Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Shaderunners
Alex Assan, Lin Darrow
A ragtag band of bootleggers open a speakeasy for bottled colour in the greyscale city of Ironwell.
No End
Erli, Kromi
A queer romance about people attempting to build lives in a cold, post-apocalyptic world ravaged by hordes of undead.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
All Known Alternatives
Karolina 'Kajotko' Jankiewicz
Akane has only one way to get back home: collect the 42 keys to parallel worlds. Eri and Ben are just trying to get through the summer before university. When a magical key turns up in an old spare set, all three are forced to change their plans and fast.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
Hemlock
Josceline Fenton
A witch accidentally marries a monster, and now she and her familiar has to navigate life around her monstrous husband and her even more terrifying in-laws.
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The whole thing is just like the eponymous DoA strip: Joyce typing away at LITERATURE on her laptop, with various degrees of blushing and every euphemism she can think of scrolling by in a bubble. It turns out to be the first ever SFW Slipshine, at least until she sends the draft to Amber for advice.
I initially misread that as “SJW Slipshine”. I think Willis has that censored, so yeah, swap the F for a J. Mostly I just want to see if it’s still censored, and what the replacement was.
The thing is, I suspect that was the root of Joyce’s teachings. ‘People are at their heart terrible and only God’s rules make them good’ is an actual doctrine. That’s part of why religious people sometimes assume atheists are terrible people – they can’t imagine NOT needing those rules to still be moral. (We saw this all play out with Dorothy way back.)
And Joyce’s ‘we’ could also refer to her church – up until Becky, Joyce was complicit in homophobic bullshit and she’s still realizing what she grew up in was garbage.
Either way, Joyce is definitely in crisis and responding as someone in crisis, not as someone whose experience with faith or lack thereof is at all healthy. (She cannot go back to where she was before, whether she emerges Christian or not. Her faith will naturally be different.) As I’ve said I find her and Willis’s experience with religious anxiety intensely relatable, and I discovered I couldn’t healthily divorce the anxiety from the religion. There was nothing under it to rebuild from. Joyce has a chance, but I suspect given she’s autobiographical to Willis that it may end up less like Becky’s and more like that.
Hello! Not always on the nocturnal schedule these days but man I relate to this recent run of strips.
(Also, someone please convince Billie she’s not doing great before she has another humongous destructive accident. Reach into the comic and get through to her, that’s how that works right.)
Avitar Jailed After Running Amuck in Indiana. – The suspect was apprehended after beating an elderly gentleman with his walking stick and accosting a freshman on a nearby collage campus. “They were talking and words were coming out of their mouth, but they just weren’t saying anything that made any sense, whatsoever” said Jennifer Billingsly. “I’m not sure, but they may have also been responsible for kidnapping my friend’s parents and replacing them with aliens.”
“I couldn’t healthily divorce the anxiety from the religion“
that’s phrased well. i can relate.
but hey! i realized that i ALSO have some anxiety that stayed anyway even after i gave up on religion! so… you can’t have the religion without the anxiety, but you can have the anxiety without the religion? maybe that’s not helpful advice … but i do get what you mean. if religion makes your life harder, it sucks. Religion is good if it helps you in your life, not if it makes you anxious or dogmatic.
I mean I was prone to anxiety already, but mine these days tends to be related to other reasons why I am clearly terrible because anxiety disorders are assholes. But it did break a lot of my more obsessive thought cycles and that’s an improvement for sure.
“Humans are innately evil and only god can make them good” philosophy is called Puritanism and is the foundation for about most american Christianity. Catholics also thought this to some degree back in the day but it was more for getting taxes out of the people in the form of “buying” your way into heaven.
I think there is some value in accepting that everybody is, to an extent, flawed. It keeps you from developing unrealistic expectations, and makes it easier to forgive those who inevitably fail. I think the problem comes in when people twist it to mean “everybody is flawed, *especially* those other heathens.”
There’s a church down the street from me with the most depressing messages out on its board. Stuff that boils down to “You’re going to Hell by default.” If I was considering Christianity, it would definitely be the last place I’d start.
Yup… bad marketing.
I mean, apparently this marketing WORKS, but a thinking person might start to wonder: is that the best thing you have to advertise with? aren’t there better things about faith that could be a reason to look for it?
My feeling is that this marketing only works on people already buying into the basic premise already. Keeps the faithful in line, might even bring in Christians from other denominations, but won’t work to bring in new converts who aren’t already worried about sin and hell.
Like the Chick tracts are little more than offensive jokes seen from outside, but from inside they’re so obviously persuasive.
Hah, reminds me of what Canadians have for decades been calling “American-style politics” (in a tone of disapproval, and usually in the context of denigrating a politician’s attack ads or what). Means attacking the other guys’ character, rather than debating their position or offering a better alternative. Less “This is why I’m the better choice,” and more “This is why he is just awful, you guys.”
You know, mud-slinging. And it doesn’t work for people who are looking for something to turn to, rather than something to turn from.
This premise is a heresy introduced by Augustine of Hippo. Were it not for the Emporer seeing it as a tool for controlling the masses it would never have made it into Christianity, as most Church leaders at the time rejected Augustine as an unrepentent heretic and reprobate.
Likewise, albeit to a lesser degree. I handily resolved the “God made bad things” argument by becoming pagan. A quick read through Greek mythology shows the gods doing all sorts of mean, stupid, random shit. It seemed a better fit for the real world that Christianity, and I still found the idea that the random awfulness had a source to be a comfort. Plus, since most pagan gods are personifications of scientific events, there wasn’t any dissonance between science and religion. An additional dollop of Humanism also helped.
I mean, a read through the old testament also shows a god doing all sorts of mean, stupid, random shit; except taking it all up to 12*.
But yeah, at least the Greek gods are all “Yeah, we’re basically what humans wish they could be, end of story.” and not pretending that they particularly love humans** while doing all the mean shit.
I remember when I had my crisis of faith… I culminated in me having a miraculous 180 turn around in my depression therapy. My parents had me going to a pastor as a therapist, and he wasn’t too pleased to hear the reason I was getting better and was happy in my life was that I figured out that god wasn’t real. lol.
When I switched churches upon moving to college, communion was a giant hunk of bread dipped in juice, instead of those tasteless wafers with wine. I never felt anything from those tiny little discs. My new pastor said “Jesus shouldn’t taste like cardboard” and I heartily agree
That bit always struck me as something a trip to a hospital to use some imaging system could prove/disprove. I’m honestly surprised I’ve never heard anyone else even consider trying this.
The communion takes on the substance of Jesus’s body and blood, but retains the appearance of bread and wine (or crackers and grape juice or whatever). It could do so when examined through some medical imaging system as well, just as it does when you taste it. Or even if you got sick and threw it up.
It’s miracle, not science.
Or so they say. In some variation, depending on the particular theology.
Learned about that tidbit while reading the excellent Louise Penny mystery series. Chalice, tabernacle and baptism are all serious curse words. Gamache doesn’t use them but his assistant (now son-in-law) does.
When they make the wafers, they punch out discs from a large sheet of unleavened bread. What do they do with the scrap bread that remains? They sell it of course? It’s unconsecrated so there’s no theological problem. You can buy some at most corner stores, it’s sold in paper bags next to chocolate and candy.
Do a web search for “retailles d’hosties” to see what I’m talking about.
Fun fact: church attendance went down a lot in Quebec in the past decades, so the demand for scrap hosts far outpaces the demand for actual hosts. So bakeries are responding by making fake scrap hosts. They just bake sheets of unleavened bread, break it into pieces and sell that.
In Mexico you can get candy made from the same stuff, only colored. They are made into big disks with honey and sesame seeds, then folded in half. They sell them on the streets and are delicious. my favorites are the purple ones even if they all taste the same.
Also, since I literally confessed to my spouse about never having actually heard God’s voice earlier today, the timing on the last panel is amazing. (Though I can’t deny these last couple strips might’ve helped me decide to say something. That and the whole “leaving a cult” thing, lol)
Sorry, just saw this. He was pretty chill about it, we talked a bit… I still want to talk about it again sometime after I’ve gathered my thoughts a lot better, but still. He’s a good one.
The hand brace and t-shirt came later in her life than The Sweater, so I feel like it might be reflecting different moods or strong memories or something, rather than this dialing backwards.
The shirt she’s wearing is similar to the one from “When God Closes the Door”, where she lied to her parents, stole the car, yelled at John, broke into Becky’s house, and asked Joe for advice.
I think you just hit the nail on the head. Everything she is wearing has been outfits she had on when experiences challenged her preconceived notions.
The sweater. The lying outfit. I think one of them was the shirt (minus hoodie) she wore when she and her mom fought after Toedad attacked.
I think she’s metaphorically trying to search for when her faith was whole (going back through different versions of herself) and realizing that her faith has been crumbling longer than she thought.
The one thing about the idea she’s regressing that, um, sort of icks me out, is that while it’s quite credible that’s an outfit she wore when she was much younger, she’s also, um, definitely past puberty in those last panels.
So the idea that she’s regressing by imagining what she wore when she went to kindergarten kinda creeps me out.
Then again, I suppose it’s a plausible costume for a fourteen year-old from my era.
(What are the chances?)
Hear that voice in your heart for the answers…
And when you feel afraid (love one another)
And you’ve lost your way (love one another)
And you’re all alone (love one another)
And you’re far from home (love one another)…
And wqhile I doubt that Joyce will ever change that much (without requiring everybody undergoes Dexter & Monkey Master style brainwipes), I’m keeping Patti Smith’s ” Gloria (in excelsis deo)” on standby.
I feel Joyce a lot in this strip, even as someone who isn’t super religious. And it hurts more because she looks like she’s wearing something she’d have worn as a kid.
I can, but I was wondering why jmsr7 repeated what I said. On Reddit if your comment is hidden you can’t tell, but other people might repeat what you said.
Yeah, i do that. I want to make it clear what i’m responding to; because the formatting of these comments means that it can be confusing to hunt down original remarks if more than one person comments.
The only thing the overalls bring to mind for me is her regressing to some sort of childlike state but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. I can’t recall her wearing them, but maybe she wore them when something dramatic happened.
Actually I kinda think that’s what’s going on. She’s probably been cycling backwards through outfits she’s worn in the past, with the overalls being maybe something she wore as a kid. “Or maybe I never did” makes me think the outfit is supposed to help convey how’s she’s re-examining the nature of her faith all the way back to her childhood.
The chronology hasn’t been totally direct. Like she wore her wrist brace outfit from punching Becky’s dad after her orange sweater from when gash-face attacked her. But I think in general they’re all from emotionally significant moments.
She’s been changing her clothes a lot in this dream. Yesterday’s comic and the comic before that had her wearing the yellow sweater she wore at the infamous party.
OK, but the wrist brace and the orange sweater have known significance to her. Presumably these overalls mean something too, but I don’t know what (though see suggestions above re childhood beliefs).
. . . OH lord this is hitting hard. Like. . my parents are/were rather religious. They forced me through sunday school and spanked me when I complained and embarrassed them in front of the parish, I think I was 8 at the time, and around the time of middle school I was well aware that I had NO faith in me regarding god or Jesus or other what not.
Like. . . I believed that there was SOME greater purpose out there but I never felt that there was anything or anyone listening. Or if they were listening then they were not worthy OF worship due to daring to ignore all of the desperate people praying for help and salvation and only receiving silence and punishment. Only worthy of spite and hatred.
I relate at least a bit to this series of strips here much more then I thought I would. Am I making any sense at all?
I realized this when I was nearly 10. I am not a Christian but from a very polytheistic faith] p. After looking at so many religions, I see that what really matters is kindness and not condescension. If we are “religious” and yet look down on other people, are we truly good?
This comment kinda reminds me of my own view of going to church, although my family was never so religious as to go to church every sunday.
But I think in elementary school I still believed in some higher power, though not God (or a God) per se.
Funny enough, we had lessons in religion in school (though I don’t know what it’s like in the US but over here, it was not only being taught about your own religion, but also about other types of faith and moral ideas in general – at least most of the time). There was one incident my father was called by other parents, I believe I was around 7 or 8 years old – he loves to tell me about it as I actually forgot it all, because our new religions teacher seemed to have scared most of my class with threats of us literally “going to hell” if we weren’t to behave and listen. And my father knew absolutely NOTHING of that.
So he called me from my room and asked me, with other parents on the phone: “Did your teacher tell you you’d go to hell if you’d misbehave?”
And I was like “Yeah. But I’m always good, so I’m not scared.”
Ultimately the teacher was reprimanded and changed for that (it seems she drove the threats too far over little things like talking in class – she wasn’t a good teacher), but I still laugh about the idea of me, still believing in God, being like “well, yeah, but I’m honest and always nice so I don’t need to fear the afterlife”.
My ideas and believes ultimately changed, but I’m still part of a denomination – mostly because of my parents, but I don’t follow the faith. I’m not completely atheist, as I do believe in some higher power – at least sometimes – but I don’t see any point in going to specific places to worship this kind of power. Most churches and beliefs are living too much in old ideas for my tastes.
Here is a reverse middle school revelation: I didn’t realize anyone still believed in God(s) in the sense of omnipotent beings with investment in humanity until we progressed past ancient history into modern history in my 7th grade class. It was one of the only times I was sent to the principal because the teacher thought my confusion was intentional sarcasm/disruption versus it honestly blowing my mind. I thought churches were places where people of common backgrounds read their stories in the manner of allegories/fables to keep the cultural context alive. Just another way to honor roots like food and language. I went from that to a catholic high school and finding out one of my parents is a gnostic, the other is “everyone is going to hell due to original sin”, and the rest of my family had a half a dozen religions across them. To say I was confused is an understatement.
Wow – your confusion is pretty understandable, given that background. I bet anyone would be confused.
(And honestly, that teacher kind of reacted over the top, I mean, even if a student would intentionally use sarcasm like that, just roll with it and simply explain. I mean, I’ve recently met a 14-year-old who has never seen a church from the inside, because of another religious background – well with my singing group she now has – and she also didn’t know how mass would be like etc. We joked around that she should tell us if she were to burst into flames while entering, which helped easing her into it – she was quite nervous.
So nothing surprises me with regards to missing knowledge, especially in children and with teenagers. :))
But Jesus doesn’t love us back regardless. If we don’t love him above all things he promised to send us to eternal fiery torture, in his infinite mercy.
Christianity is something of an extortion racket. “Nice soul you’ve got there. Pity if something bad should happen to it…”
So like I’m not interested in getting into a protracted debate on this (just to make my interest level clear from the start) but it’d be cool if y’all could stop completely demonizing Christianity. It’s not all good, but nothing is. It’s not all bad either, though, because that’s also not possible. On top of that it’s not some monolithic force. Different branches and outlooks within the Christian church vary wildly; it doesn’t pay to reduce.
Honestly probably beyond what we can calculate. But I’d say the same applies to what good is in it, since both good and bad are subjective and the Christian religion is too big to be parsed down to something easily agreed upon. (One person doesn’t have enough brain space to compute it all; a representative group of people wouldn’t be able to agree.)
All of political Christianity – all of it – in this country has been trying to outlaw and/or kill me and mine my entire life.
Yeah. It’s been toned down lately, where I live. But even here I’ve been assaulted on the street, I’ve been handed pamphlets calling for my own (in general, not specific) execution, I’ve had to go door to door Politely Debating why people shouldn’t vote for the latest popular initiative outlawing me or part of my existence – they started sending us out in opposite-gender pairs to make it less likely we’d be spontaneously attacked after that started happening – and when I went to Christian friends, I was yelled at for daring to try to involve them in politics.
And the playbook of political Christianity hasn’t changed one. goddamn. bit. They’ve made it multigenerational. They’ve made hating LGBT people a core of their religion, now, and they’re running the same tactics against trans people that they used to run against all of us, all the way down to the scary-black-and-white shakeycam of Those Child Molesting Faggots following little girls into bathrooms.
Are you seriously going to have the gall to ask for kid gloves for that?
To paraphrase your own book, clean up your own damn house first.
Okay. I’m responding to this and then that’s all. First, to clear a couple things up: you seem to be under the impression that I am a Christian, which I am actually not. Secondly, I am very queer myself, and the vast majority of my loved ones are as well. I am very well aware of how much danger we are in from the Christian church.
I never denied that Christianity has seen terrible things done in its name. But I will not deny that good things have been done in its name either. Maybe the latter don’t balance out or surpass the former. Maybe they do. I’m not qualified to say, and neither are you. Christianity, even modern American Christianity, has a long and varied history, and again, that’s more than any one person can sort through or any group of people can agree on.
I’m not asking you to give all Christians another chance based on what I’ve said. I’m not asking you to give any Christians a chance based on what I said. Your traumas are your own, and how you deal with them is your own. What I do ask — what I did ask, originally — was that people don’t take a complicated movement filled with all sorts of people who carry out their faith in all sorts of different ways, both now and in the past, and reduce it down to “[Implied: all] Christianity is a racket [implied: and nothing else]!”
Jess – While you are technically correct that there are all sorts of Christians, asking Dara (twice!) to moderate her opinion, after all she has suffered at the hands of Christians, is really a great example of tone policing, and thus not cool.
Even if a significant number of Christians would not physically attack her, almost all Christians are complicit – while living in a largely Christian-fundamentalist society, they don’t bother to oppose the huge number of Christians who do promote hate against LGBT+ people.
I get it that you’re not Christian. I get it that you want a more nuanced discussion. But instructing Dara in how they should communicate is not making the world a better place. Please search for “tone policing” and then think about it and then take a chill pill and then leave this discussion alone.
Assuming you’re talking about the US, we’re not really a “largely Christian-fundamentalist society” and much of the opposition to the Christian right agenda also comes from Christians.
The Religious Right is active and vocal and has managed to dominate a political party, so they have outsized influence, but they’re not all of Christianity nor are they without opposition
This is a reply to BBCC: Black evangelicals vote overwhelmingly to the left. Please stop erasing them. Right leaning Christianity in the US is almost entirely a white phenomenon.
I said the majority of US Christians, not all. Black people in the US generally vote overwhelmingly to the left, so that’s not surprising, but the majority of US Christians DO vote to the right. The smallest majority is in US Catholics, with 52%.
@BBCC
That’s somewhat misleading. The majority of US Christians vote Republican, but that’s largely driven by the extreme slant among white evangelicals who vote Republican by nearly 4:1 margins. Catholics are nearly split and mainline Protestants tend to lean Democratic.
Of course, as Eolirin hints, the same could largely be said about white people – a majority vote to the right, so white opposition to anti-LGTBQ policies isn’t helpful since whites vote for those policies anyway.
Mainline Protestants had a lower majority than Evangelicals but the majority of mainline protestants also vote to the right.
My point is that you (general you) cannot claim the majority of Christians oppose homophobic policies when they vote for politicians who forward those policies. I wouldn’t claim the majority of white people oppose homophobic and transphobic policies when they vote for people who forward them.
Boy howdy, this thread sure went some places. Anyway, I’m back but only to apologize. As BBCC and Chris Phoenix pointed out (and I thank you both) there was definitely some big tone policing in what I said last night, so. Dara especially but also uyKai and BarerMender, if you read this, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to invalidate your pain and/or perspectives and I should have thought more carefully about the ramifications of what I was saying before I posted. Going forward I will most probably stick to discussing these things with those who are willing and in a position to discuss, or at the very least I’ll be sure to consider my responses more carefully. Thanks for reading.
Jess, you are setting up a straw man argument. Dara is not saying no good has ever been done in the name of Christianity, but that they have suffered in the name of Christianity. You’re misrepresenting what Dara is saying when Dara’s anger give their experience is justified.
Furthermore, even if good has been done in the name of Christianity, so has a *lot* of evil and not grappling with that is intellectually dishonest.
Also, a given person can absolutely say whether or not good and bad things Christianity has done balance out. It’s a judgement everybody can make based on their own knowledge, experience and values. It’s not something you have to answer if you’re not interested in doing so, but it IS a question that can be answered and that answer can change over time.
Political/politicized religion as a rule sucks big time.
Political Christianism is no exception. I’m horrified by what is being sold/pushed in the name of Christ. But it’s still true that there is also more than that. Although it seems that this good only comes to fruition were no political involment at all is tolerated.
Is it though? Rev. King and the Civil Rights Movement was essentially political Christianity.
I’ll certainly agree that the current Religious Right movement is disgusting, but maybe part of the solution to that is more political activism from churches that oppose that ideology?
It might, but I think it’s also required that people stop immediately flocking to go ‘Not all Christians’ when people point out everything Christianity has done as an oppressive group.
Maybe. I think there’s room for a little nuance when the claims actually reach “all Christians”. (or all “political Christians”, whatever that actually is.)
Given the dominance of Christianity in the US, letting the Religious Right claim to speak for Christianity is not a good strategy. They want to frame the conflict as “Christians vs gays” because that implicitly sets up all Christians as being on their side, when that’s not at all true.
I fail to see the difference between flocking to whine ‘Not all Christians!’ and whining ‘Not all men!’ or ‘Not all cis people!’ – yeah, there’s always going to be some who recognize where the group they’re part of is screwy, but that doesn’t stop it from being an overarching problem.
“Not all Muslims are terrorists!” Is that also whining?
I do think it’s different though, because the “Not all Christians!” tends to break down on pretty clear sectarian lines. The point is that Christianity isn’t a group like that.
To use an example from the comic, should Jacob have to renounce his LGBTQ affirming church because Joyce’s church is toxic?
I said ‘oppressive groups’ – in the US, Muslims are marginalized. If we were dealing with an area where Muslims were privileged and were talking about homophobia and other oppressive attitudes in Muslim communities and someone interjected with that, yeah, it’d be a derail just like ‘Not all Christians’ is. As it stands though, an objection to a stereotype that marginalizes people and derailing a conversation about shitty things a group that is NOT marginalized does? Is a false equivalence.
There are sectarian differences, but there are problems that pop up across the demographic – it may not be universal but it is a widespread problem, much the way misogyny is among men (or transphobia among cis people).
Jacob doesn’t have to renounce his church, but if he were to start claiming Christianity as a demographic doesn’t have a homophobia problem, he’d be full of shit. Especially since he totally ignored that aspect of Ethan and Joyce’s relationship and called their relationship smart. Jacob isn’t a bad guy and I wouldn’t say he’s particularly homophobic (any more so than anybody raised in a heterocentric society), but he did skirt over that as a problem.
Fair enough and I certainly wouldn’t say Christianity doesn’t have a homophobia problem. But I also don’t want to reinforce the “Christians vs gays” framing, because if that’s the conflict, the LGBT community is going to lose. I want to support the churches that aren’t homophobic – the ones that welcome and ordain LGBTQ people, not attack them for being part of a larger group with an overall bad record.
Talking about oppressive groups as a demographic isn’t an attack on each individual member of those groups though. Going back to the example of men, there’s lots of different kinds of men and a lot of them are marginalized among other axes and there are men who support anti-misogynist groups, programs and measures. That said, men as a demographic DO forward and perpetuate misogyny in policy, systemic areas and in societal attitudes. Talking about that shouldn’t be taken as an attack on each every individual man (or even every individual men’s group), but every time someone pops up to say ‘Not all men!’. And, frankly, if men stop supporting anti-misogyny work because they don’t like hearing about men as a demographic doing misogynist things, I’d have to question whether their support was ever really genuine at all.
Again, I think the difference is that Christians aren’t a big homogeneous blob, even as much as “men” are. They’re a complex mess of different ideologies, not just individual Christians some of whom happen to be better than others. Different denominations have very different approaches to LGBT issues and those differences are rooted in the teachings of the various churches. For me that makes a difference.
I mostly don’t think it makes sense to talk about “Christianity” as anything coherent.
Frankly, I’ve made this argument more often from the other direction – pointing out to Christians who think Christianity requires homosexuality to be sinful that many denominations don’t actually believe that. Sometimes even with some success – more often with the “hate the sin, not the sinner” types than the more rabid bigots of course.
I disagree. Numerically speaking, I think there’s far more differences between men as a group than in Christians as a group. If for no other reason than it adds men of other faiths.
But while Christianity, like many faiths, has many different sects with many differing views on different issues, there are issues that thread their way through Christianity as a demographic. Homophobia is one of them and it’s something people should be able to talk about without Christians it doesn’t apply to trying to brush those issues under the rug because they don’t want to be reminded of said homophobic churches.
Like it or not, almost everybody on the planet is part of some larger demographic that treats less advantaged ones badly – the answer to that has to be grappling with it and doing what you can to support people from the less advantaged demographic, not denying the problem, brushing it aside, or going ‘Not all X!’
Okay. I disagree, obviously, but don’t really have anywhere else to go but to repeat what I’ve already said.
I don’t think I’m making the argument I think you think I’m making, but I don’t know how else to say it.
I’m not sure what argument you think I think you’re making (took me 15 minutes to parse that. XD) either, but I’m happy to talk about it more – this conversation’s been more productive, I think, than other disagreements that’ve happened lately.
BBCC thanks for the great points you’ve been making. I agree with your “not all xyz” comment. I hadn’t seen it like that for the simple reason that Christians as an organized group don’t have political power in my country. They’re still the biggest religious group, but aren’t in power… anymore. And yes, they used to be, so your point stands and I should have been more attuned to the realities of ‘other geographies’.
I liked Larry Niven in “Inferno,” where he had the hero actually come up with a reason why a kind and benevolent God would have s Hell or put people into it.
I was thinking about that myself. A brutal reform school is – maybe – some sort of justification for torturing people. But I don’t think it would actually work. Subjecting people to excrutiating pain next to other people experiencing the same pain seems unlikely to teach them empathy.
Well life is much easier when someone else makes all important decisions for you. Bad thing is, life usually stops working like that when you grow up. That’s when you have to start to find your own answers.
Yeah. A psychologist called Erich Fromm wrote a book caled (IIRC) “The Flight from Freedom”. He was concerned about people not wanting to make their own decisions. This was not long after the second World War, and a lot of people were seeking explanations for Hitler’s rise to power.
Thing is, if we really have Free Will, we must experience the consequences of our actions, good and bad. That can be unpleasant . . . but if God* protects us from the consequences of bad decisions, Free Will doesn’t mean very much. I can understand the appeal of wanting someone else to make the hard decisions, but that is not being a grownup.
* I do not believe in God. This argument is hypothetical.
I do, however, and I agree with your argument. It’s not only the consequences of our own bad decisions that God doesn’t protect us from, but the consequences of other people’s bad decisions as well.
People are keen to say “If God was really all good, or really cared about people, he’d have stopped that really evil thing from happening.” But I don’t think they’d like living in a world where God regularly intervened to stop people from doing things nearly as much as they want to imply.
But what of the bad things that happen without us making bad decisions? The Free Will argument doesn’t apply to those.
It’s also easily extended to imply that if bad things happen to you, it must be because of your bad decisions, even if the connection isn’t apparent. Poverty must be a consequence of personal failings. Disease is a punishment for sins. Etc. Or conversely, that good things are a reward for virtue.
thejeff: I’m not saying any of that. Bad things that happen to people are quite frequently because of something someone else did. Consequences are not necessarily just. They’re simply … consequential. And that is where free will applies: if a result of someone else’s
negative action is that you get hurt, you get hurt. Do we *want* God to stop anyone from ever doing anything wrong? I don’t think most people would.
If God is supposed to be a God of justice and he allows unjust things to happen for the sake of making one person learn their actions have consequences at another’s expense, God is no longer benevolent.
Not protecting someone from their own bad decisions is one thing. Not protecting someone else from their bad decisions is not okay. For example, if I found out my friend is cheating on their SO and could potentially bring an STI home, I’d feel morally obligated to tell their SO.
I was wondering if someone would bring this up. I deliberately didn’t mention it, but I STRONGLY feel that suffering the consequences of other peoples’ bad decisions – over which we have no control – is relevant to “the problem of evil” and totally not relevant to Free Will. I reject the “just world” concept that if bad things happen to you, you must deserve it.
My least favourite argument is when people say bad things happen to someone to teach someone else a lesson because seeing the other person suffering will drive them to do better – like, fuck you, people are not someone’s teaching aid. Especially since God is supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient – he should know that there’s plenty of individuals it won’t work for AND know how to teach that person without someone else’s help.
I think my “favorite” version of that is “Your baby died because God wanted to teach you a lesson.” I don’t know how common it is anymore, but it shows up disturbingly often in the historical record.
Bathymetheus: I think it’s both, because a lot of evil *is* brought about by other people’s choices. Which does make it part of free will. And a lot of other things that people call bad if not evil, things people say God should have stopped, are brought about by natural causes based on physics or geology or meteorology or suchlike. Which I for one would like to have keep on working reliably, ty!
God stopping evil things isn’t analogous to you telling your friend’s SO that your friend is cheating on them – and by what means are you thinking that God would do that? – because what the “why doesn’t God stop that?” argument expects is for God to prevent the evil in the first place, i.e. to stop the people involved *from* cheating. Most people, I assert, would not want to live in a world where, whenever something they were about to do was going to hurt or harm someone else, God just didn’t let them.
It’s one thing for free will to affect you. It’s another for your free will actions to hurt others. If you know one of your kids is about to fuck up another of your kid’s life and you decide to go ‘Ehh, I’ll let them, because they won’t like me if I interfere and them hurting someone else will teach them a lesson (or not, which I full know because I’m supposedly omnipotent)’, you are a shitty, shitty parent. Full stop.
I’d expect an omnipotent God would be able to find a way to let someone know their SO is cheating and prevent them from hurting them with an STI.
Granted, God and Free Will have a mixed track record at best. I distinctly recall at least one occasion God specifically made someone take a course of action because He wanted events to shake out a certain way.
“I’d expect an omnipotent God would be able to find a way to let someone know their SO is cheating and prevent them from hurting them with an STI.”
And sometimes I think he does, for that matter. Do you? Would you recognise it if it was God telling you something? How loud and unmistakable do you want his shouting to be? And to how many people do you want him to shout? That’s a lot of shouting.
‘Sometimes’ is not good enough for an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnipresent being. For that matter, an omniscient, omnipotent being should be able to deliver a message people are capable of recognizing – or at least dropping breadcrumbs for people to recognize as their SO being a two timing bastard.
“Granted, God and Free Will have a mixed track record at best. I distinctly recall at least one occasion God specifically made someone take a course of action because He wanted events to shake out a certain way.”
Could be. It’s never happened to me, and I have no way of forming a view on whatever other people might have reported.
It’s a bible story, actually. In Exodus, God tells Moses that when he asks Pharaoh to let his people go, he will harden the Pharaoh’s heart so he will refuse. Sure enough, the Bible says he is the one hardening the Pharaoh’s heart so he will refuse. He then proceeds to punish the Pharaoh for refusing.
There’s plenty of just reasoning for punishing the Pharaoh – like, the fact he holds slaves is a good enough reason on its own. But his refusal when God is the one mandating that refusal is bullshit.
Oh, I thought they were talking about two strips ago, what was her answer to Becky’s question, of “What is your problem?” But that also makes sense, and would explain her reaction better.
Especially since further questioning made it clear that she wasn’t saying it was OK, she was saying it wasn’t worse than a lot of other things that are also not OK (I seem to recall lying was the example she gave?)…
“I don’t have a problem! I’m fine! I’m normal! Don’t look at me!”
Although it is possible not all of that was said /to/ Becky and more said at everyone as Joyce was trying to escape.
If DoA!Dorothy’s DOB was fixed relative to the start of the comic, she could run in 2028. (2010 – 18 + 35) But since it’s a slowly progressing floating timeline, DoA!Dorothy would be eligible for the presidency in the 3200s.
Walkyverse!Dorothy’s DOB is fixed to real time. She could have run in 2016. (1980 + 35)
Well, one of the core christian doctrines is that everyone is always offered salvation, no matter how sinful we are, and if we do receive it is up to our choices.
That’s it. You don’t stop loving your children, no matter what they do. At least not if you’re a *good* parent. That doesn’t mean you approve uncritically of everything they do, and loving them might in fact mean you make sure the consequences of their actions actually come home to them. The point about divine love is that no good action earns it, and no bad action forfeits it.
Depends on the doctrine you’re getting, but my minister friend (I’m areligious, as in there’s-probably-something-but-fuck-organized-religion, but he’s a great friend to chat with) would say that while Jesus loves everyone, he acknowledges their sins and unless they truly reprint, will go to hell.
So, yes Jesus loves Ryan, but does not approve of him or his actions. IDK though, mileage will vary with church.
I have heard tales that that’s what parents, mentors, and other such things are for. I’ve never seen such a thing, but looking for a metaphorical unicorn might be easier than a physical one, and inevitable betrayal is easier the second time around when you’re an adult!
Seeing as it’s the outside of the court house that shows up, the image is probably not related to what she saw in a court room.
I’m betting that the view from those four arches is one of the best views of the city that La Porte has to offer. If county officials aren’t charging admission to go up in the tower, they’re missing out on a revenue-raising opportunity.
She also had that line to Ethan about homosexuality being a sin… a light sin, on the scale of lying… which she hates…
Even if she didn’t say so to Becky’s face, it must hurt to know that she was in team Toedad/Carol, no matter how shallow and briefly, but calling Becky a sinner just for who she is.
It’s hard to say. Becky’s still a Christian, and has managed to reconcile her orientation and rejection of “young Earth” dogma, so it may not be so “all or nothing” for Joyce.
From a certain point of experience: Becky held personal definitions of her self separate from her faith. Her religion was something she could hold at arm’s length and assess without realigning her view of LITERALLY THE ENTIRE WORLD.
Joyce (and I) couldn’t. When one’s definition of, well, everything is dependent on whether or not it aligns with your religion, if you find a keystone doctrine that you find to be morally wrong, well…
You have to either go fully into the faith and eschew the thing or person that is making you question that faith, or realize that the faith is Wrong. That’s when the entire building collapses.
Joyce is autobiographical for the comic’s author Willis (that could be clearer, sorry) so if she goes the same route, she’ll end up atheist.
However, for that to happen, she would have to examine the evidence for god’s existence and stop believing that he exists. She seems to be doing that here, but also there is a little examination of the doctrines of her branch of the religion going on here too. Down THAT route lies liberal christianity, other religions, woo, etc.
It all depends on what Willis shows us in the next few strips. It could go either way or even circle back (although that’s pretty damn unlikely). Wherever it goes, it has to be believable. Truth is stranger than fiction, because unlike reality, fiction HAS to make sense.
Becky never questioned whether she’d ever heard God at all.
Down this road lies asking the question “Am I being fooled this time like I got fooled before?” every time she thinks they’re encountering something divine. It entails going back over every previous experience of talking to God and working out whether (and how) it could happen without a god talking to her… or even without a god existing.
Joyce isn’t Becky. Becky has a far more flexible mind, and can abandon the parts of her religion she hates and don’t contradict her newfound knowledge TOO blatantly.
Joyce, meanwhile, lives and breathes rules. She needs a fixed system. She needs a God that is consistent and makes sense and is perfect, or no God at all. A God that works in SOME ways but not in others doesn’t fit Joyce’s mindset, and she can’t let it go, no more than she can comfortably consume a pizza with five different toppings.
As an atheist I find that possibility fascinating!
It would explain why she doesn’t feel a powerful psychic entity answering her attempts at telepathy: if there isn’t one.
But her beliefs and hopes and ideals for people living their lives and being kind to each other can still stand. There are plenty of believers in her life who are not overflowing with kindness, after all. And some of the nonbelievers are rather nice.
However she ends up, I can’t help thinking how intensely personal this storyline must be for Willis.
Joyce has invested a large part of herself in her faith, and… the loss of faith means the loss of the known self. A person can spend years grieving if they don’t have someone around them who understands. And Dorothy won’t. Becky might understand some of it, at least by analogy.
k question- when people refer to “hearing God’s voice” do they mean like an actual literal voice or is that a metaphor for thoughts and reflection that they attribute to god?
Usually the latter I think? But sometimes carried to the point where the individual is like “there’s no way I would have thought that on my own. God put that into my head directly.”
Sometimes you will get people purporting to be prophets who say the former, though.
Sometimes it is the former, but it is usually the latter, the belief that God will have guided them to the right direction, answer, etc. It also can just be an overwhelming feeling of a presence that does or doesn’t direct you in any particular way.
It’s going to be a pretty personal experience, I guess.
What Matsuo said. You see this referenced in even non-Christian literature. Stephen King called it “the subaudible” in “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” for example, and he’s not even a professing Christian. Spend enough time in Evangelical, Charismatic, Messianic Jewish, and “charismatic” Catholic circles, and you’ll hear story after story of people just randomly doing exactly what someone needed (e.g., someone who needed $500 to avoid eviction having a stranger hand them $500 out of the blue) and of people moved to do those actions (“I just knew that I had to write this person a check for this amount” or “I felt a leading of the Spirit”). I’ve personally experienced it on both ends, and my wife even moreso.
Joyce is in the hard place that a lot of us remember at that age. The transition from simply holding onto our parents’ faith to a mature faith of our own always involves wrestling with God, ala Jacob. Some retreat from that into a vapid religiosity, while others have their faith broken, but many (I won’t say most) come out of it stronger. I hope that’s Joyce’s journey.
But thanks for all the thoughtful responses everyone. I’ve never been a religious person so I never knew if people were hearing like actual voices (please see a doctor maybe) or what.
Kinda like asking if “green” means the same thing to everyone. If one is dealing with a mystical experience (been there), then they are by definition ineffable. (Ineffability is concerned with ideas that cannot be expressed in spoken words. )
But some people “take things to Jesus” because they know it’ll confirm the result they have already arrived at. Sheer authoritarianism.
Like most Christian (or religious) matters, the range is so wide that conversation is difficult. Many groups wander down rabbit holes (transubstantiation/ born again / antinomialism / just make up words) that they double down on until there’s no way back. Caring for others is six decisions back and out of view.
Mullins is offering a path here. People are broken and they hurt other people. Joyce hurt Becky. Joyce can also help save Becky. Loving unconditionally is basically not possible for people, but we can try. That can involve religion (even organized religion), or it works without it. YMMV, or more likely definitely will.
He was in the camp of ‘what Mr. MacIntyre did was unacceptable of course, BUT…’ with most of the congregation, I believe. Visibly uncomfortable Becky showed up all visibly queer, too.
Also their complete refusal to acknowledge Becky’s existence, say her name or look her in the eye… the week after her father hunted her with a gun… was not super great.
About a year ago I had some LDS missionaries come to my door. I chatted with them a bit and, of course, they challenged me to see all the good things in the world that God was responsible for (keep in mind I’m an atheist-leaning agnostic, so don’t take this as a fundamentalist message from me). Thinking about my recent mistakes in life, I decided to be open-minded and have some faith in a higher power. I hadn’t prayed to God in like a decade, so with my hands clasped together and my elbows propped up on the bed, I asked to see a remarkable coincidence in the next 24 hours. Nothing one-in-a-million, but rather something I would only see once every…ten years. Something that only God could do, but also something he was capable of doing on short notice.
The next day: I was on the first day of my internship, and the manager announced that we would get a first-hand view of asphalt paving on a patch of the company parking lot. We would see how the process unfolded before we would go out into the field (the real deal), and the manager remarked with a smile, “It almost didn’t happen today. I’m glad the interns will have this kind of experience.”
Was it much of a coincidence? Probably not once in a decade. Was it’s God’s doing? Perhaps. It’s a simple, realistic, short-notice event. The atheist in me added that it could’ve been the alignment of several small events and decisions that would’ve happened anyway had I not been there. Had God not been there. The agnostic in me replied:
Not really.
No one KNOWS the answer, so it’s best just to believe what you find the most comfortable (providing your beliefs don’t hurt others), whether that’s a belief in a higher power of specified or unspecified origins, or in no higher power whatsoever, or anything else that’s more complicated than what I can explain in this overly long sentence.
Most people only find out the answer when they die, assuming there’s any part of them that can be aware of an afterlife.
I always kinda liked the idea from the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony, where basically every belief was applicable to those it applied to, including atheism.
Not enough to override my personal beliefs, but I’d prefer “everyone is right” over “everyone else is wrong” in regards to religion.
mrnoidea said: “The agnostic in me replied: Does it matter?”
The answer, of course is “YES, it matters!” What you describe is the thought process of confirmation bias and insufficient evidence to support a position. The test you offered can, and has, been used by literally every belief system humanity has ever created to ‘prove’ their correctness. Please stop it.
I absolutely agree that this is textbook confirmation bias. But if they need to/benefit from believing in a higher power, what does it matter to us unbelievers? They’re not saying “…and this is why you should believe”, merely “I decided to have some faith”. They actually spell it out quite clearly that they know it to be a decision on their part.
As long as it doesn’t turn into “next I asked God to send me a sign that I should /harm in some version or other/ /some community or individual/ I don’t see why they couldn’t decide to “have some faith in a higher power” if that’s their thing.
I hate it when religious people try to push religion on me, I think we should extend the same courtesy of not pushing non-religion on them or anyone who’s on the fence.
I accidentally experienced a partial eclipse while standing by the Cruz de Ferro (one of the more important landmarks on the pilgrimage to Santiago in Spain) and I’m still very much an atheist. It was an experience that I would have missed If I had been half an hour earlier or later but if I accept that as a miracle laid on for my benefit then I accept that the very many atrocities that happen by a million to one chance are also directed by a higher power. If a higher power exists and is playing favourites like that then they are monsterous and I want no part in them.
God as a vending machine that you insert prayers into to purchase results you want is a common Christian trope. The Prayer of Jabez was a bestseller not long ago. Didn’t work for Jesus though. He got crucified even though he asked very sincerely not to be. Should be a sign to avoid that model, but it keeps coming back, like any cheap trope in a romcom.
Seems to me, the problem with dreams is, you don’t know what you don’t know. So, it kinda makes sense when Rich doesn’t answer Joyce’s question but rather asks her what she said to Becky.
While this dream probably wont bring new information to the table it seems like its being an effective way for Joyce to think through what she really believes. I, for one, am hoping she doesn’t decide to stop believing in the existance of God.
Me personally, for the sake of my sanity still believe that there is an afterlife, and some manner of God behind it all who set things on Earth in motion, under the rationalization that of the untold trillions of galaxies and the millions and millions of stars in the Milky Way, this one little rock three spaces from the Sun is the only one that has such complex biodervisty and a sapient species capable of even dreaming up a cosmic plan in the first place.
I just find it hard to believe that God is on a constant patrol to care about and influence every single thing that happens. To me, He will always be the distant but still kind father who leaves his grown up kids to make their mistakes, even the ones that break his heart, but still loves them all the same as long as they are willing to apologize and make amends.
I feel like that is a less likely scenario than her believing God, but that her congregation have lost the way. Rich, in life, had move to live with the Navajo and had felt there was insight he could gain from them and showed interest in the Catholic perspective, after seemingly getting fed up with white, midwestern protestants.
It does tie into Joyce’s experience, though. She left home, and since coming to college, her best friend is an atheist, and she has turned to a Jewish guy for help and insight in dealing with the huge cracks she can see in her parents’ marriage. I can see where that’d speak to her, that people who may not share her faith still have a lot to offer her that her flock could not.
I stopped believing in Church, but I never really stopped believing, or even praying to a god. Your belief system doesn’t have to be static and things can change over time, and I know mine did several times.
Maybe we all do suck but at different degrees, don’t I think it’s fairly Wampus all in with the same guy who kidnapped his own daughter at gunpoint so we can drag her off to some facility to be Electro shocked and tortured all the physically abusing her the whole ride there.
We’ve seen dichotomous thinking from Joyce before – and resists evolutionary theory so strongly because if evolution, then never the vegetarian sinless garden of eden- so everything= evil. She loses one thing and it all goes, cos it’s all one connected picture.
It’s not fair, and shades of grey are a thing, but it IS how Joyce responds to things. There’s good and bad, and if one thing doesn’t exist, then you can only be the other.
She’ll get there. Nuance is hard
I’m going to remember that little nugget of wisdom. “We are all messed up bags of stupid mistakes and past sins, but Jesus, the lovable goof, still loves us that way as long as we try to be better.
In a seriousness though, Joyce could still turn this into an actual vision from the Big Guy Upstairs. The soul of the actual Rich Mullins, or an angel taking on his image, is telling her not to let what the church says color her view of God and Jesus. He wants Joyce to choose kindness and understanding as her way to salvation, not dogma and ignorance.
I would say rather that JOYCE wants to be that sort of person, and is trying to decide whether she has the strength to do it by herself, without the support of a higher power.
Very true, and she’d be all the stronger for it. I truly belief that this world would be a much happier place if more people realized that they don’t need a higher power to make miracles happen. People have the power to make their own happiness and light, their own fortune, if they only believe in their own strength.
The real problem feels like that it’s not that she’s lost faith in the in her believes but more so that she’s lost faith in the church who are the ones who taught her most of what she believes. The lessons of Forgiveness, Humility, Truth, Faith, peace, and love is what Joyce shouldn’t turn her back on since those are the best parts about her and what the world needs more of. But where the issue comes in at is that she’s seen guys like Ryan and Ross doing horrible things in the name of the same beliefs she claims to have and since Joyce’s own family and church family seem to sympathize with Ross am not surprised that she’s left wondering if they even believe in anything they’ve taught her.
Though there is a silver lining in all of this. Joyce might have had her perception of her old church life disillusioned by the fact that the church might not be what it claims it is, But in all of her time being in college she found herself able to converse with people she never thought she would before she came there. Dorothy is an atheist if she considers the story aspect of the Bible To be hogwash mythology at best but it seems like she took enough good things from the biblical lessons o be able to call Joyce out on a few things and Jacob was able to reconfirm to her that her concern about sex wasn’t too unreasonable and explained to her why it’s best to wait for the right person. Maybe she can’t
There are people who she can trust in jeopardizing her beliefs. She just needs to look in the right places.
Yep. I just worry she’ll be too worried about seeming ‘normal’ to use all her new family and let them help her sort some of this out. She’s been having hints of this for a while now – weeks in strip. And the compounding trauma definitely seems to be getting to her.
That “what would you have said to Becky” line really hit me. My grandmother died when I was five, and I have nothing but positive memories of her. But every now and then, when I’m in a particularly bleak mood, I start to wonder what she would have said if she’d known that I grew up queer. Sometimes I think about asking my mom what she thinks, but I’ve never done it.
As someone who grew up in a society that was racist, homophobic, and sexist to the point of misogyny, I would say to you that her ability to put that aside (or not) for the love of you would have said something about her, but should in no way affect your belief in yourself.
It is easy to see that children under stress will regress to an earlier stage. I don’t consider it much of a stretch to think that adults can do the same. Whether actual psychologists accept that, I don’t know, and don’t much care.
Because when it really mattered what Joyce said to Becky was just the thing Becky desperately needed to hear. When an evil dad came to take her away she decked the mothereffer. When church and family tried to push her away Joyce pushed back. When Becky had NOTHING… she had Joyce.
Of course, that doesn’t negate the soul searching or the very valid, very heavy questions she asks now, but she can at least take comfort in the fact that when the chips were down she was a person who could do the right thing.
I think right now Joyce might be remembering the very first thing, the initial response of saying Becky “made a mistake,” and not recalling the second half of that strip.
Oh, absolutely, and all the things she said before that. Like what she said to Ethan about homosexuality being a sin, or how surprised she was that he seemed “normal” despite being gay, and who knows what Joyce thoughtlessly have said during their childhood (at the chick-fil-A demonstration for example, when they stood tall so “all the homos could see them”).
And when she said those things, she could hear God’s voice – or thought she did. Now she knows better, but God is silent. It might be that everything, everything, EV-ER-Y-THING she’s ever known, everything she’s been taught is a goddamned — a goddamned lie http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/originalsin/
So, at this point I’m not sure how Joyce will be once this is all over. Although I would hope she keeps her faith, I know her character and her experiences in this area reflect those of David. But what I’m curious about is what exactly Rich is going to do. I mean, his significance here thus far is that he is “idolized” by Joyce. So I wonder if he is going to say something (hopefully positive) to make a difference in her struggle here. And something I commented on before was that Rich also firmly believes that “feeling God” is pretty irrelevant since Christianity is built upon faith and obedience.
This is possibly TOO MUCH character development for Joyce in such a short period of time. I wouldn’t be surprised if she woke up and didn’t even remember the dream.
Yes and no, I guess. We’ve seen hints of this for a while now, like her reaction to her dad lying to her mom to cover for her, learning her parents can keep secrets from each other was pretty eye opening, or her mom making excuses for Ross. We’ve seen bits and pieces of all of this from her before, but this feels like she’s gathering up the parts and forming them together.
That said, I don’t expect her to 100 percent remember this, but she might remember enough.
Yes, we all are broken, but that shouldn’t stop use from trying every day t become better and make life better for others, even in little ways. Basically the Categorical Imperative with more empathy.
As for the narrative of this story arc, damn, Joyce is having an atheist epiphany? I didn’t expect that.
That last panel strikes at the core of why I never, ever felt 100% comfortable in my faith, and that I was always either mimicking my mom or acting for her favor. It never really felt real to me, no matter how desperately I wanted it to. None of the experiences that everyone else had seemed to apply to me. I was forever an outsider.
I think it took me so long to realize this because I’d always attributed it to my hearing loss, which is a massive divider between me and everyone else as it is. But it’s definitely something more than that. Even today I can’t relate to religious people at all.
As someone that grew up in a highly repressive, Pentecostal cult esque church, I suppose my one blessing was never being told that I needed to hear God when I prayed, lol….
Mostly because I was taught that I was an insignificant woman so it didn’t matter if I did anything but still ._x
I’m glad you now recognise that that attitude was . . . I’m gonna say “mistaken”, because it would be unpleasant to express my opinion more accurately. Well, it might be cathartic for me, probably less so for anyone reading this.
That sort of crap can have long term effects on self esteem. I hope you have good supports in your life now that can help if intrusive memories make things difficult.
Oh, I recognized it was a mistake the moment I was old enough to use my own brain actually, it annoyed pastors and sunday school teachers, nobody liked the annoying little tomboy in the back that raised a hand and asked questions you weren’t suppose to…
I suppose if anything, I was blessed with the gift of asking too many questions REALLY young When religion tried to crush me, I pushed back and broke my way out of it, hell first thing I did when I had a job and my own money was give myself a short hair cu-
Yeah but if a computer game stops being fun, you can walk away from it. Or change the difficulty settings. Or just pause for a few minutes (well, some of them).
Propel, propel, propel your watercraft
Placidly down the liquid solution,
Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically,
Existence is but a nocturnal illusion.
Wait, what did she told Becky and how bas was it ? The worst I remember Joyce ever did to Becky was not reciprocating her feeling when Becky tried to kiss her and it’s understable. What is Joyce remembering saying to Becky that make her feel she didn’t say the right thing ?
(To be less silly, It’s not about a specific line that’s been said on screen – it’s about Joyce being part of the same culture as ToeDad and Carol, and up until recently buying into their word view.)
She said that, with regards to finding out Becky was a lesbian, that everyone makes mistakes, which Becky took as Joyce calling her attraction a mistake. Joyce went back on that after realizing what she said, though, but she definitely still remembers it.
Also interesting parallel to Dina’s discussion about how one of the good things with Dinosaurs is that they are dead and unchanging. She can learn of them without them changing before her eyes.
If one can’t question their own faith, it’s barely faith at all. Reconciling the good and evil your religion has inflicted on the world is probably a necessary step for followers of all popular religions. I wasn’t raised fundamentalist. I never felt as though my faith were abused, I simply had to question some of the things I was raised believing as I got older. It must be much harder for Joyce, but I hope she finds peace, even if it isn’t in the hands of God.
As someone who’s been a fan of Joyce since Roomies, the timescale of this comic sometimes throws me. “Died before you were born? Don’t be ridiculous. He only died in… oh, right. I’m old.”
Question for you Christians or Caucasians: when you say ‘atheist’, do you mean person who does not believe in a god or gods, or person who has no religion?
I’m not a representative sample of Caucasians (or Westerners), but when I say that I am an atheist, I mean that I do not believe in any god or “mystical being” or “higher intelligence” or whatever you want to call it.
(For me, it actually comes down to the scientific method — I will go with whatever explanation for anything is currently best supported by scientific evidence; if there is none, I’ll conclude that I don’t know what’s going on. But I don’t believe in god (rather than being agnostic) in the sense that the existence of any higher being seems an extremely unlikely explanation for anything to me.)
See, when someone says they’re irreligious, it’s safely assumed they’re also atheistic or agnostic… Whereas you can be atheistic or agnostic and still be religious, since some religions don’t have a god. So shouldn’t people be saying irreligious rather than just atheist?
Yeah, I was more thinking of people who don’t see themselves as belonging to a religion, but still believe in some higher being that they could call god.
Which religions are you (Pl0x) thinking of where you do not believe in a higher being or power? I was lumping all of that sort of thing under god. But that may be reductive.
I think some versions of buddhism don’t believe in anything like a god (although some kind of do by worshipping different boddhisatvas), but some parts of buddhism are far more philosophical than they are religious.
Ah, I read further down that you are from a buddhist country, Pl0x!
I am aware that there are different streams of buddhism, but would you say I am totally wrong by comparing some of the enlightened personages in buddhism who are worshipped to the worship of a god, or, a saint?
(I honestly do not know that much about the details there.)
Of course buddhism isn’t a monotheistic religion like Christianity or Islam, but I think belief in god(s) is wider than that.
There are also sects of Judaism that are more focused along practice (as in, attending synagogue, celebrating the holidays, etc.) which have practicing atheist Jewish people.
heyo I am a person from one stream of Buddhism, and my stream of Buddhism, they say that Buddha is not to be idolized. We can be grateful to him and admire his qualities and seek to emulate his qualities, but there is nothing to give to him specifically in terms of worship.
There’s a concept called the triple gem, and people say that they “take refuge in triple gem.” And then they chant something like “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the teachings of the Buddha, and I take refuge in noble practitioners of those teachers.” But taking refuge in those things isn’t literally about the person Siddhartha Gautama, or the words he said, or the people who wear saffron robes — it’s about pursuing the qualities of each of those things for yourself, and taking refuge in your efforts and determination and focus. The faith, then, is that this system of behavior and compassion can make you a person who lives more harmoniously and happily and helpfully in their surroundings; that that can make you safe, and gives you refuge. You live on a “Dhammadeepa,” an island of wisdom, but this wisdom must be your own wisdom, not Buddha’s wisdom or anyone else’s wisdom.
So, Buddha is definitely not a god or an idol. He never told anyone who came to him that their god(s) were fake; he just gave them advice to make themselves happier, as irrelevant to the question of god as brushing your teeth twice a day.
Again, that’s specifically what I understand of Buddhism and the way I’ve been raised in it. I can’t speak much to other kinds of Buddhists; for instance, the Dalai Lama doesn’t have any particular place for me. There are SO MANY kinds of Buddhists!
I actually went to a Hindu ceremony recently (a marriage in my family is joining my Buddhist family to a Hindu family, woo), and the priest there actually said some very similar things! He was roasting the Hindu groom, asking him questions like “How many gods are there??” and the groom stammered and gave a ballpark large number, and he said “No! There is only one. Why do I say there’s only one?” and then after some confusion, the answer he gave was that all the different faces and names represented different qualities of God, qualities that good Hindu people should seek to emulate; rather than beings that Hindu people could worship so that they could ask for favors and such.
Sorry for the wall of text; I’m usually “not relevant” in threads about religion because I’ve never been directly challenged to be part of a Western one, but I am spiritual and serious about it at the same time so I got excited :3
Usually the first one. My mother, for instance, no longer regularly attends a church but still identifies as Christian (or Unitarian, at times.) Still has belief, so not an atheist. I have very little belief in anything, but not the active degree of non-belief my atheist brother and father have, so I usually say I’m loosely agnostic.
Usually not believing in god but it can also mean irreligious or metaphysically materialist. Basically it’s context dependent. Yes, one could be atheist and religious a la Buddhism, or atheist while believing in ghosts, but that might come across as odd. (Especially when ‘atheist’ is a religious identity, not just a descriptor; I’d expect Buddhists to say “I’m Buddhists” not “I’m atheist, and I follow Buddhism”.)
Yeah you’re right, it is context dependent. Atheism is not really a thing in my country, since the prominent religion is Buddhism. So people say they are irreligious usually. I guess in a country dominated by Christianity it would have to be different.
I guess I see it as “person who does not believe in God” since some atheist out there consider being an atheist a religion. Even though that makes no since on the grounds of there not be any specific code or conduct they follow that comes with being an atheist.
Did you not get the 2019 Atheist TOS pamphlet in the mail, yet? You should e-mail your local post office and ask them to send you a new copy, if you haven’t already done that. There’s a lot of exciting changes, this year, even for the non-nonbeliever crowd.
I don’t think I’ve ever met an atheist who considers being an atheist a religion (though I’ve met a few who were also members of a religion), but I’ve met plenty of religious people who claimed atheism was a religion.
I wouldn’t say that atheism is a religion, but I would (and do) say that it is an assertion about the existence of one or more deities that is just as unprovable as any other assertion about the existence of one or more deities.
That’s why I prefer to call myself an agnostic. I can’t prove the non-existence of any deity any more than I can prove the non-existence of unicorn space vampires from Nibiru. But in both cases I can make reasonable assumptions about the the probability of their existence.
My take on these terms is that an atheist is certain there is no god (and some of them feel it is their duty to proselytise that belief).
And an agnostic is someone who acknowledges that we do not (and probably cannot) know whether there is a god.
I count myself in the latter group, though I am inclined to think that the existence of god is improbable. But I do not know and I am OK with not knowing.
Because I do not know, I feel no need to disrespect people who think they do know, nor do I feel any need to persuade them to adopt my lack of certainty.
“Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. And this is what I’ve come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my Savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken-hearted.”- Rich Mullins, shortly before his death
He wasn’t, unfortunately. He believed the same thing early Joyce did – that being gay is a sin but everybody sins. That’s only good if you’re grading on a curve.
That said, he did die 20 years ago. Not that there weren’t people who were already 100% of the way towards accepting LGBTQ people then, but many good people took a little longer to come around. It’s hard to say where he would come have ended up on that issue, had he lived. Speaking as a queer person who came of age in the 90’s, it’s amazing how different the world is now and how much many people’s views have changed.
Well, that’s part of the difference between him and Joyce. They started in a similar place, but Joyce had the chance to grow and change and learn. Mullins is never going to have that chance because he died, so that’s not ever going to be a point where she can relate to dream!Mullins. He may very well have had he lived, but we doesn’t know that. All we can go on is his doctrine before he died, unfortunately.
If there is some sort of afterlife, I’m curious if it’s possible for ghosts to change and if so, who has changed and how much.
Not changing would resemble anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories. That kind of afterlife would not be much of a life. More like being a museum exhibit.
I guess I’m thinking more along the lines of ‘new memories form but somehow character development doesn’t’ – which doesn’t sound like much fun either, I must admit.
I love the way in panel two, Joyce is feeling a bit self-righteous, and is standing up on in the raised altar space with the stained glass behind her temporarily solidifying into a cross – and then after Rich brings her down she literally comes down, with the cross behind her warping again.
Losing religion parallels leaving an extremist upbringing so hard.
Like it’s not ONE THING that makes you realize what you were taught is bullshit. It’s a lot of little things wholly inconsistent with how They Say the word should be. People who should be baby-eating evil actually being just normal. People getting fucked over in a way inconsistent with the worldview. So on and so forth and eventually you reach a point where you decide whether to see reality or to keep ignoring it. And that’s a really vulnerable place because every thing you used to believe in is now up for question. If THIS core belief was bullshit, what’s to say it’s not ALL bullshit? And when you’re in that space, it’s so tempting to latch on to the first thing that gives you an easy answer. Doubt is not comfortable. To someone not experienced with it, it’s terrifying. Scared people don’t tend to think we’ll or make good decisions so when someone comes along who knows how to exploit it, bad things happen.
I think that’s why Trump is so popular. He gave people a way to “see reality” inconsistent with the American bootstraps capitalism ideology without changing their beliefs (which is as Joyce exemplifies, difficult and painful) by giving them a scapegoat. If not for those scapegoats, the system would work. Or so Trump says. And the converts to his cult of personality follow him with the fervor of a true believer.
I don’t know where Joyce ends up from here, but where I ended up was much better. But I had to learn to be comfortable with doubt. And I imagine that’s going to be even harder for someone like Joyce who was brought up to view doubt as literally Satan.
Fundamentalist religions appeal to people who like certainty. That’s a generalisation, but in my experience it’s mostly true. The corollary is that they don’t like ambiguity. Science is inherently uncertain, because it always acknowledges the possibility that what we think we know might be wrong, and if new evidence appears that contradicts what we have believed, it is necessary (after appropriate verification) to change our beliefs.
That is disconcerting to a lot of people. Some faiths, and some members of faiths, accept that continuous questioning is a valid way to believe . . . but a lot don’t.
Fudge me this is a day for it for me, isn’t it? :/ *sigh*
I JUST came to the realization that I’m going to have to accept my past for what is was and move on, but the only way I can ever hope to do that is to cut out the toxic manipulation of my mother & sister. It breaks my heart, because I wanted to grow and prosper together with them, but with they way they are…or rather have always been, I’ve had to accept that I can’t take them with me if I want to get better.
I get where Joyce is coming from: the desire to not have anyone hurt and having someone to turn to for answers, yet at the same time, I do know the sad reality that that’s not always going to happen, even with God. I’ve learned to have faith in what God blessed me with to do what’s best in myself and whether he answers me or not isn’t as important as what I decide to do next. I know where Joyce is right now, I just hope she makes the best choice for herself. Good luck, honey & no matter what, it’s gonna be ok because only you’ll know what’s best for yourself.
This is unrelated but I recently had an existentially terrifying thought. I’ve been reading this comic since I was 13, I’m turning 19 in a couple months. Next year, I’ll be older than most of the main cast, who I pretty much spent my entire teens with.
Ik most people here are older than me so this probably sounds stupid but idk, it’s big to me
I had similar issues with Kitty Pryde of the X-Men. Started reading when i was 13 as she joined the X-Men at the same age. Nowadays she’s weirdly classed as being early-to-mid twenties (and occasionally still a teenager) and i am much much older.
I don’t believe in god, that being said I envy dogmatic people
To know that there is someone always looking out for you that wants nothing more but for you to be happy and live a fulfilling life, to have a set of rules that will guarantee that you’re happy no matter what and if you fail one of those rules it doesn’t matter, he’ll still love you, even more than before because you failed and are willing to try again stronger than before.
I wish I could believe such a thing…
With all my heart, I wish I could latch onto those beliefs and feelings as easily as dogmatic people do, I mourn the day I lost god…
That being said, it’s not as if I’m unhappy or “need” something like that, it just made things so much easier to pray my anxieties away when I was a little kid.
Too bad I can’t for the life of me return to that blissful state.
I knew a religious guy who tried to make everyone go along with his stupid ideas and insane ramblings by claiming he heard the voice of god telling him to do those things. I told him “that’s called ‘thinking,’ and you need to filter your bad ideas.”
thinks “Wait, that can’t be right. I remember when that happened. How could Joyce be a college student born after…” checks Rich Mullins’ death date “… 1997.”
I don’t usually comment here because y’all scare me to death, but I really want to say that – as a devout Christian, but trying not to be an asshole – Willis is one of the best (justifiably) pissed-off ex-evangelicals I follow at making compassionate, nuanced observations about the culture and its effects on real human beings.
This community is the most compassionate online group I know of.
There is a lot of anger toward the injustices of this world (which are legion), but only occasionally is this directed at other commenters. Mr. Willis takes the task of moderating very seriously, and does not tolerate abuse.
I think Rich Mullins is a great choice here in the storyline. He was widely accepted and listened to in evangelical circles, but wasn’t much of an evangelical himself. He criticized the Religious Right pretty heavily.
My favorite Rich Mullins quote:
“Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.”
And, as always, I love reading Joyce’s struggles with religion because they’re so relatable for me. Homeschooled, evangelical family, culture shock, religious doubts, etc.
I had to leave the religion I grew up in, and I just- yeah. That exactly, that is exactly the experience. You have to recontextualize your entire life and realize how much of it you were just feeling the things you thought you were supposed to feel and giving them the meaning you had been told they were supposed to have. And now you don’t know what you’re doing.
Sometimes I want it to have been true, because it would hurt less that way. But it wasn’t, and it doesn’t work like that, and now we get to cope.
I love how she changes back to her overalls in the second last panel to show that her old self is questioning her experiences and her upbringing. This is the Joyce who was raised in church and conservative home trying to find if her feeling when she was young were valid or if they were “Manufactured”. Something we all deal with.
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nothing that moment when the seeds of atheism sprout
nothing LIKE
YAY past me proofreading
(so we’re totes voting for Rich Mullins Patreon bonus comic??)
but he looks creeeepy.
and we still haven’t gotten the gas station one
Can do.
I’m voting for Julia Gray, ace Space Force pilot.
Nah, that’s for Slipshine. It could be called “I’m Glad We Waited” (or alternately “Five Years Later”)
The whole thing is just like the eponymous DoA strip: Joyce typing away at LITERATURE on her laptop, with various degrees of blushing and every euphemism she can think of scrolling by in a bubble. It turns out to be the first ever SFW Slipshine, at least until she sends the draft to Amber for advice.
I initially misread that as “SJW Slipshine”. I think Willis has that censored, so yeah, swap the F for a J. Mostly I just want to see if it’s still censored, and what the replacement was.
IIRC, “glistening phallus”. It’s been gone for awhile, sadly.
Anything that starts with the premise we are all somehow “terrible” should be discarded as bullshit.
The thing is, I suspect that was the root of Joyce’s teachings. ‘People are at their heart terrible and only God’s rules make them good’ is an actual doctrine. That’s part of why religious people sometimes assume atheists are terrible people – they can’t imagine NOT needing those rules to still be moral. (We saw this all play out with Dorothy way back.)
And Joyce’s ‘we’ could also refer to her church – up until Becky, Joyce was complicit in homophobic bullshit and she’s still realizing what she grew up in was garbage.
Either way, Joyce is definitely in crisis and responding as someone in crisis, not as someone whose experience with faith or lack thereof is at all healthy. (She cannot go back to where she was before, whether she emerges Christian or not. Her faith will naturally be different.) As I’ve said I find her and Willis’s experience with religious anxiety intensely relatable, and I discovered I couldn’t healthily divorce the anxiety from the religion. There was nothing under it to rebuild from. Joyce has a chance, but I suspect given she’s autobiographical to Willis that it may end up less like Becky’s and more like that.
Saw downthread you probably agree with all that. Either way. Joyce leaving the fundamentalist ways will hopefully be good for her in the end.
Regalli! <3
Hello! Not always on the nocturnal schedule these days but man I relate to this recent run of strips.
(Also, someone please convince Billie she’s not doing great before she has another humongous destructive accident. Reach into the comic and get through to her, that’s how that works right.)
I’ll add it to the list of things I want to do when I invent a way to enter fictional universe.
Right after I, bare minimum, chew out the Walkertons and make them take parenting and diversity classes, and take Clint’s cane and whack him with it.
Avitar Jailed After Running Amuck in Indiana. – The suspect was apprehended after beating an elderly gentleman with his walking stick and accosting a freshman on a nearby collage campus. “They were talking and words were coming out of their mouth, but they just weren’t saying anything that made any sense, whatsoever” said Jennifer Billingsly. “I’m not sure, but they may have also been responsible for kidnapping my friend’s parents and replacing them with aliens.”
“Much nicer aliens, admittedly. Everyone’s happy with the change.”
Well I’m not going to STAY after I do that.
I’d have a ‘get me out of here’ button.
Besides, my plan is to make the Walkertons take classes that will ideally make them less of shitheads, not replace them with aliens.
That’s not a bad plan B though…
I belive the term for that is Shelailiegh Law.
What can I say? I’m from an Irish Canadian family.
“I couldn’t healthily divorce the anxiety from the religion“
that’s phrased well. i can relate.
but hey! i realized that i ALSO have some anxiety that stayed anyway even after i gave up on religion! so… you can’t have the religion without the anxiety, but you can have the anxiety without the religion? maybe that’s not helpful advice
… but i do get what you mean. if religion makes your life harder, it sucks. Religion is good if it helps you in your life, not if it makes you anxious or dogmatic.
I mean I was prone to anxiety already, but mine these days tends to be related to other reasons why I am clearly terrible because anxiety disorders are assholes. But it did break a lot of my more obsessive thought cycles and that’s an improvement for sure.
“Humans are innately evil and only god can make them good” philosophy is called Puritanism and is the foundation for about most american Christianity. Catholics also thought this to some degree back in the day but it was more for getting taxes out of the people in the form of “buying” your way into heaven.
I think there is some value in accepting that everybody is, to an extent, flawed. It keeps you from developing unrealistic expectations, and makes it easier to forgive those who inevitably fail. I think the problem comes in when people twist it to mean “everybody is flawed, *especially* those other heathens.”
There’s a church down the street from me with the most depressing messages out on its board. Stuff that boils down to “You’re going to Hell by default.” If I was considering Christianity, it would definitely be the last place I’d start.
Yup… bad marketing.
I mean, apparently this marketing WORKS, but a thinking person might start to wonder: is that the best thing you have to advertise with? aren’t there better things about faith that could be a reason to look for it?
My feeling is that this marketing only works on people already buying into the basic premise already. Keeps the faithful in line, might even bring in Christians from other denominations, but won’t work to bring in new converts who aren’t already worried about sin and hell.
Like the Chick tracts are little more than offensive jokes seen from outside, but from inside they’re so obviously persuasive.
Hah, reminds me of what Canadians have for decades been calling “American-style politics” (in a tone of disapproval, and usually in the context of denigrating a politician’s attack ads or what). Means attacking the other guys’ character, rather than debating their position or offering a better alternative. Less “This is why I’m the better choice,” and more “This is why he is just awful, you guys.”
You know, mud-slinging. And it doesn’t work for people who are looking for something to turn to, rather than something to turn from.
After a big snow storm one near my place put “ok, who prayed for snow?” On the board, was fun
This premise is a heresy introduced by Augustine of Hippo. Were it not for the Emporer seeing it as a tool for controlling the masses it would never have made it into Christianity, as most Church leaders at the time rejected Augustine as an unrepentent heretic and reprobate.
If you’re looking for the seeds of — if not atheism, at least doubt — I’d go with this:
If humanity isn’t the cause of sin and pain and death, if it existed before us, if we didn’t unleash it, then God did.
That is one of my favorite strips; it reminds me of my own college days.
Likewise, albeit to a lesser degree. I handily resolved the “God made bad things” argument by becoming pagan. A quick read through Greek mythology shows the gods doing all sorts of mean, stupid, random shit. It seemed a better fit for the real world that Christianity, and I still found the idea that the random awfulness had a source to be a comfort. Plus, since most pagan gods are personifications of scientific events, there wasn’t any dissonance between science and religion. An additional dollop of Humanism also helped.
I mean, a read through the old testament also shows a god doing all sorts of mean, stupid, random shit; except taking it all up to 12*.
But yeah, at least the Greek gods are all “Yeah, we’re basically what humans wish they could be, end of story.” and not pretending that they particularly love humans** while doing all the mean shit.
*Because that’s higher than 11.
**Of course, they do “love” humans quite a lot…
Greek mythology is a very insightful study of human psychology.
That’s when the seeds were planted
Yes, this strip summarizes Joyce’s faith perfectly. She need’s people to be guilty and sinful to justify the evils of the world.
It’s a scary moment… i feel you Joyce… it gets better though. atheism isn’t as horrible as you fear.
At least it is not more horrible than where she was before.
I remember when I had my crisis of faith… I culminated in me having a miraculous 180 turn around in my depression therapy. My parents had me going to a pastor as a therapist, and he wasn’t too pleased to hear the reason I was getting better and was happy in my life was that I figured out that god wasn’t real. lol.
oh kiddo :(((
oof
This is getting weirder by the page
There’s only one person you can demand goodness from.
Peter Parker, naturally.
Steve Rogers, though, surely?
Miles Morales?
Fred Rogers, too.
Hail Hydra!
Aunt May.
I disagree. When others are mistreating you (or even just people around you) I do think it’d be morally right to demand better.
You can ask for goodness. You can expect it. You can demand compliance with a code of honor. But you can’t demand goodness from anyone else.
I disagree. I think you can and should.
I agree with this, with the caveat that you should also pick your battles.
Welp, I’ve lived this comic.
Same.
When this comic started, Joyce was born five years before Rich Mullins’ death.
Ahh, I was wondering how Webcomic Time played out on that.
When the comic started, she was old enough to remember the beginning of the Bush presidency. Next year, she’ll have definitively been born after 9/11.
Dumbing of Age Book 9: Jesus Thankfully Has No Taste
Maybe that one could have sticked.
From what I can remember back when I routinely received the Body Of Christ…yeah, he was pretty bland.
When I switched churches upon moving to college, communion was a giant hunk of bread dipped in juice, instead of those tasteless wafers with wine. I never felt anything from those tiny little discs. My new pastor said “Jesus shouldn’t taste like cardboard” and I heartily agree
It’s the body of Christ, right? And bodies are made of meat, right? So why not distribute communion as a slice of summer sausage on a Ritz cracker?
I dunno if it works the same way for Joyce’s church because I was raised Catholic, but we believe it turns to meat AFTER you eat it.
That bit always struck me as something a trip to a hospital to use some imaging system could prove/disprove. I’m honestly surprised I’ve never heard anyone else even consider trying this.
The communion takes on the substance of Jesus’s body and blood, but retains the appearance of bread and wine (or crackers and grape juice or whatever). It could do so when examined through some medical imaging system as well, just as it does when you taste it. Or even if you got sick and threw it up.
It’s miracle, not science.
Or so they say. In some variation, depending on the particular theology.
How do vegetarian Catholics deal with it?
Well, for starters you have Jesus’s explicit consent and instruction, which farm animals are unable to give.
At the age when I still went to church, I actually kinda liked the styrofoam-y flavour of the wafers. And they way they dissolved in my tongue.
In Québec, you can buy (unconsecrated) wafers in grocery stores.
I’m told they’re good with honey. Sacrilicious, in fact.
Well Quebec has the distinction of using the various terms from Catholicism and its liturgy as profanities.
Do you prefer the bleached white flour or the whole wheat?
Ha! The number of times I’ve heard my mother-in-law using Catholic church terms as curse words in French…I can’t even count them
Quebecois swears are awesome.
Learned about that tidbit while reading the excellent Louise Penny mystery series. Chalice, tabernacle and baptism are all serious curse words. Gamache doesn’t use them but his assistant (now son-in-law) does.
https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/canada/quebec/articles/13-quebecois-swear-words-that-confuse-the-french/
Merci!
Mon ambition nouveau c’est jurer comme une jeune quebecoise.
When they make the wafers, they punch out discs from a large sheet of unleavened bread. What do they do with the scrap bread that remains? They sell it of course? It’s unconsecrated so there’s no theological problem. You can buy some at most corner stores, it’s sold in paper bags next to chocolate and candy.
Do a web search for “retailles d’hosties” to see what I’m talking about.
Fun fact: church attendance went down a lot in Quebec in the past decades, so the demand for scrap hosts far outpaces the demand for actual hosts. So bakeries are responding by making fake scrap hosts. They just bake sheets of unleavened bread, break it into pieces and sell that.
In Mexico you can get candy made from the same stuff, only colored. They are made into big disks with honey and sesame seeds, then folded in half. They sell them on the streets and are delicious. my favorites are the purple ones even if they all taste the same.
i will accept only a zesty chipotle savior or perhaps a cool ranch savior
DoA Book 9: I Want People To Not Be Hurt
Cthulhu however likes humans with BBQ sauce
Cthulhu is a humanitarian.
Ow! Ow! Ow! You monster!
That’s when you’ve gotta start listening to *you*, Joyce.
(Insert yet another comment about relatability here. Willis = hitting the nail on the head w Joyce’s arc.)
Also, since I literally confessed to my spouse about never having actually heard God’s voice earlier today, the timing on the last panel is amazing. (Though I can’t deny these last couple strips might’ve helped me decide to say something. That and the whole “leaving a cult” thing, lol)
You were very brave today!
I’m sure the people here can point you to a good support group, or function as one.
Echoing Zach. That pressure’s something fierce.
Wow! How’d your spouse react?
Sorry, just saw this. He was pretty chill about it, we talked a bit… I still want to talk about it again sometime after I’ve gathered my thoughts a lot better, but still. He’s a good one.
And thanks to everyone!
I really hope she does talk about this to Becky or Dorothy or Sarah or SOMEONE. Bottling this up is just gonna make the pressure worse.
That’s Boyle’s law, or boils law or 2nd Thermodynamics, right?
Is the changing of Joyce’s clothing suggesting shes regressing or something?
Back to her natural state, a baby with no religion.
It’s a dream. Dreams have a way of syncretizing things you have seen, even if you have seen them together in context.
*haven’t. (I’m on the road and between time zones and it’s a miracull I can still tipe.)
You are doing well enough to teach me a new word. Thanks for “syncretiizing”. Always a good day when you learn something.
Almost all human culture is built up sycretically, even though we usually don’t label it as “syncretic” unless the changes are relatively recent.
The hand brace and t-shirt came later in her life than The Sweater, so I feel like it might be reflecting different moods or strong memories or something, rather than this dialing backwards.
I’m thinking the overalls and striped shirt is what she wore on her first day of kindergarten.
I read it as, she’s kinda thinking about her early childhood.
(Oops, pushed enter too soon.)
Like, she feels a bit like a little kid, who just wants to ask her questions to somebody trustworthy.
Just to throw another idea out: Ruth wore a similar outfit the other day.
The shirt she’s wearing is similar to the one from “When God Closes the Door”, where she lied to her parents, stole the car, yelled at John, broke into Becky’s house, and asked Joe for advice.
I think you just hit the nail on the head. Everything she is wearing has been outfits she had on when experiences challenged her preconceived notions.
The sweater. The lying outfit. I think one of them was the shirt (minus hoodie) she wore when she and her mom fought after Toedad attacked.
I think she’s metaphorically trying to search for when her faith was whole (going back through different versions of herself) and realizing that her faith has been crumbling longer than she thought.
The one thing about the idea she’s regressing that, um, sort of icks me out, is that while it’s quite credible that’s an outfit she wore when she was much younger, she’s also, um, definitely past puberty in those last panels.
So the idea that she’s regressing by imagining what she wore when she went to kindergarten kinda creeps me out.
Then again, I suppose it’s a plausible costume for a fourteen year-old from my era.
What’s so creepy about it? Especially since overalls and a t-shirt is a pretty normal outfit for teenagers and adults now
(What are the chances?)
Hear that voice in your heart for the answers…
And when you feel afraid (love one another)
And you’ve lost your way (love one another)
And you’re all alone (love one another)
And you’re far from home (love one another)…
Pushes “Holding out for a Hero” and “No rest for the wicked” towards the front of the queue for the hacked Muzak
And wqhile I doubt that Joyce will ever change that much (without requiring everybody undergoes Dexter & Monkey Master style brainwipes), I’m keeping Patti Smith’s ” Gloria (in excelsis deo)” on standby.
Hopefully this is the Todd Rundgren version and not the Stephen Bishop version (kinda hard to tell by the typing
).
Oops. England Dan and John Ford Coley, not Stephen Bishop. Knew it was some kind of neutered adult contemporary abomination, either way…
Then again, the original was Utopia, not just Todd… Nvm. I’ll show myself out…
I feel Joyce a lot in this strip, even as someone who isn’t super religious. And it hurts more because she looks like she’s wearing something she’d have worn as a kid.
Stop that right now, young lady.
It is INCREDIBLY unfair >.>
Why does she have to look this adorable while dealing with such a heavy, sobering revelation!?
Because these kids hate us and like to make us sad.
Well it’s working, darn it ;n;
I know! Stupid sad children.
Is this ever relatable
Aw man. Been there, Joyce. Just be glad you’re even thinking to ask those questions.
Whelp, have fun in hell Joyce!
Woomy said: “Whelp, have fun in hell Joyce!”
She does come from a branch of christianity that would send someone to hell for asking those kind of questions.
Lol, did Willis hide my comment?
Why do you say that? Can you not see your comment?
I can, but I was wondering why jmsr7 repeated what I said. On Reddit if your comment is hidden you can’t tell, but other people might repeat what you said.
Looking at jsmr7’s comments today, I think that’s just their way of quoting people they’re replying to.
Yeah, i do that. I want to make it clear what i’m responding to; because the formatting of these comments means that it can be confusing to hunt down original remarks if more than one person comments.
Heh, you should see the Patreon comment system…
there’s only one level of indentation there.
Anyone care to expound on the costume change in panel five?
The only thing the overalls bring to mind for me is her regressing to some sort of childlike state but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. I can’t recall her wearing them, but maybe she wore them when something dramatic happened.
That’s all I got.
Actually I kinda think that’s what’s going on. She’s probably been cycling backwards through outfits she’s worn in the past, with the overalls being maybe something she wore as a kid. “Or maybe I never did” makes me think the outfit is supposed to help convey how’s she’s re-examining the nature of her faith all the way back to her childhood.
Makes sense.
The chronology hasn’t been totally direct. Like she wore her wrist brace outfit from punching Becky’s dad after her orange sweater from when gash-face attacked her. But I think in general they’re all from emotionally significant moments.
She’s been changing her clothes a lot in this dream. Yesterday’s comic and the comic before that had her wearing the yellow sweater she wore at the infamous party.
The outfits that she’s been wearing in her dream have all been seen before in DoA. Not necessarily on Joyce.
OK, but the wrist brace and the orange sweater have known significance to her. Presumably these overalls mean something too, but I don’t know what (though see suggestions above re childhood beliefs).
. . . OH lord this is hitting hard. Like. . my parents are/were rather religious. They forced me through sunday school and spanked me when I complained and embarrassed them in front of the parish, I think I was 8 at the time, and around the time of middle school I was well aware that I had NO faith in me regarding god or Jesus or other what not.
Like. . . I believed that there was SOME greater purpose out there but I never felt that there was anything or anyone listening. Or if they were listening then they were not worthy OF worship due to daring to ignore all of the desperate people praying for help and salvation and only receiving silence and punishment. Only worthy of spite and hatred.
I relate at least a bit to this series of strips here much more then I thought I would. Am I making any sense at all?
Making perfect sense, and same.
Quite.
I realized this when I was nearly 10. I am not a Christian but from a very polytheistic faith] p. After looking at so many religions, I see that what really matters is kindness and not condescension. If we are “religious” and yet look down on other people, are we truly good?
Yep. Middle school faith loss relatability here too.
This comment kinda reminds me of my own view of going to church, although my family was never so religious as to go to church every sunday.
But I think in elementary school I still believed in some higher power, though not God (or a God) per se.
Funny enough, we had lessons in religion in school (though I don’t know what it’s like in the US but over here, it was not only being taught about your own religion, but also about other types of faith and moral ideas in general – at least most of the time). There was one incident my father was called by other parents, I believe I was around 7 or 8 years old – he loves to tell me about it as I actually forgot it all, because our new religions teacher seemed to have scared most of my class with threats of us literally “going to hell” if we weren’t to behave and listen. And my father knew absolutely NOTHING of that.
So he called me from my room and asked me, with other parents on the phone: “Did your teacher tell you you’d go to hell if you’d misbehave?”
And I was like “Yeah. But I’m always good, so I’m not scared.”
Ultimately the teacher was reprimanded and changed for that (it seems she drove the threats too far over little things like talking in class – she wasn’t a good teacher), but I still laugh about the idea of me, still believing in God, being like “well, yeah, but I’m honest and always nice so I don’t need to fear the afterlife”.
My ideas and believes ultimately changed, but I’m still part of a denomination – mostly because of my parents, but I don’t follow the faith. I’m not completely atheist, as I do believe in some higher power – at least sometimes – but I don’t see any point in going to specific places to worship this kind of power. Most churches and beliefs are living too much in old ideas for my tastes.
wow, this grew longer than expected. I basically just wanted to express that I relate too…
Here is a reverse middle school revelation: I didn’t realize anyone still believed in God(s) in the sense of omnipotent beings with investment in humanity until we progressed past ancient history into modern history in my 7th grade class. It was one of the only times I was sent to the principal because the teacher thought my confusion was intentional sarcasm/disruption versus it honestly blowing my mind. I thought churches were places where people of common backgrounds read their stories in the manner of allegories/fables to keep the cultural context alive. Just another way to honor roots like food and language. I went from that to a catholic high school and finding out one of my parents is a gnostic, the other is “everyone is going to hell due to original sin”, and the rest of my family had a half a dozen religions across them. To say I was confused is an understatement.
Wow – your confusion is pretty understandable, given that background. I bet anyone would be confused.
(And honestly, that teacher kind of reacted over the top, I mean, even if a student would intentionally use sarcasm like that, just roll with it and simply explain. I mean, I’ve recently met a 14-year-old who has never seen a church from the inside, because of another religious background – well with my singing group she now has – and she also didn’t know how mass would be like etc. We joked around that she should tell us if she were to burst into flames while entering, which helped easing her into it – she was quite nervous.
So nothing surprises me with regards to missing knowledge, especially in children and with teenagers. :))
But Jesus doesn’t love us back regardless. If we don’t love him above all things he promised to send us to eternal fiery torture, in his infinite mercy.
Christianity is something of an extortion racket. “Nice soul you’ve got there. Pity if something bad should happen to it…”
Delete “something of.” It is an extortion racket. It used to be terror racket, and wishes it could be again.
So like I’m not interested in getting into a protracted debate on this (just to make my interest level clear from the start) but it’d be cool if y’all could stop completely demonizing Christianity. It’s not all good, but nothing is. It’s not all bad either, though, because that’s also not possible. On top of that it’s not some monolithic force. Different branches and outlooks within the Christian church vary wildly; it doesn’t pay to reduce.
Thanks in advance!
I wonder about an institution when you have to say, “It’s not all bad.” How bad is it?
Honestly probably beyond what we can calculate. But I’d say the same applies to what good is in it, since both good and bad are subjective and the Christian religion is too big to be parsed down to something easily agreed upon. (One person doesn’t have enough brain space to compute it all; a representative group of people wouldn’t be able to agree.)
Mostly it’s not “an institution”. It’s many institutions, with very different views and problems.
All of political Christianity – all of it – in this country has been trying to outlaw and/or kill me and mine my entire life.
Yeah. It’s been toned down lately, where I live. But even here I’ve been assaulted on the street, I’ve been handed pamphlets calling for my own (in general, not specific) execution, I’ve had to go door to door Politely Debating why people shouldn’t vote for the latest popular initiative outlawing me or part of my existence – they started sending us out in opposite-gender pairs to make it less likely we’d be spontaneously attacked after that started happening – and when I went to Christian friends, I was yelled at for daring to try to involve them in politics.
And the playbook of political Christianity hasn’t changed one. goddamn. bit. They’ve made it multigenerational. They’ve made hating LGBT people a core of their religion, now, and they’re running the same tactics against trans people that they used to run against all of us, all the way down to the scary-black-and-white shakeycam of Those Child Molesting Faggots following little girls into bathrooms.
Are you seriously going to have the gall to ask for kid gloves for that?
To paraphrase your own book, clean up your own damn house first.
Okay. I’m responding to this and then that’s all. First, to clear a couple things up: you seem to be under the impression that I am a Christian, which I am actually not. Secondly, I am very queer myself, and the vast majority of my loved ones are as well. I am very well aware of how much danger we are in from the Christian church.
I never denied that Christianity has seen terrible things done in its name. But I will not deny that good things have been done in its name either. Maybe the latter don’t balance out or surpass the former. Maybe they do. I’m not qualified to say, and neither are you. Christianity, even modern American Christianity, has a long and varied history, and again, that’s more than any one person can sort through or any group of people can agree on.
I’m not asking you to give all Christians another chance based on what I’ve said. I’m not asking you to give any Christians a chance based on what I said. Your traumas are your own, and how you deal with them is your own. What I do ask — what I did ask, originally — was that people don’t take a complicated movement filled with all sorts of people who carry out their faith in all sorts of different ways, both now and in the past, and reduce it down to “[Implied: all] Christianity is a racket [implied: and nothing else]!”
Jess – While you are technically correct that there are all sorts of Christians, asking Dara (twice!) to moderate her opinion, after all she has suffered at the hands of Christians, is really a great example of tone policing, and thus not cool.
Even if a significant number of Christians would not physically attack her, almost all Christians are complicit – while living in a largely Christian-fundamentalist society, they don’t bother to oppose the huge number of Christians who do promote hate against LGBT+ people.
I get it that you’re not Christian. I get it that you want a more nuanced discussion. But instructing Dara in how they should communicate is not making the world a better place. Please search for “tone policing” and then think about it and then take a chill pill and then leave this discussion alone.
Assuming you’re talking about the US, we’re not really a “largely Christian-fundamentalist society” and much of the opposition to the Christian right agenda also comes from Christians.
The Religious Right is active and vocal and has managed to dominate a political party, so they have outsized influence, but they’re not all of Christianity nor are they without opposition
The majority of US Christians vote to the right, fundamentalist or not. Opposition isn’t helpful if you vote for those policies anyways.
This is a reply to BBCC: Black evangelicals vote overwhelmingly to the left. Please stop erasing them. Right leaning Christianity in the US is almost entirely a white phenomenon.
I said the majority of US Christians, not all. Black people in the US generally vote overwhelmingly to the left, so that’s not surprising, but the majority of US Christians DO vote to the right. The smallest majority is in US Catholics, with 52%.
@BBCC
That’s somewhat misleading. The majority of US Christians vote Republican, but that’s largely driven by the extreme slant among white evangelicals who vote Republican by nearly 4:1 margins. Catholics are nearly split and mainline Protestants tend to lean Democratic.
Of course, as Eolirin hints, the same could largely be said about white people – a majority vote to the right, so white opposition to anti-LGTBQ policies isn’t helpful since whites vote for those policies anyway.
Mainline Protestants had a lower majority than Evangelicals but the majority of mainline protestants also vote to the right.
My point is that you (general you) cannot claim the majority of Christians oppose homophobic policies when they vote for politicians who forward those policies. I wouldn’t claim the majority of white people oppose homophobic and transphobic policies when they vote for people who forward them.
Boy howdy, this thread sure went some places. Anyway, I’m back but only to apologize. As BBCC and Chris Phoenix pointed out (and I thank you both) there was definitely some big tone policing in what I said last night, so. Dara especially but also uyKai and BarerMender, if you read this, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to invalidate your pain and/or perspectives and I should have thought more carefully about the ramifications of what I was saying before I posted. Going forward I will most probably stick to discussing these things with those who are willing and in a position to discuss, or at the very least I’ll be sure to consider my responses more carefully. Thanks for reading.
* DeadGuyKai, of course, oops.
It happens to all of us. Don’t beat yourself up.
Jess, you are setting up a straw man argument. Dara is not saying no good has ever been done in the name of Christianity, but that they have suffered in the name of Christianity. You’re misrepresenting what Dara is saying when Dara’s anger give their experience is justified.
Furthermore, even if good has been done in the name of Christianity, so has a *lot* of evil and not grappling with that is intellectually dishonest.
Also, a given person can absolutely say whether or not good and bad things Christianity has done balance out. It’s a judgement everybody can make based on their own knowledge, experience and values. It’s not something you have to answer if you’re not interested in doing so, but it IS a question that can be answered and that answer can change over time.
(P.S. Sorry for assuming you were American and that you are okay with queer and LGBT communities/people being conflated.)
Political/politicized religion as a rule sucks big time.
Political Christianism is no exception. I’m horrified by what is being sold/pushed in the name of Christ. But it’s still true that there is also more than that. Although it seems that this good only comes to fruition were no political involment at all is tolerated.
Is it though? Rev. King and the Civil Rights Movement was essentially political Christianity.
I’ll certainly agree that the current Religious Right movement is disgusting, but maybe part of the solution to that is more political activism from churches that oppose that ideology?
It might, but I think it’s also required that people stop immediately flocking to go ‘Not all Christians’ when people point out everything Christianity has done as an oppressive group.
Maybe. I think there’s room for a little nuance when the claims actually reach “all Christians”. (or all “political Christians”, whatever that actually is.)
Given the dominance of Christianity in the US, letting the Religious Right claim to speak for Christianity is not a good strategy. They want to frame the conflict as “Christians vs gays” because that implicitly sets up all Christians as being on their side, when that’s not at all true.
I fail to see the difference between flocking to whine ‘Not all Christians!’ and whining ‘Not all men!’ or ‘Not all cis people!’ – yeah, there’s always going to be some who recognize where the group they’re part of is screwy, but that doesn’t stop it from being an overarching problem.
“Not all Muslims are terrorists!” Is that also whining?
I do think it’s different though, because the “Not all Christians!” tends to break down on pretty clear sectarian lines. The point is that Christianity isn’t a group like that.
To use an example from the comic, should Jacob have to renounce his LGBTQ affirming church because Joyce’s church is toxic?
I said ‘oppressive groups’ – in the US, Muslims are marginalized. If we were dealing with an area where Muslims were privileged and were talking about homophobia and other oppressive attitudes in Muslim communities and someone interjected with that, yeah, it’d be a derail just like ‘Not all Christians’ is. As it stands though, an objection to a stereotype that marginalizes people and derailing a conversation about shitty things a group that is NOT marginalized does? Is a false equivalence.
There are sectarian differences, but there are problems that pop up across the demographic – it may not be universal but it is a widespread problem, much the way misogyny is among men (or transphobia among cis people).
Jacob doesn’t have to renounce his church, but if he were to start claiming Christianity as a demographic doesn’t have a homophobia problem, he’d be full of shit. Especially since he totally ignored that aspect of Ethan and Joyce’s relationship and called their relationship smart. Jacob isn’t a bad guy and I wouldn’t say he’s particularly homophobic (any more so than anybody raised in a heterocentric society), but he did skirt over that as a problem.
Fair enough and I certainly wouldn’t say Christianity doesn’t have a homophobia problem. But I also don’t want to reinforce the “Christians vs gays” framing, because if that’s the conflict, the LGBT community is going to lose. I want to support the churches that aren’t homophobic – the ones that welcome and ordain LGBTQ people, not attack them for being part of a larger group with an overall bad record.
Talking about oppressive groups as a demographic isn’t an attack on each individual member of those groups though. Going back to the example of men, there’s lots of different kinds of men and a lot of them are marginalized among other axes and there are men who support anti-misogynist groups, programs and measures. That said, men as a demographic DO forward and perpetuate misogyny in policy, systemic areas and in societal attitudes. Talking about that shouldn’t be taken as an attack on each every individual man (or even every individual men’s group), but every time someone pops up to say ‘Not all men!’. And, frankly, if men stop supporting anti-misogyny work because they don’t like hearing about men as a demographic doing misogynist things, I’d have to question whether their support was ever really genuine at all.
Again, I think the difference is that Christians aren’t a big homogeneous blob, even as much as “men” are. They’re a complex mess of different ideologies, not just individual Christians some of whom happen to be better than others. Different denominations have very different approaches to LGBT issues and those differences are rooted in the teachings of the various churches. For me that makes a difference.
I mostly don’t think it makes sense to talk about “Christianity” as anything coherent.
Frankly, I’ve made this argument more often from the other direction – pointing out to Christians who think Christianity requires homosexuality to be sinful that many denominations don’t actually believe that. Sometimes even with some success – more often with the “hate the sin, not the sinner” types than the more rabid bigots of course.
I disagree. Numerically speaking, I think there’s far more differences between men as a group than in Christians as a group. If for no other reason than it adds men of other faiths.
But while Christianity, like many faiths, has many different sects with many differing views on different issues, there are issues that thread their way through Christianity as a demographic. Homophobia is one of them and it’s something people should be able to talk about without Christians it doesn’t apply to trying to brush those issues under the rug because they don’t want to be reminded of said homophobic churches.
Like it or not, almost everybody on the planet is part of some larger demographic that treats less advantaged ones badly – the answer to that has to be grappling with it and doing what you can to support people from the less advantaged demographic, not denying the problem, brushing it aside, or going ‘Not all X!’
Okay. I disagree, obviously, but don’t really have anywhere else to go but to repeat what I’ve already said.
I don’t think I’m making the argument I think you think I’m making, but I don’t know how else to say it.
I’m not sure what argument you think I think you’re making (took me 15 minutes to parse that. XD) either, but I’m happy to talk about it more – this conversation’s been more productive, I think, than other disagreements that’ve happened lately.
BBCC thanks for the great points you’ve been making. I agree with your “not all xyz” comment. I hadn’t seen it like that for the simple reason that Christians as an organized group don’t have political power in my country. They’re still the biggest religious group, but aren’t in power… anymore. And yes, they used to be, so your point stands and I should have been more attuned to the realities of ‘other geographies’.
I liked Larry Niven in “Inferno,” where he had the hero actually come up with a reason why a kind and benevolent God would have s Hell or put people into it.
I was thinking about that myself. A brutal reform school is – maybe – some sort of justification for torturing people. But I don’t think it would actually work. Subjecting people to excrutiating pain next to other people experiencing the same pain seems unlikely to teach them empathy.
Those second and third panels. Gut punch. Nothing like a dreamscape self-own to knock you down.
Well life is much easier when someone else makes all important decisions for you. Bad thing is, life usually stops working like that when you grow up. That’s when you have to start to find your own answers.
Yeah. A psychologist called Erich Fromm wrote a book caled (IIRC) “The Flight from Freedom”. He was concerned about people not wanting to make their own decisions. This was not long after the second World War, and a lot of people were seeking explanations for Hitler’s rise to power.
Thing is, if we really have Free Will, we must experience the consequences of our actions, good and bad. That can be unpleasant . . . but if God* protects us from the consequences of bad decisions, Free Will doesn’t mean very much. I can understand the appeal of wanting someone else to make the hard decisions, but that is not being a grownup.
* I do not believe in God. This argument is hypothetical.
I do, however, and I agree with your argument. It’s not only the consequences of our own bad decisions that God doesn’t protect us from, but the consequences of other people’s bad decisions as well.
People are keen to say “If God was really all good, or really cared about people, he’d have stopped that really evil thing from happening.” But I don’t think they’d like living in a world where God regularly intervened to stop people from doing things nearly as much as they want to imply.
But what of the bad things that happen without us making bad decisions? The Free Will argument doesn’t apply to those.
It’s also easily extended to imply that if bad things happen to you, it must be because of your bad decisions, even if the connection isn’t apparent. Poverty must be a consequence of personal failings. Disease is a punishment for sins. Etc. Or conversely, that good things are a reward for virtue.
thejeff: I’m not saying any of that. Bad things that happen to people are quite frequently because of something someone else did. Consequences are not necessarily just. They’re simply … consequential. And that is where free will applies: if a result of someone else’s
negative action is that you get hurt, you get hurt. Do we *want* God to stop anyone from ever doing anything wrong? I don’t think most people would.
If God is supposed to be a God of justice and he allows unjust things to happen for the sake of making one person learn their actions have consequences at another’s expense, God is no longer benevolent.
Not protecting someone from their own bad decisions is one thing. Not protecting someone else from their bad decisions is not okay. For example, if I found out my friend is cheating on their SO and could potentially bring an STI home, I’d feel morally obligated to tell their SO.
I was wondering if someone would bring this up. I deliberately didn’t mention it, but I STRONGLY feel that suffering the consequences of other peoples’ bad decisions – over which we have no control – is relevant to “the problem of evil” and totally not relevant to Free Will. I reject the “just world” concept that if bad things happen to you, you must deserve it.
My least favourite argument is when people say bad things happen to someone to teach someone else a lesson because seeing the other person suffering will drive them to do better – like, fuck you, people are not someone’s teaching aid. Especially since God is supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient – he should know that there’s plenty of individuals it won’t work for AND know how to teach that person without someone else’s help.
I think my “favorite” version of that is “Your baby died because God wanted to teach you a lesson.” I don’t know how common it is anymore, but it shows up disturbingly often in the historical record.
I’ve seen that and it is a very good thing I like my computer or it would have gone flying.
Bathymetheus: I think it’s both, because a lot of evil *is* brought about by other people’s choices. Which does make it part of free will. And a lot of other things that people call bad if not evil, things people say God should have stopped, are brought about by natural causes based on physics or geology or meteorology or suchlike. Which I for one would like to have keep on working reliably, ty!
God stopping evil things isn’t analogous to you telling your friend’s SO that your friend is cheating on them – and by what means are you thinking that God would do that?
– because what the “why doesn’t God stop that?” argument expects is for God to prevent the evil in the first place, i.e. to stop the people involved *from* cheating. Most people, I assert, would not want to live in a world where, whenever something they were about to do was going to hurt or harm someone else, God just didn’t let them.
It’s one thing for free will to affect you. It’s another for your free will actions to hurt others. If you know one of your kids is about to fuck up another of your kid’s life and you decide to go ‘Ehh, I’ll let them, because they won’t like me if I interfere and them hurting someone else will teach them a lesson (or not, which I full know because I’m supposedly omnipotent)’, you are a shitty, shitty parent. Full stop.
I’d expect an omnipotent God would be able to find a way to let someone know their SO is cheating and prevent them from hurting them with an STI.
Granted, God and Free Will have a mixed track record at best. I distinctly recall at least one occasion God specifically made someone take a course of action because He wanted events to shake out a certain way.
“I’d expect an omnipotent God would be able to find a way to let someone know their SO is cheating and prevent them from hurting them with an STI.”
And sometimes I think he does, for that matter. Do you? Would you recognise it if it was God telling you something? How loud and unmistakable do you want his shouting to be?
And to how many people do you want him to shout? That’s a lot of shouting.
‘Sometimes’ is not good enough for an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnipresent being. For that matter, an omniscient, omnipotent being should be able to deliver a message people are capable of recognizing – or at least dropping breadcrumbs for people to recognize as their SO being a two timing bastard.
“Granted, God and Free Will have a mixed track record at best. I distinctly recall at least one occasion God specifically made someone take a course of action because He wanted events to shake out a certain way.”
Could be. It’s never happened to me, and I have no way of forming a view on whatever other people might have reported.
It’s a bible story, actually. In Exodus, God tells Moses that when he asks Pharaoh to let his people go, he will harden the Pharaoh’s heart so he will refuse. Sure enough, the Bible says he is the one hardening the Pharaoh’s heart so he will refuse. He then proceeds to punish the Pharaoh for refusing.
There’s plenty of just reasoning for punishing the Pharaoh – like, the fact he holds slaves is a good enough reason on its own. But his refusal when God is the one mandating that refusal is bullshit.
ripping off the band-aid hurts o n o
So what did she say to Becky? Anyone got a handy link?
I want to know this too… from what I remember she was pretty much immediately supportive? Why does she look so horrified at what she said?
well, the link we found was http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/pit/ *but*, Word of Willis is that he’s referring to homophobic things Joyce said when she was younger?
Oh, I thought they were talking about two strips ago, what was her answer to Becky’s question, of “What is your problem?” But that also makes sense, and would explain her reaction better.
I mean she said a lot of things to Becky, and yeah, she was supportive in a lot of awesome ways, but shitty in others: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/research/
She’s going through a lot.
Her initial doctrine was also far from being truly supportive – ‘being gay is a sin, but everybody sins’ is not actually an accepting thing.
Especially since further questioning made it clear that she wasn’t saying it was OK, she was saying it wasn’t worse than a lot of other things that are also not OK (I seem to recall lying was the example she gave?)…
She also, uno further questioning, said she HATED the examples brought up.
“I don’t have a problem! I’m fine! I’m normal! Don’t look at me!”
Although it is possible not all of that was said /to/ Becky and more said at everyone as Joyce was trying to escape.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/03-sometimes-the-sky-was-so-far-away/feel/
Someone who wants to stop people from being hurt? Someone you can trust for answers?
Someone who isn’t God?You know who to turn to!#PresidentKeener20whatever
That sounds like the Joyce x President Dorothy fic we need.
“What d Atheist believe in?”
“People, of our choosing.”
Fiiiiiine. Link.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/hug-2/
At the rate this comic progresses it’ll probably be more like 21whatever before Dorothy becomes president.
According to the wiki:
If DoA!Dorothy’s DOB was fixed relative to the start of the comic, she could run in 2028. (2010 – 18 + 35) But since it’s a slowly progressing floating timeline, DoA!Dorothy would be eligible for the presidency in the 3200s.
Walkyverse!Dorothy’s DOB is fixed to real time. She could have run in 2016. (1980 + 35)
Oh fine.
Keener-for-Leader-of-the-Smoking-Ruins-of-Society-3232
… That’s a little less catchy : (
We need to create an anti-smoking campaign that will last for centuries. What kind of organisation can do that?
I find it interesting that the background in the last panel changes to black…
Makes me kinda sad. It’s like some of the magic and wonder in the world is draining away, or something along those lines.
So according to dream Rich Mullins, Jesus loves Ryan just as much as he loves Joyce? Um…
Well, one of the core christian doctrines is that everyone is always offered salvation, no matter how sinful we are, and if we do receive it is up to our choices.
That’s it. You don’t stop loving your children, no matter what they do. At least not if you’re a *good* parent. That doesn’t mean you approve uncritically of everything they do, and loving them might in fact mean you make sure the consequences of their actions actually come home to them. The point about divine love is that no good action earns it, and no bad action forfeits it.
Depends on the doctrine you’re getting, but my minister friend (I’m areligious, as in there’s-probably-something-but-fuck-organized-religion, but he’s a great friend to chat with) would say that while Jesus loves everyone, he acknowledges their sins and unless they truly reprint, will go to hell.
So, yes Jesus loves Ryan, but does not approve of him or his actions. IDK though, mileage will vary with church.
I have heard tales that that’s what parents, mentors, and other such things are for. I’ve never seen such a thing, but looking for a metaphorical unicorn might be easier than a physical one, and inevitable betrayal is easier the second time around when you’re an adult!
(I might be in a bad brains mood.)
I’m just here wondering what Joyce saw in the court room.
Court room? Did I miss a page?
The building that keeps showing up in Joyce’s dreams is the La Porte Courthouse.
Seeing as it’s the outside of the court house that shows up, the image is probably not related to what she saw in a court room.
I’m betting that the view from those four arches is one of the best views of the city that La Porte has to offer. If county officials aren’t charging admission to go up in the tower, they’re missing out on a revenue-raising opportunity.
“Just play me a song. Play me Chopin. He died before I could know him, and so he remains beautiful.”
– Charlie Brown (via Zach Wienersmith)
What *did* she say to Becky?
I remember her telling Becky she made a mistake when Becky told her about experimenting with her old roommate, but she did take it back right away.
She also had that line to Ethan about homosexuality being a sin… a light sin, on the scale of lying… which she hates…
Even if she didn’t say so to Becky’s face, it must hurt to know that she was in team Toedad/Carol, no matter how shallow and briefly, but calling Becky a sinner just for who she is.
Look, God’s a busy guy. I’m not sure he has the time to call all his children. He’ll just send a postcard from his business trip to Cuba.
But consider this!
So I’ve been (lowercase a, adjective) atheist my whole life, but this is kinda heartbreaking?
And now, with this comic, I’m pretty sure that Joyce arc is going to end up with her as an atheist (or maybe a deist) rather than a liberal Christian.
It’s hard to say. Becky’s still a Christian, and has managed to reconcile her orientation and rejection of “young Earth” dogma, so it may not be so “all or nothing” for Joyce.
From a certain point of experience: Becky held personal definitions of her self separate from her faith. Her religion was something she could hold at arm’s length and assess without realigning her view of LITERALLY THE ENTIRE WORLD.
Joyce (and I) couldn’t. When one’s definition of, well, everything is dependent on whether or not it aligns with your religion, if you find a keystone doctrine that you find to be morally wrong, well…
You have to either go fully into the faith and eschew the thing or person that is making you question that faith, or realize that the faith is Wrong. That’s when the entire building collapses.
Joyce is autobiographical for the comic’s author Willis (that could be clearer, sorry) so if she goes the same route, she’ll end up atheist.
However, for that to happen, she would have to examine the evidence for god’s existence and stop believing that he exists. She seems to be doing that here, but also there is a little examination of the doctrines of her branch of the religion going on here too. Down THAT route lies liberal christianity, other religions, woo, etc.
It all depends on what Willis shows us in the next few strips. It could go either way or even circle back (although that’s pretty damn unlikely). Wherever it goes, it has to be believable. Truth is stranger than fiction, because unlike reality, fiction HAS to make sense.
jmsr
Becky never questioned whether she’d ever heard God at all.
Down this road lies asking the question “Am I being fooled this time like I got fooled before?” every time she thinks they’re encountering something divine. It entails going back over every previous experience of talking to God and working out whether (and how) it could happen without a god talking to her… or even without a god existing.
Joyce isn’t Becky. Becky has a far more flexible mind, and can abandon the parts of her religion she hates and don’t contradict her newfound knowledge TOO blatantly.
Joyce, meanwhile, lives and breathes rules. She needs a fixed system. She needs a God that is consistent and makes sense and is perfect, or no God at all. A God that works in SOME ways but not in others doesn’t fit Joyce’s mindset, and she can’t let it go, no more than she can comfortably consume a pizza with five different toppings.
As an atheist I find that possibility fascinating!
It would explain why she doesn’t feel a powerful psychic entity answering her attempts at telepathy: if there isn’t one.
But her beliefs and hopes and ideals for people living their lives and being kind to each other can still stand. There are plenty of believers in her life who are not overflowing with kindness, after all. And some of the nonbelievers are rather nice.
However she ends up, I can’t help thinking how intensely personal this storyline must be for Willis.
Joyce has invested a large part of herself in her faith, and… the loss of faith means the loss of the known self. A person can spend years grieving if they don’t have someone around them who understands. And Dorothy won’t. Becky might understand some of it, at least by analogy.
Jocelyn might.
k question- when people refer to “hearing God’s voice” do they mean like an actual literal voice or is that a metaphor for thoughts and reflection that they attribute to god?
Yes.
lol that doesn’t help me!
It means they hear the unmistakable voice of Morgan Freeman narrating in their life.
Usually the latter I think? But sometimes carried to the point where the individual is like “there’s no way I would have thought that on my own. God put that into my head directly.”
Sometimes you will get people purporting to be prophets who say the former, though.
Sometimes it is the former, but it is usually the latter, the belief that God will have guided them to the right direction, answer, etc. It also can just be an overwhelming feeling of a presence that does or doesn’t direct you in any particular way.
It’s going to be a pretty personal experience, I guess.
What Matsuo said. You see this referenced in even non-Christian literature. Stephen King called it “the subaudible” in “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” for example, and he’s not even a professing Christian. Spend enough time in Evangelical, Charismatic, Messianic Jewish, and “charismatic” Catholic circles, and you’ll hear story after story of people just randomly doing exactly what someone needed (e.g., someone who needed $500 to avoid eviction having a stranger hand them $500 out of the blue) and of people moved to do those actions (“I just knew that I had to write this person a check for this amount” or “I felt a leading of the Spirit”). I’ve personally experienced it on both ends, and my wife even moreso.
Joyce is in the hard place that a lot of us remember at that age. The transition from simply holding onto our parents’ faith to a mature faith of our own always involves wrestling with God, ala Jacob. Some retreat from that into a vapid religiosity, while others have their faith broken, but many (I won’t say most) come out of it stronger. I hope that’s Joyce’s journey.
It…depends on the person; some mean it literally, some don’t.
That’s true. I don’t mean to imply that it’s a universal experience, just an incredibly common one.
It’s the same feeling when you think your dead loved ones are there with you
Yeah…can’t say I’ve ever felt that.
But thanks for all the thoughtful responses everyone. I’ve never been a religious person so I never knew if people were hearing like actual voices (please see a doctor maybe) or what.
I’m wondering this too, since I’ve never heard anything that I would consider the voice of a god in my life.
Kinda like asking if “green” means the same thing to everyone. If one is dealing with a mystical experience (been there), then they are by definition ineffable. (Ineffability is concerned with ideas that cannot be expressed in spoken words. )
But some people “take things to Jesus” because they know it’ll confirm the result they have already arrived at. Sheer authoritarianism.
Like most Christian (or religious) matters, the range is so wide that conversation is difficult. Many groups wander down rabbit holes (transubstantiation/ born again / antinomialism / just make up words) that they double down on until there’s no way back. Caring for others is six decisions back and out of view.
Mullins is offering a path here. People are broken and they hurt other people. Joyce hurt Becky. Joyce can also help save Becky. Loving unconditionally is basically not possible for people, but we can try. That can involve religion (even organized religion), or it works without it. YMMV, or more likely definitely will.
Is there anything we know Joyce’s pastor said which is up (er, down) there with Toedad’s actions, or her brother John’s attitudes?
He was in the camp of ‘what Mr. MacIntyre did was unacceptable of course, BUT…’ with most of the congregation, I believe. Visibly uncomfortable Becky showed up all visibly queer, too.
Thanks. I looked at those strips but didn’t know who was talking from off-panel.
Also their complete refusal to acknowledge Becky’s existence, say her name or look her in the eye… the week after her father hunted her with a gun… was not super great.
About a year ago I had some LDS missionaries come to my door. I chatted with them a bit and, of course, they challenged me to see all the good things in the world that God was responsible for (keep in mind I’m an atheist-leaning agnostic, so don’t take this as a fundamentalist message from me). Thinking about my recent mistakes in life, I decided to be open-minded and have some faith in a higher power. I hadn’t prayed to God in like a decade, so with my hands clasped together and my elbows propped up on the bed, I asked to see a remarkable coincidence in the next 24 hours. Nothing one-in-a-million, but rather something I would only see once every…ten years. Something that only God could do, but also something he was capable of doing on short notice.
The next day: I was on the first day of my internship, and the manager announced that we would get a first-hand view of asphalt paving on a patch of the company parking lot. We would see how the process unfolded before we would go out into the field (the real deal), and the manager remarked with a smile, “It almost didn’t happen today. I’m glad the interns will have this kind of experience.”
Was it much of a coincidence? Probably not once in a decade. Was it’s God’s doing? Perhaps. It’s a simple, realistic, short-notice event. The atheist in me added that it could’ve been the alignment of several small events and decisions that would’ve happened anyway had I not been there. Had God not been there. The agnostic in me replied:
Does it matter?
Not really.
No one KNOWS the answer, so it’s best just to believe what you find the most comfortable (providing your beliefs don’t hurt others), whether that’s a belief in a higher power of specified or unspecified origins, or in no higher power whatsoever, or anything else that’s more complicated than what I can explain in this overly long sentence.
Most people only find out the answer when they die, assuming there’s any part of them that can be aware of an afterlife.
I always kinda liked the idea from the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony, where basically every belief was applicable to those it applied to, including atheism.
Not enough to override my personal beliefs, but I’d prefer “everyone is right” over “everyone else is wrong” in regards to religion.
+1
mrnoidea said: “The agnostic in me replied: Does it matter?”
The answer, of course is “YES, it matters!” What you describe is the thought process of confirmation bias and insufficient evidence to support a position. The test you offered can, and has, been used by literally every belief system humanity has ever created to ‘prove’ their correctness. Please stop it.
Why would they have to stop it?
I absolutely agree that this is textbook confirmation bias. But if they need to/benefit from believing in a higher power, what does it matter to us unbelievers? They’re not saying “…and this is why you should believe”, merely “I decided to have some faith”. They actually spell it out quite clearly that they know it to be a decision on their part.
As long as it doesn’t turn into “next I asked God to send me a sign that I should /harm in some version or other/ /some community or individual/ I don’t see why they couldn’t decide to “have some faith in a higher power” if that’s their thing.
I hate it when religious people try to push religion on me, I think we should extend the same courtesy of not pushing non-religion on them or anyone who’s on the fence.
I accidentally experienced a partial eclipse while standing by the Cruz de Ferro (one of the more important landmarks on the pilgrimage to Santiago in Spain) and I’m still very much an atheist. It was an experience that I would have missed If I had been half an hour earlier or later but if I accept that as a miracle laid on for my benefit then I accept that the very many atrocities that happen by a million to one chance are also directed by a higher power. If a higher power exists and is playing favourites like that then they are monsterous and I want no part in them.
God as a vending machine that you insert prayers into to purchase results you want is a common Christian trope. The Prayer of Jabez was a bestseller not long ago. Didn’t work for Jesus though. He got crucified even though he asked very sincerely not to be. Should be a sign to avoid that model, but it keeps coming back, like any cheap trope in a romcom.
Seems to me, the problem with dreams is, you don’t know what you don’t know. So, it kinda makes sense when Rich doesn’t answer Joyce’s question but rather asks her what she said to Becky.
While this dream probably wont bring new information to the table it seems like its being an effective way for Joyce to think through what she really believes. I, for one, am hoping she doesn’t decide to stop believing in the existance of God.
Me personally, for the sake of my sanity still believe that there is an afterlife, and some manner of God behind it all who set things on Earth in motion, under the rationalization that of the untold trillions of galaxies and the millions and millions of stars in the Milky Way, this one little rock three spaces from the Sun is the only one that has such complex biodervisty and a sapient species capable of even dreaming up a cosmic plan in the first place.
I just find it hard to believe that God is on a constant patrol to care about and influence every single thing that happens. To me, He will always be the distant but still kind father who leaves his grown up kids to make their mistakes, even the ones that break his heart, but still loves them all the same as long as they are willing to apologize and make amends.
I feel like that is a less likely scenario than her believing God, but that her congregation have lost the way. Rich, in life, had move to live with the Navajo and had felt there was insight he could gain from them and showed interest in the Catholic perspective, after seemingly getting fed up with white, midwestern protestants.
It does tie into Joyce’s experience, though. She left home, and since coming to college, her best friend is an atheist, and she has turned to a Jewish guy for help and insight in dealing with the huge cracks she can see in her parents’ marriage. I can see where that’d speak to her, that people who may not share her faith still have a lot to offer her that her flock could not.
I also hope she doesn’t stop beliving.
I stopped believing in Church, but I never really stopped believing, or even praying to a god. Your belief system doesn’t have to be static and things can change over time, and I know mine did several times.
Maybe we all do suck but at different degrees, don’t I think it’s fairly Wampus all in with the same guy who kidnapped his own daughter at gunpoint so we can drag her off to some facility to be Electro shocked and tortured all the physically abusing her the whole ride there.
We’ve seen dichotomous thinking from Joyce before – and resists evolutionary theory so strongly because if evolution, then never the vegetarian sinless garden of eden- so everything= evil. She loses one thing and it all goes, cos it’s all one connected picture.
It’s not fair, and shades of grey are a thing, but it IS how Joyce responds to things. There’s good and bad, and if one thing doesn’t exist, then you can only be the other.
She’ll get there. Nuance is hard
I’m going to remember that little nugget of wisdom. “We are all messed up bags of stupid mistakes and past sins, but Jesus, the lovable goof, still loves us that way as long as we try to be better.
In a seriousness though, Joyce could still turn this into an actual vision from the Big Guy Upstairs. The soul of the actual Rich Mullins, or an angel taking on his image, is telling her not to let what the church says color her view of God and Jesus. He wants Joyce to choose kindness and understanding as her way to salvation, not dogma and ignorance.
I would say rather that JOYCE wants to be that sort of person, and is trying to decide whether she has the strength to do it by herself, without the support of a higher power.
Very true, and she’d be all the stronger for it. I truly belief that this world would be a much happier place if more people realized that they don’t need a higher power to make miracles happen. People have the power to make their own happiness and light, their own fortune, if they only believe in their own strength.
Oh yes . . . that would be wonderful.
Huh. In which case, she’ll be getting support from the atheist, of all people. After all, Dorothy did say that what she loves about Joyce is that she’ll choose love every time. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/several/
Well this is heartbreaking.
The real problem feels like that it’s not that she’s lost faith in the in her believes but more so that she’s lost faith in the church who are the ones who taught her most of what she believes. The lessons of Forgiveness, Humility, Truth, Faith, peace, and love is what Joyce shouldn’t turn her back on since those are the best parts about her and what the world needs more of. But where the issue comes in at is that she’s seen guys like Ryan and Ross doing horrible things in the name of the same beliefs she claims to have and since Joyce’s own family and church family seem to sympathize with Ross am not surprised that she’s left wondering if they even believe in anything they’ve taught her.
Though there is a silver lining in all of this. Joyce might have had her perception of her old church life disillusioned by the fact that the church might not be what it claims it is, But in all of her time being in college she found herself able to converse with people she never thought she would before she came there. Dorothy is an atheist if she considers the story aspect of the Bible To be hogwash mythology at best but it seems like she took enough good things from the biblical lessons o be able to call Joyce out on a few things and Jacob was able to reconfirm to her that her concern about sex wasn’t too unreasonable and explained to her why it’s best to wait for the right person. Maybe she can’t
There are people who she can trust in jeopardizing her beliefs. She just needs to look in the right places.
Yep. I just worry she’ll be too worried about seeming ‘normal’ to use all her new family and let them help her sort some of this out. She’s been having hints of this for a while now – weeks in strip. And the compounding trauma definitely seems to be getting to her.
It seems like she’s been through the worse of it though I don’t know if it could get much worse for her… feel like I’m jinxing it for some reason.
For a lot of fundamentalists, faith in the Church *is* faith in God and your beliefs. They often don’t differentiate between the two.
That “what would you have said to Becky” line really hit me. My grandmother died when I was five, and I have nothing but positive memories of her. But every now and then, when I’m in a particularly bleak mood, I start to wonder what she would have said if she’d known that I grew up queer. Sometimes I think about asking my mom what she thinks, but I’ve never done it.
As someone who grew up in a society that was racist, homophobic, and sexist to the point of misogyny, I would say to you that her ability to put that aside (or not) for the love of you would have said something about her, but should in no way affect your belief in yourself.
With regard to Joyce’s clothes in the dream, there have been a number of references to regression to childhood.
Is this concept something that is still a thing outside of pop psychology?
It is easy to see that children under stress will regress to an earlier stage. I don’t consider it much of a stretch to think that adults can do the same. Whether actual psychologists accept that, I don’t know, and don’t much care.
I can just as well link this strip now and get it over with
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/pit/
Because when it really mattered what Joyce said to Becky was just the thing Becky desperately needed to hear. When an evil dad came to take her away she decked the mothereffer. When church and family tried to push her away Joyce pushed back. When Becky had NOTHING… she had Joyce.
Of course, that doesn’t negate the soul searching or the very valid, very heavy questions she asks now, but she can at least take comfort in the fact that when the chips were down she was a person who could do the right thing.
Honestly that’s a lot more than some people can say. She should definitely take some comfort in that — it’s well-deserved.
I think right now Joyce might be remembering the very first thing, the initial response of saying Becky “made a mistake,” and not recalling the second half of that strip.
Oh, absolutely, and all the things she said before that. Like what she said to Ethan about homosexuality being a sin, or how surprised she was that he seemed “normal” despite being gay, and who knows what Joyce thoughtlessly have said during their childhood (at the chick-fil-A demonstration for example, when they stood tall so “all the homos could see them”).
And when she said those things, she could hear God’s voice – or thought she did. Now she knows better, but God is silent. It might be that everything, everything, EV-ER-Y-THING she’s ever known, everything she’s been taught is a goddamned — a goddamned lie http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/originalsin/
So, at this point I’m not sure how Joyce will be once this is all over. Although I would hope she keeps her faith, I know her character and her experiences in this area reflect those of David. But what I’m curious about is what exactly Rich is going to do. I mean, his significance here thus far is that he is “idolized” by Joyce. So I wonder if he is going to say something (hopefully positive) to make a difference in her struggle here. And something I commented on before was that Rich also firmly believes that “feeling God” is pretty irrelevant since Christianity is built upon faith and obedience.
This is possibly TOO MUCH character development for Joyce in such a short period of time. I wouldn’t be surprised if she woke up and didn’t even remember the dream.
Yes and no, I guess. We’ve seen hints of this for a while now, like her reaction to her dad lying to her mom to cover for her, learning her parents can keep secrets from each other was pretty eye opening, or her mom making excuses for Ross. We’ve seen bits and pieces of all of this from her before, but this feels like she’s gathering up the parts and forming them together.
That said, I don’t expect her to 100 percent remember this, but she might remember enough.
Yes, we all are broken, but that shouldn’t stop use from trying every day t become better and make life better for others, even in little ways. Basically the Categorical Imperative with more empathy.
As for the narrative of this story arc, damn, Joyce is having an atheist epiphany? I didn’t expect that.
Sad as it is, I found it very heartwarming that Joyce’s litmus test of a person’s character is “What would you have said to Becky”
After all, the answer to that question neatly told her what members of her family she can trust.
flashback ? flashback???
I’m getting really nostalgic right now. I forget how good Rich Mullins’ his music is.
Chris Mullins is Joyce’s truest self.
. . . or Rich? Clearly I know not.
Well, Chris Mullins has a storied career as a basketball player and coach, topped off with two gold medals. She could do worse for a spirit guide.
That last panel strikes at the core of why I never, ever felt 100% comfortable in my faith, and that I was always either mimicking my mom or acting for her favor. It never really felt real to me, no matter how desperately I wanted it to. None of the experiences that everyone else had seemed to apply to me. I was forever an outsider.
I think it took me so long to realize this because I’d always attributed it to my hearing loss, which is a massive divider between me and everyone else as it is. But it’s definitely something more than that. Even today I can’t relate to religious people at all.
As someone that grew up in a highly repressive, Pentecostal cult esque church, I suppose my one blessing was never being told that I needed to hear God when I prayed, lol….
Mostly because I was taught that I was an insignificant woman so it didn’t matter if I did anything but still ._x
I’m glad you now recognise that that attitude was . . . I’m gonna say “mistaken”, because it would be unpleasant to express my opinion more accurately. Well, it might be cathartic for me, probably less so for anyone reading this.
That sort of crap can have long term effects on self esteem. I hope you have good supports in your life now that can help if intrusive memories make things difficult.
Oh, I recognized it was a mistake the moment I was old enough to use my own brain actually, it annoyed pastors and sunday school teachers, nobody liked the annoying little tomboy in the back that raised a hand and asked questions you weren’t suppose to…
I suppose if anything, I was blessed with the gift of asking too many questions REALLY young
When religion tried to crush me, I pushed back and broke my way out of it, hell first thing I did when I had a job and my own money was give myself a short hair cu-
….I’m Becky >.<
Computer games where everyone is max level, can’t be hurt, and there aren’t any villains other challenges tend to be kind of boring.
Yeah but if a computer game stops being fun, you can walk away from it. Or change the difficulty settings. Or just pause for a few minutes (well, some of them).
Well this is a long dream
Your unsolicited commentary on the transient nature of life is both acknowledged and appreciated.
Row, row, row your boat…
Row, row, row your boat…
Propel, propel, propel your watercraft
Placidly down the liquid solution,
Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically,
Existence is but a nocturnal illusion.
Wait, what did she told Becky and how bas was it ? The worst I remember Joyce ever did to Becky was not reciprocating her feeling when Becky tried to kiss her and it’s understable. What is Joyce remembering saying to Becky that make her feel she didn’t say the right thing ?
She’s been a dumb gay-hating best friend all of her life http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/gunshot/
(To be less silly, It’s not about a specific line that’s been said on screen – it’s about Joyce being part of the same culture as ToeDad and Carol, and up until recently buying into their word view.)
She said that, with regards to finding out Becky was a lesbian, that everyone makes mistakes, which Becky took as Joyce calling her attraction a mistake. Joyce went back on that after realizing what she said, though, but she definitely still remembers it.
Also interesting parallel to Dina’s discussion about how one of the good things with Dinosaurs is that they are dead and unchanging. She can learn of them without them changing before her eyes.
But everything new we learn about them changes them. They have feathers now, for gosh sakes!
If one can’t question their own faith, it’s barely faith at all. Reconciling the good and evil your religion has inflicted on the world is probably a necessary step for followers of all popular religions. I wasn’t raised fundamentalist. I never felt as though my faith were abused, I simply had to question some of the things I was raised believing as I got older. It must be much harder for Joyce, but I hope she finds peace, even if it isn’t in the hands of God.
As someone who’s been a fan of Joyce since Roomies, the timescale of this comic sometimes throws me. “Died before you were born? Don’t be ridiculous. He only died in… oh, right. I’m old.”
dark eldritch music
to welcome into us the DEMON OF IRRELIGIOUSITY
Question for you Christians or Caucasians: when you say ‘atheist’, do you mean person who does not believe in a god or gods, or person who has no religion?
Caucasian is the wrong word. I should’ve said westerners.
I’m not a representative sample of Caucasians (or Westerners), but when I say that I am an atheist, I mean that I do not believe in any god or “mystical being” or “higher intelligence” or whatever you want to call it.
(For me, it actually comes down to the scientific method — I will go with whatever explanation for anything is currently best supported by scientific evidence; if there is none, I’ll conclude that I don’t know what’s going on. But I don’t believe in god (rather than being agnostic) in the sense that the existence of any higher being seems an extremely unlikely explanation for anything to me.)
I also do not have any religion, on top of that.
See, when someone says they’re irreligious, it’s safely assumed they’re also atheistic or agnostic… Whereas you can be atheistic or agnostic and still be religious, since some religions don’t have a god. So shouldn’t people be saying irreligious rather than just atheist?
I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption either. One can not be attached to any particular religion, but still vaguely believe in God.
Different, but overlapping terms.
Yeah, I was more thinking of people who don’t see themselves as belonging to a religion, but still believe in some higher being that they could call god.
Which religions are you (Pl0x) thinking of where you do not believe in a higher being or power? I was lumping all of that sort of thing under god. But that may be reductive.
I think some versions of buddhism don’t believe in anything like a god (although some kind of do by worshipping different boddhisatvas), but some parts of buddhism are far more philosophical than they are religious.
Ah, I read further down that you are from a buddhist country, Pl0x!
I am aware that there are different streams of buddhism, but would you say I am totally wrong by comparing some of the enlightened personages in buddhism who are worshipped to the worship of a god, or, a saint?
(I honestly do not know that much about the details there.)
Of course buddhism isn’t a monotheistic religion like Christianity or Islam, but I think belief in god(s) is wider than that.
There are also sects of Judaism that are more focused along practice (as in, attending synagogue, celebrating the holidays, etc.) which have practicing atheist Jewish people.
heyo I am a person from one stream of Buddhism, and my stream of Buddhism, they say that Buddha is not to be idolized. We can be grateful to him and admire his qualities and seek to emulate his qualities, but there is nothing to give to him specifically in terms of worship.
There’s a concept called the triple gem, and people say that they “take refuge in triple gem.” And then they chant something like “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the teachings of the Buddha, and I take refuge in noble practitioners of those teachers.” But taking refuge in those things isn’t literally about the person Siddhartha Gautama, or the words he said, or the people who wear saffron robes — it’s about pursuing the qualities of each of those things for yourself, and taking refuge in your efforts and determination and focus. The faith, then, is that this system of behavior and compassion can make you a person who lives more harmoniously and happily and helpfully in their surroundings; that that can make you safe, and gives you refuge. You live on a “Dhammadeepa,” an island of wisdom, but this wisdom must be your own wisdom, not Buddha’s wisdom or anyone else’s wisdom.
So, Buddha is definitely not a god or an idol. He never told anyone who came to him that their god(s) were fake; he just gave them advice to make themselves happier, as irrelevant to the question of god as brushing your teeth twice a day.
Again, that’s specifically what I understand of Buddhism and the way I’ve been raised in it. I can’t speak much to other kinds of Buddhists; for instance, the Dalai Lama doesn’t have any particular place for me. There are SO MANY kinds of Buddhists!
I actually went to a Hindu ceremony recently (a marriage in my family is joining my Buddhist family to a Hindu family, woo), and the priest there actually said some very similar things! He was roasting the Hindu groom, asking him questions like “How many gods are there??” and the groom stammered and gave a ballpark large number, and he said “No! There is only one. Why do I say there’s only one?” and then after some confusion, the answer he gave was that all the different faces and names represented different qualities of God, qualities that good Hindu people should seek to emulate; rather than beings that Hindu people could worship so that they could ask for favors and such.
Sorry for the wall of text; I’m usually “not relevant” in threads about religion because I’ve never been directly challenged to be part of a Western one, but I am spiritual and serious about it at the same time so I got excited :3
Usually the first one. My mother, for instance, no longer regularly attends a church but still identifies as Christian (or Unitarian, at times.) Still has belief, so not an atheist. I have very little belief in anything, but not the active degree of non-belief my atheist brother and father have, so I usually say I’m loosely agnostic.
Usually not believing in god but it can also mean irreligious or metaphysically materialist. Basically it’s context dependent. Yes, one could be atheist and religious a la Buddhism, or atheist while believing in ghosts, but that might come across as odd. (Especially when ‘atheist’ is a religious identity, not just a descriptor; I’d expect Buddhists to say “I’m Buddhists” not “I’m atheist, and I follow Buddhism”.)
Yeah you’re right, it is context dependent. Atheism is not really a thing in my country, since the prominent religion is Buddhism. So people say they are irreligious usually. I guess in a country dominated by Christianity it would have to be different.
When asked what my religion is, I say “none”. I don’t say “atheist”, since imo atheism is not a religion.
I guess I see it as “person who does not believe in God” since some atheist out there consider being an atheist a religion. Even though that makes no since on the grounds of there not be any specific code or conduct they follow that comes with being an atheist.
Did you not get the 2019 Atheist TOS pamphlet in the mail, yet? You should e-mail your local post office and ask them to send you a new copy, if you haven’t already done that. There’s a lot of exciting changes, this year, even for the non-nonbeliever crowd.
I don’t think I’ve ever met an atheist who considers being an atheist a religion (though I’ve met a few who were also members of a religion), but I’ve met plenty of religious people who claimed atheism was a religion.
I wouldn’t say that atheism is a religion, but I would (and do) say that it is an assertion about the existence of one or more deities that is just as unprovable as any other assertion about the existence of one or more deities.
That’s why I prefer to call myself an agnostic. I can’t prove the non-existence of any deity any more than I can prove the non-existence of unicorn space vampires from Nibiru. But in both cases I can make reasonable assumptions about the the probability of their existence.
Welp, I’m converted.
Taking donations for the First Unicorn Space Vampires From Nibiru church.
Our formal robes are Rainbow Dracula-chic.
My take on these terms is that an atheist is certain there is no god (and some of them feel it is their duty to proselytise that belief).
And an agnostic is someone who acknowledges that we do not (and probably cannot) know whether there is a god.
I count myself in the latter group, though I am inclined to think that the existence of god is improbable. But I do not know and I am OK with not knowing.
Because I do not know, I feel no need to disrespect people who think they do know, nor do I feel any need to persuade them to adopt my lack of certainty.
“Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. And this is what I’ve come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my Savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken-hearted.”- Rich Mullins, shortly before his death
So I mean I feel like he’d be good?
That resonates with me. Thank you for sharing it.
He wasn’t, unfortunately. He believed the same thing early Joyce did – that being gay is a sin but everybody sins. That’s only good if you’re grading on a curve.
That said, he did die 20 years ago. Not that there weren’t people who were already 100% of the way towards accepting LGBTQ people then, but many good people took a little longer to come around. It’s hard to say where he would come have ended up on that issue, had he lived. Speaking as a queer person who came of age in the 90’s, it’s amazing how different the world is now and how much many people’s views have changed.
Well, that’s part of the difference between him and Joyce. They started in a similar place, but Joyce had the chance to grow and change and learn. Mullins is never going to have that chance because he died, so that’s not ever going to be a point where she can relate to dream!Mullins. He may very well have had he lived, but we doesn’t know that. All we can go on is his doctrine before he died, unfortunately.
If there is some sort of afterlife, I’m curious if it’s possible for ghosts to change and if so, who has changed and how much.
Not changing would resemble anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories. That kind of afterlife would not be much of a life. More like being a museum exhibit.
I guess I’m thinking more along the lines of ‘new memories form but somehow character development doesn’t’ – which doesn’t sound like much fun either, I must admit.
I just turned 27, and this is really somehow becoming very pivotal and moving for me. Thanks.
I love the way in panel two, Joyce is feeling a bit self-righteous, and is standing up on in the raised altar space with the stained glass behind her temporarily solidifying into a cross – and then after Rich brings her down she literally comes down, with the cross behind her warping again.
Losing religion parallels leaving an extremist upbringing so hard.
Like it’s not ONE THING that makes you realize what you were taught is bullshit. It’s a lot of little things wholly inconsistent with how They Say the word should be. People who should be baby-eating evil actually being just normal. People getting fucked over in a way inconsistent with the worldview. So on and so forth and eventually you reach a point where you decide whether to see reality or to keep ignoring it. And that’s a really vulnerable place because every thing you used to believe in is now up for question. If THIS core belief was bullshit, what’s to say it’s not ALL bullshit? And when you’re in that space, it’s so tempting to latch on to the first thing that gives you an easy answer. Doubt is not comfortable. To someone not experienced with it, it’s terrifying. Scared people don’t tend to think we’ll or make good decisions so when someone comes along who knows how to exploit it, bad things happen.
I think that’s why Trump is so popular. He gave people a way to “see reality” inconsistent with the American bootstraps capitalism ideology without changing their beliefs (which is as Joyce exemplifies, difficult and painful) by giving them a scapegoat. If not for those scapegoats, the system would work. Or so Trump says. And the converts to his cult of personality follow him with the fervor of a true believer.
I don’t know where Joyce ends up from here, but where I ended up was much better. But I had to learn to be comfortable with doubt. And I imagine that’s going to be even harder for someone like Joyce who was brought up to view doubt as literally Satan.
Fundamentalist religions appeal to people who like certainty. That’s a generalisation, but in my experience it’s mostly true. The corollary is that they don’t like ambiguity. Science is inherently uncertain, because it always acknowledges the possibility that what we think we know might be wrong, and if new evidence appears that contradicts what we have believed, it is necessary (after appropriate verification) to change our beliefs.
That is disconcerting to a lot of people. Some faiths, and some members of faiths, accept that continuous questioning is a valid way to believe . . . but a lot don’t.
Man I really wish it didn’t go this route, but at least Joyce can start to change.
This is a Riot! Hahaha, im reading the strip, and as i finish with the last frame,…..
My browser crashes back to the desktop. Hahah, no, it really happened.
What you’re experiencing joyce. Is free thinking. I know it’s weird after growing up surrounded by wingnuts but its great
Fudge me this is a day for it for me, isn’t it? :/ *sigh*
I JUST came to the realization that I’m going to have to accept my past for what is was and move on, but the only way I can ever hope to do that is to cut out the toxic manipulation of my mother & sister. It breaks my heart, because I wanted to grow and prosper together with them, but with they way they are…or rather have always been, I’ve had to accept that I can’t take them with me if I want to get better.
I get where Joyce is coming from: the desire to not have anyone hurt and having someone to turn to for answers, yet at the same time, I do know the sad reality that that’s not always going to happen, even with God. I’ve learned to have faith in what God blessed me with to do what’s best in myself and whether he answers me or not isn’t as important as what I decide to do next. I know where Joyce is right now, I just hope she makes the best choice for herself. Good luck, honey & no matter what, it’s gonna be ok because only you’ll know what’s best for yourself.
Good for you. And I mean that both literally and figuratively.
This is unrelated but I recently had an existentially terrifying thought. I’ve been reading this comic since I was 13, I’m turning 19 in a couple months. Next year, I’ll be older than most of the main cast, who I pretty much spent my entire teens with.
Ik most people here are older than me so this probably sounds stupid but idk, it’s big to me
I bet it’d be even weirder if the comic started before they were born but when it ends they’re older than the students in the comic.
I had similar issues with Kitty Pryde of the X-Men. Started reading when i was 13 as she joined the X-Men at the same age. Nowadays she’s weirdly classed as being early-to-mid twenties (and occasionally still a teenager) and i am much much older.
I first saw Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet when I was thirteen. I distinctly remember finding 14-year-old Olivia Hussey extremely hot.
Now I watch the film again and she looks like a kid, and it gets really awkward in my head. The mice-boys are no longer age-appropriate, as it were.
I don’t believe in god, that being said I envy dogmatic people
To know that there is someone always looking out for you that wants nothing more but for you to be happy and live a fulfilling life, to have a set of rules that will guarantee that you’re happy no matter what and if you fail one of those rules it doesn’t matter, he’ll still love you, even more than before because you failed and are willing to try again stronger than before.
I wish I could believe such a thing…
With all my heart, I wish I could latch onto those beliefs and feelings as easily as dogmatic people do, I mourn the day I lost god…
That being said, it’s not as if I’m unhappy or “need” something like that, it just made things so much easier to pray my anxieties away when I was a little kid.
Too bad I can’t for the life of me return to that blissful state.
I knew a religious guy who tried to make everyone go along with his stupid ideas and insane ramblings by claiming he heard the voice of god telling him to do those things. I told him “that’s called ‘thinking,’ and you need to filter your bad ideas.”
“…died before I was born…”
thinks “Wait, that can’t be right. I remember when that happened. How could Joyce be a college student born after…”
checks Rich Mullins’ death date “… 1997.”
“Oh.”
Yeeeeeep – Joyce was currently born in 2001.
I don’t usually comment here because y’all scare me to death, but I really want to say that – as a devout Christian, but trying not to be an asshole – Willis is one of the best (justifiably) pissed-off ex-evangelicals I follow at making compassionate, nuanced observations about the culture and its effects on real human beings.
Right here with you.
Fear is the mind killer . . .
This community is the most compassionate online group I know of.
There is a lot of anger toward the injustices of this world (which are legion), but only occasionally is this directed at other commenters. Mr. Willis takes the task of moderating very seriously, and does not tolerate abuse.
I think Rich Mullins is a great choice here in the storyline. He was widely accepted and listened to in evangelical circles, but wasn’t much of an evangelical himself. He criticized the Religious Right pretty heavily.
My favorite Rich Mullins quote:
“Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.”
And, as always, I love reading Joyce’s struggles with religion because they’re so relatable for me. Homeschooled, evangelical family, culture shock, religious doubts, etc.
Oh lordy, that last panel.
I had to leave the religion I grew up in, and I just- yeah. That exactly, that is exactly the experience. You have to recontextualize your entire life and realize how much of it you were just feeling the things you thought you were supposed to feel and giving them the meaning you had been told they were supposed to have. And now you don’t know what you’re doing.
Sometimes I want it to have been true, because it would hurt less that way. But it wasn’t, and it doesn’t work like that, and now we get to cope.
I love how she changes back to her overalls in the second last panel to show that her old self is questioning her experiences and her upbringing. This is the Joyce who was raised in church and conservative home trying to find if her feeling when she was young were valid or if they were “Manufactured”. Something we all deal with.