But Joyce wouldn’t eat food like Ross did anyways. He was probably a big potatoes and gravy fan, while I think Joyce probably won’t eat gravy at all. At least not on the potatoes anyway. (Potatoes and gravy, yum.)
Because this isn’t food, it’s information. If you already know a source is full of shit, you don’t keep believing the rest of that information without inspecting it.
If you like:
“Why eat the plague-ridden food your father gave you?”
“WHY LET MY JACKASS FATHER TAKE FOOD AWAY FROM ME?”
“…Because you know everything you DID eat made you sick?”
Her father isn’t the font of all religious information.
There are plenty of more open and accepting Christian groups. We’ve seen several in this comic even (Sierra’s church).
Jamie
I have no faith that Becky is aware of any of them, tbh, or considers them legitimate if she is.
Reltzik
She’s been to an episcopal church, understood that it didn’t have the toxicity of her father’s version of Christianity, and seemed to have far fewer problems with its legitimacy than Joyce did. So, aware and seems to regard it as legit.
Jamie
Oh, right! With Jacob, right? Completely forgot that episode.
I withdraw my objection.
Needfuldoer
Sounds like Becky has always had a broader worldview than Joyce, or at least didn’t build hers entirely around blind obedience to authority like she did.
Thag Simmons
she also went to church with Joyce & Sierra in a bonus strip and I think that’s her current church
John Smith
I’m sure there are. But why believe any of it? And see below for my comment on non-literalists. If you don’t actually believe your own holy books then… what are you even doing? You’re literally making it up as you go along.
King Daniel
Jesus himself often explicitly spoke in parables and metaphor; it’s not such a great extension, then, for believers to posit that other parts of the book, too, would be such.
Ravian
That’s what everybody’s doing. We’re all on a crazy ball spinning in a void and no one really knows what the heck is happening, so we’re all just trying to figure it out as best we can. Some people can look at a single source and think “This has all the answers I need, I’m good to go”. Other people find some very cogent ideas, and even if they don’t totally find some of the other bits useful, that doesn’t mean we have to dismiss every idea as being invalid.
This is little different than secular philosophy. I think there are a lot of interesting ideas to be gleaned from reading the works of Plato, he had a lot of interesting ideas about how we perceive reality through our senses and reason. He also seemed to believe that an ideal society would be a caste system ruled by an insular group of people raised from childhood on how best to rule over the rest of society and was generally dismissive of democracy in general. Does Plato being wrong about that somehow mean that his ideas about how we perceive the world are also without merit for consideration?
Knowledge and spiritual understanding is not a take it or leave it affair.
Clif
Plato’s ideas about how we perceive the world are only useful on the order of metaphor. Which is to say, not really.
On the other hand, democracy certainly does have it’s occasional problems as we have recently seen. An insular caste of people are probably not going to have an understanding of the society they are ruling and it will not go well. But if you had some other way of insulating the ruling class from self-interest, who knows?
C.T. Phipps
Probably because fundamentalists invented the ideas the books weren’t parables in the first place. The whole idea of it being literally true is a very recent idea. Also, you know, maybe they believe in God and think the whole tenets of the faith are good.
eh, whatever
The whole idea of it being literally true is a very recent idea.
Not remotely.
C.T. Phipps
Well the Catholic Church said that it wasn’t literally true for most of its history and that a lot of it was parable. The entire idea of the priestly caste existing to interpret it is because it was not to be taken at face value is indeed a major part of the reason fundamentalism exists. To challenge the idea that “anyone” could read the Bible and know the truth.
Which the Catholic Church says, “No. That is not how it goes” and they are the oldest of churches. By, you know, 1600 years or so.
jflb96
Even if the Church of England was the first non-Catholic Church, that still puts the foundation of Catholicism a century before Jesus died.
Pretty sure that there were splits before Constantine, if not *Nero*.
thejeff
There were splits before the Gospels. 🙂
Early Christianity is a mess of different variants that eventually mostly coalesced into Catholicism or were wiped out – though some sects from splits from the early centuries have survived (Coptics?)
Clif
Why worry about old sects when there are plenty of new ones.
Access to the actual bible is. For a long time people sat in a big building while someone droned on in a language they didn’t understand and they prayed on their own terms. What the monks bickered about had fairly little impact on the people working the fields and going about their lives.
Before that, people were integrating their pre existing beliefs into a religion that was violently forced on them.
But Christianity IS NOT the only religion and should NEVER be treated as such.
The earliest religions were based on our connection to nature, and honestly after working on a farm I don’t know how you can connect deeply with nature and not believe in a divine force of some kind.
They worshipped the miracle of life coming forth and ending, the swollen belly of pregnancy, the return to the earth, the rhythm of the universe. They regarded seeds as precious treasures. It was an incredible show of gratitude for the amazing bounty this solar system has gifted our species with – which is something we could all use a little more of.
Thag Simmons
It’s really difficult to get a solid idea of what the earliest religions actually looked like. We can make assumptions and inferences but reconstructing a dead religion nobody bothered to write down is really hard.
Mel
Well I can say for my particular church we believe in revelationary reading, in that God imbues a divine understanding over the fallible word of man and lets you basically vibe with a deeper truth unable to be captured by literal writing. Every man his own prophet basically.
JBento
Sierra’s church is probably not a source of religious information for Becky, because if Sierra is any indication it has absolutely zero issues with pre-marital hanky panky.
Seregiel
Or they really underline the position of not judging others transgressions.
Everybody has something they firmly believe in that is completely unsupported by evidence. Have a good look through Snopes and Politifact and see if you can spot some of yours.
I am an agnostic and I have a belief completely unsupported by evidence that the universe is both just and merciful in the long run.
The label of ‘Christian’ is varied enough that if you ask if it is helping or harming people then the answer is clearly “Yes”. Many jerks justify their jerkness in Christian belief, many nice people credit their niceness on Christian belief and a great many ordinary people are a mixture of jerk and nice and blame/credit their Christian belief for that jerkness/niceness (although it’s arguably irrelevant for both).
I guess what I’m saying is, “Don’t be a jerk and removing religion isn’t going to magically remove jerkness from human society.”
Hilen
I agree with you in most of what you said, but since I have been often “wordplayed” and dismissed by many “believers” throughout my life as a soul-less, bitter or plain stupid person, I have to clarify this little bit.
No, not “everybody has something they firmly believe in that is completely unsupported by evidence”. I don’t. I might believe some things that have yet to be _proved_ (like my belief that some type of life probably exists outside of Earth) but I would not put my hands to the fire for those, this is not part of my main convictions. Evidence (even personal experience, even if it can easily be wrong) is required for me to build concepts and ideology.
Is it better? Arguably, since objective truth is still not achieved, but it is my way of moving through life, I will see how it changes or not based on future experience.
In the meantime, I’m an Atheist and an Eskeptic. Depending on what part of the world you are in, that is quite shitty. I found out relatively recently that only 7% of people worldwide are “godless”, aparently, and since most are not in my country I have been planning to move somewhere else. Maybe one day I will.
For now, sorry, but I just don’t do that kind of belief.
Paul
> No, not “everybody has something they firmly believe in that is completely unsupported by evidence”.
The point of false beliefs is that you don’t know that they are false. If you take the time to check through lists of common misconceptions you’ll probably find at least one that you were sure was right. For example, today I found out that water isn’t actually completely colourless. If you asked me yesterday, I would have been sure that water – like air – only appears to be blue because of variable light refraction. But apparently it’s blue because even clean water preferentially absorbs red light. https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/water-color?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects
The other point where you’re almost certain to have some firmly held beliefs with no evidential basis is politics. I won’t get into any particular side or belief (I don’t even live in the US) but political beliefs on all sides include at least as much fiction as any random religious group.
JewelledMoon
Right but you are doing a false equivalency, in that very example you immediately changed your mind when supplied with information to the contrary.
Paul
I didn’t say that everybody (including skeptics) have beliefs that aren’t supported by evidence and won’t change those beliefs if confronted with contrary evidence. That is a greater claim that I didn’t make.
Hilen
Sorry Paul. In that last bit where you say “The other point where you’re almost certain to have some firmly held beliefs with no evidential basis is politics” are you implying I said a political thing, or are you just saying that politics in general often work with a set of beliefs with no evidential basis? This is a genuine question. I’m not a native English speaker, and I might be missing some obvious pointer to what you meant. Feel free not to answer.
Hilen
I think we are having problems with the “believe” thing. Just to make it clear though, I want to say I’m making the following distinction between belief and faith: belief (as I used it) is only a matter of wording. You can replace it by “I think this is true”, but it is based on experience and/or facts, even if they might be proved wrong later. For example, many kids think the moon follows them at night. They don’t just come to this idea from nowhere.
They see the moon is always up there, and as they walk they see the moon is still in the same spot, so with all the knowledge they possess at the time, they figure the moon is following them. Same could be said of them believing the sun “comes up” in the morning. If you explain to them what’s really happening, however, they will get it.
No one is born knowing. And you never learn everything, there’s always new things to know. And as you say, new stuff sometimes overrides previous knowledge. But that’s not “a belief”, it’s *understanding being built*.
I bet you thought water was colorless because 1- you were thought so in school and 2- because water, upon inspection, didn’t hold color to you. It wasn’t baseless, even if it was mistaken after all. This is common to all of us.
However “faith” IS believing in something/believing something is true WITHOUT any evidence, and it has often been justified to me as a “gut feeling” I don’t get due to me being, basically, a no-fun party-pooper. A feeling, or an intuition, or sometimes I guess just a decisive choice. You have faith the Earth is flat, you have faith there’s life after death, you have faith there is a God or ruling force in the world that defines what is and will be -a force that is often your side, in some way, or that takes you into account. You might have faith in cryptids and aliens building the pyramids or in reading hands or curing stomach ache with a measurer trick and a prayer. Some of these, I think, are easily refutable (I have had plenty of discussions regarding the measuring meter as cure for “bad eye” and stuff that I am not affraid to say it is ridiculous, based on nothing, and absolutely a scam) but other stuff is still to be actually proven. For example, I might be an atheist, but as an eskeptic I can’t enter into a discussion about a god actually existing or not, because my arguments are mostly subjective. I have no more proof god doesn’t exist than anyone has that it/he/she/they do. Religions, religious writings and other stuff like that can be “debunked” partially or totally through investigation and facts, but I have no proof regarding the “”entity”” itself.
And still, if tomorrow a literal angel spawned in my yard and smaked me in the nose, and after all posibilities had been discarded, I would have to admit the winged invader is an angel, no matter what I considered true before. Because new data would be at hand, and it would question what I thought before.
Because I have no faith. I only think some things might be true, based on stuff. And if that turns out to be mistaken I can just re-adjust. Like anybody else can.
Clif
CLEAR WATER DENIER!
Clif
Drown them all and let Poseidon sort them out.
Paul
> politics in general often work with a set of beliefs with no evidential basis?
I am absolutely saying that politics in general usually works with a set of beliefs that have no evidential basis. Not all of their beliefs, obviously, but yeah a whole heap of them.
Politics is mostly, but not entirely, money, charisma and PR. Some parties may be marginally ‘worse’ or ‘better’ but I’m not going to go into that swamp.
Hilen
Thanks for taking the time to answer that for me, Paul. I agree with your point regarding politics. I don’t know how many countries are like that, but mine is also deeply polarized. Given corruption and other factors this “side-against-side” doesn’t really amount for nothing more than separaring people, but that’s how it goes here. So yeah, I have abandoned all party-politics as well. (I don’t know if that translates properly. Here we are thought that every social act is political, therefore the “apolitical individual doesn’t exist”. Party-politics, however, are related with an afiliation with a political party -such as leftists, right-wings, etc- and that is something you can remain away from. I clarify this because I didn’t check the term, I just translated on the go and there might be more appropriate terminology.)
jflb96
If the universe is just and merciful in the long run, it will be only because it invented us and we made it so
Enkrod
We weren’t really “invented” as much as we just “happened”
Clif
Entropy always wins in the end.
Just, maybe. But merciful, not so much.
My theory is that we were invented when Evolution got bored one day.
Paul
Well, I did say that I was an agnostic – not an atheist. My belief that the universe is just and merciful in the long run is my unsupported-by-evidence faith.
Not everything; if that were the case, she would have never have tried to hook up with Joyce, and then eventually Dina. Not everything about religion is toxic.
The bible isn’t the only source of evidence for god. You can be a scientist and a theist.
John Smith
Science is entirely based around falsifiable claims and the idea of an objective reality. I’ve yet to see a theistic position that’s compatible with that.
thejeff
And yet you can still be a scientist and a theist. Plenty of people are.
That doesn’t mean that their position on God is a scientific one, just that their belief doesn’t interfere with their science.
John Smith
Sure. If you push god so far into the gaps that he/she/it literally does nothing and requires nothing from you, you can keep your vague sense of religion and purpose and still do science. The idea of a god like that boggles my mind, but I guess that’s a thing that does happen.
i have seen the light. thank you clif. www=666, amen.
Enkrod
Some of the best defenders of secularism and some of the best people working against teaching creationism are both scientists and theists.
Wereg
The usual mental compromises people make for this are things like “Theology’s original message was corrupted by man’s agendas and beliefs” or evolution as an aspect of intelligent design. These things aren’t intrinsically incompatible with science and are often based on science itself not having a full measure of things.
thejeff
Or like Becky, believe in God’s love without it interfering in their understanding of science.
One can’t be a Biblical literalist and a scientist without some serious mental contortions, but most religious people aren’t Biblical literalists.
Shade
Presently I’ve yet to see any evidence of it and that includes the bible.
You’ll probably find theist scientists will openly admit they don’t have evidence for it.
I think the point here is that just because Ross was claimed to be religious does not mean that his tainted version of religion should automatically negate all possible religion for Becky. She can choose her own religious path.
Meanwhile, Joyce’s point that Ross was bad at religion does not automatically mean that all religious is bad – but that is what Joyce is implying. It’s a false conclusion.
BBCC
It’s the Hitler ate sugar fallacy.
Delicious Taffy
If Hitler eating sugar was the worst people had to deal with back then, they’d have had it made.
Delicious Taffy
(ya know, aside from all the other geopolitical horsefuckery and atrocities going on)
I think Joyce is projecting a bit here, when asking “Why believe something your jackass father believed?” She’s also asking why should she believe something her mom does, someone she used to look up to and thought of as good, remember how upset and hurt and shocked Joyce was when her mom was agreeing with Toe-dad. I think that a big part of why Joyce lost her faith while Becky kept hers, was that Becky already knew and always knew that her dad was a POS. Joyce learning that her mom was a POS and then her parents potentially splitting because of her mom being a POS that her dad can’t support is new information and I don’t think Joyce has the same ability that Becky does to separate her feelings towards her family, from her feelings towards her religion.
She is. For Joyce, religion was handed down from infallible parents, so when her parents failed, so did the religion they handed down to her. For Becky, she already knew her dad was a jackass, and whatever her mother taught her is safely tucked away in the unchanging fortress of pleasant memory.
The events shown in the comic strip are devastating for Joyce. But for Becky, the events are basically just Tuesday. They’re not special. They don’t change how oppressive the world feels to her. Becky believes because she’s an underdog and God has her back. Joyce believed because she had been told to, and no other reason.
anonymsly
Yes!
For Becky, religion is a pile of pebbles. She can toss out the ugly ones and the mismatchy ones, keep only the ones she likes, and she still has a pile of pebbles.
For Joyce, religion was a mountain, one solid immovable mass. She can’t get rid of any of it without getting rid of all of it. This point has been a long, inevitable time coming for her.
Airyu
This is genuinely beautifully put. I love this analogy so much
Psychie
It’s even more apt considering Joyce’s aversion to her foods touching.
anonymsly
Oh, I didn’t even think about that! Poor Joyce, so many anxieties. Maybe she’ll relax re: food as she claims/reclaims control over other parts of her being.
555 thoughts on “Inside”
Ana Chronistic
“Why still eat food like your JACKASS FATHER ate?”
“WHY LET MY JACKASS FATHER TAKE FOOD AWAY FROM ME”
SEE HOW STUPID YOUR ARGUMENT IS JOYCE
tim gueguen
But Joyce wouldn’t eat food like Ross did anyways. He was probably a big potatoes and gravy fan, while I think Joyce probably won’t eat gravy at all. At least not on the potatoes anyway. (Potatoes and gravy, yum.)
Ana Chronistic
Joyce isn’t the one eating, Becky is
Clif
A single day is made up of 4 days and children should kill adults who don’t believe this basic truth.
Ack. It’s gone. Oh, well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
Clif
Dang. I should have linked to https://web.archive.org/web/20141108172553/http://www.lib.hcu.edu.tw/journal/files/CAS/CAS0206.pdf
milu
oh my god that looks both terrifying and delightful.
thejeff
You must be EDUCATED STUPID.
You don’t understand 4 Simultaneous Days Same Earth Rotation.
John Smith
Because this isn’t food, it’s information. If you already know a source is full of shit, you don’t keep believing the rest of that information without inspecting it.
If you like:
“Why eat the plague-ridden food your father gave you?”
“WHY LET MY JACKASS FATHER TAKE FOOD AWAY FROM ME?”
“…Because you know everything you DID eat made you sick?”
Rose by Any Other Name
Her father isn’t the font of all religious information.
There are plenty of more open and accepting Christian groups. We’ve seen several in this comic even (Sierra’s church).
Jamie
I have no faith that Becky is aware of any of them, tbh, or considers them legitimate if she is.
Reltzik
She’s been to an episcopal church, understood that it didn’t have the toxicity of her father’s version of Christianity, and seemed to have far fewer problems with its legitimacy than Joyce did. So, aware and seems to regard it as legit.
Jamie
Oh, right! With Jacob, right? Completely forgot that episode.
I withdraw my objection.
Needfuldoer
Sounds like Becky has always had a broader worldview than Joyce, or at least didn’t build hers entirely around blind obedience to authority like she did.
Thag Simmons
she also went to church with Joyce & Sierra in a bonus strip and I think that’s her current church
John Smith
I’m sure there are. But why believe any of it? And see below for my comment on non-literalists. If you don’t actually believe your own holy books then… what are you even doing? You’re literally making it up as you go along.
King Daniel
Jesus himself often explicitly spoke in parables and metaphor; it’s not such a great extension, then, for believers to posit that other parts of the book, too, would be such.
Ravian
That’s what everybody’s doing. We’re all on a crazy ball spinning in a void and no one really knows what the heck is happening, so we’re all just trying to figure it out as best we can. Some people can look at a single source and think “This has all the answers I need, I’m good to go”. Other people find some very cogent ideas, and even if they don’t totally find some of the other bits useful, that doesn’t mean we have to dismiss every idea as being invalid.
This is little different than secular philosophy. I think there are a lot of interesting ideas to be gleaned from reading the works of Plato, he had a lot of interesting ideas about how we perceive reality through our senses and reason. He also seemed to believe that an ideal society would be a caste system ruled by an insular group of people raised from childhood on how best to rule over the rest of society and was generally dismissive of democracy in general. Does Plato being wrong about that somehow mean that his ideas about how we perceive the world are also without merit for consideration?
Knowledge and spiritual understanding is not a take it or leave it affair.
Clif
Plato’s ideas about how we perceive the world are only useful on the order of metaphor. Which is to say, not really.
On the other hand, democracy certainly does have it’s occasional problems as we have recently seen. An insular caste of people are probably not going to have an understanding of the society they are ruling and it will not go well. But if you had some other way of insulating the ruling class from self-interest, who knows?
C.T. Phipps
Probably because fundamentalists invented the ideas the books weren’t parables in the first place. The whole idea of it being literally true is a very recent idea. Also, you know, maybe they believe in God and think the whole tenets of the faith are good.
eh, whatever
Not remotely.
C.T. Phipps
Well the Catholic Church said that it wasn’t literally true for most of its history and that a lot of it was parable. The entire idea of the priestly caste existing to interpret it is because it was not to be taken at face value is indeed a major part of the reason fundamentalism exists. To challenge the idea that “anyone” could read the Bible and know the truth.
Which the Catholic Church says, “No. That is not how it goes” and they are the oldest of churches. By, you know, 1600 years or so.
jflb96
Even if the Church of England was the first non-Catholic Church, that still puts the foundation of Catholicism a century before Jesus died.
Pretty sure that there were splits before Constantine, if not *Nero*.
thejeff
There were splits before the Gospels. 🙂
Early Christianity is a mess of different variants that eventually mostly coalesced into Catholicism or were wiped out – though some sects from splits from the early centuries have survived (Coptics?)
Clif
Why worry about old sects when there are plenty of new ones.
http://www.angels-heaven.org/english/img_0000/obr290.jpg
Z
Access to the actual bible is. For a long time people sat in a big building while someone droned on in a language they didn’t understand and they prayed on their own terms. What the monks bickered about had fairly little impact on the people working the fields and going about their lives.
Before that, people were integrating their pre existing beliefs into a religion that was violently forced on them.
But Christianity IS NOT the only religion and should NEVER be treated as such.
The earliest religions were based on our connection to nature, and honestly after working on a farm I don’t know how you can connect deeply with nature and not believe in a divine force of some kind.
They worshipped the miracle of life coming forth and ending, the swollen belly of pregnancy, the return to the earth, the rhythm of the universe. They regarded seeds as precious treasures. It was an incredible show of gratitude for the amazing bounty this solar system has gifted our species with – which is something we could all use a little more of.
Thag Simmons
It’s really difficult to get a solid idea of what the earliest religions actually looked like. We can make assumptions and inferences but reconstructing a dead religion nobody bothered to write down is really hard.
Mel
Well I can say for my particular church we believe in revelationary reading, in that God imbues a divine understanding over the fallible word of man and lets you basically vibe with a deeper truth unable to be captured by literal writing. Every man his own prophet basically.
JBento
Sierra’s church is probably not a source of religious information for Becky, because if Sierra is any indication it has absolutely zero issues with pre-marital hanky panky.
Seregiel
Or they really underline the position of not judging others transgressions.
Paul
Yay. Atheist vs Christian debate./s
Everybody has something they firmly believe in that is completely unsupported by evidence. Have a good look through Snopes and Politifact and see if you can spot some of yours.
I am an agnostic and I have a belief completely unsupported by evidence that the universe is both just and merciful in the long run.
The label of ‘Christian’ is varied enough that if you ask if it is helping or harming people then the answer is clearly “Yes”. Many jerks justify their jerkness in Christian belief, many nice people credit their niceness on Christian belief and a great many ordinary people are a mixture of jerk and nice and blame/credit their Christian belief for that jerkness/niceness (although it’s arguably irrelevant for both).
I guess what I’m saying is, “Don’t be a jerk and removing religion isn’t going to magically remove jerkness from human society.”
Hilen
I agree with you in most of what you said, but since I have been often “wordplayed” and dismissed by many “believers” throughout my life as a soul-less, bitter or plain stupid person, I have to clarify this little bit.
No, not “everybody has something they firmly believe in that is completely unsupported by evidence”. I don’t. I might believe some things that have yet to be _proved_ (like my belief that some type of life probably exists outside of Earth) but I would not put my hands to the fire for those, this is not part of my main convictions. Evidence (even personal experience, even if it can easily be wrong) is required for me to build concepts and ideology.
Is it better? Arguably, since objective truth is still not achieved, but it is my way of moving through life, I will see how it changes or not based on future experience.
In the meantime, I’m an Atheist and an Eskeptic. Depending on what part of the world you are in, that is quite shitty. I found out relatively recently that only 7% of people worldwide are “godless”, aparently, and since most are not in my country I have been planning to move somewhere else. Maybe one day I will.
For now, sorry, but I just don’t do that kind of belief.
Paul
> No, not “everybody has something they firmly believe in that is completely unsupported by evidence”.
The point of false beliefs is that you don’t know that they are false. If you take the time to check through lists of common misconceptions you’ll probably find at least one that you were sure was right. For example, today I found out that water isn’t actually completely colourless. If you asked me yesterday, I would have been sure that water – like air – only appears to be blue because of variable light refraction. But apparently it’s blue because even clean water preferentially absorbs red light.
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/water-color?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects
The other point where you’re almost certain to have some firmly held beliefs with no evidential basis is politics. I won’t get into any particular side or belief (I don’t even live in the US) but political beliefs on all sides include at least as much fiction as any random religious group.
JewelledMoon
Right but you are doing a false equivalency, in that very example you immediately changed your mind when supplied with information to the contrary.
Paul
I didn’t say that everybody (including skeptics) have beliefs that aren’t supported by evidence and won’t change those beliefs if confronted with contrary evidence. That is a greater claim that I didn’t make.
Hilen
Sorry Paul. In that last bit where you say “The other point where you’re almost certain to have some firmly held beliefs with no evidential basis is politics” are you implying I said a political thing, or are you just saying that politics in general often work with a set of beliefs with no evidential basis? This is a genuine question. I’m not a native English speaker, and I might be missing some obvious pointer to what you meant. Feel free not to answer.
Hilen
I think we are having problems with the “believe” thing. Just to make it clear though, I want to say I’m making the following distinction between belief and faith: belief (as I used it) is only a matter of wording. You can replace it by “I think this is true”, but it is based on experience and/or facts, even if they might be proved wrong later. For example, many kids think the moon follows them at night. They don’t just come to this idea from nowhere.
They see the moon is always up there, and as they walk they see the moon is still in the same spot, so with all the knowledge they possess at the time, they figure the moon is following them. Same could be said of them believing the sun “comes up” in the morning. If you explain to them what’s really happening, however, they will get it.
No one is born knowing. And you never learn everything, there’s always new things to know. And as you say, new stuff sometimes overrides previous knowledge. But that’s not “a belief”, it’s *understanding being built*.
I bet you thought water was colorless because 1- you were thought so in school and 2- because water, upon inspection, didn’t hold color to you. It wasn’t baseless, even if it was mistaken after all. This is common to all of us.
However “faith” IS believing in something/believing something is true WITHOUT any evidence, and it has often been justified to me as a “gut feeling” I don’t get due to me being, basically, a no-fun party-pooper. A feeling, or an intuition, or sometimes I guess just a decisive choice. You have faith the Earth is flat, you have faith there’s life after death, you have faith there is a God or ruling force in the world that defines what is and will be -a force that is often your side, in some way, or that takes you into account. You might have faith in cryptids and aliens building the pyramids or in reading hands or curing stomach ache with a measurer trick and a prayer. Some of these, I think, are easily refutable (I have had plenty of discussions regarding the measuring meter as cure for “bad eye” and stuff that I am not affraid to say it is ridiculous, based on nothing, and absolutely a scam) but other stuff is still to be actually proven. For example, I might be an atheist, but as an eskeptic I can’t enter into a discussion about a god actually existing or not, because my arguments are mostly subjective. I have no more proof god doesn’t exist than anyone has that it/he/she/they do. Religions, religious writings and other stuff like that can be “debunked” partially or totally through investigation and facts, but I have no proof regarding the “”entity”” itself.
And still, if tomorrow a literal angel spawned in my yard and smaked me in the nose, and after all posibilities had been discarded, I would have to admit the winged invader is an angel, no matter what I considered true before. Because new data would be at hand, and it would question what I thought before.
Because I have no faith. I only think some things might be true, based on stuff. And if that turns out to be mistaken I can just re-adjust. Like anybody else can.
Clif
CLEAR WATER DENIER!
Clif
Drown them all and let Poseidon sort them out.
Paul
> politics in general often work with a set of beliefs with no evidential basis?
I am absolutely saying that politics in general usually works with a set of beliefs that have no evidential basis. Not all of their beliefs, obviously, but yeah a whole heap of them.
Politics is mostly, but not entirely, money, charisma and PR. Some parties may be marginally ‘worse’ or ‘better’ but I’m not going to go into that swamp.
Hilen
Thanks for taking the time to answer that for me, Paul. I agree with your point regarding politics. I don’t know how many countries are like that, but mine is also deeply polarized. Given corruption and other factors this “side-against-side” doesn’t really amount for nothing more than separaring people, but that’s how it goes here. So yeah, I have abandoned all party-politics as well. (I don’t know if that translates properly. Here we are thought that every social act is political, therefore the “apolitical individual doesn’t exist”. Party-politics, however, are related with an afiliation with a political party -such as leftists, right-wings, etc- and that is something you can remain away from. I clarify this because I didn’t check the term, I just translated on the go and there might be more appropriate terminology.)
jflb96
If the universe is just and merciful in the long run, it will be only because it invented us and we made it so
Enkrod
We weren’t really “invented” as much as we just “happened”
Clif
Entropy always wins in the end.
Just, maybe. But merciful, not so much.
My theory is that we were invented when Evolution got bored one day.
Paul
Well, I did say that I was an agnostic – not an atheist. My belief that the universe is just and merciful in the long run is my unsupported-by-evidence faith.
ziggy78eog
Not everything; if that were the case, she would have never have tried to hook up with Joyce, and then eventually Dina. Not everything about religion is toxic.
Z
The bible isn’t the only source of evidence for god. You can be a scientist and a theist.
John Smith
Science is entirely based around falsifiable claims and the idea of an objective reality. I’ve yet to see a theistic position that’s compatible with that.
thejeff
And yet you can still be a scientist and a theist. Plenty of people are.
That doesn’t mean that their position on God is a scientific one, just that their belief doesn’t interfere with their science.
John Smith
Sure. If you push god so far into the gaps that he/she/it literally does nothing and requires nothing from you, you can keep your vague sense of religion and purpose and still do science. The idea of a god like that boggles my mind, but I guess that’s a thing that does happen.
Clif
You should worry more about things that come out of the gaps, Saurians from the Dark Worlds who want to put chips into your body and enslave you like poor puppets. http://www.angels-heaven.org/english/img_3000/obr3000.jpg
milu
i have seen the light. thank you clif. www=666, amen.
Enkrod
Some of the best defenders of secularism and some of the best people working against teaching creationism are both scientists and theists.
Wereg
The usual mental compromises people make for this are things like “Theology’s original message was corrupted by man’s agendas and beliefs” or evolution as an aspect of intelligent design. These things aren’t intrinsically incompatible with science and are often based on science itself not having a full measure of things.
thejeff
Or like Becky, believe in God’s love without it interfering in their understanding of science.
One can’t be a Biblical literalist and a scientist without some serious mental contortions, but most religious people aren’t Biblical literalists.
Shade
Presently I’ve yet to see any evidence of it and that includes the bible.
You’ll probably find theist scientists will openly admit they don’t have evidence for it.
RassilonTDavros
I mean, there’s a difference between eating food, something you need to do in order to live, and being religious, which you don’t.
Rose by Any Other Name
I think the point here is that just because Ross was claimed to be religious does not mean that his tainted version of religion should automatically negate all possible religion for Becky. She can choose her own religious path.
Meanwhile, Joyce’s point that Ross was bad at religion does not automatically mean that all religious is bad – but that is what Joyce is implying. It’s a false conclusion.
BBCC
It’s the Hitler ate sugar fallacy.
Delicious Taffy
If Hitler eating sugar was the worst people had to deal with back then, they’d have had it made.
Delicious Taffy
(ya know, aside from all the other geopolitical horsefuckery and atrocities going on)
milu
Like Stalin eating salt and such.
Delicious Taffy
That motherfucker
Clif
I bet Mike ate salt.
C.T. Phipps
“Do you believe religion is a good thing to have?”
A:] No [agree with Joyce]
B:] Yes [agree with Becky]
C:] Depends on the religion
anonymsly
D:] Depends on the person having the religion
Needfuldoer
THIS.
Clif
Religion is such a good thing to have that I have many of them.
Consistency is the bugaboo of small faiths.
King Daniel
There is, as always, an xkcd for that.
Enkrod
A! But not for the reasons Joyce has.
Shitbird
I think Joyce is projecting a bit here, when asking “Why believe something your jackass father believed?” She’s also asking why should she believe something her mom does, someone she used to look up to and thought of as good, remember how upset and hurt and shocked Joyce was when her mom was agreeing with Toe-dad. I think that a big part of why Joyce lost her faith while Becky kept hers, was that Becky already knew and always knew that her dad was a POS. Joyce learning that her mom was a POS and then her parents potentially splitting because of her mom being a POS that her dad can’t support is new information and I don’t think Joyce has the same ability that Becky does to separate her feelings towards her family, from her feelings towards her religion.
Queen Anthai
Pretty much this, yeah.
Jamie
She is. For Joyce, religion was handed down from infallible parents, so when her parents failed, so did the religion they handed down to her. For Becky, she already knew her dad was a jackass, and whatever her mother taught her is safely tucked away in the unchanging fortress of pleasant memory.
The events shown in the comic strip are devastating for Joyce. But for Becky, the events are basically just Tuesday. They’re not special. They don’t change how oppressive the world feels to her. Becky believes because she’s an underdog and God has her back. Joyce believed because she had been told to, and no other reason.
anonymsly
Yes!
For Becky, religion is a pile of pebbles. She can toss out the ugly ones and the mismatchy ones, keep only the ones she likes, and she still has a pile of pebbles.
For Joyce, religion was a mountain, one solid immovable mass. She can’t get rid of any of it without getting rid of all of it. This point has been a long, inevitable time coming for her.
Airyu
This is genuinely beautifully put. I love this analogy so much
Psychie
It’s even more apt considering Joyce’s aversion to her foods touching.
anonymsly
Oh, I didn’t even think about that! Poor Joyce, so many anxieties. Maybe she’ll relax re: food as she claims/reclaims control over other parts of her being.