Discussion (48)¬

1. J Ascher says:

   February 1, 2012 at 12:03 pm

   Great strip! The same points could be said of the Bible.

2. Jerry w says:

   February 1, 2012 at 12:20 pm

   A new and improved (because it’s shorter) bible:
   1. In the beginning, there was darkness.
   2. The sun came up.
   3. Repeat as necessary.
   4. Tip your waiter on your way out.

3. Suffolk Blue says:

   February 1, 2012 at 1:01 pm

   @Jerry w – is that a conscious Franz Zappa reference in your posting there?

   Do what you wanna
   Do what you will
   Just don’t mess up
   Your neighbor’s thrill
   ‘N when you pay the bill
   Kindly leave a little tip
   And help the next poor sucker
   On his one way trip. . .

   (The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing)

4. Darwin Harmless says:

   February 1, 2012 at 1:23 pm

   Like the Readers Digest version only even shorter. Which is better.
   Hey guys, check out the tail end of the last thread. Couple of links there you might enjoy.

5. Brother Daniel says:

   February 1, 2012 at 1:23 pm

   The bible at least has some pretty cool stories in it. It gets spoiled by being widely treated as holy and infallible and all that rot, but if you can get past that, it’s not all bad. The OT is simply the national literature of the Jewish people (better to think of them as an ethnicity than as a religion), and the NT contains some related fanfic.

   The Qu’ran, on the other hand, was consciously written for the purpose of looking like a holy book. It’s pompous, pretentious, and thoroughly badly written in every conceivable way.

6. Second Thought says:

   February 1, 2012 at 2:25 pm

   And just how merciful is a god who says disbelievers will bur;, stressing it to the point of repetition?

7. Second Thought says:

   February 1, 2012 at 2:27 pm

   ” burn” not “bur”

   Grrrrrrrr

8. ronmurp says:

   February 1, 2012 at 2:53 pm

   It’s True! That’s the one necessary truth:

   http://ronmurp.net/2012/02/01/its-true/

9. FreeFox says:

   February 1, 2012 at 2:57 pm

   Hullo DH and AoS (my hominid friend 😉 ), I must apologize, in my eagerness to make my point I may have come off more polemic than even I intended to be. And if you feel misrepresented by my, dear DH, I apologize for that as well. *bows deeply*

   I agree that culture is everything but static or monolithic, in fact I think every human carries not only one but often several complete sets of cultures within himself (I would claim to bear the torch for German, Prussian, Berlinian, British, English, and the West Country by upbringing, as well as Exile/Berlin Turkish, Gàidhealtachd, Sami, Roma, generally East European, and a dash of Egyptian by adoption). Neil Gaiman uses the metaphor of the individual representing one facett of a jewel. I like to see it as each being one dot of colour in an Impressionist painting. There is the overall painting (“The Culture”), but it is made up of all the different dots/people that constitute it. And with the change of the poeple so does the overall painting change (hmm… maybe it’s more a digital image made up of thousands but finite and distinct pixels…).
   But to me exactly that is still part of how the theory of cultural relativity holds true: Just as no one culture is more or less inherently right than any other, so can no one person claim to speak more or less for that culture. Still… you CAN step back from Van Gogh’s Starry Sky or Sunflowers and the thousands of dots do make up one unified image. Just because it is made up of all the individual people, each with their own right to define their culture, it is the sum that actually makes it up. Only it does not follow that we all have to adopt the same gaussian mean shade. Some of us have the function of providing the contrasting dark blue to let others shine in the starry bright yellow to make the night sky magical. :p

   The idea that since “we are all humans”, “surely we can find some basic principles that everybody can agree should form the core of our moral arguments”… well, as nice as it sounds, I think that history has disproved it as simple wishful thinking. (To add one more facet to my backstory: I got a great-grandfather who was a fanatical and incorrigible Nazi, died on the gallows in 1945. Apparently he was a very intelligent man, of good breeding, educated, courteous, and a great violinist. Just also a monster. Not the sort of thing that imbues you with much faith in the rationality of humankind.) Not that I think it should be a reason to stop trying to find common ground and from there to convince others… but it’s more like cleaning up your room or washing dishes… you got to do it or things get out of hand, but don’t expect it to be a task that ever reaches an actual end.

   @Daniel: Wholeheartedly agree about the cool stories of the OT (which to me – completely personally – are pretty holy or sacred, but not in a ‘don’t-touch-me’ way, and certainly without claim to be so for others), and the sad lack thereof in the Koran.

10. Sondra says:

    February 1, 2012 at 3:03 pm

    @ Brother Daniel – the translation of the Qu’ran I read was self-centered and petulant, but not too badly written. Ah,well, translators will be translators. 😀

11. FreeFox says:

    February 1, 2012 at 3:13 pm

    @Ron: It’s true. I know because I do. Brilliant. :))

12. fenchurch says:

    February 1, 2012 at 3:47 pm

    Dang it– this bowdlerisation omits the tangy sauce of bigotry as in the original. 🙁 And, it still fails to offer something original… like evidence.

13. noreligion2 says:

    February 1, 2012 at 5:14 pm

    Brother Daniel, as a counterpoint, here’s one of my favorite quotes:
    “The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.” – Alfred North Whitehead
    FreeFox, I apologize for bungling your name. I blame it on misfiring synapses, although maybe there is something Freudian therein that escapes me.
    AofS – I’m usually up for a good fucking, raping, not so much.

14. noreligion2 says:

    February 1, 2012 at 5:25 pm

    “well, as nice as it sounds, I think that history has disproved it as simple wishful thinking”

    Freefox, the fact that we are all still here despite a half-century of having the ability to annihilate each other is proof so far, we do have common interests… game theory, and all that.

15. noreligion2 says:

    February 1, 2012 at 5:49 pm

    ronmurph, your paragraph for the jehovah’s witnesses is BRILLIANT!

    Author, thanks for “capturing the essence,” on a regular basis.

16. Ophelia Benson says:

    February 1, 2012 at 6:19 pm

    Mo says “sheet”! Mo has thumbs! Mo has a button on his hat! I’m offended. Offended, I tell you.

17. noreligion2 says:

    February 1, 2012 at 7:10 pm

    Ophelia, I think it should be respectfully referred to as The Holy Sheet.

18. crowepps says:

    February 1, 2012 at 7:57 pm

    noreligion2 – “we” are NOT all still here after the last half-century. Only the survivors are still around. If you check at death tolls of the 20th century at a source like Twentieth Century Atlas, you will see that since 1950, various big and small wars, ‘police actions’ and ‘interventions’ have resulted in casualties exceeding a quarter billion persons. Whatever game it is that’s being played, apparently it’s a bloody one.

19. SteveC says:

    February 1, 2012 at 8:39 pm

    Heh. Reminds me of this:
    http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.php

20. Chip Camden says:

    February 1, 2012 at 8:45 pm

    @nonreligion2 the OT has a good deal of humor in it, but it gets lost in our stuffy translations. Hebrew puns and word-play are difficult to reproduce in English, though.

21. noreligion2 says:

    February 1, 2012 at 9:28 pm

    Chip Camden, not being able to read Hebrew and lacking any interest in wasting any more of humanity’s time (mine specifically) in purusing the psychotic, schizophrenic, and possibly psilocyben induced scriblings of a primitive sub-culture, I have to admit I have no first-hand knowledge of said humor.

    After thinking about it however, I do find myself whistling, “Always look on the bright side of life.”

22. joe says:

    February 1, 2012 at 10:37 pm

    @noreligion2: “The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.” – Alfred North Whitehead

    How do you or ol’ Alfred know that? It could be the greatest comedic handbook of the last 100k years!

    Humor is very specific to expectation — it happens when you manage to decrypt a context, and suddenly an opaque or misleading situation becomes clear. It’s the most culturally specific thing in human communication! So, I don’t find the humor of the 1920s very funny… and I barely even recognize 19th century humor in most cases.

    “On this rock, I shall build my church” — that sounds like possibly a quite personal joke regarding the intelligence of Peter. You don’t build upon a subtle and dynamic surface — but you use a rock-head as your muscle. Quite easily the OT and NT could be filled with humor that was lost.

23. Bernard Hurley says:

    February 2, 2012 at 1:48 am

    Sung to the tune of “Mr. Pig”:

    Mo said “sheep”, Mo said “sheep”

    Mo said, Mo said, Mo said “sheep”

24. Bernard Hurley says:

    February 2, 2012 at 1:50 am

    Note: I couldn’t bring myself to type that blasphemous word “s***t”

25. noreligion2 says:

    February 2, 2012 at 1:51 am

    crowepps, touche’ we are not “all here,” my meaning was badly stated. The topic was multi-culturalism, and I was trying to articulate that as human beings we all have an interest in not destroying ourselves. That is the common ground upon which I’m pretty sure a large majority of people should be able to negotiate a future. Providing we have had the ability to annihilate almost all of humanity (and most of the biosphere with it) and haven’t yet done so, is a positive. I realize that sets the bar pretty low, but hey, we have to start somewhere. No?

26. noreligion2 says:

    February 2, 2012 at 1:58 am

    joe, what a coincidence this is in the news:

    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ancient-tablet-world-oldest-yo-mama-joke-sex-beer-humor-article-1.1015067

    You may be right, the virgin mary might have just been an extremely elaborate insult!

27. Jobrag says:

    February 2, 2012 at 11:34 am

    Missed out all the really good stuff, like killing gays, stoning raped women and shagging your slaves, they are all in THE BOOK so they MUST be right.

28. Acolyte of Sagan says:

    February 2, 2012 at 12:27 pm

    noreligion2 (a Lennon fan, I assume, who hasn’t succumbed to the religio-Americanism ‘1religion2?), you’re almost spot on. At the risk of mixing metaphors, the bar does indeed have to be set low to provide a foot-up for human morality, but I’d disagree that it’s preservation of the species, but rather self-preservation of the ruling classes that has prevented all-out nuclear war. Not since the 18thC have our national leaders led the battle from the front; with their belief in the divine right to rule they felt safe with God by their side (never mind their vast armies behind them) but were nontheless armoured to the eyeballs to protect against sword and arrow. As technology improved the efficiency of the weapons of war, the leaders increasingly led from the rear, no longer certain of their divinity when pitted against high explosives or bullets travelling supersonic (hence ‘you don’t hear the bullet that kills you’). With the advent of nuclear weapons though, they were no longer safe no matter how far behind the lines they were, so whilst they were happy to drop the bomb on countries who couldn’t send one straight back, they drew the line at equally armed adversaries. Yes they had their bunkers (were they able to get to one in time) but they also knew that their position as leader would count for nothing in the aftermath of nuclear war if there was nobody left to be led.
    In a curious way then, the making of the atomic weapon has so far done more to prolong the existance of humanity as a whole than we give it credit for, simply through the self-preservation instincts of those responsible for deploying it. Unfortunately that same technology has only to get into the hands of a people still convinced of their own divine right to rule for us all to be screwed (visions of a mad mullah doing a Slim Pickings and ‘ridin’ it all the way in’ with a “Yee-Allah-el-Aqhb-Hah”.

29. Good and Godless says:

    February 2, 2012 at 12:56 pm

    Incredible. Seems like the abridged Koran is too short.

    I assigned a number to each letter in sequence in the new version, based on a complex formula from values extracted from leading edge quantum mechanics. These numbers then assigned to letters from the original version of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and made into a long string which I then looped back to re-aligned to create key words.

    This created a message which said (loosely translated from French).

    “The end of the world as we know it will occur”

    And it just cut off without a date.

    I re-looped it after adding Pi to every odd prime number, and multiplying every non-prime number by the sum of the previous two numbers. Leaving the even prime numbers unchanged.

    In plain English it clearly said

    “Kennedy was shot by Oswald”

    and again it cut off without resolving the rest of the message.

    It does however tell us the end of the world will start in France, (or sometime after we all speak French) and Kennedy was most likely shot in an English speaking country.

30. joe says:

    February 2, 2012 at 2:20 pm

    noreligion2: “You may be right, the virgin mary might have just been an extremely elaborate insult!”

    Some are clearer — see in Lysistrata “Is that a message staff under your toga or are you happy to see me”. But imagine someone unearthing Seinfeld in 1000 years…

    The key to communications is, in fact, the key.

31. Brother Daniel says:

    February 2, 2012 at 2:24 pm

    @ Sondra: Good point. 🙂

32. joe says:

    February 2, 2012 at 2:29 pm

    Acolyte: “In a curious way then, the making of the atomic weapon has so far done more to prolong the existance of humanity as a whole than we give it credit for, simply through the self-preservation instincts of those responsible for deploying it. Unfortunately that same technology has only to get into the hands of a people still convinced of their own divine right to rule for us all to be screwed (visions of a mad mullah doing a Slim Pickings and ‘ridin’ it all the way in’ with a “Yee-Allah-el-Aqhb-Hah”.”

    Instinct is bullshit Descartes noise. Thank God that most human leaders are craven wimps with no ambition beyond filling their maws, especially since the Enlightenment. Thank you Jesus for giving us bourgeois bean-counters as our masters! Shiiit, I could destroy the world with a Julius Caesar and a handful of his buddies.

    The “divine right” attitude would be called by good-old boys “having balls”. The problem with mullahs is they may still be boys with balls — Lord save us all from your ball boys.

33. Nassar Ben Houdja says:

    February 2, 2012 at 3:09 pm

    To reduce the Qur’an to one page
    Is another western outrage
    Removing the filling
    Eliminates infidel killing
    The only way the faithful to gauge.

34. Acolyte of Sagan says:

    February 2, 2012 at 3:37 pm

    I wondered where you’d got to Nassar. Another fine little ditty giving an insight into the minds of the fanatics.
    Were it not for your propensity to flaunt your modesty by refusing to answer questions, I’d ask if you were born with tongue planted firmly in cheek?

    Joe, I suppose it’s easy to ‘have balls’ when one is convinced that death is nought but promotion; once realisation hits that this is the only life we get, preserving that life takes on far greater importance than a warriors death with a short cut to Valhalla.

35. Acolyte of Sagan says:

    February 2, 2012 at 4:45 pm

    I can capture the essence of religion by farting into a bottle and corking it!

36. Maria Johansson says:

    February 2, 2012 at 7:16 pm

    Thanks for the cartoon. It’s really good and important. I live in Malmö in Sweden were the some muslims are harassing jews. And the newspappers don’t tell the public the truth. Some newspapers even imply that it is native swedes that’s responsible. To bad that every religion has to redo every bad thing that some other religion had done before.

37. sweetpityfulmercy says:

    February 2, 2012 at 7:18 pm

    I have read the whole awful thing three times. I attest here before Allah that Jesus is correct in his editing. There really is absolutly nothing more to the Koran than endless repertitions of the above list. Save for some rehashed biblical characters doing vaguely similar things and a few throwaway simplistic good ideas

38. Stephen Turner says:

    February 3, 2012 at 9:03 am

    @Good and Godless: that’s a great piece of research. You could submit it to “Nature”.

39. European says:

    February 3, 2012 at 9:51 am

    Soon we’ll be done with making fun of – loose clothes and beards:

    http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/33505/Egypt/Politics-/Egyptian-film-star-Adel-Imam-sentenced-to–months-.aspx

40. Neuseline says:

    February 3, 2012 at 11:16 am

    One of the best.

41. Stephen Turner says:

    February 3, 2012 at 11:40 am

    Apparently if you ask in your local Saudi Arabian mission, they’ll give you a beautifully bound Koran (which is also the Saudi constitution) for free. They could save a lot of money by using Jesus’s version.

    @Neuseline: +1

42. Darwin Harmless says:

    February 3, 2012 at 12:42 pm

    @Good and Godless Delightful. Thanks for that.
    @European Thanks for that link. It’s amazing how they throw jail time at people in Egypt. The headline says he was sentemced to jail, but I notice he was sentenced in absentia. Hopefully he’s remain absent. I sure would.

    And now a confirmation of Tim Minchin’s observation that God specializes in ophthalmology:
    http://newsletter.parkesburgbaptist.org/Newsletter/2012/february/February%20Newletter%202012%20e-mail.pdf?utm_source=Monthly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=3f6d7a0a20-Monthly_Newsletter+2%2F2012&utm_medium=email

43. spoing says:

    February 4, 2012 at 11:19 am

    thinking about it, xtianity for dummies (who else?) makes even better reading.

    God is your multiple-personality-disorder father who he loves you so much – you dirty sinful miscreant – that He tortured and killed his only decent child to get you off the hook; all this so that you can get to spend eternity heaping praise on him. Fail to believe and you get to spend eternity burning. Deal?

44. Chris says:

    February 4, 2012 at 4:49 pm

    I came across Jesus & Mo thanks to the wonderful Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association. They did a great service in publicising this great cartoon http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-16615312. I decided to start at the beginning and read a few each day. But horror of horrors, I’ve reached this page which hasn’t got a next button! This really has made me laugh out load (still can’t bear to write the acronym though).

45. European says:

    February 4, 2012 at 5:31 pm

    @Darwin: Imam didn’t show up in court, but after the appeal (depending on developments in Egypt) might still end up in court, and not only him, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/02/adel-imam-sentenced_n_1249536.html

46. Exzanian says:

    February 6, 2012 at 8:08 pm

    @Spoing
    You missed the bit where he did all that punishment to Himself…’aint it beautiful? Sigh…..what a Mighty God We Serve……

47. Confusio says:

    February 6, 2012 at 9:31 pm

    A good abstract of a reading difficult to digest. I made a spanish version, if you dont mind.
    Thank you for your work

48. durham669 says:

    February 7, 2012 at 4:26 pm

    Sprong, thanks for the laugh! Reminds me of this one – “Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.” And yeah, and you’ll burn forever if you don’t believe this.