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!
Countdown to Countdown
Velinxi
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.
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.
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.
Mac Hall
Matt Boyd
The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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:
Oh gods, that would be wonderful.
Like, a little thermometer with different Sarah faces and a red fill to indicate her current position.
That would be the best!
for real tho, science is “correct” bc it finds the answers in terms of itself, vs. “ok trust me there’s a sky dad you can’t see but sky dad is why everything exists and also women and POCs are inferior to rich white dudes”
Also important: Science reassesses its statements based on new evidence all the time. “OK SO [XYZ] FIT WITHIN CERTAIN FRAMEWORKS BUT WE’VE FOUND A BETTER EXPLANATION BASED ON A NEW FINDING!”
We’re but specks of cosmic dust trying to understand the universe with our limited tools and sometimes, we’re mistaken but hey! That means we can keep working on Finding Out! – And I find this part of being a human one of the best things we have, along with art and empathy. The journey is the destination, science isn’t dogmatic etc. But to a Fundie, or anyone who can’t stand anything but ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY, of course this wonderful thing about us as a species… Has to be terrifying.
Also-also important, the way scientific fact is based on demonstrable, repeatable evidence allows scientifically-literate people to repeatedly demonstrate its facts and convince people en masse without, you know, threats like burning at the stake or genocidal holy war.
YEP. Everyone with the right tools can replicate any scientific experiment, and it’s even possible to debunk former experiments, as in – You can KNOW if someone’s cooked the numbers so they fit “better” (looking at you, Mendel).
What the fuck is taught to Fundie kids? They use the Bible as the ultimate paradigm and twist everything to fit into their worldview, instead of, y’know. Taking demonstrable evidence and building up from there.
Scientific discoveries are just god retconning plot holes. Like hamfistedly shoving midichlorians into the star wars universe. Or revealing that one season of Dallas was all a dream. (God I hope that’s the right reference I’ve not watched dallas sorry just heard about it)
It’s not secondary sources, but you got me to go re-read wikipedia on Mendel, and it seems the debate/paradox and drama over his data were rather more overstated than they really deserved. The current concensus sounds like it was actually a non-issue that got blown out of proportion in popular awareness.
Well, sort of. Despite claims of Biblical literalism, there are significant swaths of the Bible that they ignore. (I really doubt Joyce’s former church throws out anyone who wears polyester and cotton blend shirts. ) And many of their doctrines come more from tradition than the Bible. (The Holy Trinity is foundational to most Christian sects, but it’s barely mentioned in the Bible.)
But to the brainwashed, that’s bad because the explanation “keeps changing”. They see that as a weakness to exploit.
“Sky daddy moves in mysterious ways” is irrefutable and etched in stone, to their view. It’s a simple answer they can accept at face value because it never changes.
Honestly, depending on how much fanfic he had to read that was just her self-insert OC “fixing” Draco, cursing her with childbirth pains may have been letting her off lightly.
If you actually look at the biblical term, the word they translate to pain more accurately translates to labor as in “a hard days work”. So basically eating the fruit gave humanity a sense of purpose and the satisfaction of sitting down after a long day and knowing you’ve done something worthwhile.
Childbirth isn’t necessarily innately painful. Some of the pain is self-inflicted because we *expect* pain so when we feel the intense sensation it translates as pain.
Childbirth Without Fear is a really good look into this by a medical doctor.
Anyways.
I’m just really a big fan of the idea that Eve gave humanity purpose and a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.
I’m also a big fan of empowered birth options based on solid science instead of fearmongering to push surgeries.
I could be wrong of course but “Childbirth isn’t necessarily innately painful. Some of the pain is self-inflicted because we *expect* pain so when we feel the intense sensation it translates as pain.” sounds an awful lot to me like it was written by someone who had never experienced giving birth to a child themselves and is, likely as not, male.
Well, that’s a motto that I certainty strive to live by, particularly if there is profit involved, but I reserve the right to point out other people’s BS.
What could possibly be painful about shoving a lump larger than a coconut [aprox diameter of a coconut: 12in, aprox diameter of baby’s head: 15in] out through a hole that typically only extends to a diameter better matching the shape of a grapefruit?
Women can’t feel pain after all, and a bit of tearing never hurt anybody anyway. I mean, except rich white men but, as we all know, rich white men are just sensitive like that. It comes from being bred in a better way, you understand.
This is also the reason why you don’t need to give any consideration to a virgin woman when you break her hymen. I mean, just keep telling her it isn’t painful and her tiny little woman-brain will eventually understand your righteous truths. A woman just needs a man to tell her things, after all, as they’re incapable of properly grasping even instinctual things like pain. Much like all non-human animals. And black people. And jews. And..
..this was a message brought to you by Tim Allen and the cast of Last Man Standing. Please consider watching us if you want to lose all grasp of sanity, morality, and dignitythe liberal agenda! Remember: The election was stolen!
(The diameter of a grapefruit bit was an attempt to give reasonable benefit of the doubt in regards to the kind of stretching one’d accept as tolerable, of course.
If you’d prefer to use male anatomy as the reference point, we’d consider a range between a marble [1/2in+] and a ping pong ball [1.5in]. [average diameter of a penis, according to Google: .73in].
In short, the gap between what’s “normal” to pass through that region and what happens during childbirth is massively significant, as well as being significantly beyond how you could normally stretch the numbers.. or body.)
If you have a vagina, like I do, I strongly encourage you to play around with just how much you can stretch. A healthy vagina can MORE than stretch as much as it needs to and that level of fullness us just another level.
I’m not sure how x rated were allowed to get but, in my experience, coming to completion with that fullness and then allowing the natural contractions of your body to gently push that fullness out is really just amazing.
And that’s not just labor I’m talking about btw. But gradually stretching yourself to taking a full fist without pain and experiencing climax can certainly help you understand the joy of birth.
I’ve had three natural childbirth, all without major pain interventions,two painfree.
If you think your body can’t stretch that much, and you’ve got a vagina, you may want to discover the wonders of fisting. My partner’s fist is about the size of a newborn and fits *very* nicely.
Haven’t we also got in the habit of encouraging women to give birth in ways ignoring what their bodies are telling them (encouraging birthing on their backs)? This has more recently started to change with other techniques being explored.
As for the process itself, having been present for two births, it’s not nearly as ugly as it may seem to the un-involved. Then again, they were my kids and I was super excited and invovled in helping mom as much as I could.
Ryek, should we call that the Dunning-Kruger rule? The effect is having the confidence to speak about what one little understands, but the rule would be that knowing we little understand, we are obliged to speak authoritatively on a subject?
Yes exactly this. Ina May Gardner is a midwife who really championed the joy of birth and attended thousands of births with a really low rate of interventions.
She also encouraged making out with your partner to help the birth go along.
I genuinely enjoy giving birth. It’s a dick move that you have to go through 9 months of pregnancy and 18 months of childrearing to have it.
I’m considering becoming a surrogate but God that’s complicated.
Is Ina May Gardner the same person as Ina May Gaskin? Because she is a horrible person who encourages bad science and her methods have led to the deaths of multiple children in childbirth.
As for pain, I’m glad you had multiple pain free childbirths, but please don’t dismiss the notion that many people do feel pain – even a great deal of pain – while giving birth and condescend to calling it ‘self inflicted’ because they expect pain.
Also, everyone’s anatomy is different, including and especially things like ‘size and shape of vaginal opening’. Or things like, say, how endometriosis tends to increase risk of complications and sometimes pelvic pain while pregnant. (I can’t find if it worsens labor pains offhand, but I’d suspect that it depends on where your excess endometrial lining is growing. Either way, when the potential complications tend to be life-threatening, I’d assume pain as a possibility.) Not all pain’s expectation-based, ESPECIALLY with something like childbirth where there’s a lot of variables and a lot that can go wrong.
Need to follow up just to clarify, I in absolutely no way meant to imply that pain relief during birth or any painful procedure was wrong. For both of my exes I intervened to ensure they were taken care of when it seemed like the staff were ready to say “f-it, she’s got this.” First kids mom was definitely down for it from the get go. Second one wanted to go drug free, but after a complicated gestation and a week(ish) of trying to induce, when it cam to the end and she was in pain and questioning, I encouraged her to take the epidural. She’d already been through hell at that point and there was really no purpose to allowing her to suffer through more. She was worried people would think she was a bad mom.
…
I mean, it turns out she was, but that wasn’t the reason why. (5 years of custody battles later and she still violates court orders and stops my daughters from seeing each other.) No judge around here has the gumption to invoke penalties, they just keep threatening her and letting it slide.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that it wasn’t an apple, those weren’t known to people at the time the bible was written, think it was a tomato or something?
Im 97% sure it was a ball and then a tit. Think about it. Eve was tempted by a “snake” and ate a “fruit” of the “tree” of “knowledge of good and evil.” She then presented Adam with her “fruit” and he partook a bit. Then when God came by they had to hide their bodies, but when he wouldn’t leave Adam stopped hiding to face the music, in the hopes at least he wouldnt see Eve. When God finally found Eve was when He got upset and the punishment were loss of innocence and a specifically painful burth of the child Eve was going to bear – not just a hypothetical child but the one already growing inside her belly.
The whole thing is an allegory for unsupervised puberty if allegory is allowed. If allegory is not allowed and everything must be literal then the whole thing is “God hates it when people have straight sex, and if it were Adam and Steve maybe we’d still have a garden of eden to chill in”
Don’t forget the snake had legs and walked, too. It was only after the “magic fruit” incident that God condemned it to crawl on the ground.
“Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
Johnny Hart even did a cartoon about it once in ‘B.C.’ (sorry, I couldn’t find a link). Showed a snake on two legs walking past one of the cavemen, who looks out at the reader and says, “This world is younger than I thought.”
To o’reach the terms does the trouser snake betray the “enmity between you and this woman”… so that battle of the sexes (poor terminology and all) is His fault too?
Yeah see, thiiiiiis is why Dina’s head’s this close to exploding. Empiricism this ain’t.
And remember, early Becky Dates included ‘hey can you help me figure out how much of what I learned was bullshit?’ She’s heard at least some of this before. And probably immediately repressed the knowledge of ever hearing it because how do you work with that unless the person you’re talking to is interested in deprogramming?
I’m honestly not sure how much of this Joyce actually believes to begin with. This reads a lot more like she’s just neutrally stating things she’s been told than actually trying to prove Dina wrong. Which is a lot different in tone than the last time these two talked about science vs religion.
Or atheist assholes who cherry pick science so end up proponents of eugenics and insist bigotry is scientifically based. Not sure if Hitler was an atheist or not, don’t care, but Nazism was super focused on using sciencey sounding bullshit to justify literal genocide.
Hitler was allegedly a “devout catholic” and used the Church and religion for his murderous propaganda. And the Church loved him as much as evangelicals love Trump today.
Hitler also notably trash talked Christianity as a Jewish religion of the weak in private. SHOCKINGLY, he may have been a hypocrite as well as mass murderer.
There are certainly atheists who fall for a lot of pseudo-science nonsense, but not a lot of young earth creationist atheists. She’d need to find a different framework to hang her science denial on.
I’d guess you’re right, but I’m also thinking it’s possible that just because Joyce stopped believing in God, doesn’t necessarily mean that Joyce stopped believing in the garden and the fruit and etc etc. Deconversion can follow those weird sorts of paths.
Given Joyce’s whole thing about original sin back around Kidnapping #1 (if one thing’s not true, it all falls apart) and the discussion about how rigidity of faith often leads to a complete shattering rather than an adaptation re: Joyce’s atheism back in the first post-skip arc, I think she’s eventually going to be more open to science now.
But I can see her resisting for a while too, to avoid accepting she’s changed (and that on some level she never did believe in anything but the structure.) That said, I do think she no longer buys into original sin, at least not completely, and from there the Eden story crumbles.
Honestly, to me it all reads like she’s moved past all that (though may still stumble upon the occasional Keanu “woah” moment). I think that she’s just keeping appearances because with all the chaos of last semester she wants some stability and not to be confronted by everyone about this new change. But that could also just be my own coloured lenses. (i tend to go dark and disappear around my birthday to avoid drawung attention, or possibly disappointment)
I find the contrast between Joyce and Becky interesting. Joyce has rejected faith, but seems to be having trouble letting go of what came with that faith. Becky seems far more able to ditch the garbage, while still retaining her faith. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out going forward.
Aw! It looks like one dinosaur loving rational girl doesn’t like her theories being debated in the marketplace of ideas! Now if you would open your mind for a moment I would love to talk at length about the evidence of intelligent design!
Ha! True.
Personally, as a person who embraces both faith and science, I prefer to apply ideas like Intelligent Design not to evolution (which explains the variance of quality of life-based systems better anyway) and instead to physics. The idea that everything in the universe follows certain mathamatical principles down to the subatomic level and up to the super galactic level sounds a lot more like something designed by some sort of god-like entity to me.
NOTE: Not saying that it is – just saying that the idea makes more sense to me when applied to physics than evolution.
NOTE2: Also, not subscribing this to any specific faith. Keepin it general.
The universe doesn’t follow mathematical principles. Mathematical principles are derived from observing the universe. Mathematics is our tool for understanding the universe.
Mathematics may be a tool for understanding the universe, but it’s not what mathematics is. Mathematics is the study of the logical consequences of structure and those logical consequences are not dependent on the universe. Why the universe has a structure which is simple enough for us to model reasonably well with our primitive mathematics is an open question.
“Omnipotence does not necessarily lead to competence or benevolence.”
This leads to the competing theories of Unintelligent Design (the world was created by a divine being who is very powerful and means well but honestly has no idea what he’s doing; how else do you explain all the stupid stuff everywhere) and Malevolent Design (the world was created by a divine being who is very powerful and very intelligent and loves seeing everyone suffer horribly; how else do you explain multi-host internal parasites).
I wonder if there’s a good argument to omniscience and omnipotence no longer being mutually exclusive if incompetence is thrown in the mix. (Sort of like how oil and water will mix if there’s enough alcohol involved)
They do actually have a term and it’s called teleology. The theory of intelligent design is actually still incredibly popular today with credited scientic professionals promoting it but in my experience it’s mostly half truths or abstractions used to sell books on the subject.
“Marketplace of ideas” is an analogy, not literal. As an anology it can be strained, but on the whole it seems a mildly useful one as individuals decide what ideas they buy into.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the term. Like all terms it depends on the context of its use. I only used it because it’s a familiar phrase I hear parroted by those psuedo-intellectual types you see on youtube all the time. Ready to debate proven scientific theories with it. Justifying their ideas by saying it’s just as valid because people believe in it even if it’s wrong. Lots of people still believe the earth is flat, doesn’t mean it’s true but in the marketplace of ideas what is true isn’t constant. It varies depending on how many people believe it.
I maintain the earth is indeed approximately flat in spherical coordinates, which is to say, R is approximately constant. The earth is also the center of the known universe, because the known universe is a function of what can be observed from earth which is [the time since a particular epoch] divided by the speed of light in a vacuum.
Neither of these make us in any way special nor justify the other bs that get attached to these mathematical and tautological technicalities.
It might actually be a decent analogy, but not in the sense most users of the term intend it. The term is used to claim that in the free marketplace of ideas, the truth and the best ideas will inevitably win out, just as in a true free market the best products will win out. This is obviously no more true in real markets than in the analogy. There are always far more factors than product quality that affect any market – marketing being the most obvious.
The more we treat ideas as a marketplace, the more we accept that those are valid ways of judging ideas.
Fundie religions are good at selling creationism. That doesn’t make it a valid idea.
But mostly as Sirksome implies, it’s term often used by horrible people peddling horrific ideas. Youtubers pushing anti-feminism and fascist propaganda along with the pseudo-science. They’re just competing in the free marketplace of ideas. Or just outright trolls.
Dina knows evolutionary ideas already have been debated in a marketplace of ideas. Except that marketplace is called “Peer Review”, not “Sunday School”.
It’s kind of like hearing a person tell you that rainbows are proof that global warming isn’t real. You might know what each of those things are, but it won’t make sense to someone outside of the subculture – even if you’re familiar with how it’s proof of God’s promise.
Conservatives who don’t want to believe in climate change point to God’s promise to Noah after the flood as proof that it isn’t real, yes. It’s made headlines a few times when Republican politicians or science advisors have made that argument. Though, the rainbow part is more a rhetorical flourish that’s been used a couple of times.
But unlike evolution, I do feel it important to emphasize that this is overwhelmingly a case of [person who doesn’t want to believe drawing an excuse from their faith] rather than [person’s faith prevents them from accepting evidence that contradicts their faith].
I don’t know – “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”
Maybe the sea level rise won’t be so bad, but the heat itself will get us.
She didn’t intuitively connect it to ‘The Fall’, but being familiar with the Garden of Eden story in the abstract and being familiar with fundamentalists’ justifications for Young Earth Creationism using the Garden of Eden are two very different things.
Speaking as someone who has some similar tendencies to Dina, stuff like this can be really hard to let go, especially on one’s own. It festers in the brain and will consume one’s entire attention if not resolved or sufficiently diverted by someone else.
Alright, so I don’t have a super intuitive understanding of the science, but the faster something decays the more dangerous radiation it gives off.
So if carbon (which I understand to be a fairly widespread) element used to decay exponentially faster, would that not be giving all life in the garden really nasty cancers and radiation poisoning?
Cancer is a product of Satan after the world had been corrupted by secularism and… something something whatever justification they use for the absurdly long lifespans in Genesis as well maybe?
I have absorbed some knowledge of this worldview from ex-fundamentalist postings and such but that one’s my limit and I rather doubt I WANT to see the ‘educational materials’ that would explain it.
Yes, but Carbon 12 and Carbon 13, the stable isotopes, work fine for that.
Of course, Carbon is created in stellar cores over millions of years and distributed via supernovae. Don’t know how the creationist version of Carbon works.
Young earthers can fall back on the “appearance of age” argument. Carbon is everywhere because God made the Universe look like it was billions of years old.
Ah yes! The doctrine of Last Tuesdayism, which puts forward the God created the universe and everyone in it last Tuesday, complete with memories and the holes in our socks.
You know, it occurs to me that, considering how much effort God apparently put into making the universe look billions of years old… Maybe it’d be more polite to believe it actually is so all that work hasn’t been wasted?
In other words, if Young Earth Creationists are right, they’re also being rude and ungrateful. We should believe what science has discovered because God clearly wants us to!
(I hope no one took that seriously… but if anyone wants to use this argument against a YEC, have fun!)
Alright, but if carbon (and I assume other things) didn’t even *start* decaying until after the fall, how do you square that with the “things used to decay a lot faster before the fall” argument
I seem to remember reading a paper that debunked the changing radioactive decay argument, but I can’t find it doing a quick Google. Something about a faster rate that is required for it to work for creationists would have resulted in the planet being sterilized by radiation long ago.
Those fundamentalist mental gymnastics all come back to the same basic false premises, the same messages drilled into their heads as children: the Bible is always right; those who rebel against god will suffer severe consequences; only god’s dedicated slaves will enjoy a good life.
Specifically, also, ignore any of the Bible that disagrees with what we’re telling you.
John Calvin, founder of Calvinism, repeatedly got called out in his own time for the fact that he basically ignored whole swaths of the New Testament to state, “The Bible is completely unchanging and unquestionable. Yes, including the parts about changing and questioning.”
I said it yesterday, but Dina’s over the line here and really needs to stop.
Folks here are anti-religious but that doesn’t give someone the right to confront and harass another person’s beliefs just because they don’t match your own. If this was the other way around(as in Mary) folks would be screaming for something nasty to happen to her.
Now excuse me while I await all of the anti-religion responses denouncing me because I’m going against the grain here
You’re entitled to your own beliefs; you’re not entitled to your own facts. Radiometric decay falls under the domain of “fact or not” instead of “belief.”
Except here Joyce isn’t asserting those things as fact. She’s stating what she was taught. It is a fact that when Joyce was a kid her teacher said “And now we’re going to learn about this,” ‘this’ being creationism.. That’s what Joyce is saying here. Not that she currently believes it (which we’ve seen may no longer be the case) but that this is what she was told as a child.
As a young child I was told Santa had a magic key because our house didn’t have a chimney. Does that mean I believe it? No, but it’s a fact I was told that.
If you didn’t know about Joyce’s loss of faith, would you actually realize that? I mean, she doesn’t actually say “And this is what I believe”, but she also doesn’t give any real clue that she doesn’t.
It’s phrased as if she still does – especially yesterday. The quotes around real science, her “isn’t there” response. Even here, she says it’s easy to debunk carbon dating, with no caveats that it’s just what she was taught.
There’s no reason for Dina to think Joyce isn’t serious here.
There’s a difference of opinion, and there’s teaching outright falsehoods because “religion”. I get miffed about people claiming the right to spread lies (provable falsehoods) in the name of religion. Young Earth Creationists are spreading lies. Ergo I get miffed at YEC.
Joyce is going to be in a biology class that is operating off these basic, observable principles.
If she’s going to make the class a living nightmare for everyone else in it all semester, that’s gonna put someone who knows her (previous, most likely) worldview and wants to actually learn without serious class derailment every session on edge. (I love Joyce, but oh how she can derail a class.) Unfortunately, Dina wanted to share a class with Becky, and of course Becky and Joyce are sharing a class if they can.
Most likely she won’t, but Dina does not know that yet.
You wouldn’t associate that level of confrontation from Dina, but diametrically opposed hyperfixations being put up against each other are not to be trifled with.
I get why Dina is frustrated here but the way she’s talking to Joyce is not exactly helpful. People tend to dig their heels in when confronted in this manner, rarely and I mean RARELY do they actually listen and reconsider.
I think Dina’s interpreting this back-and-forth as an argument, but Joyce sees it as a Q-and-A. Joyce isn’t getting particularly animated about her answers, but Dina is. She seems to be interpreting Joyce’s calm, flatly-delivered answers as “this is the way it actually is”, even though Joyce means “this is what we were taught”.
As the other guy said – Joyce didn’t challenge Dina. Dina asked “How did your school attempt to ‘debunk’ carbon dating?”, and Joyce replied by giving an example of the BS that was spewed by her teachers. Now to be fair, Dina’s rage could be directed to Joyce’s teachers, not Joyce; but her face certainly seems to be aiming it at Joyce.
Dina never asked about her school or what she was taught.
Dina wondered how Joyce would do as a science denier. Joyce said they’d been taught “real” stuff too, along with stuff debunking it. Joyce said it was easy to debunk carbon dating when Dina asked how do you debunk it.
There’s nothing in the text here that more than hints Joyce is just giving examples of the nonsense she was taught or that she doesn’t still agree with it. Certainly nothing Dina should be expected to realize. Visually, Joyce seems a little more distant and detached than you might expect, which might be a clue she’s not actually invested in the argument like she once would have been, but it’s pretty subtle.
She did nothing of the sort, don’t be so fucking dramatic. Joyce interrupted the question when she recognised a term, Dina accepted the interruption, Joyce elaborated, and Dina verbally expressed confusion. So she raised her voice and/or talked in a more excited tone. Boo-fucking-hoo for poor victimised Joyce.
Oh wait, Joyce is taking Dina’s intense reaction in stride and hasn’t shown even the slightest fucking hint of bother or upset. Being loud is not the inherently violent aggression it keeps being characterised as, and it’s a little weird that the “probably”-autistic character is the one we’re shoving that narrative on, of all parties present.
Confusion and anger are mutually exclusive now, or something? My stance has never been “Dina isn’t angry or aggressive in this scene”. I’m saying that it’s not strictly a problem right now, at least until Joyce takes issue or Dina escalates into personal attacks. A heated argument is actually fine.
Willful ignorance of proven and demonstrable scientific facts is not a “difference of belief.” Frankly, given the current state state our world is in (due in no small part to everyone’s “opinions” on the science of epidemiology and climate change), it is reckless and dangerous to claim that science is a belief on which people should be able to disagree instead of truths that govern our universe whether you like it or not.
Well, yeah, obviously. The autistic kid is an aggressive rage monster whose temper is clearly a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off at the slightest provocation, doncha know.
BUT, I do think Dina’s misinterpreting Joyce here. (Been there, done that.) Joyce is explaining what she was taught, not preaching that young earth creationism is factual, but Dina’s reacting as though she’s there to rebut everything the professor says.
Learning when to bite your tongue is hard, especially when you feel like your primary interest is under attack.
I agree that Dina might be misinterpreting, yeah. I also think she might just be reacting strongly to the base element of bullshit being spoken in her direction, regardless of origin. It’s incompatible with everything she’s been taught, and (speaking from my own experience), them’s fightin’ words.
As far as the “first punch” thing goes, I have difficulties seeing it as anything other than a conversation starter, especially because Joyce hasn’t expressed any discomfort. If anything, Joyce is running with it.
Dina’s statement was “I do idly wonder how you, a science denier, will prove compatible with our biology class.”
That comes across as more than a little gatekeeping-y, like Dina’s suggesting Joyce is an outsider who’s incompatible with the biology class.
“a science denier” – an outsider
“will prove compatible” – I think you don’t belong here.
Again, that probably wasn’t the intention, but that’s how it comes across given the word choice.
She could have phrased that differently, so it doesn’t come across as a jab. “Doesn’t biology class contradict what you were previously taught?” or something like that, maybe. Better still would have been not broaching the subject until Joyce brought it up.
It absolutely sucks when this happens, and having to manually interpret unspoken language (because it doesn’t come naturally) sucks even more, but it’s how the world works and we have to learn to deal with it.
I think she’s misinterpreting, but I think Joyce is also posing intentionally. She’s not nearly ready to admit to Becky that she’s lost her faith and knows that not treading the old party line here would lead to conversations she’s not ready to have. There’s nothing in Joyce’s words that gives away that she’s repeating something she was taught but no longer believes.
In Dina’s place, I would be expecting her to be there to debunk everything the professor says. Why wouldn’t she expect that?
As for that first punch, from anyone but Dina, I’d take it as a “please reassure me you’re not going to argue about creationism in class”. From Dina, it like is just something she was idly wondering as she says.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on this, thank you. Autistic literal-mindedness and blunt communication. Allistics are so used to hidden layers in speech, that speaking at a straightforward surface level gets read the same way as deliberate metaphors.
Yup. That’s what I meant with the “learning to bite your tongue” part. Reading it back, there really isn’t a way to interpret that as anything but picking on Joyce. Even if that wasn’t the intention, it was the effect.
And yet, Christians do it all the time. Have you seen the language they use to describe atheists? Have you seen them trampling boundaries? Have you seen the threatening children with hell? I don’t have any sympathy for them if someone speaks back to their stupid fucking “beliefs.”
I have already said that my belief is that it is fine, and yet you continue to harass me over it, so aren’t you just a hypocrite?
Reality is reality. Period. No one gets to have their ‘belief’ override it. Now there are plenty of things in our universe that are unknown or unknowable, or matters that are entirely subjective opinion, and you can have any belief you like regarding them, but not regarding known fact.
Eh. This reads much more like an outburst than an attack. Dina’s using the passive voice, generally. She’ll be over the line if she segues into an actual attack, like, “you’re stupid for believing that,” but she hasn’t yet. She’s not even trying to convince Joyce, which would also be reasonable. I agree that she’s edging closer, but I disagree she’s over the line.
You’re allowed to voice confusion over something that confuses you, and you’re allowed to voice opinions, even when they directly contradict what you know of the other person’s. The latter, it must be noted, is exactly what you’re doing here.
Mary’s outbursts are contextualized by what it is she wants, which is generally some acknowledgement of her superiority. That’s not true of Dina here. And I speak from the pro-religious viewpoint.
Look at Joyce. She’s not even slightly bothered. She’s still leaning towards Dina, engaged and interested in what she’s saying.
That is also fair.
You make a good point about Dina’s word choice.
Still, her facial expressions indicate hostility. While Joyce does not seem to be reacting, I can’t tell if that’s actually an indication of how clear Dina is being or Joyce’s current level of apathy.
I suppose future strips will reveal that.
I mean, Kingdom hearts is easy to understand. It’s just dumb.
And, y’know, makes you look dumb when you try to explain it to a third party.
And that’s without taking in account the deliberate mysteries, like the animal mask people or whatever that Yozora deal is supposed to be.
The animal mask people are ancient Keyblade Masters who led what essentially amounts to anime Hogwarts Houses, but they got paranoid and started going behind each others backs on weird stuff and lost trust in their friends. Yozora is a character in a video game and that’s his story. No mysteries to be found, there. Calling it “dumb” is reductive and elitist.
A description I saw fairly recently that was ‘oh yeah THAT is exactly what I love about this series, explained in a way I hadn’t found the words for’ is that the appeal of Kingdom Hearts isn’t in the (admittedly convoluted and sometimes quite silly) plot developments, it’s the emotional beats for the characters. Trying to explain it in pure plot developments is going to sound less effective than actually watching it because you don’t get the emotional beats that make it work. (This is also why, for instance, fans of Days will make jokes about ‘who am I going to have ice cream with?’ while saying simultaneously ‘but the voice acting makes this WORK, and the ice cream represents their friendship and the one moment of freedom they have from the Organization, so actually this is heartbreaking!’ When I say this, it sounds ridiculous. When you’re watching the cutscene in context, it is not.) I could bring up like three or four other examples here without batting an eye, but a key thing for Kingdom Hearts at its best is that it makes EMOTIONAL sense, even when the plot brings in time travel or clones or whatever the hell they’re doing with the Foretellers now.
Kingdom Hearts’ storyline is also way less confusing (though admittedly no less convoluted) when you experience it in release order and not chronological order. Since they’re making the plot up as they go along, 1 is of course the most accessible game of the series, and you don’t NEED to know there what Mickey’s travels in the World of Darkness were like. More importantly, the prequel games are written so that all these calls forward hit you more playing in release order than they would switching to chronological. (Bringing up Days again, the game is designed to constantly twist the knife that you KNOW how Roxas’s story ends in 2. Playing it first, you lose out on that. You also get hit with a way more jarring change from Axel being portrayed as villainous straight to tragic disaster without the gradual shift in that framing that happens during 2.)
That said, it was a genuinely bad idea for the series to do the main game/‘side game’ framing for so long when those games in between have all ended up loadbearing (especially Birth By Sleep and 3D – to this day I don’t understand why 3D at least isn’t a straight numbered title since Sora’s playable there,) and splitting the series onto so damn many consoles did it no favors. For years one of the best stories in the series was only available on the PSP, a system that had doomed itself by trying to compete with the DS. (Also impacted the gameplay in odd ways – Days loses so much in the movie format, but the technical limitations of putting it on the DS and the gameplay itself to fit are uh. Not great.) Fortunately we have the 1.5 + 2.5 combo now, which has almost everything… except for the mobile game, which has become the most important game for the series going forward. And so the cycle continues. (Now mobile games but I’m going to avoid acknowledging the Xehanort prequel as long as I can, I do not CARE about Xehanort’s backstory, that ship sailed six games ago.)
But yeah, KH is great and I love it, convoluted time travel rules and all. (I know the time travel rules, but for the life of me I can’t keep them all straight beyond ‘these were clearly designed to benefit the villains and no one else, but Sora always cheats.’) Just wish Kairi and the other girls got more to do.
and then there’s me, who (as previously noted) was there for the initial pitch of a classic Disney/Square mashup + fanboy ‘memberberries nostalgia trip, and fell off the series somewhere around (if not during) 2 when it moved away from that.
You ever read the Days manga? It’s the best of the lot where Shiro Amano’s character designs and expressive art really come together with his more jokey take on KH and adds a lot more character to a game intentionally designed in a “punch into work, do your job, punch out” kind of routine.
Anyway I appreciate that someone has finally come to the defense of the Ice Cream line, even if it kind of deserved the mockery. *I* get it, that Roxas and Xion are weird half-baked humans who feel just enough emotion to get confused and vague about what they’re going though, and that eating ice cream after work together was the only way they figured out how to bond, but I think it’s asking a lot of an audience of millions to see these lines that don’t always land the way they do and look for the meaning behind them, and by the time you get those youtube compilations of all the dumb lines in KH history it’s too late.
I need to read the Days manga but haven’t ever managed to get around to it! Bad timing for me to get ahold of it at the time, I think. But Xion’s my absolute favorite, so I really should track that down.
That is absolutely the thing about a lot of the lines in KH. Most of them make sense in context, at least if you’re willing to put a little thought into them, but removed from that context ‘Kairi’s inside of me?’ or mournfully reflecting on the end of summer vacation sounds a bit… silly. (Though the second one there’s usually remembered well because it’s at the beginning of a popular game and everyone got the metaphor through context. Now that you mention it, there’s something interesting about Roxas’s most iconic line using the same ‘doesn’t have the tools to be direct, goes to the frame of reference he has’ thing as his most-maligned one. Nice catch, thanks!)
There’s also a serious case of Proper Noun Syndrome in general that doesn’t tend to help any given line, but that’s as much a combination of ‘this is a Disney/Final Fantasy crossover fic whose many many OCs took over the plot’ and ‘We fight goth Muppets using a giant cartoon key, some shit needs expositing’ as anything. We were gonna get that even BEFORE the plot turned into an exploration of the nature of identity and what makes a unique, real person running up against an evil metaphysicist whose hobby is bodyjacking, and also Donald Duck is here.
I agree that it’s not as difficult to understand as some people say, but it’s a sprawling and convoluted story presented in a fairly unintuitive way. There’s a lot of it and it’s very easy for someone to get lost and have no idea what’s going on
It’s also been running for two entire decades. That’s a lot of history, but you don’t see people talking down about other long-runners the way they do about this one.
It’s probably because Kingdom Hearts lore never really matters.
Everything you learn in a previous game has equal odds of getting a Shocking Reveal about its true nature in the next. Nomura doesn’t know how to do plot, so he just throws in twists thinking that it makes the story more exciting.
While at the same time, it pays FAR more attention to its lore than, say, Zelda, which likewise has a ‘nothing really matters so fuck it’ approach (how many ancient, mechanically advanced civilizations have we got by now that the timeline means have to be distinct from the other ancient, mechanically advanced civilizations and we know next to nothing about any of them except ‘robots’? Genuine question here, I know there’s at least two but lost count and I’m not sure if we can list, say, the Tower of the Gods in Wind Waker with whatever the shit was with the robots in Skyward Sword.) I think once we got the Hyrule Historia timeline that revealed, surprise! You thought there were two timelines that branched off from Ocarina but there’s also one where Link canonically fails!, I think the fandom started going through the stages of grief. Certainly by ‘Breath of the Wild exists at the end of the Zelda timeline. Which one? All of them’ they’ve just accepted that the lore is meaningless to Nintendo.
As mentioned by Taffy, it is a twenty-year-old series, but at least in gaming you don’t get a ton of franchises (at least not more mainstream hits) that care about the story, all fit into a single continuity featuring the same characters – note that Zelda also features that reincarnation handwave – and have put out nearly as many games in that timeframe. A lot of the other big RPG franchises – Final Fantasy, Tales, Fire Emblem, I want to say Dragon Quest – all do standalone stories or a few connected ones before a reset, which lets them not get completely bogged down with the need for a new twist that changes Everything We Thought We Knew fitting into the last five of those.
Kingdom Hearts: It’s a unique mess of a franchise, but god do I love it for that specific reason. I’d say never change but seriously Nomura Kairi and Namine are RIGHT THERE, let them do something already. Everything else is fine just let the girls be relevant for more than their first game.
I think the difference between Zelda and KH is that the only people who really care about Zelda lore are fans, whereas KH lore is actually of significant importance to KH.
A Zelda game will say it’s in Hyrule every time but sometimes it’s the size of a shoebox and sometimes it’s an expansive wilderness and Death Mountain keeps moving all over the place. Twilight Princess makes a big deal about the Twili people and they’re never coming back, but check out my cool fan video on them actually being the tribe who crafted Majora’s Mask. None of it ever actually matters, though I suppose Breath of the Wild aiming for more developed and iconic depictions of its cast might signify a change there.
Kingdom Hearts will straight up release an updated version of one of its games with a plot relevant secret boss and brand new ending to set up the next game if you complete all the tasks and then get mad at you for not knowing what that’s about. It’s a series that throws *a lot* at you, then takes some of it back to stick new stuff in there (“It”s the guy who”s not Ansem!”), and through all of this it feels like an insurmountable hill just to keep up with all the terminology before you can even start engaging with the character arcs and themes the games want to convey.
Agreed 100%. My favorite may well be ‘remember how the final boss of the second game that people skipped for years had an airship form for no clear reason, and you all just rolled with it because whatever it’s a JRPG final boss of course they have an airship form and you were too busy being frustrated by the card battle system? Well, fifteen years later this mobile game will have a cutscene that explains a question you weren’t asking, makes that random airship actually a poignant piece of character work, and raises EVEN MORE QUESTIONS!’ Sums up everything I love and laugh baffledly at about the series in one sentence.
After all, Dina was the one who asked Joyce about this. Joyce has merely reported what she learned. If Dina wants to be upset with others on Joyces behalf, then great, but she appears to be upset with Joyce herself, who did nothing wrong. Joyce isn’t trying to convince others of this – she is literally just answering Dina’s directly asked question.
So yeah – Dina’s being a bit of a jerk about this.
Agreed. Particularly since Dina started out with the assumption that Joyce can’t be good at/have any foundational knowledge of ANY part of science (I don’t even think we know this is biology class) based on beliefs on this one issue. As somebody who entered undergrad a creationist (albeit a less than committed one) I got As in all my classes in my bio minor up until I hit Poisonois and Medicinal Plants, which was a 300 level class with a very changing professor. I got a B+ in that one. I did well on the AP physics exam in high school always liked chemistry and earth science, etc.
To be honest, I’m somewhat personally offended by Dina’s attacks on Joyce here. Assuming that somebody can’t think scientifically or understand scientific principles just because they were brought up being taught a misguided approach to one portion of one scientific discipline is pretty messed up.
Dina said “our biology class” in yesterday’s strip. Dina and Joyce clashed over Creationism last semester, Dina isn’t just making assumptions. And evolution is the heart of explanatory biology.
Joyce is kind of demonstrating her lack of understanding of scientific principles right here with her “we’ll just assume the rate of carbon decay changed to match the Bible dating with no other side effects” nonsense.
I think it’s important to point out that Dina’s being a bit mean from an allistic viewpoint. I don’t think she’s being intentionally rude or mean— science is something incredibly important to her so to me it makes sense that she’s coming across a little abrasive right now. (That doesn’t make it necessarily *right* but it does explain it a little)
That said, Joyce also isn’t doing anything wrong here. She’s just answering Dina’s questions based on what she was taught. So at a certain point, she may need to directly ask Dina to stop if the conversation is bothering her. I think Joyce has known Dina long enough to know that at this point
I think a lot of people in the comments are looking at this as very black and white in terms of “someone is in the wrong and someone is in the right” instead of looking at this as a nuanced conversation between two multi-faceted people. Could Dina be a little nicer here? Maybe. But she’s also probably not viewing what she’s saying as abrasive so much as just spitting facts.
I really don’t think it’s “over the line” to point out (angrily or otherwise) that the beliefs of a particular religion contradict the scientific evidence.
Goddamn but Dina is CRANKY. I can’t blame her because to me (an atheist raised in a LOOSELY CATHOLIC household) everything about Fundie Homeschooling wants me to scream this is abusing your children but. Becky already has told her about this? In their early dates?
There has to be a reason she’s working some of her (still unknown) frustrations on Joyce of all people. My bet? It’s because she can’t do this on Becky. Whom, if I may repeat myself, may be open to Science and Evolution but is scared to be alone in the same room with her because it might lead to Performing The Delicious One (like we say in Spanish lol) and that’d be A SIN. Before marriage, at least.
IDK. Dina’s not normally like this unless she’s being condescended to, so… I’m awaiting for the explanation with bated breath.
I wasn’t 100% on this before, but I am definitely coming more and more to it. I’m also wondering if, as I was thinking through upthread, Dina’s on edge expecting a whole semester of this when she’s trying to actually learn (or at least get through class without turning it into a Roz-Joyce Gender Studies-level shitshow every time) and feels like she’s stuck because she wants to share a class with Becky and Becky wants to share her classes with Joyce whenever possible. A slightly different flavor of the same basic thread.
…………OHHHHHHHHHH. Oh, this makes SO MUCH SENSE. Even if Dina didn’t participate of those Gender Studies classes, half her dorm did and you could bet there was much talk about the Joyce/Roz feud. So Dina’s already going into this with dread in her heart…
And also, as stated many moons before, she knows she’s Becky’s Rebound ™ – An awareness that hurts her so she does her best to not dwell in it. None of this can be conductive to a proper learning environment, nor to a healthy emotional state.
Becky was present for the big ‘up to three days ago this was you’ Shitshow, I’m pretty sure. (The one that, IIRC, led to the creation of the bongo filter.) Becky may even have been dating Dina by then, I don’t remember the timeline 100%.
Yeah, Dina almost certainly heard about Gender Studies Class.
Ah, thanks! Couldn’t remember which ones she was there for or not.
Still, between Dorothy and Walky both having front row seats to that one, Dina still probably knows about Gender Studies Class with Joyce being an experience.
Even without Joyce disrupting class too much – which is sadly not something uncommon with YEC in biology classes, it’s likely to spill over out of class and she’s likely to get drawn into it through Becky.
What, “performing (“doing”, more like) The Delicious One”? I swear to god it sounds better in Spanish, ahahah. “Hacer El Delicioso” – See how it’s shorter and more sonorous?
I was writing “doing the do” like in Early Tumblr and then went “wait! I’ve got a better one!”
This is a great phrase. Now that I’ve learned it, if I recall language classes correctly, the next step is to use it in a sentence. “Becky y Dina quieren hacer el delicioso.”
You’re ABSOLUTELY CORRECT; that’s exactly how it’s used! “Becky y Dina quieren hacer el delicioso”, even though Beck’s scared of its many delights 8D I bestow upon you the right to use this euphemism at your leisure~
Hang in there though. We now have an AI language model that is consistently judged better at writing believable fake news stories than humans in blind tests.
I wonder how Joyce would react to finding out most of the world’s Christians not only believe it to be a parable but that it was never actually meant to be taken literally. Fundamentalists descended from Renaissance Protestants had some crazy ideas.
It’s pretty fascinating to draw a direct parallel to it and a lot of “American” Christian problems.
John: Listen, you are either the Righteous or the Damned. It doesn’t matter how you BEHAVE. It’s all about God pre-selecting you as special. Which means you can do whatever you want as a righteous person and look down on the people we hate.
No, no, you left out the part about how God made sure good things happened to “righteous” people, and so being rich was proof that you were a good person.
Huh? Job? Who was that? Sounds like he must be a pretty big scumbag if God did all of that that to him…
I’m not generally one for judging other’s religions, since my own relationship with religion is somewhat… Uncomfortable, for me. I’m not personally religious, I just enjoy reading about religion.
But systems of belief that essentially say that good luck is proof of being a good person, and that bad things happening to you is proof that you deserved it? I’m pretty comfortable calling those complete garbage, and grounds for being suspicious of anyone promoting them. I don’t see how they could lead anywhere but terrible places.
I feel comfortable judging it because if you have a religion based on someone’s words you can be called out if you invert them.
For example, “The Church of Optimus Prime insists that Megatron is the coolest and humans should be enslaved for energon.” It may or may not be your bag but it certainly is inconsistent with what we know about said Transformer.
Eh, but what if the Church of Optimus Prime also says that Megatron wants you to treat other humans kindly and with respect, so that they may better serve as slaves in the future, and these teachings encourage a bunch of short-tempered hotheads to redirect their energy towards building gaudy monuments to Megatron instead of going around picking pointless fights with each other?
…Okay, maybe I should have simply abandoned the hypothetical, but to restate my point – even if it’s hard to call something “Christian” at a certain point (like, say, Pentecostals and their “spiritual warfare”), it can genuinely improve the lives of believers, and encourage them to be better people. And if one doesn’t believe in the Bible or Jesus’s divinity in the first place, does it really matter if what they practice has no relation to what they “should” be practicing?
It’s better to judge the results than the logic behind them, in my opinion. Though I certainly won’t hesitate to call out how un-Christian a lot of Christians behave in practice, since it’s the easiest way to get through to them.
Pentecostal “spiritual warfare” is totally Christian. (Source: I grew up around them, including a close family member.)
Casting out demons in the name of Jesus is right there in the Bible. Jesus directly told his followers to do it! If it was good and effective back then, why should it be any different now?
The people who believe that aren’t some kind of wacko fringe group. They’re in a mainstream denomination. Given the rest of their beliefs about Jesus’ divinity, the literal existence of Hell, etc. – which are mainstream Christian beliefs – they have perfectly reasonable beliefs about demons and the power of the Name of Jesus
You may not like it, but Christians really do have to own this one. Mainstream Christian beliefs lead straight to spiritual warfare.
“I serve a risen Savior, He’s in the world today. I know that He is living, whatever men may say…” They sing it joyfully because they believe it literally.
To be clear, I have nothing against Pentecostals – I’m certain it’s improved the lives of many believers. It’s just that when you’re praying for an angel of confusion to disrupt a meeting so that your church isn’t foreclosed on, it looks a lot more like pagan faiths calling on spirits for boons to me than it does other forms of Christianity.
Oh my, calling up an “angel of confusion” is really creepy. I suppose there’s some Old Testament precedent for God using confusion – but I agree that example is not very closely connected to any Christianity I’ve ever seen or heard of.
I wonder whether at another time, some of those same people might be intoning, “Spirit of Confusion, come out of him, I command you in the name of Jesus!”
Frankly, your story reminds me of the scene in Prince Caspian where the Hag and the Werewolf start to call up the Witch.
I mean, yeah. Calvinism was the basis for Puritanism, which was imported to America by the Mayflower (and others).
Calvin is responsible for a LOT of what people hate about modern American “Christianity”.
I also want to point out that if acceleration of radioactive decay were true, the resulting rate of radiation output in the past would be enough to destroy all life on the planet.
I can even prove it mathematically. According to fundamentalists, the world is 6000 years old. There are objects that we know to be 6 million years old, containing radioactive elements that have been decaying within that time frame. If the world really was 6000 years old, there would have been at least some point in the past where they were decaying at a rate 1000x what they are now. All together, the pretense of those super-fast decaying elements would have been enough to destroy all life on earth as we know it, but yet here we are.
if the world was 6 thousand years old, RIGHT NOW , at THIS VERY MOMENT ( and your entire life up until now ) would be a World Destroying earthquake enough to level every building on earth
and simultaneous Mega Tsunamis drowning all life on the coasts.
We Know this because Continental Drift is Objectively true, and we know of at least 2 other super continents.
No equations necessary , just back of the envelope math.
Nor can you pull that “Acceleration of X ” Fudge factor with Seismology or we wouldnt even live on an Earth with Mountains.
Compress 4.5 Billions years of earthquakes into 6000 years and shake apart every built structure. Compress it into a few days ….. welcome to bowling ball Earth.
Disproving Young Earth Creationism (it even has a tagline beyond Creationism) is like disproving the moon is made of cheese. It doesn’t actually need to be disproven and the people who believe it don’t care that you try.
I will admit my best friend spent 10 years online just being Dina because it was a religious calling to him to defend biology.
Most of the time you don’t have to – and you really can’t because the people who believe it aren’t relying on any kind of evidence beyond the Bible, despite their pretenses.
However, Dina’s going into a biology class with a pair of YECs, one of whom she’s had some success deprogramming. She’s going to be dealing with this all semester, like it or not.
I was taught that the continents split up to their present state during the lifetime of one of Noah’s great-great-grandsons (Peleg, for the curious), and that this was also when Atlantis sank into the ocean – Atlantis formerly being a “continent” sandwiched between North America and Europe during the whole single supercontinent (Pangaea, though I was never taught that name) period that lasted from Creation all through the Flood and up until Peleg.
How do you know that wasn’t the work of a giant invisible telepathic gerbil who’s trying to keep us from his reserves of rubies and diamonds hidden inside the moon?
Don’t we only know that from radioactive dating of some early bones and artifacts? If radioactive dating can’t be trusted, then we don’t actually know it.
Don’t we have some of their oral histories that stretch back tens of thousands of years as well? I won’t claim to be an expert on their cultures, though, so I’d have to look into it more to see if my half-remembered, uh, memory is correct.
(IIRC there’s at least one instance I can remember off the top of my head where a local cultural tradition describes an asteroid impact in what is now Western Australia – the corresponding impact crater, Wolfe Creek, is believed to be well over 100,000 years old.)
Obviously oral tradition can’t be trusted that far back and the dating of the crater is clearly wrong as well – remember we can’t trust radioactive dating.
More seriously – I have a lot of trouble accepting oral history as reliable anywhere near that far back and 100,000 years would be before our current best estimates of the main wave of modern humans leaving Africa. Having legends about a prominent geological feature isn’t really great evidence.
Yeah, admittedly after doing a little bit of double-checking against my memory I do seem to have partially confused the legends surrounding Wolfe Creek Crater (which does have an impact legend associated with it, but the actual crater prooobably pre-dates Aboriginal arrival in Australia roughly around 70,000 years ago – a good 30,000 years at least after the believed date of impact, geological timescales are fuuun) with the local legends of the Henbury cratersin the Northern Territory – the Henbury craters formed somewhere between two to six thousand years ago, and the region was definitely inhabited at that time.
(Can you guess what one of my major interests is?)
The problem is that once you have oral tradition of this one event that they couldn’t have witnessed and oral tradition of this other event that they could have, it gets harder to argue the second must be reliable.
A few thousand years is more plausible than many 10s of thousands, but I’d still hesitate to read too much into it.
True, but I’d note that there’s also at least one separate oral tradition for Wolfe Creek that doesn’t have any similarities to the mechanics of an impact event…while in the case of Henbury – which is one of only a handful of impact events known to have occurred in inhabited-at-the-time regions (off the top of my head it’s only: Henbury ~4k years ago, Kaali in Estonia ~2k years ago, the Tunguska Event at the turn of the 20th century, the Sikhote-Alin Mountains in the Russian Far East in ‘47, northern Peru in 2006, and Chelyabinsk back in 2013) – such a disagreement is not the case.
Is there such a mass? I thought that the Earth’s core was supplying heat mostly by solidifying and releasing latent heat of liquefaction, while most of the radiogenic heat from Earth’s interior was produced by the decay of potassium-40 in the mantle.
That’s my understanding as well. Various radioactive material throughout the mantle and maybe the outer core. The inner core is mostly iron and nickel. Not a radioactive mass.
When Booster said Joyce was just finally admitting she’s who she always was, I took it as Booster saying Joyce never completely believed in God, just the incredibly strict culture that she appreciates as a autistic person (I’m on the spectrum). Joyce doesn’t care about God, she cared about strict rules on everything and the structure.
Becky believes in God, Joyce believed in the church.
Which is why Joyce is taking it much harder than Becky because what she’s upset by is the loss of structure. I fully expect Joyce to latch onto something else that provides a substitute for “strict controlling environment.” Yes, JOYCE WILL JOIN THE AIR FORCE.
I had been thinking of this in terms of Joyce’s need for authority, as mentioned when talking about the optometrist. And so I wonder how Joyce will react to the professor, an authority figure, telling her some real science things.
Also, yes, Joyce will join the air force. Manifesting it or whatever.
Between her bad eyesight, her good grades in math, and wanting to pilot a spaceship more than an Earthly fighter jet (which she’s disqualified for because, glasses)…….. I’d bet whole 5 (five) USD that she ends up in some career path that leads her to NASA.
It’s only 5 bucks before I’m broke, ok. And also, I really hope this is what happens because the NASA rules, meanwhile the Air Force is only good for bombing brown people from countries like Yours Truly |DDD
NASA being much better than the Air Force because of all the bombing is a very good point. The other things, to me are more…we don’t know exactly what her eyesight is, her math skills don’t strike me as that strong, and she has expressed interest in being a fighter pilot.
NASA would be cool, though. I’d also support her as a commercial pilot or a helicopter pilot.
Now I want to know the extent of Joyce’s experience as a passenger on a plane.
Agreed, very much. I can see the coming to terms with religion not being directly tied to morality as well, but that was absolutely her biggest loss.
(I’m still only about 85% on Joyce as autistic specifically and not plural anxiety disorders and assorted neurodivergences, but the ‘glasses becoming part of my face’ thing? Yeah that’s one I recognize.)
Oh, agreed, I was just also considering an OCD/ARFID combo as possible. (Ie, some of those things I would have been diagnosed with were I not autistic and yeah when you consider all those things in conjunction make an autism or all but indistinguishable… but, technically a possibility.)
I also hesitate to give a definitive headcanon given the whole Willis going ‘hey when you guys figure it out can you let me know?’ bit.
Is Joyce just testing her former beliefs on Dina? Like the way Becky did a few storylines ago, except Joyce is unable/unwilling to tell Dina that’s what she’s doing. Or is she just goading her on purpose? I look forward to learning answer.
So she’s presenting the YEC point of view because that’s what she would have done six months ago, and she’s mimicking Past Joyce as part of her aversion to change? Sounds like a good guess to me.
We can kind of see that, but there’s no reason for Dina to think so.
She put “real” in audible quotes and talked about the science debunking it. The only clue that she’s not still invested in it, is that she seems a bit detached.
Compare with when Becky was asking Dina about real science – she was clear she wanted to learn and was only presenting their ideas to check to see if they were real or not.
Honestly, that Joyce was claiming yesterday that they’d been taught the real science well enough to succeed in a biology class clashes with what we’ve seen before of their ideas.
It’s a university science class – you’re expected to learn, but you’re also expected to have the basics going in. That’s why they have bio classes in high school.
Dina is not at all suggesting Joyce should know everything already, just that she wonders if she has the background knowledge expected. She knows Becky didn’t, but she’s been helping her catch up.
Catholicism actually actively doesn’t hold a belief about evolution.
The Catholic stand on evolution is ‘it does not contradict our doctrine (as long as you acknowledge the reality of the soul and its special creation), but that’s all we’re going to officially say on it’.
Two out of the three last popes (JPII and Francis, of course) have stated that they personally believe the science, but they gave that as their personal beliefs, not doctrinal claims. Benedict attempted to walk back a bit on the whole thing, but didn’t attempt to change the doctrine.
Honestly, the problem with believing that God snapped his fingers and created the Earth with dinosaur fossils in place 6000 years ago isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s useless. Knowing that doesn’t help you know anything else: it’s a dead-end. You can’t build on that to explain something else. You can’t use it to predict anything else.
You can’t, for example, figure out good spots to find oil fields in because the answer would be, “wherever God decided to put them,” and God isn’t picking up the phone to provide GPS coordinates.
Philosophically, it’s easy to come up with thought experiments where creation and evolution are both true. The problem isn’t truth. The problem is that it’s pointless. The whole thing reduces down to a giant Gotcha!.
As long as you’re not taking a literalist approach to the Bible and creationism, there’s no real problem with believing in creation and evolution. God started the process and it proceeded as understood by science – possibly with a bit of a divine nudge now and then to push it in the right direction.
You could argue that the God part is pointless, which would be true in a scientific sense, but you can still do science with it.
But it means you don’t have to think harder or dig deeper for more answers. It provides a neat and tidy little answer that tells you everything you “need to” know. That’s compelling, when the world seems too confusing or irrational (or you want to keep someone in line and teach them to accept your answers at face value).
Given believing solely in creationism is solely a religious belief and denying evolution happened is also part of that package, I would argue it absolutely would be fall under agnosticism.
Given believing solely in creationism is solely a religious belief and denying evolution happened is also part of that package, I would argue it absolutely would be fall under agnosticism.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “creationism”. If your definition includes “denying evolution” then believing both creationism and evolution isn’t agnostic, it’s just contradictory. Agnostic would be closer to claiming we don’t know how it happened.
On the other hand, God created everything and evolution was part of His process for doing so is just straight theism.
Even though she doesn’t believe in god anymore, the church programmed her so well that she can say all of that with a straight face that makes it look like she still fully believes it. I really hope it comes out soon, so she can fully except that its not a bad thing for her to be changing, cause keeping it hidden is only gonna make things worse for her when it comes to her mental health (which is already not in to great a place)
I like how the hover text mentions super evolution. It seems that Willis is aware that another consequence of the young earth creationist (YEC) model of reality requires that the various kinds of animals and plants on the ark would have to speciate at a rate many thousands of times higher than what we measure.
To get some idea of the scale of the problem, keep in mind that the ark could hold at most a few thousand species; and we’ve discovered over ten million. FURTHER, those millions of species evolved over millions of years, so YECs need to cram all that evolutionary time to mutate and speciate into ~6000 years. So they need “super evolution” where the background mutation rate is many thousands to millions of times higher than what we actually measure.
IOW in addition to needing radioactive decay to be much higher than what we measure, YECs need the rate of evolution to be much higher too.
I wonder if Joyce will mention how they also need the speed of light to fall off also (c-decay).
Now that i think about it, I like how often the best people to find the ways their religious beliefs don’t line up with reality are those who take their religious texts the most literally.
From what I’ve heard, Willis did have an evangelical upbringing. So he knows about these because he actually had those classes. Joyce is largely biographical.
Yep. Way back there’d occasionally be posts on Tumblr of YEC educational material dug up from their boxes of old drawings and other paper (usually with a ‘yes, this is real’ statement of some sort,) and before the Tumblr background was Blowjob Cat, it was Psalty the Songbook, real world inspiration for Hymmel the Hymnal.
Remember the episode of Futurama where the Planet Express crew visits the lost underwater city of Atlanta, where the caffeine from the Coca-Cola factory let the inhabitants evolve into mer-people in less than a thousand years?
Faster than an evolving bullet. More powerful than a species of locomotives. Able to leap evolutionary hurdles in a single bound. It’s Super Evolution, fighting for life, biological diversity, and the Darwinian way.
So that’d mean a spontaneous shift in an element that would have to date back further than all consistent records.
And the next step… is to introduce doubt about those records…. isn’t it?
As anyone thats ever worked in customer service can tell you one of the best ways to wind someone up is to remain calm and even when the customer gets angrier
I’m hoping Joyce doesn’t actually believe that stuff anymore and is just repeating to Dina what she was taught before she became an atheist.
And I’m finding Dina super relatable here, as I’ve stopped even trying to argue with creationists because the ridiculousness of their beliefs just gets me way too pissed off.
I love how all this religious stuff makes no sense at all to atheists but the believers will stick to it harder than a hand on a wall covered in superglue
Actuallly it’s easier than that, radioactive isotope decay rate is the same it’s always been but God made unvierse with half decayed radioactive isotopes already there because why wouldnt He
Yep. And with light already en route showing images of distant stars and galaxies, with fossils in the rocks and with holes in my socks. If He did it last Tuesday there would be no way to tell, because omniscience implies unlimited power to deceive.
I’m starting to wonder how no church I’ve been in has taught this sort of thing. Is this more American specific? Ours was pretty fine with letting science science
I couldn’t tell you exactly how common YEC is in other countries, but it’s fairly common in the US. I was raised going to a mainline protestant church, which didn’t teach it, but some of the congregation were definitely YEC. I can’t find the breakdown, but OEC+YEC are about 40% of the US population. (Old/Young Earth Creationists)
I once got conned into being a counselor at my parents’ church’s summer camp. I worked at a “astronomy camp” where the leader was a creationist who told the kids that the speed of light was slowing down *because measurements made 200 years ago and those made now are different* (actually due to more precise measurements).
I quit my position.
What church?
United Methodist.
This garbage is more common than people think. It’s not just the fringe cults.
I did have to look that up and that’s apparently an American church denomination from Texas. I’d be curious to know if it’s common in non-American churches.
I feel Dina on a spiritual level here. I just recently had a similar argument with a family member who is very much into creationism and QAnon.
Let’s just say there will be one less family member at family gatherings now because she refuses to come close to a “liberal feminist who profanes god and hates children.”
It’s been entire minutes since I typed this and still no response. So pretend that someone asked what made me think the Cheese exists in our universe and I responded
Dina: *Opens textbook to the chapter explaining carbon dating*
Joyce: “That was written by mortal humans, we don’t really know how much of that is actually true.”
I wonder how much of her side of the conversation Joyce still genuinely believes. Maybe she’s keeping up appearances in front of Becky. (Becky herself wants to know how much of what they were taught is BS, but does Joyce know that? Are they just trying to spare each other’s feelings?)
(Also I fine it super funny I was just writing a post about how weird the creation science I was taught is then DoA covers it, though that was not the reason I was given as to way carbon dating is inaccurate)
I am intimately aware of the radioactive decay rate thing. The thing they THINK they’re hand waving away would actually have pretty apocalyptic consequences, since radioactive decay produces heat exponentially increasing how fast it happens so that it would make rock that’s only 6000 years old look 4.5 BILLION years old would produce SO much extra heat that it would melt our entire planet’s crust and vaporize the oceans and atmosphere.
But hey, a magical fruit was keeping everything under control so, there you go.
…that would only work if ALL elements increased their radioactive decay by that much. about 24 terawatts of heat emit from the earth’s core due to decay or weak nuclear fission.
Oh Dina… If you find that annoying, wait until they start talking about the stars falling to earth. Multiple stars. Colliding with earth. Without any major issue.
In the last strip, Joyce put ‘real’ in scare quotes when describing actual science, and seriously claimed that they were taught facts that debunked the real science.
So, yes, she still believes it, despite having ejected the basis, because human minds are fucking weird.
to be fair, there are other, much smaller problems with carbon-12 dating, but it’s nowhere enough to change several billion years into several thousand years.
Is it still “the God of the gaps” if you pointedly avoid knowing as much as possible about stuff that can be proved experimentally to create gaps you can jam God into with whatever explanations you can make up that will rationalize your initial premise? I think there has to be a term for that but it’s probably less nice than that one.
I find it interesting that Becky saying ‘Here’s what I was taught’ in response to questions elicits sympathy/pity for Becky in Dina but Joyce doing much the same seems to incite rage at Joyce in Dina.
I think the difference is Becky seems interested in learning otherwise and says ‘here’s what I was taught’ to explain what she had been taught whereas Joyce doesn’t want to learn about carbon dating and says ‘here’s what I was taught’ in order to disprove science rather than as a conversation.
Joyce’s position is Last Thursday-ism with a veneer of respectability.
The sad thing is that just outright saying “God works in mysterious ways” is more intellectually honest, though still suspect – after all, if this is a salvation issue (and I bet Joyce was taught that it is), why would God deliberately create the universe to look older than it is? Just to trick people? Hard to reconcile that with omnibenevolence.
Reminds me of when I was in school and a classmate insisted that the dinosaurs weren’t real, God put them in the ground to ‘test our faith’ which I found stupid on principle.
Perhaps because knowledge derived from history of the universe as recorded in fossils and the like is useful for figuring out how the universe will work in the future?
I seem to remember reading a paper that debunked the changing radioactive decay argument, but I can’t find it doing a quick Google. Essentially, the faster rate that is required for it to work for creationists would have resulted in the planet being sterilized by radiation long ago.
Loading ...
I kind of want a Sarah meter on the side of each strip now.
the comments section will have to suffice
Pretty sure she’s currently here on the meter: (NSFW probably?) https://www.dumbingofage.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/WttFZ2preview-300×300.png
Oh, I think she’s well beyond it. I mean, in that picture, she’s working for it. Right now, she doesn’t have to make the faintest effort.
Oh gods, that would be wonderful.
Like, a little thermometer with different Sarah faces and a red fill to indicate her current position.
That would be the best!
Isn’t the purpose of slipshine to show us Sarah’s current position?
I have to expect that it would eventually reach ridiculous Dragon Ball Z-style power levels.
I also want a Sarah Meter on each strip now. She must be high as a kite by now.
She is probably having non-stop multiple orgasms by now.
for real tho, science is “correct” bc it finds the answers in terms of itself, vs. “ok trust me there’s a sky dad you can’t see but sky dad is why everything exists and also women and POCs are inferior to rich white dudes”
Also important: Science reassesses its statements based on new evidence all the time. “OK SO [XYZ] FIT WITHIN CERTAIN FRAMEWORKS BUT WE’VE FOUND A BETTER EXPLANATION BASED ON A NEW FINDING!”
We’re but specks of cosmic dust trying to understand the universe with our limited tools and sometimes, we’re mistaken but hey! That means we can keep working on Finding Out! – And I find this part of being a human one of the best things we have, along with art and empathy. The journey is the destination, science isn’t dogmatic etc. But to a Fundie, or anyone who can’t stand anything but ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY, of course this wonderful thing about us as a species… Has to be terrifying.
Also-also important, the way scientific fact is based on demonstrable, repeatable evidence allows scientifically-literate people to repeatedly demonstrate its facts and convince people en masse without, you know, threats like burning at the stake or genocidal holy war.
YEP. Everyone with the right tools can replicate any scientific experiment, and it’s even possible to debunk former experiments, as in – You can KNOW if someone’s cooked the numbers so they fit “better” (looking at you, Mendel).
What the fuck is taught to Fundie kids? They use the Bible as the ultimate paradigm and twist everything to fit into their worldview, instead of, y’know. Taking demonstrable evidence and building up from there.
I believe in SCIENCE.
Mendel was telling the truth.
Therefore God was just lazy and didnt get around to creating Chromosomes till AFTER Mendel.
Suddenly he was going to get caught not doing his homework.
This also explains ‘the Miracle’ of Mendel’s journals being conveniently Lost and found again.
It couldve been like No Mans Sky all over again.
with some Terrible adhoc explanation why noticed Chromosomes before.
Scientific discoveries are just god retconning plot holes. Like hamfistedly shoving midichlorians into the star wars universe. Or revealing that one season of Dallas was all a dream. (God I hope that’s the right reference I’ve not watched dallas sorry just heard about it)
It’s not secondary sources, but you got me to go re-read wikipedia on Mendel, and it seems the debate/paradox and drama over his data were rather more overstated than they really deserved. The current concensus sounds like it was actually a non-issue that got blown out of proportion in popular awareness.
Well, sort of. Despite claims of Biblical literalism, there are significant swaths of the Bible that they ignore. (I really doubt Joyce’s former church throws out anyone who wears polyester and cotton blend shirts. ) And many of their doctrines come more from tradition than the Bible. (The Holy Trinity is foundational to most Christian sects, but it’s barely mentioned in the Bible.)
But to the brainwashed, that’s bad because the explanation “keeps changing”. They see that as a weakness to exploit.
“Sky daddy moves in mysterious ways” is irrefutable and etched in stone, to their view. It’s a simple answer they can accept at face value because it never changes.
Yep. It’s all there in the story of N-rays.
And how the truth of N-rays was suppressed by the dark scientists.
Except when the old guard is wrong and progress literally stalls for 3 generations.
Like the Big Sugar thing, John Money, and pretty much the entire field of economics.
That snake wasn’t really talking. Eve was just the first parseltongue.
The knowledge she got from eating the apple was that she belonged in Slytherin.
God only punished her because it was cringey.
Honestly, depending on how much fanfic he had to read that was just her self-insert OC “fixing” Draco, cursing her with childbirth pains may have been letting her off lightly.
If you actually look at the biblical term, the word they translate to pain more accurately translates to labor as in “a hard days work”. So basically eating the fruit gave humanity a sense of purpose and the satisfaction of sitting down after a long day and knowing you’ve done something worthwhile.
Childbirth isn’t necessarily innately painful. Some of the pain is self-inflicted because we *expect* pain so when we feel the intense sensation it translates as pain.
Childbirth Without Fear is a really good look into this by a medical doctor.
Anyways.
I’m just really a big fan of the idea that Eve gave humanity purpose and a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.
I’m also a big fan of empowered birth options based on solid science instead of fearmongering to push surgeries.
So, yay for looking at translations, but…
Childbirth is going to be painful. You can tell we weren’t designed because good grief that process is ugly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHIXduEbLz0
I’m . . . I’m not going to watch that video.
I haven’t watched the video, but I was in the room for the birth of three of my four children. Yeah. It can be pretty bad.
I could be wrong of course but “Childbirth isn’t necessarily innately painful. Some of the pain is self-inflicted because we *expect* pain so when we feel the intense sensation it translates as pain.” sounds an awful lot to me like it was written by someone who had never experienced giving birth to a child themselves and is, likely as not, male.
Never let complete personal ignorance about a topic get in the way of pompously expounding upon it.
Well, that’s a motto that I certainty strive to live by, particularly if there is profit involved, but I reserve the right to point out other people’s BS.
What could possibly be painful about shoving a lump larger than a coconut [aprox diameter of a coconut: 12in, aprox diameter of baby’s head: 15in] out through a hole that typically only extends to a diameter better matching the shape of a grapefruit?
Women can’t feel pain after all, and a bit of tearing never hurt anybody anyway. I mean, except rich white men but, as we all know, rich white men are just sensitive like that. It comes from being bred in a better way, you understand.
This is also the reason why you don’t need to give any consideration to a virgin woman when you break her hymen. I mean, just keep telling her it isn’t painful and her tiny little woman-brain will eventually understand your righteous truths. A woman just needs a man to tell her things, after all, as they’re incapable of properly grasping even instinctual things like pain. Much like all non-human animals. And black people. And jews. And..
..this was a message brought to you by Tim Allen and the cast of Last Man Standing. Please consider watching us if you want to lose all grasp of
sanity, morality, and dignitythe liberal agenda! Remember: The election was stolen!(The diameter of a grapefruit bit was an attempt to give reasonable benefit of the doubt in regards to the kind of stretching one’d accept as tolerable, of course.
If you’d prefer to use male anatomy as the reference point, we’d consider a range between a marble [1/2in+] and a ping pong ball [1.5in]. [average diameter of a penis, according to Google: .73in].
In short, the gap between what’s “normal” to pass through that region and what happens during childbirth is massively significant, as well as being significantly beyond how you could normally stretch the numbers.. or body.)
If you have a vagina, like I do, I strongly encourage you to play around with just how much you can stretch. A healthy vagina can MORE than stretch as much as it needs to and that level of fullness us just another level.
I’m not sure how x rated were allowed to get but, in my experience, coming to completion with that fullness and then allowing the natural contractions of your body to gently push that fullness out is really just amazing.
And that’s not just labor I’m talking about btw. But gradually stretching yourself to taking a full fist without pain and experiencing climax can certainly help you understand the joy of birth.
I’ve had three natural childbirth, all without major pain interventions,two painfree.
If you think your body can’t stretch that much, and you’ve got a vagina, you may want to discover the wonders of fisting. My partner’s fist is about the size of a newborn and fits *very* nicely.
Haven’t we also got in the habit of encouraging women to give birth in ways ignoring what their bodies are telling them (encouraging birthing on their backs)? This has more recently started to change with other techniques being explored.
As for the process itself, having been present for two births, it’s not nearly as ugly as it may seem to the un-involved. Then again, they were my kids and I was super excited and invovled in helping mom as much as I could.
Ryek, should we call that the Dunning-Kruger rule? The effect is having the confidence to speak about what one little understands, but the rule would be that knowing we little understand, we are obliged to speak authoritatively on a subject?
Yes exactly this. Ina May Gardner is a midwife who really championed the joy of birth and attended thousands of births with a really low rate of interventions.
She also encouraged making out with your partner to help the birth go along.
I genuinely enjoy giving birth. It’s a dick move that you have to go through 9 months of pregnancy and 18 months of childrearing to have it.
I’m considering becoming a surrogate but God that’s complicated.
Is Ina May Gardner the same person as Ina May Gaskin? Because she is a horrible person who encourages bad science and her methods have led to the deaths of multiple children in childbirth.
As for pain, I’m glad you had multiple pain free childbirths, but please don’t dismiss the notion that many people do feel pain – even a great deal of pain – while giving birth and condescend to calling it ‘self inflicted’ because they expect pain.
Also, everyone’s anatomy is different, including and especially things like ‘size and shape of vaginal opening’. Or things like, say, how endometriosis tends to increase risk of complications and sometimes pelvic pain while pregnant. (I can’t find if it worsens labor pains offhand, but I’d suspect that it depends on where your excess endometrial lining is growing. Either way, when the potential complications tend to be life-threatening, I’d assume pain as a possibility.) Not all pain’s expectation-based, ESPECIALLY with something like childbirth where there’s a lot of variables and a lot that can go wrong.
18… months of childrearing?
shit, if it was MONTHS I would’ve had kids LONG ago
Need to follow up just to clarify, I in absolutely no way meant to imply that pain relief during birth or any painful procedure was wrong. For both of my exes I intervened to ensure they were taken care of when it seemed like the staff were ready to say “f-it, she’s got this.” First kids mom was definitely down for it from the get go. Second one wanted to go drug free, but after a complicated gestation and a week(ish) of trying to induce, when it cam to the end and she was in pain and questioning, I encouraged her to take the epidural. She’d already been through hell at that point and there was really no purpose to allowing her to suffer through more. She was worried people would think she was a bad mom.
…
I mean, it turns out she was, but that wasn’t the reason why. (5 years of custody battles later and she still violates court orders and stops my daughters from seeing each other.) No judge around here has the gumption to invoke penalties, they just keep threatening her and letting it slide.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that it wasn’t an apple, those weren’t known to people at the time the bible was written, think it was a tomato or something?
Im 97% sure it was a ball and then a tit. Think about it. Eve was tempted by a “snake” and ate a “fruit” of the “tree” of “knowledge of good and evil.” She then presented Adam with her “fruit” and he partook a bit. Then when God came by they had to hide their bodies, but when he wouldn’t leave Adam stopped hiding to face the music, in the hopes at least he wouldnt see Eve. When God finally found Eve was when He got upset and the punishment were loss of innocence and a specifically painful burth of the child Eve was going to bear – not just a hypothetical child but the one already growing inside her belly.
The whole thing is an allegory for unsupervised puberty if allegory is allowed. If allegory is not allowed and everything must be literal then the whole thing is “God hates it when people have straight sex, and if it were Adam and Steve maybe we’d still have a garden of eden to chill in”
Don’t forget the snake had legs and walked, too. It was only after the “magic fruit” incident that God condemned it to crawl on the ground.
“Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
Johnny Hart even did a cartoon about it once in ‘B.C.’ (sorry, I couldn’t find a link). Showed a snake on two legs walking past one of the cavemen, who looks out at the reader and says, “This world is younger than I thought.”
Yes, clearly it was a flying dragon before.
Yes, it must have been that fire-breathing dinosaur. God changed it after the Fall, so that’s why dinosaurs appeared to “go extinct.”
To o’reach the terms does the trouser snake betray the “enmity between you and this woman”… so that battle of the sexes (poor terminology and all) is His fault too?
How else could fundies justify the snakes with hip bones?
That’s probably true cuz she was the only one who talked to it besides God.
Adam probably was from Hufflepuff, and so didn’t speak parsletongue.
Oooh, tell Dina amount the firmament again. Sarah may actually explode.
Yeah see, thiiiiiis is why Dina’s head’s this close to exploding. Empiricism this ain’t.
And remember, early Becky Dates included ‘hey can you help me figure out how much of what I learned was bullshit?’ She’s heard at least some of this before. And probably immediately repressed the knowledge of ever hearing it because how do you work with that unless the person you’re talking to is interested in deprogramming?
Good news for Dina on that last part, though! Joyce hasn’t accepted it all yet but she is far more open to the possibilities now.
I’m honestly not sure how much of this Joyce actually believes to begin with. This reads a lot more like she’s just neutrally stating things she’s been told than actually trying to prove Dina wrong. Which is a lot different in tone than the last time these two talked about science vs religion.
Yeah, Joyce isn’t “out” as having lost her faith yet, especially not around Becky, so she kinda has to go through the motions here.
There’s plenty of atheist science deniers. Joyce can easily keep her anti-science stance without having God to fall back on.
Or atheist assholes who cherry pick science so end up proponents of eugenics and insist bigotry is scientifically based. Not sure if Hitler was an atheist or not, don’t care, but Nazism was super focused on using sciencey sounding bullshit to justify literal genocide.
Hitler was allegedly a “devout catholic” and used the Church and religion for his murderous propaganda. And the Church loved him as much as evangelicals love Trump today.
He also ate sugar, so we’ve that to consider.
A plurality of historians believe that, while publicly Catholic, Hitler was most likely a Deist. Still believed in a god, just not a God.
There was an entire section of the Dachau concentration camp reserved gir priests who opposed the Nazis. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest_Barracks_of_Dachau_Concentration_Camp
Hitler also notably trash talked Christianity as a Jewish religion of the weak in private. SHOCKINGLY, he may have been a hypocrite as well as mass murderer.
Well yes, but Robin also eats sugar and… You know what, I thought I had a point there, but nevermind.
Not sure if you’re kidding, but the “Hitler ate sugar” thing is a reference to a joke from Daria.
Who’s Daria?
I choose to believe that Daria is a web comic that I haven’t read yet, but will someday.
If I’m wrong don’t tell me. Let me have my little delusion.
Well, there was a cartoon called Daria, it was a spin-off of Beavis and Butthead.
There are certainly atheists who fall for a lot of pseudo-science nonsense, but not a lot of young earth creationist atheists. She’d need to find a different framework to hang her science denial on.
Oh, yeah. I’m not certain if she’s wrapped her head around it all yet, but there was in fact a change here that Dina doesn’t know about.
I’d guess you’re right, but I’m also thinking it’s possible that just because Joyce stopped believing in God, doesn’t necessarily mean that Joyce stopped believing in the garden and the fruit and etc etc. Deconversion can follow those weird sorts of paths.
She may also cling to things that refute science just because she doesn’t want to deal with it.
Given Joyce’s whole thing about original sin back around Kidnapping #1 (if one thing’s not true, it all falls apart) and the discussion about how rigidity of faith often leads to a complete shattering rather than an adaptation re: Joyce’s atheism back in the first post-skip arc, I think she’s eventually going to be more open to science now.
But I can see her resisting for a while too, to avoid accepting she’s changed (and that on some level she never did believe in anything but the structure.) That said, I do think she no longer buys into original sin, at least not completely, and from there the Eden story crumbles.
Honestly, to me it all reads like she’s moved past all that (though may still stumble upon the occasional Keanu “woah” moment). I think that she’s just keeping appearances because with all the chaos of last semester she wants some stability and not to be confronted by everyone about this new change. But that could also just be my own coloured lenses. (i tend to go dark and disappear around my birthday to avoid drawung attention, or possibly disappointment)
I find the contrast between Joyce and Becky interesting. Joyce has rejected faith, but seems to be having trouble letting go of what came with that faith. Becky seems far more able to ditch the garbage, while still retaining her faith. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out going forward.
Aw! It looks like one dinosaur loving rational girl doesn’t like her theories being debated in the marketplace of ideas! Now if you would open your mind for a moment I would love to talk at length about the evidence of intelligent design!
Intelligent Design, the belief a supposedly omnipotent being could create a bunch of really badly designed systems in his creations.
Nah, that’s not under debate.
Omnipotence does not necessarily lead to competence or benevolence.
Ha! True.
Personally, as a person who embraces both faith and science, I prefer to apply ideas like Intelligent Design not to evolution (which explains the variance of quality of life-based systems better anyway) and instead to physics. The idea that everything in the universe follows certain mathamatical principles down to the subatomic level and up to the super galactic level sounds a lot more like something designed by some sort of god-like entity to me.
NOTE: Not saying that it is – just saying that the idea makes more sense to me when applied to physics than evolution.
NOTE2: Also, not subscribing this to any specific faith. Keepin it general.
The universe doesn’t follow mathematical principles. Mathematical principles are derived from observing the universe. Mathematics is our tool for understanding the universe.
Mathematics may be a tool for understanding the universe, but it’s not what mathematics is. Mathematics is the study of the logical consequences of structure and those logical consequences are not dependent on the universe. Why the universe has a structure which is simple enough for us to model reasonably well with our primitive mathematics is an open question.
“Omnipotence does not necessarily lead to competence or benevolence.”
This leads to the competing theories of Unintelligent Design (the world was created by a divine being who is very powerful and means well but honestly has no idea what he’s doing; how else do you explain all the stupid stuff everywhere) and Malevolent Design (the world was created by a divine being who is very powerful and very intelligent and loves seeing everyone suffer horribly; how else do you explain multi-host internal parasites).
Some combination of those comes pretty close to some flavors of Gnosticism.
I wonder if there’s a good argument to omniscience and omnipotence no longer being mutually exclusive if incompetence is thrown in the mix. (Sort of like how oil and water will mix if there’s enough alcohol involved)
People who advocate for Intelligent Design are actually cdesign Proponentsists.
They do actually have a term and it’s called teleology. The theory of intelligent design is actually still incredibly popular today with credited scientic professionals promoting it but in my experience it’s mostly half truths or abstractions used to sell books on the subject.
He has intentionally created them wrong, as a joke.
I can only assume the platypus was hastily thrown together to make quota, out of whatever parts were left over, at 4:59 on Friday.
“Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, there’s just god when he’s drunk” – Tom Waits
“Marketplace of ideas” is such a stupid fucking phrase it should legally warrant a punch to the mouth.
Terrarium of ideas?
Thunderdome of ideas.
Can’t we get beyond Thunderdome?
Two thoughts enter, one thought leaves! Two thoughts enter, one thought leaves! Two thoughts enter, one thought leaves!
But three thoughts entered, realized they were the same thought, and then appear to have stayed for the nachos.
bazaar of bullshit?
“Marketplace of ideas” is an analogy, not literal. As an anology it can be strained, but on the whole it seems a mildly useful one as individuals decide what ideas they buy into.
What’s the problem with “marketplace of ideas?”
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the term. Like all terms it depends on the context of its use. I only used it because it’s a familiar phrase I hear parroted by those psuedo-intellectual types you see on youtube all the time. Ready to debate proven scientific theories with it. Justifying their ideas by saying it’s just as valid because people believe in it even if it’s wrong. Lots of people still believe the earth is flat, doesn’t mean it’s true but in the marketplace of ideas what is true isn’t constant. It varies depending on how many people believe it.
I maintain the earth is indeed approximately flat in spherical coordinates, which is to say, R is approximately constant. The earth is also the center of the known universe, because the known universe is a function of what can be observed from earth which is [the time since a particular epoch] divided by the speed of light in a vacuum.
Neither of these make us in any way special nor justify the other bs that get attached to these mathematical and tautological technicalities.
It might actually be a decent analogy, but not in the sense most users of the term intend it. The term is used to claim that in the free marketplace of ideas, the truth and the best ideas will inevitably win out, just as in a true free market the best products will win out. This is obviously no more true in real markets than in the analogy. There are always far more factors than product quality that affect any market – marketing being the most obvious.
The more we treat ideas as a marketplace, the more we accept that those are valid ways of judging ideas.
Fundie religions are good at selling creationism. That doesn’t make it a valid idea.
But mostly as Sirksome implies, it’s term often used by horrible people peddling horrific ideas. Youtubers pushing anti-feminism and fascist propaganda along with the pseudo-science. They’re just competing in the free marketplace of ideas. Or just outright trolls.
Wait until you hear about “the cathedral and the bazaar” as it applies to software distribution.
Marketplace of ideas. How you talk. Dina doesn’t like known science discounted by silly bullshit.
Dina knows evolutionary ideas already have been debated in a marketplace of ideas. Except that marketplace is called “Peer Review”, not “Sunday School”.
Well put.
I read that in ben shapiro’s little weasley voice
Every Ben Shapiro “argument”:
[Chin down]
[Furrowed brow]
[Look up at camera]
[Gatling gun of fast-paced bullshit]
I find it difficult to believe Dina has never heard of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
I get the impression she’s heard of it, she’s just not expecting to hear about it in a scientific context.
Dina’s basically egging Joyce on to explain her biblical view of the world, what did she expect?
It’s kind of like hearing a person tell you that rainbows are proof that global warming isn’t real. You might know what each of those things are, but it won’t make sense to someone outside of the subculture – even if you’re familiar with how it’s proof of God’s promise.
… That’s a thing?
Wow.
Conservatives who don’t want to believe in climate change point to God’s promise to Noah after the flood as proof that it isn’t real, yes. It’s made headlines a few times when Republican politicians or science advisors have made that argument. Though, the rainbow part is more a rhetorical flourish that’s been used a couple of times.
But unlike evolution, I do feel it important to emphasize that this is overwhelmingly a case of [person who doesn’t want to believe drawing an excuse from their faith] rather than [person’s faith prevents them from accepting evidence that contradicts their faith].
I don’t know – “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”
Maybe the sea level rise won’t be so bad, but the heat itself will get us.
She didn’t intuitively connect it to ‘The Fall’, but being familiar with the Garden of Eden story in the abstract and being familiar with fundamentalists’ justifications for Young Earth Creationism using the Garden of Eden are two very different things.
She has, that’s how she knows it’s “the story about magical fruit”.
It’s just that she’s short circuiting that this is the explanation that easily debunks carbon dating.
Possibly she derived “magical fruit” from what Joyce just told her about the fruit.
I think the 5 Second Movies version of the Garden of Eden story has become part of the general culture background noise.
Is that the one where the snake is really Adam’s penis, but everything is still Eve’s fault for letting it deceive her?
Might be better for Dina to stop picking at this. It’s not going to get…better.
Speaking as someone who has some similar tendencies to Dina, stuff like this can be really hard to let go, especially on one’s own. It festers in the brain and will consume one’s entire attention if not resolved or sufficiently diverted by someone else.
Alright, so I don’t have a super intuitive understanding of the science, but the faster something decays the more dangerous radiation it gives off.
So if carbon (which I understand to be a fairly widespread) element used to decay exponentially faster, would that not be giving all life in the garden really nasty cancers and radiation poisoning?
No, because cancer didn’t exist
Cancer is a product of Satan after the world had been corrupted by secularism and… something something whatever justification they use for the absurdly long lifespans in Genesis as well maybe?
I have absorbed some knowledge of this worldview from ex-fundamentalist postings and such but that one’s my limit and I rather doubt I WANT to see the ‘educational materials’ that would explain it.
Carbon 14 is created by cosmic rays hitting nitrogen atoms, so if the firmament blocked cosmic rays, there wouldn’t be carbon 14.
But isn’t carbon an essential component of all known forms of life?
Yes, but Carbon 12 and Carbon 13, the stable isotopes, work fine for that.
Of course, Carbon is created in stellar cores over millions of years and distributed via supernovae. Don’t know how the creationist version of Carbon works.
Young earthers can fall back on the “appearance of age” argument. Carbon is everywhere because God made the Universe look like it was billions of years old.
Ah yes! The doctrine of Last Tuesdayism, which puts forward the God created the universe and everyone in it last Tuesday, complete with memories and the holes in our socks.
That bastard, I really liked those socks.
No you didn’t . . . you just think you did.
Isn’t it (literally) the thought that counts here, though?
Better described as the God is a Lying Piece of Shit doctrine.
I call it the Trickster God idea, because it implies God is tricking his creations by making the Universe look ancient when it isn’t.
You know, it occurs to me that, considering how much effort God apparently put into making the universe look billions of years old… Maybe it’d be more polite to believe it actually is so all that work hasn’t been wasted?
In other words, if Young Earth Creationists are right, they’re also being rude and ungrateful. We should believe what science has discovered because God clearly wants us to!
(I hope no one took that seriously… but if anyone wants to use this argument against a YEC, have fun!)
Alright, but if carbon (and I assume other things) didn’t even *start* decaying until after the fall, how do you square that with the “things used to decay a lot faster before the fall” argument
Radiation poisoning and lots of genetic mutations to fill the ecosystem with?
I seem to remember reading a paper that debunked the changing radioactive decay argument, but I can’t find it doing a quick Google. Something about a faster rate that is required for it to work for creationists would have resulted in the planet being sterilized by radiation long ago.
Two words, Dina: “last Thursday.”
Cosmology: Who knew?
Whoever made snakes, mosquitos, pestilence and murder hornets must be shunned. SHUNNED.
What’s wrong with snakes, snakes are cool
Not the venomous ones, all other noodles I can tolerate
Squirty danger noodles deserve love, too!
Unfortunately for them, Steve Irwin is dead.
Squirty danger noodles would go to war with majestic sea flap-flaps over that, if they knew how to swim.
Rattlesnakes are best danger noodles. They give you a warning first.
Most venomous ones would just like to be left alone by big scary predators like you
They say Eve tempted Adam with an apple…
But me, I ain’t goin’ for that!–Bruce Springsteen
A pink Cadillac would be pretty tempting.
Particularly if it’s the advanced model that can go underwater and into space.
The best love song ever written about someone in the middle of an MLM pyramid scheme.
Those fundamentalist mental gymnastics all come back to the same basic false premises, the same messages drilled into their heads as children: the Bible is always right; those who rebel against god will suffer severe consequences; only god’s dedicated slaves will enjoy a good life.
Specifically, also, ignore any of the Bible that disagrees with what we’re telling you.
John Calvin, founder of Calvinism, repeatedly got called out in his own time for the fact that he basically ignored whole swaths of the New Testament to state, “The Bible is completely unchanging and unquestionable. Yes, including the parts about changing and questioning.”
I said it yesterday, but Dina’s over the line here and really needs to stop.
Folks here are anti-religious but that doesn’t give someone the right to confront and harass another person’s beliefs just because they don’t match your own. If this was the other way around(as in Mary) folks would be screaming for something nasty to happen to her.
Now excuse me while I await all of the anti-religion responses denouncing me because I’m going against the grain here
You’re entitled to your own beliefs; you’re not entitled to your own facts. Radiometric decay falls under the domain of “fact or not” instead of “belief.”
Except here Joyce isn’t asserting those things as fact. She’s stating what she was taught. It is a fact that when Joyce was a kid her teacher said “And now we’re going to learn about this,” ‘this’ being creationism.. That’s what Joyce is saying here. Not that she currently believes it (which we’ve seen may no longer be the case) but that this is what she was told as a child.
As a young child I was told Santa had a magic key because our house didn’t have a chimney. Does that mean I believe it? No, but it’s a fact I was told that.
If you didn’t know about Joyce’s loss of faith, would you actually realize that? I mean, she doesn’t actually say “And this is what I believe”, but she also doesn’t give any real clue that she doesn’t.
It’s phrased as if she still does – especially yesterday. The quotes around real science, her “isn’t there” response. Even here, she says it’s easy to debunk carbon dating, with no caveats that it’s just what she was taught.
There’s no reason for Dina to think Joyce isn’t serious here.
There’s a difference of opinion, and there’s teaching outright falsehoods because “religion”. I get miffed about people claiming the right to spread lies (provable falsehoods) in the name of religion. Young Earth Creationists are spreading lies. Ergo I get miffed at YEC.
If you have to teach falsehoods, that means you believe your religion contradicts the facts. It’s proof that you don’t believe it yourself.
But that’s not Joyce’s fault.
Joyce is going to be in a biology class that is operating off these basic, observable principles.
If she’s going to make the class a living nightmare for everyone else in it all semester, that’s gonna put someone who knows her (previous, most likely) worldview and wants to actually learn without serious class derailment every session on edge. (I love Joyce, but oh how she can derail a class.) Unfortunately, Dina wanted to share a class with Becky, and of course Becky and Joyce are sharing a class if they can.
Most likely she won’t, but Dina does not know that yet.
Wait, does that make Dina the Roz of this class? That’s a kind of funny thought.
The thought occurred to me as well.
You wouldn’t associate that level of confrontation from Dina, but diametrically opposed hyperfixations being put up against each other are not to be trifled with.
Joyce is responding to Dina’s direct questions about what she was taught.
Dina is the one bringing it up.
THIIIIIS.
I get why Dina is frustrated here but the way she’s talking to Joyce is not exactly helpful. People tend to dig their heels in when confronted in this manner, rarely and I mean RARELY do they actually listen and reconsider.
Science is Dina’s whole world. Someone trying to tear down her world with utter nonsense can be expected to get her upset.
Joyce doesn’t appear to me to be trying to tear it down at all. She’s just explaining what she was taught.
Again I get Dina’s frustration, all I’m saying is the way she’s going about this isn’t going to get her anywhere.
I think Dina’s interpreting this back-and-forth as an argument, but Joyce sees it as a Q-and-A. Joyce isn’t getting particularly animated about her answers, but Dina is. She seems to be interpreting Joyce’s calm, flatly-delivered answers as “this is the way it actually is”, even though Joyce means “this is what we were taught”.
As the other guy said – Joyce didn’t challenge Dina. Dina asked “How did your school attempt to ‘debunk’ carbon dating?”, and Joyce replied by giving an example of the BS that was spewed by her teachers. Now to be fair, Dina’s rage could be directed to Joyce’s teachers, not Joyce; but her face certainly seems to be aiming it at Joyce.
Dina never asked about her school or what she was taught.
Dina wondered how Joyce would do as a science denier. Joyce said they’d been taught “real” stuff too, along with stuff debunking it. Joyce said it was easy to debunk carbon dating when Dina asked how do you debunk it.
There’s nothing in the text here that more than hints Joyce is just giving examples of the nonsense she was taught or that she doesn’t still agree with it. Certainly nothing Dina should be expected to realize. Visually, Joyce seems a little more distant and detached than you might expect, which might be a clue she’s not actually invested in the argument like she once would have been, but it’s pretty subtle.
Carbon dating?
You should never date outside your metalloid group.
Admittedly, I’m mostly water, but there’s a lot of carbon in there too.
Joyce isn’t being attacked. Stop acting like such a fucking martyr over a completely reasonable response.
Dina asked a question and screamed at Joyce for answering it.
She did nothing of the sort, don’t be so fucking dramatic. Joyce interrupted the question when she recognised a term, Dina accepted the interruption, Joyce elaborated, and Dina verbally expressed confusion. So she raised her voice and/or talked in a more excited tone. Boo-fucking-hoo for poor victimised Joyce.
Oh wait, Joyce is taking Dina’s intense reaction in stride and hasn’t shown even the slightest fucking hint of bother or upset. Being loud is not the inherently violent aggression it keeps being characterised as, and it’s a little weird that the “probably”-autistic character is the one we’re shoving that narrative on, of all parties present.
I don’t know about you but that expression on Dina’s face in the last panel looks pretty angry to me.
Confusion and anger are mutually exclusive now, or something? My stance has never been “Dina isn’t angry or aggressive in this scene”. I’m saying that it’s not strictly a problem right now, at least until Joyce takes issue or Dina escalates into personal attacks. A heated argument is actually fine.
Clearly I am the one being dramatic here.
That’s a really shitty sentence to vomit at somebody.
You’ll excuse me while I don’t give a shit. Like everyone else here said, There’s belief, and then there’s spreading bullshit around.
Joyce isn’t doing that, she’s the victim of that.
Willful ignorance of proven and demonstrable scientific facts is not a “difference of belief.” Frankly, given the current state state our world is in (due in no small part to everyone’s “opinions” on the science of epidemiology and climate change), it is reckless and dangerous to claim that science is a belief on which people should be able to disagree instead of truths that govern our universe whether you like it or not.
Joyce didn’t say that.
How is Dina harassing Joyce in any way? They’re in SCIENCE class, discussing science. The topic is relevant
This is the same poster who (in yesterday’s comment that they refer to) claimed that Dina was borderline-assaulting Joyce.
Well, yeah, obviously. The autistic kid is an aggressive rage monster whose temper is clearly a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off at the slightest provocation, doncha know.
Ugh, don’t get me started on that front…
BUT, I do think Dina’s misinterpreting Joyce here. (Been there, done that.) Joyce is explaining what she was taught, not preaching that young earth creationism is factual, but Dina’s reacting as though she’s there to rebut everything the professor says.
Learning when to bite your tongue is hard, especially when you feel like your primary interest is under attack.
Never mind that Dina threw the first punch, whether she intended to spark this conversation or not. (Again, been there done that.)
“I do idly wonder how you, a science denier, will prove compatible with our biology class.”
– Dina, to Joyce, yesterday.
I agree that Dina might be misinterpreting, yeah. I also think she might just be reacting strongly to the base element of bullshit being spoken in her direction, regardless of origin. It’s incompatible with everything she’s been taught, and (speaking from my own experience), them’s fightin’ words.
As far as the “first punch” thing goes, I have difficulties seeing it as anything other than a conversation starter, especially because Joyce hasn’t expressed any discomfort. If anything, Joyce is running with it.
Dina’s statement was “I do idly wonder how you, a science denier, will prove compatible with our biology class.”
That comes across as more than a little gatekeeping-y, like Dina’s suggesting Joyce is an outsider who’s incompatible with the biology class.
“a science denier” – an outsider
“will prove compatible” – I think you don’t belong here.
Again, that probably wasn’t the intention, but that’s how it comes across given the word choice.
She could have phrased that differently, so it doesn’t come across as a jab. “Doesn’t biology class contradict what you were previously taught?” or something like that, maybe. Better still would have been not broaching the subject until Joyce brought it up.
It absolutely sucks when this happens, and having to manually interpret unspoken language (because it doesn’t come naturally) sucks even more, but it’s how the world works and we have to learn to deal with it.
I think she’s misinterpreting, but I think Joyce is also posing intentionally. She’s not nearly ready to admit to Becky that she’s lost her faith and knows that not treading the old party line here would lead to conversations she’s not ready to have. There’s nothing in Joyce’s words that gives away that she’s repeating something she was taught but no longer believes.
In Dina’s place, I would be expecting her to be there to debunk everything the professor says. Why wouldn’t she expect that?
As for that first punch, from anyone but Dina, I’d take it as a “please reassure me you’re not going to argue about creationism in class”. From Dina, it like is just something she was idly wondering as she says.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on this, thank you. Autistic literal-mindedness and blunt communication. Allistics are so used to hidden layers in speech, that speaking at a straightforward surface level gets read the same way as deliberate metaphors.
Yup. That’s what I meant with the “learning to bite your tongue” part. Reading it back, there really isn’t a way to interpret that as anything but picking on Joyce. Even if that wasn’t the intention, it was the effect.
Huh.
I believe it is fine to confront and harass someone whose “beliefs” deny reality, and how dare you confront and harass me for my beliefs.
It is fine for Joyce to believe in God (though she doesn’t). It is not fine for Joyce to deny basic factual reality.
Who among us lives in reality, spending every waking hour staring down the gaping maw that is our inevitable death?
Relax, man, we all have our happy little fictions.
It really isn’t okay to “harass” anyone over a difference in beliefs, no matter how you feel about their beliefs.
And yet, Christians do it all the time. Have you seen the language they use to describe atheists? Have you seen them trampling boundaries? Have you seen the threatening children with hell? I don’t have any sympathy for them if someone speaks back to their stupid fucking “beliefs.”
“Christians do it all the time” doesn’t make it okay.
And yet, that’s what Christians say about everyone else to justify some shitty behavior.
It’s a good thing Dina isn’t harassing her then.
No, but if you look closely, you’ll see the butt of her grenade launcher in Panel 3. She very clearly means Joyce harm.
I have already said that my belief is that it is fine, and yet you continue to harass me over it, so aren’t you just a hypocrite?
Reality is reality. Period. No one gets to have their ‘belief’ override it. Now there are plenty of things in our universe that are unknown or unknowable, or matters that are entirely subjective opinion, and you can have any belief you like regarding them, but not regarding known fact.
Eh. This reads much more like an outburst than an attack. Dina’s using the passive voice, generally. She’ll be over the line if she segues into an actual attack, like, “you’re stupid for believing that,” but she hasn’t yet. She’s not even trying to convince Joyce, which would also be reasonable. I agree that she’s edging closer, but I disagree she’s over the line.
You’re allowed to voice confusion over something that confuses you, and you’re allowed to voice opinions, even when they directly contradict what you know of the other person’s. The latter, it must be noted, is exactly what you’re doing here.
Mary’s outbursts are contextualized by what it is she wants, which is generally some acknowledgement of her superiority. That’s not true of Dina here. And I speak from the pro-religious viewpoint.
Look at Joyce. She’s not even slightly bothered. She’s still leaning towards Dina, engaged and interested in what she’s saying.
That is also fair.
You make a good point about Dina’s word choice.
Still, her facial expressions indicate hostility. While Joyce does not seem to be reacting, I can’t tell if that’s actually an indication of how clear Dina is being or Joyce’s current level of apathy.
I suppose future strips will reveal that.
Not all different beliefs can be reconciled, and there are harmful beliefs that have to be confronted
For example: “Kingdom Hearts is hard to understand”
I mean, Kingdom hearts is easy to understand. It’s just dumb.
And, y’know, makes you look dumb when you try to explain it to a third party.
And that’s without taking in account the deliberate mysteries, like the animal mask people or whatever that Yozora deal is supposed to be.
The animal mask people are ancient Keyblade Masters who led what essentially amounts to anime Hogwarts Houses, but they got paranoid and started going behind each others backs on weird stuff and lost trust in their friends. Yozora is a character in a video game and that’s his story. No mysteries to be found, there. Calling it “dumb” is reductive and elitist.
A description I saw fairly recently that was ‘oh yeah THAT is exactly what I love about this series, explained in a way I hadn’t found the words for’ is that the appeal of Kingdom Hearts isn’t in the (admittedly convoluted and sometimes quite silly) plot developments, it’s the emotional beats for the characters. Trying to explain it in pure plot developments is going to sound less effective than actually watching it because you don’t get the emotional beats that make it work. (This is also why, for instance, fans of Days will make jokes about ‘who am I going to have ice cream with?’ while saying simultaneously ‘but the voice acting makes this WORK, and the ice cream represents their friendship and the one moment of freedom they have from the Organization, so actually this is heartbreaking!’ When I say this, it sounds ridiculous. When you’re watching the cutscene in context, it is not.) I could bring up like three or four other examples here without batting an eye, but a key thing for Kingdom Hearts at its best is that it makes EMOTIONAL sense, even when the plot brings in time travel or clones or whatever the hell they’re doing with the Foretellers now.
Kingdom Hearts’ storyline is also way less confusing (though admittedly no less convoluted) when you experience it in release order and not chronological order. Since they’re making the plot up as they go along, 1 is of course the most accessible game of the series, and you don’t NEED to know there what Mickey’s travels in the World of Darkness were like. More importantly, the prequel games are written so that all these calls forward hit you more playing in release order than they would switching to chronological. (Bringing up Days again, the game is designed to constantly twist the knife that you KNOW how Roxas’s story ends in 2. Playing it first, you lose out on that. You also get hit with a way more jarring change from Axel being portrayed as villainous straight to tragic disaster without the gradual shift in that framing that happens during 2.)
That said, it was a genuinely bad idea for the series to do the main game/‘side game’ framing for so long when those games in between have all ended up loadbearing (especially Birth By Sleep and 3D – to this day I don’t understand why 3D at least isn’t a straight numbered title since Sora’s playable there,) and splitting the series onto so damn many consoles did it no favors. For years one of the best stories in the series was only available on the PSP, a system that had doomed itself by trying to compete with the DS. (Also impacted the gameplay in odd ways – Days loses so much in the movie format, but the technical limitations of putting it on the DS and the gameplay itself to fit are uh. Not great.) Fortunately we have the 1.5 + 2.5 combo now, which has almost everything… except for the mobile game, which has become the most important game for the series going forward. And so the cycle continues. (Now mobile games but I’m going to avoid acknowledging the Xehanort prequel as long as I can, I do not CARE about Xehanort’s backstory, that ship sailed six games ago.)
But yeah, KH is great and I love it, convoluted time travel rules and all. (I know the time travel rules, but for the life of me I can’t keep them all straight beyond ‘these were clearly designed to benefit the villains and no one else, but Sora always cheats.’) Just wish Kairi and the other girls got more to do.
and then there’s me, who (as previously noted) was there for the initial pitch of a classic Disney/Square mashup + fanboy ‘memberberries nostalgia trip, and fell off the series somewhere around (if not during) 2 when it moved away from that.
You ever read the Days manga? It’s the best of the lot where Shiro Amano’s character designs and expressive art really come together with his more jokey take on KH and adds a lot more character to a game intentionally designed in a “punch into work, do your job, punch out” kind of routine.
Anyway I appreciate that someone has finally come to the defense of the Ice Cream line, even if it kind of deserved the mockery. *I* get it, that Roxas and Xion are weird half-baked humans who feel just enough emotion to get confused and vague about what they’re going though, and that eating ice cream after work together was the only way they figured out how to bond, but I think it’s asking a lot of an audience of millions to see these lines that don’t always land the way they do and look for the meaning behind them, and by the time you get those youtube compilations of all the dumb lines in KH history it’s too late.
I need to read the Days manga but haven’t ever managed to get around to it! Bad timing for me to get ahold of it at the time, I think. But Xion’s my absolute favorite, so I really should track that down.
That is absolutely the thing about a lot of the lines in KH. Most of them make sense in context, at least if you’re willing to put a little thought into them, but removed from that context ‘Kairi’s inside of me?’ or mournfully reflecting on the end of summer vacation sounds a bit… silly. (Though the second one there’s usually remembered well because it’s at the beginning of a popular game and everyone got the metaphor through context. Now that you mention it, there’s something interesting about Roxas’s most iconic line using the same ‘doesn’t have the tools to be direct, goes to the frame of reference he has’ thing as his most-maligned one. Nice catch, thanks!)
There’s also a serious case of Proper Noun Syndrome in general that doesn’t tend to help any given line, but that’s as much a combination of ‘this is a Disney/Final Fantasy crossover fic whose many many OCs took over the plot’ and ‘We fight goth Muppets using a giant cartoon key, some shit needs expositing’ as anything. We were gonna get that even BEFORE the plot turned into an exploration of the nature of identity and what makes a unique, real person running up against an evil metaphysicist whose hobby is bodyjacking, and also Donald Duck is here.
Thank you.
I agree that it’s not as difficult to understand as some people say, but it’s a sprawling and convoluted story presented in a fairly unintuitive way. There’s a lot of it and it’s very easy for someone to get lost and have no idea what’s going on
It’s also extremely silly, which doesn’t help
It sounds like something I would love, but I have enough time-sinks already.
It’s also been running for two entire decades. That’s a lot of history, but you don’t see people talking down about other long-runners the way they do about this one.
It’s probably because Kingdom Hearts lore never really matters.
Everything you learn in a previous game has equal odds of getting a Shocking Reveal about its true nature in the next. Nomura doesn’t know how to do plot, so he just throws in twists thinking that it makes the story more exciting.
While at the same time, it pays FAR more attention to its lore than, say, Zelda, which likewise has a ‘nothing really matters so fuck it’ approach (how many ancient, mechanically advanced civilizations have we got by now that the timeline means have to be distinct from the other ancient, mechanically advanced civilizations and we know next to nothing about any of them except ‘robots’? Genuine question here, I know there’s at least two but lost count and I’m not sure if we can list, say, the Tower of the Gods in Wind Waker with whatever the shit was with the robots in Skyward Sword.) I think once we got the Hyrule Historia timeline that revealed, surprise! You thought there were two timelines that branched off from Ocarina but there’s also one where Link canonically fails!, I think the fandom started going through the stages of grief. Certainly by ‘Breath of the Wild exists at the end of the Zelda timeline. Which one? All of them’ they’ve just accepted that the lore is meaningless to Nintendo.
As mentioned by Taffy, it is a twenty-year-old series, but at least in gaming you don’t get a ton of franchises (at least not more mainstream hits) that care about the story, all fit into a single continuity featuring the same characters – note that Zelda also features that reincarnation handwave – and have put out nearly as many games in that timeframe. A lot of the other big RPG franchises – Final Fantasy, Tales, Fire Emblem, I want to say Dragon Quest – all do standalone stories or a few connected ones before a reset, which lets them not get completely bogged down with the need for a new twist that changes Everything We Thought We Knew fitting into the last five of those.
Kingdom Hearts: It’s a unique mess of a franchise, but god do I love it for that specific reason. I’d say never change but seriously Nomura Kairi and Namine are RIGHT THERE, let them do something already. Everything else is fine just let the girls be relevant for more than their first game.
I think the difference between Zelda and KH is that the only people who really care about Zelda lore are fans, whereas KH lore is actually of significant importance to KH.
A Zelda game will say it’s in Hyrule every time but sometimes it’s the size of a shoebox and sometimes it’s an expansive wilderness and Death Mountain keeps moving all over the place. Twilight Princess makes a big deal about the Twili people and they’re never coming back, but check out my cool fan video on them actually being the tribe who crafted Majora’s Mask. None of it ever actually matters, though I suppose Breath of the Wild aiming for more developed and iconic depictions of its cast might signify a change there.
Kingdom Hearts will straight up release an updated version of one of its games with a plot relevant secret boss and brand new ending to set up the next game if you complete all the tasks and then get mad at you for not knowing what that’s about. It’s a series that throws *a lot* at you, then takes some of it back to stick new stuff in there (“It”s the guy who”s not Ansem!”), and through all of this it feels like an insurmountable hill just to keep up with all the terminology before you can even start engaging with the character arcs and themes the games want to convey.
Agreed 100%. My favorite may well be ‘remember how the final boss of the second game that people skipped for years had an airship form for no clear reason, and you all just rolled with it because whatever it’s a JRPG final boss of course they have an airship form and you were too busy being frustrated by the card battle system? Well, fifteen years later this mobile game will have a cutscene that explains a question you weren’t asking, makes that random airship actually a poignant piece of character work, and raises EVEN MORE QUESTIONS!’ Sums up everything I love and laugh baffledly at about the series in one sentence.
…Aight what’s the lore behind Marluxia’s airship mech thing.
Is it actually his girlfriend. Googling it for a refresher does make it look kind of humanoid.
Kingdom hearts is dumb bc it’s dumb
You drink Pepsi on purpose.
Kingdom Hearts is glorious in all its insanity. I will never stop loving it.
Yeah, I agree. Dina is being a bit mean here.
After all, Dina was the one who asked Joyce about this. Joyce has merely reported what she learned. If Dina wants to be upset with others on Joyces behalf, then great, but she appears to be upset with Joyce herself, who did nothing wrong. Joyce isn’t trying to convince others of this – she is literally just answering Dina’s directly asked question.
So yeah – Dina’s being a bit of a jerk about this.
Agreed. Particularly since Dina started out with the assumption that Joyce can’t be good at/have any foundational knowledge of ANY part of science (I don’t even think we know this is biology class) based on beliefs on this one issue. As somebody who entered undergrad a creationist (albeit a less than committed one) I got As in all my classes in my bio minor up until I hit Poisonois and Medicinal Plants, which was a 300 level class with a very changing professor. I got a B+ in that one. I did well on the AP physics exam in high school always liked chemistry and earth science, etc.
To be honest, I’m somewhat personally offended by Dina’s attacks on Joyce here. Assuming that somebody can’t think scientifically or understand scientific principles just because they were brought up being taught a misguided approach to one portion of one scientific discipline is pretty messed up.
Dina said “our biology class” in yesterday’s strip. Dina and Joyce clashed over Creationism last semester, Dina isn’t just making assumptions. And evolution is the heart of explanatory biology.
Joyce is kind of demonstrating her lack of understanding of scientific principles right here with her “we’ll just assume the rate of carbon decay changed to match the Bible dating with no other side effects” nonsense.
I think it’s important to point out that Dina’s being a bit mean from an allistic viewpoint. I don’t think she’s being intentionally rude or mean— science is something incredibly important to her so to me it makes sense that she’s coming across a little abrasive right now. (That doesn’t make it necessarily *right* but it does explain it a little)
That said, Joyce also isn’t doing anything wrong here. She’s just answering Dina’s questions based on what she was taught. So at a certain point, she may need to directly ask Dina to stop if the conversation is bothering her. I think Joyce has known Dina long enough to know that at this point
I think a lot of people in the comments are looking at this as very black and white in terms of “someone is in the wrong and someone is in the right” instead of looking at this as a nuanced conversation between two multi-faceted people. Could Dina be a little nicer here? Maybe. But she’s also probably not viewing what she’s saying as abrasive so much as just spitting facts.
Being abrasive may be ineffective and even self-destructive, but it isn’t a moral failing.
I totally agree! I also don’t think it’s even necessarily intentional
woah gravatar change
Joyce could say “I don’t want to talk about it, Dina” and walk away.
She could, if Dina didn’t have her in a full Nelson to give Mary the chance to charge her Special Beam Cannon.
I really don’t think it’s “over the line” to point out (angrily or otherwise) that the beliefs of a particular religion contradict the scientific evidence.
Oh aren’t you special
Why yes. Thank you for noticing.
Goddamn but Dina is CRANKY. I can’t blame her because to me (an atheist raised in a LOOSELY CATHOLIC household) everything about Fundie Homeschooling wants me to scream this is abusing your children but. Becky already has told her about this? In their early dates?
There has to be a reason she’s working some of her (still unknown) frustrations on Joyce of all people. My bet? It’s because she can’t do this on Becky. Whom, if I may repeat myself, may be open to Science and Evolution but is scared to be alone in the same room with her because it might lead to Performing The Delicious One (like we say in Spanish lol) and that’d be A SIN. Before marriage, at least.
IDK. Dina’s not normally like this unless she’s being condescended to, so… I’m awaiting for the explanation with bated breath.
I wasn’t 100% on this before, but I am definitely coming more and more to it. I’m also wondering if, as I was thinking through upthread, Dina’s on edge expecting a whole semester of this when she’s trying to actually learn (or at least get through class without turning it into a Roz-Joyce Gender Studies-level shitshow every time) and feels like she’s stuck because she wants to share a class with Becky and Becky wants to share her classes with Joyce whenever possible. A slightly different flavor of the same basic thread.
…………OHHHHHHHHHH. Oh, this makes SO MUCH SENSE. Even if Dina didn’t participate of those Gender Studies classes, half her dorm did and you could bet there was much talk about the Joyce/Roz feud. So Dina’s already going into this with dread in her heart…
And also, as stated many moons before, she knows she’s Becky’s Rebound ™ – An awareness that hurts her so she does her best to not dwell in it. None of this can be conductive to a proper learning environment, nor to a healthy emotional state.
Becky was present for the big ‘up to three days ago this was you’ Shitshow, I’m pretty sure. (The one that, IIRC, led to the creation of the bongo filter.) Becky may even have been dating Dina by then, I don’t remember the timeline 100%.
Yeah, Dina almost certainly heard about Gender Studies Class.
Becky wasn’t present for that one – she’d gone off to get her haircut and she and Dina started dating two days later.
Ah, thanks! Couldn’t remember which ones she was there for or not.
Still, between Dorothy and Walky both having front row seats to that one, Dina still probably knows about Gender Studies Class with Joyce being an experience.
Even without Joyce disrupting class too much – which is sadly not something uncommon with YEC in biology classes, it’s likely to spill over out of class and she’s likely to get drawn into it through Becky.
That’s a hell of a euphemism.
What, “performing (“doing”, more like) The Delicious One”? I swear to god it sounds better in Spanish, ahahah. “Hacer El Delicioso” – See how it’s shorter and more sonorous?
I was writing “doing the do” like in Early Tumblr and then went “wait! I’ve got a better one!”
This is a great phrase. Now that I’ve learned it, if I recall language classes correctly, the next step is to use it in a sentence. “Becky y Dina quieren hacer el delicioso.”
You’re ABSOLUTELY CORRECT; that’s exactly how it’s used! “Becky y Dina quieren hacer el delicioso”, even though Beck’s scared of its many delights 8D I bestow upon you the right to use this euphemism at your leisure~
“Doing the delicious” is better in English than”doing the delicious one.”
I love it. I’ll keep it as the forever translation for it, as long as we keep the upper case for Delicious :DDDD!!!
I’m going to refrain from the comment I want to make, because it would be a rant and might offend anyone religious.
Instead, wonder how Sarah is enjoying her near omnipotent bliss?
This is one of the things that sets Viced Rhino off big time. Catch Viced Rhino on YouTube.
Huh. Somehow, the glasses make that explanation sound intelligent and reasonable.
Thankfully, we know Dina’s silly beliefs are disproved by it all being the Matrix.
The music of the spheres is Stan Bush.
Pfft, radiocarbon-dating only goes back on a scale of thousands of years, anyway
Now, other forms of radiometric dating, like uranium-lead…
You can’t prove how old the world is based on uranium-lead dating.
pours lead-based gasoline everywhere
Can you still get lead based gas? I thought they outlawed that stuff?
Mostly. Small piston-engine aircraft still use leaded avgas. https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=14754
Listen, Dina, that could all be the result of past timelines merging with our current quantum one.
Dina: You can’t just add quantum in front of things!
THANK YOU! I just did a search through the comments to see if anyone had already pointed this out, so I wouldn’t have to.
I’d like to go into nuclear chemistry and I’m a junior at university, so the longer I look at joyce’s explanation the more I die internally
I apologize for America. It’s our fault.
If you are American, that’s amusing. If you are English, that’s hilarious.
Truthiness is America’s most impactful contribution to the world.
Sorry about that one, world.
Hang in there though. We now have an AI language model that is consistently judged better at writing believable fake news stories than humans in blind tests.
I wonder how Joyce would react to finding out most of the world’s Christians not only believe it to be a parable but that it was never actually meant to be taken literally. Fundamentalists descended from Renaissance Protestants had some crazy ideas.
You’re a parable! D:<
Joyce: Listen, Dina, I believe you. I just think that science is stupid and illogical.
Dina: Wha…uh…uh….
Becky: I believe evolution and God are compatible.
Joyce and Dina: THEY ARE NOT!
Calvinism has many, many crimes to answer for.
Not necessarily these ones, directly, I’m not a theologian or a historian with that focus, but many crimes nonetheless.
It’s pretty fascinating to draw a direct parallel to it and a lot of “American” Christian problems.
John: Listen, you are either the Righteous or the Damned. It doesn’t matter how you BEHAVE. It’s all about God pre-selecting you as special. Which means you can do whatever you want as a righteous person and look down on the people we hate.
I swear, that’s pretty much his actual words.
No, no, you left out the part about how God made sure good things happened to “righteous” people, and so being rich was proof that you were a good person.
Huh? Job? Who was that? Sounds like he must be a pretty big scumbag if God did all of that that to him…
Its doubly funny because Jesus flat out said that was stupid. I mean, directly.
Its like Prosperity Gospel levels of dumb, except it probably helped inspired Prosperity Gospel.
I’m not generally one for judging other’s religions, since my own relationship with religion is somewhat… Uncomfortable, for me. I’m not personally religious, I just enjoy reading about religion.
But systems of belief that essentially say that good luck is proof of being a good person, and that bad things happening to you is proof that you deserved it? I’m pretty comfortable calling those complete garbage, and grounds for being suspicious of anyone promoting them. I don’t see how they could lead anywhere but terrible places.
I feel comfortable judging it because if you have a religion based on someone’s words you can be called out if you invert them.
For example, “The Church of Optimus Prime insists that Megatron is the coolest and humans should be enslaved for energon.” It may or may not be your bag but it certainly is inconsistent with what we know about said Transformer.
Eh, but what if the Church of Optimus Prime also says that Megatron wants you to treat other humans kindly and with respect, so that they may better serve as slaves in the future, and these teachings encourage a bunch of short-tempered hotheads to redirect their energy towards building gaudy monuments to Megatron instead of going around picking pointless fights with each other?
…Okay, maybe I should have simply abandoned the hypothetical, but to restate my point – even if it’s hard to call something “Christian” at a certain point (like, say, Pentecostals and their “spiritual warfare”), it can genuinely improve the lives of believers, and encourage them to be better people. And if one doesn’t believe in the Bible or Jesus’s divinity in the first place, does it really matter if what they practice has no relation to what they “should” be practicing?
It’s better to judge the results than the logic behind them, in my opinion. Though I certainly won’t hesitate to call out how un-Christian a lot of Christians behave in practice, since it’s the easiest way to get through to them.
Pentecostal “spiritual warfare” is totally Christian. (Source: I grew up around them, including a close family member.)
Casting out demons in the name of Jesus is right there in the Bible. Jesus directly told his followers to do it! If it was good and effective back then, why should it be any different now?
The people who believe that aren’t some kind of wacko fringe group. They’re in a mainstream denomination. Given the rest of their beliefs about Jesus’ divinity, the literal existence of Hell, etc. – which are mainstream Christian beliefs – they have perfectly reasonable beliefs about demons and the power of the Name of Jesus
You may not like it, but Christians really do have to own this one. Mainstream Christian beliefs lead straight to spiritual warfare.
“I serve a risen Savior, He’s in the world today. I know that He is living, whatever men may say…” They sing it joyfully because they believe it literally.
I serve a risen Savior, He’s in the world today.
I know that He is living, whatever men may say
But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die
To be clear, I have nothing against Pentecostals – I’m certain it’s improved the lives of many believers. It’s just that when you’re praying for an angel of confusion to disrupt a meeting so that your church isn’t foreclosed on, it looks a lot more like pagan faiths calling on spirits for boons to me than it does other forms of Christianity.
Oh my, calling up an “angel of confusion” is really creepy. I suppose there’s some Old Testament precedent for God using confusion – but I agree that example is not very closely connected to any Christianity I’ve ever seen or heard of.
I wonder whether at another time, some of those same people might be intoning, “Spirit of Confusion, come out of him, I command you in the name of Jesus!”
Frankly, your story reminds me of the scene in Prince Caspian where the Hag and the Werewolf start to call up the Witch.
I mean, yeah. Calvinism was the basis for Puritanism, which was imported to America by the Mayflower (and others).
Calvin is responsible for a LOT of what people hate about modern American “Christianity”.
It’s no wonder that one other country where Calvinism had a large impact has it’s own Bible Belt (the Netherlands).
Isn’t that where the Mayflower pilgrims went for a while, before the Dutch kicked them out for being too wackadoodle?
I also want to point out that if acceleration of radioactive decay were true, the resulting rate of radiation output in the past would be enough to destroy all life on the planet.
I can even prove it mathematically. According to fundamentalists, the world is 6000 years old. There are objects that we know to be 6 million years old, containing radioactive elements that have been decaying within that time frame. If the world really was 6000 years old, there would have been at least some point in the past where they were decaying at a rate 1000x what they are now. All together, the pretense of those super-fast decaying elements would have been enough to destroy all life on earth as we know it, but yet here we are.
+1 insightful
Hell, not even all fundamentalists are Creationists. There’s many smaller boxes in larger boxes before you reach the Brown family.
Southern American Fundamentalist Creationist Christianity is a very small Russian doll in a lot of other Russian Dolls.
Jimmy Swaggart for example believes in the “Gap Theory” of creationism, where the Universe is ancient, but life on Earth is a recent creation of God.
But why would He just have an empty terrarium sitting around for millennia?
Storage.
if the world was 6 thousand years old, RIGHT NOW , at THIS VERY MOMENT ( and your entire life up until now ) would be a World Destroying earthquake enough to level every building on earth
and simultaneous Mega Tsunamis drowning all life on the coasts.
We Know this because Continental Drift is Objectively true, and we know of at least 2 other super continents.
No equations necessary , just back of the envelope math.
Nor can you pull that “Acceleration of X ” Fudge factor with Seismology or we wouldnt even live on an Earth with Mountains.
Compress 4.5 Billions years of earthquakes into 6000 years and shake apart every built structure. Compress it into a few days ….. welcome to bowling ball Earth.
Disproving Young Earth Creationism (it even has a tagline beyond Creationism) is like disproving the moon is made of cheese. It doesn’t actually need to be disproven and the people who believe it don’t care that you try.
I will admit my best friend spent 10 years online just being Dina because it was a religious calling to him to defend biology.
I feel this way about religion in general, not just YEC.
Most of the time you don’t have to – and you really can’t because the people who believe it aren’t relying on any kind of evidence beyond the Bible, despite their pretenses.
However, Dina’s going into a biology class with a pair of YECs, one of whom she’s had some success deprogramming. She’s going to be dealing with this all semester, like it or not.
I was taught that the continents split up to their present state during the lifetime of one of Noah’s great-great-grandsons (Peleg, for the curious), and that this was also when Atlantis sank into the ocean – Atlantis formerly being a “continent” sandwiched between North America and Europe during the whole single supercontinent (Pangaea, though I was never taught that name) period that lasted from Creation all through the Flood and up until Peleg.
Also, “continental drift is real, but all the great mountain ranges formed either during the Flood or when the world was divided in Peleg’s day.”
W-wait… 6000 years? So Australian’s Aboriginal cultures are 5x older than the earth? How do?
God faked the evidence to test our faith.
He did it last Tuesday, complete with all our fake memories, and fake Bibles containing fake revelations.
How do you know that wasn’t the work of a giant invisible telepathic gerbil who’s trying to keep us from his reserves of rubies and diamonds hidden inside the moon?
Duh because thats nonsense you silly billy
the rubies are crystalized hearts of non-believers
They’re the Red Orbs from Devil May Cry?
in-duper-dably
Don’t we only know that from radioactive dating of some early bones and artifacts? If radioactive dating can’t be trusted, then we don’t actually know it.
Don’t we have some of their oral histories that stretch back tens of thousands of years as well? I won’t claim to be an expert on their cultures, though, so I’d have to look into it more to see if my half-remembered, uh, memory is correct.
(IIRC there’s at least one instance I can remember off the top of my head where a local cultural tradition describes an asteroid impact in what is now Western Australia – the corresponding impact crater, Wolfe Creek, is believed to be well over 100,000 years old.)
Obviously oral tradition can’t be trusted that far back and the dating of the crater is clearly wrong as well – remember we can’t trust radioactive dating.
More seriously – I have a lot of trouble accepting oral history as reliable anywhere near that far back and 100,000 years would be before our current best estimates of the main wave of modern humans leaving Africa. Having legends about a prominent geological feature isn’t really great evidence.
Yeah, admittedly after doing a little bit of double-checking against my memory I do seem to have partially confused the legends surrounding Wolfe Creek Crater (which does have an impact legend associated with it, but the actual crater prooobably pre-dates Aboriginal arrival in Australia roughly around 70,000 years ago – a good 30,000 years at least after the believed date of impact, geological timescales are fuuun) with the local legends of the Henbury craters in the Northern Territory – the Henbury craters formed somewhere between two to six thousand years ago, and the region was definitely inhabited at that time.
(Can you guess what one of my major interests is?)
The problem is that once you have oral tradition of this one event that they couldn’t have witnessed and oral tradition of this other event that they could have, it gets harder to argue the second must be reliable.
A few thousand years is more plausible than many 10s of thousands, but I’d still hesitate to read too much into it.
True, but I’d note that there’s also at least one separate oral tradition for Wolfe Creek that doesn’t have any similarities to the mechanics of an impact event…while in the case of Henbury – which is one of only a handful of impact events known to have occurred in inhabited-at-the-time regions (off the top of my head it’s only: Henbury ~4k years ago, Kaali in Estonia ~2k years ago, the Tunguska Event at the turn of the 20th century, the Sikhote-Alin Mountains in the Russian Far East in ‘47, northern Peru in 2006, and Chelyabinsk back in 2013) – such a disagreement is not the case.
All we have to do is drill down clear through the bottom of the disc so we can go ask the turtles. They’ll know the truth.
Good plan.
Start digging.
https://www.theonion.com/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-god-creates-world-1819571221
gold XD
How does that square with the great mass of radioactive material at the core of the planet?
Is there such a mass? I thought that the Earth’s core was supplying heat mostly by solidifying and releasing latent heat of liquefaction, while most of the radiogenic heat from Earth’s interior was produced by the decay of potassium-40 in the mantle.
That’s my understanding as well. Various radioactive material throughout the mantle and maybe the outer core. The inner core is mostly iron and nickel. Not a radioactive mass.
When Booster said Joyce was just finally admitting she’s who she always was, I took it as Booster saying Joyce never completely believed in God, just the incredibly strict culture that she appreciates as a autistic person (I’m on the spectrum). Joyce doesn’t care about God, she cared about strict rules on everything and the structure.
Becky believes in God, Joyce believed in the church.
Which is why Joyce is taking it much harder than Becky because what she’s upset by is the loss of structure. I fully expect Joyce to latch onto something else that provides a substitute for “strict controlling environment.” Yes, JOYCE WILL JOIN THE AIR FORCE.
I had been thinking of this in terms of Joyce’s need for authority, as mentioned when talking about the optometrist. And so I wonder how Joyce will react to the professor, an authority figure, telling her some real science things.
Also, yes, Joyce will join the air force. Manifesting it or whatever.
Between her bad eyesight, her good grades in math, and wanting to pilot a spaceship more than an Earthly fighter jet (which she’s disqualified for because, glasses)…….. I’d bet whole 5 (five) USD that she ends up in some career path that leads her to NASA.
It’s only 5 bucks before I’m broke, ok. And also, I really hope this is what happens because the NASA rules, meanwhile the Air Force is only good for bombing brown people from countries like Yours Truly |DDD
I’m now imagining a spin-off series where Joyce ends up in SPACE FORCE instead. Because that is much more humorous and tragic.
NASA being much better than the Air Force because of all the bombing is a very good point. The other things, to me are more…we don’t know exactly what her eyesight is, her math skills don’t strike me as that strong, and she has expressed interest in being a fighter pilot.
NASA would be cool, though. I’d also support her as a commercial pilot or a helicopter pilot.
Now I want to know the extent of Joyce’s experience as a passenger on a plane.
Agreed, very much. I can see the coming to terms with religion not being directly tied to morality as well, but that was absolutely her biggest loss.
(I’m still only about 85% on Joyce as autistic specifically and not plural anxiety disorders and assorted neurodivergences, but the ‘glasses becoming part of my face’ thing? Yeah that’s one I recognize.)
I was convinced by Joyce’s aversion to any kind of food being mixed together. That’s absolutely a thing for the neuroatypical.
Oh, agreed, I was just also considering an OCD/ARFID combo as possible. (Ie, some of those things I would have been diagnosed with were I not autistic and yeah when you consider all those things in conjunction make an autism or all but indistinguishable… but, technically a possibility.)
I also hesitate to give a definitive headcanon given the whole Willis going ‘hey when you guys figure it out can you let me know?’ bit.
Just feels weird to me with such a significantly autobiographical character, y’know?
Is Joyce just testing her former beliefs on Dina? Like the way Becky did a few storylines ago, except Joyce is unable/unwilling to tell Dina that’s what she’s doing. Or is she just goading her on purpose? I look forward to learning answer.
I think Joyce just doesn’t want to examine her beliefs any more than she has to. She’s undergone quite enough change as is.
So she’s presenting the YEC point of view because that’s what she would have done six months ago, and she’s mimicking Past Joyce as part of her aversion to change? Sounds like a good guess to me.
I think she’s presenting it as “this is what we were taught”, instead of “this is true”.
No, that is absolutely not how she’s presenting it.
She’s said this is a debunking of the science. And look at the previous strip. The word in scare quotes is ‘real’, not ‘debunks’.
Joyce was talking about what she was taught. Dina outright asked about it, and Joyce is answering.
How is Joyce the one antagonizing her?
Exactly, Joyce is just answering questions, she’s not arguing that it’s accurate or she still believes in it.
We can kind of see that, but there’s no reason for Dina to think so.
She put “real” in audible quotes and talked about the science debunking it. The only clue that she’s not still invested in it, is that she seems a bit detached.
Compare with when Becky was asking Dina about real science – she was clear she wanted to learn and was only presenting their ideas to check to see if they were real or not.
Honestly, that Joyce was claiming yesterday that they’d been taught the real science well enough to succeed in a biology class clashes with what we’ve seen before of their ideas.
It’s a class. Dina’s suggestion that she should know everything already is odd.
It’s a university science class – you’re expected to learn, but you’re also expected to have the basics going in. That’s why they have bio classes in high school.
Dina is not at all suggesting Joyce should know everything already, just that she wonders if she has the background knowledge expected. She knows Becky didn’t, but she’s been helping her catch up.
So has Sarah climaxed from happiness or what? There’s only so much euphoria you can take before your happiness goes to other parts od the body
“Who needs Jacob? Or Little Jacob?”
‘Other Jacob’ certainly not ‘Little’.
The Fundamentalist’s Basic Answer to Everything:
“God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.”
Speaking as a guy who lives in the heart of the Crazy Part of the Bible Belt, no, they have whole MUSEUMS and COLLEGES dedicated to this stuff.
Technically, believing in both evolution and creation constitutes as agnosticism.
Catholicism believes in evolution.
ANOTHER REASON WHY JOYCE RESISTS IT! “Hiss!”
Catholicism actually actively doesn’t hold a belief about evolution.
The Catholic stand on evolution is ‘it does not contradict our doctrine (as long as you acknowledge the reality of the soul and its special creation), but that’s all we’re going to officially say on it’.
Two out of the three last popes (JPII and Francis, of course) have stated that they personally believe the science, but they gave that as their personal beliefs, not doctrinal claims. Benedict attempted to walk back a bit on the whole thing, but didn’t attempt to change the doctrine.
Honestly, the problem with believing that God snapped his fingers and created the Earth with dinosaur fossils in place 6000 years ago isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s useless. Knowing that doesn’t help you know anything else: it’s a dead-end. You can’t build on that to explain something else. You can’t use it to predict anything else.
You can’t, for example, figure out good spots to find oil fields in because the answer would be, “wherever God decided to put them,” and God isn’t picking up the phone to provide GPS coordinates.
Philosophically, it’s easy to come up with thought experiments where creation and evolution are both true. The problem isn’t truth. The problem is that it’s pointless. The whole thing reduces down to a giant Gotcha!.
As long as you’re not taking a literalist approach to the Bible and creationism, there’s no real problem with believing in creation and evolution. God started the process and it proceeded as understood by science – possibly with a bit of a divine nudge now and then to push it in the right direction.
You could argue that the God part is pointless, which would be true in a scientific sense, but you can still do science with it.
But it means you don’t have to think harder or dig deeper for more answers. It provides a neat and tidy little answer that tells you everything you “need to” know. That’s compelling, when the world seems too confusing or irrational (or you want to keep someone in line and teach them to accept your answers at face value).
It really, really doesn’t.
IT really, really does.
Given believing solely in creationism is solely a religious belief and denying evolution happened is also part of that package, I would argue it absolutely would be fall under agnosticism.
No. Not even technically. Not even related.
Given believing solely in creationism is solely a religious belief and denying evolution happened is also part of that package, I would argue it absolutely would be fall under agnosticism.
Catholics are agnostic?
I guess it depends on what you mean by “creationism”. If your definition includes “denying evolution” then believing both creationism and evolution isn’t agnostic, it’s just contradictory. Agnostic would be closer to claiming we don’t know how it happened.
On the other hand, God created everything and evolution was part of His process for doing so is just straight theism.
Even though she doesn’t believe in god anymore, the church programmed her so well that she can say all of that with a straight face that makes it look like she still fully believes it. I really hope it comes out soon, so she can fully except that its not a bad thing for her to be changing, cause keeping it hidden is only gonna make things worse for her when it comes to her mental health (which is already not in to great a place)
Also, “a day” means whatever we need or want it to.
Panel 2 got me fully on board with glasses Joyce ngl
DoA got me to finally see an optometrist and my glasses are arriving next week. So that’s neat.
Last panel Becky is helping.
The outfit doesn’t hurt either.
I like how the hover text mentions super evolution. It seems that Willis is aware that another consequence of the young earth creationist (YEC) model of reality requires that the various kinds of animals and plants on the ark would have to speciate at a rate many thousands of times higher than what we measure.
To get some idea of the scale of the problem, keep in mind that the ark could hold at most a few thousand species; and we’ve discovered over ten million. FURTHER, those millions of species evolved over millions of years, so YECs need to cram all that evolutionary time to mutate and speciate into ~6000 years. So they need “super evolution” where the background mutation rate is many thousands to millions of times higher than what we actually measure.
IOW in addition to needing radioactive decay to be much higher than what we measure, YECs need the rate of evolution to be much higher too.
I wonder if Joyce will mention how they also need the speed of light to fall off also (c-decay).
Now that i think about it, I like how often the best people to find the ways their religious beliefs don’t line up with reality are those who take their religious texts the most literally.
From what I’ve heard, Willis did have an evangelical upbringing. So he knows about these because he actually had those classes. Joyce is largely biographical.
Yep. Way back there’d occasionally be posts on Tumblr of YEC educational material dug up from their boxes of old drawings and other paper (usually with a ‘yes, this is real’ statement of some sort,) and before the Tumblr background was Blowjob Cat, it was Psalty the Songbook, real world inspiration for Hymmel the Hymnal.
Psalty still haunts my dreams sometimes.
I will forever be confused that Psalty is the real one and Hymmel is the parody…
Except there is no speciation in most creationist approaches. That’s what they don’t believe can happen.
I’m not at all sure what “Super Evolution” is. Not a creationist term I’m familiar with.
Wait for the second semester, where they move on to Duper Evolution.
We ARE in the second semester.
I’ve been duped.
I hope the two of you will be very happy.
Remember the episode of Futurama where the Planet Express crew visits the lost underwater city of Atlanta, where the caffeine from the Coca-Cola factory let the inhabitants evolve into mer-people in less than a thousand years?
Probably something like that.
Tell us about the Super Evolution, David
Faster than an evolving bullet. More powerful than a species of locomotives. Able to leap evolutionary hurdles in a single bound. It’s Super Evolution, fighting for life, biological diversity, and the Darwinian way.
Or something like that.
So who *is* the next couple most likely to break up?
…do we actually have any couples other than Becky and Dina? Jennifer and Asher, I guess, but we’ve just seen them, barely.
Hmm… Leslie and the dentist lady…?
So that’d mean a spontaneous shift in an element that would have to date back further than all consistent records.
And the next step… is to introduce doubt about those records…. isn’t it?
Gotta give credit to Joyce for being calm in the face of Dina escalating higher and higher up the anger ladder.
Not so much for the creationist science that she better eliminate from her brain posthaste.
As anyone thats ever worked in customer service can tell you one of the best ways to wind someone up is to remain calm and even when the customer gets angrier
Listen man, we were all programmed with this backstory as part of the EARTH WAR MMORPG.
It started with the Civil War and we’ve had the WW, War on Terror, and Looney Far Right Politician expansions.
It’s running a bit thin on content lately but the simulation is still strong.
Becky is contributing!
You cannot prove to me that there definitely aren’t magical fruit.
I think those are a fungus?
there’s a *musical* fruit. that count?
I’m a little concerned that Joyce is still clinging on to such hard beliefs, given what her religion did to her.
I don’t even think she is, she’s just telling Dina she’s actually aware of the basics of biology.
Any chance Joyce is just messing with Dina here: she doesn’t come across as truly convinced here…
Just because she doesn’t believe in God doesn’t mean she believes in this ridiculous “science” stuff.
She’s not arguing, Dina asked questions and Joyce is answering them.
I’m hoping Joyce doesn’t actually believe that stuff anymore and is just repeating to Dina what she was taught before she became an atheist.
And I’m finding Dina super relatable here, as I’ve stopped even trying to argue with creationists because the ridiculousness of their beliefs just gets me way too pissed off.
Which just validates their stance, in their opinion.
It’s extremely tiresome to debate, and now somebody figured out how to apply it to politics…
I love how all this religious stuff makes no sense at all to atheists but the believers will stick to it harder than a hand on a wall covered in superglue
“Do not question Sky Daddy, or else you’ll get
the belteternal damnation” is all the convincing they need.I am Dina in this strip.
Actuallly it’s easier than that, radioactive isotope decay rate is the same it’s always been but God made unvierse with half decayed radioactive isotopes already there because why wouldnt He
Yep. And with light already en route showing images of distant stars and galaxies, with fossils in the rocks and with holes in my socks. If He did it last Tuesday there would be no way to tell, because omniscience implies unlimited power to deceive.
Yup. For all we know the world was created a couple of seconds ago, with our memories already complete.
God could be the biggest troll in the universe and we could never know.
I enjoy thinking about this.
I’m starting to wonder how no church I’ve been in has taught this sort of thing. Is this more American specific? Ours was pretty fine with letting science science
I couldn’t tell you exactly how common YEC is in other countries, but it’s fairly common in the US. I was raised going to a mainline protestant church, which didn’t teach it, but some of the congregation were definitely YEC. I can’t find the breakdown, but OEC+YEC are about 40% of the US population. (Old/Young Earth Creationists)
I once got conned into being a counselor at my parents’ church’s summer camp. I worked at a “astronomy camp” where the leader was a creationist who told the kids that the speed of light was slowing down *because measurements made 200 years ago and those made now are different* (actually due to more precise measurements).
I quit my position.
What church?
United Methodist.
This garbage is more common than people think. It’s not just the fringe cults.
I did have to look that up and that’s apparently an American church denomination from Texas. I’d be curious to know if it’s common in non-American churches.
I dunno, it seems to me more like Joyce is explaining the arguments used as opposed to believing them
I agree, but I don’t think that matters to Dina one little bit. Look how mad she’s getting at Joyce for answering her questions.
I thought Joyce no longer believed in God.
Yet she still hold to creationism?
Shes clearly trolling dina.
She hasn’t actually said she still believes it, Dina just keeps asking questions and she’s answering them.
I wonder if she’ll definitively answer that question around Becky. Last time she stumbled and lied about it.
After you realize there’s probably no god, it can take a while for the consequences of it to work through. Joyce is in for a rough ride.
I feel Dina on a spiritual level here. I just recently had a similar argument with a family member who is very much into creationism and QAnon.
Let’s just say there will be one less family member at family gatherings now because she refuses to come close to a “liberal feminist who profanes god and hates children.”
All these creation stories would taste better if you could put the Cheese on them.
But the Cheese doesn’t exist in the Dumbingverse.
Unlike ours.
It’s been entire minutes since I typed this and still no response. So pretend that someone asked what made me think the Cheese exists in our universe and I responded
CHEESE DENIER!!!
Cheeses love you. (shakes head pityingly.)
It’s amazing what humanity can believe in to protect its beliefs. And even without thinking for single moment of being stupids.
I feel Dina’s frustration here.
…which makes the Joyce avatar wonderfully ironic.
Joyce: Maybe you’re right, Dina – the Serpent and the Apple DO require further scrutiny!
*pulls out Bible*
Yep, here it is, clear as day! 100% confirmed as fact!
Dina: *Opens textbook to the chapter explaining carbon dating*
Joyce: “That was written by mortal humans, we don’t really know how much of that is actually true.”
I wonder how much of her side of the conversation Joyce still genuinely believes. Maybe she’s keeping up appearances in front of Becky. (Becky herself wants to know how much of what they were taught is BS, but does Joyce know that? Are they just trying to spare each other’s feelings?)
“You guys talking about beans?”
– Walky, only picking up on “magical fruit” out of that conversation.
Wait till we get to cowboys hunting dinos!
(Also I fine it super funny I was just writing a post about how weird the creation science I was taught is then DoA covers it, though that was not the reason I was given as to way carbon dating is inaccurate)
Technically they are dinoboys, not cowboys. Woolly mammothboys at best.
I am intimately aware of the radioactive decay rate thing. The thing they THINK they’re hand waving away would actually have pretty apocalyptic consequences, since radioactive decay produces heat exponentially increasing how fast it happens so that it would make rock that’s only 6000 years old look 4.5 BILLION years old would produce SO much extra heat that it would melt our entire planet’s crust and vaporize the oceans and atmosphere.
But hey, a magical fruit was keeping everything under control so, there you go.
…that would only work if ALL elements increased their radioactive decay by that much. about 24 terawatts of heat emit from the earth’s core due to decay or weak nuclear fission.
Maybe it’s Adam and Eve that knew snaketongue, rather than the other way around
Oh Dina… If you find that annoying, wait until they start talking about the stars falling to earth. Multiple stars. Colliding with earth. Without any major issue.
Well actually it’s the angelic avatars of stars.
Question is, is now-atheist Joyce believing any of this, or saying what she was taught to hear how actually-wrong it all sounds?
In the last strip, Joyce put ‘real’ in scare quotes when describing actual science, and seriously claimed that they were taught facts that debunked the real science.
So, yes, she still believes it, despite having ejected the basis, because human minds are fucking weird.
Haven’t seen Creationism vs Science (or Dina vs Joyce) in quite a while. It’s fun to come back to it now and again.
…For one thing, most conventionally educated persons actually have no IDEA what Creationists believe… and it’s kind of astounding.
to be fair, there are other, much smaller problems with carbon-12 dating, but it’s nowhere enough to change several billion years into several thousand years.
Is it still “the God of the gaps” if you pointedly avoid knowing as much as possible about stuff that can be proved experimentally to create gaps you can jam God into with whatever explanations you can make up that will rationalize your initial premise? I think there has to be a term for that but it’s probably less nice than that one.
i found god
on the london underground
between the train
and the platform edge-
“mind the gap”
I feel her pain
I find it interesting that Becky saying ‘Here’s what I was taught’ in response to questions elicits sympathy/pity for Becky in Dina but Joyce doing much the same seems to incite rage at Joyce in Dina.
I think the difference is Becky seems interested in learning otherwise and says ‘here’s what I was taught’ to explain what she had been taught whereas Joyce doesn’t want to learn about carbon dating and says ‘here’s what I was taught’ in order to disprove science rather than as a conversation.
Because Becky was saying ‘educate me’.
Joyce is saying ‘I am educating you’.
Joyce’s position is Last Thursday-ism with a veneer of respectability.
The sad thing is that just outright saying “God works in mysterious ways” is more intellectually honest, though still suspect – after all, if this is a salvation issue (and I bet Joyce was taught that it is), why would God deliberately create the universe to look older than it is? Just to trick people? Hard to reconcile that with omnibenevolence.
Reminds me of when I was in school and a classmate insisted that the dinosaurs weren’t real, God put them in the ground to ‘test our faith’ which I found stupid on principle.
Perhaps because knowledge derived from history of the universe as recorded in fossils and the like is useful for figuring out how the universe will work in the future?
It’s almost as though science is useful!
how does “awaiting moderation” work?
I seem to remember reading a paper that debunked the changing radioactive decay argument, but I can’t find it doing a quick Google. Essentially, the faster rate that is required for it to work for creationists would have resulted in the planet being sterilized by radiation long ago.