@author
Or… Your typos are like the deliberate mistakes in handwoven Persian Rugs… only Allah can make things perfectly… to make a perfect rug or a typo-free comic would be an offence to Allah.
JB. Surely it requires thought to understand that the bullshit fed to you by your religious parents and elders just isn’t true. If you were lucky enough to have secular Humanist parents(I hate the term Atheist) , then you were already taught to assimilate data fed into you and discard the obvious bullshit…
It depends on your standards for “thinking”. Human nature seems to be plenty eager to use tho logic circuits to rationalize the positions we’ve already settled into.
And, no, a deliberate mistake is not a mistake… but haven’t you noticed that gods are easily fooled?
From nuns washing under a sheet so as not to offend Jahweh with their nakedness, to American teens getting around his chastity rules by only having anal sex (supposedly, don’t know if it’s true)… Allah is DEFINITELY going to be fooled by deliberate mistakes in Persian rugs.
The idea of leaving an imperfection in your work to acknowledge the perfection of God is fine unless you are coding, packing a parachute, or writing a constitution.
I get a tad dizzy at the claims made about god(s). Is the one(three) “revealed” Middle Eastern character gendered? If so, which way? Additionally, is he/she/it(them) omnipotent? Or merely perfect? Surely if one is omnipotent, one can err – one(three) can be deliberately IMperfect? Divine plan and all that rot. If not, then the omnipotence feature seems lacking. And if ‘perfection’ is self-referential – “Whatever I(We) do is perfect by definition” – doesn’t it all become rather circular?
“Whatever I(We) do is perfect by definition” is reasonable, bearing in mind that this is relative to 1) all Creation so to speak, and 2) the human observer perspective. It’s possible that It/They is/are regularly shamed by other gods whose Creations are substantially better – i.e., the same Creation might lack perfection from the perspective of another omnipotent being, whose criteria would necessarily be different from ours.
Anyway, if you posit that the totality of Creation is perfect, and of course that immediate aspects of it are far from perfect, then the deliberate imperfections in your work aren’t so hard to understand.
@tebirkes
The god of the Pentateuch (five books of Moses) is described using male gendered pronouns and as “Father”. This isn’t too surprising, because man makes god in his own image – and the authors of the Torah were patriarchal in the extreme.
This god is described as quite literally “walking in the garden (of Eden)” (Genesis 3:8). Jacob quite literally wrestled with a man who turns out to be god (Genesis 32:22).
It’s not an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent god. It’s not even the “one” god (not to start with, anyway). It’s a “jealous” god that demands only that its believers worship no gods other than it – not that there are no other gods. It’s the god of the tribes of Israel. It’s a god of cultural mythos and fables. Other gods are available.
It’s not until we get to the sophisticated believer that we achieve a completely incoherent version of a god. Theirs is the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and perfectly good god – which causes all sorts of problems for them such as the Problem of Evil. There hasn’t been an apologetic or theodicy that isn’t, on a moment’s reflection, obvious claptrap. So the sophisticated believer descends into mystical woo and claims that their god is beyond comprehension (otherwise known to the rest of us as “bullshit”).
To be fair, it’s the only marketable god story in this era. No one’s going to get anywhere with tribal superman gods, it’s got to be universal and beyond the world of phenomena, so there isn’t really much but mystic woo to say about it. The interesting part is that it still has to have that personal touch that people have always demanded.
The idea that it must be perfectly good seems to be central to your point, but I am not sure it’s well supported by the church dogma. That may be a common perspective in factions that still believe in God vs. Satan, but that’s kind of antique, right? Your average modern believer naturally regards many actual occurrences as not good, but faith allows you to believe that in the End it’s all good, from a somewhat different perspective.
@Donn Cave
You’re conflating “occurrences” (which may be good or ill) with “god”. Believers throughout the ages have explained away ills as being “in the end, good (but we don’t know why because we’re mere humans)”. Meh!
But even sophisticated, modern believers believe that their god is “good” (and, being “god”, perfectly so). Your god (if you have one) isn’t evil, or even amoral, is it?
The “Problem of Evil” is that it’s impossible to reconcile the existence of suffering and evil with the beliefs that god is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. One or more of those beliefs has to be dropped to explain the existence of evil and suffering. Or the believer can construct a theodicy that doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny by someone who isn’t already a believer.
There’s a deeper problem with the concept of “good” and a god that is supposedly the source of everything. Either it defines what is “good”, in which case its decision is effectively arbitrary – or it is bound by an underlying concept of “good” and is therefore not the source of everything. Again, the only way out of this conundrum for the sophisticated believer is sophistry.
Even the simple question of whether an omnipotent god could create something that it can’t destroy shows what a logical mess these omni-attributes cause.
These just aren’t problems for the type of tribal god that Jahweh started out as. The problem is with sophisticated theology.
Beautifully stringent analysis, arbeyu.
You can’t be the first; the problem is ageless and insoluble by any logic.
Ergo: discard logic, the antithesis of faith! Age-old Gordian solution.
The kind of good and evil I think you’re talking about, is kind of an illusion of perspective. Are spiders evil? Are chimpanzees evil, when they’re cruel to another chimpanzee? There’s really no such thing.
Believers presumably entertain this illusion, as we all do, but they can juxtapose it with an absolute perspective. This may be submission to god’s will, or the tao, whatever, but of course none of that will count for anything in the scrutiny of a non-believer.
Why doesn’t god run the universe like you would? When was the last time you created anything – never, am I right? We have no idea what creation even means, we can only transform things. We’re talking about such a different order of existence that it’s silly to second guess what that gent ought to be up to.
I don’t get where “can’t destroy” comes from – did we get word from somewhere that our universe can’t be destroyed? I guess it would be easier to grapple with that question if we knew what it meant for it to be created.
I don’t mean to validate any religion here. There’s no particular real world relevance to any of it, and religions that promise otherwise are bunk. You don’t have a soul, god isn’t your best bud, none of it. But I think atheists and believers alike can benefit from the perspective shift I mentioned. When I establish my unbeliever religion, I shall certainly include it in some form.
@Donn Cave
The sophisticated belief in god you describe is a case of trying to have one’s cake and eat it: The deity has to be “universal and beyond the world of phenomena” but “still has to have that personal touch”. So we can’t say anything about it, except that it takes personal interest in us. In which case, we are saying something about it (that some kind of “personhood” applies to it, and that it is interested in us).
The problem with omnipotence is that of the “the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object”. Can “god” create something that it cannot move? It must be able to – because it’s omnipotent. But it also must be able to move it – because it’s omnipotent. Similarly, can it create something that it cannot destroy? The concept of omnipotence is internally logically inconsistent.
An omnipotent and omniscient deity would be able to create any sort of reality that it cared to. Believers can’t just sweep under the “woo” carpet the fact that, according to them, their god chose to create an existence so extravagantly full of suffering – and to leave us in utter ignorance of the purpose of it all. If their god is omniscient, it would have known the consequence of its creation; If it were omnipotent, it could have done better; If it were omnibenevolent, it would have wanted to do better. As Hitchens (or maybe Dawkins) pointed out, you and I are better, morally speaking, than this god because neither you nor I would let a child suffer in ignorance for one second if we were able to help.
The answers given by believers are that “god” is beyond the laws of logic, and beyond the realms of understanding, and that it’s not for us to question its motives.
This, my friend, is unworthy bullshit. Believers need to do better – even if their god cannot.
If one goes further into deism, where “god” is utterly impersonal, incomprehensible and uninvolved, then why bother with the concept at all? You don’t need to posit the existence of undetectable magic phone pixies if you can explain how phones work purely naturalistically.
You’re still in “there must be no god, because if there were, here’s how I would run the universe!” I.e., “would have done better.”
You really cannot have an omnipotent god that created the universe, and hold it accountable to your ideas of what’s good and what’s not. That’s laughable.
There is indeed no explanatory value, for natural phenomena. Like I said, I’m not validating or advocating for any actual religion, just responding to the idea of perfection vs. a creator.
I’m still missing something with the “immovable force”, “can’t destroy” proposition. I don’t see how that’s stated anywhere or inherently implied by anything. I don’t even know what it means, really. As true creation is not within our ken, so to speak, so implicitly would true destruction be outside our experience.
@Donn Cave.
No, I don’t say “There must be no god”. I say that descriptions of “god” are incoherent. They are internally contradictory. They are literally nonsense.
Let’s posit for a second that there is a god. It, according to sophisticates, does not exist in this reality. It is unaffected by the reality it created. It’s ME who exists in this reality. So who better than me to point out the shortcomings of its reality (and by extension, the shortcomings of the creator)? I’m the one who has to live here!
And if a sophisticate tells me that, actually, it’s all good and all the suffering is for a purpose that is far beyond me to understand, maybe even claiming to offer me a reward in a life after, then they’ve gone from incoherent babbling to an offensive level of religiously-induced delusion.
And, anyway, I’m not holding “god” accountable for anything: I don’t believe in one. I’m pointing out that descriptions of “god”, by those who believe in one, are nonsensical, and their talk is almost exclusively flimflam.
“Omnipotent” means “to have unlimited power and to be able to do anything”. That’s what it means. And that’s what believers mean when they call their god “omnipotent”. I cannot help you if you cannot spot the inherent logical contradiction in describing anything as “omnipotent”. You’ll just have to think about it yourself for a bit.
It seems to me that if you see an inherent logical contradiction, you could present it. Apparently not, but just to guess at the logical flaw that might be tying your tongue — note that “omnipotent” refers to the phenomenal world; the omnipotent god is not part of that world. There could be other universes and other gods, that our god has no ability to affect at all, yet it’s omnipotent for us.
There’s no practical value in it, for sure. Of course there are a lot of things we are kind of crazy about despite lacking any practical value.
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
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June 18, 2025
The Norse had a saying:
One’s own farts always smell good.
Oscar Wilde famously said: “Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn’t there, and finding it.”
@paradoctor – that saying is Norse? I had no idea my family is of Norse descent. They were also likely to say that about sh!t.
So true. And of inherited political beliefs too.
(PS. A wee typo in frame 2.)
To be fair, plenty of atheists don’t think either. It’s not really human nature.
Gah! Thanks, Oozoid. One day I’ll upload a typo free comic.
@author
Or… Your typos are like the deliberate mistakes in handwoven Persian Rugs… only Allah can make things perfectly… to make a perfect rug or a typo-free comic would be an offence to Allah.
JB. Surely it requires thought to understand that the bullshit fed to you by your religious parents and elders just isn’t true. If you were lucky enough to have secular Humanist parents(I hate the term Atheist) , then you were already taught to assimilate data fed into you and discard the obvious bullshit…
It depends on your standards for “thinking”. Human nature seems to be plenty eager to use tho logic circuits to rationalize the positions we’ve already settled into.
Arbeyu, a deliberate mistake, a mistake by design so to say, is that still a mistake?
@shaughn
You’re expecting LOGICAL REASONING from folk who would deliberately introduce a flaw into something to avoid offending their imaginary god???
And, no, a deliberate mistake is not a mistake… but haven’t you noticed that gods are easily fooled?
From nuns washing under a sheet so as not to offend Jahweh with their nakedness, to American teens getting around his chastity rules by only having anal sex (supposedly, don’t know if it’s true)… Allah is DEFINITELY going to be fooled by deliberate mistakes in Persian rugs.
The idea of leaving an imperfection in your work to acknowledge the perfection of God is fine unless you are coding, packing a parachute, or writing a constitution.
I get a tad dizzy at the claims made about god(s). Is the one(three) “revealed” Middle Eastern character gendered? If so, which way? Additionally, is he/she/it(them) omnipotent? Or merely perfect? Surely if one is omnipotent, one can err – one(three) can be deliberately IMperfect? Divine plan and all that rot. If not, then the omnipotence feature seems lacking. And if ‘perfection’ is self-referential – “Whatever I(We) do is perfect by definition” – doesn’t it all become rather circular?
“Whatever I(We) do is perfect by definition” is reasonable, bearing in mind that this is relative to 1) all Creation so to speak, and 2) the human observer perspective. It’s possible that It/They is/are regularly shamed by other gods whose Creations are substantially better – i.e., the same Creation might lack perfection from the perspective of another omnipotent being, whose criteria would necessarily be different from ours.
Anyway, if you posit that the totality of Creation is perfect, and of course that immediate aspects of it are far from perfect, then the deliberate imperfections in your work aren’t so hard to understand.
@tebirkes
The god of the Pentateuch (five books of Moses) is described using male gendered pronouns and as “Father”. This isn’t too surprising, because man makes god in his own image – and the authors of the Torah were patriarchal in the extreme.
This god is described as quite literally “walking in the garden (of Eden)” (Genesis 3:8). Jacob quite literally wrestled with a man who turns out to be god (Genesis 32:22).
It’s not an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent god. It’s not even the “one” god (not to start with, anyway). It’s a “jealous” god that demands only that its believers worship no gods other than it – not that there are no other gods. It’s the god of the tribes of Israel. It’s a god of cultural mythos and fables. Other gods are available.
It’s not until we get to the sophisticated believer that we achieve a completely incoherent version of a god. Theirs is the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and perfectly good god – which causes all sorts of problems for them such as the Problem of Evil. There hasn’t been an apologetic or theodicy that isn’t, on a moment’s reflection, obvious claptrap. So the sophisticated believer descends into mystical woo and claims that their god is beyond comprehension (otherwise known to the rest of us as “bullshit”).
To be fair, it’s the only marketable god story in this era. No one’s going to get anywhere with tribal superman gods, it’s got to be universal and beyond the world of phenomena, so there isn’t really much but mystic woo to say about it. The interesting part is that it still has to have that personal touch that people have always demanded.
The idea that it must be perfectly good seems to be central to your point, but I am not sure it’s well supported by the church dogma. That may be a common perspective in factions that still believe in God vs. Satan, but that’s kind of antique, right? Your average modern believer naturally regards many actual occurrences as not good, but faith allows you to believe that in the End it’s all good, from a somewhat different perspective.
@Donn Cave
You’re conflating “occurrences” (which may be good or ill) with “god”. Believers throughout the ages have explained away ills as being “in the end, good (but we don’t know why because we’re mere humans)”. Meh!
But even sophisticated, modern believers believe that their god is “good” (and, being “god”, perfectly so). Your god (if you have one) isn’t evil, or even amoral, is it?
The “Problem of Evil” is that it’s impossible to reconcile the existence of suffering and evil with the beliefs that god is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. One or more of those beliefs has to be dropped to explain the existence of evil and suffering. Or the believer can construct a theodicy that doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny by someone who isn’t already a believer.
There’s a deeper problem with the concept of “good” and a god that is supposedly the source of everything. Either it defines what is “good”, in which case its decision is effectively arbitrary – or it is bound by an underlying concept of “good” and is therefore not the source of everything. Again, the only way out of this conundrum for the sophisticated believer is sophistry.
Even the simple question of whether an omnipotent god could create something that it can’t destroy shows what a logical mess these omni-attributes cause.
These just aren’t problems for the type of tribal god that Jahweh started out as. The problem is with sophisticated theology.
Beautifully stringent analysis, arbeyu.
You can’t be the first; the problem is ageless and insoluble by any logic.
Ergo: discard logic, the antithesis of faith! Age-old Gordian solution.
The kind of good and evil I think you’re talking about, is kind of an illusion of perspective. Are spiders evil? Are chimpanzees evil, when they’re cruel to another chimpanzee? There’s really no such thing.
Believers presumably entertain this illusion, as we all do, but they can juxtapose it with an absolute perspective. This may be submission to god’s will, or the tao, whatever, but of course none of that will count for anything in the scrutiny of a non-believer.
Why doesn’t god run the universe like you would? When was the last time you created anything – never, am I right? We have no idea what creation even means, we can only transform things. We’re talking about such a different order of existence that it’s silly to second guess what that gent ought to be up to.
I don’t get where “can’t destroy” comes from – did we get word from somewhere that our universe can’t be destroyed? I guess it would be easier to grapple with that question if we knew what it meant for it to be created.
I don’t mean to validate any religion here. There’s no particular real world relevance to any of it, and religions that promise otherwise are bunk. You don’t have a soul, god isn’t your best bud, none of it. But I think atheists and believers alike can benefit from the perspective shift I mentioned. When I establish my unbeliever religion, I shall certainly include it in some form.
@Donn Cave
The sophisticated belief in god you describe is a case of trying to have one’s cake and eat it: The deity has to be “universal and beyond the world of phenomena” but “still has to have that personal touch”. So we can’t say anything about it, except that it takes personal interest in us. In which case, we are saying something about it (that some kind of “personhood” applies to it, and that it is interested in us).
The problem with omnipotence is that of the “the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object”. Can “god” create something that it cannot move? It must be able to – because it’s omnipotent. But it also must be able to move it – because it’s omnipotent. Similarly, can it create something that it cannot destroy? The concept of omnipotence is internally logically inconsistent.
An omnipotent and omniscient deity would be able to create any sort of reality that it cared to. Believers can’t just sweep under the “woo” carpet the fact that, according to them, their god chose to create an existence so extravagantly full of suffering – and to leave us in utter ignorance of the purpose of it all. If their god is omniscient, it would have known the consequence of its creation; If it were omnipotent, it could have done better; If it were omnibenevolent, it would have wanted to do better. As Hitchens (or maybe Dawkins) pointed out, you and I are better, morally speaking, than this god because neither you nor I would let a child suffer in ignorance for one second if we were able to help.
The answers given by believers are that “god” is beyond the laws of logic, and beyond the realms of understanding, and that it’s not for us to question its motives.
This, my friend, is unworthy bullshit. Believers need to do better – even if their god cannot.
If one goes further into deism, where “god” is utterly impersonal, incomprehensible and uninvolved, then why bother with the concept at all? You don’t need to posit the existence of undetectable magic phone pixies if you can explain how phones work purely naturalistically.
You’re still in “there must be no god, because if there were, here’s how I would run the universe!” I.e., “would have done better.”
You really cannot have an omnipotent god that created the universe, and hold it accountable to your ideas of what’s good and what’s not. That’s laughable.
There is indeed no explanatory value, for natural phenomena. Like I said, I’m not validating or advocating for any actual religion, just responding to the idea of perfection vs. a creator.
I’m still missing something with the “immovable force”, “can’t destroy” proposition. I don’t see how that’s stated anywhere or inherently implied by anything. I don’t even know what it means, really. As true creation is not within our ken, so to speak, so implicitly would true destruction be outside our experience.
@Donn Cave.
No, I don’t say “There must be no god”. I say that descriptions of “god” are incoherent. They are internally contradictory. They are literally nonsense.
Let’s posit for a second that there is a god. It, according to sophisticates, does not exist in this reality. It is unaffected by the reality it created. It’s ME who exists in this reality. So who better than me to point out the shortcomings of its reality (and by extension, the shortcomings of the creator)? I’m the one who has to live here!
And if a sophisticate tells me that, actually, it’s all good and all the suffering is for a purpose that is far beyond me to understand, maybe even claiming to offer me a reward in a life after, then they’ve gone from incoherent babbling to an offensive level of religiously-induced delusion.
And, anyway, I’m not holding “god” accountable for anything: I don’t believe in one. I’m pointing out that descriptions of “god”, by those who believe in one, are nonsensical, and their talk is almost exclusively flimflam.
“Omnipotent” means “to have unlimited power and to be able to do anything”. That’s what it means. And that’s what believers mean when they call their god “omnipotent”. I cannot help you if you cannot spot the inherent logical contradiction in describing anything as “omnipotent”. You’ll just have to think about it yourself for a bit.
It seems to me that if you see an inherent logical contradiction, you could present it. Apparently not, but just to guess at the logical flaw that might be tying your tongue — note that “omnipotent” refers to the phenomenal world; the omnipotent god is not part of that world. There could be other universes and other gods, that our god has no ability to affect at all, yet it’s omnipotent for us.
There’s no practical value in it, for sure. Of course there are a lot of things we are kind of crazy about despite lacking any practical value.