night

September 18th, 2019
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Discussion (22)¬

  1. clive_p says:
    September 18, 2019 at 1:41 pm

    Not to mention around 7 million other species on Earth. All created for us.

  2. Quine Duhem says:
    September 18, 2019 at 2:21 pm

    If it is all just for us, a flat Earth and crystal spheres for the heavens would have been just enough for our survival. The sort of thing that a primitive society might predict – along with a sentient creator. All this extra stuff in the universe makes you wonder …

  3. Ben Elms-Lester says:
    September 18, 2019 at 2:23 pm

    Superb again!

  4. Marcus says:
    September 18, 2019 at 2:38 pm

    Can I have your liver then?

  5. arensb says:
    September 18, 2019 at 2:58 pm

    This comic is just a retelling of a short film that was shown at Ken Ham’s Creation Museum when I visited, except that the film had better CGI.
    Creationists would have no problem surviving Douglas Adams’s Total Perspective Vortex.

  6. BC says:
    September 18, 2019 at 3:24 pm

    Thanks for publishing this on my birthday!
    I woke up, read this, and smiled…

  7. Darwin Harmless says:
    September 18, 2019 at 6:02 pm

    Ah yes, the arrogance of the true believer. The magic man made us all in his image and gave us dominion over everything. We are so very fucking special, eh.
    We need “It’s all for us” on a T-shirt with a graphic of the galaxy. The back should read: “If you can believe this, you’ll believe anything.”

  8. Son of Glenner says:
    September 18, 2019 at 6:40 pm

    Marcus: Nice Monty Python reference!

  9. Len says:
    September 18, 2019 at 9:44 pm

    Darwin H: Excellent idea. I’d certainly buy (and wear) one.

  10. jb says:
    September 19, 2019 at 11:53 am

    Maybe it’s all for him! You know, the universe as a giant snow globe that God shakes for his own amusement. (This was more or less the final denouement of the novel I mentioned two weeks ago).

    You could make a perfectly workable theology out of that! You still have to obey Him, because it pleases Him to give you orders, but now you are living on just one world in an infinite blizzard of worlds, all devoted to worshiping Him. As far as I can tell, such a cosmology would make absolutely no difference to the actual practice of religion here on Earth; but if somebody writing a holy book had had the foresight to puff up their god even further by explicitly making him the lord of many distant worlds, instead of just this one alone, it would have completely eliminated the “all for us” conundrum we find so embarrassing today. Can you imagine how smug the Muslims would be if they could point to a passage like that in the Koran?

    And the thing is, I don’t think it was totally beyond the capacity of the Iron Age mind to look at the stars and see them as distant suns with their own worlds. The Hindus certainly had some wild ideas about the universe (including seeing it as part of a multiverse). The Abrahamic religions never got that creative, but there is no fundamental reason they couldn’t have.

  11. Alexis says:
    September 19, 2019 at 2:10 pm

    As I was looking up at that moon this morning, that beautiful truncated circle of light in blue morning sky, I was moved by its rebellion against the words of Genesis ordering it to rule by night!

  12. two cents' worth says:
    September 19, 2019 at 7:26 pm

    For those like me who didn’t get Marcus’s Monty Python reference, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp-pU8TFsg0 . You’ll need to watch the whole thing.

  13. ego says:
    September 20, 2019 at 5:44 am

    that famous humility that comes with belief.

  14. M27Holts says:
    September 20, 2019 at 7:06 am

    Our evolved brains, designed to work with bison sized objects at lion velocities cannot comprehend the world at einsteinian velocities or Planck sizes. .its as simple as that…

  15. Marcus says:
    September 20, 2019 at 12:36 pm

    The succinct version of the Monty Python ‘Can I have your liver then’:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk&t=32s

  16. Rich says:
    September 21, 2019 at 12:09 am

    Preaching to the choir but…
    “You might imagine an uncharitable extraterrestrial observer looking down on our species… – with us excitedly chattering, “The Universe is created for us! We’re at the center! Everything pays homage to us!” – and concluding that our pretensions are amusing, our aspirations pathetic, that this must be the planet of the idiots”

  17. AnonymousCoward says:
    September 21, 2019 at 2:20 pm

    The Patreon link at the top right is a malformed URL – httpss://www.patreon.com/jandm should be https://www.patreon.com/jandm

  18. Troubleshooter says:
    September 21, 2019 at 2:54 pm

    As Ellie Arroway said in Contact, “If it’s just us, then it’s an awful waste of space.”

    And if Yahweh meant to do it that way, then he is one wasteful SOB!

  19. M27Holts says:
    September 22, 2019 at 10:51 am

    Those wacky python boys eh! Should have done a sequel to “Life of Brian” called “Life of a Camel Herders son”…too scared I suspect…

  20. Son of Glenner says:
    September 22, 2019 at 3:16 pm

    M27Holts: The song, “Always look on the bright side …” worked in the context of crucifixion, but could not work in the context of beheading.

  21. M27Holts says:
    September 22, 2019 at 3:58 pm

    Aye. But plenty of comical opportunities with a man hiding in a cave for months, then claiming to have been in contact with the Angel Gabriel…Then flying around on a winged horse….

  22. Hanrod says:
    October 13, 2019 at 4:12 am

    …so, can we ridicule all sincere beliefs as to racism, sexism and homophobia?

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