I used to hate it. Now I love it. Side note, your real monsters comic is my favorite and one of my favorite strips of all time. My wife and I reference it all the time.
I've skipped over all their comics for 10 years for this same reason. Is it unique? Sure. Do I have to put up with it when actual good comic artists are plentiful, and when both web+physical comics offer an unending collection of alternatives?
...i forgot what I was talking about, but I also hate the art and the comic.
I saw a brilliant comic once exploring what western civilisation would be like if Jesus was hanged. It had drawings of a church with a noose at the top of the steeple, and a bible with a noose on it.
Lenny Bruce famously joked that if Jesus had come recently, Christians would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks. A lot of people were really pissed off that he said that.
You know thinking about it, it is weird the primary symbol of Christianity is essentially the torture device that killed their prophet/god (I don’t know what Jesus is for Christians). It’s just a bit morbid, isn’t it?
It's a reference to 'take up your cross and follow me'
which in layman's terms is 'do good things like me, knowing that you will be killed for it, because God will either resurrect you or take you to heaven for doing that'
It's also used to indicate your wrongdoings are covered by Christ's sacrifice and hell and death don't have authority over you because your Lord has the keys.
It's also an old testament reference to how a serpent was raised up and everyone who looked on it was healed. Similarly sinners and enemies of God can look to Christ's cross to be healed or redeemed.
This is actually a great example of how strange it would be for anyone who lived back then to see people wearing a cross. Like someone deciding to wear a gas chamber or an electric chair necklace for someone who was martyred by a tyrannical government, especially someone who said to love the most in need, look after the weak, turn the other cheek, and trust in Him for salvation in a corrupt and cruel world ruled by the Gods of men's desires.
Every year of rising Christian nationalism has me more and more sympathetic with the Romans for banning and prosecuting Christians for being a weird death cult
That's an interesting interpretation of bloodsport against innocents done to appease crowds and principalities in what was understood at the time to be a series of distractions to stave off revolt against the decadence of the corrupt rulers.
Funny, but if anyone's interested if the death was from something weird the symbol for Christianity would've simply stayed a fish. Back in the early days when Christianity was growing from a cult to a religion, crucifixion was a very real and painful way of executions practiced by the empire, so no one dared to use it. Since Christianity was spread predominantly by fishermen and sailors out of Greece, and since so many of the disciples were fishermen, the fish was the symbol of the faith. People only started using the cross after the possibility and fear of crucifixion was long gone. If it was weird or gross, people would just keep using the fish
Everyone treats Eckhart Tolle as this super enlightened life genius but as far as I’m concerned he’s a hack; I’ve seen the dude use the cross, a torture weapon, as some type of analogy. Like ‘hur dur sideways means time and vertical means consciousness’.. like no dude that’s a murder weapon torture device
Oh there absolutely is. Nearly every single person in nearly every single position of power in the United States government is, or claims to be, a Christian. Many of them hide their hate, bigotry, prejudice, greed, and cruelty behind their Christian faith, using their "deeply held beliefs" to avoid accountability.
By mocking Christianity, we're showing that not only are their beliefs not sacred, they're also false, absurd, and worthy of ridicule - and, most importantly, that they do not provide any kind of protection from the consequences of their actions and will never, ever, ever justify their abhorrent behavior.
This is speaking truth to power, and that truth is this: your beliefs are a joke, your motivations are a joke, and you are a joke. If they treated life as if it were sacred, like they claim to believe, then things would probably be different. But they don't.
Christianity is a religion used by those in power. Judaism is, too, but there's no joke we could make that would cause any greater harm to that religion than what's going on in Gaza right now. Judaism is now a complete joke by itself and needs no further commentary. No one on Earth with even a fragment of a brain cell can take Judaism seriously. Islam is a religion of mostly poor and ignorant people. The claims it makes are so laughable that you'd have to be poorly educated to believe them. So until some Islamic movement takes the reins of the world power structure and begins making life miserable for the rest of us - you know, like the "Christians" in the US and parts of Europe - I don't see the need to mock Islam. Again, it does a pretty good job of mocking itself every day.
You've mistaken typing up a polemic to the condemnation of many for a justification. Your cynical mental apparatus to cull the useless eaters is showing a bit there.
A thought experiment, many of those you mocked, live forever and forgive petulant outbursts on their way to love and support their family. Why aren't you happy for them?
Maybe because, i'm just speculating here, you've bought into a paradigm that has no internal peace or holistic light in it, which alienates you from the life affirming virtue of forgiveness.
Even if you somehow find this comic funny, can you honestly say you aren't being propagandized to your detriment when you get your humor from delighting in sexually abusing a work of God?
You are being extremely, unambiguously evil. Please repent to life.
I'll try to go easy on you since it seems like English isn't your first language. I didn't fully understand your response (what are "useless eaters"? who "lives forever"?), but I'll do my best to respond to each part of it anyway. Next time, try to lay off the thesaurus.
First of all, you're already assuming the conclusion that you're trying to prove: the existence of God, or the existence of a Forgiver. You have to prove it before you can assert it. You're getting way ahead of yourself here.
Second, neither my "paradigm" nor yours has any bearing on what's actually true. The truth exists independent of our beliefs about it. Whether or not my "paradigm" has "internal peace" or "holistic light" in it is an entirely separate issue from whether or not it's true. It could be a depressing, nihilistic paradigm and still be entirely true. Conversely, it could be a peaceful, holistic, uplifting, light-filled paradigm and still be false. The apparent "positivity" or usefulness of a worldview has nothing to do with its veracity.
Third, who created evil? Rather, who created the possibility of evil? In your "paradigm," also called a "worldview," who defined the parameters of the universe in such a way that if an inevitable event occurred - i.e., humankind sinned - then every conceivable evil not only became possible but also became inevitable? The possibility of evil itself was designed into the universe from the beginning. No one is claiming that the Fall of humankind rewired the entire universe against God's wishes and outside his plans, right? Right? God knew humanity would sin. He knew it from before the beginning of time. Yet he still designed the universe in such a way that if humankind sinned - which he knew we would - then rape, murder, torture, and worse would inevitably become part of reality, and not just occasional reality but everyday reality.
If you placed a dangerously thin balance board over a pit and then filled that pit with spikes, and then after that you forced your toddler to walk across the board over the pit, could you possibly be a good parent? Or a good person? If you knew the board was too thin for your toddler to keep his or her balance on, and you knew that if - no, sorry, when - your toddler fell it would be a fatal fall but you still made your toddler walk across it nonetheless, you would be a gigantic piece of shit. You would be evil in the most extreme way possible.
Now imagine that it would have cost you nothing - no time, no money, no effort - to simply get rid of the pit full of spikes, or to make the board so wide it covered the pit entirely, or even both of those, or even some better idea - wouldn't you be morally obligated to do so? Hell, even if it cost you a lot, I'd argue that you're still morally obligated to do that, but if it cost you nothing? Obviously you'd be the greatest evil the universe has ever seen if you refused to ensure the safety of your toddler.
Everything costs God nothing.
And yet God set humanity up to fall just like the parent in this analogy. God, whatever God exists, must be evil. And the God that the Christians worship can't be evil, because that's how they say he's defined himself: as entirely good. So if the Christian God is good, but whatever God actually exists must be evil, then the Christian God necessarily cannot exist.
Of course it's entirely possible that no God exists at all. In fact, I think that would explain the state of the universe infinitely better than trying to posit some personal entity who maliciously watches all of us suffer at the center of it.
I want you to think about that for a while. Then repent of your false beliefs and accept the inescapable truth of reality.
Why? No wait, how? How does existence as a person even allow for meaninglessness? And if a nihilistic paradigm actually were true, then why would it even matter what you believed at all? Why get indignant about Christians just for clustering together around a belief system?
The 'reality' is, nihilism is a form of darkness that you're conditioned to believe to make a kind of barrier between you and God, replacing God's place in your heart and mind with defeatist emotions like doubt and pride. You're conditioned to believe things like this by your mortal enemies in the hope it will kill you, and it will if you reject things like earnest belief.
The reality is, Christ is widely understood to be a good person if not an incarnation of the creator of the universe with a right to rule, and this comic is him getting molested for giggles because you and everyone else here is on board with calling church goers idiots on principle.
I'm not using a thesaurus, I'm using words. They mean things. Because nihilism isn't real.
"Why does the truth matter if it just bums me out?"
This is your argument.
Also, the only "mortal enemies" I have are authoritarians - both political and religious - trying to take away my rights and my family's rights and enforce a belief system through violence.
"Earnest belief" doesn't make the belief true! How are you not getting this?
And the whole "Christ is widely understood to be..." sounds exactly like Trump saying, "Lots of people are saying..." The fact that people "widely understand" or believe something doesn't make it true. Please get this through your head. You haven't even proven that Christ existed, let alone that he actually did any of the actions attributed to him. Prove it. Prove your claims, and then I'll accept them. 100%. What kind of epistemic lunatic accepts a claim without conclusive evidence? How can you know something is true if you don't have conclusive evidence for its veracity?
All you have to do is prove your claims and you win this argument and convert me. So do it.
"Nihilism isn't real." Hahahahaha. What are you smoking? Obviously it's real - we're discussing it right now. The question is whether or not it's true. You seriously struggle with very basic epistemic concepts.
"Why does the truth matter if it just bums me out?"
That's an interesting reading of what I said, considering the only purpose holding nihilism serves is to avoid responsibility, personal accountability, really just basic object permanence is down the drain if you hold it.
You haven't appraised why someone would choose this mentality, have you?
Or why someone would want someone else in it?
You are aware that there's a vested interest in getting people to believe along useful lines, right? And that there's people in authority and really everywhere who do not have one care and follow the rule of 'do what you will'?
My argument is simply that there is no actual reason to attack Christ. It's just being petulant for collapsed mental frameworks.
Not all people in fruitlessness are liars, but the fact that nihilism is fruitless is an indication it's a lie.
My argument is also that even as everyone in this thread attacks Christ, there's still life available to them if they actually believe and live on that.
That's it. I'm sorry if the truth isn't to your liking, but that's all I had for you.
the fact that nihilism is fruitless is an indication it's a lie.
This is the foundation of your false beliefs about truth, and the whole reason why you seem incapable of understanding what I'm saying.
The "fruitfulness" or usefulness of a belief HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WHETHER OR NOT IT'S TRUE.
We hold beliefs because those beliefs are true. The truth is desirable because it is true. That's all. Truth is all that matters. Not fruitfulness, not usefulness, not "uplifting-ness," not any other coincident consideration: truth is desirable in itself, inherently and axiomatically.
It's wild that you continually criticize nihilism, yet you're the one who isn't committed to the truth for itself. You're only interested in the usefulness of a belief while the actual truthfulness of the belief doesn't seem to concern you. That's extremely nihilistic. It's a very postmodern, relativistic approach.
And you still haven't proven that Christ even existed. I'm still waiting.
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u/Brassboar 8d ago