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I fully expect that, within the next decade or so, the phrase will be “officiated to” in both cases. Yes, that will make it harder to understand what’s being said.
…now that you mention her, Leslie might actually be the best person in the cast to help Joyce process this. She was raised by fundamentalists like Joyce was, utterly failed by the community that raised her like Joyce was, and– crucially– lost her faith like Joyce did. The circumstances weren’t identical, but they’re still similar in a lot of ways.
It definitely doesn’t work that way Joyce. 3% identify as atheists, does not mean 97% believe in magic. Around 4% are agnostic and around 20% (total?) are unaffiliated with a mix of faithful and faithless. Even among agnostics, there is a split. Although many consider them “fence sitters” the truth is they either believe or not, but their stance is formally one that proof of god is unknowable either way.
I honestly feel like more people are atheist than agnostic than are currently reported, it’s just that literally nobody understands what the word “agnostic” means. Tracing it back to its roots, Gnostic, to know and be certain of, and the a prefix, introducing the ‘not’ sign in front of it.
If we were to ask “Would you say you’re sure Joyce is wearing glasses today”, we wouldn’t say “well what are glasses anyway? How do I even know Joyce exists? You all might be fictional characters, how do we know FOR SURE it’s not all just solipsistic drivel. What does ‘to wear’ mean, here?”, we’d say “yes”. This isn’t how language functions.
Hard line atheism doesn’t need to prove even beyond solipsism that god is 100% not real to declare ‘god isn’t real’ as a known fact, but for some reason in the specific case of atheism, many people push “are you suurreee??” to a degree it isn’t used anywhere else in language.
huh, that’s a funny line of reasoning.
i disagree with your parallel. the existence of god is not like the question of whether or not Joyce is wearing glasses or not. spirituality is ALL ABOUT asking deep questions. that’s kind of the point, for a lot of people.
and while most people may or may not understand what “agnostic” means, i think the way people identify is not purely down to their actual belief, or lack thereof.
for instance, i may decide to identify as an atheist for reasons of political affiliation, and expediency, and to signal my unwillingness to anyone trying to proselytize to me, but actually be more of an agnostic if it comes right down to it (mostly because i’m sympathetic to the paradox of first causes, not that i care very much though).
Yep. I know a lot of people for whom religious identity is a key part of their family life, or even in some cases of their identity, but whose beliefs are strictly physicalist or even radically skeptical. They score their religious affiliation as Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, and Anglican, and are not being disingenuous when they do so. Christmas, Pesach, Diwali etc. really matter to them. One unbelievers I know still practises confession, believing it to be good psychology.
Yeah, I’ve never understood why some people feel like “I don’t know” is a good answer to a yes or no question. You either believe in one or more gods or you don’t.
What if you think humanity has no way of knowing or obtaining scientific proof? Like I’m pretty sure some very specific religion isn’t completely true in every detail, but could there be a god-like entity? Would we have any way of proving or disproving it?
the question is believe, or think?
I think there the absence of proof for god(s) isn’t favourable to god(s) existence
option A: I don’t believe in god
Option B: I believe there is no god.
Either way, the question is flawed anyway since you can’t survey religions appartenance and beliefs at the same time, or beliefs about existence of god and beliefs about which existence/ non-existence/non-proof-of-either
I wouldn’t appartenance any religion that would have me.
I don’t believe that Joyce exists in the same way you and I do. I believe that Joyce wears glasses. I have faith that Joyce will eventually do the right thing.
But I absolutely believe you can survey beliefs and group memberships at the same time. If that’s not what you’re really interested in though, you won’t.
I think demanding a “Yes” or “No” answer is part of the whole black/white thinking that gets us in trouble with religion in the first place. Accept that people are uncertain, even about themselves. Accept that people are ignorant, even of themselves. Accept that people may not WANT to give you the answer you seem to so desperately require of them. You need to open your mind to possibilities.
Well, I’m in a country with around 30% atheists, and around 30% agnostics.
I guess it has more sens to ask there.
But also, I know how people survey and how people answer to survey.
So yeah, if it’s not a yes/no thing it may be even more flawed.
Essentially, the answer should be free to give without choosing option A, B, C, D or else, and then regrouping with explicit criterias different answers in options A, B, C, D
My reason for saying I’m agnostic is less “I don’t know” and more “it doesn’t matter”. I feel like calling myself atheist would mean I’d be willing to argue my point about how I see the universe working, and I’d rather just *not have faith be a part of my life*, whether siding with some version of it or arguing against it. (and I feel like Christian beliefs shouldn’t be a factor in politics and science both because there are people of *other* faiths as well as people with *no* faith)
I think this is where I’m at? I call myself an atheist, but I don’t know if thinking the afterlife doesn’t exist, but willing to be proven wrong on that counts as atheism or not.
I guess I process it like, the biggest and most unanswered questions are ones I’ll never figure out in my lifetime. The supernatural, however you want to define that, could exist as something yet explored.
I think it does. The position of being unwilling to accept being wrong, or even contemplate being wrong, is not a valid one except perhaps in mathematics.
I do not believe in any god or gods, and I have concluded that there most likely are none, so “atheist” is the frank and straightforward term for me to describe myself by. If new evidence appears I will change my mind, and I could that, not its opposite, as a virtue. For a theist to insist that I cannot be an atheist because I do not have faith is a put-down, and I reject it as unreasonable.
I’m not sure agnostic is the correct word for what I believe, because I’ve had multiple different people be *very* insistent that given definitions for that word are correct, but disagree wildly on what those definitions are. However, what I believe is that there is probably some kind of higher power, I have no clear definition for what that higher power might be, and I am willing to accept the possibility that there isn’t one. Additionally, considering the presence of a higher power, or lack thereof, is impossible to prove one way or another short of direct, indisputable interference, like a voice from the sky announcing that it is god and suddenly answering prayers, even secret ones, all over the world simultaneously, I feel it’s just as irresponsible to assert there definitely is not a higher power as it is to assert there is one, because you are claiming knowledge of the unknowable.
Granted, so long as whatever higher power there may or may not be is not obviously interfering with life here, for all practical purposes there may as well not be a higher power at all, so really it’s a purely academic distinction, but I still assert that it is incorrect to say that I do not believe in a higher power, so I will not identify as an atheist. Some of the definitions I have encountered for agnostic sound like my position on the subject, so as far as I am concerned, I am agnostic if for no other reason than a lack of a better term.
Not to your main point, but to share: strictly speaking, agnosticism isn’t about having faith or not (unlike how some accuse agnostics of being ‘fence sitters’). Agnosticism is a different axis than faith/non-faith, and is actually about the question of knowability (gnosis). An agnostic position is that god/faith is ‘unknowable’ (a-gnostic), versus being able to ‘know’ the existence thereof (gnostic).
Most of the atheists I know are actually agnostic but hold the view that until we know we should act on a null hypothesis, or are uncomfortable enough with magical thinking that they are uncomfortable with religion and want to be unaffiliated with it in stronger terms.
I suspect that in common use there’s not a ton of difference between atheism and agnosticism as words and people just use the one that aligns with their comfortability conceding things to religion. Like I have met a couple hard atheists and I have met some very “defend all the possibilities” agnostics but they seem like the far ends of a spectrum, not the norm.
I agree that most take it as a social position without really caring about the fine nuances of the argument.
Most of the time I’m willing to accept whichever label will get people to stop arguing about it, mostly theists claiming that atheism is just as much a matter of faith as religion. Sometimes I enjoy the discussion for a bit though.
Some also don’t want to be associated with the extremely online fedora tipping brand of rational skeptic atheists.
I have sometimes joked about being a “militant agnostic” – “I don’t know and you don’t either.”
(I’m actually a lot more laid back and not very confrontational in general.)
Personally, I’m a practicing agnostic, I might sometimes gather with some people who may share my views at some place that may or may not exist where we might or might not discuss anything at all, let alone anything relevant to the supernatural.
Eh… as cool as a cross-over reference to that game world may be, gate-keepimg access to (of all the gods) Pan’s worship seems, inconsistent with its nature.
No that’s cool. I also wasn’t meaning to gatekeep being able to make references to pan in pop-culture. That would _also_ not be cool in Pan’s faith I suspect. I mean, saying ‘not cool’ is about how seriously I imagine Pan would police such matters anyways. XD.
Yeah, if you want to run for thfe highest office in a manority christian country it’s an excellent choice to openly worship a god that inspired the christian devil’s visual aesthetic.
Declaring samesies while one party refuses to participate feels like a violation of the spirit of samesies. Only one of them doing it makes it literally not the same.
‘Knucks’, short for ‘knuckles’, is the bumping of two person’s knuckles together in an act of solidarity and support. ‘Samesies’ is an extension of ‘same’ indicating that there is a shared trait between them, as the purpose of the knucks between them.
I was just describing the latest Scourge Drama to someone earlier this evening and I was NOT expecting today’s comic to bring us to Knuckles the Echidna Cursed Archie Comics Lore, but I am appreciating the serendipity.
(Also, in case you haven’t heard, there’s Scourge Drama. Oddly enough, completely unrelated to the IDW comics. Complete shitshow, though.)
Knuckles the Echidna’s ancestors are Furry Briitish colonizers who oppressed the indigenous Dingo population of Furry Australia, stole their land by rocketing it into the air with them still on it and never brought it back down, and when the Dingos used the nukes that the Echidnas just left lying around near them to defend themselves the Echidnas stuck them in their city’s ghettos.
The Dingos are the villains of the series and are also Nazis, despite the above mentioned.
You left out the part where Knuckles’ dad did super weird genetic experiments on himself and then microwaved Knuckles’ egg before hatching it so he’d be a super mutant cause he had a bad dream one time.
Also, ALL OF KNUCKLES’S RACIST GRANDPAS (and the One Female Knuckles of the Group) are still alive and spy on Knuckles in their Secret Grandpa Spy Compound. Once, when he was being bullied by another kid, they all got together in the night and threw said kid off the edge of Angel Island without Knuckles knowing, which strikes me as somewhat disproportionate.
Also, his dad raised him out in the wilderness making him think they were the last of their species and then he randomly jumped into a wall of holographic flames before Knuckles’s eyes, making him think his dad was dead for years. This last part is apparently family tradition.
Oh, and the last time someone microwaved an Echidna to give them superpowers it produced the (alleged) greatest villain Echidnakind has ever known which really does make one wonder what Knuckles’s dad was thinking there.
I know Dr. Finitevus was supposed to be evil for throwing the entire Brotherhood into another dimension never to be seen again, but I’ve gotta ask: Was he? Was he really?
Oh that’s just the original Archie comic. You know how back in the day video games would have tie-in media that introduced OCs and stuff like that? Imagine running one for over 20 years, with one of the most popular characters in the world, by a man who believed in his Knuckles the Echidna comic so much he was able to successfully sue Archie to own his Sonic the Hedgehog OCs again.
The real fun fact is how back in 2005 Archie hired Ian Flynn, a fresh out of college writer who sent them unsolicited pitches for years and when Ken Penders bailed he was promoted to head writer, whereupon he immediately turned the series around to the point where as every other part of the Sonic franchise became a huge joke, the Archie comic was the only part of it anyone would admit to liking.
This nerdlinger went “pff I’m a huge fan I can do better” and then he actually did to the point where writing Sonic the Hedgehog comics has been his job for 15 years now and everyone likes him. If Ken Penders is Sonic’s Simon Furman (and by that I mean the weird attempted ownership of a larger brand on the grounds of “I was the first one to take it seriously”), Ian Flynn is its James Roberts; he’s a fan, he does have some finger on the pulse of what folks want out of this series, but actually let’s write a cool story first and foremost in and then do the fun fanboy thing in the margins.
If you’re wondering why Sonic fandom is known for being Like That to a consistency other large series tend not to exhibit; I don’t think they’re necessarily inherently weirder so much as a huge fandom is inevitably going to draw in some fucked up fetish art, and talking online about how Sonic the Hedgehog sucks is kind of its own institution at this point since the only consistency to Sonic is that it has none.
I should note that Penders didn’t actually sue Archie for the rights to those characters. He filed copyrights for the characters he created about two years after he left the series, and both SEGA and Archie sued him over this claim. Archie were unable to turn up a valid work-for-hire contract in court, which they claimed was because numerous contracts were accidentally destroyed by warehouse staff and Penders claimed was because no such contract had ever existed. Despite him having previously attested on his website that SEGA owned everything, several years earlier.
Other than that basically everything here is true, though.
Additionally, Penders WAS willing to license his characters to Archie and Sega, if they paid him and he got veto power over said characters because he didn’t like that Flynn had killed Knuckles’s abusive dad while acknowledging said dad was abusive, which in the process meant his precious Mobius 25 Years Later WASN’T The Canon Ending for an ongoing comic. The licensing, more or less reasonable – it’s not industry standard for creators to keep any ownership over their characters, but quite frankly the industry’s pretty terrible in that respect and frequently screws over creators. The creative control thing, significantly less reasonable, especially because that’s a kind of respect for his seniority as a writer he never afforded any of the co-writers for the comic while they were there – he was very open about not having read other writers’ stories. He felt Flynn should have consulted with him and used the story ideas HE’D had for future issues after leaving, but didn’t do the same for fellow writer Karl Bollers’s ideas when he left the series a few years before – in fact, he immediately set about undoing or ignoring plot hooks Bollers set up, something he’d accused Bollers of doing in changing the status quo for the echidnas in the Return to Angel Island arc. (Never mind that the changes to said status quo were either bringing things more in line with the games’ echidna lore – changing the Master Emerald’s chamber to, you know, the classic Genesis one, making the echidna aesthetics more in line with Adventure while allowing for Penders’s pre-Adventure lore to still exist – or clearing house because Charmy didn’t NEED to be prince of a colony of bees, and Heroes just used him so we want him back in the comics again with the other Chaotix.) Archie rebooted rather than pay the licensing fees, especially since they had very much embarassed themselves on that front.
I believe Penders DID sue Bioware for Sonic Chronicles’ similarities to the Knuckles comics, prompting the Sega and Archie suits – and the Nocturnus clan was DEFINITELY inspired by the Dark Legion – but the case was dismissed due to filing timeline issues and Bioware had no way of knowing Archie had lost the contracts and therefore the Archie lore wasn’t every bit as on the table as stuff from Sonic Battle. There was never a clear decision of ownership there as a result. Those characters are still off-limits because if Sega ever uses them again, Penders will re-sue, and Sega doesn’t want to deal with that hassle. It’s more trouble than it’s worth for about half a dozen characters people actually LIKE among the Penders cast and a few more Archie characters by other writers, especially when they have plenty of options in-house.
The most infuriating aspect of Penders is that I’m actually really glad he got one over Archie and Sega. It’s an industry where bill Finger, the real creator of Batman died alone and penniless and Bill Mantlo, creator of global super star Rocket Raccoon, has to crowdfund his own extensive, lifelong care.
Work for hire is a rigged carnie game, the creators of these comics should always own their characters and be fairly and handsomely compensated, and the only time I get to point to how this should work is that time the weird Sonic guy regained the rights to Geoffrey St. John the Skunk who makes out with a teenager.
It’s that ‘Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Made A Great Point’ headline, except that I also think it’s a real dick move by the court in question that the WRITERS got full creative rights but the ARTISTS did not (or for that matter editors who had any role in the design process,) so now we’ve got this asshole licensing out a character using the name and design created by other people after/as he left the book, with the characterization everyone likes coming from a writer he goes out of his way to denigrate, but because Penders came up with the evil Sonic in a leather jacket and sunglasses that ultimately became a beloved fan favorite once other people had him, he gets full rights.
So you know, made a good point but immediately undercut it because he’s an asshole. But at least we have Surge and Kit, I like them already and they haven’t even fought Sonic yet.
… I was more talking about how he tried to fridge Sally Acorn.
And before anyone suggests that he created her – no, he did not. Ken Kinoshita, of the Sonic TV series did.
Your last paragraph is RIGHT on the money, and why the fandom’s ~reputation~ frustrates me. :C
Any example of fandom ‘weirdness’ someone can name, I can find the exact same shit in the Pokémon fandom, and probably more examples of it. Buuut one gets mocked, and the other does not.
I say this as a big fan of both too! I just mean the comparison to illustrate that Sonic’s fandom really does get mocked to an extent that other large game fandoms do not, and it’s honestly undeserved? Like, there’s shitty people and weirdos in every fandom, Sonic is not unique or even the worst in that regard haha.
(And I’d also like to add that not every variety of ‘weirdo’ is actually bad! Let people draw their niche furry art in peace, it’s not that hard to live and learn let live dksldkfjg)
It’s not Sonic game lore at all. It’s mostly just the (pre-reboot) Archie comics.
Game lore is occasionally kinda wild (one example: Shadow is part alien and was set up both to destroy the world and save it by the same guy at different points before that guy was executed by the military, leaving Shadow understandably confused and conflicted about his purpose in life LOL), but… not like that. There’s no ancient echidna wank, the only bits involving them are in Sonic Adventure when a ghost cautions Sonic and Knuckles about what blindly craving power can do to a civilization. That’s it.
Occasionally wonky English dubs and severe schisms in What Sonic Really Is™️ back in the 90s don’t help that impression, I’ll grant you that. But most of the strangeness is found in Ken Penders’s work on the old Archie comics, which are only canon to themselves and can be completely ignored. Game canon is occasionally vague, but the Japanese scripts generally make complete sense and are sometimes incredibly emotionally profound.
For an example of profound: in Sonic And The Black Knight, Sonic – squeaky clean reputation hero Sonic – readily admits he is fully willing to play the bad guy if it gets actually ethical shit done. Can’t always be seen as the hero by everyone, and that’s okay! That game also deals with trying to hold onto the present status quo at the expense of having a future. Another example of WAIT THIS IS IN A SONIC GAME??? is Shadow’s entire multi-game arc about who he is, how does his amnesia affect who he wants to be, and his struggles with PTSD and grief. They may not quite phrase it in those terms, but the Japanese voice acting is delivered with emotional nuance and it’s clear we are meant to actually give a shit about his issues. I think that’s why, ~eDgY~ memes aside, Shadow has been such an enduring favorite in the fandom: his character arc makes people feel.
Those aren’t the only examples of surprisingly good concepts in Sonic games, but they’re a couple of my personal favorites. And since there IS some good stuff in there, it kinda bums me out a little that people dismiss the series as LOLZ SANIC, y’know?
In canon? No one, they’re not doing official romance.
My husband has written a fucking bangin’ slow burn Sonic x Shadow ship fic the length of a novel though! Deals with PTSD, the emotional pressures of being put on the pedestal of ‘hero’, and how to even recognize romantic feelings in yourself when you’ve barely even known what friendship feels like, much less sexual desire/romance. Good shit.
My theory is that drinking tea is an exercise in masochism, so if you order unsweetened tea, you must really want it with extra sugar and a couple packets of fake sugar as well.
I’m pleased to learn that the University food service concurs.
I was lost on ‘samesies’ myself – until I entered it into an online dictionary’s search field and suddenly realized what I was typing. Btw: The online dictionary got no results on it.
Ohhhh yeah. They’re all wrong. Largely because they keep asking the wrong questions: namely, “what religion(s) do you follow” rather than “what beliefs do you hold”.
A lot of people in the UK tick “Christian” (or a denomination of Christianity) when want they mean is “they go to midnight mass at Christmas and they’d like to get married in a church”.
Even amoungst people who genuinely believe, there’s a pretty massive range of Christianity from “believe in God, don’t do anything apart from try and be nice” to “actively campaign to force schools to read one chapter from the Bible every day before the regular anti-abortion lesson”. The phrase “Christian country” is so vague as to be almost useless.
Hyperminority here then, although I wonder what the global concentration of non-theists is. To be fair, even Christian/Islam/Jewish people are “atheist” I just believe in one fewer god than they.
You can be Jewish and not believe in any gods. I was taught to take the TNK seriously, not literally. There are a lot of good teachings we can take from the scripture, the community is good, and our holidays are straight up nerdy. I realized I was atheist in high school, but I’ll be Jewish for life.
My oldest son, after taking a Jewish studies class at UI on a whim, spent a year or so seriously thinking about formally converting to Judaism. This from a kid who was an atheist after the first time his Mom and I took him to church. That was his response when we bought that up. In the end, he never bit but he did learn passable Yiddish.
That’s just being Jewish in the sense of ethnicity/ancestry, without actually believing in Judaism.
There’s nothing contradictory about that, it’s merely a linguistic issue in which “Jewish” refers to two different things (religion and ethnicity), unlike with most other religions.
From many Jewish people I know, that doesn’t sound like it’s actually true. If you’re still doing things like going to your synagogue or participating in holidays, etc. that’s still practicing Judaism. Believing in God’s not necessary for that. They describe it as an orthopraxy, not an orthodoxy.
Yeah, I know practicing Jewish people who keep kosher, actively study the Torah, write at length about the ethical principles of what makes a good person under the Jewish faith as they understand it, and are like ‘does G-d exist? Eh, I generally lean towards no. Does that matter to me? Nope. I will continue to fast for and observe the high holy days because I find them meaningful even if no god is watching and caring if I do or not.’
Good point. The same problem occurs strongly when an Islamo-Christian concept of what a religion is gets applied to Hindusim, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Marxism, or Objectivism.
I had a student once that went out of her way to introduce herself as “a self-proclaimed Atheist”.
I wanted to quietly pull her aside and say: “All Atheists all self-proclaimed. That’s how you become Atheist. There’s no certification you have to do. You just say it, believe it, and done.”
I dunno, I feel like there’s also a category of “other-proclaimed atheists”, a class that includes just about every Democratic politician of the past 20 years
I personally believe Willis exaggerating the cringe levels we see in Joyce in the comic (and exaggerating the reactions everyone has to her), in part cause of how he reflects his past self, in part to hedge very strongly on the side of showing the readership that “this is very bad and i am against it”.
I honestly just hope this isn’t a one sided coin, and we resolve both the Anti-Theism Joyce’s grown into, and the Atheism Phobia that’s been baking under the surface from Becky’s end (which in comic is a lot of why it wasn’t safe for Joyce to talk in any way to Becky about her doubts of faith until she got this deep).
IDK if Becky’s “atheism phobia” is that much of an issue. Yeah, she made that one comment about this being a “stupid phase”, but remember the context – she was looking to Joyce for reassurance and validation, and Joyce didn’t give it to her. She was upset and confused, and she expected Joyce to have the certainty that she was lacking in the moment, so Joyce expressing doubts threw her even further off-balance, and she lashed out. In their argument in this arc, she made it pretty clear that Joyce’s atheism wasn’t the problem, it’s her whole “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is stupid and bad” attitude, which, besides being generally shitty, might be a bit of a raw nerve for Becky.
Either that or Willis felt too many people sympathized with her, so he had to go full-out to make sure we all felt she was being appropriately insufferable.
I don’t seriously think that he re-wrote it, but it’s not like he couldn’t slip new material into the buffer if he thinks people are missing a point he’s trying to make.
I feel like lots of people sympathised with her right to privately work through her newfound beliefs and say stupid things before she expressed them to people who might react negatively. I’d say a much smaller fraction of people actually agreed wholeheartedly with the stupid things she was saying.
Very few people agree with “be an obnoxious asshole to all your friends.” More think that “belief without actual evidence is bad, and you don’t have to pretend otherwise” is a reasonable standpoint.
This is a pretty unsympathetic take. I imagine you were not truly religious yourself at a point and left it or you’d understand. Joyce is lost and she is young. She was taught to believe that her goodness came from her beliefs and that lacking that belief, goodness was impossible. Well, she’s been forcefully dragged to the point where she simply /can’t/ believe anymore but she still needs to make sense of the formative ideas in her head while not being crippled by existential panic or self-loathing.
This is what she’s been left with: She can’t claim she’s good anymore because she doesn’t believe in what she once thought made her good, to begin with. However, that’s ok because Christians have clearly shown her they’re actually not good and, in some cases, even more, evil than non-believers. So goodness doesn’t exist and everybody is out for themselves. If the objective standard of goodness she once believed in doesn’t exist, she’d at least take solace in embracing the objective standard of “truth” instead.
She’s hurting more than she’d readily admit to herself she is.
Her early Christian cringe was worse, I agree, but she’d worked through a lot of it and gotten to a place where she wasn’t been nearly as obnoxious about it. Now she’s found a new (lack of) faith, hidden her doubts and jumped in full bore.
Joyce: Oh no, my superiority through christianity is broken. Whatever shall I do?
*atheism superiority appears*
Joyce: Ah yes that hits the spot, just like my mom but less jesus.
People keep saying Joyce acted all superior when she was Christian too. I’m not seeing it.
On the contrary, really: she believed VERY earnestly and without sublety: I imagine this self-parody level of insufferability might be at least in part a backlash against feeling so stupid for believing so strongly in something so outrageous.
If I laugh at Past Me loudly enough, no one else can.
I got the impression it was backlash from hurting Becky. Instead of owning up to that, she’s pretending it’s the way she’s supposed to act.
Come to think of it, is this how she thinks atheists should act? I mean, obviously Dorothy doesn’t, but is the idea that atheists are supposed to be smug and insufferable something her upbringing might have given to her?
Yup. Re-read the early Joyce/Dorothy interactions and you’ll find plenty of Joyce expecting smugness and Dorothy being blankly confused by the straw man.
Yeah. Some of that’s just labels — free-thinkers, agnostic-atheists identifying as agnostics, etc — and then there’s the hard-to-parse “nones”. But very, very much a minority in this country.
One of the bigger issues with categorizing non-believers is that… well, there’s a lot of varying ways to define non belief (“there are no gods”, “there might be gods but it’s ambiguous but I suppose I’m open to the possibility”, “if there’s gods out there they’d be cool with me not worshiping them because caring about that seems kinda assholish for a benevolent being”, “man do I not give a fuck” and many more!).
And it’s not like there’s coherent definitions for those forms of faith like there is for “Christian”, or even its subcategories of “Catholic”, “Protestant”, “Anglican”, “Lutheran” and such. There’s also less of a need to really define those terms because the varieties of not-really-believers are pretty chill about the whole thing, while there’s multiple historical wars whose (official) basis is centered around different denominations of Christianity.
I think this really nails it. Maybe there’s 3% of “militant” or “preaching” atheists in the US. There are many more that went from believing in god to not giving a single fuck. Discussing the non-existence of a god takes as much or more effort than demanding the existence of one.
… also, am I the only one who dislikes the term “militant” here? When we’ve got atheists waving around AKs and ARPs and threatening to use them to impose atheism as an (anti-)theocracy of their chosen nation, MAYBE then we could call them militant in the same way as religious militants. Until we get into shouting distance of that, it’s a false equivalence.
I tend to prefer “Evangelical” for that subset of Atheists… although there’s folks that object to that comparison as well (rightfully pointing out that Evangelical Christians have a lot more social power than that subsect of Atheists).
They lack the social power, but I suspect a lot of them were culturally Christian before becoming atheists and maybe haven’t come to recognize the parts of their thought processes that are very, very Christian still indeed in that respect.
I do agree there needs to be a better term and they’ve definitely got less social power or physical threat potential than religious militants, but I wouldn’t underestimate them either.
A lot of people tied into Gamergate and the rise of the alt-right were militant atheists. There’s definitely a threat from that angle, even if they’re not directly waving the rifles.
@Regalli
It’s more that watching religious activists yank entire countries around makes you think long and hard about how far your tolerance for irrational behaviour goes. At some point you have to start actually speaking against it.
It’s like people throwing around “Extremest Atheist.” People being moderately annoying on forums is not exactly a good parallel to hate crimes and bombings, thanks.
It’s definitely one of those things where the language interferes with the numbers. A lot of people identify as non-spiritual, agnostic, lapsed, or what have you. Calling yourself a full-on atheist, for some, feels like making a commitment on a subject they really don’t think or care about.
Prolepsis: I am not conflating Muslim with terrorist. Most terrorists as not Muslim. most terrorists in the USA are white-supremacists and anti-government extremists.
Americans in the same surveys also trusted Muslims far more than terrorists.
Welcome to the Church of *Shrug*, which is like Agnosticism but we don’t say anything about it and just go and get Steak and Shake milkshakes instead on Saturdays
That’s because of the horrific bigotry against atheists that’s happening in America, and also against the terrible stigma of calling oneself an atheist.
Trying to spread your beliefs as a Christian/Muslim/whatever is also seen as much more acceptable than trying to spread your beliefs as an atheist, because actually trying to battle the influence of a horrifically reactionary and oppressive institutions like Christianity/Islam/Judaism is somehow seen as *bad* by the pseudo-progressive reactionaries in the United States that call themselves “liberal” while allying themselves with horrific oppressors.
There’s a bit of weirdness in there and I think it depends on what bits of prejudice you look at. There are definitely surveys that suggest atheists are less trusted than people with any religion, including Islam, and that does likely lead into at least some discrimination. OTOH, there are far less hate crimes targeting atheists. Islamophobia tends to overlap with racism, while atheism doesn’t. It’s complicated.
But that particular take: that liberals are bad because they’re not loudly against all religions is an especially awful one.
Aelfwine’s come in here before (back during Liz’s first appearances) declaring that you’re no true progressive unless you loudly denounce the existence of religion itself – and that “American so-called progressives made a deal with the devil” by not doing so – so it’s not a particularly new take from them.
No shit you’re not progressive unless you denounce the existence of religion. You’re not a true progressive if you don’t denounce the existence of fascism or sexism or misogyny or slavery either.
But religion and religious apologists get a pass for their tyranny and oppression, when all the other oppressive institutions rightfully don’t.
Yeah, this right here? In no uncertain terms, and not being religious myself, FUCK THIS ATTITUDE. Fuck aaaaall the way off with your progressive-gatekeeping bullshit. You are exactly what’s wrong with certain parts of the atheist/agnostic/nonreligious community.
(And in case anyone else is wondering, a few weeks ago aelfwine already compared being religious to being a fucking NAZI, and then doubled down when called out on it. I am inclined to give them exactly zero percent of the benefit of the doubt right now.)
According to pseudo-progressives its perfectly okay for Christians and Jews to promote and praise books like the Bible (or the Torah), books that say an all-good God not only accepted but demanded e.g. the genocide of all male Midianites and the sexual slavery of their girls, or the stoning of homosexuals.
That, you see, is an *okay* genocide, it’s *okay* homophobic murder, and and *okay* promoting that *okay* book — because it’s a *religious* one.
Only non-religious books are non-religious institution are actually allowed to be judged morally. Religions and religious institutions may not si be judged.
Such ideas mustn’t have contributed at all to people believing that it was okay to genocide & enslave other nations after all.
And I don’t want your “benefit of the doubt”, I similarly have no reason to give you any. Telling me why a book that supports genocide and slavery is okay to use as a moral guide, or admit that it isn’t.
So I can be queer, support gay and trans rights, racial justice, universal healthcare and ecological legislation and so on…but because I don’t loudly denounce the very existence of religion at every given opportunity, I’m a “pseudo-progressive”? Fuck that.
When I said “fuck off with your progressive-gatekeeping bullshit”, that wasn’t an invitation for you to gatekeep even harder.
You don’t merely “don’t denounce the very existence of religion at every given opportunity” you instead to choose denounce at every opportunity those of us who do oppose the existence of such an oppressive system of lies and tyranny.
There’s a difference between those who aren’t vegetarians and don’t act in favour of animal rights, and those who loudly denounce vegeterianism and denounce animal rights supporters.
There’s similarly a difference between those who aren’t denouncing religion, and those like you who denounce the ones who do!
You can choose to be lazy if you want in the fight against oppresive system but religion, but atleast don’t fucking support it.
“FFS, this is exactly the kind of thing that prompted Willis’s (mostly-facetious, but still) tweet that “atheism was a mistake” a few weeks back.”
Is that tone-policing I hear? Oh, yeah, my every view is correct, but you don’t like the way I speak it?
And as for “atheism was a mistake”, imagine if some asshole had said “women’s suffrage was a mistake” or “slavery’s abolition was mistake” — they’d be rightfully cancelled and properly shunned like a sexist and a racist.
But it’s okay for someone to say “atheism was a mistake” because bigotry against atheists is okay.
According to a gallup 95% of American would be willing to vote for a Catholic president, 93% of Americans for a Jewish president, 66% of Americans would be willing to vote for a Muslim president, and only 60% would be willing to vote for an Atheist one.
To oversimplify things a bit: I’d say that shows in a neat little line the respective strength of bigotries:
5% of Americans are anti-Catholic bigots, 7% are anti-semitic bigots, 34% are islamophobic bigots, and 40% of Americans are anti-atheist bigots.
“But that particular take: that liberals are bad because they’re not loudly against all religions is an especially awful one.”
Aren’t all religions falsehoods?
Aren’t all religions oppressing people with their lies?
Perhaps you can find me some modern religion like “Unitarians” or something that isn’t oppressive, but you’d be missing my point when I’m discussing religion as a whole, and the need for it to be denounced.
Yeah, as I said what I said is admittedly an oversimplication. You can e.g. have a small group of people being much more severely and *criminally* bigoted against muslims (or gay people), leading to more hate crimes against muslims or gay people — while at the same time you can have somewhat more wide but also *more mild* prejudice against atheists, leading to things like being 0 non-closeted atheists in Congress.
I’m also thinking that part of the reason there’s fewer hates crimes against atheists, is that we don’t have the equivalent of mosques or synagogues for people to target.
“I feel the idea atheists are more persecuted in America than Muslims is a bit….well, it feels like a very Bill Maher quote”
Nah, I didn’t mean to say that they are more percecuted in America in general than Muslims, I meant to say that they are more persecuted by American pseudo-progressives.
Muslims are persecuted by rightwingers in the United States.
Atheists are obviously despited by both rightwingers AND left-wingers, however, instead.
As evidenced by the fact that there are 3 muslims in Congress, but there are 0 open atheists.
See by the supposed progressives who frown at people being “loudly” atheists or people who dare criticize religions. People can be atheists all they want, as long as they keep silent about it, and don’t dare dispute the lies of religion!
All other oppressive institution can be challenged, but not religion. That’s off-limits for the pseudo-progressives.
More seriously, the so-called pseudo-progressives do a pretty good job of challenging the directly oppressive aspects of religion, even as the right tries to amplify them. They’re just not attacking the basic concept of religion – partly because it would be political suicide.
What about those supposed progressives that aren’t politicians,
and merely speak in forums like this, often under anonymous
accounts like this, and thus shouldn’t be concerned about political
suicide?
They don’t seem to want to attack the basic concept of religion either,
though the “basic concept of religion” — concepts like (a) faith-treated-as-a-virtue or (b) treating books written millenia ago as holy or (c) the concept of an omnibenevolent god having created this world and thus what is “natural” is also treated as inherently “good” is what leads and justifies directly those “oppressive aspects” of religion.
I love how you think an atheist democrat woman’s approval for the presidency among Fox Newsers could somehow be expressed without either a a lot of decimals or a negative exponent.
Isn’t ‘sweet tea’ its own thing (like by the time it’s already brewed there’d be sugar with it as opposed to them adding sugar right after pouring it for you but i try to stick to Asian teas), seems like she should just buy a specific tea bag or so XD; (tbh i’ve had it once and it tasted weird idk why americans/southerners like it, is it even made w/ real tea leaves)
Anyways be interesting if Joyce can have a proper conversation. Tho it’d be more fun entertainment wise if she just kinda spiralled outta control but hey, that’s the point of being in your 20s right, get the superiorty complex outta your system lol
lol i knew some girls who loved buying arizona iced tea but there’s like thousands of flavors, but ppl collective call it iced tea for one specific thing, although then again i’m used to getting made to order teas in cafes where the sugar would be set aside to add extra yourself. Dunno if Indiana has a huge asian population but i guess if it was created more recently they’d have boba tea as an option (another thing for joyce to react to/nitpick about lol)
In the US, Iced tea is typically made with black tea leaves. You take several bags and make a large pot of tea. Then you pour it over a pitcher of ice. (There are Iced Tea makers like Mrs. Tea that do essentially this and has markings for where you fill the water, where you fill the ice, strength is dependent on number of tea bags you use).
Or you can make sun tea. Where you buy a clear glass jug (usually with a spout at the bottom) fill it with water, hang some tea bags on it and set it out somewhere in the sun. In a few hours its done, put it in the fridge and then you have a jug of tea whenever you want.
Per my southern mother in law, Tim isn’t wrong, but the more efficient way to make iced tea is to make a very small very concentrated pot of tea, pour it into the pitcher, and then repeatedly fill up the pot with the tea bags with cold water (let a little tea soak into it) and then pour it into the pitcher. It’s not quite as diluted by the water that way and it gets colder faster since about 9/10ths of the pitcher is filled with cold water.
But core to the process of making sweet tea is that the sugar (lots and lots of it) is added to the tea while it is still hot. Sweet tea is a supersaturated solution and the sugar does not dissolve in the tea properly when it’s cold. So, yes, Dorothy is in search of tea from an entirely different pitcher. The tea from the sweet pitcher or dispenser or whatever cannot be unsweetened. She needs to get it out of a separate pitcher of tea that was brewed and then cooled without sugar ever being added. Worth noting, this tea cannot be sweetened (without reheating) any more than the other can be unsweetened.
You cannot sweeten or unsweeten tea once it’s been made one or the other, but you can mix the 2 together to give you a level of sweet you like. Or mix it with lemonade; that’s quite nice, too.
You certainly can sweeten ice tea without heating it. Some sugar will dissolve even in cold water, just not as much as in hot water. You couldn’t get it to the absurd levels of sweet of proper “sweet tea”, but it can be sweetened.
Or, as Valdvin suggests, add simple syrup or some other liquid sweetener.
If you’re not in a hurry, you can cold brew tea. Pitcher of water, add a bunch of tea (bags or loose leaf), put in the refrigerator, drink it the next day.
As representative of the “pro-Joyce trauma process” lobby, I will offer to concede that while Joyce is surrounded by emotionally limited friends who are shit at engaging with her without being horribly condescending…
…she is coming off as somewhat unhinged these days, yes.
I think that’s intentional. She’s going to keep being portrayed as more and more “angry atheist” style until she gets hit with the karma anvil and recognizes that “thinking christianity is dumb and wrong” is bad, and then she’ll be moved to a less unhinged portrayal.
Or she’ll just stay like this for several more books. Which honestly would be fairly interesting. Though given I suspect Willis isn’t going to let any main character be positive with her until that happens, I *do* expect this plotline to be resolved this book.
I honestly hope it will be.
I’d like to think Joyce as a character was kind to people for her own reasons as well, not just because her religion told her to.
If this keeps going the way it is going now, the whiplash from seeing what I thought was her growth turning out to be a total wash… And, revealing the deep underbelly of how much Joyce actually Needed a religious structure in her life to have any consideration for others, it might make me stop reading for a while.
I think she was kind for her own reasons, but she thought those reasons were rooted in her religious upbringing. Now she has to learn to detangle herself from that world.
She’s still play-acting the stereotypical Atheist her church warned her about but thinks she’s supposed to be now.
It has occurred to me as well. I’m still thinking aggravated battery charges.
Actually, I find it odd commenters seldom seem to note how violent Joyce Brown the DOA character is. Ryan tries to to drug her and she instantly smashes her glass in his face. After Amber later slashed him to pieces, Joyce’s only objection was that Amber hadn’t killed him. Not to mention, several times she attacked men twice her size, once putting Becky’s Dad in the hospital – he had it coming.
I seem to remember sometime Willis mentioning his family tended to have hair-triggers. They went from everyday to enraged in a heart beat. As a kid, Willis said he just assumed that was normal human behavior. (Note to self: always be complimentary about his work if I ever meet Willis.)
Joyce does seem to have a temper, but it seems a bit sketchy to me to blame her violence on that temper. It seems like your implying her violence is a character flaw, when all the examples you list involve defense against serious violent felonies.
Attempted rape. Attempted murder. Multiple kidnappings.
This isn’t a character flaw, but appropriate reactions to unreasonable situations.
More specifically, it’s also Joyce with a tendency to pick ‘fight’ in the ‘fight-flight-freeze-fawn’ trauma responses. Far from exclusively – she’s got a huge tendency towards avoiding the problem and hoping it’ll go away if it’s not actively life-threatening – but in an actually dangerous situation, Joyce is almost always a fight response. (Which then led to people giving Ethan and Walky grief during the kidnapping arc, because they tend to be fawn and freeze types while Dina, Amber, Sarah, and Joyce all lean toward fight and Dorothy was really good at keeping a cool head through this. Never mind that going for fight isn’t always beneficial, and anyway your average college student, like most people, is gonna be pretty freaked out if they’ve been kidnapped in a basement and watched one kidnapper murder the other.)
Well, I’m not blaming Joyce for anything. Joyce glasses Ryan because it moves the story along and introduces a side of the character probably doesn’t expect. Also, Willis doesn’t want to establish Joyce as a simple victim and so gives her agency.
Anyway, Ryan had it coming in story terms. He’s lucky Joyce didn’t cut his throat instead of his face. Probably just as well, because then the strip would have been a 11-year slog through the legal system.
Dorothy was…absolutely not doing that. Literally never once. I don’t even know what you would have even been exaggerating about. She’s talked about being Atheist like, three times, and all of that was just in an “its not a big deal” kinda way.
No that’s just in the Archie comics, where his dad kidnapped his unhatched egg to blast it with chaos radiation to turn him into a mutant bioweapon with the power to reshape reality at his whim.
Imagine handing one of the most popular game characters in the world at the height of his relevance to some yank baby boomers in the country where the franchise is most popular, where they have to make the universe up as they go since the games had zero textual plot, and there being zero oversight or creative consultation from head office for 12 entire years until eventually a Sega employee discovers in the grocery story an issue cover of Sonic the Hedgehog curled up against the wall sobbing because his girlfriend is getting married.
I was planning on more or less ducking out entirely from this latest Joyce sequence ’cause I’m not letting my hyperfocus take the wheel all day again. I was not expecting to get to horrify people with Sonic Comic knowledge, which is actually my favourite pastime.
It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Talking about weird fucked up bullshit in Sonic comics is funny, but then I think it does some damage to how, starting in 2006, these comics have genuinely been consistently good across three continuities and two publishers.
IDW Sonic is a really good read, but the Archie Reboot continuity is probably my all-time favourite Sonic thing that exists, because retconning the comic’s history in what is colloquially known as “pulling a DC” jettisoned the bloated cast and emphasis on relationship drama and turned it into a sprawling science fantasy world of adventure where Sonic and friends fly around on their aircraft carrier trying to fix their shattered world and fighting Eggman, who’s got his own faction of evil animal people who all have their own agendas.
It’s actually a medium Sonic thrives in, really. Comic artists for decades have practiced how to make super speed look cool as hell to the point where I think it’s actually the best power to depict in comics (see also: Impulse, my favourite superhero), and Sonic’s always been a series with more character focus than its contemporary animal mascots so he’s a great fit for mediums without interactive progress.
Comics are also a GREAT medium to explore the extended cast. Yeah, I know people knock every character introduced after Knuckles, but there ARE a lot of people invested in Shadow and Blaze and Cream and everyone. But not every game is a great fit for everyone, and so it’s nice that we now have a space where you can have a story featuring Cream, Rouge and Amy entering Cheese in a Chao Race even if the games don’t and the fandom is… divided on the later cast’s existence.
Especially considering that in this case, the numbers are false. 29% of the US population was unaffiliated (18% nothing in particular”, 6% agnostic, and 5% atheist) as of 2020 and the number just keeps going up. While each person is different, the people who fall under unaffiliated still outnumber almost every religious group. Hell, even just atheists have double the numbers or more of every religious group in the US other than protestants and catholics (unaffiliated is also higher than catholic)! It’s FAR from exclusive or an insignificant number.
You can be proud of how you identify without shitting on people who are in a different group. For example, understanding the importance of today and seeing the beauty in a finite life, valuing things that positively impact the environment, not taking things at face value and doing your due diligence, mental flexibility and learning to see the gray areas, continued lifetime growth, and valuing science and others could all be ways I could describe my experience with atheism and how i express it.
Kit was making a joke on how “Three Percenters” are one of the more prominent white supremacist militias out there along the likes of the Proud Boys, I’m pretty sure. And how joining them thus is not a good idea.
The Pew Research Center found in 2020 that Americans identified as…
Christian 65%
. Protestant 42%,
. Catholic 21%
. Mormon 2%
. Orthodox 1%
Unaffiliated 29%
. “Nothing in particular” 18%
. Agnostic 6%
. Atheist 5%
Other Faiths 6%
. Jewish 1%
. Muslim 1%
. Hindu 1%
. Buddhist 1%
. Other 2%
Refused to answer 1%
That means, there are more people who are unaffiliated than
Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Christians, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist COMBINED. Agnostics ALONE equal the percentage of the theists whose faith is other than Christianity.
Just 41% of people consider religion an important part of their lives. Those identifying as any level of religious is in sharp decline, especially Christianity. In the last decade, the number of Americans who identify as Christian is down 14-17% (with unaffiliated up by 11-15%).
Only a third of Americans go to religious services weekly, then vast majority going a few times a year or less. A quarter of the population do not attend at all. According to Pew, only three states (Utah, Alabama, and Tennessee) have a population where half of the residents attend weekly services (with Gallup listing Alabama and Tennessee as less than that).
As a gay person the 65% worries me but I like that it’s in decline. No offense meant to non-homophobic Christians. I’m hoping that either Christianity can become more inclusive or it becomes less popular.
If it helps, I know of at least two Protestant denominations off the top of my head either on the verge of or actively schisming because a sizable number of their membership are like ‘have you considered gay people deserve rights?’ Wouldn’t be shocked if there’s more of them, I’ve just only heard about the Methodists and my family’s historic little denomination. So there definitely is some active Becoming Less Homophobic in particular going on!
It still has the highest NUMBER of Christians (and highest number of Protestants) of any country, but the US is freaking HUGE! According to Pew Research Institute, 15.58% of the world population is unaffiliated with any religion. This puts the US a good bit above the average. In my experience (being raised as one in the south and visiting many many Protestant churches due to one of my family members traveling to sing at them), Protestants as a group (when compared to unaffiliated people) seem to be a lot more vocal on a lot of things, more likely to boycott, quicker to turn on someone not in their group, and more centralized and able to get people to the polls. There’s a lot of shame culture too. It results in a lot of very vocal people (most seem to be more religious than an average Protestant) and a lot of politicians who either agree with them or are trying to not give them a reason to get pissed off (regardless of the size of the group, it’s still big enough to make a significant impact on elections). It makes the country come out looking as religious as a church on Sunday. There are pockets like that, but the whole country is far more diverse.
I was actually born and raised in a southern town that was infamous for how religious it was. It more closely resembles how religious the US appears to people in other countries judging by what people have told me. And again. Infamous. In the deep south. Basically not even close to the norm.
I am curious how they would measure the atheist and agnostic levels, as the two are not entirely separate categories, it is possible to be atheist and agnostic.
Joyce’s assumption that all religion and philosophy (as well as most science) functions in stark contrast between Fundamentalism vs. Materialism is an interesting case of, “Knows enough to be extra ignorant.”
[insert obnoxious comment about the Dunning-Kruger effect that makes it clear i’ve only ever skimmed the first paragraph of the wikipedia article about it]
Look. You cannot UNsweet a tea. It’s just “Iced Tea” or maybe even “Tea” (but you might get hot tea). But as far as cold tea is concerned it’s the f***ing DEFAULT. Tea without sugar may be an aberration to some areas but it’s still the default. If you want tea with sugar pre-added you can ask for a Sweet Tea. I sound like a fucking dumbass saying some made up Oceania newspeak shit like “Unsweet”.
When I go to Popeyes if you don’t specify un-sweet tea and just ask for tea, they default to sweet tea. And at other fastfood places, if you don’t say un-sweet tea, they give you iced tea with a ton of sugar in it. And I’m in NorCal, not somewhere in the south. It’s like how Americans go wild with ice – unless I specify “no ice,” ¾ of my soda is just ice cubes
I asked for tea at a local supermarket (Florida), and was referred to the other side of the store. I found the iced tea cooler. I asked someone else, who pointed to the cooler. I had to ask for tea in a box, which was in the coffee aisle.
I asked for “iced tea” in a southern state once. Never again. Now no matter where I am, I always say unsweetened tea. I’d rather unnecessarily specify unsweetened, even though it should be the default, than get sweetened tea.
From a culinary perspective, yes. In a country where most things are loaded with sugar, sweet tea is the more popular order. If you order tea from a fast-food place, they will assume you want sweet tea.
I once ordered an ice water through the drive-through and got sweet tea.
Let’s take a moment to enjoy all details Willis gives to the characters clothes: Joyce, with her new black and white social grow-up with her new believes, Joe with his sex-meanings basic shirt, Dina with her results of dinosaurs researchs and Becky with her adorable lesbian-flag outfit.
It’s like she wants to join the Church of Atheism. Which isn’t how that works, or a thing. She needs to check the feeling “superior over others” stuff at the door while exiting religion, and find a club that’s not about that if she needs someplace to belong so badly.
Yeah, see, THIS would be the part Dorothy was disappointed in and Sarah feared as Joyce and Liz were egging each other on.
And yeah, it’s pretty fucking awful to watch, even knowing she’ll grow out of it eventually and a lot of the egging on was trauma venting. Now they’ve expressed it, and worse, they believe it now.
I wish I had understood their fears better before, because when it happened I definitely read it as trauma venting, and was confused by the severity reactions to an extent. But yeah, this makes sense. I guess I just don’t have enough personal experience with people like Joyce and Liz, so I didn’t see what was probably going to happen next.
The thing is, Joyce and Liz definitely were, and that is definitely still a thing – hell, before Joyce was formally sliding into ‘loss of religion,’ when she made friends with Dorothy, she’d genuinely started losing some of the I Am Right And Know Bestness (something which, I’ll note, Becky still has – see her bit talking about being with Bonnie in heaven where Dina would be with them and realizing she was wrong all along.)
But this is very much a known phase for new atheists, especially young ones who were raised in very evangelical environments. They’ve rejected the God part, but not so much the proselytizing about The One True Way… just, now it’s the One True Way of Godlessness. Generally, they grow out of it after a bit, especially after having time to work through the trauma. If they’re VERY wise, they might eventually realize this is still a very evangelical Christian way of thinking and that their atheism is not even universal among atheists.
Okay so definitely not gonna push this all day like I’ve been doing, just gonna be real concise entirely for my own “not checking the site a hundred times a day to argue” sake, but it’s worth pointing out that Joyce’s current behaviour is not how she was acting at first with Sarah and later Joe. When confronted by what her lack of belief now meant, she internalized it. I’m just a monkey, Heaven and Hell aren’t real so neither am I, and both times Joe was able to help her through that.
Joyce doesn’t know what she believes, because her atheism (and this strip is the first time she is calling it that) isn’t a belief in the non-existence of God, it’s a lack of belief in everything she was taught was an objective fact. Then Becky makes her defend these beliefs she doesn’t understand, she just knows that what she used to believe like the Earth being 6000 years old is factually wrong, and then Sarah browbeats her over and over with “you’re not really sorry”, “you deserve to suffer for your hubris”, “the person you used to be was annoying but better than this”, and finally “we’ll forgive you”; Sarah’s not trying to solve this, she wants it to go away, so Joyce has to dig her heels in harder. Joyce has to be right because being right is the only thing she has to defend herself against her friends.
Okay! I’m done! I’m running away to Bulmeria so I don’t keep coming back today and shooting my productivity dead with a gun!
Unless it’s more horrifying Sonic the Hedgehog facts!
It’s written by authors who actually like each other and build off each other’s work! It contains ZERO Tommy Turtle!* It DOES contain a cool lemur with a stretchy tail power who we all love!
* If you have to ask, we cannot explain Tommy Turtle.
How dare you disrespect the legacy of Tommy Turtle, Sonic’s greatest and closest friend in the world, without whom he would never have become the hero he is today.
(apparently Tangle/Whisper is supposed to be canon by the standards of the romance mandates for the series, or at least that’s what thankskenpenders told me)
Yeah go check out thankskenpenders on tumblr. She’s done issue by issue covers of every single comic Archie made about Sonic, and it’s more fun to have a sensible person along for the ride than reading yourself; the weird moments mentioned don’t do much to detract from them being very dull comics.
As a bonus, while she’s still relatively early in the Ian Flynn run, TKP is also through the pre-Flynn era and the part she has gotten through covers a lot of the cleaning house after decades of the other writers doing really ridiculous crap (especially the last few years before he came onboard, referred to by fans as ‘The Dark Ages’,) which also serves as payoff for all those years of bad comics. In particular, all the fucked up echidna lore? Oh, Flynn has PAYOFF for that, and it is delicious.
It’s not always this extreme for new atheists, mind. This is a relative rarity, even if the few that are loud about it tend to make it seem otherwise. We just knew it 100% would turn out this way for Joyce specifically because this plot thread is very much a “being confident and smug about atheism is bad” storyline.
And because her initial belief was extreme. The stronger your faith was and the faster you lose it, the harder it is to take the loss and the more you feel a need to overcompensate. If she had believed more casually, it wouldn’t be such a system shock.
That makes a lot of sense. I wondered why I didn’t really have that phase, and I think it’s because religion was very minimal in my life. My parents’ version of Hinduism was taking me to temple once every 3 or so months, and not translating any scripture (idk any Indian languages), so temple was *walk around pretty statues and eat some carrot pudding after*. And at home, I had to say “god bless mom, dad, [my dog], and [my little brother]” before bed. It’s hard to realize that’s not at all comparable to how a lot of religious people here grew up, so of course they’d have a tougher time doing so
It’s also a thing with Joyce in general – though that may still be related to her religious upbringing of course. Remember way back how she threw herself into Dexter fandom? Watched a couple shows, went and ordered all the clothing she could find and wanted everyone to know she was the biggest fan.
Yeah, that would be part of the ‘is Joyce Like That due to religious abuse or neurodivergent?’ because she is DEFINITELY prone to hyperfixations. But the fact that people raised in really strict religious upbringings have a tendency to break HARD specifically because their faith tends to be inflexible is also a known phenomenon, much moreso than someone whose loss of faith is much more gradual and chill.
But as bizarre as it seems, I not as interested in the answer to this question as much as I am interested in exactly HOW this question will eventually be answered.
At least for the time being, the barrier between those two influences seems to be as indistinguishable as layers of marble cake.
In other words, there may very well be tons of overlap between her nature and nurture and their impact on her.
Honestly, I’m not sure you can. The question is one Willis has asked on Twitter on more than one occasion, with a ‘if anyone figures it out, let me know’ usually (he’s also said putting traits of his into Dina and Joyce and opening comments was how he learned some things about himself, to whit, while specific diagnosis is unlikely there’s probably a stripe or two of neurodivergence in there.)
Personally, based off my own less-abusive experience with religion, I can say if you’re prone to anxiety already it is WAY easier to absorb the toxic fear-based aspects of Christianity without necessarily getting the all-loving God idea as much. (Because, well, how loving can a God be when your takeaway is ‘don’t do these things or you will be PUNISHED FOREVER.’) And I could see someone prone to hyperfocus and hyperfixation zeroing in on the thing that gets PRAISE for being obsessed with (and punishment if you don’t, and it has this nice rigid set of RULES) and therefore the religiosity is a manifestation of the neurodivergence. But it’s just as possible that all of those came from the trauma, so… end result, who the fuck knows. The only conclusion that can be drawn is Joyce clearly has an anxiety disorder and PTSD.
I feel like I should point out to Joyce that, in fact, the only thing atheists don’t believe in is deities. It is entirely possible to be an atheist and believe in ghosts, witches, reincarnation, crystals, unicorns, fairies, alien abductions, and quite a lot of other quite silly things that may or may not be properly categorized as “magic”.
You’d think that once a person rejects gods – or God, even – they’d go ahead and reject all of the supernatural at once, and perhaps even all the silly things as well… but unfortunately, despite the hype, atheism does not confer superior +4 rationality on nonbelievers. I wish. I have spent years of my life longing for my fellow atheists to really be kinder, smarter, better people than they are.
The way I see it, and the lesson I’ve learned in regards to fellow atheists, and fellow x members of many groups of people I also classify as (as well as groups I don’t), is that “dunking on an extremely, laughably falsifiable concept is not in fact a high intellectual bar to leap”, and is not at all related to how kind they are.
Speaking as a nice polytheistic Baptist boy whose kinda into Science and whose religious thought is heavily colored by quantum theory:
Ghosts – yeah, but they aren’t what you think they are
Witches – some of my best friends are witches
Reincarnation – depends on how you define it and how you define identity. From a certain point of view, we’re all the same person.
Crystals – absolutely exist. If you use some of them right you can even pull human voices out of the air from the din of unheard noise that constantly surrounds you. (It’s called a crystal radio). If crystals help you focus your awareness, then it works for you. Crystal skulls are way cool.
Unicorns – Not yet, but once we engineer chickens into pet dinosaurs, we’ll get right on it.
Fairy abductions and alien abductions are not seperate things, just differences in the way your mind processes it.
I notice you left out demonic possession, the coming singularity and simultaneously believing in Relativity and Quantum theory.
One of my Dad’s friends identifies as Atheist…
And believes in The Secret.
The Secret, if you don’t know or remember, is a self-help book that proselytizes the power of wishing. If you just wish hard enough, the universe will grant it.
i am now imagining an agnostic-atheist who does believes in supernatural god entities but only to the extent that they work to unseat them from their thrones of deityhood so that they are no longer gods and they no longer have to believe in them. Like, “I believe this supernatural entity exists but not that it should BE god, and I believe in *my* right to kick their ass off their pedestal once and for all”
That kind of concept has shown up in some fantasy settings. “Sure, there’s magic and various powerful extra-dimensional entities, but none of them are gods in the ‘deserve to be worshiped’ sense.”
True. I know far too many atheistic people who are wildly enthused about magical thinking eg The Secret. *rolling eyes emoji* Just replacing dubious beliefs with other dubious beliefs it seems sometimes. Not offense to true believers. Some people think, oh, if I can reject mainstream religion, I could believe *anything*…. and they do. Oy.
It’s much more ridiculous. It’s tulip mania level ridiculous, except that it’s also becoming an ecological threat of its own.
It’s not a currency, no matter its pretenses. It’s a pyramid scheme level speculative instrument with practical use only for black market and tax evasion.
Oh no. Dorothy begins to seems unhappy to see Joyce! My fear is this it will arrive to the point where she can’t stand her anymore. After that, moving to another school will become a relief.
Yeah, I have to imagine that it really hurts Dorothy to see Joyce acting out the very behavior she always thought atheists were supposed to be like. In a “is this how she sees me?” kinda way.
Joyce is lucky her eyes were closed because that disapproving look would have killed her on the spot.
And sadly Joyce truly became a fanatical neophyte of Atheism…
As probably the biggest proponent of the “Joyce is hurting and everyone else sucks at recognizing it” position, I can safely say that I can’t wait for this arc to be over.
I think it’s true that Joyce’s faith is about being right. It’s difficult to say what came first, Joyce’s love of rule or the way she was molded in her church. I guess she is grasping to some sort of authority here, and the glasses storyline was a prologue of that.
Meanwhile, Becky’s faith is very much in the vein of “living in the best of all possible worlds” by Leibnitz, because God is good -> Therefore, the universe that God chose to exist is the best of all possible worlds.
Something which is very much part of Becky’s compartmentalization and facade, tbh. Her faith is a way for not to accept the tragedy, stepford smiler like.
Becky strikes me as someone who actually identifies with the suffering of the faithful and martyrdom–and is not actually smugly superior about it because she actually DID suffer horribly.
its the same thing that many athiests go for. remember the stages of grief? these are the stages of athiesm
despair (you realize there is no god, and your identity it thrown into turmoil)
anger (you feel fooled, betrayed, tricked, and taken for a fool. it angers you)
directionless (now that your direction is gone, you have nowhere to go. this can also be called the “why bother” stage)
insufferability (now that you KNOW there is no god, you can’t believe you were ever so foolish and naive. you want to share this newfound wisdom with others, especially those that still believe in the stories you once held so dear. you see it as tearing the bandage off, but it comes off as you belittling others for their feelings)
Calming (having gotten the tantrums out of your system, you can now start to calm the heck down. you still sneer or groan when you hear religious things, like poking at an old wound, but you’ve learned to keep your fat yap shut.
background (at this point you don’t really care about it anymore. it has faded into the background and it doesn’t even register with you. the only things that make you cringe are christian rants, and atheist rants from the insufferable stage. kinda like looking at the jokes and cringy things you did as a kid and wanting to forget them.)
Well, maybe for the previously-significantly-religious Atheists.
Grown up a non-believer, you rarely, if ever, reach a point of radicalization about Atheism or Agnosticism or such. You just kinda gently find a place on that spectrum of non-belief and idle there for a while.
It’s not so much “atheist” as “converts to a new belief system”, I think.
It also significantly depends on what changed. I didn’t have an insufferable atheist phase, but I also didn’t have an inciting event for leaving Catholicism, I just….stopped. And found that it didn’t change anything else about my life except my parent’s opinion on how I spent Sundays.
Joyce is somewhere between “Directionless” and “Insufferability” now. Hopefully that means she’ll move on to “Calming” in the next couple chapters, but it looks like she has a couple more bridges to burn first.
I am waiting for Dina to show up and Joyce to try out a ‘Shamesies Knux for god being fake’ with her and Dina concludes she’s ended up in some kind of parallel dimension where Joe can feel shame and Joyce is like THIS
The latter, I think. As of the last breakdown I can find in 2014 from Pew, nones were 23% of the population, broken down as:
3.1% Atheist
4% Agnostic
8.8% No particular identifier, religion is not important to me
6.9% No particular identifier, religion is important to me
This may be a necessary stage. How do you process your grief at the loss of the known self, plus your anger at being lied to and pushed into a mold, without it.
After everything that happened during first semester, I can understand Joyce being turned off of her particular ultra-fundamental flavor of Christianity, as taught to her by her parents. ´What I can’t totally accept is her complete reversal to the opposite side of the spectrum of “total and unapologetic atheist”.
It just doesn’t seem natural… sort of like because someone had a bad experience with a specific model of car, they swore off of all motor vehicles entirely.
It makes sense when you consider the arc of Joyce finding out how much of what she was taught doesn’t jive with reality. It starts with “Atheists aren’t satan worshippers” through to “Even a pastor’s son can be an unabashed monster, and very real danger to you personally” and right on to “The people I thought cared about me growing up, that I was taught to respect and look to for guidance and help are okay with my friends and I dying so long as they don’t have to address an uncomfortable truth and reflect.” That kind of chain of realizations has a sort of momentum to it that drives a lot of people past “I need to be more willing to address uncomfortable truths and reflect myself in precisely the way they refuse to” and “So much of what I’ve been taught is this nonsensical house of cards/jenga that falls apart if any single piece doesn’t hold up” into the “And anyone who disagrees is just as stupid as I feel like I was” territory. Couple that with learned social patterns from growing up in a fundie cult, and what used to get positive responses and you get an insufferable atheist.
To riff on your metaphor, it’s like someone bought a car because everyone in their life told them it was essential, and then moved to the city. The people around them keep extolling replacing their car with a bike or scooter since you don’t have to worry about parking and it gets you where you need to go. They’re reluctant at first, keeping their car so they can visit home, but they use it less and less. Then one day when going to visit, they’re in a horrendous wreck that leaves them somewhat injured, but deeply psychologically rattled. They recover, get a new car, and are more cautious.
Then they’re in a worse wreck, and this time their friends were in the car with them. Instead of talking to their friends about how they can’t bring themselves to drive their car anymore (requiring making themselves feel deeply vulnerable and bring up how their need to have and drive a car put their friends in danger) they just sell the car and double down hard on the “who even needs a car in this day and age!” rhetoric, becoming that insufferable brand of city biker who goes on and on about how drivers are a menace and the devil and should never be allowed in city limits, etc. Even their friends who were encouraging them to switch to non-car transportation start feeling uncomfortable around them, but don’t feel like they can really say anything.
It’s also apparently a distinct and known phenomenon for certain people who were raised REALLY evangelical, ESPECIALLY the ones who were really fervent in their belief. Because they believed everything, it tends to be a lot more rigid than the people who were more selective and willing to treat the word of God as metaphorical at times, and so faced with things that challenge any of it they will either ignore and double down… or their faith SHATTERS, and that tends to include a lot of self-loathing about how they used to believe that can get directed outward.
Maybe it seems unnatural to you, but it’s actually a pretty common experience for those breaking away from toxic religion. Not universal, but definitely real. For many people in those environments all the parts of religion are wrapped up in one tight mess, too tightly tied together to neatly pick apart and just keep the good bits. Joyce commented on this early on when Becky was accepting Dina’s view on evolution. Evolution->No Eden-> No Fall/Original Sin-> everything they’ve been taught is wrong.
Hey… Dorothy… now would be an AMAZING time to have a supportive non-judgmental conversation where you actually listen to Joyce and her experiences and explain why what shes saying is hurtful even if she is “right”. Because it would be SUPER unhelpful to chastise her and try to make her feel guilty without acknowledging her feelings. Right Dorothy? RIGHT DOROTHY???
You mean like the emotional labor Dorothy has been doing for Joyce since the beginning of the comic?
Now she’s got to start over again deprogramming her from being an atheist zealot instead of a Christian one.
I just do not like this version of Joyce, and it is not because she is an Atheist. I hate her because now she thinks that she is somehow, “better”, than others, simply for what they believe in. She is no better than her Mother/Fundie Community she thought she left behind; this is just a lateral move. This just goes to show that being a judgemental bongo is not the sole purview of a single group.
today in #9chickweedlane i learned we have to be shown children learning and relearning what sex is, for Reasons, even though they already clearly know and have prepared nuanced questions about it!
also that Gran must hate, if she's still alive, how Old Juliette is the same but with gray hair
one of my favorite things is when a commenter explodes WHEN DO THESE CHARACTERS GET THERAPY but directed towards a character who canonically has a regular therapist
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btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 21h
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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“I don’t believe it works that way”
“Sure it does! Check the book!”
“…atheists don’t HAVE a book”
Robin and Leslie’s wedding in the other universe was officiated with a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Sounds appropriate to me.
Wait, the BOOK officiated?
The AI in the latest edition must be quite advanced!
Eh. Marriage isn’t complicated. I could bang out that code in ten minutes.
Officiated with, not by.
It was officiated by Jesus.
Yes, that Jesus.
Though, honestly, I wouldn’t put a copy of HHGttG that could officiate weddings past the Walkyverse.
I fully expect that, within the next decade or so, the phrase will be “officiated to” in both cases. Yes, that will make it harder to understand what’s being said.
Well, a guy in a giant book costume but you’re supposed to suspend your disbelief…
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
…now that you mention her, Leslie might actually be the best person in the cast to help Joyce process this. She was raised by fundamentalists like Joyce was, utterly failed by the community that raised her like Joyce was, and– crucially– lost her faith like Joyce did. The circumstances weren’t identical, but they’re still similar in a lot of ways.
It definitely doesn’t work that way Joyce. 3% identify as atheists, does not mean 97% believe in magic. Around 4% are agnostic and around 20% (total?) are unaffiliated with a mix of faithful and faithless. Even among agnostics, there is a split. Although many consider them “fence sitters” the truth is they either believe or not, but their stance is formally one that proof of god is unknowable either way.
sauce
Philosophy nerding from me here:
I honestly feel like more people are atheist than agnostic than are currently reported, it’s just that literally nobody understands what the word “agnostic” means. Tracing it back to its roots, Gnostic, to know and be certain of, and the a prefix, introducing the ‘not’ sign in front of it.
If we were to ask “Would you say you’re sure Joyce is wearing glasses today”, we wouldn’t say “well what are glasses anyway? How do I even know Joyce exists? You all might be fictional characters, how do we know FOR SURE it’s not all just solipsistic drivel. What does ‘to wear’ mean, here?”, we’d say “yes”. This isn’t how language functions.
Hard line atheism doesn’t need to prove even beyond solipsism that god is 100% not real to declare ‘god isn’t real’ as a known fact, but for some reason in the specific case of atheism, many people push “are you suurreee??” to a degree it isn’t used anywhere else in language.
They aren’t glasses, they are highly advanced eyebrow curls.
huh, that’s a funny line of reasoning.
i disagree with your parallel. the existence of god is not like the question of whether or not Joyce is wearing glasses or not. spirituality is ALL ABOUT asking deep questions. that’s kind of the point, for a lot of people.
and while most people may or may not understand what “agnostic” means, i think the way people identify is not purely down to their actual belief, or lack thereof.
for instance, i may decide to identify as an atheist for reasons of political affiliation, and expediency, and to signal my unwillingness to anyone trying to proselytize to me, but actually be more of an agnostic if it comes right down to it (mostly because i’m sympathetic to the paradox of first causes, not that i care very much though).
Yep. I know a lot of people for whom religious identity is a key part of their family life, or even in some cases of their identity, but whose beliefs are strictly physicalist or even radically skeptical. They score their religious affiliation as Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, and Anglican, and are not being disingenuous when they do so. Christmas, Pesach, Diwali etc. really matter to them. One unbelievers I know still practises confession, believing it to be good psychology.
For “even in some cases of their identity” read even in some cases of their ethnic or national identity”.
Yeah, I’ve never understood why some people feel like “I don’t know” is a good answer to a yes or no question. You either believe in one or more gods or you don’t.
What if you think humanity has no way of knowing or obtaining scientific proof? Like I’m pretty sure some very specific religion isn’t completely true in every detail, but could there be a god-like entity? Would we have any way of proving or disproving it?
the question is believe, or think?
I think there the absence of proof for god(s) isn’t favourable to god(s) existence
option A: I don’t believe in god
Option B: I believe there is no god.
Either way, the question is flawed anyway since you can’t survey religions appartenance and beliefs at the same time, or beliefs about existence of god and beliefs about which existence/ non-existence/non-proof-of-either
I wouldn’t appartenance any religion that would have me.
I don’t believe that Joyce exists in the same way you and I do. I believe that Joyce wears glasses. I have faith that Joyce will eventually do the right thing.
Do I believe in Joyce?
But I absolutely believe you can survey beliefs and group memberships at the same time. If that’s not what you’re really interested in though, you won’t.
I think demanding a “Yes” or “No” answer is part of the whole black/white thinking that gets us in trouble with religion in the first place. Accept that people are uncertain, even about themselves. Accept that people are ignorant, even of themselves. Accept that people may not WANT to give you the answer you seem to so desperately require of them. You need to open your mind to possibilities.
Well, I’m in a country with around 30% atheists, and around 30% agnostics.
I guess it has more sens to ask there.
But also, I know how people survey and how people answer to survey.
So yeah, if it’s not a yes/no thing it may be even more flawed.
Essentially, the answer should be free to give without choosing option A, B, C, D or else, and then regrouping with explicit criterias different answers in options A, B, C, D
My reason for saying I’m agnostic is less “I don’t know” and more “it doesn’t matter”. I feel like calling myself atheist would mean I’d be willing to argue my point about how I see the universe working, and I’d rather just *not have faith be a part of my life*, whether siding with some version of it or arguing against it. (and I feel like Christian beliefs shouldn’t be a factor in politics and science both because there are people of *other* faiths as well as people with *no* faith)
I think this is where I’m at? I call myself an atheist, but I don’t know if thinking the afterlife doesn’t exist, but willing to be proven wrong on that counts as atheism or not.
I guess I process it like, the biggest and most unanswered questions are ones I’ll never figure out in my lifetime. The supernatural, however you want to define that, could exist as something yet explored.
I think it does. The position of being unwilling to accept being wrong, or even contemplate being wrong, is not a valid one except perhaps in mathematics.
I do not believe in any god or gods, and I have concluded that there most likely are none, so “atheist” is the frank and straightforward term for me to describe myself by. If new evidence appears I will change my mind, and I could that, not its opposite, as a virtue. For a theist to insist that I cannot be an atheist because I do not have faith is a put-down, and I reject it as unreasonable.
Have you considered the term “apatheist”, denoting someone who just doesn’t care about the question of where any gods exist.
I’m not sure agnostic is the correct word for what I believe, because I’ve had multiple different people be *very* insistent that given definitions for that word are correct, but disagree wildly on what those definitions are. However, what I believe is that there is probably some kind of higher power, I have no clear definition for what that higher power might be, and I am willing to accept the possibility that there isn’t one. Additionally, considering the presence of a higher power, or lack thereof, is impossible to prove one way or another short of direct, indisputable interference, like a voice from the sky announcing that it is god and suddenly answering prayers, even secret ones, all over the world simultaneously, I feel it’s just as irresponsible to assert there definitely is not a higher power as it is to assert there is one, because you are claiming knowledge of the unknowable.
Granted, so long as whatever higher power there may or may not be is not obviously interfering with life here, for all practical purposes there may as well not be a higher power at all, so really it’s a purely academic distinction, but I still assert that it is incorrect to say that I do not believe in a higher power, so I will not identify as an atheist. Some of the definitions I have encountered for agnostic sound like my position on the subject, so as far as I am concerned, I am agnostic if for no other reason than a lack of a better term.
Not to your main point, but to share: strictly speaking, agnosticism isn’t about having faith or not (unlike how some accuse agnostics of being ‘fence sitters’). Agnosticism is a different axis than faith/non-faith, and is actually about the question of knowability (gnosis). An agnostic position is that god/faith is ‘unknowable’ (a-gnostic), versus being able to ‘know’ the existence thereof (gnostic).
Here is the encyclopædic article on agnosticism as well as a more descriptive breakdown in quadrants.
Most of the atheists I know are actually agnostic but hold the view that until we know we should act on a null hypothesis, or are uncomfortable enough with magical thinking that they are uncomfortable with religion and want to be unaffiliated with it in stronger terms.
I suspect that in common use there’s not a ton of difference between atheism and agnosticism as words and people just use the one that aligns with their comfortability conceding things to religion. Like I have met a couple hard atheists and I have met some very “defend all the possibilities” agnostics but they seem like the far ends of a spectrum, not the norm.
I agree that most take it as a social position without really caring about the fine nuances of the argument.
Most of the time I’m willing to accept whichever label will get people to stop arguing about it, mostly theists claiming that atheism is just as much a matter of faith as religion. Sometimes I enjoy the discussion for a bit though.
Some also don’t want to be associated with the extremely online fedora tipping brand of rational skeptic atheists.
I have sometimes joked about being a “militant agnostic” – “I don’t know and you don’t either.”
(I’m actually a lot more laid back and not very confrontational in general.)
When Huxley coined the word, that is what he meant by it: that the existence of God was unknowable, so that anyone claiming to know was wrong.
The meaning has developed and changed since then, as is wont to happen to words.
Personally, I’m a practicing agnostic, I might sometimes gather with some people who may share my views at some place that may or may not exist where we might or might not discuss anything at all, let alone anything relevant to the supernatural.
Dorothy: That’s it, I refuse to be a part of this, even passively. I’m officially joining the church of…
(Pulls out mythology book, opens to random page)
Dorothy: Pan. Fair enough, it will complement my morning jog, I can get some cavorting in as well.
Dorothy’d better be discreet. Wouldn’t want to start a Pan-ic.
Thank you. I needed a Dad-joke this evening.
It’s not a dad joke if it’s the actual etymology of the word
Which is the actual origin of that word!
On the contrary, I expect panache!
That’s just pandering.
Better than panhandling.
We than the distinguished pan-el for their efforts,
A morning jog is a nice start before the day’s pandæmonium.
The mental image of this occurring brings me joy. Thank you ♡
She better talk to Merle Highchurch first.
Eh… as cool as a cross-over reference to that game world may be, gate-keepimg access to (of all the gods) Pan’s worship seems, inconsistent with its nature.
Sorry, I was just making a reference.
No that’s cool. I also wasn’t meaning to gatekeep being able to make references to pan in pop-culture. That would _also_ not be cool in Pan’s faith I suspect. I mean, saying ‘not cool’ is about how seriously I imagine Pan would police such matters anyways. XD.
That’s actually perfect, if she wants to be President! All of America’s cultural elite worships Pan, the Goat God!
Dorothy would not be the first president of the USA to be a pantheist.
Yeah, if you want to run for thfe highest office in a manority christian country it’s an excellent choice to openly worship a god that inspired the christian devil’s visual aesthetic.
Pan is the GOAT.
Nice.
You can get your own personal Pan at Galasso’s.
(someone to hear your prayers / someone who cares)
The Church of Eris is an actual thing that exists, the religion is called Discordianism.
Hail Kalista!
Declaring samesies while one party refuses to participate feels like a violation of the spirit of samesies. Only one of them doing it makes it literally not the same.
Dorothy: You’re violating the spirit of Samesies.
Joyce: I know! Violating the spirit of things is what atheism is all about! Because we don’t believe in spirits!
Dorothy: That is not what atheism is all about.
Joyce: Also, I rub dirt in my hair now, and spit on the floor! When do I grow my tail and extra toes?
Dorothy: Okay, I think you still have some deprogramming to go through.
First of all, what the fuck are “Samesies Knucks”?
Second of all, is the beverage service at IU really THAT bad?!?!
‘Knucks’, short for ‘knuckles’, is the bumping of two person’s knuckles together in an act of solidarity and support. ‘Samesies’ is an extension of ‘same’ indicating that there is a shared trait between them, as the purpose of the knucks between them.
“Samesies Knucks” is when all of Knuckles the Echidna’s ancestors look completely identical to him apart from clothing, and so does virtually member of his society.
… I did not expect to encounter the foul name of Ken Penders when I arrived to read tonight’s comic.
How now, what do you have against Sonic’s chili dogs LOL.
No seriously I know literally nothing else about Sonic except for the gameplay and Robotnik memes.
I have nothing against Sonic’s chili dogs.
I have plenty against Ken Penders. Awful person. Control freak. Total hack.
I was just describing the latest Scourge Drama to someone earlier this evening and I was NOT expecting today’s comic to bring us to Knuckles the Echidna Cursed Archie Comics Lore, but I am appreciating the serendipity.
(Also, in case you haven’t heard, there’s Scourge Drama. Oddly enough, completely unrelated to the IDW comics. Complete shitshow, though.)
Yeah.
The IDW comic has Surge drama now.
Oh thank goodness, they’re delicious!
Now that I think of it, haven’t had one myself in quite a while…
Knuckles the Echidna’s ancestors are Furry Briitish colonizers who oppressed the indigenous Dingo population of Furry Australia, stole their land by rocketing it into the air with them still on it and never brought it back down, and when the Dingos used the nukes that the Echidnas just left lying around near them to defend themselves the Echidnas stuck them in their city’s ghettos.
The Dingos are the villains of the series and are also Nazis, despite the above mentioned.
This has been your unsolicited Sonic Comic fact.
You left out the part where Knuckles’ dad did super weird genetic experiments on himself and then microwaved Knuckles’ egg before hatching it so he’d be a super mutant cause he had a bad dream one time.
Also, ALL OF KNUCKLES’S RACIST GRANDPAS (and the One Female Knuckles of the Group) are still alive and spy on Knuckles in their Secret Grandpa Spy Compound. Once, when he was being bullied by another kid, they all got together in the night and threw said kid off the edge of Angel Island without Knuckles knowing, which strikes me as somewhat disproportionate.
Also, his dad raised him out in the wilderness making him think they were the last of their species and then he randomly jumped into a wall of holographic flames before Knuckles’s eyes, making him think his dad was dead for years. This last part is apparently family tradition.
Oh, and the last time someone microwaved an Echidna to give them superpowers it produced the (alleged) greatest villain Echidnakind has ever known which really does make one wonder what Knuckles’s dad was thinking there.
I know Dr. Finitevus was supposed to be evil for throwing the entire Brotherhood into another dimension never to be seen again, but I’ve gotta ask: Was he? Was he really?
Hey, Locke had to do it.
He had a bad dream, time to microwave the baby.
Finitevus was definitely pretty evil. Whether or not sending the Racist Grandpa Society to the Shadow Realm counts as part of that is less clear.
Wow, what were they thinking?
Baby boomer lionizing his own abusive upbringing, basically.
Why is Sonic lore and fandom so… that?
Oh that’s just the original Archie comic. You know how back in the day video games would have tie-in media that introduced OCs and stuff like that? Imagine running one for over 20 years, with one of the most popular characters in the world, by a man who believed in his Knuckles the Echidna comic so much he was able to successfully sue Archie to own his Sonic the Hedgehog OCs again.
The real fun fact is how back in 2005 Archie hired Ian Flynn, a fresh out of college writer who sent them unsolicited pitches for years and when Ken Penders bailed he was promoted to head writer, whereupon he immediately turned the series around to the point where as every other part of the Sonic franchise became a huge joke, the Archie comic was the only part of it anyone would admit to liking.
This nerdlinger went “pff I’m a huge fan I can do better” and then he actually did to the point where writing Sonic the Hedgehog comics has been his job for 15 years now and everyone likes him. If Ken Penders is Sonic’s Simon Furman (and by that I mean the weird attempted ownership of a larger brand on the grounds of “I was the first one to take it seriously”), Ian Flynn is its James Roberts; he’s a fan, he does have some finger on the pulse of what folks want out of this series, but actually let’s write a cool story first and foremost in and then do the fun fanboy thing in the margins.
If you’re wondering why Sonic fandom is known for being Like That to a consistency other large series tend not to exhibit; I don’t think they’re necessarily inherently weirder so much as a huge fandom is inevitably going to draw in some fucked up fetish art, and talking online about how Sonic the Hedgehog sucks is kind of its own institution at this point since the only consistency to Sonic is that it has none.
I should note that Penders didn’t actually sue Archie for the rights to those characters. He filed copyrights for the characters he created about two years after he left the series, and both SEGA and Archie sued him over this claim. Archie were unable to turn up a valid work-for-hire contract in court, which they claimed was because numerous contracts were accidentally destroyed by warehouse staff and Penders claimed was because no such contract had ever existed. Despite him having previously attested on his website that SEGA owned everything, several years earlier.
Other than that basically everything here is true, though.
Additionally, Penders WAS willing to license his characters to Archie and Sega, if they paid him and he got veto power over said characters because he didn’t like that Flynn had killed Knuckles’s abusive dad while acknowledging said dad was abusive, which in the process meant his precious Mobius 25 Years Later WASN’T The Canon Ending for an ongoing comic. The licensing, more or less reasonable – it’s not industry standard for creators to keep any ownership over their characters, but quite frankly the industry’s pretty terrible in that respect and frequently screws over creators. The creative control thing, significantly less reasonable, especially because that’s a kind of respect for his seniority as a writer he never afforded any of the co-writers for the comic while they were there – he was very open about not having read other writers’ stories. He felt Flynn should have consulted with him and used the story ideas HE’D had for future issues after leaving, but didn’t do the same for fellow writer Karl Bollers’s ideas when he left the series a few years before – in fact, he immediately set about undoing or ignoring plot hooks Bollers set up, something he’d accused Bollers of doing in changing the status quo for the echidnas in the Return to Angel Island arc. (Never mind that the changes to said status quo were either bringing things more in line with the games’ echidna lore – changing the Master Emerald’s chamber to, you know, the classic Genesis one, making the echidna aesthetics more in line with Adventure while allowing for Penders’s pre-Adventure lore to still exist – or clearing house because Charmy didn’t NEED to be prince of a colony of bees, and Heroes just used him so we want him back in the comics again with the other Chaotix.) Archie rebooted rather than pay the licensing fees, especially since they had very much embarassed themselves on that front.
I believe Penders DID sue Bioware for Sonic Chronicles’ similarities to the Knuckles comics, prompting the Sega and Archie suits – and the Nocturnus clan was DEFINITELY inspired by the Dark Legion – but the case was dismissed due to filing timeline issues and Bioware had no way of knowing Archie had lost the contracts and therefore the Archie lore wasn’t every bit as on the table as stuff from Sonic Battle. There was never a clear decision of ownership there as a result. Those characters are still off-limits because if Sega ever uses them again, Penders will re-sue, and Sega doesn’t want to deal with that hassle. It’s more trouble than it’s worth for about half a dozen characters people actually LIKE among the Penders cast and a few more Archie characters by other writers, especially when they have plenty of options in-house.
The most infuriating aspect of Penders is that I’m actually really glad he got one over Archie and Sega. It’s an industry where bill Finger, the real creator of Batman died alone and penniless and Bill Mantlo, creator of global super star Rocket Raccoon, has to crowdfund his own extensive, lifelong care.
Work for hire is a rigged carnie game, the creators of these comics should always own their characters and be fairly and handsomely compensated, and the only time I get to point to how this should work is that time the weird Sonic guy regained the rights to Geoffrey St. John the Skunk who makes out with a teenager.
It’s that ‘Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Made A Great Point’ headline, except that I also think it’s a real dick move by the court in question that the WRITERS got full creative rights but the ARTISTS did not (or for that matter editors who had any role in the design process,) so now we’ve got this asshole licensing out a character using the name and design created by other people after/as he left the book, with the characterization everyone likes coming from a writer he goes out of his way to denigrate, but because Penders came up with the evil Sonic in a leather jacket and sunglasses that ultimately became a beloved fan favorite once other people had him, he gets full rights.
So you know, made a good point but immediately undercut it because he’s an asshole. But at least we have Surge and Kit, I like them already and they haven’t even fought Sonic yet.
… I was more talking about how he tried to fridge Sally Acorn.
And before anyone suggests that he created her – no, he did not. Ken Kinoshita, of the Sonic TV series did.
Your last paragraph is RIGHT on the money, and why the fandom’s ~reputation~ frustrates me. :C
Any example of fandom ‘weirdness’ someone can name, I can find the exact same shit in the Pokémon fandom, and probably more examples of it. Buuut one gets mocked, and the other does not.
I say this as a big fan of both too! I just mean the comparison to illustrate that Sonic’s fandom really does get mocked to an extent that other large game fandoms do not, and it’s honestly undeserved? Like, there’s shitty people and weirdos in every fandom, Sonic is not unique or even the worst in that regard haha.
(And I’d also like to add that not every variety of ‘weirdo’ is actually bad! Let people draw their niche furry art in peace, it’s not that hard to live and
learnlet live dksldkfjg)“This nerdlinger went ‘pff I’m a huge fan I can do better’ and then he actually did”
And now he’s writing for the games! (Here from the future)
It’s not Sonic game lore at all. It’s mostly just the (pre-reboot) Archie comics.
Game lore is occasionally kinda wild (one example: Shadow is part alien and was set up both to destroy the world and save it by the same guy at different points before that guy was executed by the military, leaving Shadow understandably confused and conflicted about his purpose in life LOL), but… not like that. There’s no ancient echidna wank, the only bits involving them are in Sonic Adventure when a ghost cautions Sonic and Knuckles about what blindly craving power can do to a civilization. That’s it.
Occasionally wonky English dubs and severe schisms in What Sonic Really Is™️ back in the 90s don’t help that impression, I’ll grant you that. But most of the strangeness is found in Ken Penders’s work on the old Archie comics, which are only canon to themselves and can be completely ignored. Game canon is occasionally vague, but the Japanese scripts generally make complete sense and are sometimes incredibly emotionally profound.
For an example of profound: in Sonic And The Black Knight, Sonic – squeaky clean reputation hero Sonic – readily admits he is fully willing to play the bad guy if it gets actually ethical shit done. Can’t always be seen as the hero by everyone, and that’s okay! That game also deals with trying to hold onto the present status quo at the expense of having a future. Another example of WAIT THIS IS IN A SONIC GAME??? is Shadow’s entire multi-game arc about who he is, how does his amnesia affect who he wants to be, and his struggles with PTSD and grief. They may not quite phrase it in those terms, but the Japanese voice acting is delivered with emotional nuance and it’s clear we are meant to actually give a shit about his issues. I think that’s why, ~eDgY~ memes aside, Shadow has been such an enduring favorite in the fandom: his character arc makes people feel.
Those aren’t the only examples of surprisingly good concepts in Sonic games, but they’re a couple of my personal favorites. And since there IS some good stuff in there, it kinda bums me out a little that people dismiss the series as LOLZ SANIC, y’know?
Whoever created that property was obviously neither Australian nor a biologist.
OK, here’s a (kind of?) Sonic-related question that’s probably never gonna get answered.
Who’s gonna be the next character to get a craving for a Sonic Chili Dog?
In canon? No one, they’re not doing official romance.
My husband has written a fucking bangin’ slow burn Sonic x Shadow ship fic the length of a novel though! Deals with PTSD, the emotional pressures of being put on the pedestal of ‘hero’, and how to even recognize romantic feelings in yourself when you’ve barely even known what friendship feels like, much less sexual desire/romance. Good shit.
i would like to inform you that i am currently losing my mind and also dyign from this. you have been put on notice.
OMG thank you for this, I needed a laugh today dsksfkgjg
You will always have to try multiple times to get unsweetened tea no matter where you order.
My theory is that drinking tea is an exercise in masochism, so if you order unsweetened tea, you must really want it with extra sugar and a couple packets of fake sugar as well.
I’m pleased to learn that the University food service concurs.
I was lost on ‘samesies’ myself – until I entered it into an online dictionary’s search field and suddenly realized what I was typing. Btw: The online dictionary got no results on it.
TALK TO EACH OTHER. PRODUCTIVELY.
@ My dumbs self – REMEMBER TO DO GRAV ROULETTE.
TBH at this particular moment I would also be okay with Dorothy just slapping Joyce, because goddamn.
But talking productively instead (or after) would also be positive.
They’d frickin’ better. I can’t believe Dorothy’s innate “fix everything” mindset hasn’t already pushed her into this.
Unless this IS the “fix everything” mindset, but she’s employing the “don’t engage and she’ll knock it off” strategy.
“Ignore it and it’ll go away eventually” has not ever really been Dorothy’s approach, though
I think it is, but her way of fixing it isn’t very positive here, for Joyce or herself.
It would be nice if they did that, but unfortunately this isn’t Smarting of Age.
couple typos
*”it would be boring if they did that, but thankfully this isn’t Smarting of Age.”
there, fixed
*plays Paul McCartney’s “English Tea” on the hacked Muzak*
DO THE KNUCKS!
Sometimes I see CIA statistics pop up about other countries’ religions
looking for my country, france, it systematically highly overstimate it for some reason. Wonder if it’s the same for intra-country stats.
Ohhhh yeah. They’re all wrong. Largely because they keep asking the wrong questions: namely, “what religion(s) do you follow” rather than “what beliefs do you hold”.
A lot of people in the UK tick “Christian” (or a denomination of Christianity) when want they mean is “they go to midnight mass at Christmas and they’d like to get married in a church”.
Even amoungst people who genuinely believe, there’s a pretty massive range of Christianity from “believe in God, don’t do anything apart from try and be nice” to “actively campaign to force schools to read one chapter from the Bible every day before the regular anti-abortion lesson”. The phrase “Christian country” is so vague as to be almost useless.
I bet that’s by design, to get all the assorted denominations in red states to wave the same banner.
So, how often do you need to go to church to qualify as a real Christian?
Relying on anything other than self-identification for surveys like this gets problematic pretty quickly.
That said, I do know that a lot of US political surveys do check for “frequent church attendance” because that is a big predictor of voting patterns.
I’m pretty sure they don’t go to every country do actual surveys
Surveys are done. Just not by CIA agents. They’re compiling publicly available data.
Hyperminority here then, although I wonder what the global concentration of non-theists is. To be fair, even Christian/Islam/Jewish people are “atheist” I just believe in one fewer god than they.
You can be Jewish and not believe in any gods. I was taught to take the TNK seriously, not literally. There are a lot of good teachings we can take from the scripture, the community is good, and our holidays are straight up nerdy. I realized I was atheist in high school, but I’ll be Jewish for life.
My oldest son, after taking a Jewish studies class at UI on a whim, spent a year or so seriously thinking about formally converting to Judaism. This from a kid who was an atheist after the first time his Mom and I took him to church. That was his response when we bought that up. In the end, he never bit but he did learn passable Yiddish.
That’s just being Jewish in the sense of ethnicity/ancestry, without actually believing in Judaism.
There’s nothing contradictory about that, it’s merely a linguistic issue in which “Jewish” refers to two different things (religion and ethnicity), unlike with most other religions.
From many Jewish people I know, that doesn’t sound like it’s actually true. If you’re still doing things like going to your synagogue or participating in holidays, etc. that’s still practicing Judaism. Believing in God’s not necessary for that. They describe it as an orthopraxy, not an orthodoxy.
Yeah, I know practicing Jewish people who keep kosher, actively study the Torah, write at length about the ethical principles of what makes a good person under the Jewish faith as they understand it, and are like ‘does G-d exist? Eh, I generally lean towards no. Does that matter to me? Nope. I will continue to fast for and observe the high holy days because I find them meaningful even if no god is watching and caring if I do or not.’
This is part of the problem of trying to fit one religion into a mold shaped by another.
Good point. The same problem occurs strongly when an Islamo-Christian concept of what a religion is gets applied to Hindusim, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Marxism, or Objectivism.
I had a student once that went out of her way to introduce herself as “a self-proclaimed Atheist”.
I wanted to quietly pull her aside and say: “All Atheists all self-proclaimed. That’s how you become Atheist. There’s no certification you have to do. You just say it, believe it, and done.”
I dunno, I feel like there’s also a category of “other-proclaimed atheists”, a class that includes just about every Democratic politician of the past 20 years
Joyce, you’re turning into Faz. Stop it.
But she’s just prepared a chart and accompanying PowerPoint presentation!
Could be worse. She could be turning into Wen.
Maybe Joyce’s evolution isn’t complete, and she needs some special stones to evolve any further…
RIP Dorothy’s kidneys
Since when does that make sense?
You do know what stones can be a euphemism for, right ?
Does she realize yet that she’s just reverted back to year one but atheist?
This is still year one, just not term one.
(also: no, she does not.)
Sorry, comic book lingo has ruined my sense of narrative time. Term One (But God this is still awful) it is.
Joyce has somehow become more cringe as an atheist than she was as a christian. Maybe Joyce just exists as cringe regardless of belief.
Is that the thing all Variants of Joyce have in common?
Seeing as how Joyce is semi-autobiographical it very well may be that Willis sees Joyce (and thus past-Willis) as cringe.
I personally believe Willis exaggerating the cringe levels we see in Joyce in the comic (and exaggerating the reactions everyone has to her), in part cause of how he reflects his past self, in part to hedge very strongly on the side of showing the readership that “this is very bad and i am against it”.
I honestly just hope this isn’t a one sided coin, and we resolve both the Anti-Theism Joyce’s grown into, and the Atheism Phobia that’s been baking under the surface from Becky’s end (which in comic is a lot of why it wasn’t safe for Joyce to talk in any way to Becky about her doubts of faith until she got this deep).
IDK if Becky’s “atheism phobia” is that much of an issue. Yeah, she made that one comment about this being a “stupid phase”, but remember the context – she was looking to Joyce for reassurance and validation, and Joyce didn’t give it to her. She was upset and confused, and she expected Joyce to have the certainty that she was lacking in the moment, so Joyce expressing doubts threw her even further off-balance, and she lashed out. In their argument in this arc, she made it pretty clear that Joyce’s atheism wasn’t the problem, it’s her whole “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is stupid and bad” attitude, which, besides being generally shitty, might be a bit of a raw nerve for Becky.
It was enough an issue to mean Joyce wasn’t comfortable talking to Becky about this
Either that or Willis felt too many people sympathized with her, so he had to go full-out to make sure we all felt she was being appropriately insufferable.
Willis’s buffer is in excess of four-to-five months long, this strip was written far before Joyce started acting like this in the comic.
I don’t seriously think that he re-wrote it, but it’s not like he couldn’t slip new material into the buffer if he thinks people are missing a point he’s trying to make.
it’s a major pain in the ass to do that
I feel like lots of people sympathised with her right to privately work through her newfound beliefs and say stupid things before she expressed them to people who might react negatively. I’d say a much smaller fraction of people actually agreed wholeheartedly with the stupid things she was saying.
Very few people agree with “be an obnoxious asshole to all your friends.” More think that “belief without actual evidence is bad, and you don’t have to pretend otherwise” is a reasonable standpoint.
I’d gauge it as only 98% as cringe, but the difference is within margin of error and too close to call.
This is a pretty unsympathetic take. I imagine you were not truly religious yourself at a point and left it or you’d understand. Joyce is lost and she is young. She was taught to believe that her goodness came from her beliefs and that lacking that belief, goodness was impossible. Well, she’s been forcefully dragged to the point where she simply /can’t/ believe anymore but she still needs to make sense of the formative ideas in her head while not being crippled by existential panic or self-loathing.
This is what she’s been left with: She can’t claim she’s good anymore because she doesn’t believe in what she once thought made her good, to begin with. However, that’s ok because Christians have clearly shown her they’re actually not good and, in some cases, even more, evil than non-believers. So goodness doesn’t exist and everybody is out for themselves. If the objective standard of goodness she once believed in doesn’t exist, she’d at least take solace in embracing the objective standard of “truth” instead.
She’s hurting more than she’d readily admit to herself she is.
I mean she’s still being, on the face, objectively cringe right now. Both can be true
nah, she’s not hurting, because she’s Right
againnow.being Right is all she needs (right?)
she’s fine
I honestly found Joyce’s cringe more annoying when she was still a Christian than now when she’s an atheist.
Her early Christian cringe was worse, I agree, but she’d worked through a lot of it and gotten to a place where she wasn’t been nearly as obnoxious about it. Now she’s found a new (lack of) faith, hidden her doubts and jumped in full bore.
Most atheists go through this phase. Some never exit.
I know she doesn’t believe in the Book anymore, but it seems to me that there’s one passage that’s highly relevant here:
“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
Hi Sarah!
Joyce: Oh no, my superiority through christianity is broken. Whatever shall I do?
*atheism superiority appears*
Joyce: Ah yes that hits the spot, just like my mom but less jesus.
Ooooof
People keep saying Joyce acted all superior when she was Christian too. I’m not seeing it.
On the contrary, really: she believed VERY earnestly and without sublety: I imagine this self-parody level of insufferability might be at least in part a backlash against feeling so stupid for believing so strongly in something so outrageous.
If I laugh at Past Me loudly enough, no one else can.
I got the impression it was backlash from hurting Becky. Instead of owning up to that, she’s pretending it’s the way she’s supposed to act.
Come to think of it, is this how she thinks atheists should act? I mean, obviously Dorothy doesn’t, but is the idea that atheists are supposed to be smug and insufferable something her upbringing might have given to her?
Yup. Re-read the early Joyce/Dorothy interactions and you’ll find plenty of Joyce expecting smugness and Dorothy being blankly confused by the straw man.
3%?!
[looks it up]
So 3% use the term “athiest,” a lot more don’t but aren’t believers, but I’m surprised how low both numbers are.
Whole lot higher percentages here in Seattle. Washington State in general, in fact. Oregon too.
I should know this obviously but the numbers are still surprising sometimes
Yeah. Some of that’s just labels — free-thinkers, agnostic-atheists identifying as agnostics, etc — and then there’s the hard-to-parse “nones”. But very, very much a minority in this country.
One of the bigger issues with categorizing non-believers is that… well, there’s a lot of varying ways to define non belief (“there are no gods”, “there might be gods but it’s ambiguous but I suppose I’m open to the possibility”, “if there’s gods out there they’d be cool with me not worshiping them because caring about that seems kinda assholish for a benevolent being”, “man do I not give a fuck” and many more!).
And it’s not like there’s coherent definitions for those forms of faith like there is for “Christian”, or even its subcategories of “Catholic”, “Protestant”, “Anglican”, “Lutheran” and such. There’s also less of a need to really define those terms because the varieties of not-really-believers are pretty chill about the whole thing, while there’s multiple historical wars whose (official) basis is centered around different denominations of Christianity.
I think this really nails it. Maybe there’s 3% of “militant” or “preaching” atheists in the US. There are many more that went from believing in god to not giving a single fuck. Discussing the non-existence of a god takes as much or more effort than demanding the existence of one.
That 3% is self-identifying atheists — people who use the word “atheist” as a self-descriptor. “Militant” is a minority within that tiny minority.
… also, am I the only one who dislikes the term “militant” here? When we’ve got atheists waving around AKs and ARPs and threatening to use them to impose atheism as an (anti-)theocracy of their chosen nation, MAYBE then we could call them militant in the same way as religious militants. Until we get into shouting distance of that, it’s a false equivalence.
I tend to prefer “Evangelical” for that subset of Atheists… although there’s folks that object to that comparison as well (rightfully pointing out that Evangelical Christians have a lot more social power than that subsect of Atheists).
They lack the social power, but I suspect a lot of them were culturally Christian before becoming atheists and maybe haven’t come to recognize the parts of their thought processes that are very, very Christian still indeed in that respect.
I do agree there needs to be a better term and they’ve definitely got less social power or physical threat potential than religious militants, but I wouldn’t underestimate them either.
A lot of people tied into Gamergate and the rise of the alt-right were militant atheists. There’s definitely a threat from that angle, even if they’re not directly waving the rifles.
@Regalli
It’s more that watching religious activists yank entire countries around makes you think long and hard about how far your tolerance for irrational behaviour goes. At some point you have to start actually speaking against it.
It’s like people throwing around “Extremest Atheist.” People being moderately annoying on forums is not exactly a good parallel to hate crimes and bombings, thanks.
It’s definitely one of those things where the language interferes with the numbers. A lot of people identify as non-spiritual, agnostic, lapsed, or what have you. Calling yourself a full-on atheist, for some, feels like making a commitment on a subject they really don’t think or care about.
Yup. Atheism is an affirmative declaration that many people are uninterested in making.
It’s unsurprising that “I don’t feel like answering this question” might be a far more popular response.
Which they’re scared of making, because they’ve seen the bigotry against atheists all their lives.
In opinion surveys, Americans rate terrorists as more trustworthy than atheists.
Prolepsis: I am not conflating Muslim with terrorist. Most terrorists as not Muslim. most terrorists in the USA are white-supremacists and anti-government extremists.
Americans in the same surveys also trusted Muslims far more than terrorists.
Welcome to the Church of *Shrug*, which is like Agnosticism but we don’t say anything about it and just go and get Steak and Shake milkshakes instead on Saturdays
That’s because of the horrific bigotry against atheists that’s happening in America, and also against the terrible stigma of calling oneself an atheist.
Trying to spread your beliefs as a Christian/Muslim/whatever is also seen as much more acceptable than trying to spread your beliefs as an atheist, because actually trying to battle the influence of a horrifically reactionary and oppressive institutions like Christianity/Islam/Judaism is somehow seen as *bad* by the pseudo-progressive reactionaries in the United States that call themselves “liberal” while allying themselves with horrific oppressors.
I feel the idea atheists are more persecuted in America than Muslims is a bit….well, it feels like a very Bill Maher quote.
There’s a bit of weirdness in there and I think it depends on what bits of prejudice you look at. There are definitely surveys that suggest atheists are less trusted than people with any religion, including Islam, and that does likely lead into at least some discrimination. OTOH, there are far less hate crimes targeting atheists. Islamophobia tends to overlap with racism, while atheism doesn’t. It’s complicated.
But that particular take: that liberals are bad because they’re not loudly against all religions is an especially awful one.
Aelfwine’s come in here before (back during Liz’s first appearances) declaring that you’re no true progressive unless you loudly denounce the existence of religion itself – and that “American so-called progressives made a deal with the devil” by not doing so – so it’s not a particularly new take from them.
No shit you’re not progressive unless you denounce the existence of religion. You’re not a true progressive if you don’t denounce the existence of fascism or sexism or misogyny or slavery either.
But religion and religious apologists get a pass for their tyranny and oppression, when all the other oppressive institutions rightfully don’t.
Yeah, this right here? In no uncertain terms, and not being religious myself, FUCK THIS ATTITUDE. Fuck aaaaall the way off with your progressive-gatekeeping bullshit. You are exactly what’s wrong with certain parts of the atheist/agnostic/nonreligious community.
(And in case anyone else is wondering, a few weeks ago aelfwine already compared being religious to being a fucking NAZI, and then doubled down when called out on it. I am inclined to give them exactly zero percent of the benefit of the doubt right now.)
And you are exactly what’s wrong with certain parts of self-proclaimed progressivism.
According to pseudo-progressives its perfectly okay for Christians and Jews to promote and praise books like the Bible (or the Torah), books that say an all-good God not only accepted but demanded e.g. the genocide of all male Midianites and the sexual slavery of their girls, or the stoning of homosexuals.
That, you see, is an *okay* genocide, it’s *okay* homophobic murder, and and *okay* promoting that *okay* book — because it’s a *religious* one.
Only non-religious books are non-religious institution are actually allowed to be judged morally. Religions and religious institutions may not si be judged.
Such ideas mustn’t have contributed at all to people believing that it was okay to genocide & enslave other nations after all.
And I don’t want your “benefit of the doubt”, I similarly have no reason to give you any. Telling me why a book that supports genocide and slavery is okay to use as a moral guide, or admit that it isn’t.
So I can be queer, support gay and trans rights, racial justice, universal healthcare and ecological legislation and so on…but because I don’t loudly denounce the very existence of religion at every given opportunity, I’m a “pseudo-progressive”? Fuck that.
When I said “fuck off with your progressive-gatekeeping bullshit”, that wasn’t an invitation for you to gatekeep even harder.
FFS, this is exactly the kind of thing that prompted Willis’s (mostly-facetious, but still) tweet that “atheism was a mistake” a few weeks back.
You don’t merely “don’t denounce the very existence of religion at every given opportunity” you instead to choose denounce at every opportunity those of us who do oppose the existence of such an oppressive system of lies and tyranny.
There’s a difference between those who aren’t vegetarians and don’t act in favour of animal rights, and those who loudly denounce vegeterianism and denounce animal rights supporters.
There’s similarly a difference between those who aren’t denouncing religion, and those like you who denounce the ones who do!
You can choose to be lazy if you want in the fight against oppresive system but religion, but atleast don’t fucking support it.
“FFS, this is exactly the kind of thing that prompted Willis’s (mostly-facetious, but still) tweet that “atheism was a mistake” a few weeks back.”
Is that tone-policing I hear? Oh, yeah, my every view is correct, but you don’t like the way I speak it?
And as for “atheism was a mistake”, imagine if some asshole had said “women’s suffrage was a mistake” or “slavery’s abolition was mistake” — they’d be rightfully cancelled and properly shunned like a sexist and a racist.
But it’s okay for someone to say “atheism was a mistake” because bigotry against atheists is okay.
“my every view is correct”
no notes.
According to a gallup 95% of American would be willing to vote for a Catholic president, 93% of Americans for a Jewish president, 66% of Americans would be willing to vote for a Muslim president, and only 60% would be willing to vote for an Atheist one.
To oversimplify things a bit: I’d say that shows in a neat little line the respective strength of bigotries:
5% of Americans are anti-Catholic bigots, 7% are anti-semitic bigots, 34% are islamophobic bigots, and 40% of Americans are anti-atheist bigots.
“But that particular take: that liberals are bad because they’re not loudly against all religions is an especially awful one.”
Aren’t all religions falsehoods?
Aren’t all religions oppressing people with their lies?
Perhaps you can find me some modern religion like “Unitarians” or something that isn’t oppressive, but you’d be missing my point when I’m discussing religion as a whole, and the need for it to be denounced.
And yet, hate crimes against Muslims are much higher than hate crimes against atheists. (Hell, hate crimes against Jews are also much higher.)
Perhaps “would vote for President” isn’t the best measure of bigotries.
Yeah, as I said what I said is admittedly an oversimplication. You can e.g. have a small group of people being much more severely and *criminally* bigoted against muslims (or gay people), leading to more hate crimes against muslims or gay people — while at the same time you can have somewhat more wide but also *more mild* prejudice against atheists, leading to things like being 0 non-closeted atheists in Congress.
I’m also thinking that part of the reason there’s fewer hates crimes against atheists, is that we don’t have the equivalent of mosques or synagogues for people to target.
“I feel the idea atheists are more persecuted in America than Muslims is a bit….well, it feels like a very Bill Maher quote”
Nah, I didn’t mean to say that they are more percecuted in America in general than Muslims, I meant to say that they are more persecuted by American pseudo-progressives.
Muslims are persecuted by rightwingers in the United States.
Atheists are obviously despited by both rightwingers AND left-wingers, however, instead.
As evidenced by the fact that there are 3 muslims in Congress, but there are 0 open atheists.
See by the supposed progressives who frown at people being “loudly” atheists or people who dare criticize religions. People can be atheists all they want, as long as they keep silent about it, and don’t dare dispute the lies of religion!
All other oppressive institution can be challenged, but not religion. That’s off-limits for the pseudo-progressives.
See, obviously the problem here is that progressives don’t persecute Muslims enough.
More seriously, the so-called pseudo-progressives do a pretty good job of challenging the directly oppressive aspects of religion, even as the right tries to amplify them. They’re just not attacking the basic concept of religion – partly because it would be political suicide.
What about those supposed progressives that aren’t politicians,
and merely speak in forums like this, often under anonymous
accounts like this, and thus shouldn’t be concerned about political
suicide?
They don’t seem to want to attack the basic concept of religion either,
though the “basic concept of religion” — concepts like (a) faith-treated-as-a-virtue or (b) treating books written millenia ago as holy or (c) the concept of an omnibenevolent god having created this world and thus what is “natural” is also treated as inherently “good” is what leads and justifies directly those “oppressive aspects” of religion.
God she’s so embarrassing. Dorothy’s poll numbers dropped just by having Joyce talk to her.
Well if it’s any consolation, she can NOT have Joyce talk to her and still NOT be electable.
Candidate Keener reported to associate with atheists! Approval rating down 50% with Fox News viewers! (Previously 2%, now 1%.)
I love how you think an atheist democrat woman’s approval for the presidency among Fox Newsers could somehow be expressed without either a a lot of decimals or a negative exponent.
Hey, some people hate-watch.
Oh now it’s the cringey atheist phase. xD Maybe because I’m atheist too so this is so hard to watch.
Isn’t ‘sweet tea’ its own thing (like by the time it’s already brewed there’d be sugar with it as opposed to them adding sugar right after pouring it for you but i try to stick to Asian teas), seems like she should just buy a specific tea bag or so XD; (tbh i’ve had it once and it tasted weird idk why americans/southerners like it, is it even made w/ real tea leaves)
Anyways be interesting if Joyce can have a proper conversation. Tho it’d be more fun entertainment wise if she just kinda spiralled outta control but hey, that’s the point of being in your 20s right, get the superiorty complex outta your system lol
I think she’s talking about iced tea.
lol i knew some girls who loved buying arizona iced tea but there’s like thousands of flavors, but ppl collective call it iced tea for one specific thing, although then again i’m used to getting made to order teas in cafes where the sugar would be set aside to add extra yourself. Dunno if Indiana has a huge asian population but i guess if it was created more recently they’d have boba tea as an option (another thing for joyce to react to/nitpick about lol)
Anyway babbling over lol.
In the US, Iced tea is typically made with black tea leaves. You take several bags and make a large pot of tea. Then you pour it over a pitcher of ice. (There are Iced Tea makers like Mrs. Tea that do essentially this and has markings for where you fill the water, where you fill the ice, strength is dependent on number of tea bags you use).
Or you can make sun tea. Where you buy a clear glass jug (usually with a spout at the bottom) fill it with water, hang some tea bags on it and set it out somewhere in the sun. In a few hours its done, put it in the fridge and then you have a jug of tea whenever you want.
Per my southern mother in law, Tim isn’t wrong, but the more efficient way to make iced tea is to make a very small very concentrated pot of tea, pour it into the pitcher, and then repeatedly fill up the pot with the tea bags with cold water (let a little tea soak into it) and then pour it into the pitcher. It’s not quite as diluted by the water that way and it gets colder faster since about 9/10ths of the pitcher is filled with cold water.
But core to the process of making sweet tea is that the sugar (lots and lots of it) is added to the tea while it is still hot. Sweet tea is a supersaturated solution and the sugar does not dissolve in the tea properly when it’s cold. So, yes, Dorothy is in search of tea from an entirely different pitcher. The tea from the sweet pitcher or dispenser or whatever cannot be unsweetened. She needs to get it out of a separate pitcher of tea that was brewed and then cooled without sugar ever being added. Worth noting, this tea cannot be sweetened (without reheating) any more than the other can be unsweetened.
You cannot sweeten or unsweeten tea once it’s been made one or the other, but you can mix the 2 together to give you a level of sweet you like. Or mix it with lemonade; that’s quite nice, too.
Arnold Palmer half and half is the only tea I find palatable.
Spousal Ms ValdVin is a tea maniac.
She will always ask in a restaurant “Do you have simple syrup?” before ordering iced tea so she can make it the barely sweet level she likes.
We’re in the Northeast, and she’s pleased to report that simple syrup is a much easier thing to find here than ~40 years ago.
You certainly can sweeten ice tea without heating it. Some sugar will dissolve even in cold water, just not as much as in hot water. You couldn’t get it to the absurd levels of sweet of proper “sweet tea”, but it can be sweetened.
Or, as Valdvin suggests, add simple syrup or some other liquid sweetener.
You pour it over a glass at a time, usually.
Canned tea is an abomination.
If you’re not in a hurry, you can cold brew tea. Pitcher of water, add a bunch of tea (bags or loose leaf), put in the refrigerator, drink it the next day.
She really is such a wiener right now.
Ugh, Joyce.
As representative of the “pro-Joyce trauma process” lobby, I will offer to concede that while Joyce is surrounded by emotionally limited friends who are shit at engaging with her without being horribly condescending…
…she is coming off as somewhat unhinged these days, yes.
I think that’s intentional. She’s going to keep being portrayed as more and more “angry atheist” style until she gets hit with the karma anvil and recognizes that “thinking christianity is dumb and wrong” is bad, and then she’ll be moved to a less unhinged portrayal.
Or she’ll just stay like this for several more books. Which honestly would be fairly interesting. Though given I suspect Willis isn’t going to let any main character be positive with her until that happens, I *do* expect this plotline to be resolved this book.
I honestly hope it will be.
I’d like to think Joyce as a character was kind to people for her own reasons as well, not just because her religion told her to.
If this keeps going the way it is going now, the whiplash from seeing what I thought was her growth turning out to be a total wash… And, revealing the deep underbelly of how much Joyce actually Needed a religious structure in her life to have any consideration for others, it might make me stop reading for a while.
I think she was kind for her own reasons, but she thought those reasons were rooted in her religious upbringing. Now she has to learn to detangle herself from that world.
She’s still play-acting the stereotypical Atheist her church warned her about but thinks she’s supposed to be now.
okay time for face roulette
I’m okay with this.
You know what would be fun? This Joyce and Mary meeting. Just think of the fireworks.
It has occurred to me as well. I’m still thinking aggravated battery charges.
Actually, I find it odd commenters seldom seem to note how violent Joyce Brown the DOA character is. Ryan tries to to drug her and she instantly smashes her glass in his face. After Amber later slashed him to pieces, Joyce’s only objection was that Amber hadn’t killed him. Not to mention, several times she attacked men twice her size, once putting Becky’s Dad in the hospital – he had it coming.
I seem to remember sometime Willis mentioning his family tended to have hair-triggers. They went from everyday to enraged in a heart beat. As a kid, Willis said he just assumed that was normal human behavior. (Note to self: always be complimentary about his work if I ever meet Willis.)
Joyce does seem to have a temper, but it seems a bit sketchy to me to blame her violence on that temper. It seems like your implying her violence is a character flaw, when all the examples you list involve defense against serious violent felonies.
Attempted rape. Attempted murder. Multiple kidnappings.
This isn’t a character flaw, but appropriate reactions to unreasonable situations.
More specifically, it’s also Joyce with a tendency to pick ‘fight’ in the ‘fight-flight-freeze-fawn’ trauma responses. Far from exclusively – she’s got a huge tendency towards avoiding the problem and hoping it’ll go away if it’s not actively life-threatening – but in an actually dangerous situation, Joyce is almost always a fight response. (Which then led to people giving Ethan and Walky grief during the kidnapping arc, because they tend to be fawn and freeze types while Dina, Amber, Sarah, and Joyce all lean toward fight and Dorothy was really good at keeping a cool head through this. Never mind that going for fight isn’t always beneficial, and anyway your average college student, like most people, is gonna be pretty freaked out if they’ve been kidnapped in a basement and watched one kidnapper murder the other.)
Well, I’m not blaming Joyce for anything. Joyce glasses Ryan because it moves the story along and introduces a side of the character probably doesn’t expect. Also, Willis doesn’t want to establish Joyce as a simple victim and so gives her agency.
Anyway, Ryan had it coming in story terms. He’s lucky Joyce didn’t cut his throat instead of his face. Probably just as well, because then the strip would have been a 11-year slog through the legal system.
I believe the word you’re looking for is “cringe”
Feels binge
Samesies Gamgee
That’s all I got. I’mma go touch grass.
Yeah me too bruh.
My brain’s too pooped out from staring at lines of JavaScript all day.
And something tells me Joyce is gonna be even worse tomorrow.
take a shroom beforehand and enjoy your grass-touching ^^
Christ I actually would rather have Malaya
idk i am exaggerating it in my head or was dorothy busting out sick atheist burns of about this quality earlier in the school year
Dorothy was…absolutely not doing that. Literally never once. I don’t even know what you would have even been exaggerating about. She’s talked about being Atheist like, three times, and all of that was just in an “its not a big deal” kinda way.
The closest thing I can think of is ‘hey this time the atheist is the foxhole’.
Yeah she absolutely wasn’t
Iirc she didn’t even mention it unless the topic was brought up
Yup.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/04-the-bechdel-test/gasp/
(Joyce sure has come a long way, yet absolutely not far enough…)
She did an atheists in foxholes joke once and everyone around her hated it, but that’s not the same
I would very much like to know what comic you were reading where Dorothy actually cared about the fact that she’s an atheist
I have never before seen ‘knucks’ used to mean a fistbump, rather than brass knuckles…
I have only ever encountered the term Knucks being used in reference to a red echidna.
Who becomes a sort of messianic hero…the sort of thing that Joyce has stopped believing in. We’re through the looking glass here.
Don’t you mean we’re down the Echidna Hole? >v<
No that’s just in the Archie comics, where his dad kidnapped his unhatched egg to blast it with chaos radiation to turn him into a mutant bioweapon with the power to reshape reality at his whim.
(Knuckles did also walk on water in this series)
what the fuck are these comics
Imagine handing one of the most popular game characters in the world at the height of his relevance to some yank baby boomers in the country where the franchise is most popular, where they have to make the universe up as they go since the games had zero textual plot, and there being zero oversight or creative consultation from head office for 12 entire years until eventually a Sega employee discovers in the grocery story an issue cover of Sonic the Hedgehog curled up against the wall sobbing because his girlfriend is getting married.
Goddamn that is funny
I was planning on more or less ducking out entirely from this latest Joyce sequence ’cause I’m not letting my hyperfocus take the wheel all day again. I was not expecting to get to horrify people with Sonic Comic knowledge, which is actually my favourite pastime.
You’re doing the Lord’s work.
It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Talking about weird fucked up bullshit in Sonic comics is funny, but then I think it does some damage to how, starting in 2006, these comics have genuinely been consistently good across three continuities and two publishers.
IDW Sonic is a really good read, but the Archie Reboot continuity is probably my all-time favourite Sonic thing that exists, because retconning the comic’s history in what is colloquially known as “pulling a DC” jettisoned the bloated cast and emphasis on relationship drama and turned it into a sprawling science fantasy world of adventure where Sonic and friends fly around on their aircraft carrier trying to fix their shattered world and fighting Eggman, who’s got his own faction of evil animal people who all have their own agendas.
It’s actually a medium Sonic thrives in, really. Comic artists for decades have practiced how to make super speed look cool as hell to the point where I think it’s actually the best power to depict in comics (see also: Impulse, my favourite superhero), and Sonic’s always been a series with more character focus than its contemporary animal mascots so he’s a great fit for mediums without interactive progress.
Comics are also a GREAT medium to explore the extended cast. Yeah, I know people knock every character introduced after Knuckles, but there ARE a lot of people invested in Shadow and Blaze and Cream and everyone. But not every game is a great fit for everyone, and so it’s nice that we now have a space where you can have a story featuring Cream, Rouge and Amy entering Cheese in a Chao Race even if the games don’t and the fandom is… divided on the later cast’s existence.
It is an EXCELLENT use of time.
Joining a group of three percenters doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
Especially considering that in this case, the numbers are false. 29% of the US population was unaffiliated (18% nothing in particular”, 6% agnostic, and 5% atheist) as of 2020 and the number just keeps going up. While each person is different, the people who fall under unaffiliated still outnumber almost every religious group. Hell, even just atheists have double the numbers or more of every religious group in the US other than protestants and catholics (unaffiliated is also higher than catholic)! It’s FAR from exclusive or an insignificant number.
You can be proud of how you identify without shitting on people who are in a different group. For example, understanding the importance of today and seeing the beauty in a finite life, valuing things that positively impact the environment, not taking things at face value and doing your due diligence, mental flexibility and learning to see the gray areas, continued lifetime growth, and valuing science and others could all be ways I could describe my experience with atheism and how i express it.
Kit was making a joke on how “Three Percenters” are one of the more prominent white supremacist militias out there along the likes of the Proud Boys, I’m pretty sure. And how joining them thus is not a good idea.
Yeah, much better to join the one percenters.
Eh, leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone, unless you have something they want.
The really dangerous 1%ers are the ones shooting themselves into space for bragging rights.
wow, that’s a politics XD
I’m confused. Should only governments be allowed to shoot people into space for bragging rights?
If someone gets shot in space and no one hears them scream, was it a crime?
always has been.
My mom also prefers unsweet tea and knows that struggle, Dorothy
Oh damn hey shiro haven’t seen you in a while
Unrelatedly, Dorothy’s hair is really cute in this strip.
I’m disappointed in Joyce. I hope she pulls her shit together.
Interesting that Joyce uses the term “silly magic” as it makes me curious what other kinds of magic there are, and who practices them.
The economicon is so dark, Satan fears it.
Fae magic is probably silly in nature.
Except for that of the Unseelie Court, of course.
Check the etymology of “silly”. It’s a giggle. At one stage its most common sense was “blessed”.
“Let’s not go to Camelot, tis a blessed place.”
Well, there’s stage magic, which is “magic”.
Most magic suffers from not being silly enough.
Statistics for future readers!
The Pew Research Center found in 2020 that Americans identified as…
Christian 65%
. Protestant 42%,
. Catholic 21%
. Mormon 2%
. Orthodox 1%
Unaffiliated 29%
. “Nothing in particular” 18%
. Agnostic 6%
. Atheist 5%
Other Faiths 6%
. Jewish 1%
. Muslim 1%
. Hindu 1%
. Buddhist 1%
. Other 2%
Refused to answer 1%
That means, there are more people who are unaffiliated than
Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Christians, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist COMBINED. Agnostics ALONE equal the percentage of the theists whose faith is other than Christianity.
Just 41% of people consider religion an important part of their lives. Those identifying as any level of religious is in sharp decline, especially Christianity. In the last decade, the number of Americans who identify as Christian is down 14-17% (with unaffiliated up by 11-15%).
Only a third of Americans go to religious services weekly, then vast majority going a few times a year or less. A quarter of the population do not attend at all. According to Pew, only three states (Utah, Alabama, and Tennessee) have a population where half of the residents attend weekly services (with Gallup listing Alabama and Tennessee as less than that).
As a gay person the 65% worries me but I like that it’s in decline. No offense meant to non-homophobic Christians. I’m hoping that either Christianity can become more inclusive or it becomes less popular.
If it helps, I know of at least two Protestant denominations off the top of my head either on the verge of or actively schisming because a sizable number of their membership are like ‘have you considered gay people deserve rights?’ Wouldn’t be shocked if there’s more of them, I’ve just only heard about the Methodists and my family’s historic little denomination. So there definitely is some active Becoming Less Homophobic in particular going on!
Looks like Americans in general are a lot less religious than most people seem to think. Nice.
It still has the highest NUMBER of Christians (and highest number of Protestants) of any country, but the US is freaking HUGE! According to Pew Research Institute, 15.58% of the world population is unaffiliated with any religion. This puts the US a good bit above the average. In my experience (being raised as one in the south and visiting many many Protestant churches due to one of my family members traveling to sing at them), Protestants as a group (when compared to unaffiliated people) seem to be a lot more vocal on a lot of things, more likely to boycott, quicker to turn on someone not in their group, and more centralized and able to get people to the polls. There’s a lot of shame culture too. It results in a lot of very vocal people (most seem to be more religious than an average Protestant) and a lot of politicians who either agree with them or are trying to not give them a reason to get pissed off (regardless of the size of the group, it’s still big enough to make a significant impact on elections). It makes the country come out looking as religious as a church on Sunday. There are pockets like that, but the whole country is far more diverse.
I was actually born and raised in a southern town that was infamous for how religious it was. It more closely resembles how religious the US appears to people in other countries judging by what people have told me. And again. Infamous. In the deep south. Basically not even close to the norm.
I am curious how they would measure the atheist and agnostic levels, as the two are not entirely separate categories, it is possible to be atheist and agnostic.
Joyce’s assumption that all religion and philosophy (as well as most science) functions in stark contrast between Fundamentalism vs. Materialism is an interesting case of, “Knows enough to be extra ignorant.”
You mean the Dunning-Krueger effect?
[insert obnoxious comment about the Dunning-Kruger effect that makes it clear i’ve only ever skimmed the first paragraph of the wikipedia article about it]
Look. You cannot UNsweet a tea. It’s just “Iced Tea” or maybe even “Tea” (but you might get hot tea). But as far as cold tea is concerned it’s the f***ing DEFAULT. Tea without sugar may be an aberration to some areas but it’s still the default. If you want tea with sugar pre-added you can ask for a Sweet Tea. I sound like a fucking dumbass saying some made up Oceania newspeak shit like “Unsweet”.
*Burns the soap box*
I like you.
The default isn’t sweet, it’s maple syrup, and I’m made to feel self conscious ordering unsweetened, like a sissy. It’s weird here.
It depends on where one is.
When I go to Popeyes if you don’t specify un-sweet tea and just ask for tea, they default to sweet tea. And at other fastfood places, if you don’t say un-sweet tea, they give you iced tea with a ton of sugar in it. And I’m in NorCal, not somewhere in the south. It’s like how Americans go wild with ice – unless I specify “no ice,” ¾ of my soda is just ice cubes
Well yeah. That’s why our fast food cups are gargantuan.
Monkey brain go “big thing for little money? SCORE!” while the restaurant makes insane profit off selling you 52oz of ice cubes and 12oz of drink.
Though to be fair, the drink is nearly pure profit for them anyways. The ice probably isn’t much cheaper than the syrup and water.
I asked for tea at a local supermarket (Florida), and was referred to the other side of the store. I found the iced tea cooler. I asked someone else, who pointed to the cooler. I had to ask for tea in a box, which was in the coffee aisle.
I asked for “iced tea” in a southern state once. Never again. Now no matter where I am, I always say unsweetened tea. I’d rather unnecessarily specify unsweetened, even though it should be the default, than get sweetened tea.
From a culinary perspective, yes. In a country where most things are loaded with sugar, sweet tea is the more popular order. If you order tea from a fast-food place, they will assume you want sweet tea.
I once ordered an ice water through the drive-through and got sweet tea.
Though I think the rules are different for hot tea. That doesn’t come sweetened by default.
Let’s take a moment to enjoy all details Willis gives to the characters clothes: Joyce, with her new black and white social grow-up with her new believes, Joe with his sex-meanings basic shirt, Dina with her results of dinosaurs researchs and Becky with her adorable lesbian-flag outfit.
Willis really does throw quite a bit of work into the character aesthetics lately.
oh yeah! he’d mentioned somewhere that Joyce was gonna be in B&W this storyline. thanks for bringing it to my attention =)
It’s like she wants to join the Church of Atheism. Which isn’t how that works, or a thing. She needs to check the feeling “superior over others” stuff at the door while exiting religion, and find a club that’s not about that if she needs someplace to belong so badly.
My random avatar is PERFECT today, since Becky recently called out Joyce on how she used religion to feel superior.
Yeah, see, THIS would be the part Dorothy was disappointed in and Sarah feared as Joyce and Liz were egging each other on.
And yeah, it’s pretty fucking awful to watch, even knowing she’ll grow out of it eventually and a lot of the egging on was trauma venting. Now they’ve expressed it, and worse, they believe it now.
I wish I had understood their fears better before, because when it happened I definitely read it as trauma venting, and was confused by the severity reactions to an extent. But yeah, this makes sense. I guess I just don’t have enough personal experience with people like Joyce and Liz, so I didn’t see what was probably going to happen next.
The thing is, Joyce and Liz definitely were, and that is definitely still a thing – hell, before Joyce was formally sliding into ‘loss of religion,’ when she made friends with Dorothy, she’d genuinely started losing some of the I Am Right And Know Bestness (something which, I’ll note, Becky still has – see her bit talking about being with Bonnie in heaven where Dina would be with them and realizing she was wrong all along.)
But this is very much a known phase for new atheists, especially young ones who were raised in very evangelical environments. They’ve rejected the God part, but not so much the proselytizing about The One True Way… just, now it’s the One True Way of Godlessness. Generally, they grow out of it after a bit, especially after having time to work through the trauma. If they’re VERY wise, they might eventually realize this is still a very evangelical Christian way of thinking and that their atheism is not even universal among atheists.
And then occasionally, you get Richard Dawkins.
Okay so definitely not gonna push this all day like I’ve been doing, just gonna be real concise entirely for my own “not checking the site a hundred times a day to argue” sake, but it’s worth pointing out that Joyce’s current behaviour is not how she was acting at first with Sarah and later Joe. When confronted by what her lack of belief now meant, she internalized it. I’m just a monkey, Heaven and Hell aren’t real so neither am I, and both times Joe was able to help her through that.
Joyce doesn’t know what she believes, because her atheism (and this strip is the first time she is calling it that) isn’t a belief in the non-existence of God, it’s a lack of belief in everything she was taught was an objective fact. Then Becky makes her defend these beliefs she doesn’t understand, she just knows that what she used to believe like the Earth being 6000 years old is factually wrong, and then Sarah browbeats her over and over with “you’re not really sorry”, “you deserve to suffer for your hubris”, “the person you used to be was annoying but better than this”, and finally “we’ll forgive you”; Sarah’s not trying to solve this, she wants it to go away, so Joyce has to dig her heels in harder. Joyce has to be right because being right is the only thing she has to defend herself against her friends.
Okay! I’m done! I’m running away to Bulmeria so I don’t keep coming back today and shooting my productivity dead with a gun!
Unless it’s more horrifying Sonic the Hedgehog facts!
More Sonic the Hedgehog facts please. I was culturally ignorant and now have to figure out how to access back Archie comics.
Go with IDW Sonic! It’s good! And it’s on sale like every other week!
https://www.comixology.com/Sonic-the-Hedgehog-Vol-1-Fallout/digital-comic/685810?ref=c2VyaWVzL3ZpZXcvZGVza3RvcC9ncmlkTGlzdC9jb21peG9sb2d5VW5saW1pdGVk
It’s written by authors who actually like each other and build off each other’s work! It contains ZERO Tommy Turtle!* It DOES contain a cool lemur with a stretchy tail power who we all love!
* If you have to ask, we cannot explain Tommy Turtle.
How dare you disrespect the legacy of Tommy Turtle, Sonic’s greatest and closest friend in the world, without whom he would never have become the hero he is today.
(apparently Tangle/Whisper is supposed to be canon by the standards of the romance mandates for the series, or at least that’s what thankskenpenders told me)
My source for such information as well, I have no attention span for podcasts and missed the Archie era except the very first Omnibus collection.
No, no. I am intrigued by the indigenous nazi ferrits and egg nuking abusive parent and Illuminate of grandparents. Where do I find those?
There is no place to purchase an official copy at this point, since they’re all out of print and delisted from digital storefronts.
Oh wait you want the fucked up shit
Yeah go check out thankskenpenders on tumblr. She’s done issue by issue covers of every single comic Archie made about Sonic, and it’s more fun to have a sensible person along for the ride than reading yourself; the weird moments mentioned don’t do much to detract from them being very dull comics.
As a bonus, while she’s still relatively early in the Ian Flynn run, TKP is also through the pre-Flynn era and the part she has gotten through covers a lot of the cleaning house after decades of the other writers doing really ridiculous crap (especially the last few years before he came onboard, referred to by fans as ‘The Dark Ages’,) which also serves as payoff for all those years of bad comics. In particular, all the fucked up echidna lore? Oh, Flynn has PAYOFF for that, and it is delicious.
It’s not always this extreme for new atheists, mind. This is a relative rarity, even if the few that are loud about it tend to make it seem otherwise. We just knew it 100% would turn out this way for Joyce specifically because this plot thread is very much a “being confident and smug about atheism is bad” storyline.
And because her initial belief was extreme. The stronger your faith was and the faster you lose it, the harder it is to take the loss and the more you feel a need to overcompensate. If she had believed more casually, it wouldn’t be such a system shock.
That makes a lot of sense. I wondered why I didn’t really have that phase, and I think it’s because religion was very minimal in my life. My parents’ version of Hinduism was taking me to temple once every 3 or so months, and not translating any scripture (idk any Indian languages), so temple was *walk around pretty statues and eat some carrot pudding after*. And at home, I had to say “god bless mom, dad, [my dog], and [my little brother]” before bed. It’s hard to realize that’s not at all comparable to how a lot of religious people here grew up, so of course they’d have a tougher time doing so
It’s also a thing with Joyce in general – though that may still be related to her religious upbringing of course. Remember way back how she threw herself into Dexter fandom? Watched a couple shows, went and ordered all the clothing she could find and wanted everyone to know she was the biggest fan.
Same deal.
Yeah, that would be part of the ‘is Joyce Like That due to religious abuse or neurodivergent?’ because she is DEFINITELY prone to hyperfixations. But the fact that people raised in really strict religious upbringings have a tendency to break HARD specifically because their faith tends to be inflexible is also a known phenomenon, much moreso than someone whose loss of faith is much more gradual and chill.
I myself find that question rather intriguing.
But as bizarre as it seems, I not as interested in the answer to this question as much as I am interested in exactly HOW this question will eventually be answered.
At least for the time being, the barrier between those two influences seems to be as indistinguishable as layers of marble cake.
In other words, there may very well be tons of overlap between her nature and nurture and their impact on her.
Honestly, I’m not sure you can. The question is one Willis has asked on Twitter on more than one occasion, with a ‘if anyone figures it out, let me know’ usually (he’s also said putting traits of his into Dina and Joyce and opening comments was how he learned some things about himself, to whit, while specific diagnosis is unlikely there’s probably a stripe or two of neurodivergence in there.)
Personally, based off my own less-abusive experience with religion, I can say if you’re prone to anxiety already it is WAY easier to absorb the toxic fear-based aspects of Christianity without necessarily getting the all-loving God idea as much. (Because, well, how loving can a God be when your takeaway is ‘don’t do these things or you will be PUNISHED FOREVER.’) And I could see someone prone to hyperfocus and hyperfixation zeroing in on the thing that gets PRAISE for being obsessed with (and punishment if you don’t, and it has this nice rigid set of RULES) and therefore the religiosity is a manifestation of the neurodivergence. But it’s just as possible that all of those came from the trauma, so… end result, who the fuck knows. The only conclusion that can be drawn is Joyce clearly has an anxiety disorder and PTSD.
Fascinating.
So anxiety disorders, including S.A.D., count as neurodivergence too?
This I did not know.
I just want someone to talk to Joyce about why this is problematic instead of saying “that was disappointing” or “this is worse than the Jesus stuff”.
For some reason. I look at Joyce, her attitude, glasses and current outfit. It feels different, revervsed like some sort of ANTI JOYCE!
January is way too cold for the Anti-Joyce outfit.
I feel like I should point out to Joyce that, in fact, the only thing atheists don’t believe in is deities. It is entirely possible to be an atheist and believe in ghosts, witches, reincarnation, crystals, unicorns, fairies, alien abductions, and quite a lot of other quite silly things that may or may not be properly categorized as “magic”.
You’d think that once a person rejects gods – or God, even – they’d go ahead and reject all of the supernatural at once, and perhaps even all the silly things as well… but unfortunately, despite the hype, atheism does not confer superior +4 rationality on nonbelievers. I wish. I have spent years of my life longing for my fellow atheists to really be kinder, smarter, better people than they are.
It’s extremely annoying.
The way I see it, and the lesson I’ve learned in regards to fellow atheists, and fellow x members of many groups of people I also classify as (as well as groups I don’t), is that “dunking on an extremely, laughably falsifiable concept is not in fact a high intellectual bar to leap”, and is not at all related to how kind they are.
Speaking as a nice polytheistic Baptist boy whose kinda into Science and whose religious thought is heavily colored by quantum theory:
Ghosts – yeah, but they aren’t what you think they are
Witches – some of my best friends are witches
Reincarnation – depends on how you define it and how you define identity. From a certain point of view, we’re all the same person.
Crystals – absolutely exist. If you use some of them right you can even pull human voices out of the air from the din of unheard noise that constantly surrounds you. (It’s called a crystal radio). If crystals help you focus your awareness, then it works for you. Crystal skulls are way cool.
Unicorns – Not yet, but once we engineer chickens into pet dinosaurs, we’ll get right on it.
Fairy abductions and alien abductions are not seperate things, just differences in the way your mind processes it.
I notice you left out demonic possession, the coming singularity and simultaneously believing in Relativity and Quantum theory.
Sorry, left out a line.
From a certain point of view, we’re all the same person. From another point of view, you’re a different person than you were a year ago.
One of my Dad’s friends identifies as Atheist…
And believes in The Secret.
The Secret, if you don’t know or remember, is a self-help book that proselytizes the power of wishing. If you just wish hard enough, the universe will grant it.
Well, it worked for the author of the book. They wished to get lots of money off of gullible people, and look!
Fair point. But I notice they had to match the wishing with the actions necessary to pull it off. Bilking the gullible takes work.
i am now imagining an agnostic-atheist who does believes in supernatural god entities but only to the extent that they work to unseat them from their thrones of deityhood so that they are no longer gods and they no longer have to believe in them. Like, “I believe this supernatural entity exists but not that it should BE god, and I believe in *my* right to kick their ass off their pedestal once and for all”
That kind of concept has shown up in some fantasy settings. “Sure, there’s magic and various powerful extra-dimensional entities, but none of them are gods in the ‘deserve to be worshiped’ sense.”
Yes, but do you want to be the one who tells them that.
If you’re Epic-level, you at least have a chance of taking them on.
True. I know far too many atheistic people who are wildly enthused about magical thinking eg The Secret. *rolling eyes emoji* Just replacing dubious beliefs with other dubious beliefs it seems sometimes. Not offense to true believers. Some people think, oh, if I can reject mainstream religion, I could believe *anything*…. and they do. Oy.
“Of course the Secret is ridiculous. But have you considered Bitcoin?”
Bitcoin is a belief system. So is the Internet. So are most governments.
Bitcoin is only marginally more ridiculous than paper money.
It’s much more ridiculous. It’s tulip mania level ridiculous, except that it’s also becoming an ecological threat of its own.
It’s not a currency, no matter its pretenses. It’s a pyramid scheme level speculative instrument with practical use only for black market and tax evasion.
But Doooooorothy, Joyce is only believing of other people of her chooooooosing
Youngster Joey and the top percentage of Rattatas, I sleep
Youngster Joyce and the top percentage of atheists, real shit???
Actually no, I get what she’s going through, but that doesn’t objectively make Joyce any less of a pain right now.
Oh no. Dorothy begins to seems unhappy to see Joyce! My fear is this it will arrive to the point where she can’t stand her anymore. After that, moving to another school will become a relief.
The irony is Dorothy is the one who showed Joyce atheists aren’t generally the narcistic, dismissive assholes she was raised to believe them to be.
Converts are almost always more zealous than those born to the faith.
Yeah, I have to imagine that it really hurts Dorothy to see Joyce acting out the very behavior she always thought atheists were supposed to be like. In a “is this how she sees me?” kinda way.
Joyce is lucky her eyes were closed because that disapproving look would have killed her on the spot.
And sadly Joyce truly became a fanatical neophyte of Atheism…
This kid’s actin’ silly. Call in the U.N. supersoldiers. To escort her to Gitmo.
The UN has no supersoldiers and they operate out of an old volcanic cavern in Iceland, not Gitmo.
Well we’re sure as heck not calling in those weirdos with yellow stripes on their shirts.
I like the story line but this also hurts my heart
As probably the biggest proponent of the “Joyce is hurting and everyone else sucks at recognizing it” position, I can safely say that I can’t wait for this arc to be over.
I don’t think Becky was totally wrong about Joyce’s faith being about superiority. Her lack of faith has an element of that as well.
It may not have been something she was doing intentionally, but at the very least it was a side effect.
I think it’s true that Joyce’s faith is about being right. It’s difficult to say what came first, Joyce’s love of rule or the way she was molded in her church. I guess she is grasping to some sort of authority here, and the glasses storyline was a prologue of that.
Meanwhile, Becky’s faith is very much in the vein of “living in the best of all possible worlds” by Leibnitz, because God is good -> Therefore, the universe that God chose to exist is the best of all possible worlds.
Something which is very much part of Becky’s compartmentalization and facade, tbh. Her faith is a way for not to accept the tragedy, stepford smiler like.
Becky strikes me as someone who actually identifies with the suffering of the faithful and martyrdom–and is not actually smugly superior about it because she actually DID suffer horribly.
its the same thing that many athiests go for. remember the stages of grief? these are the stages of athiesm
despair (you realize there is no god, and your identity it thrown into turmoil)
anger (you feel fooled, betrayed, tricked, and taken for a fool. it angers you)
directionless (now that your direction is gone, you have nowhere to go. this can also be called the “why bother” stage)
insufferability (now that you KNOW there is no god, you can’t believe you were ever so foolish and naive. you want to share this newfound wisdom with others, especially those that still believe in the stories you once held so dear. you see it as tearing the bandage off, but it comes off as you belittling others for their feelings)
Calming (having gotten the tantrums out of your system, you can now start to calm the heck down. you still sneer or groan when you hear religious things, like poking at an old wound, but you’ve learned to keep your fat yap shut.
background (at this point you don’t really care about it anymore. it has faded into the background and it doesn’t even register with you. the only things that make you cringe are christian rants, and atheist rants from the insufferable stage. kinda like looking at the jokes and cringy things you did as a kid and wanting to forget them.)
Well, maybe for the previously-significantly-religious Atheists.
Grown up a non-believer, you rarely, if ever, reach a point of radicalization about Atheism or Agnosticism or such. You just kinda gently find a place on that spectrum of non-belief and idle there for a while.
It’s not so much “atheist” as “converts to a new belief system”, I think.
It also significantly depends on what changed. I didn’t have an insufferable atheist phase, but I also didn’t have an inciting event for leaving Catholicism, I just….stopped. And found that it didn’t change anything else about my life except my parent’s opinion on how I spent Sundays.
Quite. It reminds me my aunt who was a staunch communist back before the 90s while now she is heavily into Catholicism.
Joyce is somewhere between “Directionless” and “Insufferability” now. Hopefully that means she’ll move on to “Calming” in the next couple chapters, but it looks like she has a couple more bridges to burn first.
people don’t usually move to “calming” without a reality slap to the face.
Depends on the person.
I think Dorothy’s winding up to deliver that slap. Who better to give it to her than her favorite non-Becky person?
I hope Dorothy actually talks to her about why this is problematic.
I am waiting for Dina to show up and Joyce to try out a ‘Shamesies Knux for god being fake’ with her and Dina concludes she’s ended up in some kind of parallel dimension where Joe can feel shame and Joyce is like THIS
[citation needed]
3% sounds either WAY outdated or just like a low number, or am I confusing it with the percentage of people who have no religious afiliation?
The latter, I think. As of the last breakdown I can find in 2014 from Pew, nones were 23% of the population, broken down as:
3.1% Atheist
4% Agnostic
8.8% No particular identifier, religion is not important to me
6.9% No particular identifier, religion is important to me
Joyce is being very unsweet right now.
I thought 3% was surprisingly low but I checked where I live and it’s only 6% o_O
Joyce is acting less like an atheist and more like someone who is angry at the God she’s says she doesn’t believe in anymore.
This may be a necessary stage. How do you process your grief at the loss of the known self, plus your anger at being lied to and pushed into a mold, without it.
Doesn’t make it any easier to watch though.
Becky went through something similar when she blew her closet to smithereens
The best thing of you be able to create your own avatar is to remember great moments and poses of before, like this.
That’s pathetic, give me a shoe.
Talk to me when you get enough a- adjectives to get below 0.1%.
It’s a shame you’re not ace or aro; that really helps.
Joyce you’re really making me hate you
After everything that happened during first semester, I can understand Joyce being turned off of her particular ultra-fundamental flavor of Christianity, as taught to her by her parents. ´What I can’t totally accept is her complete reversal to the opposite side of the spectrum of “total and unapologetic atheist”.
It just doesn’t seem natural… sort of like because someone had a bad experience with a specific model of car, they swore off of all motor vehicles entirely.
It makes sense when you consider the arc of Joyce finding out how much of what she was taught doesn’t jive with reality. It starts with “Atheists aren’t satan worshippers” through to “Even a pastor’s son can be an unabashed monster, and very real danger to you personally” and right on to “The people I thought cared about me growing up, that I was taught to respect and look to for guidance and help are okay with my friends and I dying so long as they don’t have to address an uncomfortable truth and reflect.” That kind of chain of realizations has a sort of momentum to it that drives a lot of people past “I need to be more willing to address uncomfortable truths and reflect myself in precisely the way they refuse to” and “So much of what I’ve been taught is this nonsensical house of cards/jenga that falls apart if any single piece doesn’t hold up” into the “And anyone who disagrees is just as stupid as I feel like I was” territory. Couple that with learned social patterns from growing up in a fundie cult, and what used to get positive responses and you get an insufferable atheist.
To riff on your metaphor, it’s like someone bought a car because everyone in their life told them it was essential, and then moved to the city. The people around them keep extolling replacing their car with a bike or scooter since you don’t have to worry about parking and it gets you where you need to go. They’re reluctant at first, keeping their car so they can visit home, but they use it less and less. Then one day when going to visit, they’re in a horrendous wreck that leaves them somewhat injured, but deeply psychologically rattled. They recover, get a new car, and are more cautious.
Then they’re in a worse wreck, and this time their friends were in the car with them. Instead of talking to their friends about how they can’t bring themselves to drive their car anymore (requiring making themselves feel deeply vulnerable and bring up how their need to have and drive a car put their friends in danger) they just sell the car and double down hard on the “who even needs a car in this day and age!” rhetoric, becoming that insufferable brand of city biker who goes on and on about how drivers are a menace and the devil and should never be allowed in city limits, etc. Even their friends who were encouraging them to switch to non-car transportation start feeling uncomfortable around them, but don’t feel like they can really say anything.
It’s also apparently a distinct and known phenomenon for certain people who were raised REALLY evangelical, ESPECIALLY the ones who were really fervent in their belief. Because they believed everything, it tends to be a lot more rigid than the people who were more selective and willing to treat the word of God as metaphorical at times, and so faced with things that challenge any of it they will either ignore and double down… or their faith SHATTERS, and that tends to include a lot of self-loathing about how they used to believe that can get directed outward.
Maybe it seems unnatural to you, but it’s actually a pretty common experience for those breaking away from toxic religion. Not universal, but definitely real. For many people in those environments all the parts of religion are wrapped up in one tight mess, too tightly tied together to neatly pick apart and just keep the good bits. Joyce commented on this early on when Becky was accepting Dina’s view on evolution. Evolution->No Eden-> No Fall/Original Sin-> everything they’ve been taught is wrong.
I think this thing where an idea being proven wrong instantly disproving all held ideas based on that idea goes by a name.
I think it’s called “Fractal Wrongness”.
It’s a pretty typical deconversion trajectory for people who grew up in a certain flavor of toxic religion. Which Joyce did, so.
It may even be *healthy*, within limits, so long as it eventually passes.
there is nothing like the zeal of a new convert
Hey… Dorothy… now would be an AMAZING time to have a supportive non-judgmental conversation where you actually listen to Joyce and her experiences and explain why what shes saying is hurtful even if she is “right”. Because it would be SUPER unhelpful to chastise her and try to make her feel guilty without acknowledging her feelings. Right Dorothy? RIGHT DOROTHY???
Oh, honey.
Yea I’m not hopeful.
You mean like the emotional labor Dorothy has been doing for Joyce since the beginning of the comic?
Now she’s got to start over again deprogramming her from being an atheist zealot instead of a Christian one.
Exactly!
I was trying to be lenient towards Joyce, but still going this hard the next day is too much.
I just do not like this version of Joyce, and it is not because she is an Atheist. I hate her because now she thinks that she is somehow, “better”, than others, simply for what they believe in. She is no better than her Mother/Fundie Community she thought she left behind; this is just a lateral move. This just goes to show that being a judgemental bongo is not the sole purview of a single group.
this are going to be some tiring years with Joyce…