Iris Black is a self-proclaimed inventor with the curious ability to bring his drawings to life, and yearns to find a space where he can use his powers freely.
Mac Hall
Matt Boyd
The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
The Otherknown
Lorian Merriman
Chandra is a 12-year-old accidental time traveler with a reluctant new dad, who happens to be a member of a feared galactic crime syndicate.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
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.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
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.
2 Slices
RJ Morel
After a case of mistaken identity, will awkward Daisuke find help from excitable Mamo, or will his love life be thrown completely off track?
Slightly Damned
Chu
Rhea Snaketail returns from the dead, befriending a Demon who falls in love with an Angel. The afterlife ain't what it used to be!
Fantomestein
Beka Duke
Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Beeserker
TJ Cordes
This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
BOOKMARK Click "Tag Page" to bookmark a page. When you return to the site, click "Goto Tag" to continue where you left off.
BUFFER WATCH
Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:
In my experience, the practical difference in beliefs between a self-professed atheist and a self-professed agnostic is incredibly minuscule. The difference typically just ends up being whether the individual prefers to stress that they are an agnostic atheist or that they are an agnostic atheist.
If you view belief as being a two-axis chart (theist/atheist one one axis and agnostic/gnostic on the other), the “gnostic atheist” portion has a vanishingly small number of people in it. And if you’re viewing it as a single-axis system with “agnostic” in the middle, that’s a viewpoint that just muddies the water, since hardly any atheists claim to have any absolute certainty on the issue (instead usually adopting a “No reason to believe until presented with convincing evidence” position).
I don’t know if there’s a God, and I don’t pretend to anything more or less than that. Although I do look askance at anyone else’s claim to be certain either way, which in the immortal words of Phil Foglio makes me a practitioner of “Militant Agnosticism – ‘I don’t know and you don’t either!
are you sure about the tooth fairy? i mean, impossible to prove a negative, right?
im agnostic when i don’t feel like having the SAME. DAMN. CONVERSATION. again and yet again. when im feeling spunkier, i go top shelf: “I don’t believe and YOU DON’T EITHER”.
Yes, however, that very same certainty of uncertainty means that you lack belief in any specific deity — you are open to the possibility, but you are not a worshipper or practitioner of any faith. By the majority of definitions, you would qualify as an atheist. This is what I was getting at when I mentioned stressing the agnosticism versus the atheism of being an agnostic atheist.
Woden87 – You are completely ignoring the fact that belief has different meanings. When the DOA characters do things that to me seem odd or out of character, I keep reading the comic because I believe in Willis. This has little to do with whether I believe in the literal existence of Willis or believe the name is a pseudonym for Jeph Jacques.
> ‘It all depends on what you want,’ put in Merry. ‘You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word.
Heretic! Clearly Jeph Jacques is a nom de plume of Willis. Kinda like Nora Roberts writing as JD Robb. You can do an archive dive on the wayback machine to find evidence.
Such a damnable heretical position as the other way around can only condemn you to the fires chairs of burning diaper eating.
“Gnosticism” as an opposite to “agnosticism” is a bad choice of a term. “Strong atheism” is the term I’ve seen used to describe the certainty that no gods exist. There’s already something called gnosticism, and it’s a group of mystery religions, some of which were a precursor to Christianity.
There are such people as agnostic theists (including agnostic Christians) but the taboo against doubt among the faithful means they’re not going to identify themselves that way, so most of the people who identify as agnostic, at least in religious countries like the US, are agnostic atheists. Who don’t like the connotations of the term “atheist”.
There are lots of specific gods that I know don’t exist, for various evidentiary reasons like “they’re self-contradictory” or “their bios include events that didn’t happen” or “if they existed as described the world would necessarily be different than it is”. Also, looking at the set of entities that aren’t disproven by the above sorts of things, I have realized that I personally wouldn’t consider them to really be a god, as opposed to a mere supernatural entity. So, despite being entirely receptive to being proven wrong by evidence, I have sort of stumbled into hard atheism based mostly on the fact that just because some wimpy amoral yahoo calls itself a god, I don’t have to agree with them.
And I think you are proceeding on the assumption that reality is singular. Whereas I believe the Universe is too complex to be understood in a single way and is best captured by thinking about it in levels and things that are absolutely true on one level can be completely false on another.
For instance, there is no such thing as the color of an object. Light has wavelengths, and light interacts with objects in various ways, but we don’t experience the wavelengths. What we perceive as color (most of us anyway) is an illusion completely created in our brains which automatically correlates receptors of three relatively narrow frequency bands and corrects for different things, sometimes using different strategies, as became apparent awhile back on social media with the picture of a dress that some people saw as one color and other people saw as a completely different color. The fact is, color is an illusion and not really a property of an object.
And for all that I am wearing a blue shirt.
I can’t speak for your experiences, but in 70+ years I’ve seen and experienced a fair amount that just doesn’t fit into consensus reality. None of which means I don’t find consensus reality a good tool for understanding most things. But there are levels and I also believe things that would probably curl your toes.
Not trying to change your beliefs necessarily, but sometimes things that aren’t strictly true (on one level) are the most true.
I feel like putting a title on it makes it more difficult for her. Like just let people be people. Everyone has a different relationship with faith or lack there of.
Well, she wouldn’t really admit to not being straight either. Instead she tried to normalize same-sex relationships as something all straight women do.
I’m a woman.
I do X.
So women do X, it’s completely normal, was my take on life as a teenager. I really was, and still am, annoyed with people who question my gender. I’m a cis woman and still people question, because their idea of what a woman is is rather narrow.
I have the opposite problem of having too broad an idea, which leads to embarrassment, especially with nonbinary folks, since there are apparently culturally accepted visual cues I have a habit of assuming are just personal aesthetic choices!
It could technically be read as “queer/bi is normal and I don’t like labels”, but the connotations lean heavily towards “I’m not queer, I’m normal”, which strongly implies there’s something wrong about actually being queer.
Especially since her character growth has leaned into her accepting she is queer.
I mean to be fair I also had that logic about checking out women when I was younger. Course I also learned that wasn’t the case when I was in middle school, not college.
I feel like agnosticism is the true Pascal’s wager. I mean, faith is faith, by definition you can’t force it or logic it out, but agnosticism holds the door open for the existence of something our meat brains can’t comprehend. Anyway, most religions say a “mustard seed of faith” is sufficient.
The point of the wager was Pascal’s way of saying you have nothing to lose if you believe in God beacuse if there is none then you lose nothing but if there is one you lose everything.
Basically just belive in God you have nothing to lose (if you ignore a whole bunch of things)
Since agnosticism does not take a leap towards one way or the other it would probably anger him (if he was still alive and not a skelton in the ground).
Pascal was a European Math guy, so could use a generic European sort of God, a sort of Emotionally Distant Paternalistic being who approached Infinity Omnipotence/Goodness/Omniscience without you having to divide by zero and wonder why babies die of disease.
There is a particular theistic switcharoo you see in a lot of the philosophical arguments for divinity, where they (if unconvincingly) prove some sort of divinity or metaphysical existence and then jump right from there to the Nicene Creed.
My counterpoint to Pascal’s wager is how do you know which god to believe in? What if there is a god, but it’s not the Christian God? What if the actual god doesn’t take kindly to those who worship false gods? What if we were supposed to worship Odin the whole time?
And whatever belief you choose, at least three fourths of the world will disagree. Well, even more, actually. Christianity and Islam each account for about a quarter of the world’s population, but both are split into multiple sects, which often consider each other heretical. So you can’t even just go with the majority, except strictly locally.
A person’s birthplace is the best predictor of their religion. Yes, people change their beliefs, but your family and community play the biggest part for most people. That used to be baked in to the entire concept. We had the Norse Gods, the God of the Hebrews, the Greek Gods, the Hindu gods, etc. It’s a subtle change in the way we treat other religions. Does it make a difference? I’m not sure.
“We go to war with those people all the time over land and water. Also, their gods are wrong.”
vs.
“We will make war on those people because their gods are wrong, then we will take their land and water.”
I don’t know, but I bet some thoughtful scholars have looked into it.
FWIW, Apostle Paul said “If you were hot or cold I would take you in, but you are lukewarm so I spit you out” or something like that. But Paul is only an authority if you buy into the whole “Bible is magically correct” thing.
Blaise Pascal literally invented the roulette wheel, and he certainly knew that the options were not “Christian” and “not-Christian”. There are countless possibilities for ‘the right religion’, and that’s just the ones humans know about!
Besides, what if whoever’s in charge prefers an honest atheist to a conniving convert who’s only in it for the benefits?
The way I see it is this: If there is an afterlife, and the system is just, then thoughtcrime doesn’t keep you out of the good one and there is no eternal torture because eternal torture is never just. If the system isn’t just, then it doesn’t matter what you believe because the game is rigged from the start.
Right, but “belief” isn’t something you can choose-not for me anyway. For me, Pascal’s wager is “I’ll believe in a God–because why not?” while agnosticism is “I believe in a probability that there is something larger than us.”
I always thought that Pascal’s Wager was bullshit, m’self. First, true belief isn’t something one chooses to have or not; there are lots of things in the world that I don’t like, but I don’t get to pretend or convince myself they don’t exist.
And second, a belief that “costs me nothing” is meaningless. If your faith has no opportunity cost, if it does not limit you or your behavior in any way, then IMO it counts for nothing.
You make a very valid first point but the second invites a believer to sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. If your belief demands you not to do something, I don’t think that makes it more valid. On the other hand, I agree that saying you blieve in the jewish god of abraham izaak and yaacov, and not keeping shabat, eating kosher nor doing any of the things connected to the belief, does invalidate the claim to believe. I need to think some more on this..
Most religions don’t talk about ‘faith’ at all. They’ll care about practice, not belief.
Jennifer Michael Hecht (_Doubt: a A History_) argued that the Christian and late-Judaic emphases on faith was itself a reaction to doubt, e.g. Hellenistic doubt.
Note: While the NT may say that with the faith of a mustard seed you can move mountains, human construction activities move the equivalent of several mountain ranges every year. You don’t need faith, you just need bulldozers and explosives, or, barring that, lots of people with shovels.
We can verify over and over that gravity and math work. God cannot be verified. Comparing the two is disingenuous at best and actively malicious at worst, so knock that shit off.
The phrase is, “the faith of a grain of mustard seed.”
Thing is, a mustard seed doesn’t have doubt. It doesn’t need to be persuaded to grow, to become a mustard plant – it just does it.
In my interpretation of the phrase, if you go to wield your faith to move a mountain, but you have to make yourself believe in it, if failure is even something you can conceive of – then you won’t succeed. Having the faith of a grain of mustard seed is about the hardest thing you can do, when you’re a sapient being; doing without thinking doesn’t come easily to us, no matter how it may look in relation to some people.
I don’t believe Joyce has turned her back on God as a concept, just the version of ‘the One True God’ as He has been presented to her in her own little branch of Christianity (and of course with them there is no doubt God is male: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost; Mary, if they even acknowledge her, was nothing more than the vessel by which the world was presented with God in His second form). So she has not “given up” on God entirely but is merely searching her own mind, trying to reconcile her experiences to a God-form that she can still accept and believe in. Therefore, I reject the “atheist” or even “agnostic” labels, and remain firmly in the “heretical thinking” camp.
Now, this may eventually lead her to atheism or agnosticism. It might also lead her to Zen Buddhism, Druidism, or Pastafarianism (the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster), for all I know. But at this point she is just a confused little eighteen-year-old facing a significant crossroads in her life, and I wish her all the best.
She’s definitely still confused and in the midst of a crisis of faith, but all the indications are that in losing her faith in the God she knew, she’s not even considering replacing it with another. It’s all wrapped together too tightly in her head. All or nothing.
Look at her Richard Mullins dream – she doesn’t feel any presence anymore and wonders if she ever did. That’s not rejecting a specific conception.
Short answer: Nothing. Or hellfire, if you ask a fundie, but nothing, if you ask me.
But if you choose the agnostic label BECAUSE you’re afraid of the atheist label, even if it’s an agnostic-atheist label… well, that’s still not anything wrong with being agnostic, but it is a problem of being in denial.
(Disclaimer: I’m not including in that people who select the agnostic label for other reasons, such as wishing to emphasize their belief in the unknowability of the question, disagreement about what the word even means, etc.)
Nothing, but the distinction between agnostic and atheist is mostly academic. At the end of the day, neither believes in (any) god, which 99% of the time is the important bit.
I think some words got reversed in the second panel. As of me typing this Sarah is asking Joyce if she believes in a Christian god or otherwise when I’m pretty sure Willis meant to have her asking if Joyce believes in a god Christian or otherwise.
I’m less sure that I know where he is going. Now to me, I think Sarah is presenting Joyce with a false choice, but I don’t know if that’s where he’s going or not.
Me too, but I’m also aware that Willis is mortal, and fallible, and has made typos and messed up scripts before.
And so, I agree with Proxiehunter: I think that was supposed to be “a God, Christian or otherwise”, and somewhere in the process it got screwed up. I expect we’ll see it fixed presently.
Whether you put Christian before or after does not change what the sentence is conveying significantly, and I feel putting it before makes more sense due to Joyce’s former status as a Christian that she is initially asking if she believes in the Christian idea of God. I don’t think words were reversed.
Agnosticism isn’t just a half-step towards Atheism. Some meander in Agnosticville before heading into Athiestown, sure, but it’s its own thing as well, a different school of though and approach to the question of gods and how that affects how we should act.
The point is that Joyce needs to figure this out. Her faith’s been shattered, and presumably she’s spent the last few months coming to terms with that… but she still needs to forge something new out of those shards.
I feel like Becky would understand, but I also feel like Joyce is not going to test it and try to hide it for as long as possible. Though this brings up an interesting question, what is Joyce doing ahout church? Is she still attending with Becky? Or is she not going at all?
Entirely possible she’s still going with Becky. I still went to Mass occasionally with my family, especially the big holidays, just to keep the peace. Even though I’d pretty much lost my faith in high school. I can see her trying to avoid upsetting Becky after last year’s horrible events.
I just hope it goes well for her. I never actually told my parents that I didn’t really believe anymore (or if I did they must’ve dismissed it). Joyce has more courage than I do in several ways.
Joyce’s fear (as shown in the Rich Mullins dream) is that Becky still kept her faith through dead mom, evil dad, and now dead evil dad, and if Becky still believes in God what right does she have?
Becky has… not exactly eased this fear, when it really seemed to come up. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/beeessin/ (And while it could well have been focused on the nihilism, that ‘you’ve been at odds with your parents for thirty seconds’ in response to ‘everything our parents taught us was a lie’ definitely suggests a degree of ‘I’ve managed just fine through worse’ on some level.) She didn’t discuss Joyce’s ‘I’m not sure I felt God’ after going to Jacob’s church beyond the ‘yeah this church was too structured and proper for our tastes’ aspect, which Becky herself felt.
Incidentally, Becky basically said she can sit through a service and not really internalize the doctrine in that strip – not surprising since I bet she’d been doing it for years – while we’ve seen Joyce struggle with both ‘we’re all imperfect except Jesus’ and ‘Jesus died because he was Good and we are Sinners’ on both the traumatic trigger front and the not being comforted by the concept front.
Becky’s had years to balance what she felt about herself with the doctrine she was taught. Joyce built her entire moral foundation on those teachings without question, only to have it all upended less than four months ago.
Yep. Becky also had all that time to manage WITHOUT finding a core tenet of Christianity in virtually any form whatsoever traumatic. And as far as we can tell, Becky never internalized the degrees of shame and neurosis about even considering having Imperfect Thoughts, the way Joyce has.
Gotta be honest given that, even if Joyce were to eventually come to terms with the concept of God I think she’d need a REALLY hard reset while she disentangles religion from her anxiety and shame.
She stopped going to church before all the kidnapping stuff happened. Im pretty sure if she didnt want to go, Becky wouldnt have any issue since it would open up some fresh wounds, and Becky herself would be looked down upon at most christian churches.
not really. As somebody who was raised half my life in a christian household, churches vary greatly and some christians dont like some churches and wont go to that church, choosing to drive upwards of 1-2 hours to go to one they like (I know from experience, having to get up at 6am to get ready for church, it was a 1 1/2 hour drive….). All she has to do if she doesnt want to be open about it, is that she has been to all the churches there and didnt feel at home at any of them.
Even with a mortgage (which she likely couldn’t pay), if there’s some equity in the place, she might be in a much better place financially than a few months ago.
Do you think The Former Congresswoman Formerly Known As Robin DeSanto was there over winter break? That was one of her two homes, right? And not her favorite?
Eh.. Strikes me more of Agnostic.
Can believe in the idea of something, but isn’t sure its anything good, or useful. Is just potentially there. Unrelated
Joyce’s crisis of faith is not resolved, she can’t decide if she believes in Yahweh or not.
There’s no joke here, but if I were there I would hand her a hammer and direct her to a forge to get rid of stress. Hephaestus may not have many followers these days but we are very mellow.
Sarah, this is the one time that teasing Joyce is not appropriate. This is actually really traumatizing and horrible for some people. Just leave it alone.
Yeah, this really isn’t cool to me. Joyce had so much of her identity wrapped up in being Christian and is now trying to work her way through years of doctrine that tell her she cannot be a good person and is going to hell. Even if she doesn’t consciously believe that, it’s very very hard to shake off.
Sarah isnt really teasing, more so just being blunt and logical, trying to talk joyce through it in a way for it to make sense, like bring up the fact that she is friends with a person and sees no issue with them having said belief.
It is important to talk through issues like this with friends, as keeping it in and not talking about it could lead to heightened levels of stress and anxiety over the issue. Sarah might not be doing the Nicest thing in some people’s views, but she is doing the smartest and in the long term, most helpful things she could be doing.
Joyce has been thinking through this for atleast 7-8 months now (its hard to tell a time frame in most of this comic) if not more, she knows that she doesnt have faith anymore, just doesnt want to label herself as a person who lacks faith as its been told to her over and over that a person who lacks faith is evil, even when it has been proven otherwise.
Ripping the bandaid off with a little bit of Sarah style care is kinda what she needs.
I kinda agree… but I kinda also agree with Switchchris. If this IS still teasing, yeah, Sarah, cut it out. If it started as teasing but began turning into a frank conversation as Sarah realized it was Serious… well, tread carefully, but not necessarily time to stop.
If Joyce has a problem with the conversation or how it is being handled, I’m pretty sure she could say so herself. Just like with real people, I don’t think you should jump to saying someone is being traumatising or harmful… when the person supposedly being harmed is still engaging in the conversation and isn’t trying to shut it down.
Yes, Sarah’s way of handling it and trying to talk it through wouldn’t be helpful for everyone, but this probably isn’t how she would handle it with everyone. It is the way she handles it with Joyce and Joyce doesn’t seem too broken up about it so much as struggling to accept the word atheist in a similar way to how she struggled to accept the word divorce because saying it out loud would make it real and that is scary and difficult.
Well, I mean, she might well be. Atheists don’t just not believe in God. They believe in the non-existence of God.
Joyce might well not have that kind of conviction. That’d likely make her an agnostic. Or she might’ve just abandoned the idea of the Judeo-Christian style of god. That’d like make her a deist.
It’s not like Joyce is suddenly going to decide she’s Muslim or worships Zeus. Other people might, but this is Joyce. Sarah’s just focusing on Joyce’s conflict.
So it sounds like ‘agnostic’ might be a more accurate label. For now, if not for long. Not that all agnostics are atheists-in-waiting, but it’s pretty common for someone on her deconversion trajectory to be ‘agnostic’ for a period.
Or it might be that she’s mostly averse to atheist as a label, due to ‘connotations’, even if she is one in effective reality.
“Just because I believe in worker control of the means of production doesn’t make me a *communist*.” “Why not?” “I was raised hating communists!”
The thing is, what communists actually seem to believe is the state controlling the means of production in the name of the workers. On the other hand, capitalists seem perfectly fine with workers also being capitalists.
I think Billie’s position would be that it’s not really bisexuality if your just experimenting. That was also a pre-Ruth position.
I tend to suspect that Joyce is a person who will wind up with a strong belief in something. What that something might look like, it’s too early to tell.
I have discussed the issue with many communists which derided “state capitalism” and professed to believe that under communism “the state will wither away”.
I could never get them to explain how, or how the resulting economy would work. But that’s another problem.
Decades of Cold War propaganda taught generations of Americans to blindly reject every “ism” as an evil virus of Satan, except unfettered capitalism of course. (All while they built interstate highways, Social Security, and Medicare, but you’re not supposed to think about the contradiction. Just galvanize the doublethink like a good little consumer.)
Capitalists may be perfectly fine with the workers also being capitalists in theory, but in practice they’re pretty good at keeping the vast majority from doing so. And no, a 401K doesn’t count as “capital”.
I do agree that the step where the state withers away seems unlikely in practice. Things like worker owned companies seem a better approach. Or requirements for labor to have a seat on the board – as I believe happens in Germany. Along with other worker protections and social supports.
A synthesis of capitalist and socialist approaches.
At some point we are going to have to do something radically different. I don’t think people have really realized in full yet that the rapid development of AI technology means that our form of capitalism has a strictly limited shelf life.
Our form perhaps, but that doesn’t mean that what we know as communism is that “radically different” thing or that it would then wither away.
And “eternal growth” isn’t really limited to capitalism. It’s been a basic approach to human economies since we started civilization – with the attendant collapses.
I’m not a fan of communism or centralized control of economy in general and I do like the feedback aspects of regulated capitalism while not believing it is in any way magical. But the thing is, when labor becomes more or less valueless, I don’t see any way to make things work without some serious changes.
Worker control of the means of production is also pretty meaningless when you have and need almost no workers. So, no, communism is in no way the answer. Maybe some form of socialism is. Heck, maybe a small patch like massively negative income tax would preserve the base of customers that it keeps capitalism humming, but none of this has been thought through and I have no confidence that it will be until the future smacks into us.
When it comes to labels, you can always create your own if there aren’t any that fit quite right. It helps to have your beliefs fully fleshed out first though, and it seems like Joyce is still in the figuring it out stage.
And if a busy person like you is too occupied to create your own label, we at Labels Are Us will be most happy to licence you a fully customised hand-crafted label that will provide your beliefs with the gravitos and air of authority they deserve, all for a low low monthly fee.
Joyce spent her winter break at Becky’s? I feel like the divorce implosion at the Brown’s already happened. I’m surprised Joyce still has tuition, since there’s no way in Hell her mother would allow her to spend more time with (in her eyes) a godless heathen lesbian. Or is Hank in charge of finances?
Hmm. Yeah, I’m with those commenters who think Joyce’s current hangup isn’t the existence of god(s); it’s the word “atheist”. Lack of belief dates back to the Rich Mullins strips. There’s nothing yet that indicates she’ll consider another religion or some indefinable god-being in the place of her previous Christianity. Embracing the word for her beliefs, now, that’s a challenge given what she was raised to believe about “the A-word”.
Joyce, sweetie, it’s okay for you to be an atheist. Yes, you.
On the other, it took me maybe 30 seconds. It involved a brief conversation with my grandfather about ‘jesus’ and santa claus. I’d already proven using a bit of logic and some experiments that santa wasn’t real. He tried to convince me that ‘jesus’ was somehow different.
Which means it has a social function but does not render reality as it is? Before I learned that fundamentalist Christians actually exist, that was my definition of a religion. A metaphor, to make sense of life and create connection.
So I never had any problem with religion vs science, they were not concerned with the same subject matter. That people exist that think they are still makes my brain hurt.
It’s not only fundamentalists who think that God (or gods) and souls are real, not metaphorical. Christian fundamentalists purport to be literal about the whole Bible, world created in six days a set number of lifespans ago. Catholics aren’t fundamentalist, but they’d get pretty offended if you said they thought everything was just a metaphor.
Many Christians consider some of the stories and rituals metaphoric, but few consider God and Jesus themselves to be metaphor. God is still the creator – even if He didn’t do it in a literal 7 days in the order described in Genesis. Jesus still died on the cross for your salvation, even if some of the other stories are metaphors.
Much of Joyce’s belief is tied up in literalism. Another reason Catholicism would confound the hell out of her is the fact they believe in evolution. I knew a fundamentalist turned atheist friend of Joyce (who was more like Mike in personality) who had his brain shut down when I explained to him that.
The idea that the story of Creation didn’t have to be literal for believers was not at all how he was raised.
Becky mentioned a mortgage after the first kidnapping. If it and the utilities were on auto-pay, it might just coast until the account it draws from is depleted.
It’s going to be tied up as part of her father’s estate, though. I think by default she would inherit everything (seeing as she’s an only child and there’s no surviving spouse), but Toedead could have left a will specifying other beneficiaries. If he did, the question is whether he wrote her out at any point.
Not even so much that assumption, but that writing her out of his will would have been symbolically acknowledging that she wasn’t his property anymore. He’s not going to disown her, because she’s his.
Yep. I don’t think Becky’s keeping the house, because that’s a lot of money she doesn’t have for a place full of ghosts, but it’s pretty likely it’s legally hers now unless he, like, willed it to the church. (I mean, SOMEONE’S childhood home is being sold in a vain attempt to save the congregation from bankruptcy. And that’d be a good way to spare Becky months and months of Dealing With Dead Parent’s Estate. Having to clear and sell the house adds so much time to that pain in the ass.)
… Actually speaking of that estate issue, I will totally give Robin more credit on the redemption arc/Adopting A Teenage Lesbian path if she’s gotten Becky an accountant for that shit. Don’t make Becky do Ross’s taxes, Robin. She has college to deal with.
Though if anything can be cleared from the sale, the money would be good to have.
And as awful as having to clear out the stuff is, just having it all taken away without recourse might be worse.
But having an accountant or somesuch to handle the process would be great.
Unless she just arranges to have an estate sale company liquidate everything and cut her a check. If she firmly believed she’d never set foot in the house again anyway, and has already mourned the loss of the idea of it as “home”, returning might just reopen old wounds.
I suspect Becky would want to do at least some cursory looking around in her room (now that her living situation is pretty stable and so she can bring a sentimental item or two,) probably another check for original documents just to be on the safe side because new copies might be slow going, but yeah, I don’t think she’s up for sorting through everything there. Or spending any more time in that community than absolutely necessary. Sold as quickly as feasible seems like the best idea, and hopefully since she was his only heir all accounts could be closed quickly and mailing subscriptions cancelled.
You are missing some interesting distinctions. There is a difference in believing a god exists and believing in him (them). As an illustration, there are plenty of people who believe Satan exists that aren’t satanists. There is also a difference between a belief that a god does not exist and the lack of a belief that the same god does exist.
Atheist doesn’t quite seem to cover Joyce’s current state, though it might do so in the future.
I see that as a distinction between believing Satan exists and worshipping Satan, not as a distinction between believing Satan exists and believing in Satan.
There’s also some non-theist religions, usually Eastern, where the literal existence of gods is utterly unimportant. Some strands of Buddhism, Confuscism, philosophical faiths, and even strands of Hinduism.
“Atheism” is something that means more to Joyce than some.
Granted, she’s out the outskirts of Agnostiville, but Agnosticism isn’t “I don’t believe in a specific god anymore and now I’m not sure what I believe in”. It’s a positive affirmation that you don’t know if there are any divine beings, you’re not against the concept, but you’re comfortable with not knowing for sure too.
The only thing that Joyce knows about what she believes in right now is that she doesn’t know what she believes in. That’s not agnosticism, that’s “I don’t know what my faith is right now”, and that’s okay. Admitting that to oneself is a good start to figuring that out.
Wow. Never thought I’d see Sarah be this much of an ass. There’s a lot of spectrum between “doesn’t believe in a fundamentalist caricature of the Judeo-Christian God” and “believes that God does not exist,” girl. You wouldn’t appreciate it if Joyce whipped out “The Four Spiritual Laws” tract when your whole world suddenly collapsed, would you? Stop deliberately digging at fresh wounds as you try to get that notch on your belt and give Joyce some space to figure things out on her own.
Uhhh. Joyce literally just said to her she does not believe in a Christian God OR OTHERWISE, Sarah did give her the option to mention other possibilities if she believed in them.
Sarah is not being an ass, she is trying to talk Joyce through it. If Joyce was unwilling to talk about it at all, yes, she would be being an ass, but Joyce is more than capable of saying ‘I don’t want to talk about it right now, can you stop?’ But Joyce is more just grappling with the word atheist like she did divorce where she doesn’t want to say it aloud and give it the power of being real because it is uncomfy and scary.
Yup, in some abstract theoretical discussion there would be other possibilities, but this is Joyce and Sarah knows her well.
She’s having trouble with the word. With the admission. She’s not holding some nuanced position in between her former beliefs and atheism.
There are different types of non religious people:
Atheists: “God isn’t real”
Agnostics: “Maybe, maybe not. Show me evidence.”
Deists: “God created the universe but only focuses on the laws of physics.”
Pantheists: “We are one with everything.”
Secular Humanists: “We must base our morals on helping other people.”
Satanists: “Fuck religion!”
State atheists: “W e must destroy all religious stuff, even if it’s counterproductuve to human culture!”
Transhumanists: “BECOME AS GODS!”
Nihilists: “Nothing matters!”
Objectivists: “Let’s burn oil field, destroy the economy, build a secret society and forbid altruistic organizations.”
BioShock fans: “Let’s built a city in the Atlantic Ocean.”
Warhammer 40K fans: “Purge the Xenos!”
What is a state atheist?
And you forgot people like me: Spirituality is a human need. That doesn’t mean, there is a god(des) or several, but that it might help me (And everybody else) deal with life and connect to the world and other people if I (everybody) have a religious or spiritual practice. It just means I know it’s not about „the truth“, so everybody does this in a way that feels right to them. A no f**** proselytizing, harassing or otherwise being a bother to the rest,
Or at least aimed at countering the potential power of religion as a opposing force to the state. It’s generally more effective to co-opt religion than suppress it though.
There were aspects of Soviet and Maoist Communism that seemed like religion-substitute: fixation on texts and spinoff heresies, entombing Lenin like a saint relic. But I’d say the state atheism itself was in parallel to but distinct from that. Hostility to religion doesn’t have to mean trying to create a secular substitute.
Maybe.Though I wonder. If you ignore the contents of what is being said and just compare the rituals, the structure of what is done, is there really a difference?
Interesting change, even in its walky joyce continued to believe in God, despite having to deal with aliens, a giant cyborge monkey and interdimensional cheese, I remember that was actually a plot point.
I never thought I’d see joyce in a place of not actually believing in God.
Some of us are attached to her turning out to be atheist!
I’m sure it’s related to what one thinks of ‘atheist’ and ‘agnostic’ and their corresponding ‘isms’, and whether one thinks of religious thought as meaningful and desirable or as a giant digression on the part of the human race.
Sometimes also related to ideas of “Joyciness” and sadness at her being perceived to move too far, too fast.
I mean, go back one day and the comments were like 99% “ZOMG YAY JOYCE IS AN ATHEIST NOW!”
I read it more as people wanting the best for her, for Joyce to be happy and secure in herself and confident and away from all of those evil Evangelical sorts. They’re largely just hoping that she’s got it all sorted out, and aren’t quite grasping that it’s fine for her to not be there yet, because this way she has some fun story stuff to develop.
(…also, just gonna say that Evangelical Atheists are a thing, and while generally lacking in numbers or de facto power, they can be just as much of a dick on a personal level as Evangelical Christians)
You see, I do not agree that faith is a virtue. To me the propensity to believe things without evidence is, well, maybe not a sin, but at least a failing. Joyce still feels that Becky is meritorious for having maintained her faith through horrible tribulations. I prefer to admire Joyce for having cast off the burden of her faith without them.
“Your faith was stronger than mine? I’m sorry to hear it, but I’m sure you can escape from it nevertheless. Would you like help?”
What faith can also be is a sort of rock one clings to against the trials of every day life. One of my personal tenets of faith (as an Agnostic, mind you) is that people, generally speaking, want to be good, they want to do good things, and most of the awful shit that happens stems not from people being evil, but people being really shitty at being good.
And yeah, it can abso-fucking-lutely be a blinding sort of faith. The “maybe this time things will work out alright” sort of thing. But it’s also helped keep me, well, sane for the last few years, when it feels like we’re stuck in this endless downhill spiral and there’s so, so many examples of people being just… just the worst.
I suppose, though, that I’m not describing it as a virtue. Just a bit of helpful self-delusion that helps one get through life without going crazy.
Faith can be a comfort in times of trial, the relief of agony. Or rather, it can enable beliefs that function thus. That’s fine.
But I have known people whose faith gave them beliefs because of which they lived in miserable terror of eternal, deserved torture. Or died. A dear friend of mine passed her last few days in an agony of apprehension that her repentances and penances had not been sincere and abject enough to remit her sins, which by my lights were imaginary.
I feel like people are missing that she spent the entire break with Becky, wich means that Joyce is still avoiding her family. It is possible that she still has not yet seen or spoken to her mom since before the “incedent”.
I’m a Christian, I believe in God, that he created everything. I don’t know the bible by heart like Joyce but I don’t really get why she can’t just believe in God in her own way? Not in her church’s way.
I’m just curious. If Willis wants her to be atheist or not believing in God thats his right as a writer cuz its his character. I was just commenting and asking questions.
Because Joyce’s brand of extremism she was brought up with and her own personality both are very prone to black-and-white thinking. To her and her belief structure, if one thing is false or incorrect or intentional falsehood, it all is.
She figured out she’d been lied to on matters she felt core to her faith and beliefs – and to her, if that’s a lie, it all is. The sects of Christianity prone to young-earth creationism and to fundamentalism teach explicitly that if one part of science is wrong, it’s all a satanic conspiracy to damn people and all lies. IME as someone who was brought up in a politically similar subculture, that kind of rigidity cuts too ways – it helps keep people from questioning, but when they do start to question, it tends to result in swift and severe disillusionment.
I wasn’t brought up in that particular extremist subculture but I was brought up in the fundamentalist/prepper/militia/far right scene & my disillusionment followed a pretty similar trajectory to what Joyce is following. If the belief structure demands that you believe everything or nothing from it, when you find a deal breaker you end up throwing it all out. It affected Joyce this way and not Becky because Becky never fully bought into the all or nothing aspects of her religion in the first place. Joyce was “the best” of her homeschool group – she was the one who had most completely internalized their indoctrination of her. Her belief was the hardest – but also the most brittle.
Eventually I did swing back a little and end up in moderate leftist land but the stereotype of the ex far righter becoming an arch leftist (or the ex fundamentalist becoming the antitheist atheist) has a basis in reality – not for everyone, but for enough.
Two significant reasons, in addition to ischemgeek’s point about all-or-nothing.
1) Joyce ‘doesn’t feel God when she prays’ and isn’t sure that she ever did. Judging from the Rich Mullins dream and her further protest that she ‘does sometimes!’ and that she’s ‘normal’, this is a doubt she’s actually had for quite some time. Can’t believe in God in your own way if you don’t fundamentally have a sense God is there. (Note also here all of Joyce’s similar anxieties and behaviors, particularly with her sexuality. Note the shame involved in admitting she has sexual desires at all. This is autobiographical from the writer, as is Joyce in general, and having been in a similar place myself it’s a big clusterfuck of anxiety and shame.)
2) Joyce finds the core tenet of Chrisitanity – ‘Jesus is perfect, we all are not, and he died for our sins’ – traumatic now, after Ross said he’d die for Becky while pointing a gun at them both. She no longer takes comfort even in the idea of Jesus alone being perfect – she instead finds it sad. Even if Joyce were to reconcile with the idea of God, I don’t think it would be in a Christian context.
…It’s weird to see a conversation you’ve been having in your head multiple times a week suddenly show up on a comic you just caught up on less than a month ago…
I’m only freshly past the guilt of leaving, then the self-hatred for wondering if I lost my faith because God didn’t want me, then the loneliness of losing an entire family/social group (again).
This comic has addressed a lot of “Christianese.” I was taught names, titles and labels always mean something. There’s a number of ritualistic things I’ve held onto; some by choice and some by compulsion. Holding onto the labels of Jewish and Christian (yes, both. It’s complicated) is one of them. Taking on a label of “Atheist” should be silly and easy but it’s really one of the rougher steps so far.
Oh, thank GOD. (Yeah, I know. Just leave that one on the table.)
Sarah’s come such a long way from “I DON’T WANT TO MAKE FRIENDS” that it’s easy to forget she still has blind spots. This convo is SO much more nuanced than it would’ve been, otherwise.
Spirituality is not a binary thing.
Atheism is the firm belief that there is not and cannot be any unseen or yet unknown higher power. It’s basically a religion in itself.
Agnosticism on the other hand akcknowledges there is no proof of either way and therefore organized religion is bogus. You cannot claim to know the desires of a spirit that may or may not exist. Pray if you feel like it, believe in good luck charms if you must, but do it for yourself not an expectation that might never come to fruition. You may believe but rituals and dogmas are meaningless because you cannot claim to know.
To me, agnosticism is a more scientific approach than atheism, because acknowledging you don’t know is the first step to one day knowing.
Yah drs is right. Also, your definition of atheism is insulting and a reflection of an outside observation of a phenomenon rather than a clear understanding of it removed from bias.
Atheism is an absence of belief, we don’t actively believe in nothing, we just don’t have belief in gods or higher powers. We spend literally zero seconds of any day worshiping or devoting belief to a concept or practice.
For me, my time is spent grousing about my shitty childhood and wishing humanity wasn’t a perpetual horrorshow of terrible decisions. Take 100 different atheists, and they will each spend their time, energy and thoughts in 100 different ways. The only thing we all agree on is that generally, we don’t believe there’s some cosmic level sentience that created everything, or moves everything around, or that has made a place or indeed many places for every alive thing to go when it dies.
We do not attend atheist church, we do not worship atheist jesus, we do not quote atheist scripture nor do we follow any brand of atheist dogma. We just live our lives by accepting the consequences of our actions, that our actions are ours alone, and that this applies to every living thing capable of acting.
There’s some grey area around that last point of course, because in or outside of religion, many people struggle with concepts of personal responsibility, then we get into psychology and psycho-analysis, bringing in questions like “nature versus nurture”, and then there’s Biology that brings in stuff like instincts and biological imperatives… but anyway.
Science is a process of proving or disproving a hypothesis, it is no more scientific to be agnostic than atheist, because both atheists and agnostics require the same burden of proof of the divine to change their thinking, atheists just understand that scientific reasoning doesn’t necessitate proving a negative, it cannot prove something doesn’t exist, so the better avenue is to assume god/s do/es not exist/s because there is no tangible evidence in favor.
Also, technically the definition of agnosticism you provide isn’t correct either, as agnosticism is the belief that there may be a higher power, but there has not been sufficient evidence presented to the observer to establish it, and may also mean that the observer does not believe that sufficient evidence can be provided to establish that a God or Gods exist/s. Agnosticism also allows any or all of the world’s religions to themselves be scientifically accurate, as it only requires sufficient evidence to be delivered to the agnostic to lead them to believe God/s exist/s as that particular religion describes.
Atheists put forward the hypothesis that there is no sentient creator and therefore no afterlife or divine will, so if there is a god then there can be evidence of a god, which can then disprove the hypothesis. We stake nothing by potentially being wrong, because there is and has been no cosmic punishment observed for stated lack of belief, and for people who care (theists) and within their own religion’s scriptures, both agnostics and atheists are nonbelievers and therefore punished for their lack of belief in the same fashion, to the same degree.
I‘d say that distinction is superficial (like the alleged difference between christian sects), but it was certainly interesting following that line of thought. I will include that in my argument in the future.
Most of what you „correct“ is basically what I was saying but with way more words.
Without proof it‘s still a belief system based on a hunch, though. That’s the thing where atheists are exactly like other religious people: The unwavering conviction to be in the right. If the laissez-faire approach of atheism would be true, you wouldn’t get this worked up about it.
Most atheists I know are pretty chill about this, though. So no harm done.
I agree that most religions are nonsense and/or dangerous (because you can proof they are) but I could not say for certain spiritual beings don’t exist — just that it‘s a) highly unlikely and b) completely irrelevant for my life if it were true, obviously.
Also I myself am neither „pure“ agnostic or atheist, I consider myself an agnostic discordian. Gods are unlikely, but chaos (in a spiritual and practical sense) is most likely a thing.
Now that I’m not on the phone: most atheists will say they could be wrong, if you push them in a philosophical dispute, they just don’t think it’s very likely. Agnostics say they can’t know, but lots of them act pretty solidly atheist: they don’t believe, they live godless lives, etc.
The scientific approach *starts* with “I could be wrong” but it goes on from there; you don’t refuse to form any belief or to take any stand, you form and revise probabilistic beliefs based on evidence.
My Bayesian odds ratio on the existence of any form of intelligent creator is less than 50%, and my odds ratio for the existence of a personally attentive benevolent creator who care if I believe in it is vanishingly small. The prior is small and the likelihood — the conditional probability of the observable evidence given such a hypothesis — is teeny, so the posterior probability is teenier.
I have a lot of trouble plucking Bayesian priors out of thin air to begin with, but I think I’d start out with 50:50 between Cartesian dualism and physicalism. Then all the evidence about brain injury, neurological diversity, the effects of drugs, fatigue, nutrition, and hormones such as adrenalin on mental processes would have me conclude that mental processes are very likely (a) physical, (b) the function of elaborate neurology, and (c) adaptive as the result of evolution. The propositions that the universe has a soul and that its creator has a mind are both less likely than that souls exist and that un-evolve things with no brains have mental processes. So I end up with a personal creator or spirit of the universe being very, very unlikely.
yeah, kind of like that. Ignorance might suggest a uniform prior between p(Creator) and p(no Creator), but the trend of intelligent and vitalist explanations being displaced has me lowering the former. p(Christian God) has to be strictly smaller than p(Creator), and while p(evidence|Creator) is kind of murky, p(evidence|Christian God) strikes me as minuscule. A benevolent powerful god who cares about my belief would behave very differently. (Also I’m not sure ‘benevolent’ and ‘cares about my belief’ are at all compatible, but benevolence should lead to efforts to avoid ‘having’ to send me to Hell…)
It‘s true insofar as „no man is an island“ as they say and everything exists on a spectrum. There is probably no certain single way of being a „true“ atheists (or anything else for that matter).
But this whole discussion is basically intellectual navel-gazing (I’m kinda sorry I started it) since most religious people wouldn’t even make a distinction between atheism and agnosticism. Analyzing the minuscule differences between currents within a belief system is certainly interesting and very entertaining but doesn’t add much value in day-to-day dealings with people of either group. Because if push comes to shove, they will stick together, no matter they’re alleged differences.
I think the whole drive to find meaning in a meaningless universe is bordering on madness, yet people are willing to fight over it or devote their entire lives to it. Everything just to not gaze into the abyssal maw of randomness that is existence.
As a staunch atheist, I’m just gonna say, nah to all of this.
If you wanna talk about the toxicity of the New Atheism movement go right ahead, but don’t lump me in with the likes of TJ “This Shit Is Bananas” Kirk or Richard Dawkins.
This is already been addressed specifically, but I wanna point out that more generally, while acknowledging what you don’t know *is* important to science, it doesn’t follow from that that it is unscientific to disbelieve in the existence of things for which there is no empirical evidence
This is why it’s not un-scientific to believe dragons or unicorns don’t exist, despite. Not believing in things simply because it can’t be proven they DON’T exist is kinda standard practice for good scientists. When something can’t be proven or disproven either way there’s really no position on that issue that it even makes sense to say is more scientific than another.
On the basic concept of god as a being that created the universe, atheism, agnosticism, and theism are on equal footing.
Also worth noting is that even if some vastly powerful being showed up and started making flaming shrubs talk to people, it’s claims to being any sort of supreme being would be dubious. Atheists would be completely reasonable to accept them only as some kind of extremely powerful being rather than “God”
It’s actually kind of interesting to consider: The level of power necessary to convince any observer that you are God is far below the omnipotence we attribute to the usual Creator God idea. Whether it’s performing sufficient miracles or simple directly changing our minds so that we believe, nothing like that requires omnipotence or proves they created the universe.
It is possible to convince the most extreme skeptic, but not to actually prove.
I mean, there’s no scientific or even philosophical way to distinguish between infinite power and power that is merely extreme, because you can’t measure infinity.
I’m not sure it’d be possible for a creator god to scientifically prove to a human that they created the universe. It would be very difficult to prove they even had the power to do so, and didn’t simply have the power to manipulate human senses. They’d have to either tweak the laws of the universe or the human they were proving it to, and doing either kinda defeats the point
To me, can relate to Joyce to some extent, in that though I never really had faith, for a long time I pretended to and thought there must be something wrong with me.
Then I thought all the folks who claim faith were bullshitting too and we were just all going in a circle jerk of “Yep, I believe, do you believe?” “Yep, I believe, you?” Believe believe believe believe believe.
Now I accept that some faithful might be experiencing something outside of my experience, even as I consider myself an agnostic atheist and secular humanist.
But I keep the agnosticism under my hat if only because evangelical believers take agnosticism as a plz convert me sign and… No. I’ve had ppl try to convert me to their beliefs for 30+ years, it’s never worked, you don’t have the secret sauce, Captain Conversion, and I’d prefer not to waste my time or yours.
I think the reason just as much people want Joyce to be agnostic as much as there are people wanting her to be atheist is because it seems it’s always full-on belief or full-on atheist with no in-between of agnosticism generally ever being portrayed.
Neither Becky nor Joyce believe in a fundie god. Becky knows that does necessarily make one an atheist. Joyce thinks it does. They need to talk about this. Joyce is used to being the problem solver but Becky has answers for her.
Deconstructing fundie religion can take you a lot of places with atheism just one destination.
Becky believes in a god who is not the fundie god. Probably she got there years ago.
Joyce does not. Her god was the fundie god. Her whole belief system rested on it. And she didn’t realize she feels some other version of god, she realized she doens’t feel or hear god at all.
Joyce has no more reason to go down Becky’s path than to become an atheist, an arguably less reason.
If I’m reading her reactions right, Joyce is exactly where I was when I first started moving away from Christianity. It took a long time to be able to admit to myself that I was an atheist (and a really long time to get rid of that nagging fear that I might be wrong and hell was waiting for me.)
I also remember my coping mechanisms at the time: “I don’t DISBELIEVE… I just believe in a BIGGER god now! It’s still the same God, He’s just so much more loving than even the Bible was able to express! All the fundies who only go by the book are missing the big picture!” It took me too long to realize I was just trying to reconcile what I actually believed (about politics/society/history/science) with what I used to believe about God, and that I couldn’t have it both ways.
I definitely get what Sarah is saying and doing here, and is trying to help Joyce reconcile with herself and know that being an atheist isn’t a bad thing but… if Joyce doesn’t want to identify as an atheist yet, or doesn’t feel like that term fits what her lack-of-belief-in-god is right now, I feel it’s a little presumptuous to push her.
Also, it’s been one semester. If she needs time, she needs time.
Well it has been questioned, and outright denied, pretty loudly by the worst corners of religion.
A lot of religious moderates demonstrate that, on an individual level, it is possible to be reasonably moral (no one’s perfect, but some of them are pretty good people) while believing in deity.
Whether it’s possible to have that sort of moderate belief as part of a larger society, without spinning off a bunch of super-nasty extremist versions like an old-fashioned nuclear plant tossing out its radioactive waste? That’s the question I don’t know the answer to, but I suspect the answer isn’t a pleasant one.
The importance of religion, God, and how they are intertwined with Good isn’t related to secular humanism. If you believe in God then your humanity and capacity for good is part of why you love God because that is a gift.
Gnosticism was (is?) an actual philosophical belief that is considered heretical by the church. They believe in God but they don’t believe he meant to create the world. The world is material, god is everything immaterial, thus this world was made by something lesser. I don’t remember a lot of the nuances, but some of their stuff is just bizarrely cool… like humanity being little bits of god dust that were somehow captured in meat suits and just wants to find it’s way back home. I 100% stand by my ridiculous paraphrasing.
In standard Gnostic theology, this world is evil and was created by the demiurge, a flawed and/or evil lesser “god” – this is often equated with the Old Testament God. The real God is remote but sent (or inspired) Jesus to reveal the truth.
It is kind of fascinating stuff, especially when you start digging into the history and influence on early Christianity. It developed along with the early Church out of the same stew of influences.
And it puttered along pretty steadily until the first half of the Thirteenth Century, when it was stomped hard with great cruelty, brutality, and slaughter in the Albigensian Crusade.
“Kill them all, for God will surely know which are His” goes back to a recommendation by the papal nuncio to the head of the French forces, recommending the massacre of the population of Toulouse on the suspicion that some were Gnostics.
Are you sure you weren’t trying to term Adorthable in the al-text? It is clearly a concept, if unrealized, in Joyce’s mind, and quite likely quite realized in the minds of others, who note her infatuation with Dorothy.
I know that Joyce is supposed to be semi-biographical for Willis’s own experience with college and Christianity, but I really was hoping that Joyce would come to the conclusion of “It’s possible to be a Christian and believe in God without being a judgemental racist piece of shit” instead of just throwing out the whole religion with the bathwater. Maybe this is just a midpoint in her path, but Joyce is one of my favorite webcomic characters BECAUSE she’s a positive Christian character.
I’ll keep reading because I love these characters and want to see them happy, but at the same time I can tell it’s gonna be a bittersweet experience.
I mean, Joyce does think you can believe in god without being a judgmental racist piece of shit. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t care at all what Becky, who believes in god, thinks about her.
Hey, I can see where you’re coming from. Think about it from Willis’s perspective, though. If Joyce is meant to be reflective of him, then it only makes sense that she eventually reach the same point as him. And from how he grew up, then it may very well seem to him that this is a liberation of sorts.
I can understand the wish for a positive Christian character, but those still exist. Becky’s faith is still very much going strong. If I recall correctly, Danny and Billie are both Christian, and while Danny and especially Billie have to grapple with their own shortcomings, they’re still decent people. Sierra, while not a major character, is pretty unambiguously good. And Hank easily stands out as one of DoA’s finest characters.
Joyce was not meant to be a character that symbolizes that “It’s possible to be a Christian and believe in God without being a judgmental racist piece of shit or Mary”. Nor is she meant to be a character that teaches that “you cannot be a good-hearted, positive person who learns but also be Christian”. She just is herself; a good-hearted young woman who, after she stepped out of her safe little bubble, saw more of the world, eventually became divorced from her original set of beliefs, and revised her position. (Alright, maybe I’m assuming too much too soon and Willis intends to show that I’m wrong. I’m just going off of the cards laid on the table so far.)
Last I checked Becky, Hank, and Sierra were all Christians AND good people, as were Agatha and Roz unless you don’t count Mormons or Catholics as Christians
Joyce bought completely into the toxic version of Christianity she was taught growing up. Her faith based purely on indoctrination is always going to fall apart completely when her trust in the community that indoctrinated her was broken. It has nothing to do with her thinking Christians are all bigots
Why is it disheartening, when Becky, Jacob, Agatha, and Sierra are all good-people Christians who aren’t judgemental racist pieces of shit?
I don’t think you can honestly read this comic with its wealth of good Christians of various levels of faith and sects and pull a “Christianity is bad” message. I posit it isn’t the exploration of Christianity that offends you so much as the exploration of de-conversion without an inherently pro-Christian bias to it.
Like tbh as an atheist ex-extremist-far-righter Joyce is the one character I get to see my own life trajectory explored in. It’s not one to one (I was an atheist by the time I hit grade school and didn’t shake far right politics for another 15 years almost), but characters like Joyce don’t get to exist in most of North American media because every single flipping time someone ends up doing a crisis of faith story, all the Offended Christians come out of the woodwork to decry it as debasing Christiany that the character seriously questions religion beyond the stereotypical “One bad thing happened so now I hate God” that shows up in Christian dramas occasionally when they want to straw man atheists, ignoring sympathetic portrayals of good-people Christians in the same story and applying pressure until the show/book series/comic/whatever chickens out and goes for a saccharin reunion with faith ending. Here you (and a few other commentators) are, doing the damn damn thing.
Not all parts of all stories have to be for you personally. Want a crisis of faith where the person retains their faith in Christianity? Go watch most Hallmark flicks, almost all mainstream dramas with religious overtones, and literally any Christian drama (the God’s Not Dead series seems right up your alley). Or, heck, read this story and follow Becky instead.
Off the top of my head, you still have Becky, Sierra, Jacob, and I’m pretty sure Lucy? They’re all very chill, reasonable Christians who talk about their faith but are respectful and don’t cudgel people with it.
I think one of the points of Joyce is that she was raised to be *extremely fundamentalist,* and one of the most common paths for these kids is that they crash hard (or continue to be a raging judgmental-ist like, say, Mary).
Joyce’s story is definitely one of those. But you’ve still got a bunch of positive representation in other characters who are what you’re describing. Becky especially, who’s been through *WAY TOO MUCH* but has kept her faith in the face of it all.
Loading ...
“like how I (barely admit I) like ding-dongs… just not on me”
go with you’re athorist, Joyce
“So you like ding-dongs on other people?”
She’s a voyeur
That’s good enough for Falwell Jr’s version of Christianity.
an ain’theist
Could be agnostic! Or apatheist!
But probably she’s just scared.
Yeah, that’s what I’m getting too.
In my experience, the practical difference in beliefs between a self-professed atheist and a self-professed agnostic is incredibly minuscule. The difference typically just ends up being whether the individual prefers to stress that they are an agnostic atheist or that they are an agnostic atheist.
If you view belief as being a two-axis chart (theist/atheist one one axis and agnostic/gnostic on the other), the “gnostic atheist” portion has a vanishingly small number of people in it. And if you’re viewing it as a single-axis system with “agnostic” in the middle, that’s a viewpoint that just muddies the water, since hardly any atheists claim to have any absolute certainty on the issue (instead usually adopting a “No reason to believe until presented with convincing evidence” position).
I don’t know if there’s a God, and I don’t pretend to anything more or less than that. Although I do look askance at anyone else’s claim to be certain either way, which in the immortal words of Phil Foglio makes me a practitioner of “Militant Agnosticism – ‘I don’t know and you don’t either!
‘”
That’s pretty close to what Huxley meant “agnostic” to mean when he coined the term.
Same here.
I love this and thank you for attributing it. I need to take a closer look at Phil’s work.
are you sure about the tooth fairy? i mean, impossible to prove a negative, right?
im agnostic when i don’t feel like having the SAME. DAMN. CONVERSATION. again and yet again. when im feeling spunkier, i go top shelf: “I don’t believe and YOU DON’T EITHER”.
Yes, however, that very same certainty of uncertainty means that you lack belief in any specific deity — you are open to the possibility, but you are not a worshipper or practitioner of any faith. By the majority of definitions, you would qualify as an atheist. This is what I was getting at when I mentioned stressing the agnosticism versus the atheism of being an agnostic atheist.
Woden87 – You are completely ignoring the fact that belief has different meanings. When the DOA characters do things that to me seem odd or out of character, I keep reading the comic because I believe in Willis. This has little to do with whether I believe in the literal existence of Willis or believe the name is a pseudonym for Jeph Jacques.
It’s worth trying to escape possible ambiguity by considering the use of words such as “trust”.
Can you trust a god you don’t believe in?
I can trust him not to bug me!
> ‘It all depends on what you want,’ put in Merry. ‘You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word.
No, but I can believe in a comics writer I don’t trust.
Who would not be D.Y. Willis, of course, No more that Descartes’ Demon would be God.
I believe in Sir Willis as well, however, that is because I have met the man.
Heretic! Clearly Jeph Jacques is a nom de plume of Willis. Kinda like Nora Roberts writing as JD Robb. You can do an archive dive on the wayback machine to find evidence.
Such a damnable heretical position as the other way around can only condemn you to the fires chairs of burning diaper eating.
just in case anybody was wondering: Gnostic is not actually A Thing
I get a fraud warning when I follow that link.
It is Richard Carrier, so that is not surprising.
Firefox says that site is a potential security risk.
Article about Gnosticism on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
“Gnosticism” as an opposite to “agnosticism” is a bad choice of a term. “Strong atheism” is the term I’ve seen used to describe the certainty that no gods exist. There’s already something called gnosticism, and it’s a group of mystery religions, some of which were a precursor to Christianity.
There are such people as agnostic theists (including agnostic Christians) but the taboo against doubt among the faithful means they’re not going to identify themselves that way, so most of the people who identify as agnostic, at least in religious countries like the US, are agnostic atheists. Who don’t like the connotations of the term “atheist”.
There are lots of specific gods that I know don’t exist, for various evidentiary reasons like “they’re self-contradictory” or “their bios include events that didn’t happen” or “if they existed as described the world would necessarily be different than it is”. Also, looking at the set of entities that aren’t disproven by the above sorts of things, I have realized that I personally wouldn’t consider them to really be a god, as opposed to a mere supernatural entity. So, despite being entirely receptive to being proven wrong by evidence, I have sort of stumbled into hard atheism based mostly on the fact that just because some wimpy amoral yahoo calls itself a god, I don’t have to agree with them.
And I think you are proceeding on the assumption that reality is singular. Whereas I believe the Universe is too complex to be understood in a single way and is best captured by thinking about it in levels and things that are absolutely true on one level can be completely false on another.
For instance, there is no such thing as the color of an object. Light has wavelengths, and light interacts with objects in various ways, but we don’t experience the wavelengths. What we perceive as color (most of us anyway) is an illusion completely created in our brains which automatically correlates receptors of three relatively narrow frequency bands and corrects for different things, sometimes using different strategies, as became apparent awhile back on social media with the picture of a dress that some people saw as one color and other people saw as a completely different color. The fact is, color is an illusion and not really a property of an object.
And for all that I am wearing a blue shirt.
I can’t speak for your experiences, but in 70+ years I’ve seen and experienced a fair amount that just doesn’t fit into consensus reality. None of which means I don’t find consensus reality a good tool for understanding most things. But there are levels and I also believe things that would probably curl your toes.
Not trying to change your beliefs necessarily, but sometimes things that aren’t strictly true (on one level) are the most true.
Oh I Like Apatheist, I might have to steal that… kind of embarrassed I didn’t think of it myself!
Apatheism from the church of Meh.
It’s the Militant Apatheists you have to watch out for.
Interesting. Do you have tracts?
Huge tracts of land.
It’s on the agenda for the next meeting.
I’m not sure when that’s been postponed till though…
Another one is Ignostic: “the term ‘god’ is not defined well enough to evaluate the statement ‘a god exists’.”
Ahhhh, apatheist. Very difficult to tell from the extremely similar brontotheist. Caused much confusion in the community.
Hail Eros.
I think she definitely cares about this too much to be an apatheist.
It always is, sweetie. It always is.
One day Carla will mix Joyce and Dorothy’s DNA in a test tube, send it through a spacetime warp, and it will grow up to be Leslie Knope.
Omg. I see it.
+1. We need thumbs up over here.
°o°
Yeah, that checks out.
Perfect comment for Amy Poehler’s birthday.
I like Sarah’s quiet acknowledgement that despite being an atheist herself (maybe?), she knows she’s not Joyce’s favourite person.
She’s happy in the knowledge she’s in the top ten.
Being Joyce’s favorite person would mean that Joyce would want to spend more time with her when Sarah wanted to be alone.
Sarah’s Joyce’s sister. Sisters are NEVER best friends, usually the opposite.
They love each other, but that’s a completely different emotion.
I feel like putting a title on it makes it more difficult for her. Like just let people be people. Everyone has a different relationship with faith or lack there of.
It’s like Billie not being able to call herself bisexual.
Ooh, good example!
… was that a problem with not wanting a label, or was that a problem with not actually knowing what the label means?
… because yes, it’s like that.
Well, she wouldn’t really admit to not being straight either. Instead she tried to normalize same-sex relationships as something all straight women do.
I am completely normal.
I do X.
Therefor it is normal to do X.
Impeccable logic.
Exactly.
I’m a woman.
I do X.
So women do X, it’s completely normal, was my take on life as a teenager. I really was, and still am, annoyed with people who question my gender. I’m a cis woman and still people question, because their idea of what a woman is is rather narrow.
I have the opposite problem of having too broad an idea, which leads to embarrassment, especially with nonbinary folks, since there are apparently culturally accepted visual cues I have a habit of assuming are just personal aesthetic choices!
I wonder if I would miss out on most of them, too.
Impeccable logic, but with unfortunate connotations. “I’m normal, not like one of them.”
Thank goodness, I’m not one of them. People who are not me can be so annoying.
@thejeff: Sorry, I don’t get what you are trying to say.
It could technically be read as “queer/bi is normal and I don’t like labels”, but the connotations lean heavily towards “I’m not queer, I’m normal”, which strongly implies there’s something wrong about actually being queer.
Especially since her character growth has leaned into her accepting she is queer.
I mean to be fair I also had that logic about checking out women when I was younger. Course I also learned that wasn’t the case when I was in middle school, not college.
What’s wrong with being agnostic?
To me nothing I am one and I am fine. But Pascal will get all bent out of shape about it.
I feel like agnosticism is the true Pascal’s wager. I mean, faith is faith, by definition you can’t force it or logic it out, but agnosticism holds the door open for the existence of something our meat brains can’t comprehend. Anyway, most religions say a “mustard seed of faith” is sufficient.
The point of the wager was Pascal’s way of saying you have nothing to lose if you believe in God beacuse if there is none then you lose nothing but if there is one you lose everything.
Basically just belive in God you have nothing to lose (if you ignore a whole bunch of things)
Since agnosticism does not take a leap towards one way or the other it would probably anger him (if he was still alive and not a skelton in the ground).
Yeah, but made Pascal so sure his god was the right one?
*what made Pascal*
Mostly water
Pascal was a European Math guy, so could use a generic European sort of God, a sort of Emotionally Distant Paternalistic being who approached Infinity Omnipotence/Goodness/Omniscience without you having to divide by zero and wonder why babies die of disease.
There is a particular theistic switcharoo you see in a lot of the philosophical arguments for divinity, where they (if unconvincingly) prove some sort of divinity or metaphysical existence and then jump right from there to the Nicene Creed.
My counterpoint to Pascal’s wager is how do you know which god to believe in? What if there is a god, but it’s not the Christian God? What if the actual god doesn’t take kindly to those who worship false gods? What if we were supposed to worship Odin the whole time?
And whatever belief you choose, at least three fourths of the world will disagree. Well, even more, actually. Christianity and Islam each account for about a quarter of the world’s population, but both are split into multiple sects, which often consider each other heretical. So you can’t even just go with the majority, except strictly locally.
Christianity is a bit under 1/3, Islam a bit under 1/4.
Unaffiliated is third, at 1/6, just beating out Hinduism, which is 2x Buddhism’s 7%. “Folk religions” at 6%, and that’s almost the whole wrapped up.
If you lump all the Christianities together, yes. But there have been plenty of Christians horrified at others’ beliefs.
Your suggestion of Odin has got me thinking:
A person’s birthplace is the best predictor of their religion. Yes, people change their beliefs, but your family and community play the biggest part for most people. That used to be baked in to the entire concept. We had the Norse Gods, the God of the Hebrews, the Greek Gods, the Hindu gods, etc. It’s a subtle change in the way we treat other religions. Does it make a difference? I’m not sure.
“We go to war with those people all the time over land and water. Also, their gods are wrong.”
vs.
“We will make war on those people because their gods are wrong, then we will take their land and water.”
I don’t know, but I bet some thoughtful scholars have looked into it.
FWIW, Apostle Paul said “If you were hot or cold I would take you in, but you are lukewarm so I spit you out” or something like that. But Paul is only an authority if you buy into the whole “Bible is magically correct” thing.
Paul’s a dip, he’s the original Problematic Jesus Fanboy.
Blaise Pascal literally invented the roulette wheel, and he certainly knew that the options were not “Christian” and “not-Christian”. There are countless possibilities for ‘the right religion’, and that’s just the ones humans know about!
Besides, what if whoever’s in charge prefers an honest atheist to a conniving convert who’s only in it for the benefits?
The way I see it is this: If there is an afterlife, and the system is just, then thoughtcrime doesn’t keep you out of the good one and there is no eternal torture because eternal torture is never just. If the system isn’t just, then it doesn’t matter what you believe because the game is rigged from the start.
Right, but “belief” isn’t something you can choose-not for me anyway. For me, Pascal’s wager is “I’ll believe in a God–because why not?” while agnosticism is “I believe in a probability that there is something larger than us.”
I always thought that Pascal’s Wager was bullshit, m’self. First, true belief isn’t something one chooses to have or not; there are lots of things in the world that I don’t like, but I don’t get to pretend or convince myself they don’t exist.
And second, a belief that “costs me nothing” is meaningless. If your faith has no opportunity cost, if it does not limit you or your behavior in any way, then IMO it counts for nothing.
You make a very valid first point but the second invites a believer to sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. If your belief demands you not to do something, I don’t think that makes it more valid. On the other hand, I agree that saying you blieve in the jewish god of abraham izaak and yaacov, and not keeping shabat, eating kosher nor doing any of the things connected to the belief, does invalidate the claim to believe. I need to think some more on this..
Most religions don’t talk about ‘faith’ at all. They’ll care about practice, not belief.
Jennifer Michael Hecht (_Doubt: a A History_) argued that the Christian and late-Judaic emphases on faith was itself a reaction to doubt, e.g. Hellenistic doubt.
“Most” religions? Or just the New Testament?
Note: While the NT may say that with the faith of a mustard seed you can move mountains, human construction activities move the equivalent of several mountain ranges every year. You don’t need faith, you just need bulldozers and explosives, or, barring that, lots of people with shovels.
But in order to actually use them, you must have faith they will work, otherwise you wouldn’t use them.
It isn’t belief without evidence, is it?
We can verify over and over that gravity and math work. God cannot be verified. Comparing the two is disingenuous at best and actively malicious at worst, so knock that shit off.
Well, you know, no one ever actually asked the mustard seed what it believed.
That’s a ridiculous argument and you know it.
The phrase is, “the faith of a grain of mustard seed.”
Thing is, a mustard seed doesn’t have doubt. It doesn’t need to be persuaded to grow, to become a mustard plant – it just does it.
In my interpretation of the phrase, if you go to wield your faith to move a mountain, but you have to make yourself believe in it, if failure is even something you can conceive of – then you won’t succeed. Having the faith of a grain of mustard seed is about the hardest thing you can do, when you’re a sapient being; doing without thinking doesn’t come easily to us, no matter how it may look in relation to some people.
So what you’re saying is that Yeshua was the original Yoda: “Do or do not, there is no try.”
I think it’s less the definition and more the connotation. She grew up with the term “atheist” being almost derogatory, as evidenced here
I’m not convinced anyone has said that word in Joyce’s presence, but I’d have to archive binge and I’m not physically up to that tonight.
Dorothy said it plainly. Something like, “I don’t believe either. I’m an atheist.”
“Atheist” is not the word under discussion. For example, Sarah just said it.
It seems she’s not agnostic, she just won’t say “No I don’t believe” out loud, even to Sarah or maybe even herself.
She doesn’t believe, but she’s certainly full of doubts about it.
I don’t believe Joyce has turned her back on God as a concept, just the version of ‘the One True God’ as He has been presented to her in her own little branch of Christianity (and of course with them there is no doubt God is male: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost; Mary, if they even acknowledge her, was nothing more than the vessel by which the world was presented with God in His second form). So she has not “given up” on God entirely but is merely searching her own mind, trying to reconcile her experiences to a God-form that she can still accept and believe in. Therefore, I reject the “atheist” or even “agnostic” labels, and remain firmly in the “heretical thinking” camp.
Now, this may eventually lead her to atheism or agnosticism. It might also lead her to Zen Buddhism, Druidism, or Pastafarianism (the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster), for all I know. But at this point she is just a confused little eighteen-year-old facing a significant crossroads in her life, and I wish her all the best.
She’s definitely still confused and in the midst of a crisis of faith, but all the indications are that in losing her faith in the God she knew, she’s not even considering replacing it with another. It’s all wrapped together too tightly in her head. All or nothing.
Look at her Richard Mullins dream – she doesn’t feel any presence anymore and wonders if she ever did. That’s not rejecting a specific conception.
Short answer: Nothing. Or hellfire, if you ask a fundie, but nothing, if you ask me.
But if you choose the agnostic label BECAUSE you’re afraid of the atheist label, even if it’s an agnostic-atheist label… well, that’s still not anything wrong with being agnostic, but it is a problem of being in denial.
(Disclaimer: I’m not including in that people who select the agnostic label for other reasons, such as wishing to emphasize their belief in the unknowability of the question, disagreement about what the word even means, etc.)
Nothing is wrong with it, but the tone of the comic being set is that Joyce has become an atheist and is unwilling to say so herself.
I don’t know.
Nothing, but the distinction between agnostic and atheist is mostly academic. At the end of the day, neither believes in (any) god, which 99% of the time is the important bit.
I think some words got reversed in the second panel. As of me typing this Sarah is asking Joyce if she believes in a Christian god or otherwise when I’m pretty sure Willis meant to have her asking if Joyce believes in a god Christian or otherwise.
I’m pretty sure Willis knows what he is doing. And where he is going.
I’m less sure that I know where he is going. Now to me, I think Sarah is presenting Joyce with a false choice, but I don’t know if that’s where he’s going or not.
Me too, but I’m also aware that Willis is mortal, and fallible, and has made typos and messed up scripts before.
And so, I agree with Proxiehunter: I think that was supposed to be “a God, Christian or otherwise”, and somewhere in the process it got screwed up. I expect we’ll see it fixed presently.
Whether you put Christian before or after does not change what the sentence is conveying significantly, and I feel putting it before makes more sense due to Joyce’s former status as a Christian that she is initially asking if she believes in the Christian idea of God. I don’t think words were reversed.
I think it was Sarah phrasing “do you believe in the existence of a Christian god, yes or no” in a way Joyce would find more palatable.
While it would be more technically correct the way you said it, it’s completely believable that someone would say it the way Sarah said it.
Agnostic ?
No one could know that.
>_<
You may or may not have just earned a gold star.
That’s the Schroedinger Medal.
She doesn’t know, she’s still figuring it out.
Agnosticism isn’t just a half-step towards Atheism. Some meander in Agnosticville before heading into Athiestown, sure, but it’s its own thing as well, a different school of though and approach to the question of gods and how that affects how we should act.
The point is that Joyce needs to figure this out. Her faith’s been shattered, and presumably she’s spent the last few months coming to terms with that… but she still needs to forge something new out of those shards.
I feel like Becky would understand, but I also feel like Joyce is not going to test it and try to hide it for as long as possible. Though this brings up an interesting question, what is Joyce doing ahout church? Is she still attending with Becky? Or is she not going at all?
Entirely possible she’s still going with Becky. I still went to Mass occasionally with my family, especially the big holidays, just to keep the peace. Even though I’d pretty much lost my faith in high school. I can see her trying to avoid upsetting Becky after last year’s horrible events.
I just hope it goes well for her. I never actually told my parents that I didn’t really believe anymore (or if I did they must’ve dismissed it). Joyce has more courage than I do in several ways.
Joyce’s fear (as shown in the Rich Mullins dream) is that Becky still kept her faith through dead mom, evil dad, and now dead evil dad, and if Becky still believes in God what right does she have?
Becky has… not exactly eased this fear, when it really seemed to come up. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/beeessin/ (And while it could well have been focused on the nihilism, that ‘you’ve been at odds with your parents for thirty seconds’ in response to ‘everything our parents taught us was a lie’ definitely suggests a degree of ‘I’ve managed just fine through worse’ on some level.) She didn’t discuss Joyce’s ‘I’m not sure I felt God’ after going to Jacob’s church beyond the ‘yeah this church was too structured and proper for our tastes’ aspect, which Becky herself felt.
Incidentally, Becky basically said she can sit through a service and not really internalize the doctrine in that strip – not surprising since I bet she’d been doing it for years – while we’ve seen Joyce struggle with both ‘we’re all imperfect except Jesus’ and ‘Jesus died because he was Good and we are Sinners’ on both the traumatic trigger front and the not being comforted by the concept front.
For reference, the Jacob interaction:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-8/01-face-the-strange/howyoureallyfeel/ and strips immediately following,
And the Rich Mullins dream, which also indicates this is deeply wrapped up in shame because if she doesn’tbfeel God something must be wrong with HER, specifically: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/03-sometimes-the-sky-was-so-far-away/feel/
(Lowkey forget that part sometimes, but that’s probably also a huge factor. Oh, debilitating, crushing anxiety.)
Oh, and for good measure, Joyce being actively triggered by a hymn: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/amazinglove/
Becky’s had years to balance what she felt about herself with the doctrine she was taught. Joyce built her entire moral foundation on those teachings without question, only to have it all upended less than four months ago.
Yep. Becky also had all that time to manage WITHOUT finding a core tenet of Christianity in virtually any form whatsoever traumatic. And as far as we can tell, Becky never internalized the degrees of shame and neurosis about even considering having Imperfect Thoughts, the way Joyce has.
Gotta be honest given that, even if Joyce were to eventually come to terms with the concept of God I think she’d need a REALLY hard reset while she disentangles religion from her anxiety and shame.
Though her panic over sex with Dina shows she’s not entirely immune.
Definitely not, but she’s willing to admit she has those thoughts, which still puts her a step above Joyce in that regard.
It also shows that she’s mature enough to know she’s not ready for that step, which is impressive for an 18-year old.
Maybe. Or maybe she’s mature enough, but hung up on the religious taboo.
She stopped going to church before all the kidnapping stuff happened. Im pretty sure if she didnt want to go, Becky wouldnt have any issue since it would open up some fresh wounds, and Becky herself would be looked down upon at most christian churches.
But if she didn’t want to go, that would open up all sorts of questions she doesn’t want to address with Becky.
not really. As somebody who was raised half my life in a christian household, churches vary greatly and some christians dont like some churches and wont go to that church, choosing to drive upwards of 1-2 hours to go to one they like (I know from experience, having to get up at 6am to get ready for church, it was a 1 1/2 hour drive….). All she has to do if she doesnt want to be open about it, is that she has been to all the churches there and didnt feel at home at any of them.
For many Christians that would be fine. It’s been a huge focus for Joyce and Becky knows it too well.
Becky’s place?
I’m assuming Robin’s, but we’re probably going to hear about all that soon enough.
Could be Becky’s home in La Porte, depends on what was sorted out in the will.
… and on whether that was owned or loaned.
At least Becky got (official) access to all her stuff that was left there.
Even with a mortgage (which she likely couldn’t pay), if there’s some equity in the place, she might be in a much better place financially than a few months ago.
Ex-Robin’s place.
Wouldn’t it be more Robin’s ex-place?
On the one hand, yes.
On the other hand, I can totally see her calling herself something like “The Former Congresswoman Formerly Known As Robin DeSanto”
Do you think The Former Congresswoman Formerly Known As Robin DeSanto was there over winter break? That was one of her two homes, right? And not her favorite?
I think it was the one she had so, on paper, she could say she lived in the district she represented.
Either Robin’s place or Ross’ home.
And that means she didn’t spend Christmas with her family. Oooh..
“One of those”. wtf Joyce. You can’t be saying shit like that while acknowledging athiests are human.
old habits die hard
Joyce thinks they’re fine people. Not necessarily human, though.
Like elves.
There are indeed connotations. You need to go buy a fedora
Or a trilby, if you’re a heathen.
So definitely get a trilby, is what you’re saying.
Joyce’s last comment is me about basically any and everything.
Not even agnostic uh
So she’s..agnostic then???
Eh.. Strikes me more of Agnostic.
Can believe in the idea of something, but isn’t sure its anything good, or useful. Is just potentially there. Unrelated
—Closer I Am Defined!
Do you mean, “Closer I am to fine”?
I think it was a Punne or play on words.
I believe you were going for “pūne”, if indeed you’re quoting DEATH. (hard bar for emphasis,NOT actually a part of the quote.)
Joyce’s crisis of faith is not resolved, she can’t decide if she believes in Yahweh or not.
There’s no joke here, but if I were there I would hand her a hammer and direct her to a forge to get rid of stress. Hephaestus may not have many followers these days but we are very mellow.
Favorite comment.
Agreed
I dunno. Normally I’d say go for it, but we’ve seen Joyce’s temper and I don’t like the idea of her emulating a volcano.
I subscribe to this, only ATM it is too hot here and much to sunny to forge during the day, and too noisy for the neighborhood at night.
Who’s that strange woman in the 3rd & 4th panels and what’s that odd facial expression she’s making?
Just tell her that you missed her, Sarah. No need to needle her
That’s how Sarah expresses her love!
and lil sis knows it <3
Sarah, this is the one time that teasing Joyce is not appropriate. This is actually really traumatizing and horrible for some people. Just leave it alone.
Yeah, this really isn’t cool to me. Joyce had so much of her identity wrapped up in being Christian and is now trying to work her way through years of doctrine that tell her she cannot be a good person and is going to hell. Even if she doesn’t consciously believe that, it’s very very hard to shake off.
Yeah, I went atheist at 14. The last time I dreamed of going to hell I was 35.
Sarah isnt really teasing, more so just being blunt and logical, trying to talk joyce through it in a way for it to make sense, like bring up the fact that she is friends with a person and sees no issue with them having said belief.
It is important to talk through issues like this with friends, as keeping it in and not talking about it could lead to heightened levels of stress and anxiety over the issue. Sarah might not be doing the Nicest thing in some people’s views, but she is doing the smartest and in the long term, most helpful things she could be doing.
Joyce has been thinking through this for atleast 7-8 months now (its hard to tell a time frame in most of this comic) if not more, she knows that she doesnt have faith anymore, just doesnt want to label herself as a person who lacks faith as its been told to her over and over that a person who lacks faith is evil, even when it has been proven otherwise.
Ripping the bandaid off with a little bit of Sarah style care is kinda what she needs.
School started in August or September. It’s January now. Mid-August to Mid-January is the max possible range, and 5 months.
I kinda agree… but I kinda also agree with Switchchris. If this IS still teasing, yeah, Sarah, cut it out. If it started as teasing but began turning into a frank conversation as Sarah realized it was Serious… well, tread carefully, but not necessarily time to stop.
If Joyce has a problem with the conversation or how it is being handled, I’m pretty sure she could say so herself. Just like with real people, I don’t think you should jump to saying someone is being traumatising or harmful… when the person supposedly being harmed is still engaging in the conversation and isn’t trying to shut it down.
Yes, Sarah’s way of handling it and trying to talk it through wouldn’t be helpful for everyone, but this probably isn’t how she would handle it with everyone. It is the way she handles it with Joyce and Joyce doesn’t seem too broken up about it so much as struggling to accept the word atheist in a similar way to how she struggled to accept the word divorce because saying it out loud would make it real and that is scary and difficult.
*eyes alt text*
Well goddammit, now I want to see Dorothy dressed up as Season 5 She-Ra.
“Hey Adorothy.”
Adora-thy?
Adorathy!
Do you mean original She-Ra or the reboot?
2018 series. The original didn’t get 5 seasons. I don’t even think it got 2.
I don’t think Sarah actually knows what an atheist is, if she thinks not believing in the CHRISTIAN god makes you one.
That would just mean Joyce is no longer Christian; that’s it.
And she’s not even that at this point – she’s pretty clearly somewhere between doubting-Christian and agnostic.
The “or otherwise” indicates other gods. It’s awkward phrasing, but I’m certain Sarah is not confused as to what an atheist is.
Well, I mean, she might well be. Atheists don’t just not believe in God. They believe in the non-existence of God.
Joyce might well not have that kind of conviction. That’d likely make her an agnostic. Or she might’ve just abandoned the idea of the Judeo-Christian style of god. That’d like make her a deist.
In context, it doesn’t really matter.
It’s not like Joyce is suddenly going to decide she’s Muslim or worships Zeus. Other people might, but this is Joyce. Sarah’s just focusing on Joyce’s conflict.
To be fair, Sarah knows Joyce doesn’t believe in Catholicism let alone Buddhism.
So it sounds like ‘agnostic’ might be a more accurate label. For now, if not for long. Not that all agnostics are atheists-in-waiting, but it’s pretty common for someone on her deconversion trajectory to be ‘agnostic’ for a period.
Or it might be that she’s mostly averse to atheist as a label, due to ‘connotations’, even if she is one in effective reality.
“Just because I believe in worker control of the means of production doesn’t make me a *communist*.” “Why not?” “I was raised hating communists!”
Or Billie refusing to call herself bisexual just because she’s attracted to men and women, per the comment above.
The thing is, what communists actually seem to believe is the state controlling the means of production in the name of the workers. On the other hand, capitalists seem perfectly fine with workers also being capitalists.
I think Billie’s position would be that it’s not really bisexuality if your just experimenting. That was also a pre-Ruth position.
I tend to suspect that Joyce is a person who will wind up with a strong belief in something. What that something might look like, it’s too early to tell.
I have discussed the issue with many communists which derided “state capitalism” and professed to believe that under communism “the state will wither away”.
I could never get them to explain how, or how the resulting economy would work. But that’s another problem.
And yet when the Soviet Union withered away, I don’t think anyone was more surprised than the communist party.
Decades of Cold War propaganda taught generations of Americans to blindly reject every “ism” as an evil virus of Satan, except unfettered capitalism of course. (All while they built interstate highways, Social Security, and Medicare, but you’re not supposed to think about the contradiction. Just galvanize the doublethink like a good little consumer.)
Capitalists may be perfectly fine with the workers also being capitalists in theory, but in practice they’re pretty good at keeping the vast majority from doing so. And no, a 401K doesn’t count as “capital”.
I do agree that the step where the state withers away seems unlikely in practice. Things like worker owned companies seem a better approach. Or requirements for labor to have a seat on the board – as I believe happens in Germany. Along with other worker protections and social supports.
A synthesis of capitalist and socialist approaches.
At some point we are going to have to do something radically different. I don’t think people have really realized in full yet that the rapid development of AI technology means that our form of capitalism has a strictly limited shelf life.
The “eternal growth” model is fundamentally flawed in ways that have nothing to do with AI.
Our form perhaps, but that doesn’t mean that what we know as communism is that “radically different” thing or that it would then wither away.
And “eternal growth” isn’t really limited to capitalism. It’s been a basic approach to human economies since we started civilization – with the attendant collapses.
I’m not a fan of communism or centralized control of economy in general and I do like the feedback aspects of regulated capitalism while not believing it is in any way magical. But the thing is, when labor becomes more or less valueless, I don’t see any way to make things work without some serious changes.
Worker control of the means of production is also pretty meaningless when you have and need almost no workers. So, no, communism is in no way the answer. Maybe some form of socialism is. Heck, maybe a small patch like massively negative income tax would preserve the base of customers that it keeps capitalism humming, but none of this has been thought through and I have no confidence that it will be until the future smacks into us.
“Just because I don’t believe in God doesn’t make me godless!
When it comes to labels, you can always create your own if there aren’t any that fit quite right. It helps to have your beliefs fully fleshed out first though, and it seems like Joyce is still in the figuring it out stage.
And if a busy person like you is too occupied to create your own label, we at Labels Are Us will be most happy to licence you a fully customised hand-crafted label that will provide your beliefs with the gravitos and air of authority they deserve, all for a low low monthly fee.
Joyce spent her winter break at Becky’s? I feel like the divorce implosion at the Brown’s already happened. I’m surprised Joyce still has tuition, since there’s no way in Hell her mother would allow her to spend more time with (in her eyes) a godless heathen lesbian. Or is Hank in charge of finances?
Joyce was raised believing in men as the head of household.
And Hank’s a dentist, almost certainly the breadwinner of the family by far.
The US is also happy to lend you insane amounts of debt for your tuition. Comic won’t last long enough for the characters to have to pay it back…
Yeah, I’m kind of amused by everyone focused on the “atheist”, while the implications of that little piece of info are even more drastic.
Hmm. Yeah, I’m with those commenters who think Joyce’s current hangup isn’t the existence of god(s); it’s the word “atheist”. Lack of belief dates back to the Rich Mullins strips. There’s nothing yet that indicates she’ll consider another religion or some indefinable god-being in the place of her previous Christianity. Embracing the word for her beliefs, now, that’s a challenge given what she was raised to believe about “the A-word”.
Joyce, sweetie, it’s okay for you to be an atheist. Yes, you.
Depends on really what makes her fulfilled as a person. Atheism? Perhaps.
But perhaps she was meant to be a Cheese Follower or the Temple of Willis the Great Cartoonist.
So, on one hand it seems kind of sudden.
On the other, it took me maybe 30 seconds. It involved a brief conversation with my grandfather about ‘jesus’ and santa claus. I’d already proven using a bit of logic and some experiments that santa wasn’t real. He tried to convince me that ‘jesus’ was somehow different.
He failed.
I was six.
Oh, and I’ll be 50 in a few months.
I still agree emphatically with my take as a six year old: jesus is a fairy tale.
Which means it has a social function but does not render reality as it is? Before I learned that fundamentalist Christians actually exist, that was my definition of a religion. A metaphor, to make sense of life and create connection.
So I never had any problem with religion vs science, they were not concerned with the same subject matter. That people exist that think they are still makes my brain hurt.
It’s not only fundamentalists who think that God (or gods) and souls are real, not metaphorical. Christian fundamentalists purport to be literal about the whole Bible, world created in six days a set number of lifespans ago. Catholics aren’t fundamentalist, but they’d get pretty offended if you said they thought everything was just a metaphor.
Obviously I was raised in a liberal Lutheran context, not catholic, I was also shocked when I learned they believe in transmutation of wine and bread.
Many Christians consider some of the stories and rituals metaphoric, but few consider God and Jesus themselves to be metaphor. God is still the creator – even if He didn’t do it in a literal 7 days in the order described in Genesis. Jesus still died on the cross for your salvation, even if some of the other stories are metaphors.
Much of Joyce’s belief is tied up in literalism. Another reason Catholicism would confound the hell out of her is the fact they believe in evolution. I knew a fundamentalist turned atheist friend of Joyce (who was more like Mike in personality) who had his brain shut down when I explained to him that.
The idea that the story of Creation didn’t have to be literal for believers was not at all how he was raised.
Personally, I don’t like using “atheist” like a noun.
I’m atheist (adjective); not an atheist.
I don’t see my lack of belief in deities as a particularly important part of myself, but rather just an accurate descriptor.
Aaaaalso, seeing a lot of people treating (a)gnosticism and (a)theism as mutually exclusive things rather than perpendicular axes.
Most of the time when someone says “[person] is [an] agnostic” they seem to mean “[person] is agnostic atheist”.
But you can also be gnostic atheist, agnostic theist, and gnostic theist.
Can you? I would appreciate examples.
gnostic atheist: “I have a logical proof that God cannot exist! There is not even the slightest chance that I could be wrong!”
agnostic theist: “I believe, but I’m pretty aware that I could be wrong.”
gnostic theist: this is normal.
♫ “Heyy Adorothy” ♫
-Joyce, presumably dressed as Catra
We missed Halloween!
CHRIST yes this.
I suppose with Toedad actually gone and not just imprisoned, there’s actually no barriers between Becky and her old house.
It’s entirely possible that the pair of them spent the break there, and helped Becky pack some things up for her official move into dorms.
It would be a good middle ground for “going home” for the Christmas break when home doesn’t exactly feel entirely welcoming for Joyce.
The utilities have probably all been shut off and the house has probably gone into foreclosure, so it’s pretty unlikely they went there.
Dunno if the house is still under mortgage or paid off.
Hank could have helped out with minor bills.
Becky mentioned a mortgage after the first kidnapping. If it and the utilities were on auto-pay, it might just coast until the account it draws from is depleted.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/mortgage/
It’s going to be tied up as part of her father’s estate, though. I think by default she would inherit everything (seeing as she’s an only child and there’s no surviving spouse), but Toedead could have left a will specifying other beneficiaries. If he did, the question is whether he wrote her out at any point.
Toedad wouldn’t have because he assumed Becky would be “fixed”. His church probably encouraged him to disown her but that was unacceptable.
Not even so much that assumption, but that writing her out of his will would have been symbolically acknowledging that she wasn’t his property anymore. He’s not going to disown her, because she’s his.
Or to put it even more bluntly: He isn’t going to disown her; he owns her.
Yep. I don’t think Becky’s keeping the house, because that’s a lot of money she doesn’t have for a place full of ghosts, but it’s pretty likely it’s legally hers now unless he, like, willed it to the church. (I mean, SOMEONE’S childhood home is being sold in a vain attempt to save the congregation from bankruptcy. And that’d be a good way to spare Becky months and months of Dealing With Dead Parent’s Estate. Having to clear and sell the house adds so much time to that pain in the ass.)
… Actually speaking of that estate issue, I will totally give Robin more credit on the redemption arc/Adopting A Teenage Lesbian path if she’s gotten Becky an accountant for that shit. Don’t make Becky do Ross’s taxes, Robin. She has college to deal with.
Though if anything can be cleared from the sale, the money would be good to have.
And as awful as having to clear out the stuff is, just having it all taken away without recourse might be worse.
But having an accountant or somesuch to handle the process would be great.
Unless she just arranges to have an estate sale company liquidate everything and cut her a check. If she firmly believed she’d never set foot in the house again anyway, and has already mourned the loss of the idea of it as “home”, returning might just reopen old wounds.
I suspect Becky would want to do at least some cursory looking around in her room (now that her living situation is pretty stable and so she can bring a sentimental item or two,) probably another check for original documents just to be on the safe side because new copies might be slow going, but yeah, I don’t think she’s up for sorting through everything there. Or spending any more time in that community than absolutely necessary. Sold as quickly as feasible seems like the best idea, and hopefully since she was his only heir all accounts could be closed quickly and mailing subscriptions cancelled.
When you don’t believe in any god, that makes you an atheist, Joyce. You can (and probably should) use that word to describe yourself now.
You are missing some interesting distinctions. There is a difference in believing a god exists and believing in him (them). As an illustration, there are plenty of people who believe Satan exists that aren’t satanists. There is also a difference between a belief that a god does not exist and the lack of a belief that the same god does exist.
Atheist doesn’t quite seem to cover Joyce’s current state, though it might do so in the future.
I see that as a distinction between believing Satan exists and worshipping Satan, not as a distinction between believing Satan exists and believing in Satan.
The words are often used interchangeably though. Christians routinely use “believe” to cover both.
There’s also some non-theist religions, usually Eastern, where the literal existence of gods is utterly unimportant. Some strands of Buddhism, Confuscism, philosophical faiths, and even strands of Hinduism.
“Atheism” is something that means more to Joyce than some.
Agnostic, Joyce .
You’re an agnostic .
No, she’s not.
Granted, she’s out the outskirts of Agnostiville, but Agnosticism isn’t “I don’t believe in a specific god anymore and now I’m not sure what I believe in”. It’s a positive affirmation that you don’t know if there are any divine beings, you’re not against the concept, but you’re comfortable with not knowing for sure too.
The only thing that Joyce knows about what she believes in right now is that she doesn’t know what she believes in. That’s not agnosticism, that’s “I don’t know what my faith is right now”, and that’s okay. Admitting that to oneself is a good start to figuring that out.
I disagree. I think she doesn’t believe in God anymore, but is having a lot of trouble accepting that. Which is different from not knowing.
She’s moving out of Godtown. She hasn’t decided where she’s gonna settle yet. She’s sort of a homeless vagabond of faith, right now.
Wow. Never thought I’d see Sarah be this much of an ass. There’s a lot of spectrum between “doesn’t believe in a fundamentalist caricature of the Judeo-Christian God” and “believes that God does not exist,” girl. You wouldn’t appreciate it if Joyce whipped out “The Four Spiritual Laws” tract when your whole world suddenly collapsed, would you? Stop deliberately digging at fresh wounds as you try to get that notch on your belt and give Joyce some space to figure things out on her own.
Uhhh. Joyce literally just said to her she does not believe in a Christian God OR OTHERWISE, Sarah did give her the option to mention other possibilities if she believed in them.
Sarah is not being an ass, she is trying to talk Joyce through it. If Joyce was unwilling to talk about it at all, yes, she would be being an ass, but Joyce is more than capable of saying ‘I don’t want to talk about it right now, can you stop?’ But Joyce is more just grappling with the word atheist like she did divorce where she doesn’t want to say it aloud and give it the power of being real because it is uncomfy and scary.
Yup, in some abstract theoretical discussion there would be other possibilities, but this is Joyce and Sarah knows her well.
She’s having trouble with the word. With the admission. She’s not holding some nuanced position in between her former beliefs and atheism.
Nuance! There’s the word we need!
Joyce still isn’t an atheist because she adores Dorothy in the biblical sense.
Lies face down on the floor?
There are different types of non religious people:
Atheists: “God isn’t real”
Agnostics: “Maybe, maybe not. Show me evidence.”
Deists: “God created the universe but only focuses on the laws of physics.”
Pantheists: “We are one with everything.”
Secular Humanists: “We must base our morals on helping other people.”
Satanists: “Fuck religion!”
State atheists: “W e must destroy all religious stuff, even if it’s counterproductuve to human culture!”
Transhumanists: “BECOME AS GODS!”
Nihilists: “Nothing matters!”
Objectivists: “Let’s burn oil field, destroy the economy, build a secret society and forbid altruistic organizations.”
BioShock fans: “Let’s built a city in the Atlantic Ocean.”
Warhammer 40K fans: “Purge the Xenos!”
What is a state atheist?
And you forgot people like me: Spirituality is a human need. That doesn’t mean, there is a god(des) or several, but that it might help me (And everybody else) deal with life and connect to the world and other people if I (everybody) have a religious or spiritual practice. It just means I know it’s not about „the truth“, so everybody does this in a way that feels right to them. A no f**** proselytizing, harassing or otherwise being a bother to the rest,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism
Ah, right. Worshipping the communist party instead of a god.
So state atheism is a power strategy.
Or at least aimed at countering the potential power of religion as a opposing force to the state. It’s generally more effective to co-opt religion than suppress it though.
There were aspects of Soviet and Maoist Communism that seemed like religion-substitute: fixation on texts and spinoff heresies, entombing Lenin like a saint relic. But I’d say the state atheism itself was in parallel to but distinct from that. Hostility to religion doesn’t have to mean trying to create a secular substitute.
Maybe.Though I wonder. If you ignore the contents of what is being said and just compare the rituals, the structure of what is done, is there really a difference?
Nothing wrong with being agnostic
I dislike the fact that it seems like Joyce was going to say “I am not a atheist”
I feel she is not ready for Atheist. Her mood comes off as agnostic. Well that or she is afraid of what people will think if she says it out loud.
She’s afraid of a lot of things.
Interesting change, even in its walky joyce continued to believe in God, despite having to deal with aliens, a giant cyborge monkey and interdimensional cheese, I remember that was actually a plot point.
I never thought I’d see joyce in a place of not actually believing in God.
Somebody who summarized Walky and Joyce to me said that Joyce eventually dropped religion, like Willis. Was that BS?
Has Willis dropped religion?
Yes. Willis is an atheist last I checked.
So, uh.
Starting to get the vibe that several people her are quite attached to the idea of Jocye turning out to become specifically Agnostic?
Not sure what that’s about.
*Joyce, damn.
Some of us are attached to her turning out to be atheist!
I’m sure it’s related to what one thinks of ‘atheist’ and ‘agnostic’ and their corresponding ‘isms’, and whether one thinks of religious thought as meaningful and desirable or as a giant digression on the part of the human race.
Sometimes also related to ideas of “Joyciness” and sadness at her being perceived to move too far, too fast.
I mean, go back one day and the comments were like 99% “ZOMG YAY JOYCE IS AN ATHEIST NOW!”
I read it more as people wanting the best for her, for Joyce to be happy and secure in herself and confident and away from all of those evil Evangelical sorts. They’re largely just hoping that she’s got it all sorted out, and aren’t quite grasping that it’s fine for her to not be there yet, because this way she has some fun story stuff to develop.
(…also, just gonna say that Evangelical Atheists are a thing, and while generally lacking in numbers or de facto power, they can be just as much of a dick on a personal level as Evangelical Christians)
This but also seeing an atheist character who isn’t the villain and doesn’t end up converting at the end of the story happens approximately never.
It’s nice to see a nuanced and sympathetic take on reconversion.
One thing that got me through the first episode of Dawson’s Creek was the multiple atheist or churchless characters.
I think SF has had lots of good atheist characters.
Feeling the ‘it’s different when it’s me’ sentiment.
You see, I do not agree that faith is a virtue. To me the propensity to believe things without evidence is, well, maybe not a sin, but at least a failing. Joyce still feels that Becky is meritorious for having maintained her faith through horrible tribulations. I prefer to admire Joyce for having cast off the burden of her faith without them.
“Your faith was stronger than mine? I’m sorry to hear it, but I’m sure you can escape from it nevertheless. Would you like help?”
What faith can also be is a sort of rock one clings to against the trials of every day life. One of my personal tenets of faith (as an Agnostic, mind you) is that people, generally speaking, want to be good, they want to do good things, and most of the awful shit that happens stems not from people being evil, but people being really shitty at being good.
And yeah, it can abso-fucking-lutely be a blinding sort of faith. The “maybe this time things will work out alright” sort of thing. But it’s also helped keep me, well, sane for the last few years, when it feels like we’re stuck in this endless downhill spiral and there’s so, so many examples of people being just… just the worst.
I suppose, though, that I’m not describing it as a virtue. Just a bit of helpful self-delusion that helps one get through life without going crazy.
Faith can be a comfort in times of trial, the relief of agony. Or rather, it can enable beliefs that function thus. That’s fine.
But I have known people whose faith gave them beliefs because of which they lived in miserable terror of eternal, deserved torture. Or died. A dear friend of mine passed her last few days in an agony of apprehension that her repentances and penances had not been sincere and abject enough to remit her sins, which by my lights were imaginary.
I feel like people are missing that she spent the entire break with Becky, wich means that Joyce is still avoiding her family. It is possible that she still has not yet seen or spoken to her mom since before the “incedent”.
I’m a Christian, I believe in God, that he created everything. I don’t know the bible by heart like Joyce but I don’t really get why she can’t just believe in God in her own way? Not in her church’s way.
She can’t believe it because it doesn’t seem to be true.
To her, that is.
And if she could believe what she chose, without regard to evidence and reason, why should she choose that rather than something else?
I’m just curious. If Willis wants her to be atheist or not believing in God thats his right as a writer cuz its his character. I was just commenting and asking questions.
Because Joyce’s brand of extremism she was brought up with and her own personality both are very prone to black-and-white thinking. To her and her belief structure, if one thing is false or incorrect or intentional falsehood, it all is.
She figured out she’d been lied to on matters she felt core to her faith and beliefs – and to her, if that’s a lie, it all is. The sects of Christianity prone to young-earth creationism and to fundamentalism teach explicitly that if one part of science is wrong, it’s all a satanic conspiracy to damn people and all lies. IME as someone who was brought up in a politically similar subculture, that kind of rigidity cuts too ways – it helps keep people from questioning, but when they do start to question, it tends to result in swift and severe disillusionment.
I wasn’t brought up in that particular extremist subculture but I was brought up in the fundamentalist/prepper/militia/far right scene & my disillusionment followed a pretty similar trajectory to what Joyce is following. If the belief structure demands that you believe everything or nothing from it, when you find a deal breaker you end up throwing it all out. It affected Joyce this way and not Becky because Becky never fully bought into the all or nothing aspects of her religion in the first place. Joyce was “the best” of her homeschool group – she was the one who had most completely internalized their indoctrination of her. Her belief was the hardest – but also the most brittle.
Eventually I did swing back a little and end up in moderate leftist land but the stereotype of the ex far righter becoming an arch leftist (or the ex fundamentalist becoming the antitheist atheist) has a basis in reality – not for everyone, but for enough.
Two significant reasons, in addition to ischemgeek’s point about all-or-nothing.
1) Joyce ‘doesn’t feel God when she prays’ and isn’t sure that she ever did. Judging from the Rich Mullins dream and her further protest that she ‘does sometimes!’ and that she’s ‘normal’, this is a doubt she’s actually had for quite some time. Can’t believe in God in your own way if you don’t fundamentally have a sense God is there. (Note also here all of Joyce’s similar anxieties and behaviors, particularly with her sexuality. Note the shame involved in admitting she has sexual desires at all. This is autobiographical from the writer, as is Joyce in general, and having been in a similar place myself it’s a big clusterfuck of anxiety and shame.)
2) Joyce finds the core tenet of Chrisitanity – ‘Jesus is perfect, we all are not, and he died for our sins’ – traumatic now, after Ross said he’d die for Becky while pointing a gun at them both. She no longer takes comfort even in the idea of Jesus alone being perfect – she instead finds it sad. Even if Joyce were to reconcile with the idea of God, I don’t think it would be in a Christian context.
…It’s weird to see a conversation you’ve been having in your head multiple times a week suddenly show up on a comic you just caught up on less than a month ago…
I’m only freshly past the guilt of leaving, then the self-hatred for wondering if I lost my faith because God didn’t want me, then the loneliness of losing an entire family/social group (again).
This comic has addressed a lot of “Christianese.” I was taught names, titles and labels always mean something. There’s a number of ritualistic things I’ve held onto; some by choice and some by compulsion. Holding onto the labels of Jewish and Christian (yes, both. It’s complicated) is one of them. Taking on a label of “Atheist” should be silly and easy but it’s really one of the rougher steps so far.
Agnostic, gals. The word you’re looking for is agnostic.
Oh, thank GOD. (Yeah, I know. Just leave that one on the table.)
Sarah’s come such a long way from “I DON’T WANT TO MAKE FRIENDS” that it’s easy to forget she still has blind spots. This convo is SO much more nuanced than it would’ve been, otherwise.
(Hi, T!)
Wow. I feel Joyce here. I was in this frame of mind for about three years.
Ah, to be or not to be, that is the question
i can’t believe you waited/took 10 years to make that alt text pun, willis
Spirituality is not a binary thing.
Atheism is the firm belief that there is not and cannot be any unseen or yet unknown higher power. It’s basically a religion in itself.
Agnosticism on the other hand akcknowledges there is no proof of either way and therefore organized religion is bogus. You cannot claim to know the desires of a spirit that may or may not exist. Pray if you feel like it, believe in good luck charms if you must, but do it for yourself not an expectation that might never come to fruition. You may believe but rituals and dogmas are meaningless because you cannot claim to know.
To me, agnosticism is a more scientific approach than atheism, because acknowledging you don’t know is the first step to one day knowing.
Your conception of atheism is incorrect.
Yah drs is right. Also, your definition of atheism is insulting and a reflection of an outside observation of a phenomenon rather than a clear understanding of it removed from bias.
Atheism is an absence of belief, we don’t actively believe in nothing, we just don’t have belief in gods or higher powers. We spend literally zero seconds of any day worshiping or devoting belief to a concept or practice.
For me, my time is spent grousing about my shitty childhood and wishing humanity wasn’t a perpetual horrorshow of terrible decisions. Take 100 different atheists, and they will each spend their time, energy and thoughts in 100 different ways. The only thing we all agree on is that generally, we don’t believe there’s some cosmic level sentience that created everything, or moves everything around, or that has made a place or indeed many places for every alive thing to go when it dies.
We do not attend atheist church, we do not worship atheist jesus, we do not quote atheist scripture nor do we follow any brand of atheist dogma. We just live our lives by accepting the consequences of our actions, that our actions are ours alone, and that this applies to every living thing capable of acting.
There’s some grey area around that last point of course, because in or outside of religion, many people struggle with concepts of personal responsibility, then we get into psychology and psycho-analysis, bringing in questions like “nature versus nurture”, and then there’s Biology that brings in stuff like instincts and biological imperatives… but anyway.
Science is a process of proving or disproving a hypothesis, it is no more scientific to be agnostic than atheist, because both atheists and agnostics require the same burden of proof of the divine to change their thinking, atheists just understand that scientific reasoning doesn’t necessitate proving a negative, it cannot prove something doesn’t exist, so the better avenue is to assume god/s do/es not exist/s because there is no tangible evidence in favor.
Also, technically the definition of agnosticism you provide isn’t correct either, as agnosticism is the belief that there may be a higher power, but there has not been sufficient evidence presented to the observer to establish it, and may also mean that the observer does not believe that sufficient evidence can be provided to establish that a God or Gods exist/s. Agnosticism also allows any or all of the world’s religions to themselves be scientifically accurate, as it only requires sufficient evidence to be delivered to the agnostic to lead them to believe God/s exist/s as that particular religion describes.
Atheists put forward the hypothesis that there is no sentient creator and therefore no afterlife or divine will, so if there is a god then there can be evidence of a god, which can then disprove the hypothesis. We stake nothing by potentially being wrong, because there is and has been no cosmic punishment observed for stated lack of belief, and for people who care (theists) and within their own religion’s scriptures, both agnostics and atheists are nonbelievers and therefore punished for their lack of belief in the same fashion, to the same degree.
I‘d say that distinction is superficial (like the alleged difference between christian sects), but it was certainly interesting following that line of thought. I will include that in my argument in the future.
Most of what you „correct“ is basically what I was saying but with way more words.
Without proof it‘s still a belief system based on a hunch, though. That’s the thing where atheists are exactly like other religious people: The unwavering conviction to be in the right. If the laissez-faire approach of atheism would be true, you wouldn’t get this worked up about it.
Most atheists I know are pretty chill about this, though. So no harm done.
I agree that most religions are nonsense and/or dangerous (because you can proof they are) but I could not say for certain spiritual beings don’t exist — just that it‘s a) highly unlikely and b) completely irrelevant for my life if it were true, obviously.
Also I myself am neither „pure“ agnostic or atheist, I consider myself an agnostic discordian. Gods are unlikely, but chaos (in a spiritual and practical sense) is most likely a thing.
Now that I’m not on the phone: most atheists will say they could be wrong, if you push them in a philosophical dispute, they just don’t think it’s very likely. Agnostics say they can’t know, but lots of them act pretty solidly atheist: they don’t believe, they live godless lives, etc.
The scientific approach *starts* with “I could be wrong” but it goes on from there; you don’t refuse to form any belief or to take any stand, you form and revise probabilistic beliefs based on evidence.
My Bayesian odds ratio on the existence of any form of intelligent creator is less than 50%, and my odds ratio for the existence of a personally attentive benevolent creator who care if I believe in it is vanishingly small. The prior is small and the likelihood — the conditional probability of the observable evidence given such a hypothesis — is teeny, so the posterior probability is teenier.
I have a lot of trouble plucking Bayesian priors out of thin air to begin with, but I think I’d start out with 50:50 between Cartesian dualism and physicalism. Then all the evidence about brain injury, neurological diversity, the effects of drugs, fatigue, nutrition, and hormones such as adrenalin on mental processes would have me conclude that mental processes are very likely (a) physical, (b) the function of elaborate neurology, and (c) adaptive as the result of evolution. The propositions that the universe has a soul and that its creator has a mind are both less likely than that souls exist and that un-evolve things with no brains have mental processes. So I end up with a personal creator or spirit of the universe being very, very unlikely.
yeah, kind of like that. Ignorance might suggest a uniform prior between p(Creator) and p(no Creator), but the trend of intelligent and vitalist explanations being displaced has me lowering the former. p(Christian God) has to be strictly smaller than p(Creator), and while p(evidence|Creator) is kind of murky, p(evidence|Christian God) strikes me as minuscule. A benevolent powerful god who cares about my belief would behave very differently. (Also I’m not sure ‘benevolent’ and ‘cares about my belief’ are at all compatible, but benevolence should lead to efforts to avoid ‘having’ to send me to Hell…)
It‘s true insofar as „no man is an island“ as they say and everything exists on a spectrum. There is probably no certain single way of being a „true“ atheists (or anything else for that matter).
But this whole discussion is basically intellectual navel-gazing (I’m kinda sorry I started it) since most religious people wouldn’t even make a distinction between atheism and agnosticism. Analyzing the minuscule differences between currents within a belief system is certainly interesting and very entertaining but doesn’t add much value in day-to-day dealings with people of either group. Because if push comes to shove, they will stick together, no matter they’re alleged differences.
I think the whole drive to find meaning in a meaningless universe is bordering on madness, yet people are willing to fight over it or devote their entire lives to it. Everything just to not gaze into the abyssal maw of randomness that is existence.
As a staunch atheist, I’m just gonna say, nah to all of this.
If you wanna talk about the toxicity of the New Atheism movement go right ahead, but don’t lump me in with the likes of TJ “This Shit Is Bananas” Kirk or Richard Dawkins.
This is already been addressed specifically, but I wanna point out that more generally, while acknowledging what you don’t know *is* important to science, it doesn’t follow from that that it is unscientific to disbelieve in the existence of things for which there is no empirical evidence
This is why it’s not un-scientific to believe dragons or unicorns don’t exist, despite. Not believing in things simply because it can’t be proven they DON’T exist is kinda standard practice for good scientists. When something can’t be proven or disproven either way there’s really no position on that issue that it even makes sense to say is more scientific than another.
On the basic concept of god as a being that created the universe, atheism, agnosticism, and theism are on equal footing.
Also worth noting is that even if some vastly powerful being showed up and started making flaming shrubs talk to people, it’s claims to being any sort of supreme being would be dubious. Atheists would be completely reasonable to accept them only as some kind of extremely powerful being rather than “God”
It’s actually kind of interesting to consider: The level of power necessary to convince any observer that you are God is far below the omnipotence we attribute to the usual Creator God idea. Whether it’s performing sufficient miracles or simple directly changing our minds so that we believe, nothing like that requires omnipotence or proves they created the universe.
It is possible to convince the most extreme skeptic, but not to actually prove.
I mean, there’s no scientific or even philosophical way to distinguish between infinite power and power that is merely extreme, because you can’t measure infinity.
I’m not sure it’d be possible for a creator god to scientifically prove to a human that they created the universe. It would be very difficult to prove they even had the power to do so, and didn’t simply have the power to manipulate human senses. They’d have to either tweak the laws of the universe or the human they were proving it to, and doing either kinda defeats the point
But is indistinguishable in terms of results.
To me, can relate to Joyce to some extent, in that though I never really had faith, for a long time I pretended to and thought there must be something wrong with me.
Then I thought all the folks who claim faith were bullshitting too and we were just all going in a circle jerk of “Yep, I believe, do you believe?” “Yep, I believe, you?” Believe believe believe believe believe.
Now I accept that some faithful might be experiencing something outside of my experience, even as I consider myself an agnostic atheist and secular humanist.
But I keep the agnosticism under my hat if only because evangelical believers take agnosticism as a plz convert me sign and… No. I’ve had ppl try to convert me to their beliefs for 30+ years, it’s never worked, you don’t have the secret sauce, Captain Conversion, and I’d prefer not to waste my time or yours.
“I’m not a…one of those.”
One of what? A b-hole?
I think the reason just as much people want Joyce to be agnostic as much as there are people wanting her to be atheist is because it seems it’s always full-on belief or full-on atheist with no in-between of agnosticism generally ever being portrayed.
Neither Becky nor Joyce believe in a fundie god. Becky knows that does necessarily make one an atheist. Joyce thinks it does. They need to talk about this. Joyce is used to being the problem solver but Becky has answers for her.
Deconstructing fundie religion can take you a lot of places with atheism just one destination.
Becky believes in a god who is not the fundie god. Probably she got there years ago.
Joyce does not. Her god was the fundie god. Her whole belief system rested on it. And she didn’t realize she feels some other version of god, she realized she doens’t feel or hear god at all.
Joyce has no more reason to go down Becky’s path than to become an atheist, an arguably less reason.
If I’m reading her reactions right, Joyce is exactly where I was when I first started moving away from Christianity. It took a long time to be able to admit to myself that I was an atheist (and a really long time to get rid of that nagging fear that I might be wrong and hell was waiting for me.)
I also remember my coping mechanisms at the time: “I don’t DISBELIEVE… I just believe in a BIGGER god now! It’s still the same God, He’s just so much more loving than even the Bible was able to express! All the fundies who only go by the book are missing the big picture!” It took me too long to realize I was just trying to reconcile what I actually believed (about politics/society/history/science) with what I used to believe about God, and that I couldn’t have it both ways.
Joyce seems to have skipped that coping mechanism.
Oh, that’s not atheist.
That’s not even agnostic.
I think that’s just gnostic.
‘gnosis’ means ‘knowledge’. What are you saying she ‘knows’?
she’s not willing to let go of “atheist = bad person” when she’s applying it to herself. She’s accepted Dorothy, but she cannot accept herself yet.
I definitely get what Sarah is saying and doing here, and is trying to help Joyce reconcile with herself and know that being an atheist isn’t a bad thing but… if Joyce doesn’t want to identify as an atheist yet, or doesn’t feel like that term fits what her lack-of-belief-in-god is right now, I feel it’s a little presumptuous to push her.
Also, it’s been one semester. If she needs time, she needs time.
Wait ’til she googles ‘Secular Humanism’: that humanity is capable of morality and self-fulfillment without belief in God.
We can all be good to each other and to our habitat without the fear that someone is judging us from the sky.
I was one of them before I knew it had a name. Still am.
Whether humanity can be moral without the belief in one or more gods has never been in question.
The real question is, given the things human have done in the name of religion, is humanity capable of morality with the belief in one or more gods?
Well it has been questioned, and outright denied, pretty loudly by the worst corners of religion.
A lot of religious moderates demonstrate that, on an individual level, it is possible to be reasonably moral (no one’s perfect, but some of them are pretty good people) while believing in deity.
Whether it’s possible to have that sort of moderate belief as part of a larger society, without spinning off a bunch of super-nasty extremist versions like an old-fashioned nuclear plant tossing out its radioactive waste? That’s the question I don’t know the answer to, but I suspect the answer isn’t a pleasant one.
“Secular humanist” and “atheist” are not exclusive. Dorothy would probably use both.
The importance of religion, God, and how they are intertwined with Good isn’t related to secular humanism. If you believe in God then your humanity and capacity for good is part of why you love God because that is a gift.
“I don’t need heat! I have FIRE!”
So it’s a bizarre statement.
I have no idea what you’re saying or even what exactly you’re responding to.
Gnosticism was (is?) an actual philosophical belief that is considered heretical by the church. They believe in God but they don’t believe he meant to create the world. The world is material, god is everything immaterial, thus this world was made by something lesser. I don’t remember a lot of the nuances, but some of their stuff is just bizarrely cool… like humanity being little bits of god dust that were somehow captured in meat suits and just wants to find it’s way back home. I 100% stand by my ridiculous paraphrasing.
This was supposed to be a reply to Mr.Random and Deanatay. Woop.
In standard Gnostic theology, this world is evil and was created by the demiurge, a flawed and/or evil lesser “god” – this is often equated with the Old Testament God. The real God is remote but sent (or inspired) Jesus to reveal the truth.
It is kind of fascinating stuff, especially when you start digging into the history and influence on early Christianity. It developed along with the early Church out of the same stew of influences.
And it puttered along pretty steadily until the first half of the Thirteenth Century, when it was stomped hard with great cruelty, brutality, and slaughter in the Albigensian Crusade.
“Kill them all, for God will surely know which are His” goes back to a recommendation by the papal nuncio to the head of the French forces, recommending the massacre of the population of Toulouse on the suspicion that some were Gnostics.
Are you sure you weren’t trying to term Adorthable in the al-text? It is clearly a concept, if unrealized, in Joyce’s mind, and quite likely quite realized in the minds of others, who note her infatuation with Dorothy.
Well this is a disheartening development.
I know that Joyce is supposed to be semi-biographical for Willis’s own experience with college and Christianity, but I really was hoping that Joyce would come to the conclusion of “It’s possible to be a Christian and believe in God without being a judgemental racist piece of shit” instead of just throwing out the whole religion with the bathwater. Maybe this is just a midpoint in her path, but Joyce is one of my favorite webcomic characters BECAUSE she’s a positive Christian character.
I’ll keep reading because I love these characters and want to see them happy, but at the same time I can tell it’s gonna be a bittersweet experience.
I mean, Joyce does think you can believe in god without being a judgmental racist piece of shit. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t care at all what Becky, who believes in god, thinks about her.
Hey, I can see where you’re coming from. Think about it from Willis’s perspective, though. If Joyce is meant to be reflective of him, then it only makes sense that she eventually reach the same point as him. And from how he grew up, then it may very well seem to him that this is a liberation of sorts.
I can understand the wish for a positive Christian character, but those still exist. Becky’s faith is still very much going strong. If I recall correctly, Danny and Billie are both Christian, and while Danny and especially Billie have to grapple with their own shortcomings, they’re still decent people. Sierra, while not a major character, is pretty unambiguously good. And Hank easily stands out as one of DoA’s finest characters.
Joyce was not meant to be a character that symbolizes that “It’s possible to be a Christian and believe in God without being a judgmental racist piece of shit or Mary”. Nor is she meant to be a character that teaches that “you cannot be a good-hearted, positive person who learns but also be Christian”. She just is herself; a good-hearted young woman who, after she stepped out of her safe little bubble, saw more of the world, eventually became divorced from her original set of beliefs, and revised her position. (Alright, maybe I’m assuming too much too soon and Willis intends to show that I’m wrong. I’m just going off of the cards laid on the table so far.)
Last I checked Becky, Hank, and Sierra were all Christians AND good people, as were Agatha and Roz unless you don’t count Mormons or Catholics as Christians
Joyce bought completely into the toxic version of Christianity she was taught growing up. Her faith based purely on indoctrination is always going to fall apart completely when her trust in the community that indoctrinated her was broken. It has nothing to do with her thinking Christians are all bigots
Like, this was pretty explicitly spelled out/foreshadowed a LONG time ago
Becky, Jacob, Sierra, Lucy
There you already have four off the top of my head
Why is it disheartening, when Becky, Jacob, Agatha, and Sierra are all good-people Christians who aren’t judgemental racist pieces of shit?
I don’t think you can honestly read this comic with its wealth of good Christians of various levels of faith and sects and pull a “Christianity is bad” message. I posit it isn’t the exploration of Christianity that offends you so much as the exploration of de-conversion without an inherently pro-Christian bias to it.
Like tbh as an atheist ex-extremist-far-righter Joyce is the one character I get to see my own life trajectory explored in. It’s not one to one (I was an atheist by the time I hit grade school and didn’t shake far right politics for another 15 years almost), but characters like Joyce don’t get to exist in most of North American media because every single flipping time someone ends up doing a crisis of faith story, all the Offended Christians come out of the woodwork to decry it as debasing Christiany that the character seriously questions religion beyond the stereotypical “One bad thing happened so now I hate God” that shows up in Christian dramas occasionally when they want to straw man atheists, ignoring sympathetic portrayals of good-people Christians in the same story and applying pressure until the show/book series/comic/whatever chickens out and goes for a saccharin reunion with faith ending. Here you (and a few other commentators) are, doing the damn damn thing.
Not all parts of all stories have to be for you personally. Want a crisis of faith where the person retains their faith in Christianity? Go watch most Hallmark flicks, almost all mainstream dramas with religious overtones, and literally any Christian drama (the God’s Not Dead series seems right up your alley). Or, heck, read this story and follow Becky instead.
Speaking as a Christian, I get the idea, but does Becky not count? She was in the last strip.
Off the top of my head, you still have Becky, Sierra, Jacob, and I’m pretty sure Lucy? They’re all very chill, reasonable Christians who talk about their faith but are respectful and don’t cudgel people with it.
I think one of the points of Joyce is that she was raised to be *extremely fundamentalist,* and one of the most common paths for these kids is that they crash hard (or continue to be a raging judgmental-ist like, say, Mary).
Joyce’s story is definitely one of those. But you’ve still got a bunch of positive representation in other characters who are what you’re describing. Becky especially, who’s been through *WAY TOO MUCH* but has kept her faith in the face of it all.
It’s ok to be an agnostic, Joyce
it’s ok to be an atheist too, bro
It’s also okay to be unsure of what you believe in and needing to figure that out, which seems to be where Joyce is at the moment.
Someone needs to give her the word “agnostic” very soon. She would be much more comfortable with it I think.
Maybe, but because it reflects her theological views better, or because she associates atheism with immorality and badness?
Nine years ago they established being sisters.
And now they can keep a thing like this secret while Joyce grapples with all the implications.
I love it!