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Or the D&D causes suicides, as opposed to people with certain mental issues need help, treatment and should avoid hobbies that can rely on knowing the difference between fantasy and reality….
Holy crap, I can’t believe I’m remembering this, but I think your avatar there is an MtG card, yes? Prodigal Sorceror or some such, 1/1 creature, tap to deal 1 damage…
Wanna know the best part about that “D&D causes suicides” thing? The suicide rate amongst D&D players is actually lower than average. They’d have to start killing themselves more than they do to even reach the national US average.
I imagine part of that is because a D&D group (at least a good one) is a circle of friends who spend time together on a regular basis. That’s both a functional support system and something to continue to look forward to, both extremely important things in mental illness and suicide prevention.
(Don’t quote me on that, though, it is just an educated guess and I’m sure there’s plenty of other factors)
In quite a few of these cases where “someone” is accusing a hobby of causing problems, the statistics actually indicate that it reduces those problems instead of increasing them. IIRC Games making kids violent has similar data (gamers being less violent due to having an outlet to release frustration safety).
Almost as if they are picking a hobby they do not like, something they can claim is universally objectionable, and claiming the hoby increases the objectionable action/lifestyle/effect/etc, and never actually doing the research to verify it is true.
Of course there is also scapegoating to pretend you are not at fault, and “forgetting” that correlation causation…
If games have thought me anything, is that just PUNCHING someone of lower level then myself can kill them, instantly. I hence try to avoid punching people.
I have one I “rescued” from the mall that I was gonna mail to a friend who likes laughing at them… “OH THE TITANIC HIT AN ICEBERG I HOPE THAT UNBELIEVER REPENTED BEFORE HE DROWNED”
yeah, kinda flat after the D&D one… there was one I had but lost that I think was about a dog that found God…?? (friend read it for me, I preferred to save brain cells)
Chick tracks are so funny that I actually thought they were a parody the first time I’ve seem them. It took quite a while before learning they were not.
I remember reading somwhere that because the author doesn’t talk much there is actually something of a debate still going on about if they are parodies or not.
Jack Chick may not make public appearances, but he has relatively(given its niche market) large publishing company and has been writing for over 50 years. He distributes his…beliefs worldwide in a surprising number of different languages.
He’s not quiet and there’s no ambiguity to what he actually believes.
I’ll take your word for it, but there will probably always be those who suspect it all to be an elaborate joke regardless of what he says, anyway.
The rest of us can carry on laughing at the Tracts and not giving a shit about the guy’s beliefs.
The D&D one was called ‘Dark Dungeons’ and recently, someone made a fully accurate movie of it with Jack’s permission, with him not realizing they were making fun of it.
I’ve always kind of wanted to send Jack Chick an email congratulating him for undermining faith in god. Just a short, “I know what you’re doing and good on ‘ya”. You know, to encourage him to keep doing what he actually does.
Is there an anti-Poe’s Law? Something that says, “Any serious criticism, done stupidly enough, will be mistaken for parody?” ‘Cuz I could see that, for Chick Tracts.
The one that stood out in my mind was when the little girl (Lisa) was being molested by the father who in turn let the neighbour join in, the mother was physically abusive towards her and the father gave her an std
the doctor instead of reporting him to the police got him to repent his sins and find god instead…
and apparantly they all lived happily ever after because everything was forgiven
Apparently the reason behind that one is that Chick Tract are designed to appeal to different groups of people that they wished to convert (children, people who live in poor inner city areas, fans of rock and roll etc.), so the reason WHY they thought that it’d be a good idea to make a strip saying that a serial child abuser just needs to accept Jesus into their lives and everything will be FINE is… well…
…It was designed to convert monsterous child abusers in prison, making them replace any guilt or responsibility they might fill with religion. Which, yeah…
There was another one which had an atheist who spent their entire life doing charity and being a good person going to hell when they died because they didn’t believe in God/try to convert others to Christianity, while a multiple murderer gets into Heaven because they converted at the last minute.
One of the oddest fanfic crossovers I’ve seen is Left Behind crossed with Stargate: SG1. I can’t bring myself to read it to found out how they reconcile the young earth creationism of LaHaye and Jenkins with Stargate’s timeline including events that happened millions of years ago.
omg thank you for telling me about that D&D thing that was so hilarious it made my night. I couldn’t even take it all in one go i was laughing so much.
i thought the left behind series was actually a pretty good piece of fiction honestly… but i look at things like that as pure works of fiction not… i dunno… biblical fiction? could have made a good 14-part miniseries, or else a decent hbo original imho. id have watched it.
What. How did you arrive at Left Behind as good fiction? It’s terrible. I don’t just mean its theology (which is pretty evil!) I mean as fiction, it is bad. It engages in the authors’ pseudofetishes, and the characters are monsters (Not for their beliefs, although their beliefs are terrible, but because of their sheer inability to behave like people). And I don’t just mean the villains, or the… protagonists (I can’t use heroes for people who know about widespread nuclear devastation, and sit on their ass). Random people have totally forgotten that the children of the world are GONE. There is no cries for blood from their parents, and they don’t seem to really care. And it’s not a commentary on how people who aren’t saved are terrible – the protags are just as awful.
Personally I feel like the Left Behind books are less preachy than the Chick-tracts. Yes they are a literal interpretation of what’s in (some) parts of the bible, but I feel Jack Chick went further and layered his own bias on top of that.
The books (if I recall) involved themes like second chances and redemption. The tracts are more like “if you haven’t been living my personal brand of Christianity for your entire life, then you can go straight to hell this moment”.
Overall I still only rate them a B, because I think they go on for to long, but I can at least read them without getting a headache.
I had a fundie type quite excited when I expressed happiness at being given a Chick tract, when I told her I didn’t have that one yet. Then she got quite insulted when I informed her that I collected them to make fun of them.
It really is bad how anti-knowledge fundies are after getting, considering that so much of the foundations of modern science were laid and preserved by deeply religious and spiritual people.
It is not even a case of them not being able to co-exist, you just need to accept the limits of both science and religion, and accept that no “holy” book should be taken as 100% divine truth, and your beliefs could be proven wrong.
The way I see it, some people can’t follow the trend of civilisation forward (things go to fast and they can’t adapt), and take a purposely ultra conservative stance to cope.
From an European’s point of view, the USA are pretty much going toward a religious dark age.
To say, creationnism only has been gaining traction in the US and radicalising (passing anti abortion/contraception/etc laws) in the last decade or so.
Pfft, when the second crusade comes around, just tell them that all the “godless heathens” are in some place inhospitable (The arctic tundra perhaps?), and they will all die while searching for them.
I’ll concur that it’s damn scary for Americans too. I live in a very red section of Texas. We all know that’s saying something.
I’m an atheist and in general have to hide that or at the very least simply not mention it. If I do I run the risk of becoming a pariah, being spat upon, having CPS called on me, and of having people try to surreptitiously convert my young son.
I mean, we all know that atheists have no morals at all because there is no higher power telling them right from wrong. So obviously neighbors should avoid me and my son must be protected because I’m obviously abusing him even if there is absolutely no evidence of this.
I’m just thankful I live in an area that’s just as Catholic as it is evangelical/fundamentalist. In general the Catholics tend to have a more rational and realistic view of non-believers than the Fundies. I don’t know if I’d be able to keep from going crazy if I lived in one of the counties that’s something like 80-90% evangelical fundy.
I would disagree as I remember my childhood being much less influenced by fundamentalism than now, but I think that comes down to where in Texas you live. I grew up in a very diverse area of San Antonio and spent a lot of time in Austin as well.
I now live in a small city that is more-or-less isolated from the major cities in the state. So of course the small, insular city and it’s surrounding minute ranch towns are going to be far less secular and have more of the good ol’ boy politics than a fairly large multicultural city.
What’s scary? That we as a society have decided to believe that our society would be better off if it followed slightly different rules?
Do you think that we on this side of the pond are less scared by some of the decisions you’ve made?
(also, I feel like the US has almost as many divisions culturally as some of the various European countries; lumping 300 million people together is almost as problematic as lumping the 1 billion or so Europeans all in the same basket)
AFAIK, very few, if any states are trying to limit birth control in the sense of pills, condoms, and other stuff that like that prevents conception. Certain places ARE trying to limit access to abortion (the Supreme Court ruling is fairly clear that we can’t outlaw it entirely) because the pro-life side of that argument sees it as honest-to-goodness killing. So to someone on the other side of the argument your comment comes across as “those hicks in the states are trying to stop murder! And that’s terrible!”
You don’t have to agree with me, but I would have you can at least understand where a different perspective comes from.
‘slightly different rules’. Totally ignoring reality in creating educational curricula is a wildly different rule – an important one, although itself only a single rule.
“also, I feel like the US has almost as many divisions culturally as some of the various European countries,”
You can feel that all you want – it ain’t true. Meriken are insular and fairly homogenous. That you think the occasional passive-aggressive swipe at northerners or flyover country equates to the difference that the French (or basically anyone else) feels from every other neighbor they have, shows how little you know about what actual cultural differences look like. There’s often tensions that date back /millenia/, underscored by multiple wars between ethnic groups. The USA just doesn’t have separate cultures in the same way. It’s probably better thought of as an umbrella for extremely similar subcultures. There’s a bigger divide between urban and rural, but hey, the same exists in most european countries – with extremely different ideas of what that entails, even!
People know the damn pro-life argument. Of course they claim it’s murder – they just only do it when it’s pregnant women, and not anyone else who could provide life-saving organs with invasive-but-survivable medical care. Given that ‘pro-life’ people never push for this shit in general, it is a fucking lie – they just don’t consider the bodily autonomy of women relevant. When straight white men have to give up their actual, factual livers, we’ll talk about how ‘pro-life’ is a genuine belief that is sincerely held.
At the risk of playing “but you”, European elites currently approach economics the way Creationists approach biology. The austerity fetish is about as intellectually respectable as anti-vaccine people.
The austerity fetish is in response to the government will do it all but I wont pay taxes or do anything for the community.
I’m talking about the Greeks who stayed in Greece as opposed to the ones who left to do that culturally subversive thing called a work ethic.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. How exactly are people who are jobless, have no money and are forced to live in small rooms with ten other people or more supposed to pay for Greece’s debts?
*Facepalms* Yeah, that was the problem in greece, people just refused to work. It wasn’t rampant corruption or tax evasion, no no…
The austerity fetish precedes greece, at any rate. PRetending it’s anything but a naked attempt to tear down what you’ve built up for your poor is a sick joke at best.
I think it’s because the number of Americans who actually identify as being associated with any religion at all is steadily shrinking. I heard a survey that said as many as 20% of Americans had no religious affiliation whatsoever, and that trend is increasing. People that might have been kind of noncommittal about religion fifty years ago, but didn’t want to become social pariahs by dropping it are dropping it today. So you’re left with the hard core believers who are really load and insist on getting what they want as loudly as possible. They are also scared because they see mainstream culture moving steadily away from them, which is what the whole Left Behind/Rapture obsession is about. “You’ll be sorry once the end times come!”
Well, from my view of the situation, it is only parts of the US (and Canada, to a lesser extent) that are falling into the dark ages, and forces are finally mobilizing to fight back at the ignorance.
As a recovered fundie myself, I’m pretty certain that Willis isn’t referring to Chick tracts here, but rather to the honest-to-God textbooks by publishers like A Beka Book, and which kids in Christian schools and homeschools are routinely subjected to. I remember the math and spelling/grammar books as being okay (and what a shocker, those ended up being my strong subjects in high school), but the things purporting to be science and history textbooks were in reality nothing of the sort.
I would think that they would be “decent” on most history material.
All the history courses I took in grade-high school tended to focus on the last few centuries, where there is not much room for creationism to mess up, unless your books were also doing things like re-labeling causes of the US civil war…
I’d imagine that Creationist textbooks would struggle with ancient cultures. Like the ones that were around more than 6,000 years ago?
I also assume that the creationist history books would claim that the Hebrews built the pyramids. And would they cover Greek/Roman mythology at all? That was actually a big part of my English classes some years.
I was raised on “it was about state’s rights” propaganda as well. We were also told that slavery was almost non-existent in Texas since it was illegal in Mexico and Texas had been too new of a state by the Civil War to have many wealthy land owners (just to be clear, that is total BS).
I was also taught that Jim Crow and segregation weren’t all that bad in Texas. Not as bad as the Deep South, anyway.
And my classes and books never even mentioned the fact that Latinos and Native Americans were often considered “colored” for the purposes of Jim Crow, or the “round-ups” they used to do where they frequently deported US citizens because they were Latino.
After coverage of the Texas Revolution and/or the Mexican American War, Mexico and Central America basically got forgotten in our textbooks, as did anything to do with Hispanic/Latin people. Even in college this was true. And I went to high school and college in a city that is about 75% Hispanic.
Usually they either get ignored or rounded down in order to fit within the 6000 years.
The ones I saw noted that Egyptians built the pyramids but they focused on the Hebrew slave labor for it and used that to segue into the Exodus stuff. Greeks and Romans get mentioned, but mostly Romans (again to segue mostly into prosecution of early Christians) (lots and lots of talk about feeding Christians to lions, very little talk about Christian church growing because an emperor converted and began forcing formerly “pagan” tribes to convert). Much like general history textbooks of the time that I saw these, they didn’t mention at all ancient Eastern civilizations or ancient African civilizations or much about the Germanic tribes outside of “evil pagan murderers” digs.
Willis would be far more capable of fully answering this one than I am as this is all mostly remembered from friends showing me stuff their Sunday Schools gave them.
Heck, I went to a public school and my textbooks never once mentioned Latinos, Native Americans, & etc getting lumped into the colored people category. Only reason I learned about that as a child was because I am Latina and so my dad told me.
First time commenter because I have ridiculously strong feels about textbooks. Actually, a lot of textbooks are TERRIBLE with history. The reason being is that a lot of fundies are all about American exceptionalism (and by American, they only mean the USA). This creates a whole host of issues, mainly because in every scenario the USA is always the best and most correct. It washes over things like the Trail of Tears, slavery, women’s rights, LGBT people in history, people of color in history….you get the picture. And that’s not even getting into the fact that world history is only a blip on the radar because it’s clearly not as important as ‘murica.
The reason why I get really upset with this is that all major textbook companies are in Texas. This means that this kind of thinking about history creeps into even “regular” texts, and those get distributed around the country. It makes me RAGE and I’m really glad that there’s an increased push in education to move away from textbooks in favor of primary sources, news articles, and the like.
Seriously. To zero in on the ‘no history of POC’ that you mentioned… Almost everything I know about Puerto Rican history and all the wrongs committed against us, I learned from my dad. My US History textbooks never once mentioned Puerto Rico, and it’s a commonwealth of the US, so, ya know, you’d think we’d get a shoutout.
Know what’s even worse (late to the party I know, sorry, am rereading)? Canadian schools use those same damned textbooks the American publishers use, because we don’t have the population to insist on our own. So we get the whole USA! USA! thing as well, with the teachers throwing in some stuff about Louis Riel and the Metis, and that’s about it.
A southern friend I had once was genuinely surprised when we didn’t know what the “War of Northern Aggression” was as that was how the war was titled in her history books. There was also a weird chronology to it in order to erase all the aggressive actions the South did at the beginning of the war. And of course, the whole thing was about “state’s rights” rather than slavery.
There was some terse but interesting conversations as some of us tried to detangle that particular knot of propaganda.
I live in North West Alabama, which is decidedly more liberal than some other parts of the state. Since Bama was kind of the epicenter of Jim Crow and was a major battleground of the Civil Rights movement, there really wasn’t an “official” attempt to whitewash history here, at least not in school. It’s kind of hard to say “it wasn’t that bad here” when you can produce footage of Bull Conner’s police force attacking peaceful protesters with firehoses and attack dogs. I have relatives who will go on about “The War of Northern Agression .” My high school history was pretty matter of fact about the realities of the Civil War and Jim Crow, though. In some ways, at least in Alabama, We were forced to confront the realities of institutional racism in ways that some of the South, or even the North have never been forced to. For example, I’m trying to imagine how the national media would react if Birmingham had New York P.D. style stop and frisk.
As someone who wears “damnyankee” as a badge of pride, but who went to high school in the South, I’ve taken to always referring to it as “the War of Southern Aggression”. Which is honestly a lot more historically accurate.
Disclaimer is that it’s been several decades, so we’re going on old memories of a twelve-year-old kid. However, here’s some highlights from what I remember from the A Beka world history book:
– The early chapters were all about the book of Genesis (and maybe other early OT books, I don’t remember).
– As somebody else mentioned, the Romans and their persecution of Christians were kinda stars of the story for a while.
– The section on the Middle Ages never referred to the Roman Catholic church by name, instead consistently called it “a distorted form of Christianity.” All of medieval Europe’s problems are blamed on them following the wrong brand of belligerent religiosity. A lot of adoration was bestowed upon anti-papist “rebels” such as John Wycliffe and Jan Hus.
– Every major player in history received extreme value judgments based on how godly they are. I seem to remember the book really hating the Medicis, in particular.
– The book went completely apeshit once it got to the twentieth century and socialism/Communism show up. I remember at one point it had you thinking that people were fleeing Sweden in droves because the taxes were higher than 100%.
I don’t remember that much from the American history one, but here are a couple of things:
– It really went out of its way to extol the nineteenth century and its policies. In particular, it repeatedly hit you over the sledgehammer about how there were no income taxes, and America did just fine financing itself with the protective tariff. The book must have used the words “protective tariff” about 3,251,589,264 times.
– The only other thing I remember is that John Steinbeck was a socialist, anti-American propaganda artist. He wrote this awful propaganda tract called “The Grapes of Wrath” greatly exaggerating the plight of the Okies, and somebody made a movie of it, but one day they showed that movie in Soviet Russia (or did the movie show you? Hmm), with the intention of showing everyone how the American capitalist system had failed, and the tables were turned, because the Russians all ended up feeling jealous of the Okies, because they were even worse off! Ha ha, sucks to be you, John Steinbeck!
To be fair, that’s actually how evolutionary biologists go about their day to day lives. Halfway through a phylogenetic analysis of a linkage map of key mutations, they just stand up wave their arms akimbo and go “hurr hurr, me no understand God” right before plotting to bury the incontrovertible evidence that Satan faked all dinosaur bones everywhere.
Seriously, if anyone got cheated out of their biology education like Becky or just wants some sweet evolution facts, let me know, I’m happy to talk about that stuff
So, are there any ecological niece that no dinosaurs were known to inhabit? Like, there are herding herbivors and fast predators and scavengers and so on. Are there insect eaters? Fruit eaters? (Wait? How old are fruit again?) Burrowers?
Lots of small dinosaurs were insect eaters. Fruits eaters I’m not 100% about, but what with herbivores eating pretty much anything they can get their mouths near to, I’m pretty sure there were a few (I actually think I used to know the name of quite a few, but they’re just out of reach right now). Burrowing is hard to tell, considering that you can’t really tell what animal a burrow belongs to, but it’s such a common behavior that it would be unlikely for it not to be inhabited by dinosaurs. Again, this is mostly a small dinosaurs thing. I recommend reading Mark Witton’s (he focuses on pterosaurs, but he knows a ridiculous amount about dinosaurs as well) blog at markwitton-com.blogspot.co.uk. Also, unrelated to your questions, but hopefully still interesting, a dinosaur has been discovered that uses membranous, bat-like wings to fly rather than feathery ones. Yi qi, which is a contestant for shortest scientific species name ever, belongs to the scansoriopterygds, a group known for their ridiculously long fingers. Yi qi also possessed an extended wrist bone that acted like another finger in terms of support.
Oh, and when looking up anything related to paleontology, avoid David Peters. He’s a kind of atheist fundie, although his opinion of himself might invalidate the atheist bit. He photoshops photos of fossils and zooms in until they’re pixelated, and then claims to have found patterns that no one else can see. If you want to know more about this, there’s the article “Why the world has to ignore ReptileEvolution.com” (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/world-must-ignore-reptileevolution-com/).
Oh, and Spinosaurus was a quadruped, because its legs were too short to support it otherwise. It really resembled a crocodile to a ridiculous extent, to the point that it is probably the first fully aquatic dinosaur (outside of penguins) that we know of. If you want to know more about feathers on dinosaurs and various other dinosaur-related subjects, here’s a youtube channel that covers various such issues, even providing information on which groups of dinosaurs had feathers and where on there body they had them: https://www.youtube.com/user/GamerCreator12345.
Awesome. Thanks so much. But as for burrowing, wouldn’t it be possible to see if something was the equivalent of mole? Almost blind, enormous front legs, smallish? Anything like that?
I’ll throw general bio education and shared commiseration over shitty HS and lower biology education due to this stuff as well (True story, my Biology class in HS’s entire section on evolution was the teacher angrily stating “it’s a theory. It’s wrong. You shouldn’t believe in it”. AP was better, but that was only because I ended up teaching that section [complicated story with a teacher having a mid-life crisis and abandoning the class halfway through the year]).
You have my condolences. In my opinion teachers foisting off that ignorant crap on helpless children is criminal, and makes me very angry such stupidity is allowed to happen in schools.
Well, there’s a difference in who’s being presented with the information. Becky seems to be having some trouble accepting it, but she’s at least showing some willingness to try and learn.
I think Dina may not be used to Young Earth Creationists outside of Joyce. So I see it more as a look of bafflement and culture shock, like she’s getting her first taste of exactly what brand of propaganda and denial of knowledge has built Joyce to be the way she is.
So yeah, definitely a “I have my work cut out for me” as you note with maybe a “what kind of crap were you and Joyce raised with” thrown in for good measure.
I think Dina’s just giving a random example. Actually I’m not sure how much she knows about ancient humans since her interests have been on dinosaurs instead.
Yes, but they were hardly human. Depending on who I gives the numbers, creatures we can safely start calling “humans” started popping up somewhere around 100 to 250 thousand years ago.
Homo Erectus is widely acknowledged as a true human species. They made stone hand axes and utilized fire for cooking and probably had rudimentary language. From a standpoint of longevity, Homo Erectus is the most successful human species we know off from the fossil record. Homo Erectus fossils have been found from as early as 1.5 million years ago to as late as 70,000 years ago with some debate as to whether Homo Ergaster was a subspecies of H. Erectus or was a common ancestor that eventually led to H. Neanderthal and H. Sapiens. If H. Ergaster is considered a subspecies species of H. Erectus, then the H. Erectus goes back even further to 1.8 million years ago. While H. Ergaster and H. Erectus didn’t have our intelligence, they were undeniably smarter than anything else that walked the planet at the time, walked fully upright and were skilled tool users as well as tool makers. They were Human in every way that mattered. They may not have been H. Sapiens, but humans have been around a Hell of a lot longer than 6000 years. Incidentally, the autocorrect kept trying to make Homo Erectus “Homosexuality Erectus,” for whatever that’s worth.
I was fully expecting that to be a link to an article about one of the times they’ve found dildos at an archaeological site.
I guess I mentally placed the emphasis on one word rather than the other.
who are the asshole 3, btw? people who come to mind are: malaya, carla, mike, ruth, mary, blaine, toe-dad, faz (sal and sarah are omitted cuz we like her).
Eh, most catholics realise that a big part of the bible was made from oral legends written down by people an hundred years or more after things happens.
So, not to be taken litterally.
Yes. The 4004 BC date is only one of a number of different calculations various folks performed, specifically that of Bishop Ussher. It’s widely accepted by U.S. fundamentalists because it was the one given in the hugely popular Schofield Reference Bible in the 19th century, which is also what popularized the entire Rapture theory/chronology that had been made up a couple years before by a guy named Darby.
Google any of this; it’s weird. The Rapture was invented more recently than the telephone.
Eh, most catholics realise that a big part of the bible was made from oral legends written down by people an hundred years or more after things happens.
So, not to be taken litterally..
According to Daniel the Human, there’s also the fact The Book has has translation errors (accidental & DELIBERATE), Holier-Than-Thou Pricks editing/straight-up-rewriting parts because THEY deemed it’s current version “Heresy”, people paying more attention to part X & ignoring part B, etc.
He says it’s best to take note of the important part tho; “Love one another, as I have loved you”. Sounds pretty simple to me…
You know the Vatican is against a literal reading of Genesis? Young Earth Creationists are mostly protestant…and Americans. The Director of the Vatican Observatory is known for saying ‘the Bible isn’t a science manual’.
are you saying that my plan to bring about a flood shall never bear fruit?? then how can i possibly justify the past fortnight of hedonism? man, science is hard
I know the Pope isn’t liked by Protestants and certain other groups. But are Catholics severely reviled throughout the States? I know of this divide in Ireland tho.
Not in my (limited) experience. I suspect that it’s only really common in the ‘join or congregation in the second first holy church of GOD or burn forever in hell.’
I have no idea if my experience of more tolerant churches is the norm or the exception.
There are some parts of the US where anti-Catholic feelings still reside. Coming from Kentucky as a child I did occasionally hear the term “mackerel-snatcher” used for a Catholic.
Catholics can be strongly disliked or distrusted in areas where the Fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant denominations reign. It is not uncommon to hear some of my very Southern Baptist very fundy relatives talk about the evil “Jezebel Church.”
In general, though, American Catholics are more moderate than American Evangelical Protestants. Really, the only area where this isn’t true is when it comes to abortion and birth control access. And even then that’s speaking of the Church’s position. Individual Catholics are, in my experience, far more likely to approve of birth control usage and/or be pro-choice than individual Evangelical Protestants.
There’s kind of a sliding scale of fundamentalism. At the shallow end are the Anglican derivatives like Episcopalian and Methodists who are kind of Catholic Lite, though individual congregations can vary, of course. Then you move down to the various Baptists, with Southern Babtists at the higher, more tolerant end, the Free Will Baptists kind of in the middle and Primitive Baptists at the low end. At this point, you’re in full Creationism mode with just a bit of wiggle room for practical science. Below that come the crazy sects like The Church of Christ and Seventh Day Adventists who not only reject anything science oriented, but believe that they are “The One True Path” and everyone else is going to Hell. To be fair, so do some of the others higher on the list, but at least they’re not as vocal about it. Below this are snake handlers and the like who view anything created in the last century or so with suspicion.
Up high on the list, Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists and the like, you’ll get acknowledgement that science is real and the rationalization that evolution is God’s creation process with quotes that “A thousand years are like a day to God” and the like.
Much below the Methodists, you get this weird cognitive dissonance, especially among fundamentalist Sci Fi and Fantasy fans where they can enjoy stuff that directly contradicts their beliefs while saying, “It’s just a story.” I had a fundamentalist friend who loved Harry Potter and was a regular at my weekly D&D games in the early 2000’s. I made the mistake of talking theology with him once. It was in relation to the fictional Forgotten Realms Pantheon and somehow segued into the adoption of Christianity by the Romans and their co-opting all the Pagan festivals and rituals. He left that evening and he never came back. The few times I saw him in public, he would either not acknowledge me, or would greet me in the friendly way you greet a stranger you’ve never met. He was a great guy with a vivid imagination and good storytelling skills, so I regret his leaving the group. But he’s a prime example of how fundamentalist teaching fucks people up sideways. They have to compartmentalize their intelligence and don’t deal at all well with things that tear those partitions down.
In Ireland, I.recon it is partly caused by one religion being the one of the English invaders. (all the bombings were about this)
Grmbl want to look that up but phones ain’t practical.
Yeah. In general Catholics tend not view the Bible as being strictly literal. Especially Genesis and other parts of the Old Testament.
For example, a Catholic is more likely to say that if the universe started with the Big Bang, well who’s to say God didn’t put things in place intentionally to cause that Big Bang?
A Fundamentalist Protestant is more likely to laugh and say that there was no Big Bang at all and anyone that believes it is an ignorant fool.
I went to a Catholic high school where I took a medical ethics course taught by a priest….
…who covered both the pro-life and the pro-choice sides of the abortion debate fairly.
(Also his take on birth control was that while the Church advocates abstaining from sex until marriage, God still gave humanity the ability to choose, and if people are going to be choosing to do things with their parts, then we might as well make sure we’re doing it safely.)
I went to a Catholic school and we covered Dinosaurs (including them being millions of years old) in grade school…. and evolution i junior high, and theories about the probability of life on other planets…
Heck, I always got the feeling the proper Catholic view of Evolution is “Hey, we found one of the tools God used to create us.”
It’s unfortunate that due the fundies brand of crazy, it’s colored the perception of many people that if you tell them you’re Catholic or Christian then they automatically think that you don’t believe in evolution and stuff.
Especially if you’re actually in one of the many moderate/liberal mainline Protestant branches (Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc). It makes me sad that the loudest voices are the crazy fundie ones. Like, we do a lot of good things in our world/communities, we just get shouted down by the “REPENT, SINNER!!!!” types. Maybe we need better PR?
I didn’t realize Catholicism seemed much better off with regards to evolution than other Christian subgroups. I mistakenly assumed narrow-mindedness would be prevalent across them for evolution (though other things, likely so).
What? Well, that’s just great. Last week at debate club I got in trouble for making an ad hominid attack, and now I find they’ve been doing it for millions of years? I’m calling bullshit!
It’s a good thing this storyline is nearly over, because I’m starting to get tired of Dina and Becky. THEY’RE GREAT AND I LOVE THEM TOGETHER, but still.
Heretic! This is all the comic should be about from now on. Willis should just make a spin-off strip and put the rest of the cast in it so that he can keep this essence pure and strong.
yes, but unless evolution has made an exception and inexplicably given them monkey feet which they can hold out of shot, they are still not holding hands! we shall not let this go. say it with me brothers and sisters: “hold hands and look at pictures of dinosaurs!”
Going by past experience, they probably found it inconvenient to let go, turn the page, and then clasp hands again after about the third page turned, amd defaulted to just enjoying each other’s company.
there are work-arounds. if they find a comfortable way to lie down, then they can flip with one hand while holding the other. personally, i prefer to lean back and rest the book against my legs
well it’s a good thing every single christian has the exact same experiences and upbringing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You can tell for a fact that evolutionist scientist don’t have access to time travel by the fact that there are evolutionist scientists around. If we had time travel most of us would be buddy-riding on dinosaurs and high fiving all day long instead of going “hurrrr” at meetings.
That’s how they hide the evidence of the time machine. Those scientists going “hurrr” are actually all planted robots to throw off the trail of Time Poachers.
The jist of things is that Joyce and Becky’s upbringing is directly based on Willis’ own life. Several other commenters frequently also talk about how what they’re going through is also pretty much how they were raised.
Just take it as a good sign Willis. If somebody doesn’t believe the level of crazy that’s really out there, then that’s one more noncrazy person in the world. It’s a reassuring sign of sanity.
This is kinda the problem. The christian community often acts like its one group when in reality you put up some of their beliefs at others and they will say “that’s crazy I don’t think anyone believes that”. -basically- you have the seventh day adventists who believe the bible literally. You have fundamentalists that can be any religion and just use their religious text to support their ideas ( the reason we have screwed up schools, education and the fact its year 2015 and people are still psycho about the idea of a non christian leader). Believers in a God who just seek reassurance and justification from their community( most common) annoying christians people complaintsn about) Spiritualists who’ve modeled their faith around a religion( what most “christians” and religious people who aren’t buttholes are). Agnostic people who were raised christian, and aethists afraid of death who trick themselves into believing. All these people of the christian variety would call themselves “christian” but most would be highly uncomfortable among any other community.
Remember how Joyce said her family has switched churches several times, how that other bongo acted like scouting churches was a past time . Its very rare to find a group bigger than a few who have similar beliefs on all aspects of religiin
I had thought Dina was referring to the falsified dates from Shinichi Fujimura’s hoaxed finds, but I went and checked and she’s got her date estimate correct.
I like this. Becky is clearly motivated rebel against her fundamentalist upbringing. One may infer that her father’s actions have a lot to do with that, especially considering that they have all been done in the name of religion. It stands to reason that Becky would want to disassociate herself from that.
None of this changes the fact that Becky has basically experienced the same education as Joyce. She’s been taught a particular worldview starting in early childhood. The roots of her beliefs about the nature of certain things are going to be pretty deeply embedded. I would imagine that some of those beliefs may take significant time to unlearn.
There’s an interesting internal conflict going on here, and I would be interested in seeing it explored further.
I’m not sure that the video proves your point or that the song fits the story line, but Mahiru Inami’s father does share a number of traits with Becky’s.
Both Joyce and Becky are Fundies, but two totally different outlooks on what they’ve been taught it appears.
Becky reminds me of most people I know, whatever their religion. Most people go to church on Sunday and that’s about it. Becky’s attitude seems to be like that – her beliefs seem to be more world encompassing than just religion even though all of her school books were religious in one form or another: but she also seems to understand that there are other’s who don’t think like her, and not be too upset about it. It’s just getting over that little ‘the world is a lot older than 6000 years that’s seems to bother her most’. Yet she’s willing to consider proof.
Joyce got the same upbringing, but swallowed every word of it with no worries, That others may not think like her, never occurred to her – till college apparently. And she simply assumed they just didn’t know any better, so she’d gladly correct their thinking. Proof, no proof it’s all faked.
Those fossils were just God testing us. [Haven’t figured that theory out yet].
Wicca doesn’t need propaganda. We don’t spread it. We don’t want it.
Yeah, and it’s interesting that Joyce is smacking face first things she can’t just hand-wave into what she was taught. More and more she is having to be as curious and accepting of the world and what is true as Becky is trying to be and all the time the little voice in the back of her head is saying that this is how good people start walking down the road to Hell.
Becky has the dubious ‘advantage’ of being someone already pre-damned by her family’s religious values. I think that may help her take the rest of their teachings less at word; if they were wrong about ‘dem gays,’ what else could they be wrong about?
Yeah, that’s a major difference. To Joyce, it’s “if they are wrong about my friend, maybe not everything they told me is true”. To Becky, it’s “they are wrong about me. They’re probably equally wrong about a lot of stuff.”
Wicca fundamentalists would be highly transphobic, probably, and also be an actual wiccan. Most people who say they are wiccans are actually neo-wiccans, because wicca is an initiation based religion. So there ya go.
Hem, sorry to interject, but I think you might want to nuance “Wicca doesn’t need propaganda. We don’t spread it. We don’t want it.”
Wicca is a rather wide movement, and Wiccan scriptures and texts and ideas can be and are proselytized like any other…
You may not spread it, but others do. Through social networks, “Gaia consciousness meetings”, covens, congregations, seminaries… Not all proselytism is door-to-door evangelism
Dina’s many, many talents aside, teaching is not one of them. “I’ve already explained this concept once. How comes you do not understand it?”
FUDGE YOU, people who wrote Becky’s and Joyce’s textbooks. It’s one thing when a poor duped homeschooled sap believes in Inteligent Design, but the people who write textbooks and claim to be scientists have NO EXCUSE. YOU ARE LYING TO CHILDREN, POOPHEADS. FUDGE YOU
It is a standard (religious) right wing attack method. Make yourself “look to be credible” in the area you are attacking, and begin making up stuff that conforms to your beliefs, but not science. Unfortunately man are not able to tell that there is no logical basis for the “facts”, or have been conditioned to not blindly believe.
Happens all the time in the Climate Change debate as well, and the war on drugs, and poverty, and well it is a long list…
…if someone kickstarts that concept (with suitably changed names and characters) it would be AWESOME!!!! Indiana Jones-style paleontologists, fighting rivaling paleontologists in the gobi dessrt and holding hands in museums.
*beckasaur, trampling through on horseback
Becky: *whip-snatches a small clay pot
Dude: “OW!!! MY HAND!!!”
Dina: “This belongs in a museum!!”
Dude: “DO YOU NOT SEE ALL THESE CRATES HEADED TO THE SMITHSONIAN!!!?”
Maybe it’s research into the ancestry of that species of lizards that reproduces by using lesbian sex to stimulate self-fertilization (I may be misremembering something here about the way they produce embryos)?
From https://paleobiodb.org/ it looks like there hasn’t been any, although there have been lots of brachiopods and ammonites found on one of the other Aegean islands.
Here you go. All available to read online, except for a few that were so awful they just pretend they don’t exist. http://chick.com/catalog/tractlist.asp
Crocoduck: slang for “Spinosaurus”. Short legs apparently forced it into a usual stance similar to that of a crocodile, while it’s long snout resembled a crocodile. And it’s a dinosaur, so pretty close to birds and it definitely had feathers.
A large part of her problem isnt ( just ) that shes miseducated.
Humans are actually terrible at picturing large numbers and putting them in proportion.
Almost no one is able to intuitively think with “Deep-time”.
6000 years out of millions would be almost a reasonable assumption. But the earth isnt “millions” of years old Its Billions .
We say billions all the time, but most of us dont grasp how vast that is.
I took Archeology in College and this was one of the first lessons.
The Professor created a time-line and then transferred it to toilet paper.
Actual rolls of toiletpaper.
All of human written history was only the in first inch of the first sheet if toilet paper.
Then he started stacking a ridiculous amount of rolls on the front of the classroom from the floor to the ceiling. and asked us to guess how many?
Even knowing the scale, most people guess wrong. It was around 50 rolls. ( i forget the exact amount It was a while ago. ) .
Then he passed around the toilet paper rolls around the whole auditorium , which had a full Earth geological timeline written on it, in black marker.
i don’t think Becky really needs defense. I think it’s pretty admirable that she has been raised to believe one thing and is now at least open to the idea that something that is radically different might be true. she is learning and growing, that is always worth applauding.
“A large part of her problem isnt ( just ) that shes miseducated.
Humans are actually terrible at picturing large numbers and putting them in proportion.”
Yes THIS very much.
Numbers past a certain point just cant be visualized, we cant intuitively compare things.
Theres 7 billion people on earth right now. more.
I dont even think I appreciate fully what that means.
I like the analogy that if the history of the universe was compressed into a 24 hour day, from the big bang to right now, Homo Sapiens would have shown up a little over a second ago, and all of human civilization (from the start of agriculture and the first cities) happened in the blink of an eye.
It’s pretty scary seeing stuff like this as over in the UK I hardly see any Christians brought up this way at all. I only had to suffer through a Christian primary school (from around age 5 – 11) and then after that it’s all kind of a bad memory. Though even then it wasn’t that bad, we were still taught about evolution and such, we just had to sing some hymns every now and then.
To think in some places people believe that human existence is only 6,000 years old is pretty crazy. Along with all the other stuff.
I’m surprised that we are less than a million years old as a species. It has been 65 million years since the end of the dinosaurs, and more than 64 million were without Homo Sapiens in them.
I didn’t see it as satire when I first saw it. I had no clue of what it was satiring until I was informed. And even then, I didn’t find it funny. It made me uncomfortable.
Thats something I appreciate about this comic. Came for the hilarity, stayed for the parts that sorta made me me think more about the things I believe in. I dunno where I stand 100 percent or nothin, but I figure I’ll get there eventually.
Becky’s a walking list of self discovery and Book of Cheese progress bars.
This particular one is first half of reconciling the Book of Cheese against empirical science then, picking one.
She kinda reminds of a Sim with the little blue bar filling up, really fast.
-lbgt skill: 5
-charisma: 4
-logic: 3 (climbing) (this sim is being tutored by dina…)
-common sense: 6
Having your opinions on science based on Chick Tracts is as stupid as having your opinions on Christians based on them.
Which is a passive-aggressive way of saying, that the “aren’t these Christians backward” theme is wearing a bit thin with me.
I know, it’s a comic strip, and some stereotyping is part of the package. The portrayal of Joyce hasn’t been a problem for me (part of the fun of the strip, actually) But as more characters that are Christian appear, and become regular or semi-regular characters, the sameness tends to worry me.
No, I’m not a Christian, but my sister’s family is, they do homeschool, and my niece and nephews are the least sheltered/naive kids I know of.
The only people who subscribe to this thought process are Joyce and Becky, both of whom grew up being homeschooled in a fundamentalist community. At that, their experiences are based on Willis’ own life growing up in a fundamentalist household. It’s right there in the About page.
Other Christian characters in the cast include Danny, Amber, Billie, Sierra, and maybe more characters I’ve forgotten, and none of them have displayed the same viewpoints as Joyce or Becky. There’s lots of ways to grow up in a Christian family.
You are forgetting about Mary…
Walky and Sal might be catholic as well.
Also: done properly homeschooling is fine, and there are many reasons why someone could legitimately decide it is the best option for their children (like the schools in your area being horrible). It is just that most of the time when it comes up it is because someone is using it for what is basically indoctrination/brainwashing disguised as education.
I forgot about Mary because Mary is terrible and I was focusing on positive Christian characters.
As for Walky, he’s very much an atheist in that reddit brand of relentlessly mocking Joyce for her beliefs. Sal, I imagine she’s probably distanced herself from organized religion, but her beliefs are unclear as of yet.
This. The comic is filled with positive portrayals of Christians who do not have a background in Young Earth Creationism or that whole Pre Millennial Dispensationalist fundie culture. Additionally, I would argue that Joyce and Becky are rather positive examples of people working through that kind of raising into their own forms of Christianity.
And this culture and its impact are real things. Willis has stated that with Joyce and her culture, he is writing autobiographically about his own childhood and real things that he was taught growing up and which kids are still being taught in a lot of places in America and the world.
And I can confirm growing up in a community dominated by this particular flavor of Christianity and having the majority of my childhood friends go through their various Becky and Joyce style workthroughs of what they were carefully taught that this rings true to the actions of that particular sect.
These things are real. Willis lived through it. I lived through it second-hand.
Exactly. There’s this pervasive, hyper defensive attitude in pop culture that showing any form of organized religion (and almost always Christianity) as anything but good and helpful gets you labelled some liberal maverick. Is Joyce repressed? Sure. Is it because of her religion? Danny, Amber and Billie all seem to be into the pre-marital hanky panky so it’s clearly not that much of a pandemic. Maybe it’s just Joyce and her upbringing.
But no, that’s just not good enough for some people.
If this was a mockish general parody of all christianity, wouldn’t, like, half the school be speaking from exactly the same notions as Joyce and Pre-Dinky Becks?
*quick google* Okay, wiki tells us that 80% percent of indiana’s population identifies as christian based on a 2008 report on religious demographics. So why isn’t like… all the college behaving exactly the same as Joyce?
Could it be that she and her upbringing represent a minority element of a pervasive faith where the vast majority don’t share the extreme views and upbringing and don’t feel immediately compelled to act like an ignorant dick over it?
Does Willis really need to hold our hands and make us all feel better by telling us that most people are pretty okay? “I’m so sorry that you’re upset by all the crappy things that got shoveled into my head in my upbringing. But you know, statistically you’re probably pretty okay.”
Maybe I should take it upon myself to post a disclaimer in the comments after every comic reminding everybody that most people aren’t terrible if it’s just such a fucking difficult subject to grasp.
Willis, you’re being unkind. All they are saying is that Satan faked the dinosaur bones of your raising environment to make Christians look bad. (/sarcasm)
I seem to recall reading a sci-fi short story way back in the day which posited that the earth was created and populated by space aliens, and it was they who planted the fake ‘fossils’ in the different strata.
I believe this was Hitchhiker’s Guide Trilogy – Slartibartfast was one of the designers of Earth, he mentioned other designers placing fossils. He, himself, was all about the fjords…
Not to mention this whole idea that you’re “out to get” Christianity espoused by certain commentators is ridiculous. Even just focusing on Joyce and Becky; Joyce has consistently remained stalwart in her faith while gradually rejecting the worst parts of it that conflict with her desire to do right by those she loves, and Becky, who unlike Joyce has lost nearly everything because of her father, still believes in God, she’s just opening up to the truths she’s been deprived of because of her upbringing.
If that’s your idea of tearing down Christianity then they should feel honoured to be so oppressed.
“people just fall all the fuck over themselves scrambling to tell me how fake my own fucking life is”
And I made no such claim.
I didn’t even say that such people don’t exist.
Sorry, just trying to say that as more examples show up, it comes across as closer to stereotyping than character traits. Pardon me if I’ve seen too many people mock and insult a whole religion over the extreme few. I’m hoping that’s not where this strip ends up going, which is why I expressed my worry here.
But if you want to scramble all over yourself to tell me MY life experiences are fake, that’s your prerogative.
Okay, that last sentence may have been a bit too snarky…
Let’s lighten things back up: Will there be a Becky/Dina Slipshine coming up? I can (part of) the title now “The mating habits of the (whatever species of dinosaur Dina’s hoodie is supposed to emulate)”
“But as more characters that are Christian appear, and become regular or semi-regular characters, the sameness tends to worry me.”
Wait what? The only other main character that has the exact same views as Joyce is Becky. (Other characters, that are related to Becky, and Joyce also have similar views. Add in Mary, and you get what, six fundamentalist characters we’ve seen? There’s also a lot of Christian characters who don’t have the same views as Joyce. Danny and Billie to start with)
Also, all that stuff about Joyce’s upbringing being the same as the author’s upbringing. I mean, that’s in the Read Before Posting part of the site.
Well I guess you could call it the terms of service. But put in other words? It’s the posting rules. And it’s not written like a EULA. It’s not super arcane and difficult to parse.
were those actually text books she learned from or did her parents accidentally buy satirical joke books and were too stupid to tell the difference? Also those japanese tools may be 30,000 years old but evidence of stone tools goes back WAY farther than that, over 2.5 million years ago in fact…
There are actual text books that are used by fundamentalist christian parents who homeschool their children. Check the old Dina & Joyce storyline about vacination to see how badly they represent science.
Finally almost caught up. Just have to finish the last chapter of Shortpacked! and binge Joyce and Walky! then I can be “cool” and “hip”. Those are still words, right?
I find it very odd for people to look at how FUCKED the world is, and to still believe that there is any kind of deity out there dictating our actions.
If there IS a God telling us what to do, then obviously he’s been bored for several thousand years and has more bloodlust than an entire COLOSSEUM worth of Greek commoners!
Omniscience voids the concept of free will. God set things up, and knew exactly how they would play out – EXACTLY how they will play out. Following the logic of Christian tradition, he bears 100% responsibility for the state of the world.
Gods can exist without being responsible for “Creation” .
Thats a Theist Bias ( tradition )
They can be an after-effect, a rounding error or co-arise like Universal Constants. or Just evolve. Like us.
Thats the Buddhist View.
My opinion is that any sufficiently advanced consciousness is indistinguishable from a classical God.
I am partial to Epictetus view on his Lazy Gods.
An interesting Thought experiment is : “Imagine the sun was a conscious being” What would it be like?
Whats interesting from a scientific speculative view is the ( remote ) possibility that Stellar-core EM networks ( which move very slowly ) could be able to support a consciousness.
…None of which has anything to do with the Christian conception of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent YHWH, which was what I was responding to.
But at any rate, in principle there’s a lot of definitions for ‘God’. In practice, ‘sufficiently advanced consciousness’ isn’t going to be one without actually having one (And no, White People were not typically accepted as gods for having guns – even Mesoamericans, who DID do that, did it because it fit multiple aspects of their myth, and they kinda realized ‘nah’ before the fighting.)
People die by eating things they thought were healthy, and turned out to be poisonous or allergenic. Not to mention not knowing enough about earthquakes, hurricanes, or plagues to avoid them.
Saying everything is on people is like saying a child should have to take responsibility for surviving on the savanna. It’s a cruel excuse for what happens next.
ah yes, the “when you do the scientific equivalent of dividing by zero, nothing makes sense, and you have to keep RE-EVALUATING THINGS rather than always knowing the so-called answers!!” argument disproving science
welp, gotta just take all our vaccines and medicine and technology and throw it in the trash and replace it with Intelligent Design which created NOTHING WHATSOEVER other than smugness
I would have thought that if a scientific discovery causes a re-evaluation of the existing understanding of the universe, that’s a sign that science is
*working*, not that it’s defective.
The scientific process is designed to self-correct. At any point in time our body of scientific knowledge represents the most-likely-true understanding that we are capable of obtaining with our most honest, intelligent and objective interpretation, from all of the currently-available data, with our currently-available tools and imaginations. It is always and necessarily subject to revision as new data and ideas emerge. Of course, this process only works if you’re willing to let the data inform and re-shape your hypotheses, and not the other way around…
My aunt got a degree in “Life Sciences” and is married to a university biology professor but she still believes the earth is 6,000 years old and evolution is a crock. And she didn’t even grow up with the kind of schooling Willis, Joyce, and Becky had. My grandparents thought she was straight up nuts.
So yeah, Fundamentalists come from weird places sometimes.
There’s a geology prof at my Uni who was fine until he got tenure, then he started to teach that ‘evolution isn’t real,’ and that all those fossils he keeps finding were put there to throw us off… He still publishes papers and writes very unusual articles for the local paper, but he’s been isolated from the rest of the department (physically put his office inside another department’s area) and not allowed to teach students. He put up a giant bulletin board beside his [always closed] office door and posts B.C. comics and things.
I personally try to keep an ever evolving view of my religion. The world existed and I still have my faith. I know full well that world is older than 6000 years old just by the default of ‘Let’s face it, humanity’s been around a LONG time.’
I also understand that people’s abilities to play telephone with religion is tough. At a certain point we were able to get the story on paper/stone… But anything before then is put through the views and understandings of the people who told them, even those who were there.
Do I believe the universe as we know it was made in six days? Yes. I believe that the planet and stars were shaped as would be best for us (factoring in free will) so that we would have the best possible outcome. It sort of sits on the view that he knows, but did what he could so that we would do what we do, but still end up in the best place we could as we are.
“Yes. I believe that the planet and stars were shaped as would be best for us (factoring in free will) so that we would have the best possible outcome”
I’m not sure if this is the case. Jupiter is a really weird double edged sword. It can draw in objects that might impact the Earth, but it can also disrupt the orbits of stuff in the asteroid belt, causing it to go into the inner solar system (and possibly into Earth’s path)
In any case, while it’s true that life as we know it would not exist if some universal constants were different, that doesn’t mean that the universe is designed. After all, maybe life would just exist in a completely different form, in a way we can’t imagine if the universe was slightly different.
One of the biggest falsies that some Christians fall into is thinking that God is the cause of only what we don’t understand. This makes for a small God that gets smaller whenever someone discovers the natural mechanism of something. However, most main stream Christians (Catholic/Lutheran) believe that ALL of creation is their God’s work. Including the stuff that science has explained. The thinking goes that the “universe is the the true word of God” (one interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis: “God Spoke and it Was.”) Thus the study of the universe (dinosaurs included) is in a way the study of their Gods work.
Just a thought you guys might want to keep in mind before taking cheap shots at the dumb ass young earthers.
Ha! Last summer, I went to a ‘home school’ garage sale, and bought 3 of the ‘the earth is 6000 years old’/’biology isn’t real’ ‘science’ text books- had to make sure no one else could buy them. They weren’t even CREATIVE with their falsehoods! You’d think they could come up with creative Literal InExactitudes (LIEs).
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
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 ⋅ 1d
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
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
It's #webcomicday? We have a special day???
Well, my name is Pat McHoarney and I draw 69 Mouse-Ear Blvd, a multigenerational story about women who all have sexy legs and probably other features. There was a grandmother, but she wasn't hot and so she died off-panel.
Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through her blood-testing company, Theranos. Her partner, Billy Evans, is now trying to raise money for a company that describes itself as “the future of diagnostics.” nyti.ms/3FbtZm9
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 1d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 10d
The New York Times @nytimes.com ⋅ 5d
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 3d
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You mean science is more than just Jack Chick drawings making fun of strawman scientists?? CRAZINESS
Not possible.
If you think of it as satire, it becomes much more amusing– but then you take Poe’s Law into account, and everything sucks again.
Chick tracts are the funniest thing ever.
Did you read the one where D&D actually give you real powers and are a wiccan propaganda tool
Ooh or the one where you can be the best person on earth but if you don’t get on your knees and suck holy you still go to hell.
Reading the Left Behind novels is like reading on big long Tract.
if d&d imbued such powers, then surely there would’ve been much less virginity present at my last campaign
But if you don’t have virgins, how can you possibly make proper human sacrifices?
With the babies of course
Best icon for a comment ever.
Or the D&D causes suicides, as opposed to people with certain mental issues need help, treatment and should avoid hobbies that can rely on knowing the difference between fantasy and reality….
Holy crap, I can’t believe I’m remembering this, but I think your avatar there is an MtG card, yes? Prodigal Sorceror or some such, 1/1 creature, tap to deal 1 damage…
There are those who call me…
Tim.
Thanks. I would have had to post that, if you hadn’t.
No link?
Wanna know the best part about that “D&D causes suicides” thing? The suicide rate amongst D&D players is actually lower than average. They’d have to start killing themselves more than they do to even reach the national US average.
Panicky anti-D&Ders are idiots.
I imagine part of that is because a D&D group (at least a good one) is a circle of friends who spend time together on a regular basis. That’s both a functional support system and something to continue to look forward to, both extremely important things in mental illness and suicide prevention.
(Don’t quote me on that, though, it is just an educated guess and I’m sure there’s plenty of other factors)
In quite a few of these cases where “someone” is accusing a hobby of causing problems, the statistics actually indicate that it reduces those problems instead of increasing them. IIRC Games making kids violent has similar data (gamers being less violent due to having an outlet to release frustration safety).
Almost as if they are picking a hobby they do not like, something they can claim is universally objectionable, and claiming the hoby increases the objectionable action/lifestyle/effect/etc, and never actually doing the research to verify it is true.
Of course there is also scapegoating to pretend you are not at fault, and “forgetting” that correlation causation…
If games have thought me anything, is that just PUNCHING someone of lower level then myself can kill them, instantly. I hence try to avoid punching people.
Dungeons & Dragons on 60 Minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN_nuxOhT2s
I have one I “rescued” from the mall that I was gonna mail to a friend who likes laughing at them… “OH THE TITANIC HIT AN ICEBERG I HOPE THAT UNBELIEVER REPENTED BEFORE HE DROWNED”
yeah, kinda flat after the D&D one… there was one I had but lost that I think was about a dog that found God…?? (friend read it for me, I preferred to save brain cells)
Chick tracks are so funny that I actually thought they were a parody the first time I’ve seem them. It took quite a while before learning they were not.
I remember reading somwhere that because the author doesn’t talk much there is actually something of a debate still going on about if they are parodies or not.
Jack Chick may not make public appearances, but he has relatively(given its niche market) large publishing company and has been writing for over 50 years. He distributes his…beliefs worldwide in a surprising number of different languages.
He’s not quiet and there’s no ambiguity to what he actually believes.
I’ll take your word for it, but there will probably always be those who suspect it all to be an elaborate joke regardless of what he says, anyway.
The rest of us can carry on laughing at the Tracts and not giving a shit about the guy’s beliefs.
It’s real
http://www.chick.com/
The D&D one was called ‘Dark Dungeons’ and recently, someone made a fully accurate movie of it with Jack’s permission, with him not realizing they were making fun of it.
http://www.darkdungeonsthemovie.com/
I’ve always kind of wanted to send Jack Chick an email congratulating him for undermining faith in god. Just a short, “I know what you’re doing and good on ‘ya”. You know, to encourage him to keep doing what he actually does.
Is there an anti-Poe’s Law? Something that says, “Any serious criticism, done stupidly enough, will be mistaken for parody?” ‘Cuz I could see that, for Chick Tracts.
Huh. According to TVTropes, Poe’s Law contains its opposite. So, this is Poe’s Law, too.
The one that stood out in my mind was when the little girl (Lisa) was being molested by the father who in turn let the neighbour join in, the mother was physically abusive towards her and the father gave her an std
the doctor instead of reporting him to the police got him to repent his sins and find god instead…
and apparantly they all lived happily ever after because everything was forgiven
I wish I was making that up
You sure that wasn’t a documentary about the Duggar family?
Apparently the reason behind that one is that Chick Tract are designed to appeal to different groups of people that they wished to convert (children, people who live in poor inner city areas, fans of rock and roll etc.), so the reason WHY they thought that it’d be a good idea to make a strip saying that a serial child abuser just needs to accept Jesus into their lives and everything will be FINE is… well…
…It was designed to convert monsterous child abusers in prison, making them replace any guilt or responsibility they might fill with religion. Which, yeah…
There was another one which had an atheist who spent their entire life doing charity and being a good person going to hell when they died because they didn’t believe in God/try to convert others to Christianity, while a multiple murderer gets into Heaven because they converted at the last minute.
Man there are a lot of typos I missed there.
To be fair, this is the one tract that even Chick (or his audience) thought was going too far, and stopped distributing.
One of the oddest fanfic crossovers I’ve seen is Left Behind crossed with Stargate: SG1. I can’t bring myself to read it to found out how they reconcile the young earth creationism of LaHaye and Jenkins with Stargate’s timeline including events that happened millions of years ago.
The second greatest thing ever is the face he drew on the evil little girl in that one: link
The first greatest thing is the time Willis drew himself with the same face: link
There go my carefully laid plans of sleeping tonight.
Woah, I’ve never seen this. This is amazing.
It’s that little girl Tina Yothers?
Isn’t, not it’s. Boy, I sure am typing poorly on here lately.
omg thank you for telling me about that D&D thing that was so hilarious it made my night. I couldn’t even take it all in one go i was laughing so much.
I don’t want to be Elfstar anymore. I want to be Debbie.
I was introduced to Chick Tracts freshman year of college when my roommate would just randomly shout that line.
i thought the left behind series was actually a pretty good piece of fiction honestly… but i look at things like that as pure works of fiction not… i dunno… biblical fiction? could have made a good 14-part miniseries, or else a decent hbo original imho. id have watched it.
What. How did you arrive at Left Behind as good fiction? It’s terrible. I don’t just mean its theology (which is pretty evil!) I mean as fiction, it is bad. It engages in the authors’ pseudofetishes, and the characters are monsters (Not for their beliefs, although their beliefs are terrible, but because of their sheer inability to behave like people). And I don’t just mean the villains, or the… protagonists (I can’t use heroes for people who know about widespread nuclear devastation, and sit on their ass). Random people have totally forgotten that the children of the world are GONE. There is no cries for blood from their parents, and they don’t seem to really care. And it’s not a commentary on how people who aren’t saved are terrible – the protags are just as awful.
Someone bought the rights to “Dark Dungeons” by Jack Chick and made it into a movie.
It’s awesome.
http://www.darkdungeonsthemovie.com/
I thought that was Mazes and Monsters
Personally I feel like the Left Behind books are less preachy than the Chick-tracts. Yes they are a literal interpretation of what’s in (some) parts of the bible, but I feel Jack Chick went further and layered his own bias on top of that.
The books (if I recall) involved themes like second chances and redemption. The tracts are more like “if you haven’t been living my personal brand of Christianity for your entire life, then you can go straight to hell this moment”.
Overall I still only rate them a B, because I think they go on for to long, but I can at least read them without getting a headache.
The DND one was adapted recently into a shortfilm. It is AMAZING.
I had a fundie type quite excited when I expressed happiness at being given a Chick tract, when I told her I didn’t have that one yet. Then she got quite insulted when I informed her that I collected them to make fun of them.
That Track is a movie now, and it is glorious
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LADLv1803Vw&list=PLTtpi7gJO7XOBoFSiLAYjrfR6n9odNG9y
It really is bad how anti-knowledge fundies are after getting, considering that so much of the foundations of modern science were laid and preserved by deeply religious and spiritual people.
It is not even a case of them not being able to co-exist, you just need to accept the limits of both science and religion, and accept that no “holy” book should be taken as 100% divine truth, and your beliefs could be proven wrong.
it’s a matter of reaction and counter-reaction.
The way I see it, some people can’t follow the trend of civilisation forward (things go to fast and they can’t adapt), and take a purposely ultra conservative stance to cope.
From an European’s point of view, the USA are pretty much going toward a religious dark age.
To say, creationnism only has been gaining traction in the US and radicalising (passing anti abortion/contraception/etc laws) in the last decade or so.
Again, from an european point of view, this is fucking scary.
From an American point of view, it’s still fucking scary
From a Canadian point of view, it’s even scarier.
At least you have the ocean to protect you.
Plus we Canadians see more US media thanks to various things.
We will hold them here, Canada.
We also have a Prime Minister who is all for supporting such views one way or the other and damn the Charter of Rights.
Note to self: register to vote.
Well we Canadians have more room to hide.
So please, guys, let’s get Harper and his cronies out of parliament before he makes this place even more ignorant.
Pfft, when the second crusade comes around, just tell them that all the “godless heathens” are in some place inhospitable (The arctic tundra perhaps?), and they will all die while searching for them.
Hey, the Inuit survived in the arctic unaided for millennia…
This far, no further?
whoops, meant that for the canadians.
I’ll concur that it’s damn scary for Americans too. I live in a very red section of Texas. We all know that’s saying something.
I’m an atheist and in general have to hide that or at the very least simply not mention it. If I do I run the risk of becoming a pariah, being spat upon, having CPS called on me, and of having people try to surreptitiously convert my young son.
I mean, we all know that atheists have no morals at all because there is no higher power telling them right from wrong. So obviously neighbors should avoid me and my son must be protected because I’m obviously abusing him even if there is absolutely no evidence of this.
I’m just thankful I live in an area that’s just as Catholic as it is evangelical/fundamentalist. In general the Catholics tend to have a more rational and realistic view of non-believers than the Fundies. I don’t know if I’d be able to keep from going crazy if I lived in one of the counties that’s something like 80-90% evangelical fundy.
I’m scared to ask what CPS is.
Google says Canadian Paediatric Society. ???
Wiki says Child Protection Services. Ouch.
Hate to say it, but compared to Texas 30 years ago we live in a golden age of secular humanism.
I would disagree as I remember my childhood being much less influenced by fundamentalism than now, but I think that comes down to where in Texas you live. I grew up in a very diverse area of San Antonio and spent a lot of time in Austin as well.
I now live in a small city that is more-or-less isolated from the major cities in the state. So of course the small, insular city and it’s surrounding minute ranch towns are going to be far less secular and have more of the good ol’ boy politics than a fairly large multicultural city.
What’s scary? That we as a society have decided to believe that our society would be better off if it followed slightly different rules?
Do you think that we on this side of the pond are less scared by some of the decisions you’ve made?
(also, I feel like the US has almost as many divisions culturally as some of the various European countries; lumping 300 million people together is almost as problematic as lumping the 1 billion or so Europeans all in the same basket)
AFAIK, very few, if any states are trying to limit birth control in the sense of pills, condoms, and other stuff that like that prevents conception. Certain places ARE trying to limit access to abortion (the Supreme Court ruling is fairly clear that we can’t outlaw it entirely) because the pro-life side of that argument sees it as honest-to-goodness killing. So to someone on the other side of the argument your comment comes across as “those hicks in the states are trying to stop murder! And that’s terrible!”
You don’t have to agree with me, but I would have you can at least understand where a different perspective comes from.
‘slightly different rules’. Totally ignoring reality in creating educational curricula is a wildly different rule – an important one, although itself only a single rule.
“also, I feel like the US has almost as many divisions culturally as some of the various European countries,”
You can feel that all you want – it ain’t true. Meriken are insular and fairly homogenous. That you think the occasional passive-aggressive swipe at northerners or flyover country equates to the difference that the French (or basically anyone else) feels from every other neighbor they have, shows how little you know about what actual cultural differences look like. There’s often tensions that date back /millenia/, underscored by multiple wars between ethnic groups. The USA just doesn’t have separate cultures in the same way. It’s probably better thought of as an umbrella for extremely similar subcultures. There’s a bigger divide between urban and rural, but hey, the same exists in most european countries – with extremely different ideas of what that entails, even!
People know the damn pro-life argument. Of course they claim it’s murder – they just only do it when it’s pregnant women, and not anyone else who could provide life-saving organs with invasive-but-survivable medical care. Given that ‘pro-life’ people never push for this shit in general, it is a fucking lie – they just don’t consider the bodily autonomy of women relevant. When straight white men have to give up their actual, factual livers, we’ll talk about how ‘pro-life’ is a genuine belief that is sincerely held.
At the risk of playing “but you”, European elites currently approach economics the way Creationists approach biology. The austerity fetish is about as intellectually respectable as anti-vaccine people.
Yeah, but that’s also something the US seems to be getting.
The austerity fetish is in response to the government will do it all but I wont pay taxes or do anything for the community.
I’m talking about the Greeks who stayed in Greece as opposed to the ones who left to do that culturally subversive thing called a work ethic.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. How exactly are people who are jobless, have no money and are forced to live in small rooms with ten other people or more supposed to pay for Greece’s debts?
*Facepalms* Yeah, that was the problem in greece, people just refused to work. It wasn’t rampant corruption or tax evasion, no no…
The austerity fetish precedes greece, at any rate. PRetending it’s anything but a naked attempt to tear down what you’ve built up for your poor is a sick joke at best.
I think it’s because the number of Americans who actually identify as being associated with any religion at all is steadily shrinking. I heard a survey that said as many as 20% of Americans had no religious affiliation whatsoever, and that trend is increasing. People that might have been kind of noncommittal about religion fifty years ago, but didn’t want to become social pariahs by dropping it are dropping it today. So you’re left with the hard core believers who are really load and insist on getting what they want as loudly as possible. They are also scared because they see mainstream culture moving steadily away from them, which is what the whole Left Behind/Rapture obsession is about. “You’ll be sorry once the end times come!”
Well, from my view of the situation, it is only parts of the US (and Canada, to a lesser extent) that are falling into the dark ages, and forces are finally mobilizing to fight back at the ignorance.
As a recovered fundie myself, I’m pretty certain that Willis isn’t referring to Chick tracts here, but rather to the honest-to-God textbooks by publishers like A Beka Book, and which kids in Christian schools and homeschools are routinely subjected to. I remember the math and spelling/grammar books as being okay (and what a shocker, those ended up being my strong subjects in high school), but the things purporting to be science and history textbooks were in reality nothing of the sort.
I would think that they would be “decent” on most history material.
All the history courses I took in grade-high school tended to focus on the last few centuries, where there is not much room for creationism to mess up, unless your books were also doing things like re-labeling causes of the US civil war…
I mean, they probably did, but I’d be surprised if they did it more than normal USian textbooks.
“It was about states rights and federal governance” did not begin with the Creationists, after all.
I’d imagine that Creationist textbooks would struggle with ancient cultures. Like the ones that were around more than 6,000 years ago?
I also assume that the creationist history books would claim that the Hebrews built the pyramids. And would they cover Greek/Roman mythology at all? That was actually a big part of my English classes some years.
I was raised on “it was about state’s rights” propaganda as well. We were also told that slavery was almost non-existent in Texas since it was illegal in Mexico and Texas had been too new of a state by the Civil War to have many wealthy land owners (just to be clear, that is total BS).
I was also taught that Jim Crow and segregation weren’t all that bad in Texas. Not as bad as the Deep South, anyway.
And my classes and books never even mentioned the fact that Latinos and Native Americans were often considered “colored” for the purposes of Jim Crow, or the “round-ups” they used to do where they frequently deported US citizens because they were Latino.
After coverage of the Texas Revolution and/or the Mexican American War, Mexico and Central America basically got forgotten in our textbooks, as did anything to do with Hispanic/Latin people. Even in college this was true. And I went to high school and college in a city that is about 75% Hispanic.
Usually they either get ignored or rounded down in order to fit within the 6000 years.
The ones I saw noted that Egyptians built the pyramids but they focused on the Hebrew slave labor for it and used that to segue into the Exodus stuff. Greeks and Romans get mentioned, but mostly Romans (again to segue mostly into prosecution of early Christians) (lots and lots of talk about feeding Christians to lions, very little talk about Christian church growing because an emperor converted and began forcing formerly “pagan” tribes to convert). Much like general history textbooks of the time that I saw these, they didn’t mention at all ancient Eastern civilizations or ancient African civilizations or much about the Germanic tribes outside of “evil pagan murderers” digs.
Willis would be far more capable of fully answering this one than I am as this is all mostly remembered from friends showing me stuff their Sunday Schools gave them.
Heck, I went to a public school and my textbooks never once mentioned Latinos, Native Americans, & etc getting lumped into the colored people category. Only reason I learned about that as a child was because I am Latina and so my dad told me.
First time commenter because I have ridiculously strong feels about textbooks. Actually, a lot of textbooks are TERRIBLE with history. The reason being is that a lot of fundies are all about American exceptionalism (and by American, they only mean the USA). This creates a whole host of issues, mainly because in every scenario the USA is always the best and most correct. It washes over things like the Trail of Tears, slavery, women’s rights, LGBT people in history, people of color in history….you get the picture. And that’s not even getting into the fact that world history is only a blip on the radar because it’s clearly not as important as ‘murica.
The reason why I get really upset with this is that all major textbook companies are in Texas. This means that this kind of thinking about history creeps into even “regular” texts, and those get distributed around the country. It makes me RAGE and I’m really glad that there’s an increased push in education to move away from textbooks in favor of primary sources, news articles, and the like.
Seriously. To zero in on the ‘no history of POC’ that you mentioned… Almost everything I know about Puerto Rican history and all the wrongs committed against us, I learned from my dad. My US History textbooks never once mentioned Puerto Rico, and it’s a commonwealth of the US, so, ya know, you’d think we’d get a shoutout.
Know what’s even worse (late to the party I know, sorry, am rereading)? Canadian schools use those same damned textbooks the American publishers use, because we don’t have the population to insist on our own. So we get the whole USA! USA! thing as well, with the teachers throwing in some stuff about Louis Riel and the Metis, and that’s about it.
A southern friend I had once was genuinely surprised when we didn’t know what the “War of Northern Aggression” was as that was how the war was titled in her history books. There was also a weird chronology to it in order to erase all the aggressive actions the South did at the beginning of the war. And of course, the whole thing was about “state’s rights” rather than slavery.
There was some terse but interesting conversations as some of us tried to detangle that particular knot of propaganda.
I live in North West Alabama, which is decidedly more liberal than some other parts of the state. Since Bama was kind of the epicenter of Jim Crow and was a major battleground of the Civil Rights movement, there really wasn’t an “official” attempt to whitewash history here, at least not in school. It’s kind of hard to say “it wasn’t that bad here” when you can produce footage of Bull Conner’s police force attacking peaceful protesters with firehoses and attack dogs. I have relatives who will go on about “The War of Northern Agression .” My high school history was pretty matter of fact about the realities of the Civil War and Jim Crow, though. In some ways, at least in Alabama, We were forced to confront the realities of institutional racism in ways that some of the South, or even the North have never been forced to. For example, I’m trying to imagine how the national media would react if Birmingham had New York P.D. style stop and frisk.
As someone who wears “damnyankee” as a badge of pride, but who went to high school in the South, I’ve taken to always referring to it as “the War of Southern Aggression”. Which is honestly a lot more historically accurate.
Well, to be fair, South Carolina DID fire the first shot.
Disclaimer is that it’s been several decades, so we’re going on old memories of a twelve-year-old kid. However, here’s some highlights from what I remember from the A Beka world history book:
– The early chapters were all about the book of Genesis (and maybe other early OT books, I don’t remember).
– As somebody else mentioned, the Romans and their persecution of Christians were kinda stars of the story for a while.
– The section on the Middle Ages never referred to the Roman Catholic church by name, instead consistently called it “a distorted form of Christianity.” All of medieval Europe’s problems are blamed on them following the wrong brand of belligerent religiosity. A lot of adoration was bestowed upon anti-papist “rebels” such as John Wycliffe and Jan Hus.
– Every major player in history received extreme value judgments based on how godly they are. I seem to remember the book really hating the Medicis, in particular.
– The book went completely apeshit once it got to the twentieth century and socialism/Communism show up. I remember at one point it had you thinking that people were fleeing Sweden in droves because the taxes were higher than 100%.
I don’t remember that much from the American history one, but here are a couple of things:
– It really went out of its way to extol the nineteenth century and its policies. In particular, it repeatedly hit you over the sledgehammer about how there were no income taxes, and America did just fine financing itself with the protective tariff. The book must have used the words “protective tariff” about 3,251,589,264 times.
– The only other thing I remember is that John Steinbeck was a socialist, anti-American propaganda artist. He wrote this awful propaganda tract called “The Grapes of Wrath” greatly exaggerating the plight of the Okies, and somebody made a movie of it, but one day they showed that movie in Soviet Russia (or did the movie show you? Hmm), with the intention of showing everyone how the American capitalist system had failed, and the tables were turned, because the Russians all ended up feeling jealous of the Okies, because they were even worse off! Ha ha, sucks to be you, John Steinbeck!
well that’s why I said “drawings” rather than tracts
or has he only done tracts
To be fair, that’s actually how evolutionary biologists go about their day to day lives. Halfway through a phylogenetic analysis of a linkage map of key mutations, they just stand up wave their arms akimbo and go “hurr hurr, me no understand God” right before plotting to bury the incontrovertible evidence that Satan faked all dinosaur bones everywhere.
needs moar LOL = 100% accurate
+1
Fun fact, I’m writing this from a scientific conference. After each session we stand up in a circle and say “hurrr, hurrr, hurrrrrrrrr” in unison.
Seriously, if anyone got cheated out of their biology education like Becky or just wants some sweet evolution facts, let me know, I’m happy to talk about that stuff
hurr
And for those who just want dinosaur facts, I’m here.
Cool!
So, are there any ecological niece that no dinosaurs were known to inhabit? Like, there are herding herbivors and fast predators and scavengers and so on. Are there insect eaters? Fruit eaters? (Wait? How old are fruit again?) Burrowers?
Lots of small dinosaurs were insect eaters. Fruits eaters I’m not 100% about, but what with herbivores eating pretty much anything they can get their mouths near to, I’m pretty sure there were a few (I actually think I used to know the name of quite a few, but they’re just out of reach right now). Burrowing is hard to tell, considering that you can’t really tell what animal a burrow belongs to, but it’s such a common behavior that it would be unlikely for it not to be inhabited by dinosaurs. Again, this is mostly a small dinosaurs thing. I recommend reading Mark Witton’s (he focuses on pterosaurs, but he knows a ridiculous amount about dinosaurs as well) blog at markwitton-com.blogspot.co.uk. Also, unrelated to your questions, but hopefully still interesting, a dinosaur has been discovered that uses membranous, bat-like wings to fly rather than feathery ones. Yi qi, which is a contestant for shortest scientific species name ever, belongs to the scansoriopterygds, a group known for their ridiculously long fingers. Yi qi also possessed an extended wrist bone that acted like another finger in terms of support.
Oh, and when looking up anything related to paleontology, avoid David Peters. He’s a kind of atheist fundie, although his opinion of himself might invalidate the atheist bit. He photoshops photos of fossils and zooms in until they’re pixelated, and then claims to have found patterns that no one else can see. If you want to know more about this, there’s the article “Why the world has to ignore ReptileEvolution.com” (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/world-must-ignore-reptileevolution-com/).
Oh, and Spinosaurus was a quadruped, because its legs were too short to support it otherwise. It really resembled a crocodile to a ridiculous extent, to the point that it is probably the first fully aquatic dinosaur (outside of penguins) that we know of. If you want to know more about feathers on dinosaurs and various other dinosaur-related subjects, here’s a youtube channel that covers various such issues, even providing information on which groups of dinosaurs had feathers and where on there body they had them: https://www.youtube.com/user/GamerCreator12345.
Awesome. Thanks so much. But as for burrowing, wouldn’t it be possible to see if something was the equivalent of mole? Almost blind, enormous front legs, smallish? Anything like that?
I’ll throw general bio education and shared commiseration over shitty HS and lower biology education due to this stuff as well (True story, my Biology class in HS’s entire section on evolution was the teacher angrily stating “it’s a theory. It’s wrong. You shouldn’t believe in it”. AP was better, but that was only because I ended up teaching that section [complicated story with a teacher having a mid-life crisis and abandoning the class halfway through the year]).
You have my condolences. In my opinion teachers foisting off that ignorant crap on helpless children is criminal, and makes me very angry such stupidity is allowed to happen in schools.
What is God ?
Baby don’t hurt me,
don’t hurt me,
no more.
WHAT IS GOD
We were all thinking this, admit it.
I am now
Damnit, it would have been even better with “baby don’t durr me”.
hmm…
Baby don’t herp me,
Don’t derp me,
No more
“Night at the Clark Wing”
Dina, Becky, and ____? in the car together.
Sarah, obvs
…okay MAYBE Joycs if she’ll behave
Joyce, dangit keyboard
Joyce with her eyes all “premarital hanky panky” bug eyed, please.
Toedad
(sorry)
I do believe there is something missing.There,fixed it.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILt5HZnPz5o
here you go, all you care to eat
I feel like the What is Evolution one is particularly topical.
*bobs my head repeatedly*
Crap, now you’ve got me doing it too.
What is God?
Yaweh don’t plague me,
don’t plauge me
no more.
I’m sure a other people could have done better, but nobody did, so I stepped in. Now on to find someone to sing it.
don’t make me break out Avanna
(srsly, I have shit to do tonight)
I wonder if digivolution is frowned upon by the church. Surely they’ve seen Windows 95 to XP, to Vista, etc.
they turn a blind eye to windows because apple is even worse, with their tigers evolving into leopards
Well, Apple is worse because… well, Adam and Eve.
(actually, with the company that’s litterally be Adam and Steve…Jobs)
steve and steve, surely. jobs and woz should not be shipped, but i think that ship has sailed since ashton kutcher played him in the movie
No, Linux is the worst. There are currently around three hundred Linux distros available, branching out in what can best be described as an evolutionary tree: http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/11.03/gldt1103.png
And I’m still using Slackware, which is basically the Linux equivalent of the Queensland lungfish. I believe every older distro is extinct.
I thought this was going to be a Digimon joke.
I am disappointed.
If you want, I could probably come up with something involving devimon creating false evidence of “rookie form” to mislead the faithful.
I expected that too, but I’m happy with how it turned out.
Man, Dina in the last panel.
“Shit, maybe I can’t save you.”
Well, there’s a difference in who’s being presented with the information. Becky seems to be having some trouble accepting it, but she’s at least showing some willingness to try and learn.
That face is much more “I have my work cut out for me”
I think Dina may not be used to Young Earth Creationists outside of Joyce. So I see it more as a look of bafflement and culture shock, like she’s getting her first taste of exactly what brand of propaganda and denial of knowledge has built Joyce to be the way she is.
So yeah, definitely a “I have my work cut out for me” as you note with maybe a “what kind of crap were you and Joyce raised with” thrown in for good measure.
Rather “damn, this is some shit they teach creationists”
Weren’t the first stone tools from like homo habilis like 2 million years ago?
I think Dina’s just giving a random example. Actually I’m not sure how much she knows about ancient humans since her interests have been on dinosaurs instead.
Yes, but they were hardly human. Depending on who I gives the numbers, creatures we can safely start calling “humans” started popping up somewhere around 100 to 250 thousand years ago.
I think she pointed this one because they are more realibly and precisely datable.
Homo Erectus is widely acknowledged as a true human species. They made stone hand axes and utilized fire for cooking and probably had rudimentary language. From a standpoint of longevity, Homo Erectus is the most successful human species we know off from the fossil record. Homo Erectus fossils have been found from as early as 1.5 million years ago to as late as 70,000 years ago with some debate as to whether Homo Ergaster was a subspecies of H. Erectus or was a common ancestor that eventually led to H. Neanderthal and H. Sapiens. If H. Ergaster is considered a subspecies species of H. Erectus, then the H. Erectus goes back even further to 1.8 million years ago. While H. Ergaster and H. Erectus didn’t have our intelligence, they were undeniably smarter than anything else that walked the planet at the time, walked fully upright and were skilled tool users as well as tool makers. They were Human in every way that mattered. They may not have been H. Sapiens, but humans have been around a Hell of a lot longer than 6000 years. Incidentally, the autocorrect kept trying to make Homo Erectus “Homosexuality Erectus,” for whatever that’s worth.
Wow, you meat sack have been around for a while…
Speaking of ancient “stone tools“…
I was fully expecting that to be a link to an article about one of the times they’ve found dildos at an archaeological site.
I guess I mentally placed the emphasis on one word rather than the other.
Ancient dildos are so passé these days.
Yea, that was my first thought to, didn’t help that I thought I saw dongs, not bongs, as the page was loading.
I like how they capitalize BONG. Makes it read like a sound effect rather than a word.
oh don’t you worry, becky, dina is going to educate you so hard you won’t be able to remember your name in the morning
Ohh mmyyyy~
Double sense sentences are the best.
they are to die for!
…wait, i think i did that one wrong
la petit mort
Nome of the Asshole Three is on panel, so yah.
none*
Why do I ever post from my phone?!
who are the asshole 3, btw? people who come to mind are: malaya, carla, mike, ruth, mary, blaine, toe-dad, faz (sal and sarah are omitted cuz we like her).
oh, do you mean raidah + friends 1 and 2?
My guess is Blaine, ToeDad, and Ryan.
Sure, the rest can be quite annoying and antagonistic, but those three are proper-noun-worthy.
Ding-ding.
Not sure where this comment belongs, but your icon is as good a place as any. I am loving the orange-and-green Dinasaurus Becks color scheme!
(Which is strange since I don’t like either of those colors, nor the combination, usually.)
When I get bummed out I can take solace in having parents open-minded enough to buy history books like this while one of them raises me Catholic.
Eh, most catholics realise that a big part of the bible was made from oral legends written down by people an hundred years or more after things happens.
So, not to be taken litterally.
Well the majority of the earth is 6000 years old people are fundamentalist. Who are not catholic.
It’s pretty much an US specific trend, as far as I know.
Yes. The 4004 BC date is only one of a number of different calculations various folks performed, specifically that of Bishop Ussher. It’s widely accepted by U.S. fundamentalists because it was the one given in the hugely popular Schofield Reference Bible in the 19th century, which is also what popularized the entire Rapture theory/chronology that had been made up a couple years before by a guy named Darby.
Google any of this; it’s weird. The Rapture was invented more recently than the telephone.
SDAs also believe in the 6000yo Earth idea.
Whew, that’s refreshing to learn about.
Eh, most catholics realise that a big part of the bible was made from oral legends written down by people an hundred years or more after things happens.
So, not to be taken litterally..
According to Daniel the Human, there’s also the fact The Book has has translation errors (accidental & DELIBERATE), Holier-Than-Thou Pricks editing/straight-up-rewriting parts because THEY deemed it’s current version “Heresy”, people paying more attention to part X & ignoring part B, etc.
He says it’s best to take note of the important part tho; “Love one another, as I have loved you”. Sounds pretty simple to me…
You know the Vatican is against a literal reading of Genesis? Young Earth Creationists are mostly protestant…and Americans. The Director of the Vatican Observatory is known for saying ‘the Bible isn’t a science manual’.
are you saying that my plan to bring about a flood shall never bear fruit?? then how can i possibly justify the past fortnight of hedonism? man, science is hard
oh, that’s good to know.
I guess even the Vatican is tired of that sh**.
(but to quote the Author, [joyce] thinks the Pope is more likely to be the Anti-Christ than someone she should listen to.
“Catholocism is a false church and the Pope is the antichrist” is a really common thing in US fundie sects..
Sect really feels like an adequate description.
It’s tendency to produce sect maniacs is unprecedented, after all.
I know the Pope isn’t liked by Protestants and certain other groups. But are Catholics severely reviled throughout the States? I know of this divide in Ireland tho.
Not in my (limited) experience. I suspect that it’s only really common in the ‘join or congregation in the second first holy church of GOD or burn forever in hell.’
I have no idea if my experience of more tolerant churches is the norm or the exception.
That’s “Join our congregation in the Reformed First Holy Church of GOD or burn forever in Hell.” you splitter!
There are some parts of the US where anti-Catholic feelings still reside. Coming from Kentucky as a child I did occasionally hear the term “mackerel-snatcher” used for a Catholic.
Catholics can be strongly disliked or distrusted in areas where the Fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant denominations reign. It is not uncommon to hear some of my very Southern Baptist very fundy relatives talk about the evil “Jezebel Church.”
In general, though, American Catholics are more moderate than American Evangelical Protestants. Really, the only area where this isn’t true is when it comes to abortion and birth control access. And even then that’s speaking of the Church’s position. Individual Catholics are, in my experience, far more likely to approve of birth control usage and/or be pro-choice than individual Evangelical Protestants.
There’s kind of a sliding scale of fundamentalism. At the shallow end are the Anglican derivatives like Episcopalian and Methodists who are kind of Catholic Lite, though individual congregations can vary, of course. Then you move down to the various Baptists, with Southern Babtists at the higher, more tolerant end, the Free Will Baptists kind of in the middle and Primitive Baptists at the low end. At this point, you’re in full Creationism mode with just a bit of wiggle room for practical science. Below that come the crazy sects like The Church of Christ and Seventh Day Adventists who not only reject anything science oriented, but believe that they are “The One True Path” and everyone else is going to Hell. To be fair, so do some of the others higher on the list, but at least they’re not as vocal about it. Below this are snake handlers and the like who view anything created in the last century or so with suspicion.
Up high on the list, Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists and the like, you’ll get acknowledgement that science is real and the rationalization that evolution is God’s creation process with quotes that “A thousand years are like a day to God” and the like.
Much below the Methodists, you get this weird cognitive dissonance, especially among fundamentalist Sci Fi and Fantasy fans where they can enjoy stuff that directly contradicts their beliefs while saying, “It’s just a story.” I had a fundamentalist friend who loved Harry Potter and was a regular at my weekly D&D games in the early 2000’s. I made the mistake of talking theology with him once. It was in relation to the fictional Forgotten Realms Pantheon and somehow segued into the adoption of Christianity by the Romans and their co-opting all the Pagan festivals and rituals. He left that evening and he never came back. The few times I saw him in public, he would either not acknowledge me, or would greet me in the friendly way you greet a stranger you’ve never met. He was a great guy with a vivid imagination and good storytelling skills, so I regret his leaving the group. But he’s a prime example of how fundamentalist teaching fucks people up sideways. They have to compartmentalize their intelligence and don’t deal at all well with things that tear those partitions down.
In Ireland, I.recon it is partly caused by one religion being the one of the English invaders. (all the bombings were about this)
Grmbl want to look that up but phones ain’t practical.
This is refreshing to know. So Catholicism is fairly progressive towards evolution, though not without faults.
Catholicism has no problem whatsoever about evolution, modern cosmology or science in general, really…
Yeah. In general Catholics tend not view the Bible as being strictly literal. Especially Genesis and other parts of the Old Testament.
For example, a Catholic is more likely to say that if the universe started with the Big Bang, well who’s to say God didn’t put things in place intentionally to cause that Big Bang?
A Fundamentalist Protestant is more likely to laugh and say that there was no Big Bang at all and anyone that believes it is an ignorant fool.
I went to a Catholic high school where I took a medical ethics course taught by a priest….
…who covered both the pro-life and the pro-choice sides of the abortion debate fairly.
(Also his take on birth control was that while the Church advocates abstaining from sex until marriage, God still gave humanity the ability to choose, and if people are going to be choosing to do things with their parts, then we might as well make sure we’re doing it safely.)
That priest sounds like a reasonable guy.
I’m Catholic and my parents were perfectly ok with me being taught about evolution at school.
Same here.
I went to a Catholic school and we covered Dinosaurs (including them being millions of years old) in grade school…. and evolution i junior high, and theories about the probability of life on other planets…
Heck, I always got the feeling the proper Catholic view of Evolution is “Hey, we found one of the tools God used to create us.”
It’s unfortunate that due the fundies brand of crazy, it’s colored the perception of many people that if you tell them you’re Catholic or Christian then they automatically think that you don’t believe in evolution and stuff.
Especially if you’re actually in one of the many moderate/liberal mainline Protestant branches (Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc). It makes me sad that the loudest voices are the crazy fundie ones. Like, we do a lot of good things in our world/communities, we just get shouted down by the “REPENT, SINNER!!!!” types. Maybe we need better PR?
I didn’t realize Catholicism seemed much better off with regards to evolution than other Christian subgroups. I mistakenly assumed narrow-mindedness would be prevalent across them for evolution (though other things, likely so).
The Church is a very old organization and slow to change but it does change.
I demand to see one of these texts, I need something funny to read.
Here ya go and sleep well, Mwahahahahahaaaaahaaahaaaaa
http://io9.com/5742032/who-will-be-eaten-first—-a-lovecraftian-parody-of-chick-tracts/
Pfffff, 30,000 years is NOTHIN’. Use of fire by hominids dates back 1.2 million years!
What? Well, that’s just great. Last week at debate club I got in trouble for making an ad hominid attack, and now I find they’ve been doing it for millions of years? I’m calling bullshit!
Wow, Dina’s eyes.
It’s a good thing this storyline is nearly over, because I’m starting to get tired of Dina and Becky. THEY’RE GREAT AND I LOVE THEM TOGETHER, but still.
Heretic! This is all the comic should be about from now on. Willis should just make a spin-off strip and put the rest of the cast in it so that he can keep this essence pure and strong.
Let their cuteness devour your soul. Mua ha ha ha!
No, that has been reserved for http://www.hello-cthulhu.com/images/comics/en/001.gif
I agree. I like them together but I could definitely sue a break. My Becky batteries need recharging.
The next arc is definitely another Becky focused one, probably with lots of Dina too.
Dina has been on all pages since DoA started.
Mostly behind doors.
Instead there is a dorky-looking scientist with a cute dinosaur costume telling her about strata.
yes, but unless evolution has made an exception and inexplicably given them monkey feet which they can hold out of shot, they are still not holding hands! we shall not let this go. say it with me brothers and sisters: “hold hands and look at pictures of dinosaurs!”
Going by past experience, they probably found it inconvenient to let go, turn the page, and then clasp hands again after about the third page turned, amd defaulted to just enjoying each other’s company.
there are work-arounds. if they find a comfortable way to lie down, then they can flip with one hand while holding the other. personally, i prefer to lean back and rest the book against my legs
Well, at least you’re displaying a willingness to learn and overcome the deficiencies of your past (not saying they’re you’re fault), Becky.
I know she’s super sheltered, but come on. Im Christian and have been my whole life and even I don’t think the world is only 6000 years old.
well it’s a good thing every single christian has the exact same experiences and upbringing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Willis, stop having a fake lived experience.
Jeebus, Willis, why did you travel back in time to manipulate your own upbringing just to make Christians look bad? Talk about a strawman! (/sarcasm)
You are saying that maybe God rewrote time to be an asshole?
Nah, that’s the secret nefarious work of the evilutionists. Hence why they have to put up the front of being dopey and cross-eyed all the time.
You can tell for a fact that evolutionist scientist don’t have access to time travel by the fact that there are evolutionist scientists around. If we had time travel most of us would be buddy-riding on dinosaurs and high fiving all day long instead of going “hurrrr” at meetings.
That’s how they hide the evidence of the time machine. Those scientists going “hurrr” are actually all planted robots to throw off the trail of Time Poachers.
Hohoho, that is absolutely not true. What a silly notion indeed. Hurr.
God is the reason behind the berenstain/berenstein bears controversy
Well, being brought up in the church with no schoolin besides what pastors taught us would probably ring home with what she was taught…
Though I guess I said fuck all that in my 20s(early) and had to understand that the world was much bigger then I thought.
The jist of things is that Joyce and Becky’s upbringing is directly based on Willis’ own life. Several other commenters frequently also talk about how what they’re going through is also pretty much how they were raised.
Different strokes for different folks and all.
Just take it as a good sign Willis. If somebody doesn’t believe the level of crazy that’s really out there, then that’s one more noncrazy person in the world. It’s a reassuring sign of sanity.
Sanity is over-rated…
Yeah, it’s ten thousand years old, obviously!
Well Christian doesn’t automatically equal Young Earth Creationist or whatever other flavor of fundie there is out there.
Fair enough, I admit I overreacted a bit and do apologies as such.
This isn’t even the first time that the fact that fundies like Joyce and Becky are taught that has been brought up in the comic.
It’s kinda a significant element to the story.
“And on the 3rd day, God created the Remington bolt-action rifle rifle so that man could fight the dinosaurs
…………..and the homosexuals.”
(Amen)
They are out there…
I’m sorry guys, I did over reactive a bit and retract my statement. Of course not everyone has the same experience.
Didn’t mean to wily people up.
My background is that I grew up in a somewhat similar situation and even I knew that not everything could be trusted.
This is kinda the problem. The christian community often acts like its one group when in reality you put up some of their beliefs at others and they will say “that’s crazy I don’t think anyone believes that”. -basically- you have the seventh day adventists who believe the bible literally. You have fundamentalists that can be any religion and just use their religious text to support their ideas ( the reason we have screwed up schools, education and the fact its year 2015 and people are still psycho about the idea of a non christian leader). Believers in a God who just seek reassurance and justification from their community( most common) annoying christians people complaintsn about) Spiritualists who’ve modeled their faith around a religion( what most “christians” and religious people who aren’t buttholes are). Agnostic people who were raised christian, and aethists afraid of death who trick themselves into believing. All these people of the christian variety would call themselves “christian” but most would be highly uncomfortable among any other community.
Remember how Joyce said her family has switched churches several times, how that other bongo acted like scouting churches was a past time . Its very rare to find a group bigger than a few who have similar beliefs on all aspects of religiin
YEAH WILLIS CATHOLICS DON’T THINK THE WORLD IS 6000 YEARS OLD COME ON.
(I hope caps make this a joke)
I had thought Dina was referring to the falsified dates from Shinichi Fujimura’s hoaxed finds, but I went and checked and she’s got her date estimate correct.
Well done Dina!
I like this. Becky is clearly motivated rebel against her fundamentalist upbringing. One may infer that her father’s actions have a lot to do with that, especially considering that they have all been done in the name of religion. It stands to reason that Becky would want to disassociate herself from that.
None of this changes the fact that Becky has basically experienced the same education as Joyce. She’s been taught a particular worldview starting in early childhood. The roots of her beliefs about the nature of certain things are going to be pretty deeply embedded. I would imagine that some of those beliefs may take significant time to unlearn.
There’s an interesting internal conflict going on here, and I would be interested in seeing it explored further.
Becky also has a source of great motivation to undermine her upbringing, that is, a desire for forbidden girl-on-girl action.
C’mon, Becky, I can see the gears turning in that last panel. Get interested, I know you want to learn more~~~
Mmm, fishlizards. Them’s mighty good eatin’.
More like them eating you,this guys were big,luckily they only ate mostly fish and squidshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyosaur
Actually there is a thing called lizardfish. I found this out by reading the ingredients in the frozen shu mai I bought from a Korean grocery.
Tetrapods, but they evolved so rapidly when they hit that point that very few fossils survived.
Why does god make bad things happen to good people? The answer…may surprise you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAUPy8sBhXs
To test them.
I’m not sure that the video proves your point or that the song fits the story line, but Mahiru Inami’s father does share a number of traits with Becky’s.
As a former homeschooler, can confirm.
Both Joyce and Becky are Fundies, but two totally different outlooks on what they’ve been taught it appears.
Becky reminds me of most people I know, whatever their religion. Most people go to church on Sunday and that’s about it. Becky’s attitude seems to be like that – her beliefs seem to be more world encompassing than just religion even though all of her school books were religious in one form or another: but she also seems to understand that there are other’s who don’t think like her, and not be too upset about it. It’s just getting over that little ‘the world is a lot older than 6000 years that’s seems to bother her most’. Yet she’s willing to consider proof.
Joyce got the same upbringing, but swallowed every word of it with no worries, That others may not think like her, never occurred to her – till college apparently. And she simply assumed they just didn’t know any better, so she’d gladly correct their thinking. Proof, no proof it’s all faked.
Those fossils were just God testing us. [Haven’t figured that theory out yet].
Wicca doesn’t need propaganda. We don’t spread it. We don’t want it.
Yeah, and it’s interesting that Joyce is smacking face first things she can’t just hand-wave into what she was taught. More and more she is having to be as curious and accepting of the world and what is true as Becky is trying to be and all the time the little voice in the back of her head is saying that this is how good people start walking down the road to Hell.
Becky has the dubious ‘advantage’ of being someone already pre-damned by her family’s religious values. I think that may help her take the rest of their teachings less at word; if they were wrong about ‘dem gays,’ what else could they be wrong about?
Yeah, that’s a major difference. To Joyce, it’s “if they are wrong about my friend, maybe not everything they told me is true”. To Becky, it’s “they are wrong about me. They’re probably equally wrong about a lot of stuff.”
Part of me now has a morbid interest in finding out what a Wiccan fundie would be like.
Wicca fundamentalists would be highly transphobic, probably, and also be an actual wiccan. Most people who say they are wiccans are actually neo-wiccans, because wicca is an initiation based religion. So there ya go.
@idontcarenomore
Hem, sorry to interject, but I think you might want to nuance “Wicca doesn’t need propaganda. We don’t spread it. We don’t want it.”
Wicca is a rather wide movement, and Wiccan scriptures and texts and ideas can be and are proselytized like any other…
You may not spread it, but others do. Through social networks, “Gaia consciousness meetings”, covens, congregations, seminaries… Not all proselytism is door-to-door evangelism
“She blinded me…with SCIENCE!”
‘Good heavens, Miss Saruyama . . . you’re beautiful!”
Dina’s many, many talents aside, teaching is not one of them. “I’ve already explained this concept once. How comes you do not understand it?”
FUDGE YOU, people who wrote Becky’s and Joyce’s textbooks. It’s one thing when a poor duped homeschooled sap believes in Inteligent Design, but the people who write textbooks and claim to be scientists have NO EXCUSE. YOU ARE LYING TO CHILDREN, POOPHEADS. FUDGE YOU
+100
Yeah, Dina’s not really a Leslie.
It is a standard (religious) right wing attack method. Make yourself “look to be credible” in the area you are attacking, and begin making up stuff that conforms to your beliefs, but not science. Unfortunately man are not able to tell that there is no logical basis for the “facts”, or have been conditioned to not blindly believe.
Happens all the time in the Climate Change debate as well, and the war on drugs, and poverty, and well it is a long list…
I want Becky to become a scientist so bad now.
The Saruyamas: Lesbian Paleontologists
…if someone kickstarts that concept (with suitably changed names and characters) it would be AWESOME!!!! Indiana Jones-style paleontologists, fighting rivaling paleontologists in the gobi dessrt and holding hands in museums.
*beckasaur, trampling through on horseback
Becky: *whip-snatches a small clay pot
Dude: “OW!!! MY HAND!!!”
Dina: “This belongs in a museum!!”
Dude: “DO YOU NOT SEE ALL THESE CRATES HEADED TO THE SMITHSONIAN!!!?”
*hour later, all three brushing, each in a quad…
What is Lesbian Paleontology?
Paleontology with a queer biological perspective (yup, it’s a real thing!)
…or, you know, paleontologist who happen to be lesbians, but how fun is that?
Maybe it’s research into the ancestry of that species of lizards that reproduces by using lesbian sex to stimulate self-fertilization (I may be misremembering something here about the way they produce embryos)?
From https://paleobiodb.org/ it looks like there hasn’t been any, although there have been lots of brachiopods and ammonites found on one of the other Aegean islands.
We still need to have a poll on whether they go with Saruyama or MacIntyre as their last name though.
Me too! It’d be awesome and heartwarming if she found a calling in her life, out of this nastiness.
One of us. One of us.
I… Kinda want to see these comics. Anyone got a link?
Here you go. All available to read online, except for a few that were so awful they just pretend they don’t exist. http://chick.com/catalog/tractlist.asp
Well. That was deeply disturbing.
What, no Crocoducks?
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/crocoduck.jpg
Crocoduck: slang for “Spinosaurus”. Short legs apparently forced it into a usual stance similar to that of a crocodile, while it’s long snout resembled a crocodile. And it’s a dinosaur, so pretty close to birds and it definitely had feathers.
Chick tracts can be purchased at http://www.chick.com/gospel-tracts/?gclid=CNXqoq7Aw8cCFUVlfgodyd4Gdw, but I know I have read at least one online before.
I am coming to Beckys defense.
A large part of her problem isnt ( just ) that shes miseducated.
Humans are actually terrible at picturing large numbers and putting them in proportion.
Almost no one is able to intuitively think with “Deep-time”.
6000 years out of millions would be almost a reasonable assumption. But the earth isnt “millions” of years old Its Billions .
We say billions all the time, but most of us dont grasp how vast that is.
I took Archeology in College and this was one of the first lessons.
The Professor created a time-line and then transferred it to toilet paper.
Actual rolls of toiletpaper.
All of human written history was only the in first inch of the first sheet if toilet paper.
Then he started stacking a ridiculous amount of rolls on the front of the classroom from the floor to the ceiling. and asked us to guess how many?
Even knowing the scale, most people guess wrong. It was around 50 rolls. ( i forget the exact amount It was a while ago. ) .
Then he passed around the toilet paper rolls around the whole auditorium , which had a full Earth geological timeline written on it, in black marker.
So we could physically see it and handle it.
I like the Cosmic Calendar for that same illustrative reason.
That’s an awesome professor. I hope you learned lots under him!
i don’t think Becky really needs defense. I think it’s pretty admirable that she has been raised to believe one thing and is now at least open to the idea that something that is radically different might be true. she is learning and growing, that is always worth applauding.
“A large part of her problem isnt ( just ) that shes miseducated.
Humans are actually terrible at picturing large numbers and putting them in proportion.”
Yes THIS very much.
Numbers past a certain point just cant be visualized, we cant intuitively compare things.
Theres 7 billion people on earth right now. more.
I dont even think I appreciate fully what that means.
I like the analogy that if the history of the universe was compressed into a 24 hour day, from the big bang to right now, Homo Sapiens would have shown up a little over a second ago, and all of human civilization (from the start of agriculture and the first cities) happened in the blink of an eye.
Crocoduck 4 lyfe
It’s pretty scary seeing stuff like this as over in the UK I hardly see any Christians brought up this way at all. I only had to suffer through a Christian primary school (from around age 5 – 11) and then after that it’s all kind of a bad memory. Though even then it wasn’t that bad, we were still taught about evolution and such, we just had to sing some hymns every now and then.
To think in some places people believe that human existence is only 6,000 years old is pretty crazy. Along with all the other stuff.
I’m surprised that we are less than a million years old as a species. It has been 65 million years since the end of the dinosaurs, and more than 64 million were without Homo Sapiens in them.
So what you are saying is that they basically overlap, like in The Flintstones.
We live closer to the T-Rex, than the T-Rex lived to Stegosaurus.
Time frames get mentally WONKY when they’re that big.
Being as God is love, the proper answer to the evolutionists’ question is, “Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me…no more.”
Actually Becky is awful close to the start of human history.
History is written record. Everything before writing is prehistoric.
I’m sure Becky would understand the age of the world if she saw a picture of an erect penis.
Sorry, that’s actually a really uncomfortable thing you just said there.
Check yesterday’s comment sections and Willis’ tumblr.
Ah, I see the context now. But still, fucking uncool.
How is it “fucking uncool” to satirize ignorance and bigotry?
I didn’t see it as satire when I first saw it. I had no clue of what it was satiring until I was informed. And even then, I didn’t find it funny. It made me uncomfortable.
It was a joke. I’m an MTF lesbian. I think I can safely say I am aware the world does not work that way.
And I was clearly informed of these things before I wrote what I did.
Well, you know what they say when you assume.
I made no assumptions of any kind. I merely stated my discomfort.
I was responding to you saying it was still “fucking uncool”, not the initial statement. I have no issue with the initial statement.
I realize it’s a ref to that one comment yesterday, but urgh.
Just…no ?
Satire.
I was not taught this dating Method in Archaeology and Pre-History.
But I am very willing to learn
Thats something I appreciate about this comic. Came for the hilarity, stayed for the parts that sorta made me me think more about the things I believe in. I dunno where I stand 100 percent or nothin, but I figure I’ll get there eventually.
+10 for being open minded
Please tell me that last panel isn’t referring tonsomething in real life…
Not a lot of hand-holding going on in this segment.
Not a lot of dinosaurs in this segment
The new banner is the cutest thing ever.
This is why I should go to sleep before the comic comes out. Not only do I get enough sleep before work, but I wake up to Dina’s Dinadorableness.
… ok Becky is great too… Becky and her… nope, got nothing. A little help plz?
Becky’s a walking list of self discovery and Book of Cheese progress bars.
This particular one is first half of reconciling the Book of Cheese against empirical science then, picking one.
She kinda reminds of a Sim with the little blue bar filling up, really fast.
-lbgt skill: 5
-charisma: 4
-logic: 3 (climbing) (this sim is being tutored by dina…)
-common sense: 6
Having your opinions on science based on Chick Tracts is as stupid as having your opinions on Christians based on them.
Which is a passive-aggressive way of saying, that the “aren’t these Christians backward” theme is wearing a bit thin with me.
I know, it’s a comic strip, and some stereotyping is part of the package. The portrayal of Joyce hasn’t been a problem for me (part of the fun of the strip, actually) But as more characters that are Christian appear, and become regular or semi-regular characters, the sameness tends to worry me.
No, I’m not a Christian, but my sister’s family is, they do homeschool, and my niece and nephews are the least sheltered/naive kids I know of.
The only people who subscribe to this thought process are Joyce and Becky, both of whom grew up being homeschooled in a fundamentalist community. At that, their experiences are based on Willis’ own life growing up in a fundamentalist household. It’s right there in the About page.
Other Christian characters in the cast include Danny, Amber, Billie, Sierra, and maybe more characters I’ve forgotten, and none of them have displayed the same viewpoints as Joyce or Becky. There’s lots of ways to grow up in a Christian family.
+1
I understand that homeschooling, handled right, can work out just fine. It can also be a trainwreck.
You are forgetting about Mary…
Walky and Sal might be catholic as well.
Also: done properly homeschooling is fine, and there are many reasons why someone could legitimately decide it is the best option for their children (like the schools in your area being horrible). It is just that most of the time when it comes up it is because someone is using it for what is basically indoctrination/brainwashing disguised as education.
I forgot about Mary because Mary is terrible and I was focusing on positive Christian characters.
As for Walky, he’s very much an atheist in that reddit brand of relentlessly mocking Joyce for her beliefs. Sal, I imagine she’s probably distanced herself from organized religion, but her beliefs are unclear as of yet.
This. The comic is filled with positive portrayals of Christians who do not have a background in Young Earth Creationism or that whole Pre Millennial Dispensationalist fundie culture. Additionally, I would argue that Joyce and Becky are rather positive examples of people working through that kind of raising into their own forms of Christianity.
And this culture and its impact are real things. Willis has stated that with Joyce and her culture, he is writing autobiographically about his own childhood and real things that he was taught growing up and which kids are still being taught in a lot of places in America and the world.
And I can confirm growing up in a community dominated by this particular flavor of Christianity and having the majority of my childhood friends go through their various Becky and Joyce style workthroughs of what they were carefully taught that this rings true to the actions of that particular sect.
These things are real. Willis lived through it. I lived through it second-hand.
Exactly. There’s this pervasive, hyper defensive attitude in pop culture that showing any form of organized religion (and almost always Christianity) as anything but good and helpful gets you labelled some liberal maverick. Is Joyce repressed? Sure. Is it because of her religion? Danny, Amber and Billie all seem to be into the pre-marital hanky panky so it’s clearly not that much of a pandemic. Maybe it’s just Joyce and her upbringing.
But no, that’s just not good enough for some people.
If this was a mockish general parody of all christianity, wouldn’t, like, half the school be speaking from exactly the same notions as Joyce and Pre-Dinky Becks?
*quick google* Okay, wiki tells us that 80% percent of indiana’s population identifies as christian based on a 2008 report on religious demographics. So why isn’t like… all the college behaving exactly the same as Joyce?
Could it be that she and her upbringing represent a minority element of a pervasive faith where the vast majority don’t share the extreme views and upbringing and don’t feel immediately compelled to act like an ignorant dick over it?
Does Willis really need to hold our hands and make us all feel better by telling us that most people are pretty okay? “I’m so sorry that you’re upset by all the crappy things that got shoveled into my head in my upbringing. But you know, statistically you’re probably pretty okay.”
Maybe I should take it upon myself to post a disclaimer in the comments after every comic reminding everybody that most people aren’t terrible if it’s just such a fucking difficult subject to grasp.
my opinions on christians are based one my own fucking life as one
people just fall all the fuck over themselves scrambling to tell me how fake my own fucking life is
Willis, you’re being unkind. All they are saying is that Satan faked the dinosaur bones of your raising environment to make Christians look bad. (/sarcasm)
I seem to recall reading a sci-fi short story way back in the day which posited that the earth was created and populated by space aliens, and it was they who planted the fake ‘fossils’ in the different strata.
I believe this was Hitchhiker’s Guide Trilogy – Slartibartfast was one of the designers of Earth, he mentioned other designers placing fossils. He, himself, was all about the fjords…
Not to mention this whole idea that you’re “out to get” Christianity espoused by certain commentators is ridiculous. Even just focusing on Joyce and Becky; Joyce has consistently remained stalwart in her faith while gradually rejecting the worst parts of it that conflict with her desire to do right by those she loves, and Becky, who unlike Joyce has lost nearly everything because of her father, still believes in God, she’s just opening up to the truths she’s been deprived of because of her upbringing.
If that’s your idea of tearing down Christianity then they should feel honoured to be so oppressed.
Truth.
Didn’t you know Christians are the most persecuted group?
because, like, they’re the ones who have to eat the most crow
or
something
idk
Spenscer: “Not to mention this whole idea that you’re “out to get” Christianity espoused by certain commentators is ridiculous.”
I never said he was “out to get” Christianity. If he was, it would have been pointless to even bring my concerns up here.
(If you weren’t referring to my post, I apologize for the error)
“people just fall all the fuck over themselves scrambling to tell me how fake my own fucking life is”
And I made no such claim.
I didn’t even say that such people don’t exist.
Sorry, just trying to say that as more examples show up, it comes across as closer to stereotyping than character traits. Pardon me if I’ve seen too many people mock and insult a whole religion over the extreme few. I’m hoping that’s not where this strip ends up going, which is why I expressed my worry here.
But if you want to scramble all over yourself to tell me MY life experiences are fake, that’s your prerogative.
Okay, that last sentence may have been a bit too snarky…
Let’s lighten things back up: Will there be a Becky/Dina Slipshine coming up? I can (part of) the title now “The mating habits of the (whatever species of dinosaur Dina’s hoodie is supposed to emulate)”
I quote you:
No, fuck you. You said this strip based its opinions of Christians on Chick Tracts. That is your OPENING SENTENCE.
Don’t you backpedal on me.
“But as more characters that are Christian appear, and become regular or semi-regular characters, the sameness tends to worry me.”
Wait what? The only other main character that has the exact same views as Joyce is Becky. (Other characters, that are related to Becky, and Joyce also have similar views. Add in Mary, and you get what, six fundamentalist characters we’ve seen? There’s also a lot of Christian characters who don’t have the same views as Joyce. Danny and Billie to start with)
Also, all that stuff about Joyce’s upbringing being the same as the author’s upbringing. I mean, that’s in the Read Before Posting part of the site.
“Also, all that stuff about Joyce’s upbringing being the same as the author’s upbringing. I mean, that’s in the Read Before Posting part of the site.”
Thanks for pointing that out. I’d either forgotten or never read that
(Who remembers the “terms of service” of all the websites they’ve read? I must owe someone a firstborn or something like that by now…)
Well I guess you could call it the terms of service. But put in other words? It’s the posting rules. And it’s not written like a EULA. It’s not super arcane and difficult to parse.
So hey is it just me or does anyone else hear Tina’s voice in their head as Hynden Walch?
were those actually text books she learned from or did her parents accidentally buy satirical joke books and were too stupid to tell the difference? Also those japanese tools may be 30,000 years old but evidence of stone tools goes back WAY farther than that, over 2.5 million years ago in fact…
There are actual text books that are used by fundamentalist christian parents who homeschool their children. Check the old Dina & Joyce storyline about vacination to see how badly they represent science.
In addition to Will’s answer, check David Willis’ “gem” of a Christian homeschool textbook on his Tumblr: http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/127522736172/oh-dear
Finally almost caught up. Just have to finish the last chapter of Shortpacked! and binge Joyce and Walky! then I can be “cool” and “hip”. Those are still words, right?
Guys?
You’re all kinds of crazy fly.
You’ll slice it rebel-style
Fo shizazzlez!
…z.
I get the feeling that I’d probably have the same look on my face as Dina does in the last panel if Becky had said that to me
I find it very odd for people to look at how FUCKED the world is, and to still believe that there is any kind of deity out there dictating our actions.
If there IS a God telling us what to do, then obviously he’s been bored for several thousand years and has more bloodlust than an entire COLOSSEUM worth of Greek commoners!
God gave us freewill so everything we do is our own choice the shitty state of the world is entirely on us.
Yet apparently that free will did not extend to writing, compiling and translating the bible…
Omniscience voids the concept of free will. God set things up, and knew exactly how they would play out – EXACTLY how they will play out. Following the logic of Christian tradition, he bears 100% responsibility for the state of the world.
Gods can exist without being responsible for “Creation” .
Thats a Theist Bias ( tradition )
They can be an after-effect, a rounding error or co-arise like Universal Constants. or Just evolve. Like us.
Thats the Buddhist View.
My opinion is that any sufficiently advanced consciousness is indistinguishable from a classical God.
I am partial to Epictetus view on his Lazy Gods.
An interesting Thought experiment is : “Imagine the sun was a conscious being” What would it be like?
Whats interesting from a scientific speculative view is the ( remote ) possibility that Stellar-core EM networks ( which move very slowly ) could be able to support a consciousness.
…None of which has anything to do with the Christian conception of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent YHWH, which was what I was responding to.
But at any rate, in principle there’s a lot of definitions for ‘God’. In practice, ‘sufficiently advanced consciousness’ isn’t going to be one without actually having one (And no, White People were not typically accepted as gods for having guns – even Mesoamericans, who DID do that, did it because it fit multiple aspects of their myth, and they kinda realized ‘nah’ before the fighting.)
People die by eating things they thought were healthy, and turned out to be poisonous or allergenic. Not to mention not knowing enough about earthquakes, hurricanes, or plagues to avoid them.
Saying everything is on people is like saying a child should have to take responsibility for surviving on the savanna. It’s a cruel excuse for what happens next.
Just gotta say this, Earth’s about 4 and a half billion years old
Coincidentally, this article appeared today.
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.672698?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook
And that’s why my parents aren’t Orthodox.
Same article but with rather enlightening comments:
http://bit.ly/1NPQmHE
i wonder if the people you make fun of for being awful on tumblr ever see what you say
Based on the responses in the other thread that are still happening, I’m going to guess: not often.
People keep posting links to the D&D Chick tract, but this one seems more relevant to the comic: https://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0055/0055_01.asp
ah yes, the “when you do the scientific equivalent of dividing by zero, nothing makes sense, and you have to keep RE-EVALUATING THINGS rather than always knowing the so-called answers!!” argument disproving science
welp, gotta just take all our vaccines and medicine and technology and throw it in the trash and replace it with Intelligent Design which created NOTHING WHATSOEVER other than smugness
I would have thought that if a scientific discovery causes a re-evaluation of the existing understanding of the universe, that’s a sign that science is
*working*, not that it’s defective.
The scientific process is designed to self-correct. At any point in time our body of scientific knowledge represents the most-likely-true understanding that we are capable of obtaining with our most honest, intelligent and objective interpretation, from all of the currently-available data, with our currently-available tools and imaginations. It is always and necessarily subject to revision as new data and ideas emerge. Of course, this process only works if you’re willing to let the data inform and re-shape your hypotheses, and not the other way around…
My aunt got a degree in “Life Sciences” and is married to a university biology professor but she still believes the earth is 6,000 years old and evolution is a crock. And she didn’t even grow up with the kind of schooling Willis, Joyce, and Becky had. My grandparents thought she was straight up nuts.
So yeah, Fundamentalists come from weird places sometimes.
There’s a geology prof at my Uni who was fine until he got tenure, then he started to teach that ‘evolution isn’t real,’ and that all those fossils he keeps finding were put there to throw us off… He still publishes papers and writes very unusual articles for the local paper, but he’s been isolated from the rest of the department (physically put his office inside another department’s area) and not allowed to teach students. He put up a giant bulletin board beside his [always closed] office door and posts B.C. comics and things.
I personally try to keep an ever evolving view of my religion. The world existed and I still have my faith. I know full well that world is older than 6000 years old just by the default of ‘Let’s face it, humanity’s been around a LONG time.’
I also understand that people’s abilities to play telephone with religion is tough. At a certain point we were able to get the story on paper/stone… But anything before then is put through the views and understandings of the people who told them, even those who were there.
Do I believe the universe as we know it was made in six days? Yes. I believe that the planet and stars were shaped as would be best for us (factoring in free will) so that we would have the best possible outcome. It sort of sits on the view that he knows, but did what he could so that we would do what we do, but still end up in the best place we could as we are.
“Yes. I believe that the planet and stars were shaped as would be best for us (factoring in free will) so that we would have the best possible outcome”
I’m not sure if this is the case. Jupiter is a really weird double edged sword. It can draw in objects that might impact the Earth, but it can also disrupt the orbits of stuff in the asteroid belt, causing it to go into the inner solar system (and possibly into Earth’s path)
Source: http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/villain-in-disguise-jupiters-role-in-impacts-on-earth/
In any case, while it’s true that life as we know it would not exist if some universal constants were different, that doesn’t mean that the universe is designed. After all, maybe life would just exist in a completely different form, in a way we can’t imagine if the universe was slightly different.
One of the biggest falsies that some Christians fall into is thinking that God is the cause of only what we don’t understand. This makes for a small God that gets smaller whenever someone discovers the natural mechanism of something. However, most main stream Christians (Catholic/Lutheran) believe that ALL of creation is their God’s work. Including the stuff that science has explained. The thinking goes that the “universe is the the true word of God” (one interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis: “God Spoke and it Was.”) Thus the study of the universe (dinosaurs included) is in a way the study of their Gods work.
Just a thought you guys might want to keep in mind before taking cheap shots at the dumb ass young earthers.
“falsies”?
BIG falsies!
fallacies ?
there we go
The same Devil who planted fossils in the ground went on to put autocorrect in computers.
Ha! Last summer, I went to a ‘home school’ garage sale, and bought 3 of the ‘the earth is 6000 years old’/’biology isn’t real’ ‘science’ text books- had to make sure no one else could buy them. They weren’t even CREATIVE with their falsehoods! You’d think they could come up with creative Literal InExactitudes (LIEs).