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At any rate I’d assume since the strapon incident and the vibrator incident and the dicks on whiteboards incident Joyce has been doing research just so that she isn’t caught unprepared
And that sounded way different in my head but you know what I mean, right?
I got my curse words thirdhand, kids at school who went to church were apparently told there what they were so they could be told not to say them. I assume blowjob knowledge would be transferred the same way.
Jesus never said ANYTHING about not sucking dick. (prove me wrong. I am equally happy to know that there isn’t anything that refutes sucking dick as I would be that there is a passage SPECIFICALLY saying you can’t suck a dick)
Wait, was the “no sodomy” thing Old or New Testament? If it’s New it was probably Paul, not Jesus who said it, so I guess it still means Jesus said nothing about gays. (And in Paul’s case he hated sex, period, so I guess he doesn’t count either.)
There’s a great line from James Michener’s Chesapeake, where the Quaker matriarch is debating the Bible with a visitor. I don’t have the book to hand, but I’m pretty sure it’s close to this:
“It is possible to love Christ, and wonder about Paul.”
The whole “no sodomy” thing isn’t even really Old Testament.
Sodom was a city that, according to God, had a population of 1 excellent dude, and some unimportant but large number of terrible dudes, plus the women who obviously don’t matter.
God sent a pair of super hot angels to the excellent dude, Lot, to tell him to GTFO bc God was going to delete Sodom and its neighbor city Gomorrah.
The people of Sodom and Gomorrah showed up because their phones all went off when some super hot angels entered the city limits and demanded to have sex with the angels. I can’t read Hebrew, so I don’t know if the angels were canonically male, but every translation into English that I’ve read (which is not necessarily a LOT) doesn’t specify.
Lot, the so-called “excellent dude”, according to God, said “hey, no, don’t rape the super hot angels, rape my daughters instead”, but the city was like “dude, not cool” and just…left, I guess?
Anyway, Lot and his family got out of the city that was Hard for Angels, but Lot’s wife looked over her shoulder at her home as it was destroyed by fire from the sky, so God turned her into salt. (I don’t have to make that part of the story sound ridiculous.)
Lot’s daughters, presumably distraught over their mom getting turned into salt, got their dad drunk and raped HIM.
And somehow, the moral of the story is that…gays are bad?
Ha! That’s the best version of the Sodom and Gomorrah story I’ve ever heard! But yeah once I was old enough to understand the whole thing with Lot’s daughters I was all WTF?! (well metaphorically speaking of course…I didn’t swear at the time).
Yeah, most non-conservative Christians and Jews interpret the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as a story about hospitality, rather than gay sex (the point being that in a desert society with a large nomadic contingent, travelers taken in under your roof are supposed to be able to assume they will not be harmed, nor will they harm those who have taken them in).
I think it’s notable even if you don’t talk about hospitality, you can think a town with roving rape gangs getting punished by God has nothing to do with homosexuality. Having lived in the Bible Belt my entire life, it’s a constant struggle to have faith while dealing with people who can bend and twist any passage to mean whatever they want to do anyway.
Hm, Lot’s wife – we never get to know her name – was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back.
Don’t remember the story of Job, too masochistic, must have tuned the details out.
Slightly different note: saw a election video of the German alt-right party on the subway today. “Merkel says we need immigrants. We don’t need them, we can make more people ourselves ”
(Showing a pregnant women lying on a flower meadow). If being German required an intelligence test, at least half of their voters would fail….
I sure hope it’s not half the German voters. Last time, it was 14,9% which is scary enough. That party’s campaigns seem to be basically done with the goal “let’s make racist messages, using as much underlying misogynist objectifying sexism as possible”. There’s another one with three women™ (all white and thin) in bikinis seen from behind that says “we prefer bikinis over burkas“ and… i’m kind of hoping that some racists refrain from voting for the party because even they won’t stand for this objectifying sexist position…? but i guess i hope in vain, they won’t even notice there’s something wrong with that.
Job never got turned to salt in the Bible. The “pillar of salt” was indeed Lot’s wife. In the cult I grew up in, she was used as a moralizing tale on the dangers of “looking back” at the “System” you came from.
Honestly, the actual story isn’t that crazy. Guy is saved with his family after angels come to investigate town of rapists and judge it worthy of destruction. Woman looks at divine and dies. The thing is, all the so-called Biblical literalists turn it into a metaphor for BS when the literal interpretation is perfectly fine.
If you were raised mainline, churches like Joyce’s are capital W Weird. The really singy ones are kind of like an audience participation musical with songs as catchy and trite as commercial jingles. There. I said it. Praise music is 99 percent dreck. The spoken portions relentlessly tug you toward an emotional climax, which is often an excruciating public display called an altar call. And they never seem to know what liturgical season it is. Also, they do ex tempore prayer–badly.
Of course, from Joyce’s perspective, she’s going to a service led by a woman, or possibly a man in a long white dress with a table runner around his neck, where you spend most of your time sitting still and not talking. The preacher never seems to raise his (or her!) voice, so how do you know whether what they’re saying is important? The music is probably old timey and requires you to keep your hands on your hymnal, not in the air. And in the middle of the service EVERYBODY DRINKS ALCOHOL. EVERY WEEK!!!!!!!!!
A friend was a practising Catholic and if she was sitting the kids Sunday mornings she’d take them with her to church. The kids hated it; they said it was like being in a time out for an hour and a half when they hadn’t even done anything wrong.
Ends up it’s an extremely effective way to turn them off Christianity, heh.
No longer religious, but back when I was a Catholic I saw that kind of all-singing audience participation church as *really weird* and would probably have not been able to deal with it.
Church was a quiet time, where I could go and turn off my brain for an hour and think about wizards while unconsciously standing up and sitting down again when appropriate.
… I, uh, guess I never actually got the whole religion thing to start with, in hindsight.
My (Roman Catholic)church did mostly solemn hymns during the Mass, but the final hymn, which occurred while we exited the nave after mass, was always an upbeat, celebratory hymn, often accompanied by electric guitar.
That just makes me think of the time my Roman Catholic Sunday School teacher sat an eight year old down for a lesson in why her Aunt’s Faith isn’t (our specific version of) the Catholic Faith.
Just a taste of that lecture: “No, Molly, the Jewish ALSO get into Heaven. Their God is OUR God. We just disagree on if the Saviour has arrived, yet.”
That was Khyrin’s First Lesson in Religious Tolerance, which boils down to:
“Jesus said, ‘Love thy Neighbor.'”
“But what about the gays?”
“Did I stutter the first time?”
These days, virtually every catholic church has little activity booklets and coloring stuff for the kids. Some of them even have “family rooms” which are soundproofed but play the mass over speakers, so the kids can go wild.
I collect 19th-century hymals, and let me tell you, the ones that weren’t considered worth reprint are even worse. Syrupy, twee, bathetic, and bombastic–sometimes all at once.
I always like the story about how you tell a praise song from a hymn. A praise song has one verse that you sing five times. A Hymn has four verses and a chorus, but you only sing the first and third verses.
“Worship” specifically refers to the singing. What Joyce said will make a lot more sense if you understand that a “Worship Leader” is actually the lead singer of a band.
The denomination I grew up in had various names for various positions, based on education, ordination, gender, and payroll status. A seminary-trained, ordained man, on church payroll, was Minister of Music (or youth, children, etc.), whereas an ordained man (seminary graduate or not) doing it as an unpaid volunteer or intern was Music Minister (or Youth Minister, etc.); women didn’t get to be called Minister, so women and non-ordained men used Leader in the place of Minister. Divorced men weren’t eligible for ordination, but if you were already ordained and then got a divorce, you stayed ordained (although you were expected to resign your position, and would most likely have to leave town to find work again).
I’m not going to name which denomination it was, but it’s extremely conservative, evangelical, predominantly white, and above all Southern.
Hold up. My husband goes to a non-liturgical church, and they have both a worship leader (who leads the service) and a song leader (who leads the singing, and would generally be the one doing any arm waving that’s required.)
My church, OTOH, is a pentecostal one with occasional Hebrew, with feminist- and trans-friendly yet anti-LGB leadership (my suspicion that this’ll change for the better is one of the reasons I’m there) and a multi-verging-on-pan-cultural membership (another reason) that ranges from gullible Milo-is-awesome types to, well, para-hippies like me. Which can be just as political, but come to think much of the politics seems to involve me somehow. Huh.
TL;DR: there’s always politics, but how far back a particular denomination was founded can be a useful predictor for what sort of politics.
Women were always allowed to be president of the USA. They were citizens from the start, they just couldn’t vote. There were female office holders (at the local level) before women were allowed to vote. But we won’t let one of them actually be elected president.
The pastor and worship leader are almost certainly different people. The {worship leader, song leader, cantor, choir director music minister} leads the congregation (or in some cases, just the choir) in the songs of worship, while the {pastor, priest, [pulpit] minister} delivers the {message, homily, sermon}.
Each of these terms has its own slightly different connotation, of course. The “worship leader” Joyce is describing probably has a backing band, and the “worship” isn’t that much different from a Christian Rock concert. I don’t know what the Episcopalians call their music leader, but it’s probably someone wearing a robe, who doesn’t move around much (maybe raise their hands), let alone dance, and the music is probably closer to “hymns” and may involve a pipe organ. Joyce is definitely in for a shock, but who knows, she may actually appreciate the reflective/reverential nature of their worship.
That’s a very good description of the services I was taken to when I was dating an evangelical Christian girl. I took to rating churches by number of drum sets. The worst one had two, one conventional and one with bongos and such.
As a former Episcopal, lemme give y’all the run-down:
Deacon/Priest/Bishop/Archbishop–Deacons can do most of the things priests do, except certain Sacraments. They also often fill in if the priest is sick. Smaller churches won’t have a Deacon, and may even ‘share’ priests, who go to multiple churches to perform Mass. Bishops oversee a Diocese, and an Archbishop oversees all the Dioceses in the Archdiocese.
Acolytes are lay-people, generally youth, who help out during the Mass with various small tasks, and guiding processions. Also, they’re the ones who get to put out fires, both literal and figurative, that may come up during Mass, so the priest can continue on uninterrupted. (Yes, I’m speaking from personal experience here.)
Assuming the church is large enough to have a choir, they’ll also have a choir director. A smaller church with no formal choir will usually have a music director, which may be a purely volunteer position.
And yes, women can fill all the formal roles at this point, at least in most churches (there are still some who will refuse to install a woman priest, though many of those will take a woman as deacon).
(Interesting, actually, that Jacob referred to a ‘pastor’–I almost never heard that term growing up. Might vary in local usage, though.)
The church as a whole is very LGBT friendly, as Jacob has indicated, but there are hold-outs who remain mired in the past, and periodically threaten to schism–either just going their own way, or ‘going back’ to the Roman Catholic Church, which is still firmly stuck on Leviticus.
Well, considering that Rome is looking into ordaining women to the permanent diaconate, it’s not that surprising that there would be Episcopal churches that are ok with women as deacons but not as priests.
Someone pointed out yesterday that it might actually be the CME (Christian Methodist Episcopal) instead of the standard Anglican Communion Episcopal Church.
CME is a historically black church and quite separate from white Episcopal churches – thus the Methodist, I assume.
Good on female priests as I understand it, but not so much on LGBT issues, so it might still be more likely to a be a white Episcopal Church.
In Fundie culture women aren’t allowed to lead mixed gender groups. Of course, if you’d seen the “teachings” I was subjected to in mother-daughter retreats you’d agree there wasn’t much improvement even with women speakers.
When I hear the term “jakes,” to me it has the slang sense of “restroom.” But Urban Dictionary doesn’t even have that meaning in it’s first 10 pages of definitions.
23-skiddoo, hubba-hubba, pipe those gams! (I am not old enough to have used those phrases, but when I was a young and precocious reader, I read books containing them.)
Willis thinks he’s old because people who are now reading his comics weren’t born when started them. Willis? That’s not old. Old is when you and 40-year-olds are using the same words, but you and the 40-year-olds have completely different understandings of the exact same words.
Growing up going to Catholic church, if someone so much as tapped a toe at the music you’d get the hairy eyeball from the older women in the pews behind you.
So, the synagogue I grew up attending…there were about 4 people who could carry a tune in a bucket. 3 of them were my family. The songs and prayer tunes tended towards, well, one visitor from out of town asked if it was a funeral.
After my brother and I went to college my mother was more free to look for a synagogue she was more comfortable in. Bout a 45 minute drive away (New Mexico, so nothing’s close together). I visited for Rosh Hashanah, the new year.
They had a separate cantor from the rabbi leading services. He had a guitar. The songs of praise SOUNDED like songs of praise. People were dancing in the aisles. PEOPLE WERE LITERALLY DANCING IN THE AISLES!
It was awesome, and also felt weird and surreal and weird and I half expected to see John Belushi backflipping having seen the light. My mother got the reference, and understood.
Like, I had attended a Reform synagogue at college a couple times, and they had a harpsichord (electronic), but it felt like they were trying to ape a Christian service, while this felt organic and awesome.
That was always one of my biggest problems with synagogue. (I came up in a conservative one and then we moved to a reform one after my bar mitzvah.) The tunes all souded like dirges, with the exception of v’shamru. I was bored out of my mind.
Mine growing up was…I think technically Conservative but we had Orthodox and Reform members as well. As my mother put it “if we upset anyone we’d lose a minyan.” (small community)
The music I’ve heard I would describe as New Age-y. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNdwdn9uSBE for example. Unlike my brother, though, I tend to hang onto the dirge-like tunes we grew up with so my language is probably unconsciously more dismissive.
Growing up going to the Church of Scotland (well, dragged to it by the school three times a year, over the objections of my atheist parents) I was relieved I was going to the one that even had music.
I believe the Free Church voted to allow music in services in 2010 or something, and some of the clergy resigned over this.
Actually, the puritans who have recovered from their horrified shock at the notion of dancing and guitars are probably busy preparing stakes for the members of Joyce’s church.
Seen a couple Catholic services (1 Confirmation, a few weddings). A wedding service I don’t remember the denomination of (Episcopalian? Crud, now I need to figure out how to politely ask a friend what denomination another friend (who I’ve since lost touch with) is).
Am I sheltered? Or just Jewish? Like, I don’t make a habit of going to worship services of religions I don’t follow unless it’s a special event.
No, that makes sense, especially depending on the denomination and personality of one’s immediate circle. I’ve been to a few Jewish events but I couldn’t even name what tradition they belonged to, and I’m sad to say that I’ve never set foot in a mosque (although for some pretty neat reasons my mother has).
I mean that’s the equivalent of asking if someone is so sheltered they’ve never had in-and-out burger.
They just didn’t live near an in-and-out burger, dude. And maybe the handfull of times they were near one they didn’t wanna spend the money.
Until the internet I’d never even heard of In & Out’s. To this day, I’ve never knowingly seen one any place I’ve been and I’ve been over almost all the country.
People don’t tend to go to services of religions they don’t belong to. Why would they?
Especially as kids, in a strongly religious family. You get taken to your parents church and have little to no say in the matter.
I’m actually kind of surprised Joyce had as much freedom looking for a church at school as she did. That she wasn’t told which one was acceptable and probably brought in to be introduced to the pastor.
Joyce did explain that her church at home was “independent”, so it would probably be unaffiliated with any formal religious groups (i.e. like Baptists, Adventists, etc.) This would mean that she’d have no real direction about which church to go to when at school.
On her own, no. But I would expect a family from that culture to have a proper similar church picked out for her already – the one John went to during college or something recommended by their pastor, rather than taking the chance she’d wander into some inappropriate “hippy” church.
Or worse: a Catholic one.
As you say, it’s easier if you’re a member of some more formal denomination, you just go to the local one of those.
I was taken by my mother to Catholic church and caticisum(?) classes. After she died my aunt and uncle took me to a Baptist church. I finally out of there and lived with another aunt nd uncle and they took me to a Protestant church. later a wife had me go to a Covenant church for a while. All In all I figured out it was all hocum designed by people who wanted power and to control what you think and want your money.
My 2 cents
One key difference for all the people pointing out that why would she go to a different church: if her church is unaffiliated with a denomination, she isn’t going to have a matching one to go to when she travels. We always found a Catholic church to go to when I was a kid, but my husband’s family tended more towards “it’s a church, let’s go there”. So while it wasn’t common, he had *been* to Protestant (or Catholic, I dunno) churches.
I think there’s an e but also I agree with you, Jocelyne can do whatever she wants because she’s a motherfucking goddess
And no I didn’t get her mixed up with Carla, they are both motherfucking goddesses in the motherfucking pantheon of motherfucking trans girls in fictional motherfucking Indiana
Wait, so Indiana is a popular setting for a lot of webcomics? Weird.
If we expanded to a pantheon of motherfucking transwoman / trans-girl goddesses in the motherfucking midwest, we could include Sulla Pinsky (O Human Star), Sydney (As the Crow Flies), and Qiao and her friends (Failing Sky [although for part of the story they’re on the West Coast]. )
Everybody’s moovin’
Everybody’s groovin’ baby!
Folks lining up outside just to get down.
Everybody’s moovin’
Everybody’s groovin’ baby!
Funky little church
Funky little church!
Everybody’s prayin’, looking for salvation, baby
(Folks linin’ up outside just to kneel down)
Everybody’s prayin’, looking for salvation, baby
(Holy little church, holy little church!)
Yeah, so they’re not Baptist or Anabaptist. I mean, they’re “non-denominational” but maybe they’ve got a lot of Methodist influence? Or…some revivalist kinds of things going on?
Yeah, probably derived from the worship practices of the charismatic/Pentecostal movement, just with the whole speaking in tongues thing kinda forgotten about (or at least way downplayed). A lot of the leaders of the Evangelical mega-churches grew up Pentecostal/Assembly of God (or their parents did), and even those who didn’t were influenced by the prevailing culture. (Despite the “non-denominational” label and no central hierarchy, these churches tend to be very similar.)
I can’t tell if Joyce is projecting on her own experience or if this is subliminal racism in expecting it to be like how Black churches appear in media
I’m pretty sure that it’s based on her own experience in church. Joyce’s exposure to portrayals of black churches in the media is probably pretty limited.
I think it’s the former. Don’t forget that Joyce apparently has a fairly narrow range of secular pop culture she’s been exposed to. I doubt she’s seen many if any fictional portrayals of African-American churches.
Given that her own experiences involved churches with rock shows and lyrics projected onto multiple screens and she’s been pretty thoroughly shielded from any types of religion save her own, I’m guessing it’s the former.
Seriously, my parents started going to a church like this when I was a teenager. I know EXACTLY what she is talking about. (Still didn’t stick, as I am very apatheistic now, but you know).
An Espicopal or Catholic parish in an African-American neighborhood is likely to be a very different experience. Most music is locally determined. Attended a Catholic Mass in Louisville that had traditional call-response singing and ladies in big hats. At home, a Mass tends towards a polka beat. Betting that this church is going to be pretty whitebread, since its Indiana.
First, panel 4 Joyce is killing me dead.
Second… This sounds less like church and more like… I don’t know, something very corny that aliens would do to try to fit into human society? Come on, ‘worship leader’ absolutely sounds stilted enough to be alienspeak. Anyone with more information about whatever sect Joyce and Becky belong to, feel free to explain how this is a thing.
Nah, worship leader is a fairly common term in a lot of US evangelical churches. I’ve seen church bands referred to as worship teams. There’s a genre of modern Christian music called praise and worship music connected with those churches. Some of it apparently sounds like watered down U2.
As someone in the situation… there’ll often be a tentative acoustic guitar, and a keyboard that isn’t offering any counterpoint. So as an electric guitarist the best way to add rhythmic colour to them is via palm muting and delay, which means having to consciously fight against sounding like the Edge.
I’m parked next to the drummer, which means that if I need to keep him in time via amp spill and block chords of the BLART BLART BLART BLART variety I can.
It also means that if I don’t figure out how to reprogram the Roland’s mappings I’m eventually going to be facing humongeous temptation to deal with him the way Iggy Pop’s awesome rider suggests dealing with someone about to “do lighting”.
Church… band. That almost feels like an oxymoron to me, heh.
Okay, to be fair, I haven’t been to a church service except for weddings and funerals for, like, almost thirty years now, so things may very well have changed since my time. But back then, we had the priest at the front, he’d give his sermon, the pages for the hymns were listed up front ahead of time so you could find the next one and keep your finger there beforehand, there was one middle-aged woman on an electric organ, and we all droned along to her playing.
Except for the Christmas Mass when one might expect hymns like “Silent Night” etc, not a one of them would be one I had ever heard of before; so far as I could tell none of them were repeated; and every one of them would be credited something like “words by So-and-so, 1603, music: traditional”. Which would mean that it all was several hundred years or more older, and had music that was less a recognizable melody and more a random collection of notes.
Anglicans don’t need to do penance because it’s bloody penance just sitting through a service.
We took it all very seriously and I know even Teenaged!Me would have looked seriously askance at the addition of any guitars, or mikes, let alone drums. For Youth Group? Sure! But, like, in the church?! For the service?! *clutches pearls*
The really weird part is that the Anglicans were also one of (if not the) first churches in Canada to allow women to be full priests, and to be fine with performing gay marriages. And they don’t seem to have the same issues around pre-marital sex and abortions that other denominations have, and priests can marry, of course.
Very nice people and very progressive; they just really really seem to prefer their services very traditional, at least at my church, back when.
Yeah, this (both having a designated leader of worship and the dancing) is totally normal in vast swaths of Christianity, not just in the US but worldwide. Most churches of a decent size will have a staff person or even just designated volunteer in charge of selecting and leading the music (my church has like 20 people and we have a volunteer worship leader). More traditional churches might call them a “minister of music” but “worship leader” is very common among the less formal groups. The idea is that it makes them an equal with the rest of the congregation – simply another participant leading the others, as opposed to “minister” which implies elevated training and position. In practice there’s not much difference.
as far as i know theres no name for this “sect”? the church i grew up in was very similar to the kind joyce and becky did and it was just kind of? very generically fundamentalist.
i asked my mom one time “what kind of church are we?” (because we live in an area w a LOT of churches and i started noticing many would say “methodist” or baptist”) and she responded our church was “non-denominational”.
my father on the other hand grew up in the church of god, for which my granpa was a pastor, which is where a lot of his fundamentalism seems to have come from. i think regardless of sect fundies tend to stick together.
(also yes i can confirm “worship leader” is very much somehow a thing)
I thought her family went through several denominations. Or am I confusing her for another character? Then again, she might’ve been too young to really notice the difference.
A bunch of similar churches, but mainly the same denomination. Like different neighnorhoods of a small town. Or a series of small towns in the same county.
I’m fairly sure this can be said of most religious people. Whatever religious practices you learn growing up will seem totally normal, regardless of how weird they are.
Like, the whole Eucharist thing. Metaphorical cannibalism is LESS weird than the real thing, but it’s still really damn weird
Growing up in church we just stood their singing the music. Sometimes clapping along. It’s like Choir. Except longer. And all the songs sucked…
No wait it was basically like choir.
Choir and church were indistinguishable for me because I went to a Protestant school and the choir only existed to make the services fancy. All I ever learnt in choir were hymns and carols. But, you know, in four part harmony.
Sucked? I was quite happy when I got to join actual choir in school, but, I’m still sad that almost all the best songs are religious. I remember hearing an attempt at taking the “God” out of From a Distance, but the chorus ended up as “They are watching us” which is just fucking creepy. (or maybe it was always creepy, but that made the creepiness too obvious to ignore)
I had other reasons for why Jacob and joyce together would be a bad idea, especially for Jacob, but this strip shows that Joyce is probably far to naïve for someone like Jacob
While Jacob is, I’m guessing early twenties?, his demeanour is more like someone in their late 20s at least (not a criticism) and so is much more worldy than Joyce
Also please stop with giving people nick names Becky
I wouldn’t mind dating someone who’s more worldly and mature than I am. As long as they’re nice about it it can be an enriching experience for both people.
We don’t know if Raidah is giving him “everything he wants”. We saw some good looking communication, some Raidah lying to him about Sarah and we just don’t know.
She didn’t lie but she DID purposely omit context from comments she made to him about Sarah to reflect her in a worst light about an event that she had said was forgiven to Sarah’s face. Which is morally reprehensible, you don’t forgive an event then use it as ammo against them to try to skew someone’s opinion on them.
On behalf of readers who wondered about last panel Joyce without the obfuscating speech bubble, I thank you. And yes, too much of that in front of Becky will cause a reaction.
it really speaks to the reach of evangelical protestant churches that while there are Americans (I assume) in this comment section unfamiliar with what Joyce is describing, what she describes is exactly my experience from attending assembly of god type churches in the middle class parts of a south east Asian capital city…
Something I just realized here is that, in addition to being much more liberal and tolerant, the service that Joyce is about to go to will also be much more CEREBRAL.
I think that, after the initial disappointment of the lack of Christian Rock, Joyce will get very, very into that and actually start STUDYING religion.
Sometimes I think when Luther did away with all the pomp and kneeling and stuff, he did his religion a disservice. Because all that moving and ritual was more conducive to bonding and happyness hormones than his intellectual approach.
…. yes, I know I’ve had Danny for several nights and–… what, no, not like that…. crying out loud Grav Roulette I’m both a straight male and NOT a cradle robb-… look, just shut up, okay? YES I’ve gone several nights without a spin, but we’re doing this anyway.
Stupid Grav Roulette.
*aHEM* Danny’s an interesting fit for me. On the one hand, he’s adorkable, and I’m at least a dork, so there’s some similarity there. He’s good with math and he likes video games and he gets his naive idiocy going a lot. He misinterprets situations a lot, puts his foot in his mouth, and often doesn’t know what’s going on. In a lot of ways he’s a poser. He pretends to be wise when he isn’t, pretends to be a moral center when he isn’t, pretends to be a beatnik when he isn’t. …. and yeah, all of that’s me.
(Though I don’t pose. I emulate with the intention of becoming. Big difference, y’all.)
(… I don’t actually say y’all.)
On the other hand….
….
…. dammit, no! I don’t WANT to be Danny! No no no! There’s got to be some reason that Danny’s a bad fit for me!
…..
….. we’ll try this again tomorrow, Grav Roulette, by which time I shall have repressed this memory and be ready for another spin.
And more than a third of these comments, I admit, are from me, but I still feel like this is significant somehow
(even though the strip from two days ago is the lowest possible baseline from all the comics in the past week)
You can estimate it by ctrl+f’ing for the date plus the start of the timestamp (say, “September 19, 2017 at”) and subtracting two, you’re guaranteed to probably only be a little high if that, and even then only if assholes like me deliberately include the date in the comments in that format for the purposes of demonstration and/or making that method of tallykeeping harder
Although you could get around that by typing “september 19, 2017 at ”
She just whispers it in the middle of the night, while she’s waiting for the last half-hour of consciousness to fade. For the last few nights, Leslie’s gotten up to use the bathroom, and in the dead silence of the she just hears Becky whispering to herself, quiet as a gust of wind.
Apologies to all for this, but I think I may be in the spam folder, and I’m just testing this out?
I began a post with the phrase “a-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n w-i-l-l-i-s-!” (in caps) and I’m guessing that’s what got me in the spam folder? So if you see this two or three days from now, don’t ever do that?
I am learning a lot wow. my family is non-religious and the times I went to Sunday school and bible camp while visiting my birth father never sank in, so it’s hard to keep all these different denominations straight.
Nah, they had to leave one of their previous churches precisely because they didn’t allow dancing (or that’s what Joyce was told). So one person dancing is better than none, as far as the Browns are concerned.
I’ve seen a lot of “What sort of weird church does Joyce go to!?” comments, so I thought I’d offer up my thoughts. Of course, this is all a product of my own church hopping from my youth and your mileage may vary.
I believe it has been established that Joyce attends a non-denominational or unaligned protestant church. Protestantism is a very broad category and includes a very broad range of doctrines. Non-denominational churches don’t align with any hierarchy and, as such, have doctrines that are established at the church level rather than from a central organizing body. Because of this, no two are ever the same. They tend to be rather light on specific doctrine, preferring to allow members to adopt their own beliefs in order to keep attendance high. What doctrine they do have tends to be assembled piecemeal from other protestant denominations. Some baptize, others don’t. Some do communion, other don’t. And so on.
There are certain patterns that emerge in these churches by way of style. Some churches (larger, more affluent ones, in my experience) will have a worship band lead by a young man with long brown hair (not too long, though) and stubble to attract younger crowds. They also have digital projectors to scroll the lyrics of the worship songs along with a slide show of Christian iconography to put you in the mood. This seems to be Joyce’s primary experience. Other churches (usually smaller ones established in storefronts or abandoned fast food restaurants) will have an older woman playing piano with no accompanying band and a surplus overhead projector from an elementary school that stopped using them in the 90’s to project the lyrics. If you’ve never experienced an overhead transparency projector, then I envy your obvious youth. In either case, worship is lead by the worship leader (which, in retrospect, is obvious. I’m leaving it in anyway) while the congregants sing along in one of three positions; one arm raised with index finger pointing at the ceiling, both arms raised hands open, or both arms slightly extended as though catching a duffle bag being thrown at them. In all three cases, gently swaying side to side is encouraged, but dancing is not. This continues for thirty minutes. Afterwards, the pastor delivers a bad joke, a ten minute long anecdote about himself, then a twenty minute sermon that somehow relates to the anecdote. After the sermon, half of the congregation gathers around the foyer for light refreshments and idle gossip while their spouses and children whinge obnoxiously about going home.
While the McIntyres were clearly more strict than the Browns, they both clearly had firm restrictions of anything that could be seen as secular entertainment. This probably included any dancing that wasn’t “praise and worship” related. There is a lot of evidence that they substituted Christian versions of popular culture; a practice facilitated by any local Christian bookstore (my family’s favorite was One Way before Baptist Bookstore bought out their local outlet) which sells Christian music, books, toys, movies, and candies with bible verses printed in the wrappers (TestaMints. They were awful, but I got some every time I went there).
Which was the trippy part? Was it the TestaMints? It’s always the TestaMints.
The really crazy thing for me was how every one of the churches I attended growing up had the same set of 10-15 worship songs to chose from. I’m sure that typing “I’m coming back to the heart of worship” is going to plant a mighty earworm in quite a few commenters’ heads.
As I mentioned above, I went to Protestant school (in South Asia). There were hymns proper and a very classical choir, which I didn’t mind very much. But this weird comic has reminded me of a dude called … Uncle John, I think, who used to show up a couple of times every year with a guitar and slideshow. We were herded into the auditorium where he told us pointless anecdotes and played slideshows and made us sing songs about how god made the rainbow etc. It was quite kooky and not quite in keeping with the serious tone of religion in my school, but Protestants in my country tend to merge into one broad coalition because there’s so few of them. And now I see some people I went to school with touring Southeast Asia as missionaries-cum-Christian-band. Uncle John, look what you did.
So, from this I’m assuming that Joyce and Becky are… Evangelicals? Is that what that particular sect is called? A more traditional service of sober spiritual learning is going to be alien for them!
It’s worth pointing out that most US black churches are also technically Evangelical, but have almost nothing in common with Joyce’s church or the Religious Right version of white Evangelicals.
It might be because I just got out of bed 15 minutes ago, but Joyce’s hand motions in the last panel instantly made me imagine her entire church standing around with shakeweights.
Don’t equate the behaviour of Joyce’s group with anyone else. I’m thinking more and more that ‘atypical’ summarises the religion in which she was raised.
I honestly have to say it’s been interesting to see that the kind of worship that involves christian rock and worship singing is the atypical one rather than not. I guess it’s the marketing and targeting of said marketing…
Honestly, I’m speaking from a Western European perspective; I can’t speak for how normal the whole ‘rock bands, warm-up act and dancing in the aisles’ thing is in the US as a proportion of professed Christianity as a whole.
It’s technically a minority of churches, but that’s in the sense of 35% or so as opposed to 0.35% or so. Joyce is depicted as coming from a pretty standard fundagelical* chuch, and there’s no shortage of those.
*Evangelical/fundamentalist. They’re basically the same category, although that’s not the view from inside the bubble.
With the caveat I mentioned before about a lot of black churches being Evangelical, but not fundamentalist or anything like the Religious Right versions.
Other than a handful of ear-wormy songs (not all of them mind, just a handful) which got me really irrationally angry whenever I heard them…yeah, Veggie Tales was alright.
What, no love for Commander Kelly and . . . I honestly don’t remember the rest of that terrible series, so nevermind! Anybody else remember the live-action anti-public-school propaganda movies?
On a completely different note, I live in the southern coast of Norway commonly called the Bible belt and on the subject of dancing in churches I remember an episode when I was younger that turned up in the local newspapers about a woman who had left her church after the priest had organized an event which, according to her, had turned the house of God into a satanic den of debauchery. “Which event?” you might ask. Traditional folk dancing.
Yeah, but Episcopal churches that border universities often seem to shy away from high church stuff to avoid upsetting the (mainstream) Protestants. At least, in my experience they did.
As someone that was raised Catholic in South America and who has only gone to church a handful of times, I gotta say that religion in the US is… perplexing. Although I recently discovered that apparently there’s a religious, Spanish cover of The Sound of Silence that’s frequently used in mass so who am I to judge?
It really depends on her definition of ‘worship’, in the end. If she doesn’t believe that it’s real without the floor show then I think that she’s approaching this with the wrong mindset.
I’m pretty damn sure I’d notice it in real life, but I suspect I was too focused on the text while reading and swiping the comic on my smartphone. Only noticed on a laptop.
Yeah, from the ‘freak out’ picture that Willis has already posted on Tumblr, I guessed that this was going to be a bit of a ‘stranger in a strange land’ scenario for poor Joyce!
I think you’ve nailed the location. Trinity Episcopal Church is indeed on the other side of the campus from Read Hall, but not nearly as far as Blowjob Cat. Also, we can rule out the campus ministry because they only have a 4:00 PM service.
It’s almost certain they’re not going to the early Holy Eucharist Rite I, “a quiet service with no music,” since that takes place a little before sunrise in mid-October, when this storyline is set.
So it’s almost certain they are heading for 9:00 AM Holy Eucharist Rite II. From the church’s website: “A festive service that includes rich musical offerings by the Trinity Choir and our fabulous organist…this service includes Holy Eucharist, readings, and a sermon, as well as Children’s Chapel.”
In the land of fiction, churchgoers get to bounce around and shimmy with impunity.
Meanwhile, in the real world, I’ve stumbled across r/Incels. For anyone not In The Know, “incel” is short for “involuntarily celibate”. Every single unironic user of this subreddit is a complete waste of human particles, and deserves to die the way they live – alone, bitter and unloved. They’re fucking disgusting, and I wish I’d never learned of them.
No. You know what’s fucking unclean!? These pathetic, foul-tempered, self-pitying pieces of shit calling themselves “incels”! All they fucking do all day is sit around crying into each other’s assholes about how fucking horrible they think women are for not wanting to fuck them.
Here’s a fucking thought, dumbasses. Stop calling women whores, sluts, congas, bongoes, and animals, if you don’t want them to think you’re a repulsive ball of slime. Stop demeaning every single woman who’s ever so much as kissed a guy when she was 12, treating them like they’re impure sinners or something. Maybe, just fucking maybe, take the 1/100000000th of a second required to realise that no, not all women are gold-digging man-haters with a million “white knight betas” flocking around them, waiting to do their bidding in the hopes of sex that never comes.
Holy fucking shit, I have never come across something that infuriates me this fucking much. And I’ve lived with a registered fucking pedophile! I want to message every single one of this shitbags personally, and tell them all how fucking stupid and self-centered they all are. The problem is, they intentionally surround themselves with thousands upon thousands of their own fucking clones, all parroting the same few goddamn sentences and “thoughts” all day, every day, so the effort would be wasted. They’ve already made up their “minds”, blocking out all possibility of reason or basic logic.
I’m about to get banned from a hell of a lot of sites, motherfuckers.
Generally, I personally think that anger towards people feeling goddamn fucking entitled without any justification whatsoever is generally an understandable anger.
Your anger is perfectly understandable. People being entitled about literally anything IS infuriating and particularly when it is the kind of thinking that leads to hurting people over things they don’t deserve in the first place which is yeesh, no, disgusting.
I first encountered one on deviantART, a few years ago. I thought he was just some sort of bitter wacko, and he disappeared before long. Then, a few months back, Kaya Orsan of The Official Podcast brought them up. It wasn’t until this morning that I learned just how far gone these scumbags are.
People say “ignorance is bliss”, but incels are living proof that the saying is bullshit. They’re ignorant as all hell, and all they ever talk about is how miserable they are.
Well, I guess the saying kind of works in that staying ignorant about the existence of incels would have been a bliss.
The way you described them reminds me a lot of the rhetoric in r/redpill, which I happened to come across accidentally some years ago. And which really managed to destroy a lot of my faith in humanity. So I guess I will fight my curiousity and not check out r/Incels, I really don’t need more of that garbage right now.
It’s exactly like all the “Liberals are evil commie atheists” windmill crusading, except laser focused into the superficially-reasonable question “Why don’t I have a girlfriend?”.
I’ll give away the secret right fuckin’ now: They don’t have girlfriends because they’re angry little gremlins with no ability to comprehend reason.
If there’s a “they read X so I don’t have to” award, I’d give it to We Hunted The Mammoth. The site does a good job of finding these idjits and dissecting their crap. And it doesn’t start from the pablum of “both sides” like that most mainsteam press.
It isn’t a site to read every day (blood.pressure), but more than.once in a while,.and kick a little dineros to.
It’s a bit of a complicated story. It involves (and I promise none of these descriptions are made up) a one-eyed man, a radio DJ, a witch with a metal leg, and welfare fraud. One of these days, I might share it all here.
I wonder if there will be a story line built around Joyce going to Jacob’s church, finding it too dull/boring, and Joyce either returning to the other church, or realizing that there is no place for her in organized religion… Fundamentalist churches are exciting but bigoted, Episcopalian churches are open but dull.
Between Joyce’s hand motions, and the discussions about different churches and their respective approaches to song and music (both in the strip and in the comments), there is only one song that will work as a soundtrack today:
(P.S. For those of you who didn’t like how things transpired in the story of the song, they made another song called “Dark Mavis” which had a happier ending to it; with the vicar’s congregation being perfectly fine with the whole thing.)
Oh, hey, apparently the GOP has ANOTHER ACA replacement bill (v3, somehow even worse than v2, because clearly the thing’s problem was that it didn’t kill enough people) and there’s LESS people complaining about it, so those among you that aren’t already might want to get on that. Also, tell your friends.
Also, vote come 2018 (provided we don’t nuclear holocaust’d before then – thanks for that fear on top of my pile of neuroses, btw), you fuckers.
I’m concerned their game plan was to lull people into a false sense of security (“Oh these bills keep failing, we don’t need to worry,”) plus the fact that people probably get less and less gung-ho about calling the more they have to do it, and it looks like that very well might be happening. :[
Please guys, for the sake of those of us with chronic illnesses, call your Senators! Keep calling. For many of us with chronic health problems/disabilities, our ability to live productive, happy lives as contributing members of society depends on our health insurance not barring preexisting conditions (and for many others, it literally means the difference between life and death).
It’s absurd really. I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (a genetic collagen production disorder). Because I have health insurance, I can work, I can take care of my child, I can live my life. If I were unable to pay for the medications and doctor appointments (which can often cost hundreds to thousands in the course of a year, or hundreds of thousands if I need surgery) I’d be bedridden, probably need to go on disability, and be a “drain on society” in the ironic words of the people who tend to oppose good healthcare. They don’t want the government to have to pay for our care, yet don’t want us to be able to get fair, quality insurance so we can work either? I guess they just want us…dead? I don’t know.
Never attribute to conspiracy what stupidity will do. The failure of the bill is the fact Republicans don’t agree on it and still can’t because the difference in ideology is real.
I have a different theory, that I won’t mention right now in case I’m wrong and I jinx it. I might say it after this one goes to vote and hopefully fails to pass. When is that, anyway?
Yep, call your senators (emphasis on YOURS – senators outside your jurisdiction are not going to care, you don’t vote for them) and your governors because a lot of senators are asking governors for input!
And tell your friends to call and have them tell their friends to call and so on and so on.
The first thing I thought of after reading this was the people singing and dancing and doing backflips in the church scene in The Blues Brothers movie.
And yes, I know others have already made the same references, but I don’t care, I still thought of it before I read the comments.
I also like how Blowjob Cat is a common reference and/or navigation point.
I feel like this comic is giving me a fascinating tl;dr education on different church atmospheres. My family is midwestern (Minnesota) Lutheran and southern…protestant I think? I’m honestly not entirely sure because while my parents *briefly* tried the church thing to appease THEIR parents, they’re new age into-astrology hippies so it didn’t last.
All I remember from the few times I went to church as a kid when my parents were trying to make it A Thing (as well as the occasional religious weddings & baptisms I’ve been too since), was that it was a quiet, boring, somber experience. There may have been some traditional singing at some point by the church choir? But definitely no dancing.
I’ve heard some people would draw or read or even play (quiet) handheld games in church but this was DEFINITELY not allowed when we went. I’m an artist, and would’ve found it much more tolerable if I could’ve at least doodled in my sketchbook, but no. As someone said above, it was enough to quickly turn me and my brother off church forever.
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“let me guess: the folding chairs were so you could take them down and form a mosh pit?”
f’r sakes, Jakes
I am now stealing that expression and using it in my everyday life
Whenever someone says something that exasperates me or misses something obvious, I will say, “F’r sakes, Jakes”
Thank you for giving this to me
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Mom: “Where are you going?”
Dad: “Up Mike’s, down Jake’s.”
(I never did find out what that was about…)
Is this you? http://www.sparkpeople.com/mypage_public_journal_individual.asp?blog_id=6193139
Tag Blowjob Cat.
Bets it’s a hair salon.
it’s a statue outside an elementary school
A real statue in fact
This was a whole thing in the comments section when it first popped up
It has a tag and everything
The viola.
It even got the most votes for the Patreon bonus strip last month.
And also a gravatar image.
My second guess was that it was the name of some fringe cafe, I would have never guessed it was a statue.
At an elementary school!
Interesting that Joyce doesn’t immediately vocally object to the mere use of the phrase “blowjob cat”
CONSPIRACY TIME
…I got nothing
…Does she know what a blowjob is? I’m honestly confused how Becky knows, and I suspect she just overheard it from somewhere.
Of course Becky knows, she…
…huh
Becky somehow knew that Joyce’s fashion sense sent false positives. She knows stuff she’s not expected to.
I mean there’s educating yourself about queer signalling and then there’s educating yourself about non-dinosaur-related sex acts
At any rate I’d assume since the strapon incident and the vibrator incident and the dicks on whiteboards incident Joyce has been doing research just so that she isn’t caught unprepared
And that sounded way different in my head but you know what I mean, right?
She IS a waitress now. They hear things.
Too many things
Becky now has a phone with unrestricted internet access, and therefore an intense motive and unparalleled ability to research all things lesbian.
…… wait….
“Hey I found this webcomic that a lesbian character and also there are two girls that make out but they’re bye-sex-you-all or something”
“Cool, what’s it called”
“I dunno, lemme — hey wait a gosh darn minute”
“I know, it’s pretty shocking when you first realize you’re a f—”
“I look lesbiawesome!”
“…that one was a stretch even for you”
“Also who are you, I’m not entirely sure who I’m talking to”
“Well based on speech patterns I’m probably not Dina, so the next most likely candidate is Leslie.”
“Let’s get to the bottom of this. Call in Joyce from Dumbing of Age Noir!”
“I thought it was Joyce Noir.”
“No, that’s something different.”
“Also who’s this asshole transcribing our conversation?”
“Don’t worry about him. He’s just the narrator.”
“Are you sure if he’s a guy?”
“…I don’t think he is.”
“Look to your left.”
“What does he mean by ‘look to your left’? I’ve written tons about that on the forums. I think it’s a political statement.”
what did I just do
did I just make another fanfic
is this even a fanfic
I don’t know anymore
I don’t know anything
Let me take you down cause I’m going to
açia berry fields
seriously those are some good berries
have you ever tried them
açia fields forever
fuck I mean açaí
f’r sakes jakes
I got my curse words thirdhand, kids at school who went to church were apparently told there what they were so they could be told not to say them. I assume blowjob knowledge would be transferred the same way.
Actually blowjob knowledge is transferred through osmosis
I’ve been doing it wrong?
Jesus never said ANYTHING about not sucking dick. (prove me wrong. I am equally happy to know that there isn’t anything that refutes sucking dick as I would be that there is a passage SPECIFICALLY saying you can’t suck a dick)
Wait, was the “no sodomy” thing Old or New Testament? If it’s New it was probably Paul, not Jesus who said it, so I guess it still means Jesus said nothing about gays. (And in Paul’s case he hated sex, period, so I guess he doesn’t count either.)
There’s a great line from James Michener’s Chesapeake, where the Quaker matriarch is debating the Bible with a visitor. I don’t have the book to hand, but I’m pretty sure it’s close to this:
“It is possible to love Christ, and wonder about Paul.”
Yeah, even when I was a more serious Christian than I am now, I ignored Paul. That guy’s a jerk.
The whole “no sodomy” thing isn’t even really Old Testament.
Sodom was a city that, according to God, had a population of 1 excellent dude, and some unimportant but large number of terrible dudes, plus the women who obviously don’t matter.
God sent a pair of super hot angels to the excellent dude, Lot, to tell him to GTFO bc God was going to delete Sodom and its neighbor city Gomorrah.
The people of Sodom and Gomorrah showed up because their phones all went off when some super hot angels entered the city limits and demanded to have sex with the angels. I can’t read Hebrew, so I don’t know if the angels were canonically male, but every translation into English that I’ve read (which is not necessarily a LOT) doesn’t specify.
Lot, the so-called “excellent dude”, according to God, said “hey, no, don’t rape the super hot angels, rape my daughters instead”, but the city was like “dude, not cool” and just…left, I guess?
Anyway, Lot and his family got out of the city that was Hard for Angels, but Lot’s wife looked over her shoulder at her home as it was destroyed by fire from the sky, so God turned her into salt. (I don’t have to make that part of the story sound ridiculous.)
Lot’s daughters, presumably distraught over their mom getting turned into salt, got their dad drunk and raped HIM.
And somehow, the moral of the story is that…gays are bad?
Ha! That’s the best version of the Sodom and Gomorrah story I’ve ever heard! But yeah once I was old enough to understand the whole thing with Lot’s daughters I was all WTF?! (well metaphorically speaking of course…I didn’t swear at the time).
Yeah, most non-conservative Christians and Jews interpret the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as a story about hospitality, rather than gay sex (the point being that in a desert society with a large nomadic contingent, travelers taken in under your roof are supposed to be able to assume they will not be harmed, nor will they harm those who have taken them in).
I think it’s notable even if you don’t talk about hospitality, you can think a town with roving rape gangs getting punished by God has nothing to do with homosexuality. Having lived in the Bible Belt my entire life, it’s a constant struggle to have faith while dealing with people who can bend and twist any passage to mean whatever they want to do anyway.
The bit with the salt was Job, not Lot. Other than that, yeah, pretty much.
Hm, Lot’s wife – we never get to know her name – was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back.
Don’t remember the story of Job, too masochistic, must have tuned the details out.
Slightly different note: saw a election video of the German alt-right party on the subway today. “Merkel says we need immigrants. We don’t need them, we can make more people ourselves ”
(Showing a pregnant women lying on a flower meadow). If being German required an intelligence test, at least half of their voters would fail….
Spread your legs and think of England.
I sure hope it’s not half the German voters. Last time, it was 14,9% which is scary enough. That party’s campaigns seem to be basically done with the goal “let’s make racist messages, using as much underlying misogynist objectifying sexism as possible”. There’s another one with three women™ (all white and thin) in bikinis seen from behind that says “we prefer bikinis over burkas“ and… i’m kind of hoping that some racists refrain from voting for the party because even they won’t stand for this objectifying sexist position…? but i guess i hope in vain, they won’t even notice there’s something wrong with that.
Job never got turned to salt in the Bible. The “pillar of salt” was indeed Lot’s wife. In the cult I grew up in, she was used as a moralizing tale on the dangers of “looking back” at the “System” you came from.
… It’s easy to forget how messed up that part of the story really is. Really, the whole book of Judges is messed up.
Honestly, the actual story isn’t that crazy. Guy is saved with his family after angels come to investigate town of rapists and judge it worthy of destruction. Woman looks at divine and dies. The thing is, all the so-called Biblical literalists turn it into a metaphor for BS when the literal interpretation is perfectly fine.
Thank you for this.
Aw man, Joyce church sounds strange. Y’know, even apart from all the evil.
“They aren’t just any bigots. They’re EXTRAORDINARILY BORING bigots!”
I don’t know whY I put that in quotes but I’m keeping them
wherE diD thaT comE froM
typinG likE thiS iS oddlY satisfyinG
… clearly this is the correct case for improper nouns …
Well someone has just found their typing quirk.
Were you referencing Spongebob without realising it? Because the quoted bit is a Spongebob meme.
My church definitely had people who had vague aspirations to such a position.
They weren’t white, though, so they didn’t try to be cool.
If you were raised mainline, churches like Joyce’s are capital W Weird. The really singy ones are kind of like an audience participation musical with songs as catchy and trite as commercial jingles. There. I said it. Praise music is 99 percent dreck. The spoken portions relentlessly tug you toward an emotional climax, which is often an excruciating public display called an altar call. And they never seem to know what liturgical season it is. Also, they do ex tempore prayer–badly.
Of course, from Joyce’s perspective, she’s going to a service led by a woman, or possibly a man in a long white dress with a table runner around his neck, where you spend most of your time sitting still and not talking. The preacher never seems to raise his (or her!) voice, so how do you know whether what they’re saying is important? The music is probably old timey and requires you to keep your hands on your hymnal, not in the air. And in the middle of the service EVERYBODY DRINKS ALCOHOL. EVERY WEEK!!!!!!!!!
So this is going to be interesting.
A friend was a practising Catholic and if she was sitting the kids Sunday mornings she’d take them with her to church. The kids hated it; they said it was like being in a time out for an hour and a half when they hadn’t even done anything wrong.
Ends up it’s an extremely effective way to turn them off Christianity, heh.
No longer religious, but back when I was a Catholic I saw that kind of all-singing audience participation church as *really weird* and would probably have not been able to deal with it.
Church was a quiet time, where I could go and turn off my brain for an hour and think about wizards while unconsciously standing up and sitting down again when appropriate.
… I, uh, guess I never actually got the whole religion thing to start with, in hindsight.
My (Roman Catholic)church did mostly solemn hymns during the Mass, but the final hymn, which occurred while we exited the nave after mass, was always an upbeat, celebratory hymn, often accompanied by electric guitar.
That just makes me think of the time my Roman Catholic Sunday School teacher sat an eight year old down for a lesson in why her Aunt’s Faith isn’t (our specific version of) the Catholic Faith.
Just a taste of that lecture: “No, Molly, the Jewish ALSO get into Heaven. Their God is OUR God. We just disagree on if the Saviour has arrived, yet.”
That was Khyrin’s First Lesson in Religious Tolerance, which boils down to:
“Jesus said, ‘Love thy Neighbor.'”
“But what about the gays?”
“Did I stutter the first time?”
These days, virtually every catholic church has little activity booklets and coloring stuff for the kids. Some of them even have “family rooms” which are soundproofed but play the mass over speakers, so the kids can go wild.
CS Lewis on 19th-century hymns: “Second-rate poetry set to third-rate music”. Modern praise music is even worse!
I collect 19th-century hymals, and let me tell you, the ones that weren’t considered worth reprint are even worse. Syrupy, twee, bathetic, and bombastic–sometimes all at once.
*reprinting
I always like the story about how you tell a praise song from a hymn. A praise song has one verse that you sing five times. A Hymn has four verses and a chorus, but you only sing the first and third verses.
“Guy”. “His”. Oh, Joyce…
I really hope they have a female priest, just to watch Joyce make crazy eyes. Though, I don’t see how Willis could have missed that opportunity.
I doubt they have a single priest. Even if they called it something else, Jakes wouldn’t have acted confused upon hearing “worship leader”.
I mean “Worship leader” does sound really alien, presumably even moreso to a mainstream protestant like I’m guessing. I
“Worship” specifically refers to the singing. What Joyce said will make a lot more sense if you understand that a “Worship Leader” is actually the lead singer of a band.
So he’s their cantor?
The denomination I grew up in had various names for various positions, based on education, ordination, gender, and payroll status. A seminary-trained, ordained man, on church payroll, was Minister of Music (or youth, children, etc.), whereas an ordained man (seminary graduate or not) doing it as an unpaid volunteer or intern was Music Minister (or Youth Minister, etc.); women didn’t get to be called Minister, so women and non-ordained men used Leader in the place of Minister. Divorced men weren’t eligible for ordination, but if you were already ordained and then got a divorce, you stayed ordained (although you were expected to resign your position, and would most likely have to leave town to find work again).
I’m not going to name which denomination it was, but it’s extremely conservative, evangelical, predominantly white, and above all Southern.
Hold up. My husband goes to a non-liturgical church, and they have both a worship leader (who leads the service) and a song leader (who leads the singing, and would generally be the one doing any arm waving that’s required.)
From here, they’re called pastors and Joyce already knows that some of them are women.
She said that church was hip or something like that.
Just ‘cos the Episcopalians allow women to lead surely doesn’t mean they’d be crazy enough to actually let them, I hope?!
(irony alert? I has a gay Methodist stepmum, and know the culture well)
wait
allow let allow let
what does even
i am confuse
Just ‘cos there’s a rule saying they can do something, that’s no reason for them to go so far as to actually do it. People might talk, and that’s bad.
(gay Methodist minister stepmum that should be, and the fun I’ve heard of there…)
… All you’re telling me now is Methodists sound awesome.
Holy carp I finally have a good gravatar again yay
That’s “fun” in the sense of “highly political”.
My church, OTOH, is a pentecostal one with occasional Hebrew, with feminist- and trans-friendly yet anti-LGB leadership (my suspicion that this’ll change for the better is one of the reasons I’m there) and a multi-verging-on-pan-cultural membership (another reason) that ranges from gullible Milo-is-awesome types to, well, para-hippies like me. Which can be just as political, but come to think much of the politics seems to involve me somehow. Huh.
TL;DR: there’s always politics, but how far back a particular denomination was founded can be a useful predictor for what sort of politics.
Women were always allowed to be president of the USA. They were citizens from the start, they just couldn’t vote. There were female office holders (at the local level) before women were allowed to vote. But we won’t let one of them actually be elected president.
The pastor and worship leader are almost certainly different people. The {worship leader, song leader, cantor, choir director music minister} leads the congregation (or in some cases, just the choir) in the songs of worship, while the {pastor, priest, [pulpit] minister} delivers the {message, homily, sermon}.
Each of these terms has its own slightly different connotation, of course. The “worship leader” Joyce is describing probably has a backing band, and the “worship” isn’t that much different from a Christian Rock concert. I don’t know what the Episcopalians call their music leader, but it’s probably someone wearing a robe, who doesn’t move around much (maybe raise their hands), let alone dance, and the music is probably closer to “hymns” and may involve a pipe organ. Joyce is definitely in for a shock, but who knows, she may actually appreciate the reflective/reverential nature of their worship.
So the services Joyce is used to are like Jesus pep rallies?
That’s a very good description of the services I was taken to when I was dating an evangelical Christian girl. I took to rating churches by number of drum sets. The worst one had two, one conventional and one with bongos and such.
Eddie Izzard’s bit on singing in the Church of England is absolutely hilarious to me because I was raised Anglican and holy crap does he nail it.
If Jacob’s church is anything like the one I was raised in she’s in for a bit of a shock, ha ha.
Catholic churches have eternal guilt, Anglican-protestant churches have those hymns.
Either way, Christianity truly is about suffering on earth.
As a former Episcopal, lemme give y’all the run-down:
Deacon/Priest/Bishop/Archbishop–Deacons can do most of the things priests do, except certain Sacraments. They also often fill in if the priest is sick. Smaller churches won’t have a Deacon, and may even ‘share’ priests, who go to multiple churches to perform Mass. Bishops oversee a Diocese, and an Archbishop oversees all the Dioceses in the Archdiocese.
Acolytes are lay-people, generally youth, who help out during the Mass with various small tasks, and guiding processions. Also, they’re the ones who get to put out fires, both literal and figurative, that may come up during Mass, so the priest can continue on uninterrupted. (Yes, I’m speaking from personal experience here.)
Assuming the church is large enough to have a choir, they’ll also have a choir director. A smaller church with no formal choir will usually have a music director, which may be a purely volunteer position.
And yes, women can fill all the formal roles at this point, at least in most churches (there are still some who will refuse to install a woman priest, though many of those will take a woman as deacon).
(Interesting, actually, that Jacob referred to a ‘pastor’–I almost never heard that term growing up. Might vary in local usage, though.)
The church as a whole is very LGBT friendly, as Jacob has indicated, but there are hold-outs who remain mired in the past, and periodically threaten to schism–either just going their own way, or ‘going back’ to the Roman Catholic Church, which is still firmly stuck on Leviticus.
Well, considering that Rome is looking into ordaining women to the permanent diaconate, it’s not that surprising that there would be Episcopal churches that are ok with women as deacons but not as priests.
Someone pointed out yesterday that it might actually be the CME (Christian Methodist Episcopal) instead of the standard Anglican Communion Episcopal Church.
CME is a historically black church and quite separate from white Episcopal churches – thus the Methodist, I assume.
Good on female priests as I understand it, but not so much on LGBT issues, so it might still be more likely to a be a white Episcopal Church.
In Fundie culture women aren’t allowed to lead mixed gender groups. Of course, if you’d seen the “teachings” I was subjected to in mother-daughter retreats you’d agree there wasn’t much improvement even with women speakers.
*plays Footloose from Footloose on the hacked muzak*
Praise be!
*Cues up Dirty Dancing soundtrack to follow*
“Nobody puts Becky in the corner!”
You win tonight’s internet.
Wait, from the original movie or the awful remake? Because ONE of those has a high irony factor.
I don’t know, whichever one I sang in elementary school choir
The remake was this decade, so probably the original?
That sounds right then
Not Maniac from Flashdance?
That too; maybe some “Helter Skelter”, either the original or Bono’s glorious reclamation.
Ha ha, oh dear, Joyce’s expecting this and she’s gonna get that instead, isn’t she? XD
becky, stop trying to make “jakes” happen. it’s not going to happen
What are you talking about Ems
When I hear the term “jakes,” to me it has the slang sense of “restroom.” But Urban Dictionary doesn’t even have that meaning in it’s first 10 pages of definitions.
23-skiddoo, hubba-hubba, pipe those gams! (I am not old enough to have used those phrases, but when I was a young and precocious reader, I read books containing them.)
Willis thinks he’s old because people who are now reading his comics weren’t born when started them. Willis? That’s not old. Old is when you and 40-year-olds are using the same words, but you and the 40-year-olds have completely different understandings of the exact same words.
Of course that’s also “young” since your definition is pretty loose
Try being 71 and hearing what has happened to the language
I… I am 40 years old. (Closer to 50, now.)
You are not permitted to accompany us in our seating arrangement.
Stop trying to make Jakes happen, Becky.
Dammit!
What did you damn?
Probably the fact that the alt-text already made that joke.
Ah. Quite damnable indeed. *adjusts monocle with pinky raised*
Also the fact that Emily beat them to it with a difference of mere seconds.
Stop trying to stop Becky from making Jakes happen, Matts.
Stop trying to stop me from stopping becky from making jakes happen, Pablo.
Don’t start unbelieving
Never don’t not feel that feeling!
Growing up going to Catholic church, if someone so much as tapped a toe at the music you’d get the hairy eyeball from the older women in the pews behind you.
On some Mexican churches there are people who sing more ubeat worship songs at times and you can move those times.
So, the synagogue I grew up attending…there were about 4 people who could carry a tune in a bucket. 3 of them were my family. The songs and prayer tunes tended towards, well, one visitor from out of town asked if it was a funeral.
After my brother and I went to college my mother was more free to look for a synagogue she was more comfortable in. Bout a 45 minute drive away (New Mexico, so nothing’s close together). I visited for Rosh Hashanah, the new year.
They had a separate cantor from the rabbi leading services. He had a guitar. The songs of praise SOUNDED like songs of praise. People were dancing in the aisles. PEOPLE WERE LITERALLY DANCING IN THE AISLES!
It was awesome, and also felt weird and surreal and weird and I half expected to see John Belushi backflipping having seen the light. My mother got the reference, and understood.
Like, I had attended a Reform synagogue at college a couple times, and they had a harpsichord (electronic), but it felt like they were trying to ape a Christian service, while this felt organic and awesome.
That was always one of my biggest problems with synagogue. (I came up in a conservative one and then we moved to a reform one after my bar mitzvah.) The tunes all souded like dirges, with the exception of v’shamru. I was bored out of my mind.
Mine growing up was…I think technically Conservative but we had Orthodox and Reform members as well. As my mother put it “if we upset anyone we’d lose a minyan.” (small community)
I always imagined synagogues used klezmer and maybe “modern” Israelian music?
The music I’ve heard I would describe as New Age-y. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNdwdn9uSBE for example. Unlike my brother, though, I tend to hang onto the dirge-like tunes we grew up with so my language is probably unconsciously more dismissive.
Between us, as a fellow Catholic kid? I’m amazed I didn’t get glared at for singing loudly and joyfully.
Growing up going to the Church of Scotland (well, dragged to it by the school three times a year, over the objections of my atheist parents) I was relieved I was going to the one that even had music.
I believe the Free Church voted to allow music in services in 2010 or something, and some of the clergy resigned over this.
Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come before his presence with singing!
Psalm 100. Praise Google!
Is Joyce really so sheltered that she’s NEVER seen a traditional Protestant service?
At this point even the puritans are going, “Hath this kid been raised in a soap-bubble?”
Actually, the puritans who have recovered from their horrified shock at the notion of dancing and guitars are probably busy preparing stakes for the members of Joyce’s church.
It helps to defame them from your own pew. That somehow keeps the curiosity down.
…..
….. aaaaaand now I’ve lost faith in humanity again.
Yeah there is a lot of that going around this year.
I’ve never seen a traditional Protestant service.
Seen a couple Catholic services (1 Confirmation, a few weddings). A wedding service I don’t remember the denomination of (Episcopalian? Crud, now I need to figure out how to politely ask a friend what denomination another friend (who I’ve since lost touch with) is).
Am I sheltered? Or just Jewish? Like, I don’t make a habit of going to worship services of religions I don’t follow unless it’s a special event.
No, that makes sense, especially depending on the denomination and personality of one’s immediate circle. I’ve been to a few Jewish events but I couldn’t even name what tradition they belonged to, and I’m sad to say that I’ve never set foot in a mosque (although for some pretty neat reasons my mother has).
I mean that’s the equivalent of asking if someone is so sheltered they’ve never had in-and-out burger.
They just didn’t live near an in-and-out burger, dude. And maybe the handfull of times they were near one they didn’t wanna spend the money.
Count that one person lucky to save their money, the shakes are okay but In-N-Out fries are fucking shit.
Until the internet I’d never even heard of In & Out’s. To this day, I’ve never knowingly seen one any place I’ve been and I’ve been over almost all the country.
People don’t tend to go to services of religions they don’t belong to. Why would they?
Especially as kids, in a strongly religious family. You get taken to your parents church and have little to no say in the matter.
I’m actually kind of surprised Joyce had as much freedom looking for a church at school as she did. That she wasn’t told which one was acceptable and probably brought in to be introduced to the pastor.
Joyce did explain that her church at home was “independent”, so it would probably be unaffiliated with any formal religious groups (i.e. like Baptists, Adventists, etc.) This would mean that she’d have no real direction about which church to go to when at school.
On her own, no. But I would expect a family from that culture to have a proper similar church picked out for her already – the one John went to during college or something recommended by their pastor, rather than taking the chance she’d wander into some inappropriate “hippy” church.
Or worse: a Catholic one.
As you say, it’s easier if you’re a member of some more formal denomination, you just go to the local one of those.
I was taken by my mother to Catholic church and caticisum(?) classes. After she died my aunt and uncle took me to a Baptist church. I finally out of there and lived with another aunt nd uncle and they took me to a Protestant church. later a wife had me go to a Covenant church for a while. All In all I figured out it was all hocum designed by people who wanted power and to control what you think and want your money.
My 2 cents
Catechism?
One key difference for all the people pointing out that why would she go to a different church: if her church is unaffiliated with a denomination, she isn’t going to have a matching one to go to when she travels. We always found a Catholic church to go to when I was a kid, but my husband’s family tended more towards “it’s a church, let’s go there”. So while it wasn’t common, he had *been* to Protestant (or Catholic, I dunno) churches.
i dont believe jocelyn cant dance
I think there’s an e but also I agree with you, Jocelyne can do whatever she wants because she’s a motherfucking goddess
And no I didn’t get her mixed up with Carla, they are both motherfucking goddesses in the motherfucking pantheon of motherfucking trans girls in fictional motherfucking Indiana
Are they the only members of said pantheon?
This pantheon also includes Emily from Questionable Content, Pancetta from Cucumber Quest, and Fenic from Goodbye to Halos.
Not that Emily doesn’t join whatever the fudge group she wants to join over at Questionable Content, but I think you mean Claire?
Yes, I am bad at names
f’r sakes jakes
Also, I’m pretty sure QC is set in Massachusetts, not Indiana.
The entire pantheon isn’t set in Indiana, Carla just runs the Indiana branch
Wait, so Indiana is a popular setting for a lot of webcomics? Weird.
If we expanded to a pantheon of motherfucking transwoman / trans-girl goddesses in the motherfucking midwest, we could include Sulla Pinsky (O Human Star), Sydney (As the Crow Flies), and Qiao and her friends (Failing Sky [although for part of the story they’re on the West Coast]. )
Actually none of the others are set in Indiana, I am sorry for giving that impression
Also Magpie and others from Sister Claire. Or maybe they is more gender-fluid.
I question Carla’s ability to dance. That music don’t get to tell her what to do.
Carla moves her body and the musicians change to match it.
Even if it’s a recording.
Especially if it’s a recording.
Nonono, Carla disassembles and alters the record player / cassette player / cd player / mp3 player / internet to change the music.
Yes, she COULD change it by dancing, but why miss the chance to show that she’s an engineering goddess?
Dancing is kinda like engineering. It’s kinesthetics.
I think it was can “allowed to” not can “capable of”.
i meant “capable of”
Joyce can dance!
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/02-i-was-a-teenage-churchmouse/etchasketch/
He, I started to read the following strips, and it’s adorable how touchy feely Joyce and Dorothy are back then.
The whole church shimmies!
(The whole church shimmies!)
It’s a…loooove church!
Love church, baby, yeah!
(Hurry up and bring your offering money!)
Everybody’s moovin’
Everybody’s groovin’ baby!
Folks lining up outside just to get down.
Everybody’s moovin’
Everybody’s groovin’ baby!
Funky little church
Funky little church!
Everybody’s prayin’, looking for salvation, baby
(Folks linin’ up outside just to kneel down)
Everybody’s prayin’, looking for salvation, baby
(Holy little church, holy little church!)
The Fun Church,
Is a little ol’ place where
we can pray together-eeerrr
Fun Church, Bayy-beee
She must be made of jelly,
‘Cause jam don’t shake like that!
jacob!!! !
So Joyces church hates gays but they’re fine with dancing….?
Well they’re fine with one specific person dancing
Well yeah, Kevin Bacon came to town.
Beat me to it.
Yeah, so they’re not Baptist or Anabaptist. I mean, they’re “non-denominational” but maybe they’ve got a lot of Methodist influence? Or…some revivalist kinds of things going on?
I think it’s more of a what ever keeps people in the seats and coming back every Sunday, than theological consistency kind of church.
Well, you know why Baptists disapprove of premarital sex: it could lead to dancing.
Yeah, probably derived from the worship practices of the charismatic/Pentecostal movement, just with the whole speaking in tongues thing kinda forgotten about (or at least way downplayed). A lot of the leaders of the Evangelical mega-churches grew up Pentecostal/Assembly of God (or their parents did), and even those who didn’t were influenced by the prevailing culture. (Despite the “non-denominational” label and no central hierarchy, these churches tend to be very similar.)
Straight people love to dance. Everyone does. Except dorks and nerds.
Am nerd, hate dancing.
The rule holds up!
Does headbanging counts as dancing? Because if it does, I’m a nerd that loves neckpain inducing dancing.
I can’t tell if Joyce is projecting on her own experience or if this is subliminal racism in expecting it to be like how Black churches appear in media
I’m pretty sure that it’s based on her own experience in church. Joyce’s exposure to portrayals of black churches in the media is probably pretty limited.
I think it’s the former. Don’t forget that Joyce apparently has a fairly narrow range of secular pop culture she’s been exposed to. I doubt she’s seen many if any fictional portrayals of African-American churches.
Given that her own experiences involved churches with rock shows and lyrics projected onto multiple screens and she’s been pretty thoroughly shielded from any types of religion save her own, I’m guessing it’s the former.
Seriously, my parents started going to a church like this when I was a teenager. I know EXACTLY what she is talking about. (Still didn’t stick, as I am very apatheistic now, but you know).
We’ve seen Joyce’s church, it’s the former
(though maybe also the latter)
(Has she seen Blues Brothers? Is that allowed?)
I probably shouldn’t, but I really want Joyce to walk into a church right out of the Blues Brothers, complete with James Brown.
An Espicopal or Catholic parish in an African-American neighborhood is likely to be a very different experience. Most music is locally determined. Attended a Catholic Mass in Louisville that had traditional call-response singing and ladies in big hats. At home, a Mass tends towards a polka beat. Betting that this church is going to be pretty whitebread, since its Indiana.
If it is a black church, it’s not likely to be too whitebread.
Okay, wheatbread then.
no its definitely from her experience. i grew up in a similar kind of setting and thats exactly what its like
First, panel 4 Joyce is killing me dead.
Second… This sounds less like church and more like… I don’t know, something very corny that aliens would do to try to fit into human society? Come on, ‘worship leader’ absolutely sounds stilted enough to be alienspeak. Anyone with more information about whatever sect Joyce and Becky belong to, feel free to explain how this is a thing.
“Something very corny that aliens would do to try to fit into human society” is not, on its face, mutually exclusive with “church”.
“Always twirling, twirling, twirling, toward salvation!”
Nah, worship leader is a fairly common term in a lot of US evangelical churches. I’ve seen church bands referred to as worship teams. There’s a genre of modern Christian music called praise and worship music connected with those churches. Some of it apparently sounds like watered down U2.
As someone in the situation… there’ll often be a tentative acoustic guitar, and a keyboard that isn’t offering any counterpoint. So as an electric guitarist the best way to add rhythmic colour to them is via palm muting and delay, which means having to consciously fight against sounding like the Edge.
Some… don’t fight so hard.
i think you’re forgetting the lazy yet somehow also enthusiastic drummer with a bizarre love of lightly tapping the cymbals
I was TRYING to forget the drummer thank you SO MUCH for bringing that up
*curls up in corner*
— oh, and the ones with an inexplicable fondness for chimes bars?
*curls up tighter in corner*
Lord I give you my heart
*inexplicable chime bars*
I give you my soul
*more chimes*
I live for you alooone!
*MORE FUCKING CHIMES*
I’m parked next to the drummer, which means that if I need to keep him in time via amp spill and block chords of the BLART BLART BLART BLART variety I can.
It also means that if I don’t figure out how to reprogram the Roland’s mappings I’m eventually going to be facing humongeous temptation to deal with him the way Iggy Pop’s awesome rider suggests dealing with someone about to “do lighting”.
Church… band. That almost feels like an oxymoron to me, heh.
Okay, to be fair, I haven’t been to a church service except for weddings and funerals for, like, almost thirty years now, so things may very well have changed since my time. But back then, we had the priest at the front, he’d give his sermon, the pages for the hymns were listed up front ahead of time so you could find the next one and keep your finger there beforehand, there was one middle-aged woman on an electric organ, and we all droned along to her playing.
Except for the Christmas Mass when one might expect hymns like “Silent Night” etc, not a one of them would be one I had ever heard of before; so far as I could tell none of them were repeated; and every one of them would be credited something like “words by So-and-so, 1603, music: traditional”. Which would mean that it all was several hundred years or more older, and had music that was less a recognizable melody and more a random collection of notes.
Have you ever seen Eddie Izzard’s bit on singing in the Church of England? He fucking nails it on the NOSE.
Anglicans don’t need to do penance because it’s bloody penance just sitting through a service.
We took it all very seriously and I know even Teenaged!Me would have looked seriously askance at the addition of any guitars, or mikes, let alone drums. For Youth Group? Sure! But, like, in the church?! For the service?! *clutches pearls*
The really weird part is that the Anglicans were also one of (if not the) first churches in Canada to allow women to be full priests, and to be fine with performing gay marriages. And they don’t seem to have the same issues around pre-marital sex and abortions that other denominations have, and priests can marry, of course.
Very nice people and very progressive; they just really really seem to prefer their services very traditional, at least at my church, back when.
Yeah, this (both having a designated leader of worship and the dancing) is totally normal in vast swaths of Christianity, not just in the US but worldwide. Most churches of a decent size will have a staff person or even just designated volunteer in charge of selecting and leading the music (my church has like 20 people and we have a volunteer worship leader). More traditional churches might call them a “minister of music” but “worship leader” is very common among the less formal groups. The idea is that it makes them an equal with the rest of the congregation – simply another participant leading the others, as opposed to “minister” which implies elevated training and position. In practice there’s not much difference.
‘Minister of music’, taken out of church, sounds kinda metal.
Can confirm this is pretty common in the culture both Joyce and I grew up in.
as far as i know theres no name for this “sect”? the church i grew up in was very similar to the kind joyce and becky did and it was just kind of? very generically fundamentalist.
i asked my mom one time “what kind of church are we?” (because we live in an area w a LOT of churches and i started noticing many would say “methodist” or baptist”) and she responded our church was “non-denominational”.
my father on the other hand grew up in the church of god, for which my granpa was a pastor, which is where a lot of his fundamentalism seems to have come from. i think regardless of sect fundies tend to stick together.
(also yes i can confirm “worship leader” is very much somehow a thing)
Apparently, a lot of the non-denominational churches come out of Church of God and similar denominations.
Of course, “non-denominational” is pretty much a misnomer. They’re essentially their own denomination at this point.
At some point I hope the distance between every location is measured by its proximity to Blowjob Cat.
Allow me to respond to this not just with a YES, but with a cat-egorical YES.
I’ll pass on this system since it seems like you would lose important details, but Manx anyway …
What kinda weird, hairball, scheme is that!?
Clearly it is the one purr furred by the catastrophically misguided ..
I like how Jacob just knows what blowjob cat is. It’s like it’s some cultural touchstone.
Evidently foreshadowing for when Joyce starts dancing in the middle of the church session. Bonus points if a flash mob appears at the same time. :p
Probably not. We have a hard time getting even one plasma mongoose in here of late.
(I’d be surprised if anyone OTHER than P.M. remembers what that means.)
Well, Plasma Mongoose did show up today, as well as Kamiko Neko and Yotomoe.
“Dude, we’re getting the band back together.”
I’m back to some extent, I go through periods where I become less active in spaces I was very active before and vice versa.
Guess who’s back
Back again
Plasma’s back
Now and then
“I danced for the scribes and the pharisees
But they looked at me like they thought I had spasms in my knees”
I like how almost everyone on campus knows what Blowjob Cat is.
And I just realised Joyce learnt whatever she knows of dancing from a Christian dude man ‘shimmying’ on a stage… I laugh, I crie.
I mean it could be worse. She could’ve learned how to dance from the Kennedy Cartoon Kick Dance.
No she also learned from Hymmel the Hymnal.
Good thing Walky has moves.
I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate…
And Joyce wonders why people think she didn’t go to a real church…
For someone who takes her religion so seriously, she seems to have never considered how absurd her actual practice of it is.
To be fair her exposure to other denominations is limited.
I thought her family went through several denominations. Or am I confusing her for another character? Then again, she might’ve been too young to really notice the difference.
I’m including denominations outside the Protestant sphere.
A bunch of similar churches, but mainly the same denomination. Like different neighnorhoods of a small town. Or a series of small towns in the same county.
I suspect she was mostly too young. And they were probably pretty similar non-denominations.
I’m fairly sure this can be said of most religious people. Whatever religious practices you learn growing up will seem totally normal, regardless of how weird they are.
Like, the whole Eucharist thing. Metaphorical cannibalism is LESS weird than the real thing, but it’s still really damn weird
Growing up in church we just stood their singing the music. Sometimes clapping along. It’s like Choir. Except longer. And all the songs sucked…
No wait it was basically like choir.
Choir and church were indistinguishable for me because I went to a Protestant school and the choir only existed to make the services fancy. All I ever learnt in choir were hymns and carols. But, you know, in four part harmony.
Sucked? I was quite happy when I got to join actual choir in school, but, I’m still sad that almost all the best songs are religious. I remember hearing an attempt at taking the “God” out of From a Distance, but the chorus ended up as “They are watching us” which is just fucking creepy. (or maybe it was always creepy, but that made the creepiness too obvious to ignore)
Now I want to see Becky making up steadily more outlandish stories about their upbringing and seeing how far she can get people to believe
I don’t even think she needs to
She has to do it in Joyce’s presence, though. For the faces.
But Joyce reacting would spoil the bit and lose the benefit of others reacting
They already don’t believe, though.
~20 minutes after the comic has updated I comprise exactly 1/3 of the comment section, that gives me plurality stakes in the community right
I bow to your superior commentating.
I basically do this once a week, the rest of the days either having ten comments max or none at all
I think once I broke 60
I do wonder about who’s set what records, but I don’t know if Willis even has access to that kind of metadata
I mean probably
Yeah, but unfortunately you now have to switch your bookkeeping over to the equity method. That’s a real pain.
I had other reasons for why Jacob and joyce together would be a bad idea, especially for Jacob, but this strip shows that Joyce is probably far to naïve for someone like Jacob
While Jacob is, I’m guessing early twenties?, his demeanour is more like someone in their late 20s at least (not a criticism) and so is much more worldy than Joyce
Also please stop with giving people nick names Becky
I wouldn’t mind dating someone who’s more worldly and mature than I am. As long as they’re nice about it it can be an enriching experience for both people.
But why would Jacob want that? Hes got Raidah who’s giving Jacob everything he wants and needs at the moment
We don’t know if Raidah is giving him “everything he wants”. We saw some good looking communication, some Raidah lying to him about Sarah and we just don’t know.
I don’t think Raidah’s lied to him about Sarah. She’s told him what she believes, which is distorted, but I don’t think she’s deliberately lied.
She didn’t lie but she DID purposely omit context from comments she made to him about Sarah to reflect her in a worst light about an event that she had said was forgiven to Sarah’s face. Which is morally reprehensible, you don’t forgive an event then use it as ammo against them to try to skew someone’s opinion on them.
Jacob is their age as far as I can tell.
Jacob is Sarah’s age, aka a sophomore. Assuming he’s the same age as the rest of his class, which could very well not be the case.
Being a sophmore means nothing in college. I was 19 but I knew guys who were in my class that were like 23 and had kids and shit.
True, but it’s the general rule and I don’t think we’ve been given any reason to assume otherwise.
The older students (with 23 on the low end there) with kids don’t live in the dorms.
Hes certainly a lot more mature though
But nicknames are practically the best part of social interaction!
I started life with four names and now I have, like, twenty just because some people liked me enough to be playful with my nomenclature.
https://imgur.com/a/NQFbV
Once you get Joyce shimmying no force on earth will stop it.
I read the time narration in a French accent because Spongebob ruined my life and by ruined I mean greatly improvined
Think of Jesus, Becky!
Leave room for Jesus to join in
Wait what
Jesus inside of all of us.
and he didn’t even use protectionBecky’ s a lesbian, she doesn’t want the Son of Man joining in!
Exactly why it would work to think of him and not Joyce’s firm, bouncing… THINK OF JESUS
Unless we’re talking about one of the many, many, surprisingly many female incarnations of Jesus throughout culture
I dare you to call my bluff
On the other side, Joyce’s face in that sketch would also make Becky blush.
Yotomoe — Just when I think your sketches can’t possibly get more awesome…they do.
On behalf of readers who wondered about last panel Joyce without the obfuscating speech bubble, I thank you. And yes, too much of that in front of Becky will cause a reaction.
it really speaks to the reach of evangelical protestant churches that while there are Americans (I assume) in this comment section unfamiliar with what Joyce is describing, what she describes is exactly my experience from attending assembly of god type churches in the middle class parts of a south east Asian capital city…
Something I just realized here is that, in addition to being much more liberal and tolerant, the service that Joyce is about to go to will also be much more CEREBRAL.
I think that, after the initial disappointment of the lack of Christian Rock, Joyce will get very, very into that and actually start STUDYING religion.
…. if so, that will not end well.
It could!
…although it’ll more likely end the way it ended with David since she’s sort of based on him in many regards
…I wonder if we’ll ever recurse
Sometimes I think when Luther did away with all the pomp and kneeling and stuff, he did his religion a disservice. Because all that moving and ritual was more conducive to bonding and happyness hormones than his intellectual approach.
It took many wars to determine, yes, there’s room for emotion and the mind in religion.
But Luther also did some great hymns:
“Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,
ein gute Wehr und Waffen…”
The Jesus Shimmy makes people faint.
He shakes and he shimmies like jelly on a plate…
Tonight, Grav Roulette, you’ve given me Danny.
…. yes, I know I’ve had Danny for several nights and–… what, no, not like that…. crying out loud Grav Roulette I’m both a straight male and NOT a cradle robb-… look, just shut up, okay? YES I’ve gone several nights without a spin, but we’re doing this anyway.
Stupid Grav Roulette.
*aHEM* Danny’s an interesting fit for me. On the one hand, he’s adorkable, and I’m at least a dork, so there’s some similarity there. He’s good with math and he likes video games and he gets his naive idiocy going a lot. He misinterprets situations a lot, puts his foot in his mouth, and often doesn’t know what’s going on. In a lot of ways he’s a poser. He pretends to be wise when he isn’t, pretends to be a moral center when he isn’t, pretends to be a beatnik when he isn’t. …. and yeah, all of that’s me.
(Though I don’t pose. I emulate with the intention of becoming. Big difference, y’all.)
(… I don’t actually say y’all.)
On the other hand….
….
…. dammit, no! I don’t WANT to be Danny! No no no! There’s got to be some reason that Danny’s a bad fit for me!
…..
….. we’ll try this again tomorrow, Grav Roulette, by which time I shall have repressed this memory and be ready for another spin.
What the HECK kinda church does Joyce go to?
There are already more comments on this strip than there are on the strip from two days ago. (Just a random stat for y’all!)
And more than a third of these comments, I admit, are from me, but I still feel like this is significant somehow
(even though the strip from two days ago is the lowest possible baseline from all the comics in the past week)
You can estimate it by ctrl+f’ing for the date plus the start of the timestamp (say, “September 19, 2017 at”) and subtracting two, you’re guaranteed to probably only be a little high if that, and even then only if assholes like me deliberately include the date in the comments in that format for the purposes of demonstration and/or making that method of tallykeeping harder
Although you could get around that by typing “september 19, 2017 at ”
But not anymore
i hate so much that i know exactly what joyce is talking about. a fact for which i will never forgive my parents
I feel this comment on a deep level.
Becky knows perfectly well the church is nowhere near Blowjob cat, but she just learnt a new word and GOSHDANGIT, she will use it.
She just whispers it in the middle of the night, while she’s waiting for the last half-hour of consciousness to fade. For the last few nights, Leslie’s gotten up to use the bathroom, and in the dead silence of the she just hears Becky whispering to herself, quiet as a gust of wind.
“Bloooowjoooobs…”
I do find it amusing that apparently everyone on campus learned about Blowjob Cat over the last couple of days.
I mean, we saw Meredith learn about it, and those things spread like wildfire.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/border/
Joyce is adorable.
That is all.
Apologies to all for this, but I think I may be in the spam folder, and I’m just testing this out?
I began a post with the phrase “a-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n w-i-l-l-i-s-!” (in caps) and I’m guessing that’s what got me in the spam folder? So if you see this two or three days from now, don’t ever do that?
I can’t help but remember, one thing that shook my faith in christianity was learning that it was not all the same.
OMG best new gravitar.
As a young kid, I was shocked to learn there were more Protestant worshippers than Catholics.
I am learning a lot wow. my family is non-religious and the times I went to Sunday school and bible camp while visiting my birth father never sank in, so it’s hard to keep all these different denominations straight.
That’s okay. You wouldn’t believe the lengths a lot of these denominations go to to keep THEMSELVES straight.
….. It begins with reparative therapy, and goes downhill from there.
And here I thought they went to one of those churches like in Footloose where dancing is forbidden.
Nah, they had to leave one of their previous churches precisely because they didn’t allow dancing (or that’s what Joyce was told). So one person dancing is better than none, as far as the Browns are concerned.
Speaking as the kid of 2 Episcopal priests, the only time they hop on the altar is if they tripped over the rug.
So am I close or far if I’m picturing the dancing from Hi-tops (1985)?
I’ve seen a lot of “What sort of weird church does Joyce go to!?” comments, so I thought I’d offer up my thoughts. Of course, this is all a product of my own church hopping from my youth and your mileage may vary.
I believe it has been established that Joyce attends a non-denominational or unaligned protestant church. Protestantism is a very broad category and includes a very broad range of doctrines. Non-denominational churches don’t align with any hierarchy and, as such, have doctrines that are established at the church level rather than from a central organizing body. Because of this, no two are ever the same. They tend to be rather light on specific doctrine, preferring to allow members to adopt their own beliefs in order to keep attendance high. What doctrine they do have tends to be assembled piecemeal from other protestant denominations. Some baptize, others don’t. Some do communion, other don’t. And so on.
There are certain patterns that emerge in these churches by way of style. Some churches (larger, more affluent ones, in my experience) will have a worship band lead by a young man with long brown hair (not too long, though) and stubble to attract younger crowds. They also have digital projectors to scroll the lyrics of the worship songs along with a slide show of Christian iconography to put you in the mood. This seems to be Joyce’s primary experience. Other churches (usually smaller ones established in storefronts or abandoned fast food restaurants) will have an older woman playing piano with no accompanying band and a surplus overhead projector from an elementary school that stopped using them in the 90’s to project the lyrics. If you’ve never experienced an overhead transparency projector, then I envy your obvious youth. In either case, worship is lead by the worship leader (which, in retrospect, is obvious. I’m leaving it in anyway) while the congregants sing along in one of three positions; one arm raised with index finger pointing at the ceiling, both arms raised hands open, or both arms slightly extended as though catching a duffle bag being thrown at them. In all three cases, gently swaying side to side is encouraged, but dancing is not. This continues for thirty minutes. Afterwards, the pastor delivers a bad joke, a ten minute long anecdote about himself, then a twenty minute sermon that somehow relates to the anecdote. After the sermon, half of the congregation gathers around the foyer for light refreshments and idle gossip while their spouses and children whinge obnoxiously about going home.
While the McIntyres were clearly more strict than the Browns, they both clearly had firm restrictions of anything that could be seen as secular entertainment. This probably included any dancing that wasn’t “praise and worship” related. There is a lot of evidence that they substituted Christian versions of popular culture; a practice facilitated by any local Christian bookstore (my family’s favorite was One Way before Baptist Bookstore bought out their local outlet) which sells Christian music, books, toys, movies, and candies with bible verses printed in the wrappers (TestaMints. They were awful, but I got some every time I went there).
Thank you very much, it was very educational… also a tiny bit trippy…
Which was the trippy part? Was it the TestaMints? It’s always the TestaMints.
The really crazy thing for me was how every one of the churches I attended growing up had the same set of 10-15 worship songs to chose from. I’m sure that typing “I’m coming back to the heart of worship” is going to plant a mighty earworm in quite a few commenters’ heads.
Just… the whole thing kind of. I was raised as a Catholic in Europe so this… madness of America feels kinda bizarre to me.
And thanks to the global reach of american evangelism it’s not uncommon in Asia too…
As I mentioned above, I went to Protestant school (in South Asia). There were hymns proper and a very classical choir, which I didn’t mind very much. But this weird comic has reminded me of a dude called … Uncle John, I think, who used to show up a couple of times every year with a guitar and slideshow. We were herded into the auditorium where he told us pointless anecdotes and played slideshows and made us sing songs about how god made the rainbow etc. It was quite kooky and not quite in keeping with the serious tone of religion in my school, but Protestants in my country tend to merge into one broad coalition because there’s so few of them. And now I see some people I went to school with touring Southeast Asia as missionaries-cum-Christian-band. Uncle John, look what you did.
This sounds much like the Pentecostal church I went to as a teenager.
So, from this I’m assuming that Joyce and Becky are… Evangelicals? Is that what that particular sect is called? A more traditional service of sober spiritual learning is going to be alien for them!
AfaIk ‘Evangelicals’ isn’t so much a single sect as rather a category of sects; into which Joyce and Becky’s church would fall.
It’s worth pointing out that most US black churches are also technically Evangelical, but have almost nothing in common with Joyce’s church or the Religious Right version of white Evangelicals.
It might be because I just got out of bed 15 minutes ago, but Joyce’s hand motions in the last panel instantly made me imagine her entire church standing around with shakeweights.
[stares] What kind of insane shenanigans do Christians in America get up to?
Shimmying, as far as I can tell.
Don’t equate the behaviour of Joyce’s group with anyone else. I’m thinking more and more that ‘atypical’ summarises the religion in which she was raised.
I honestly have to say it’s been interesting to see that the kind of worship that involves christian rock and worship singing is the atypical one rather than not. I guess it’s the marketing and targeting of said marketing…
Honestly, I’m speaking from a Western European perspective; I can’t speak for how normal the whole ‘rock bands, warm-up act and dancing in the aisles’ thing is in the US as a proportion of professed Christianity as a whole.
It’s technically a minority of churches, but that’s in the sense of 35% or so as opposed to 0.35% or so. Joyce is depicted as coming from a pretty standard fundagelical* chuch, and there’s no shortage of those.
*Evangelical/fundamentalist. They’re basically the same category, although that’s not the view from inside the bubble.
With the caveat I mentioned before about a lot of black churches being Evangelical, but not fundamentalist or anything like the Religious Right versions.
Um, let’s see.
Barring liquor sales on Sundays….
… illegally leading prayers in schools….
… teaching elementary school students to bully non-Christian kids into Christianity….
… defending such bullying as religious freedom….
… Intelligent Design and Teach The Controversy We Invented…
… let’s not forget the congregation that delivered a royal beatdown on a gay member for being gay….
… er, congregations, plural….
… telling people to max out their credit cards so that the pastor could by a private jet…
… defunding, protesting, sabotaging Planned Parenthood in order to
stopincrease abortions…… lying to all and sundry about just how much of Planned Parenthood’s business is abortions…
… more acts of bombs-and-assault-rifles terrorism against Planned Parenthood than I can count…
… destroying public welfare programs that help the poor, because Jesus….
… blaming the poor for being poor, because obviously they did something wrong and this is God’s punishment…
… blaming hurricanes, 9/11, and basically everything bad under the sun on gays and atheists and liberals…
… voraciously propagating the slander that gay = pedophile…
… let’s not forget the Klan, they’re Christian…
…. um, I should probably stop here, because there’s no way I’m going to be able to provide a complete list.
Worst of all, there’s basically no decent Christian entertainment.
…Okay, Veggie Tales is pretty dope.
…And Fireflight has at least one song.
I admit, Veggie Tales was one of the few highlights of being raised in a cult.
Other than a handful of ear-wormy songs (not all of them mind, just a handful) which got me really irrationally angry whenever I heard them…yeah, Veggie Tales was alright.
What, no love for Commander Kelly and . . . I honestly don’t remember the rest of that terrible series, so nevermind! Anybody else remember the live-action anti-public-school propaganda movies?
Lots of MST and drinking game potential. That counts as entertainment, right?
On a completely different note, I live in the southern coast of Norway commonly called the Bible belt and on the subject of dancing in churches I remember an episode when I was younger that turned up in the local newspapers about a woman who had left her church after the priest had organized an event which, according to her, had turned the house of God into a satanic den of debauchery. “Which event?” you might ask. Traditional folk dancing.
Oh please oh please oh please let Jacob’s church use an incense brazier
“Is that a HOOKAH? Am I being HOTBOXED?”
If it’s a high church then it most likely would.
Yeah, but Episcopal churches that border universities often seem to shy away from high church stuff to avoid upsetting the (mainstream) Protestants. At least, in my experience they did.
Props to Jacob for having a three-piece suit in college.
Nonono. That’s not a prop, that’s a costume.
……..
*flees*
I laughed stupidly for 5 min XD
You sure have a vested interest in those jokes. Suits you right.
Reltzik continues their punishing work as a trail blazer …
Of course I’m a blazer. If I’m going to make the pun work, I have to fit in a three-piece.
Tie as I might, I’m knot able to generate a fitting roomsponse to this …
*is escorted off in linked cuffs to an undisclothed location*
Nooooo that’s not a costume, it’s holding up the roof!
Joyce is adorable hopping about like that. ^_^
As someone that was raised Catholic in South America and who has only gone to church a handful of times, I gotta say that religion in the US is… perplexing. Although I recently discovered that apparently there’s a religious, Spanish cover of The Sound of Silence that’s frequently used in mass so who am I to judge?
As someone from the States who was raised Episcopalian and has since become Agnostic: it’s pretty perplexing here too
Of course Becky know who Blowjob cat is already
Looking at the preview panels, somebody please draw a stud ent, pretty please
Why would you need a stud ent? The entwives are all long gone.
(well, I guess that wouldn’t preclude gay ents…)
Oh dear. Something tells me Joyce is going to be very disappointed by Episcopalian church.
Oh, I’m sure the company will more than make up for it.
It really depends on her definition of ‘worship’, in the end. If she doesn’t believe that it’s real without the floor show then I think that she’s approaching this with the wrong mindset.
“The floor show? We’re not ready for the floor show!”
More seriously, I think a major theme of this entire web comic is that Joyce’s entire religious experience has come from the wrong mindset.
Is it bad that only now did I realize the dress has a cleavage cut in it?_?
Not really; you didn’t notice it for the same reason as Jacob evidently has not – You’re not romantically interested in Joyce!
…bet you a packet of Arby’s sauce that is not STRICTLY true in Jacob’s case…
I’m pretty damn sure I’d notice it in real life, but I suspect I was too focused on the text while reading and swiping the comic on my smartphone. Only noticed on a laptop.
Well, it is the dress Billie picked out when they went shopping…
“Hey cut rate James Mason I was kicked out Episcopal prep school, twice.”
Sorry I couldn’t resist.
If Willis is going to base this on the Episcopalian church in downtown Bloomington (and not the campus ministry) then Joyce is in for…
A gay reverend as the rector
A woman as the associate rector
Lots of organ music and hymn singing
Yeah, from the ‘freak out’ picture that Willis has already posted on Tumblr, I guessed that this was going to be a bit of a ‘stranger in a strange land’ scenario for poor Joyce!
I think you’ve nailed the location. Trinity Episcopal Church is indeed on the other side of the campus from Read Hall, but not nearly as far as Blowjob Cat. Also, we can rule out the campus ministry because they only have a 4:00 PM service.
It’s almost certain they’re not going to the early Holy Eucharist Rite I, “a quiet service with no music,” since that takes place a little before sunrise in mid-October, when this storyline is set.
So it’s almost certain they are heading for 9:00 AM Holy Eucharist Rite II. From the church’s website: “A festive service that includes rich musical offerings by the Trinity Choir and our fabulous organist…this service includes Holy Eucharist, readings, and a sermon, as well as Children’s Chapel.”
In the land of fiction, churchgoers get to bounce around and shimmy with impunity.
Meanwhile, in the real world, I’ve stumbled across r/Incels. For anyone not In The Know, “incel” is short for “involuntarily celibate”. Every single unironic user of this subreddit is a complete waste of human particles, and deserves to die the way they live – alone, bitter and unloved. They’re fucking disgusting, and I wish I’d never learned of them.
I feel unclean…
No. You know what’s fucking unclean!? These pathetic, foul-tempered, self-pitying pieces of shit calling themselves “incels”! All they fucking do all day is sit around crying into each other’s assholes about how fucking horrible they think women are for not wanting to fuck them.
Here’s a fucking thought, dumbasses. Stop calling women whores, sluts, congas, bongoes, and animals, if you don’t want them to think you’re a repulsive ball of slime. Stop demeaning every single woman who’s ever so much as kissed a guy when she was 12, treating them like they’re impure sinners or something. Maybe, just fucking maybe, take the 1/100000000th of a second required to realise that no, not all women are gold-digging man-haters with a million “white knight betas” flocking around them, waiting to do their bidding in the hopes of sex that never comes.
Holy fucking shit, I have never come across something that infuriates me this fucking much. And I’ve lived with a registered fucking pedophile! I want to message every single one of this shitbags personally, and tell them all how fucking stupid and self-centered they all are. The problem is, they intentionally surround themselves with thousands upon thousands of their own fucking clones, all parroting the same few goddamn sentences and “thoughts” all day, every day, so the effort would be wasted. They’ve already made up their “minds”, blocking out all possibility of reason or basic logic.
I’m about to get banned from a hell of a lot of sites, motherfuckers.
I have a lot of anger, right now. Sorry if I’ve said anything upsetting.
Generally, I personally think that anger towards people feeling goddamn fucking entitled without any justification whatsoever is generally an understandable anger.
…i was gonna type a real sarcastic version of what these nutbars honestly believe, but even typing it in bolded italics feels fucking gross
tomorrow i will be buying as many trading cards as my penny collection will allow
Your anger is perfectly understandable. People being entitled about literally anything IS infuriating and particularly when it is the kind of thinking that leads to hurting people over things they don’t deserve in the first place which is yeesh, no, disgusting.
R/incel has nothing on r/TheRedPill.
I know your pain, finding out about incels and about how they didn’t think the entire concept is a fucking joke was the day laughter died in me
I first encountered one on deviantART, a few years ago. I thought he was just some sort of bitter wacko, and he disappeared before long. Then, a few months back, Kaya Orsan of The Official Podcast brought them up. It wasn’t until this morning that I learned just how far gone these scumbags are.
People say “ignorance is bliss”, but incels are living proof that the saying is bullshit. They’re ignorant as all hell, and all they ever talk about is how miserable they are.
Well, I guess the saying kind of works in that staying ignorant about the existence of incels would have been a bliss.
The way you described them reminds me a lot of the rhetoric in r/redpill, which I happened to come across accidentally some years ago. And which really managed to destroy a lot of my faith in humanity. So I guess I will fight my curiousity and not check out r/Incels, I really don’t need more of that garbage right now.
It’s all the same MRA crap.
Literally the exact same thing.
It’s always the exact same fucking thing.
Why can’t any of these dumbasses have a reasonable fucking thought, for once in their miserable lives?
It’s exactly like all the “Liberals are evil commie atheists” windmill crusading, except laser focused into the superficially-reasonable question “Why don’t I have a girlfriend?”.
I’ll give away the secret right fuckin’ now: They don’t have girlfriends because they’re angry little gremlins with no ability to comprehend reason.
If there’s a “they read X so I don’t have to” award, I’d give it to We Hunted The Mammoth. The site does a good job of finding these idjits and dissecting their crap. And it doesn’t start from the pablum of “both sides” like that most mainsteam press.
It isn’t a site to read every day (blood.pressure), but more than.once in a while,.and kick a little dineros to.
You lived with a registered paedophile? I’m sorry to pry but I’m curious as to how that came about
It’s a bit of a complicated story. It involves (and I promise none of these descriptions are made up) a one-eyed man, a radio DJ, a witch with a metal leg, and welfare fraud. One of these days, I might share it all here.
Sounds like something David Lynch would come up with
Being the autistic son of a crazy witch makes for better stories than Lynch could ever dream up.
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
I wonder if there will be a story line built around Joyce going to Jacob’s church, finding it too dull/boring, and Joyce either returning to the other church, or realizing that there is no place for her in organized religion… Fundamentalist churches are exciting but bigoted, Episcopalian churches are open but dull.
So what you’re saying is Joyce should found her own church with shimmying and acceptance? Like Bender?
The word you’re looking for is “vicar.”
No, it has to be grocer.
It’s green.
Niiiiiiiiice!
Between Joyce’s hand motions, and the discussions about different churches and their respective approaches to song and music (both in the strip and in the comments), there is only one song that will work as a soundtrack today:
STRIPPER VICAR
(P.S. For those of you who didn’t like how things transpired in the story of the song, they made another song called “Dark Mavis” which had a happier ending to it; with the vicar’s congregation being perfectly fine with the whole thing.)
if DOA were an anime, Joyce would see Jacob quietly walk over to three similarly-garbed gents, and something like this would follow.
Cool.
Oh, hey, apparently the GOP has ANOTHER ACA replacement bill (v3, somehow even worse than v2, because clearly the thing’s problem was that it didn’t kill enough people) and there’s LESS people complaining about it, so those among you that aren’t already might want to get on that. Also, tell your friends.
Also, vote come 2018 (provided we don’t nuclear holocaust’d before then – thanks for that fear on top of my pile of neuroses, btw), you fuckers.
Call your Senators. Again. Even if they’re lost causes or already on the right side. Senators talk. Call volume matters.
I’m concerned their game plan was to lull people into a false sense of security (“Oh these bills keep failing, we don’t need to worry,”) plus the fact that people probably get less and less gung-ho about calling the more they have to do it, and it looks like that very well might be happening. :[
Please guys, for the sake of those of us with chronic illnesses, call your Senators! Keep calling. For many of us with chronic health problems/disabilities, our ability to live productive, happy lives as contributing members of society depends on our health insurance not barring preexisting conditions (and for many others, it literally means the difference between life and death).
It’s absurd really. I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (a genetic collagen production disorder). Because I have health insurance, I can work, I can take care of my child, I can live my life. If I were unable to pay for the medications and doctor appointments (which can often cost hundreds to thousands in the course of a year, or hundreds of thousands if I need surgery) I’d be bedridden, probably need to go on disability, and be a “drain on society” in the ironic words of the people who tend to oppose good healthcare. They don’t want the government to have to pay for our care, yet don’t want us to be able to get fair, quality insurance so we can work either? I guess they just want us…dead? I don’t know.
Never attribute to conspiracy what stupidity will do. The failure of the bill is the fact Republicans don’t agree on it and still can’t because the difference in ideology is real.
I have a different theory, that I won’t mention right now in case I’m wrong and I jinx it. I might say it after this one goes to vote and hopefully fails to pass. When is that, anyway?
Regardless, an offering of hugs!
“False sense of security” MIGHT be a decent tactic to attempt… but the GOP isn’t nearly coordinated enough to pull it off.
Yep, call your senators (emphasis on YOURS – senators outside your jurisdiction are not going to care, you don’t vote for them) and your governors because a lot of senators are asking governors for input!
And tell your friends to call and have them tell their friends to call and so on and so on.
The first thing I thought of after reading this was the people singing and dancing and doing backflips in the church scene in The Blues Brothers movie.
And yes, I know others have already made the same references, but I don’t care, I still thought of it before I read the comments.
I also like how Blowjob Cat is a common reference and/or navigation point.
I feel like this comic is giving me a fascinating tl;dr education on different church atmospheres. My family is midwestern (Minnesota) Lutheran and southern…protestant I think? I’m honestly not entirely sure because while my parents *briefly* tried the church thing to appease THEIR parents, they’re new age into-astrology hippies so it didn’t last.
All I remember from the few times I went to church as a kid when my parents were trying to make it A Thing (as well as the occasional religious weddings & baptisms I’ve been too since), was that it was a quiet, boring, somber experience. There may have been some traditional singing at some point by the church choir? But definitely no dancing.
I’ve heard some people would draw or read or even play (quiet) handheld games in church but this was DEFINITELY not allowed when we went. I’m an artist, and would’ve found it much more tolerable if I could’ve at least doodled in my sketchbook, but no. As someone said above, it was enough to quickly turn me and my brother off church forever.
Is that CLEAVAGE I see on Joyce? Oy vey!
I’ve only been in Catholic and Episcopal churches, so I think Joyce is the weird one.
And now I’m trying to imagine the vicar from ‘Dad’s Army’ hopping & shimmying while yelling about the devil into a microphone.
8‑0