genesis 1:6, KJV.
I had a somewhat religious upbringing, but I’m really counting my lucky stars that it wasn’t to the point where I’d honestly lost track of what was a science thing and what was a religion thing. I mean, there was some cognitive dissonance trying to believe both at once, but I at least knew which was which. Poor Becky.
I feel it’s interesting to note that the people in the 15th century found the people who settled the United States with these beliefs to be crazy.
Oh god. Do american christians REALLY believe this bullshit? I know a lot of christians here in my country but none are THIS far in denial. Please tell me its an exageration for the sake of comedy. I need to
hearread itTo use a simile: Christians are like “gamers.” Becky’s group is like asking the guys who dox female game developers as representative of all people who have ever sat down at a console. It’s not so much there’s not a book to talking about Christianity (there is a rather famous one) but what people get out of it or say what it means varies wildly.
But to be honest, growing up in Rural Kentucky, there are some crazy ass beliefs. My dad’s secretary grew up in a compound which had very similar beliefs. Also, the general reaction to me believing in science and Christianity was “You can do that?” from at least a couple of my ex-fundamentalist friends.
Nope, no exaggeration. Various American Christians do believe that stuff. Unfortunately this probably includes some Catholics and what are called mainline Protestants in the US whose churches in general accept the conclusions of science.
Catholics are actually very good about siding with science against crazy beliefs–at least since the whole “Sun revolves around the Earth” thing. I know because I attended 12 years of Catholic school and they brought it up constantly.
The Galileo thing was a bit more complicated than “Christianity opposes science,” even then.
There are a few people like that, but the majority of christians here mostly accept mainstream science too and aren’t bible literalists. But in certain places, especially low population, rural countryside in the midwest and the south, there will be more of them.
The most common thing people will dispute is evolution and the age of the earth
Also those sort of anti-science beliefs are really only found in “Christian” congregations that I would personally define as “cultish” or “elaborate scams”, but you can find plenty of non-christian themed variants of those too
What Papaya said. But unfortunately, they tend to get into office. And right-wing politicians court their votes. So they try to infect it into the education system, use it to argue that climate change is a hoax (and so the US shouldn’t do anything about it)… and they’re Senators and Representatives.
One question often asked of candidates for office is how old they think the Earth is, because it’s a good way to tell if they’re part of this wacky mindset. If they say less than a million years, you know that they’re part of the crazy. It’s…. somewhere between laughable and lamentable how many dodge the question.
Holy crap…the Firmament sounds AWESOME! I’d never heard of that before! Sounds like a hell of a story idea. Like the good future in the second Echo the Dolphin game.
I have a vague memory of roleplaying setting where you adventure in the firmament in sky boats. It was indeed awesome
Probably Spelljammer (linked above).
That’s the one! And it does indeed seem awesome.
THIS IS WHAT BECKY MACINTYRES ACTUALLY BELIEVE
HOW IS BECKY FORMED
Wait, pretty sure that as a kid I was taught there was an ozone layer protecting us from the sun, but pollution was making holes in the ozone layer. Not in religious school, like, public school and Captain Planet. The holes were bigger at the poles, I think? Or was it the other way around, with the greenhouse effect magnifying the sun, and methane from cow farts? What was going on in my fevered childhood mind?
There is a layer of ozone, and it reduces the solar radiation that reaches the surface. Chemicals released into the air have reduced the ambient ozone in the atmosphere, especially around the poles.
Other chemicals in the atmosphere are retaining heat, which causes climate change as the average temperature increases.
There is no big layer of water above the planet. That’s silly.
Actually the ozone hole is starting to heal since chlorofluorocarbons were banned.
Global Warming aka Climate Change is caused by CO2 and methane, and water vapor gets into it too. It is getting worse.
So the good news is we won’t be going blind and getting skin cancer while we die from droughts, hurricanes, 35 C wet-bulb temperatures, etc.
Crazy argumentation is not something only religious groups do. Just recently I heard someone say that the closing again of the ozone layer hole proves that there was no need to ban the chlorofluorocarbons. Or all the energy to avoid the y2k-bug was wasted, because no catastrophe occurred. Your hear other circular thinking like this whenever you ask people to do something they don’t like or stop doing something that’s convenient for them to prevent disaster.
Btw: to most Germans I know, Firmamant is just a fancy word for the night sky. I didn’t realize it had any biblical connections or that it might mean anything but the night sky as perceived by romantic rather then scientific eyes.
Comic Reactions:
Holy shit, this is like horrifying nostalgia central. I remember all these fucked up theories. I’m gonna have to break some of these down for the folks lucky enough to never spend time hanging around in the “literalist interpretation of the Bible” swamp pits.
Panel 1: Okay, I love love love Becky in these, because she has such a good scientific way of approaching the world even though her formal training is low. Like, she recognizes her potential biases owing to the way information has been filtered to her for so long but doesn’t just throw them away willy-nilly.
Instead she checks each one with someone who knows better, especially as this is also a good way to check what all the cobwebs are, knowing that there might be some she doesn’t even recognize as cobwebs yet.
It’s all so methodical and thorough and well-thought out that I just know that she’s actually going to reach her dream, become the sort of lesbian scientist her dad would despise and find happiness in that career and calling. That in the end, she’s going to be okay no matter what shit she’s going to continue to go through in the short term.
Panel 2-3: Okay, there’s a reason why this comes immediately after the flood and a lot of it has to do with a man named Ken Ham. Ken Ham is the designer of the Creationist Museum. He’s also in love with dinosaurs and the idea that dinosaurs actually existed and coexisted with man.
So basically The Flintstones taken as documentary sort of thing. So, to justify this, he came up with the idea that they were all drowned in The Flood, which is why none exist today. One of my creationist friends growing up had a version of this and argued that the “dragons” that are mentioned in the King James version are actually surviving dinosaurs that escaped The Flood.
Now, part of this is he argues that all the mean meat-eating dinosaurs and indeed all predators used to eat only fruit and vegetables and coexist peacefully with all other animals up until man introduced sin into the world by eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Thus his museum is full of humans feeding giant death beasts fruit while existing in harmony in the Garden.
Now, most Rapture-believing types don’t hold truck with that largely because they are convinced that dinosaurs are an evil hoax created by Satan. But the carnivores all ate fruit one is definitely wide held, largely because the idea is that everyone was at peace until the Fruit and by being cast out of the garden, all the creatures learned savagery and sin.
Interestingly, these were also groups who believed that being vegetarian made you gay and thus a sinner and the only way to fight that was to eat meat for every meal, so consistency wasn’t exactly a strong value in this equation.
I grew up in Appalachia, Cerberus and in my part of Kentucky, I can name 15 different individual churches with absolutely insane but completely contradictory belief structures. This in addition to completely normal churches. I can’t help but wonder about Papa Joyce because if he actually switched churches as much as he did, his children must have been exposed to all manner of bizarre and different beliefs.
I also feel like I come off as prejudiced but my faith is deeply personal to me and I feel personally betrayed by those who indoctrinated me to believe in some of this stuff.
I can relate to that. *hugs* and hopes that I’m not stepping on toes with your faith.
If my faith was threatened by the idea God can’t exist because of the strangeness of one small spec in the universe of infinite grandeur then I didn’t have much faith to begin with. It’s not scientific to believe without evidence but it’s stupid to dismiss science as it reinforces my love of the universe and humanity.
Of course, I’m very well acquainted with taking the good and fighting the bad. I write about the awesomeness of interracial relationships in my Cthulhu novels, for example.
HP lovecraft would not be pleased.
Definitely not.
PH Lovecraft would be pleased though.
Yay! *clapping*
*ahem*
Now since that’s out of the way, I do like how Becky used Dina’s confusion in the third panel as an answer of “Well, that one’s false”.
I know. It’s like, well, if my super smart girlfriend hasn’t even heard of that one, it must be bullshit.
Becky has a new gold standard for scientific truth.
Becky: “Um, I’ve heard that the hair on Asian people parts differently than for other people, is that true or is that just more nonsense? Can I see?”
“You know…. for Science?”
I know, right. Becky is such a great scientist. She also is able to sort out some of the things she has been told that probably are not true. You just know that some of those have been niggling in the back of her mind.
Wait… Ken Ham said that… but dinosaurs… did they what? DID THEY WHAT??????
I’d assumed the dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden thing was just a ploy to grab the minds of little kids. Because lots of little kids love dinosaurs. So if you put them in the Bible it reinforces their faith, while if you don’t they might be tempted in secularist damnation by dinosaurian coolness. Like Mary says, if evil wasn’t nice no one would bother with it.
(Should I tell the story again about the carefully mutilated dinosaur book I saw in a tire store waiting area once?)
“(Should I tell the story again about the carefully mutilated dinosaur book I saw in a tire store waiting area once?)”
I’d like to hear it, but I can search for it if you don’t feel like telling it again.
I was at a tire store killing time waiting on my car repair. I wandered over to the empty play area and looked through the kids’ books on the table. One of them was about dinosaurs, so I started looking through it, since I was a dinosaur geek back in the day.
There were a lot of pages torn out, but I just assumed that was little kids being rough on books. Until I noticed something. In the reduced version of the book there was nothing left that would be inconsistent with young earth creationism. No mention of “Dinosaurs existed during the three periods of the Mezozoic Era between 252 and 66 million years ago”, or “An Allosaurus could not have ever met a Tyrannosaurs Rex because they had been extinct for over 70 million years” or “Dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago, due to volcanos, an asteroid impact, or by having their eggs eaten by mammals that later evolved into people and other animals.”
And the places you would expect to see that sort of thing by the table of contents just happened to be on pages that were missing. So either there was a very odd coincidence in kid damage, or someone carefully read through the book and ripped out the pages they didn’t like.
Eugh.
EUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHH!!!
Same. I usually get either flat-out disbelief (and accusations of lying) or I get someone getting really upset in the line of Dina when I talk about shit I grew up with (I am the kid of a right-wing libertarian atheist in the mold of Trump on the women and racism fronts and a fundie Biblical literalist in the mold of Carol. Without even throwing in the shit I got from being bullied in school all 12 years of schooling, stuff that was genuinely normal to me growing up – including, among other things, dinner table conversation along the lines of what Trump would brush off as “locker room banter” – is horrifying to a lot of people)
*Dina-hugs you*
“There, there. Dina will hold you and protect you and the stupid people will NEVER say stupid things to you again.”
“Wait no, they WILL say stupid things, there will always be stupid people who say stupid things, but together we will bean them in the head with tire irons from far away.”
Pictured: Dina saving this one
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/03-the-butterflies-fly-away/radiometric/
…she’l have her work cut out for her.
One of my all time favorite strips in DoA. And rather close to my first strip which caught my interest:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/devourin/
Now I’m getting flashbacks to my own Creationist brainwashing. I fucking love this comic.
I love how Becky goes limp when Dina goes into “I can save this one!” mode.
I’ve heard it’s the best way to survive hard falls.
It’s super cute. Like ‘oh, hugging time? Sure’
So, I’m thinking that either no one wants to post “Oh, you sweet Summer Child”, or they’re just being deleted.
DAFUQ via heavy physical contact.
I can’t like this comment but I like this comment.
*Sigh* Tag yourself, I’m Dina.
Panel 3-4: I love Dina’s face progressions in these. The curiosity of Panel 2 fading into the stunned disbelief of Panel 3 to the distressed panic of Panel 4 with the shimmering eyes starting to fill with tears.
I also love the casual way Becky is rolling with these. Like, she doesn’t try to push back or argue anything, she just checks and discards as needed and then moves on down the checklist.
Like, she’s being very methodical, but these are things she was raised to believe would be sins to discard, the only things she was ever taught and all things she was lovingly taught by a mother she still misses deeply. Like, she’s lost her faith connection to these pieces, but it’s still gotta carry some deep psychic resonance she’s weathering like a goddamn trooper.
And hoo boy, firmament. So, this lovely bit of howdoyoudo comes care of the attempts to resolve three things. One, the idea that firmament existed above the Earth in Genesis, two, the way characters in many of the old stories are suggested to survive hundreds of years, and three, the flood itself.
The idea being what Becky says, all the water of the world sat in a giant sea bubble around the Earth blocking all the bad stuff and thus letting people grow like giants and build giant arcs and live for up to a thousand years or more on the regular. Creationists who believe in dinosaurs like Ken Ham also use this to get around dino bones being super buried, arguing that the giant drop of flood layers aren’t counted in the layers of the Earth.
It’s also used to explain things like the Grand Canyon, arguing that the Flood Waters rushing through eroded it very quickly thus confusing foolish secular scientists (overheard that one when visiting the Grand Canyon).
And in case you think me or Willis are making shit up:
http://www.thesonsofnoah.com/creation-science/the-preflood-world/scientific-explanation-of-the-water-canopy/
Panel 5: Oof, this one hits hard. Cause I’ve been Becky in so many situations, talking about rough stuff that’s happened to me or that I’ve grown up with and then ending up having to comfort a loved one about that stuff as its so alien and upsetting to them that it’s practically traumatic.
Like, I don’t think Dina is necessarily a perfect analog, seeing as how her instinct is to death cuddle Becky and show her love and comfort rather than to demand emotional care from Becky. And that matters a shit-ton because Becky definitely could use some care and support and tight cuddles from the woman she loves.
And of course this is upsetting to Dina. She knew she could save this one. She has saved this one. But here she’s getting more and more of a glimpse of what she saved her from. The depth of the lies she was fed.
And for someone like Dina, that must hurt. The idea that someone so precious to her as her Becky grew up being lied to everyday. About the sinfulness of her natural attractions. About evolution being a lie. About dinosaurs not being real. About the age of the planet. About everything and anything.
For Dina, who uses the facts of events millions of years ago to ground her, this amount of deliberate lying and culture is alien and upsetting and seemingly the worst.
And the beauty of this moment is that she genuinely doesn’t want to dump that upset feeling on Becky. She’s biting her lip, she’s screwing her eyes up to try not to cry, she’s hugging Becky. She’s freaking the fuck out and not okay, but she’s trying her damndest to not dump that on Becky’s plate and that…
That part is beautiful to me and healing. I love their relationship so much and just want these two queer weirdos to be happy.
*Clicks link*
DID THEY WHAT??????
The way they make it sound like any of it is supported by science makes me angrier than I was expecting
I’m staying out of this one as much as possible due to that and very much connected and related things… and also because I know that people here are more or less not those people and not in a situation where they need to hear otherwise.
Yeah, Becky is a fucking rock. Stronk like bull.
That was beautiful Cerb.
You are spot on about Dina. How much it hurts that Becky – her perfect, marvelous, wonderful precious Becky who she wishes for to have everything that is good in the world – has been lied to her entire life – has been denied the things that are so important for Dina.
Dina thinks back of how she was a child, hiding under her blanket, reading about Qianzhousaurus for the first time. The pleasure she felt every time she asked a question and got and answer that comfortably slid in with the rest, forming the fundaments of her understanding of the world…. and she realizes that her Becky never had any of that.
Her last panel response the only one she can think of. Hug her Becky and never let anyone lie to her again.
BAWWWWWWWWW *broken feels induced sobbing*
Qianzhousaurus was named in 2014, so it should be another decade or so of real time before it’s part of Dina’s childhood.
Nitpicking about dinosaur lore, are we? Dina would approve
:’)
all I have to offer is my appreciation, but know that you have it. always.
I think part of what upsets Dina so much is that she knows what Becky is missing, from experience.
Becky, for her part… she never had it. She’s starting to see how much she’s behind the 8-ball on stuff, but she’s not like Joyce (or me for that matter) – she’s not the type to get bitter about stuff. She gets angry, sure (we saw that when she confronted her father), but she doesn’t tend to get bitter… So she won’t stew in it. So in her mind, it’s not a huge emotional thing, she’s just cleaning out her brain-closet.
Dina knows what Becky’s missing. Dina understands, better than Becky is able to at the moment, what Becky could have had as a kid – and what she was missing out on. Dina sees the full depth of the educational deprivation that Creationist children are missing out on.
Cuz, like, for me: I always thought evolution, and physics and stuff like that was so much more awesome than the myths I was taught in Church (my mother tried to religionify me and my sibs – stuck with my sib a bit, but I honestly believe it’s just simply not in my mental makeup to be able to take things on faith, because “faith” and “worship” are concepts which are completely alien to me).
Like, think about it: A giant fucking space rock comes out of the sky, crashes into the Gulf of Mexico so catastrophically that The Gulf itself is a fucking impact crater. Parts of the Earth’s crust were ejected dozens to hundreds of kilometers into space. It peeled some of the crust away as if it was a fucking orange, with such force that the friction alone melted millions of tons of solid rock. When the ejecta crashed down to Earth, it heated the atmosphere so much that trees on the other side of the planet likely spontaneously combusted. The entire world was a fucking firestorm.
… and life survived that.
And we know what happened because we can find evidence in the geological record. There’s huge carbon deposits from the fire storms, and deposits of solid glass near the impact where the impact heated the crust so much that the silica melted and fused into glass (fyi: Happens between 1400°C-1800°C depending on the morphology of the silica), and ash deposits and and and and….
Is that not fucking amazing?! This amazing disaster, this catastrophic apocalypse actually happened and we can prove it did, and the entire world burned but somehow life survived and that’s how Mammalia was able to become the dominant force on the fucking planet.
Or look at chemistry: The stuff of matter. Everything you can see and touch and breathe is chemicals (welll technically seeing is an interaction between a photon which isn’t really chemical with light receptors in your eye which are chemical but that’s not really my point here), and we can’t even build anything even 0.01% as complicated as the average membrane protein, but your body produces them every day like it’s nothing.
Or maybe we could look at physics: How stuff moves. That giant space rock? We can prevent our own species from meeting the same end as the Dinosaurs with math. Because as big as it is and as mind-bogglingly huge or small different parts of the universe are… they have rules. And they follow the rules. And through careful study and experimentation, we can figure out what those rules are and use them to our advantage. When you think about it: physics is cracking the code of the Universe itself.
Is that not fucking awesome?!
To me, science has always been so much cooler than anything else. I don’t get the myth of the dry and dusty passionless scientist – I’m a scientist because science is the coolest fucking thing humans have ever made.
And I’m 100% certain Dina feels the same way about it as I do. And she’s so angry because not only was Becky denied the experience of being able to crack the universe with your mind, but she was also fed watered-down fairy-tale bullshit and told that was what science was. It’s just so wrong of a thing to do to someone.
And for me that’s not even the really cool part.
The really cool part is that humans are able to figure this shit out. By ourselves. We don’t need any magic omniscient being to do it, we can. Because we are smart, and inventive, and stubborn.
We’re glorified hairless apes who have such a strong drive for exploration and discovery that we strap ourselves to hundreds of tonnes of energetic material and launch ourselves into space despite the very real risk of death. We travel to the bottom of the sea, even though the pressures there would crush us like a bug. We figure out how to make it work.
Think about it: We’re able to send stuff from Earth to other planets. Why do we do this? Just to see what’s there. 1000 years ago, most of the planet didn’t even have plumbing… and now we’re sending spacecraft to go land on comets just to see what’s on it.
I’m young, but in my life time, we’ve gone from the infancy of personal computing to a world where almost everyone is connected to a vast network of computing resources that spans the globe, where I can and do video-chat on a regular basis with people in Australia and China etc, in real time and without loss of fidelity – and I do it because it helps me to advance knowledge in my field. But that’s not the cool thing. The cool thing is that we’ve designed this network so well that an average toddler can figure out how to use it.
Our babies can talk to anyone in the world.
Human ingenuity and curiosity is fucking amazing.
I totally agree!
Yes, yes, YES and all the yes!!!!!!!!!
Speaking of space rocks…. About 3.5 billion years ago there were most likely life on earth. There are even fossilised… something that might be cells (geologist tend to yell a lot about those 3.5 billion year old blobs, and I tend to not get into a pissing contest with people who wield hammers for a living). About 3.8 billion years ago there is a pretty strong reason to believe there were life on earth, based on chemical inbalance hinted at in minerals from the time. There are even hints of life 3.9 billion years ago. 3.95 years ago however…
SPACE-ROCKS!!!!! ALL THE MOTHER-EFFIN SPACE-ROCKS AT THE SAME TIME. And with space-rocks I mean the LATE FRIGGIN’ HEAVY BOMBARDMENT, also known as ROCKS FALL AND EVERYTHING, YES EVERYTHING, DIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Which means that there is a first possible date for life on earth, and in just a few measly million years this fine planet went from not having life to having life.
I could talk about this stuff all day (come to think of it, usually I do), but it all boils down to how right you are – how incredibly amazing the world is.
Darwin: “There is a grandeur in this view of life.”
IT’S COBWEBS ALL THE WAY DOWN!
Oh Becky. How brave you are.
You’re tearing up Dina.
Which is good? Dina wants to interact with people and learn about them. Hard facts to face on this one, but a hellofa lesson.
Never have I felt more grateful for my upbringing than in this moment. Because I was brought up in an environment that said this was all, and I quote, “Mass bunkum.” So, I didn’t have to be unbrainwashed. Of course now I feel guilty because I didn’t get creationist brainwashed and other people here. Because I can’t possibly think of a reason for why I got so lucky in that department.
A fucking what? Firmament? You fucking people…
Well that’s rude…
There is a nice parallel between Dina’s faces here and Dorothy’s face in panel 3 here
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/personal-2/
That moment when the realization hits you of just how deep the evil of the world runs and your poor innocence is forever lost
So now I’m trying to remember if we ever found out what Sal got in her “small package”.
The other question is, does she have a green leaf on her package?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjFrHNVeBbU
Ooooh this was always a fun game to play with my friends in college. The fun games make you sad. This was shortly before I started drinking.
I had Dina’s reaction the first time a newly-atheist friend asked me very, very sincerely, “Did we really come from chimpanzees?”, because they’d never had a real science lesson and had no idea how to untangle fact from stuff-their-Youth-Pastor-said.
It was not even funny.
For real, they told them “SCIENTISTS say we came from chimpanzees”. Like, they literally meant modern-day chimpanzees. Literal. They built a strawman, and he came from a strawchimp.
And yeah, they would “teach” about how “scientists said” such and such about Lucy, Neanderthals, & other hominids AND also the thing about chimpanzees and no one at the time really thought about why scientists would say such contradictory things bc obviously they were wrong.
the firmament huh? I actually just learned about that today when I picked up Robert Graves’ “Hebrew Myths” to help me get through Yom Kippur.
Was it any good?
Yom Kippur? Well, some people like it. I always thought it went by to fast.
a worthy pun, ruined by bad spelling
*gently places “you tried” sticker on your forehead*
Bull. There is nothing misspelled there.
too, not to
Nope, “to” is correct. It’s a particle of the infinitive form of the verb “fast”. The intention was to draw attention to the pun by making it clear that “fast” was not an adverb.
Ironically, it was kinda dry.
Jokes aside, lots of stuff about influences from older Ugaritic and Canaanite myths. Cool if you’re bored and into comparative mythology, but not a riveting read. It might have just been cause I was exhausted and hungry, but I kept falling asleep.
for some reason the whole “im gonna start listin’ stuff and you tell me if it’s real or not” line made me think of Hunger Games ha ha. Dina and Becky Hunger Games AU?
I’ve never even heard of the firmament… that’s how deep Becky was buried in this shit… also
“comforting through heavy physical contact”
It’s mentioned in Genesis 1:6–“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Almost anyone who’s ever cracked open a Bible has probably gotten to that verse, though different translations render “firmament” differently–NIV just says “vault”.
I thought it meant, you know. Land.
Appropriate avatar is appropriate.
My friends still don’t believe me when I tell them this was in my science and history books.
Long biblical lifespans, I looked it up because I’m a dork: http://www.bible-history.com/old-testament
Should I feel bad that I think Dina’s traumatic breakdowns are adorable?
…firmament?
Wtf?
Oooooh the firmament. That’s a good one. Functionally belief that there’s a big dome over the earth that separates the earth from the sea of the heavens. A vast dome with tiny windows in it that allows rain to pass through and some light from Heaven to pass through known as the stars.
The firmament is a special kind of crazy, backward, non-scientific religious lack of understanding of basic physics.
Nah, it’s a perfectly reasonable and fairly common attempt at understanding the structure of the world from some 3000 years ago. Non-scientific? Of course. We hadn’t invented science yet. And knew an awful lot less of even basic physics.
Holding on to it and pretending it somehow makes sense with modern science? That’s just batshit crazy.
Americans! Is some of this stuff taught in some of your schools? Because I can’t… I literally can’t conceive of that.
Not in public schools*, only in some private schools (paid for by the parents), or in some home schooling (like what Joyce and Becky got).
Or at least it isn’t supposed to be, because it violates the Constitution’s stuff about religious freedom. I’ve got friends with kids out in rural public schools who say that the rules about religious neutrality get ignored a lot there.
* Schools run by the local government and free for everyone up to age 18. Yes, this is the opposite of what “public school” means in England.
Not in our for-real, state-accredited schools. Only in a few “Christian” “schools” scattered here and there, and of course in places where people can home-school their children without state supervision of any kind.
I envy you.
This comic is so nostalgic.
Oh… oh God this hurts…
Too many years ago, that was me. I was in my late teens to early twenties and I found myself stripping away the last vestiges of my ruined faith. It isn’t fun. It hurts. It is terrifying. You don’t know what’s worth saving or how to rebuild after. The community you used to rely on for support has either abandoned you or are actively attacking you for your apostasy. Eventually it will feel liberating, but when you’re in the thick of it, it just feels like the end of the world. I so desperately want to give her a hug right now. No other character has made my heart ache quite like Becky.
To be honest, I never went through the “trauma” phase of tossing out some things like this.
Like, in terms of the actual message of Jesus, questions of whether there was a global flood, or whether the Earth is old or young, or whether evolution (as defined by biologists) was a mechanism in the rise of humanity…all those questions seemed superfluous and irrelevant. So it wasn’t a big deal to let those things go.
Like, I still have my faith, but I mean, if my faith ever hinged on whether or not there was ever a “firmament”…I imagine I would have needed to revisit my theology, you know?
I always had those questions, I just knew not to voice them with parents and such. Grew away from them, and now when I mention my religious beliefs, it’s mainly “I walk a different path…”
Dina the Scientist has her work cut out for her…
Do people actually believe this kind of stuff ? Serious question here. I live in France and we don’t have this kind of Christians here. Or we do I never met one of them.
Serious answer: Check out http://www.answersingenesis.org.
DID THEY WHAT??????
NOT WHAT ENOUGH!
Other serious answer:
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1038/1038_01.asp
In France, if I’m correct, you’re mostly meeting Catholics. The Catholic Church has generally been pro-science. In America, this kind of Creationist lunacy has been the domain of extreme Protestants.
South-west France (and even the king Henry IV), and some part of eastern France were and are lands of vast protestant parishes. But it’s another kind of protestantism. Evangelical churches are nevertheless coming through, especially in lumpenproletariat layers (new migrants from Congo or Roumany, suburbian populations – suburbs in the french sens of “banlieue”, not petit-bourgeois suburbs).
In the catholic church, the Opus Dei influence is still present, and Saint Nicolas du Chardonneret is an example of a creationnism nest “inside” (depends of the pope and of the time of the month) the apostolical catholic Church. You can find more and more “tradi” (conservative christians) among both protestants and catholics as the global number of church-goers sink, some of those have really strange ideas about literacy and science.
Oh, and it’s one of the few european countries were homeschooling is allowed (contrary to germany or spain).
Tu dois habiter dans une zone pas trop urbaine, parce que les évangélistes sont, de loin, les plus susceptibles de balancer ce genre de trucs, et c’est actuellement le groupe religieux qui progresse le plus au niveau fidèles. Beaucoup de congrégations différentes, donc peu de visibilté, mais je t’assure, y en a des tonnes, surtout en Alsace-Moselle à cause des lois concordataires.
Donc j’ai déjà eu des élèves (de LP, entre 15 et 21 ans) qui croient dur comme fer que les licornes existent parce que “c’est dans le coran” (ou plutôt dans une interprétation d’une école soufie particulière), que l’homme ne peut pas descendre du singe parce que sinon eh ben on le saurait ( c’est ça de regarder TF1), ou qu’effectivement l’homme chassait le dino à la sagaie. Je passe les histoires de taille et d’âge parce que ça finalement c’est du détail, vu que certains croient que les vaches hibernent sans l’aide d’aucun texte religieux.
English summary: those churches appear in France too, and are growing.
“Woah, my head is, like, rubbing against her hat right now”
Something I’ve always wondered . . . why do the fundies still question Darwin, but not the “controversial” theories before him? Like back in Darwin’s day, they were still arguing that a species couldn’t go extinct at all. I mean yeah blah blah overwhelming evidence and all, but it’s not like overwhelming evidence stopped ’em from arguing for the earth being 6000 years old.
I think Darwin really pissed them off because his theories weren’t difficult to understand and could be appreciated by the layman. Also, Darwin was a faithful Christian himself and that seemed to make it more threatening.
Note that, from what I gather, “species” isn’t something that fundies accept exists – they use “kinds,” which, from the little understanding I couldn’t avoid getting, are far more broad categories. So, say, the Siberian Tiger going poof wouldn’t be an issue for them, because there’s other tigers, and, for them, that’s the same.
It’s the like how they keep pretending macroevolution and microevolution are different things, when in fact neither of them is a thing.
I will forever refuse to accept dinosaurs having feathers.
They look ridiculous.
Everything about this comment confuses me.
1: With the exception of birds alive today… You’ve never seen the look of a feathered dinosaur. You’ve seen artists interpretation of what a feathered dinosaur would look like. Even had dinosaurs been reptiles, they wouldn’t look like we initially thought we they did, because we gave them, like, zero muscle and fat, and just sort of had the skin of the animal where the bone was. Which is pretty silly. Feathers or no feathers, coloration, fat and muscle are things we barely have any idea about, and can only venture guesses.
2: Why would you refuse to accept a facet of reality becase it seems silly? Lots of real things seem silly to human beings. That does not make them less real.
3: Different perspective, but… a Velociraptor was 1.6 ft (0.5 m) tall, significantly smaller than the average american chicken, and they could jump 6 feet into the air, drive their claws into the flesh of a prey, and hang on until it keeled over. Having feathers does not make velociraptors not be terrifying machines of death. (Admitedly, I also like the idea of adorable predators, but still. Results.)
Some of the guesses look really sensible and good, though. If KingOfGreyfell thinks feathered dinosaurs look ridiculous, he needs to look for better art.
They ARE reptiles. They need to be reptiles for the reptile clade to make sense – if you exclude dinosaurs, crocodilians and turtles need to be excluded too.
They’re not squamata, though, so ‘terrible lizards’ is still a misnomer.
And…actually, old reconstructions were generally better about shrinkwrapping than more modern ones…the anatomy was very, very wrong, but aside from a few bits of weirdness (most of the ones I can think of were not dinosaurs, actually, but…), generally respectably fleshy.
They need to be reptiles for the reptile clade to make any sense, but the idea that reptiles should be a clade is new. In many older books, they’re intended to be a grade (like fish or monkeys), from which both birds and mammals were thought to descend.
strongly considering refusing to accept commenters who won’t accept feathered dinosaurs
For anyone who thinks a dinosaur with feathers would be ridiculous or look like a giant chicken
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150512-bird-grows-face-of-dinosaur
Consider tar and feathering them, maybe?
ha.
What are your feelings on hoodies and McNuggets?
Is your name, in fact, David Walkerton?
“Also, what do you think about maths?”
I think some of the feathered dinosaurs are really pretty and elegant.
I also believe that dinosaurs survived until humans were around. In fact, I’m watching one of the smaller feathered ones eat seeds from a feeder outside my window right now.
You’re right, of course, things that look ridiculous can’t possibly exist.
The platypus is as much a hilarious prank as the dropbear
What if they’re wearing platemail?
Eagles, Hawks, Falcons all dispute your contention that feathered creatures can’t be bad-ass.
I’ll take the cassowary as top of the “shit I’d rather wrestle an alligator than go up against” list.
Or some of the extinct South American Terror Birds.
Hell, we’ve got established strategies for dealing with gators. With cassowaries, it’s pretty much, “You brought your riot shield, right?”
And that’s merely taking the opposite of ‘ridiculous’ to be ‘badass’, and not ‘beautiful’, ‘striking’, or even ‘kind of boring’ (all of which have extant dinosaurs who fit the description…though there is also ‘ridiculous’).
hmm, that’s just american rethoric.
Becky’s got a lot of creationist cobwebs to get rid of.
#1 might actually be open to debate, depending on how you look at things. During the late Cretaceous, for example, the Earth was much hotter than it is now, hot enough for the polar ice caps to disappear completely. Such a massive increase in sea levels could TECHNICALLY be called a global flood, and it would have displaced many species and wiped out a lot of habitats, but it clearly didn’t destroy all life on the planet.
There isn’t even enough water for an actual worldwide flood. Melt the icecaps and all glaciers and whatever you got in the freezer and the Earth would still only be like 80% covered in water, up from the usual 70%.
Sea level would be about 70 meters / 230 feet higher, but and it would have destroyed lots of habitats, but considering it would still have happened over thousands of years and left much of the Earth unaffected, calling it a ”global flood” would be a stretch.
Like, here’s a map National Geographic made projecting what the world would look like if it happened today:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/if-ice-melted-map
The coasts are boned, but most of the US gets to wait to be killed by year-round tornado season and starvation or disease.
…yay?
I seem to survive the theoretical flood, and it DOES get rid of Florida (but not of Texas, nor, I think, Mississipi). Conflicted…
Don’t worry! Those latitudes are unlikely to remain habitable if climate change reaches that point! We’ll probably take meaningful action soon to avert that though. I mean, only fringe crazies would deny the obvious at this point, and not hundreds of thousands of people in a developed nation! People are just too consistently rational for that.
Seriously though we are hosed and I hope whatever rises in our place actually figures out ”not being cruel, selfish assholes to one another”. And that they don’t touch my stuff.
I for one embrace our future xenobiological lifeform, AI, or xenobiological lifeform AI overlords for just that reason.
I grew up Pentacostal and while I knew about the story of the flood vegetarian animals and frimaments are complete news to me.
Oh, Dina. You’ll cry a lot more if you read the stats:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2014/12/creationism_poll_how_many_americans_believe_the_bible_is_literal_inerrant.html
Still, there seems to be some glimmer of light for the US.
Except in the UK, where the fad for Academies and “Free” schools seems to be letting the darkness back in.
….. what….. what did I just read?
.-.
Things some sects of creationist Christians actually believe.
Well, technically creationism only covers how the universe was made: hand of God vs Big Bang.
This sounds more like they’re literalists (aka Fundies) – every word of the Bible is 100% truth, with no exaggeration, metaphors, mistranslations, or parts left out. It’s a bonkers way to live.
Except Creationism, in practice, is focused as much on creation of humans (and other creatures) as much as the creation of the universe. About 99% of what Creationists talk about is attacking evolution, not attacking early universe physics cosmology.
What. the actual. fuck.
Do they really TEACH stuff like that!? Are they really allowed to do that!?
That is messed up.
That this was allowed to pass as “education” should be legal grounds for Becky to sue her family, her church, her government, and everyone else involved in the shitshow.
Unfortunately she can’t.
Children are legally considered property in the US, so you can teach them whatever the hell you want.
I know most states have regulations on home school educators, but they only ensure that kids are taught the basics. There’s no laws against faith-based “science” and history.
Children are who what now? What the fuck, people?
…
Wait, that can’t be exactly right. Otherwise, pedophilia and child labour wouldn’t be illegal there.
Hey, it’s not like lawmakers haven’t tried controlling every other sort of property a person could have. Cars, houses, guns, dildos, you name it, someone’s at least tried to make a law saying who can and can’t have it.
They’re not literally considered property. However, until they turn 18, children have very few legal rights or protections that their parents can’t override.
If a child requires medical treatment and their parents refuse on religious grounds, someone basically has to sue for custody to override the parents, even if the child consents.
There are also exceptions in labor laws that allow children to work for family at a younger age, for more hours and less pay than would otherwise be allowed.
You know, I haven’t cast “Summon Meteorite” in 65 million years, but sometimes, just sometimes, a repeat performance crosses my mind…
I think it’s like a “farmer’s law” or something.
Oh yeah, I remember reading about that. Every country except the US agreed to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
OTOH, you wouldn’t want children to be determining their own medical care with out the parent being able to override either: “Nope. No shots. Shots hurt.”
Or applying labor laws to ban chores.
There aren’t simple, clear overriding rules to apply to get the results we want. It’s complicated and we’re just muddling through. Parents can’t have unquestioned total control, but kids can’t actually be treated as adults independent of parents either.
I was literally educated by nuns and priests and this is the first time i heard aboit those things
Actually, there is geological evidence for a massive, worldwide flood in our distant past; specifically when the last ice age ended, suddenly and catastrophically. It’s just all the rest of the story that’s bonkers.
Worldwide flooding, not worldwide flood. Nothing even remotely like the Noachian flood.
I kinda figured as much. I’m into myths & folklore of various origins, and I always thought it too much of a coincidence that most have some version of a “flood myth”. They all differ on the reason and how survivors escaped, but the one thing they agree on is that there was a global flood at some point in distant memory.
This is easy to explain – early cultures were, for obvious reasons, mostly founded either on the coast on near large rivers. That’s where all the food was, and it also allowed people to move fast. They all have flood myths because they all got flooded. This didn’t happen at the same time (mostly – when the Mediterranean water level went up, A LOT of people became very fond of boats very fast), but back then, “the world” was like 3 villages in either direction.
The modern equivalent is a US senator holding up a snowball, as evidence that it represents worldwide weather.
My understanding is the Mediterranean finished drying and flooding before there were Homo sapiens. There weren’t boats in response and there aren’t stories about it.
The Black Sea was much more recent, so maybe from that, though I still doubt anyone actually remembers it in any form. River floods that people thought were the whole world, or quickly became it in the retelling, seem much more likely to me.
Dina looks like she’s about to break her own spine out of anger at the world of ignorance.
The hell kinda bible is she reading…?
More a case of having a preacher telling her what to read and explaining what it’s supposed to mean.
Some folk believe only *their* interpretation of an interpretation of an interpretation of a mistranslation of an interpretation of an interpretation of the Word of God [as written down by humans] is the One True Word that *everyone* should follow -all other views are incorrect. …At some point, things become ridiculous (but I won’t suggest which point it is, as folks would yell at me).
Dina found her orange-frosting cinnamon roll. very sweet. needs guidance.
“The base code of your freckled redhead is good to go, but the previous users seem to have purposefully installed the F.U.N.D.I.E. virus. You’re going to have to run realitycheck.exe so you can install the ScienceIsAwesome app.”
But there does seem to be an usually high priority given to accessing the memory at the top of the stack.
Ironically enough, a lot of scientists are coming around to the idea that the world was once totally covered in water. It just wasn’t LIQUID water. The “snowball Earth” hypothesis argues that there was a super Ice Age where the glaciers made it all the way to the equator, and it lasted until volcanic activity pumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere to greenhouse things back to normal.
That was around 600 million years ago, and the melting of the ice released massive ammounts of free oxygen and allowed the multicellular animals of the “Cambrian explosion” to develop.
Something seems to be amiss here. You already HAD massive amounts of free oxygen, from photosynthetic single-cell organisms. It’s what caused the first (and possibly greatest) mass extinction.
It was definitely already aerobic, but oxygen levels do go up and down. The massive forests of the Carboniferous, for instance, produced an unusually high level of oxygen (and unusually low level of CO2, which I’ve heard blamed for the ice ages they had then).
They do – a lot (relatively speaking). Besides the forests, the high O2 composition of the Carboniferous atmosphere also got you the giant bugs. Non-aquatic arthropods only get oxygen by diffusion, which means their body size is effectively limited by how “deep” the oxygen goes through their tracheal network – it’s sort of like if you didn’t have lungs, but your skin pores were huge, and that was the only way your cells could get oxygen.
Technically, its is not that they produced more O2 or less CO2. It is that underdeveloped fungi made trees rot too slowly (which releases a lot of CO2) and got buried, and thus the “books were unbalance” so to speak. Assuming the slow decrease is CO2 eventually led to a severe ice age seems reasonable.
The idea is that there were two major jumps in oxygen levels — the first from photosynthetic bacteria, and then another at the end of the snowball period.
The theory is still somewhat controversial, and the wikipedia article doesn’t explain it the same way that several documentaries on paleozoology I’ve watched did. Is the hypothesis true? I’m not really in a position to offer expert opinion — not my field of scholarship, I’m just an interested amateur.
How can people actually believe these?
But if they do, I can finally see how the flat-earth believers actually exist, and they aren’t just some trolls…..
oh god…we are doomed.
Flat Earthers are completely sincere I’m afraid.
You can convince a child almost anything is true. You can keep them believing in the tooth fairy their entire lives if you also teach them not to trust science, that there’s lots of things that don’t make any sense because God is beyond our comprehension and you have doubts and don’t it on faith that’s because the devil is trying to corrupt them.
Sheltering them from outside influences and teaching them to believe they are inherently sinful and that the Angry Sky Man will look for any excuse to burn them for eternity and you can create a mindset with its own sense of self-preservation, which will try to defend itself when threatened by logic, evidence and even actual human suffering.
Its a completely cruel thing to do to a child.
That… that was a thing? I mean, I’m no biblical scholar, but I don’t remember that being freaking anywhere the the Bible I’ve read…
Please tell me that’s out of some sort of popular Christian fantasy novel I know nothing of…
Think of fundie interpretations as a sort of Biblical fanfic. Stuff gets twisted all sorts of ways to make stories that were first told around fires before writing was even developed into some kind of accurate historical record.
I find that I have to keep reminding people that what we think of as “history” didn’t even exist until the 1700s – before that, legend and fact were pretty much intermingled, and nobody really cared what the “truth” was. Folks actually believed in a historical King Arthur ruling over a peaceful England with a group of handpicked knights errant, St. George slaying literal dragons to save Europe, and St. Patrick chasing snakes out of Ireland.
Rejection of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, it seems, leads quickly back into that same morass…
Good grief, fundamentalists believe some really weird stuff…
Oh my, yes. Did you know there are full textbooks of this stuff? The best ones try to find “alternate” explanations that seem to flow along with reality, the worst ones just say the opposite of reality. I’ve a few uni colleagues who collect the books and prop them up in their office’s clerestory windows, so the titles are visible from the hallway- just to mess with folks walking past.
Careful, Becky. Dina is well known to respond negatively to Christian attempts to fake science. Exposing her to the full extent of your sheltered upbringing might shatter her.
Or, unleash The Raptor.
The Sexy, Sexy Raptor!
I think though Becky’s context and “No but can you help me blast out the creationist cobwebs” means Dina will at least not get angry AT Becky, just the lies themselves.
Still better than to belive in spaghetti monster religion or scientology
Nobody believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (hallowed be his noodly appendage) – that’s the whole POINT of the FSM.
….
Ramen!
What about the Invisible Pink Unicorn?
An obvious lie. The Invisible Unicorn is, as everyone knows, Purple (which is the superior colour anyway, so I don’t know why the Invisible Unicorn would want to be any other).
Filthy Heretic Pig-Dog!
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!
A pox upon your house, and a crusade upon your lands! Tic-tac-toe or rock-paper-scissors?!
Is there someone else up there we could talk to?
There’s the Little Orbiting Teapot, but I think it’s brewing some tea at the moment.
Is it better? Like JBento says, I don’t think anyone actually believes in the FSM, but supposing someone did I’m not sure there is anything preventing them from understanding the whole of history and the natural world like this.
Last I looked into it FSM really isn’t so bad…
Setp 1: binge watch Aaronra’s and Thunderfoot’s youtube videos, specifically the Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism and Why do People Laugh at Creationists playlists.
Step 2: something that should involve fire…
Step 3: Avoid at all cost Thunderfoot’s more recent works.
Step 4: Curl into fetal ball of conflictedness because you failed to adhere to step 3.
When does “Profit!” come in?
Hmmm.
I’m not sure, but I instinctively want to tie it into step 2 somehow.
Really? That’s what a firmament is supposed to be to them? I thought it was understood that it’s just an old-timey word for “sky”. A WATER SHIELD????
If you don’t know, just say you don’t know.
..Well, now that I’ve had time to think about it, I suppose that “sky canopy that keeps out radiation & stuff” could be considered a primitive description for the atmosphere. (Assuming it even comes from the actual Bible and not some shit Christian “scientists” made up.)
The firmament is meant to separate the earth from Heaven. Some bible literalists decided it was made of water that dropped during the flood, hence why people didn’t live to be 900 afterwards and explaining the whole ‘world covering flood’ deal.
Part of me kinda DO admire the elegance of that model.
All the other parts of me, however, walk around in a circle shouting WHAT THE WHAT???????
I am beside myself with rage and sadness, but the words come from inside us.
Actually, I wonder if Dina has ever felt strongly enough to be this speechless before. It’s wondrous thing, this pain of learning, of life. Even if it’s also sad.
haha this was me
I wouldn’t put Scientology and the FSM in the same sentence, this suggest they are in any way comparable. But’s that’s like saying the Sith (if they were real) and the film “the life of Brian” were in any way comparable.
The Scientologist have all the hallmarks of a cult and want their followers to believe even more rubbish than fundi Christians do. The stuff really makes your brain hurt.
Where FSM is concerned- in the last year or so I started to get the impression that some people have not caught on the the fact that FSM is a satire to show how crazy some religious ideas are. Which kind of proves their point though…
This strip makes me feel empathy at the same time for Becky and Dina
Oh, and since we’re on the topic, I’ve got to mention this one, because it cracks me up every time. It’s from either Hovind or Ham (one of the head kooks, at any rate):
Dinosaurs went extinct because the O2 ratio in the atmosphere started going down, but their nostrils didn’t enlarge, which meant that they had to breathe harder and faster to compensate, and then their nostrils caught fire from all the friction and that’s where you get fire-breathing dragons from.
These people are not in a mental institution, and that makes me sad. And then I remember that mental health resources aren’t all that many, and become glad that they’re not being wasted on this lot.
DID THEY WHAT??????
So now you have TWO catchphrases! Why, in another couple of years we might get an actual conversation out of you. ;p
Might be a townsperson from a videogame. Come back after the next cutscene and see if anything has changed.
Does it cycle dialogues, or pull randomly from the list? Should I interact with Bagge a few more time to see if a new line comes up?
I used to be an internet commentator like you but then I took an arrow to the knee.
FUDGE YOU, ROSS!!!!!
Doooooofus
Oh silly Dina this is all the information you need: https://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1038/1038_01.asp
Don’t forget this. https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/128/414998399_4b1b06b1b8_b.jpg
So THAT’S what firmament means. I was reading Genesis a few weeks ago and was very confused. Huh.
It isn’t, actually. “Firmament” literally means a solid crystal sphere, or set of nested spheres, on which the fixed stars and planets (the latter term includes the sun and moon, but not Neptune or Uranus) are mounted. It comes from the same Latin root as “firm”.
The idea behind the “separating the waters above and waters below” is that the entire habitable world is a bubble in the vast cosmic ocean, inside a crystal sphere – the firmament – that keeps the cosmic waters from flooding in and drowning everything.
The cosmology here is obviously wrong, but it’s at least an honest attempt to explain what was at the time unexplained.
The idea that the firmament itself is a dome of water held up by God magic is retconning and fanwanking by so-called literalists, in an attempt to explain how that bit of Genesis is really actually right despite being completely and obviously wrong in light of newer information.
“The idea that the firmament itself is a dome of water held up by God magic is retconning and fanwanking by so-called literalists, in an attempt to explain how that bit of Genesis is really actually right despite being completely and obviously wrong in light of newer information.”
We are pleased to say that We find this particular description particularly apt, as well as humorous. Carry on, please.
Agreed!
It’s also an attempt to push some greek flights of fancy in there for good measure. Because we can’t actually have Aristoteles be wrong about anything now, can we?
Wait until she gets to the part where it never rained before “The Great Flood”. That was one of the major points when I was being indoctrinated.
LOL @ Dina’s face in the last panel. She was not prepared for this.
Unspoken: “Who did this to you??”
I grew up in a Christian household, and I’ve never heard of half of this stuff. But that might be because I’m Lutheran, which is like the laziest form of Christianity.
All you really got to do is show up to church maybe every so often and bring some hotdish to the Wednesday potluck and you’re set for eternal salvation.
I think that’s the most expression Dina has ever shown, and I love it
Honestly, whoever wrote the Bible was obviously copying ideas from Doctor Who. 900+ year old humanoids… really?
Oddly it is probably true that most carnivores were, at one point in time, bacteria that gained energy through chemical reaction. From a certain point of view all were once carnivores until they developed symbiosis with the organelle that does that sunlight to energy thing.
I am learning more Creationist beliefs than I have ever heard of before today…
…and gaining perspective on how lucky that makes me.