It’s relatable to me too. While I didn’t have a fundamentalist upbringing, and wasn’t raised to believe that every last word of the Bible is literally true, my natural instinct is to be a continuity nerd and I consequently took a lot of it literally anyway. Which meant I spent a long time as a kid trying to come up with reasons why I could simultaneously believe in the Bible and not consider gay people eeeevul. Getting away from Christianity altogether and just being completely finished with the Bible was… well, a Revelation, if you’ll pardon the double entendre.
Yeah, had to do a lot of justifying in my younger days to explain why homosexuality in biblical times was bad whereas today it was not. “Well, back then it was just rape and lust, now it is about loving each other.” Ultimately, a disagreement over the perception of gay people is why I stopped going to church.
. . . Yes, I am aware of my handle and my gravatar.
Geneseepaws
You could play a chaotic good Paladin, but with that handle it’s unlikely that yer playing a lawful evil gnoll berserker.
Deanatay
I’unno, I could see an LE character taking the name ‘TemplarKnight’ just to piss off actual Knights Templar.
jflb96
Lawful Evil is the default alignment for Knights Templar in fiction anyway.
Yes. Yes it is. It started as facebook posts that were so long that I figured no one would read them, so I changed it to Long Damn Reviews.
Sami
Best I ever came up with was “okay, Leviticus was entirely about a people being nearly wiped out and birth rates being critical to their survival so those laws made sense”
“what about the new testament?”
“Oh that’s all mistranslated.”
Instead I have a lot of trouble justifying how gays are evil according to the bible? I’ve literally found only one reference and it did not really say anything about good or evil.
C.T. Phipps
Given Jesus said the law of Aaron was superceded by the will to do good and be kind, the reason gays are evil is because, “Southern churches wanted a scapegoat after they could no longer hate black people publicly.”
Pickman
I think it could be even worse. As far as I know the law of Aaron does not state “gays are evil”, it does not even hint at it.
S.R.
The passage often misinterpreted as “gay sex is an abomination”, on closer inspection, more than likely actually says “sex with young boys is an abomination”. Which I think we can generally agree on.
Jason
I’ve heard that a possible translation may be “temple boys”, which is not only abominable (assuming them to be actual boys and not men who were raised as temple boys) but has a religious aspect to it there as well.
Don’t know how much, if at all, that is backed up by people who actually know the subject, but…
I had a similar experience! I wasn’t raised fundie or anything, but was raised in a generically Christian setting. My natural urge to want order and structure meant that I looked to the Bible for guidance even more strictly than the adults around me sometimes…with some of those same mental gymnastics you reference, trying to reconcile it with other knowledge.
No kidding. I’ve mentioned in the past how I grew up in a slightly conservative religious background (not quite fundie levels of “alternative” education, but still different from what’s widely accepted) and trying to shake off the shit we were taught to just accept on faith still took some real effort
QuixoticMaunster
I wrote a big philosophical explanation of how I lost my “faith” as well, but suffice to say it was more like bone-deep terror that I was made “wrong” and god would “find out” and send me to forever-torture for loving who I loved.
Shaking that terror as I stepped away from the religion was a horrible thing, and I do not miss the panic attacks that left me quaking like a chihuahua and crying.
THANKS RELIGION!
Wagstaff
I’m so sorry you had to go through that. You have my condolences.
Here it is very instructive to recognize worship for what it is: a response to threat.
When we humans are faced with a threat, we have a number of natural responses: we fight, we flee, we freeze. But we also have another possible response: fawn. We praise, we please, we submit, we worship.
Some claim that worship is a free expression of adoration. But you really only have to look at the threats aimed at us who refuse to worship any gods to recognize the underlying coercion.
wow, I never had think that way, about worship to be a response to something you fear…
Geneseepaws
Roll over on our backs and let God give us tummy rubs?
Eyebrow
I think the term “God-fearing individual” sums it up nicely.
Shade
I mean I’ve certainly heard Christians tell me its proper to fear god, hell my name is a Christian name that literally means “fear of God” and that’s supposed to be a good thing.
Jhon
I, for one, worship our new insect overlords.
Devin
I think that’s an accurate representation of the model of a lot of Christian denominations, I would caution against applying that to all worship.
You really have to look at more than just the threats against us, because they’re not representative of all those who worship. It’s representative of those people and those people alone, and they are the loudest to be sure, but most certainly not enough to draw a conclusion that worship == threat response as a general rule.
Wagstaff
But isn’t the very point of worship to sway the comprise of the allegedly conscious aspects of the universe to work in our favor? In other words to mitigate threatsto our lives and livelihoods?
For most of pre-industrial human history, worship, swaying the comprise of the universe, was definitely not for advancing status as much as it was for preventing bad things from happening. Pre-industrial societies (and their religious practices) were structured for stability and survival, not change and development. Equally important, people were not accustomed to economic or social progress, nor did they expect either. In fact, a “good life” to most people (especially the peasants and farmers) almost always meant the absence of ANY change. A “good life,” was one were nothing bad happened. In this world and the religions designed to support it, one generation took over from another, doing essentially the same things that their parents did. Outside the sparse upper class population, people in this world never have embraced this idea that things could better for themselves or future generations. Maintaining the status quo was thought to be as good as it gets, and religions made sure of this, often further softening peoples’ resentment through promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave.
Devin
Not all religions treat worship as a way to sway the will of the higher beings, no. That’s an extremely Christian approach. That’s not to say it’s exclusively Christian, but it’s far from the only model. Also asking for things to work in our favor is not 1:1 with threat mitigation. That’s only part of the picture. You’re over-simplifying this concept.
That’s even been explored a little in DoA. You may recall at one point Ethan was poking at Joyce for the “personal God” model of her belief that he thought was weird.
With your brief exploration of pre-industrial human history, you’re way over-generalizing, and I’m telling you that having been where you are, you need to broaden your horizons. Your concept of “religions” as a monolith is very obviously informed primarily by Christianity, and you’re doing yourself and a great many others a disservice. I’ve been there. There’s a whole lot more to the world, and most of it isn’t hostile to us.
Wagstaff
Worship need not be exclusive to gods or beings you could call “gods” in order to motivate people to act in arbitrary ways under the premise that said behaviors somehow mitigate threat to our personal ambitions, if not our lives and livelihoods (for instance, the system of Karma in Hinduism, or the nature spirits of Japan’s Shinto).
This squares well with what is perhaps one of the loosest available definitions of a “religion”, offered by senior anthropologist Clifford Geertz:
“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive, long-lasting moods and motivations in its members by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”
Devin
Again, attempting to influence the way things go is not 1:1 with threat mitigation. Spinning every hope for a positive outcome as the result of the fear of a bad outcome is an incredibly cynical way of looking at the world, and not actually reflective of the way people think and live their lives.
When I say that your concept of “religions” as a monolith is very obviously informed primarily by Christianity, I’m talking about the behaviors of control that you attribute to “religions”.
“Maintaining the status quo was thought to be as good as it gets, and religions made sure of this…”
This kind of attribution to a monolithic entity is what makes it so obvious that your attitude towards religion has been shaped by Christianity. I understand that you get that religion can take other forms, but they do not all behave the same way. Their approaches to the world are at least as varied as the forms they can take, and they do not all deserve your ire as a collective. They certainly don’t all deserve the same charge.
Listen, I get it. I grew up atheist, I understand what it’s like to feel like you’re under assault from all sides. But being surrounded by Christianity* is not the same as being attacked by all religions. They’re not all the enemy you’re painting them as, but they’re going to be wary of you if you approach them with the same vitriol that so much of Christianity approaches us.
*I feel like this is an obligatory acknowledgement, but yes I understand that it’s not all of Christianity. I’m already too verbose and I need to use a little shorthand here.
Wagstaff
Thank you for your criticism. Now that I think about it, it was my bad for leaving out essential context.
I understand that most people who practice religion do not necessarily intend to dedicate themselves to doctrine as their way of life, although it is very difficult to distinguish “cultural traditions” from religious practices given the tremendous influence religion and culture have had on each other for millenia.
It is absurd to live as if nothing had been learned about the world before we came into it. But we should feel free to critically assess the traditions and customs we’re born into.
We’re not obliged to follow empty or outdated conventions that have failed to anticipate our modern insights. It’s no justification to continue practices on the grounds they’ve
always been done. Justification requires evidence of ongoing relevance.
This inevitably includes practices that were designed to support monarchies and otherwise pre-industrial societies that were resistant to change and solely interested in averting threat.
Often times, people will draw on these outdated reference models without even thinking about it. They inadvertently copy the chaos of their ancestors, mimicking their good and their bad without comprehending the difference.
As humankind proceeds into uncharted areas, the gulf between our long-dead ancestors and our modern lives becomes ever wider. Advancements in technology and medicine — from in vitro fertilization to interplanetary inhabitation — raise new kinds of moral questions for which our ancestors and their dusty old tales can offer no explicit guidance. Would colonizing
other planets be a crime in the eyes of an Abrahamic god character? Would genetic engineering upset the nature spirits of the Shinto religion? How would we locate Jerusalem or Mecca in hundreds of millions of years from now, when their respective tectonic plates have shifted them far from their original coordinates? Would it be Kosher to eat pork that was grown with microbes, as opposed to pigs?
Dave
Only if those microbes have split hooves and chew their cud.
Devin
This is part of why I want you to branch out. An incredibly important part of Judaism in particularly, culturally speaking, is figuring stuff like that out. I promise you that question has been a subject of a whole lot of discussion amongst a lot of rabbis. You use that as an example when it’s already standard practice to question things like that. You clearly have a lot to learn.
Dave
Also, like, given the tiny barest sliver of a blink of Time’s eye that human civilization has existed for, those other hypotheticals are just plain bonkers. Homo sapiens have only existed for ~300,000 years, recorded history only goes back some odd 5000 years, and you’re asking about the ethics of colonizing planets? Questioning what direction to pray in hundreds of millions of years from now? Assuming humans even last that long (and that’s an assumption of OUTRAGEOUS proportions), what reason do we have to believe any cultural touchstones of today would be recognizable, religious or not? It’s naive at best and concern trolling at worst.
Devin
Wagstaff has also now gone completely off the rails, considering they went from talking about worship as a threat response to talking about the validity of critiquing outdated practices.
They very clearly have no reference point in the various religions they cite to how they would actually respond to the situations they cited. It’s hollow criticism of all religion from a position almost entirely informed by experience fighting with Christians and a culturally Christian mindset and perception of the function and behavior of religion, which in a broader context is just flat-out wrong.
Wagstaff
Looking back, I guess what I wrote was a little excessive and definitely tangential, and I’m sorry.
In regard to viewing worship as a response to threat, I guess it helps to define what “worship” is exactly.
Many dictionary define “worship” as reverence and adoration towards a god or gods. However, people also worship pop idols and the like, and people rever and love pop idols without necessarily worshipping them, so restricting “worship” to preconceived notions of gods really does the term no justice.
“Worship”, as opposed to just “love”, means to devote one’s self to something or someone uncritically. Unquestioning dedication to rituals or figures, to the point to which you are willing to distort of deny valid information to keep with such practice, is just about always born out of fear of threat, real or perceived (threats towards livelihood, social life, identity, personal relationships, etc. ).
Also, I think it really does no justice to culture to conflate it with religion, although admittedly, untangling such a convolution is harder than it looks.
For instance, many Buddhists and non-Buddhists (myself included), will meditate and admire Buddhist art, but that doesn’t mean I am Buddhist.
Likewise, I don’t think it’s right to suggest that Judaism or any other religion or culture for that matter has some kind of patent on criticism of old practices.
I mean, Jews could adopt new techniques within dentistry for instance. That doesn’t mean those techniques are Jewish. In order to give Judaism the credit, you would have to demonstrate a sound ideological pathway to Judaism itself.
A similar misunderstanding exists within Islam, where some followers claim that the Koran predicted important scientific discoveries. This and the claim about criticism of old practices being an “important part of Judaism”, are dubious ad hoc arguments: Modern-day believers attribute these explanations to their religion after the fact. If these ideologies really contained these scientific and philosophical insights, many of their countless believers would have discovered them before anyone else. That none of these predictions were revealed by interpretations of the ideologies until after they’d come to light by secular thinkers makes such claims highly dubious.
It’s not all unknown. Becky has not been helpful to this process, she’s picking and choosing what she wants and she’s been a bit dismissive of Joyce’s crisis (which I think is why Joyce is keeping all of this from Becky). And some of what Becky has chosen to cling to is still pretty harmful.
Eldritchy
Becky riding that fence while she could be riding Dina huh?
Like, I’m glad she got there? But I’m sorry that he had to sit there and listen to her talk herself through it, rather than just working it out on her own.
QuixoticMaunster
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with needing other people, either for listening/soundboarding or for actual help. It’s okay to not work everything out on your own in your own head and we shouldn’t have to do difficult things alone.
It’s not like it’s Joyce’s fault that she got indoctrinated and brainwashed for her entire life and it’s not like they don’t have kind of a supportive relationship already (re: texting)…short story long, I don’t see what the issue is with her working it out aloud.
Anon A Mouse
As much as it would be nice for Joyce to have this revelation herself, sometimes you just need someone there so when you say it out loud and say “Wow, that sounds really dumb out loud” they can just sit there and nod.
Demoted Oblivious
Yes. This. Activel Listening can be incredibly powerful for both the speaker and the listener. Sometimes all one needs is to know that they have been heard.
Meagan
Agree with the last three commenters.
Devin
Rubber duck debugging: it’s definitely not just for programmers.
I think it was more he was cringing more then being progressively more angry. Like he was thinking “Damn what are they teaching these people in church, this is wrong on so many levels”.
Alt text suggests it is in fact anger as well. Then again, presumably Maggie’s more used to the occasional horror of Willis revisiting childhood and going ‘holy shit they really taught you this’ and so it no longer surprises her, whereas Joe is a fresh vessel of horrible knowledge.
If she didn’t realize that view on reality was massively distorted, it’s because everything else in her life was distorted around it to make it look reasonable.
For years, she was conditioned to defend her ideology automatically, with reflex evasions to all the things that signaled to her, “you’re looking at this the wrong way!”
The flip in perspective is disorienting at first, but well worth it. She will get to enjoy more justified confidence in her knowledge, and generate her own light, instead of passively badking in the fallacious, dogmatic certainty of faith.
It is a wonderful, satisfying, empowering feeling to puzzle through something logically, step by step, arrive at a conclusion– and then discover that you were right!! Much better than coming up completely wrong, because some adult authority figure says that something written down somewhere negates at least one logical step, just because.
Let alone trying to come up with the right answer just based on guessing what that authority figure probably wants and/or expects to hear, or just straight memorization of metaphorical and open-to-interpretation verses, which themselves may be in direct conflict with something you’ve either been taught to be true by another (equally confident) authority figure (like, say, a science teacher), or something you’ve actually witnessed for yourself. (Or puzzled out yourself). Or, hell, even something else in another part of the same damned source!!
I can’t wait until she hears how they figured something out, step by step, and pipes up with the next logical step/conclusion– and is right. 😀
“Wait. I don’t need to know how God or my pastor or parents feel about it to be able to come up with the right answer? I– I can just think?!“
396 thoughts on “Macro-evolution”
Ana Chronistic
Joe: “N– …wait what”
Demoted Oblivious
Go Joyce go!
Clif
If Joe hadn’t gotten out of bed, he would have missed all this,
Reltzik
Sarah might have been nice to him for a bit if he’d recorded it.
butts
SHE DID IT
GreyICE
Joe realizes he might be getting laid. Enthusiastically.
Miles
Joe: No you woke me up for this
ian livs
That last panel is relatable AF
RassilonTDavros
It’s relatable to me too. While I didn’t have a fundamentalist upbringing, and wasn’t raised to believe that every last word of the Bible is literally true, my natural instinct is to be a continuity nerd and I consequently took a lot of it literally anyway. Which meant I spent a long time as a kid trying to come up with reasons why I could simultaneously believe in the Bible and not consider gay people eeeevul. Getting away from Christianity altogether and just being completely finished with the Bible was… well, a Revelation, if you’ll pardon the double entendre.
TemplarKnight
Yeah, had to do a lot of justifying in my younger days to explain why homosexuality in biblical times was bad whereas today it was not. “Well, back then it was just rape and lust, now it is about loving each other.” Ultimately, a disagreement over the perception of gay people is why I stopped going to church.
. . . Yes, I am aware of my handle and my gravatar.
Geneseepaws
You could play a chaotic good Paladin, but with that handle it’s unlikely that yer playing a lawful evil gnoll berserker.
Deanatay
I’unno, I could see an LE character taking the name ‘TemplarKnight’ just to piss off actual Knights Templar.
jflb96
Lawful Evil is the default alignment for Knights Templar in fiction anyway.
Demoted Oblivious
Is… is that a play on “too long; didn’t read”?
TemplarKnight
Yes. Yes it is. It started as facebook posts that were so long that I figured no one would read them, so I changed it to Long Damn Reviews.
Sami
Best I ever came up with was “okay, Leviticus was entirely about a people being nearly wiped out and birth rates being critical to their survival so those laws made sense”
“what about the new testament?”
“Oh that’s all mistranslated.”
Pickman
Instead I have a lot of trouble justifying how gays are evil according to the bible? I’ve literally found only one reference and it did not really say anything about good or evil.
C.T. Phipps
Given Jesus said the law of Aaron was superceded by the will to do good and be kind, the reason gays are evil is because, “Southern churches wanted a scapegoat after they could no longer hate black people publicly.”
Pickman
I think it could be even worse. As far as I know the law of Aaron does not state “gays are evil”, it does not even hint at it.
S.R.
The passage often misinterpreted as “gay sex is an abomination”, on closer inspection, more than likely actually says “sex with young boys is an abomination”. Which I think we can generally agree on.
Jason
I’ve heard that a possible translation may be “temple boys”, which is not only abominable (assuming them to be actual boys and not men who were raised as temple boys) but has a religious aspect to it there as well.
Don’t know how much, if at all, that is backed up by people who actually know the subject, but…
Meagan
I had a similar experience! I wasn’t raised fundie or anything, but was raised in a generically Christian setting. My natural urge to want order and structure meant that I looked to the Bible for guidance even more strictly than the adults around me sometimes…with some of those same mental gymnastics you reference, trying to reconcile it with other knowledge.
hof1991
Recommended reading. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53121662-jesus-and-john-wayne
RassilonTDavros
You can do it, Joyce!
Wagstaff
*plays “Brainiac Maniac” by Laura Shigihara on Voxola PR-76*
EpochFlame
poor joe
Doctor_Who
I have sympathy for Joyce too. This sort of character development, while positive, can nonetheless be…kinda traumatic.
NotThatDrew
No kidding. I’ve mentioned in the past how I grew up in a slightly conservative religious background (not quite fundie levels of “alternative” education, but still different from what’s widely accepted) and trying to shake off the shit we were taught to just accept on faith still took some real effort
QuixoticMaunster
I wrote a big philosophical explanation of how I lost my “faith” as well, but suffice to say it was more like bone-deep terror that I was made “wrong” and god would “find out” and send me to forever-torture for loving who I loved.
Shaking that terror as I stepped away from the religion was a horrible thing, and I do not miss the panic attacks that left me quaking like a chihuahua and crying.
THANKS RELIGION!
Wagstaff
I’m so sorry you had to go through that. You have my condolences.
Here it is very instructive to recognize worship for what it is: a response to threat.
When we humans are faced with a threat, we have a number of natural responses: we fight, we flee, we freeze. But we also have another possible response: fawn. We praise, we please, we submit, we worship.
Some claim that worship is a free expression of adoration. But you really only have to look at the threats aimed at us who refuse to worship any gods to recognize the underlying coercion.
Amos Batista
wow, I never had think that way, about worship to be a response to something you fear…
Geneseepaws
Roll over on our backs and let God give us tummy rubs?
Eyebrow
I think the term “God-fearing individual” sums it up nicely.
Shade
I mean I’ve certainly heard Christians tell me its proper to fear god, hell my name is a Christian name that literally means “fear of God” and that’s supposed to be a good thing.
Jhon
I, for one, worship our new insect overlords.
Devin
I think that’s an accurate representation of the model of a lot of Christian denominations, I would caution against applying that to all worship.
You really have to look at more than just the threats against us, because they’re not representative of all those who worship. It’s representative of those people and those people alone, and they are the loudest to be sure, but most certainly not enough to draw a conclusion that worship == threat response as a general rule.
Wagstaff
But isn’t the very point of worship to sway the comprise of the allegedly conscious aspects of the universe to work in our favor? In other words to mitigate threatsto our lives and livelihoods?
For most of pre-industrial human history, worship, swaying the comprise of the universe, was definitely not for advancing status as much as it was for preventing bad things from happening. Pre-industrial societies (and their religious practices) were structured for stability and survival, not change and development. Equally important, people were not accustomed to economic or social progress, nor did they expect either. In fact, a “good life” to most people (especially the peasants and farmers) almost always meant the absence of ANY change. A “good life,” was one were nothing bad happened. In this world and the religions designed to support it, one generation took over from another, doing essentially the same things that their parents did. Outside the sparse upper class population, people in this world never have embraced this idea that things could better for themselves or future generations. Maintaining the status quo was thought to be as good as it gets, and religions made sure of this, often further softening peoples’ resentment through promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave.
Devin
Not all religions treat worship as a way to sway the will of the higher beings, no. That’s an extremely Christian approach. That’s not to say it’s exclusively Christian, but it’s far from the only model. Also asking for things to work in our favor is not 1:1 with threat mitigation. That’s only part of the picture. You’re over-simplifying this concept.
That’s even been explored a little in DoA. You may recall at one point Ethan was poking at Joyce for the “personal God” model of her belief that he thought was weird.
With your brief exploration of pre-industrial human history, you’re way over-generalizing, and I’m telling you that having been where you are, you need to broaden your horizons. Your concept of “religions” as a monolith is very obviously informed primarily by Christianity, and you’re doing yourself and a great many others a disservice. I’ve been there. There’s a whole lot more to the world, and most of it isn’t hostile to us.
Wagstaff
Worship need not be exclusive to gods or beings you could call “gods” in order to motivate people to act in arbitrary ways under the premise that said behaviors somehow mitigate threat to our personal ambitions, if not our lives and livelihoods (for instance, the system of Karma in Hinduism, or the nature spirits of Japan’s Shinto).
This squares well with what is perhaps one of the loosest available definitions of a “religion”, offered by senior anthropologist Clifford Geertz:
“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive, long-lasting moods and motivations in its members by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”
Devin
Again, attempting to influence the way things go is not 1:1 with threat mitigation. Spinning every hope for a positive outcome as the result of the fear of a bad outcome is an incredibly cynical way of looking at the world, and not actually reflective of the way people think and live their lives.
When I say that your concept of “religions” as a monolith is very obviously informed primarily by Christianity, I’m talking about the behaviors of control that you attribute to “religions”.
“Maintaining the status quo was thought to be as good as it gets, and religions made sure of this…”
This kind of attribution to a monolithic entity is what makes it so obvious that your attitude towards religion has been shaped by Christianity. I understand that you get that religion can take other forms, but they do not all behave the same way. Their approaches to the world are at least as varied as the forms they can take, and they do not all deserve your ire as a collective. They certainly don’t all deserve the same charge.
Listen, I get it. I grew up atheist, I understand what it’s like to feel like you’re under assault from all sides. But being surrounded by Christianity* is not the same as being attacked by all religions. They’re not all the enemy you’re painting them as, but they’re going to be wary of you if you approach them with the same vitriol that so much of Christianity approaches us.
*I feel like this is an obligatory acknowledgement, but yes I understand that it’s not all of Christianity. I’m already too verbose and I need to use a little shorthand here.
Wagstaff
Thank you for your criticism. Now that I think about it, it was my bad for leaving out essential context.
I understand that most people who practice religion do not necessarily intend to dedicate themselves to doctrine as their way of life, although it is very difficult to distinguish “cultural traditions” from religious practices given the tremendous influence religion and culture have had on each other for millenia.
It is absurd to live as if nothing had been learned about the world before we came into it. But we should feel free to critically assess the traditions and customs we’re born into.
We’re not obliged to follow empty or outdated conventions that have failed to anticipate our modern insights. It’s no justification to continue practices on the grounds they’ve
always been done. Justification requires evidence of ongoing relevance.
This inevitably includes practices that were designed to support monarchies and otherwise pre-industrial societies that were resistant to change and solely interested in averting threat.
Often times, people will draw on these outdated reference models without even thinking about it. They inadvertently copy the chaos of their ancestors, mimicking their good and their bad without comprehending the difference.
As humankind proceeds into uncharted areas, the gulf between our long-dead ancestors and our modern lives becomes ever wider. Advancements in technology and medicine — from in vitro fertilization to interplanetary inhabitation — raise new kinds of moral questions for which our ancestors and their dusty old tales can offer no explicit guidance. Would colonizing
other planets be a crime in the eyes of an Abrahamic god character? Would genetic engineering upset the nature spirits of the Shinto religion? How would we locate Jerusalem or Mecca in hundreds of millions of years from now, when their respective tectonic plates have shifted them far from their original coordinates? Would it be Kosher to eat pork that was grown with microbes, as opposed to pigs?
Dave
Only if those microbes have split hooves and chew their cud.
Devin
This is part of why I want you to branch out. An incredibly important part of Judaism in particularly, culturally speaking, is figuring stuff like that out. I promise you that question has been a subject of a whole lot of discussion amongst a lot of rabbis. You use that as an example when it’s already standard practice to question things like that. You clearly have a lot to learn.
Dave
Also, like, given the tiny barest sliver of a blink of Time’s eye that human civilization has existed for, those other hypotheticals are just plain bonkers. Homo sapiens have only existed for ~300,000 years, recorded history only goes back some odd 5000 years, and you’re asking about the ethics of colonizing planets? Questioning what direction to pray in hundreds of millions of years from now? Assuming humans even last that long (and that’s an assumption of OUTRAGEOUS proportions), what reason do we have to believe any cultural touchstones of today would be recognizable, religious or not? It’s naive at best and concern trolling at worst.
Devin
Wagstaff has also now gone completely off the rails, considering they went from talking about worship as a threat response to talking about the validity of critiquing outdated practices.
They very clearly have no reference point in the various religions they cite to how they would actually respond to the situations they cited. It’s hollow criticism of all religion from a position almost entirely informed by experience fighting with Christians and a culturally Christian mindset and perception of the function and behavior of religion, which in a broader context is just flat-out wrong.
Wagstaff
Looking back, I guess what I wrote was a little excessive and definitely tangential, and I’m sorry.
In regard to viewing worship as a response to threat, I guess it helps to define what “worship” is exactly.
Many dictionary define “worship” as reverence and adoration towards a god or gods. However, people also worship pop idols and the like, and people rever and love pop idols without necessarily worshipping them, so restricting “worship” to preconceived notions of gods really does the term no justice.
“Worship”, as opposed to just “love”, means to devote one’s self to something or someone uncritically. Unquestioning dedication to rituals or figures, to the point to which you are willing to distort of deny valid information to keep with such practice, is just about always born out of fear of threat, real or perceived (threats towards livelihood, social life, identity, personal relationships, etc. ).
Also, I think it really does no justice to culture to conflate it with religion, although admittedly, untangling such a convolution is harder than it looks.
For instance, many Buddhists and non-Buddhists (myself included), will meditate and admire Buddhist art, but that doesn’t mean I am Buddhist.
Likewise, I don’t think it’s right to suggest that Judaism or any other religion or culture for that matter has some kind of patent on criticism of old practices.
I mean, Jews could adopt new techniques within dentistry for instance. That doesn’t mean those techniques are Jewish. In order to give Judaism the credit, you would have to demonstrate a sound ideological pathway to Judaism itself.
A similar misunderstanding exists within Islam, where some followers claim that the Koran predicted important scientific discoveries. This and the claim about criticism of old practices being an “important part of Judaism”, are dubious ad hoc arguments: Modern-day believers attribute these explanations to their religion after the fact. If these ideologies really contained these scientific and philosophical insights, many of their countless believers would have discovered them before anyone else. That none of these predictions were revealed by interpretations of the ideologies until after they’d come to light by secular thinkers makes such claims highly dubious.
RowenMorland
At least this time Roz isn’t here to yell at her for not being good enough for having rebelled against this as a small child.
K^2
I’m actually amazed at how much patience Joe has.
Schpoonman
Oh, good, she’s just working out her deprogramming.
Wagstaff
At this rate, she’ll be completely deconverted in no time!
…provided nothing goes wrong. We must account for unknown unknowns, after all.
Devin
It’s not all unknown. Becky has not been helpful to this process, she’s picking and choosing what she wants and she’s been a bit dismissive of Joyce’s crisis (which I think is why Joyce is keeping all of this from Becky). And some of what Becky has chosen to cling to is still pretty harmful.
Eldritchy
Becky riding that fence while she could be riding Dina huh?
Emperor Norton II
“…provided nothing goes wrong.”
Pffft, when has anything ever gone wrong for any character in this webcomic?
NotThatDrew
Oh god, every part of my brain dedicated to my bio major hurts
Sam
Glad to not be the only one who agrees with Joe that listening to this was painful.
Doctor_Who
Yeah, this is nails on a chalkboard.
Somewhere, Dina is taking psychic damage and doesn’t know why.
TrueVCU
Internally: {cyberman} PAIN. PAIN. PAIN.
StClair
Like, I’m glad she got there? But I’m sorry that he had to sit there and listen to her talk herself through it, rather than just working it out on her own.
QuixoticMaunster
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with needing other people, either for listening/soundboarding or for actual help. It’s okay to not work everything out on your own in your own head and we shouldn’t have to do difficult things alone.
It’s not like it’s Joyce’s fault that she got indoctrinated and brainwashed for her entire life and it’s not like they don’t have kind of a supportive relationship already (re: texting)…short story long, I don’t see what the issue is with her working it out aloud.
Anon A Mouse
As much as it would be nice for Joyce to have this revelation herself, sometimes you just need someone there so when you say it out loud and say “Wow, that sounds really dumb out loud” they can just sit there and nod.
Demoted Oblivious
Yes. This. Activel Listening can be incredibly powerful for both the speaker and the listener. Sometimes all one needs is to know that they have been heard.
Meagan
Agree with the last three commenters.
Devin
Rubber duck debugging: it’s definitely not just for programmers.
Michael Steamweed
Progressively increasing anger is appropriate.
Switchchris23
I think it was more he was cringing more then being progressively more angry. Like he was thinking “Damn what are they teaching these people in church, this is wrong on so many levels”.
Regalli
Alt text suggests it is in fact anger as well. Then again, presumably Maggie’s more used to the occasional horror of Willis revisiting childhood and going ‘holy shit they really taught you this’ and so it no longer surprises her, whereas Joe is a fresh vessel of horrible knowledge.
Demoted Oblivious
Yeah, I see both anger and confusion in Joe. Just not anger at Joyce, more about what she’s been through.
Regalli
As is being unable to come up with anything to say to it other than ‘no.’, because where do you even BEGIN with that one?
Deanatay
Joe just had a nega-orgasm – each panel progressively more painful, until at the end – sweet, sweet release!
Formedras
“When I say it out loud it sounds really really stupid. It’s because it is really really stupid, isn’t it?”
Wagstaff
If she didn’t realize that view on reality was massively distorted, it’s because everything else in her life was distorted around it to make it look reasonable.
For years, she was conditioned to defend her ideology automatically, with reflex evasions to all the things that signaled to her, “you’re looking at this the wrong way!”
The flip in perspective is disorienting at first, but well worth it. She will get to enjoy more justified confidence in her knowledge, and generate her own light, instead of passively badking in the fallacious, dogmatic certainty of faith.
Kryss LaBryn
It is a wonderful, satisfying, empowering feeling to puzzle through something logically, step by step, arrive at a conclusion– and then discover that you were right!! Much better than coming up completely wrong, because some adult authority figure says that something written down somewhere negates at least one logical step, just because.
Let alone trying to come up with the right answer just based on guessing what that authority figure probably wants and/or expects to hear, or just straight memorization of metaphorical and open-to-interpretation verses, which themselves may be in direct conflict with something you’ve either been taught to be true by another (equally confident) authority figure (like, say, a science teacher), or something you’ve actually witnessed for yourself. (Or puzzled out yourself). Or, hell, even something else in another part of the same damned source!!
I can’t wait until she hears how they figured something out, step by step, and pipes up with the next logical step/conclusion– and is right. 😀
“Wait. I don’t need to know how God or my pastor or parents feel about it to be able to come up with the right answer? I– I can just think?!“
Kryss LaBryn
“–Wait, I have to think?!
“I’m scared.” XD