treat
December 5th, 2012
Holy Moses, what an Islamophobe.
Inspired by the Bristol University Christian Union story.
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Oh no! I can’t bear Moses to be PC!
Not often one sees a Jew respecting Islam.
Or am I mis-reading the whole Israel/Palestine thing?
Is it just me or is the world going backwards? This is a university in the 21st century?
The Bristol University Christian Union thing they are being ironic aren’t they?
Tell me they are not serious, please.
Moses is one to speak! Judaism, during the time he’s alleged to have lived, was very misogynistic.
But that’s not Moses. It’s the “spiritual” guy (see previous comic… duh!).
@Jobrag, I hope what they’re doing is showing the general public just how irrelevant (and, in many ways, immoral), Christianity is in today’s society. I hope it’s another nail in the coffin.
Of course I doubt it’ll be that, but I can hope can’t I?
Great strip. I just love the final pane.
If there is one thing I detest about the spiritually inclined it is that one is expected to tiptoe around their ludicrous beliefs out of some daft cultural respect for fact that they actually have beliefs at all even if those are ludicrous and in spite of their inevitable manifestation of activities that really do assault ones sensibilities to very real human rights issues from gender to genocide.
That world is indeed going backwards and that in itself is probably a reaction to the pressure of the coffin lid. And interestingly, just as Moses has dropped the PC bombshell of hypocrisy and mixed messages, perhaps this nail is one that will seal the fate of all the Abrahamic religions.
@ Eon – Are you new here, or am I missing your joke? Try entering “Moses” in the search box top left. My favourite is “Cosy”.
Now I must check back to see if Moses has always been somewhat of an *agent provocateur*.
Or is he an irony metre? (an instrument of irony? … er … one who metes irony?) Ah ha!: Moses is an irony meter; one who offers a measure of irony.
Who would have thought there are 40 meanings of the word ‘measure’?
Once again, self styled Christians are not behaving in a Christlike way…
Hard to believe, isn’t it?
Women speaking is “a difficult issue for some” – oh really? Have they seen a professional about it?
There it is –
‘The Christian Union said it had “no formal position on the role of men and women in the church”, adding: “We respect those of our members who hold strong Biblical convictions in this area and seek to find the most practical way of expressing this inclusivity.”‘
How sweet. Too bad they don’t “respect” those of their members who don’t hold Biblical convictions that women should stfu.
Oh looky here, the guy who called the alert on the Bristol U Christian Union –
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2012/12/wull-if-the-bishops-can-we-can/#comment-370418
A round of applause for Steve Murray!
The problem that some are starting to detect.
Is the selective application of respect.
The truth in what some call blasphemy.
Would be an international catastrophe.
The foundation of the cuts beliefs, totally wrecked.
Nassar, that is brilliant. Not as a limerick-type verse, but it would make for a good rap. I can even overlook the missing ‘l’ from ‘cults’ – assuming it was ‘cults’ you were aiming for, that is!
And for once I must applaud Nassar’s efforts. That first couplet is all we really need. I think I shall quote him on occasion, which is something I never thought I would do.
As for this being the twenty-first century, where is my flying car and my robot to do all the yard work. Not surprising that there are a few troglodytes among us still. In fact, a friend once commented that we can still find every flavour of humanity someplace in the world, from stone age hunter gatherers to rocket scientists. We’ve still got them all. Sometimes they get together and announce that their century is not yet over.
@Acolyte… Actually “cult’s” …. Or possibly “cults'” … poor persecuted missing apostrophe! Loved your comment. I wait to be shot down over my grammar pedantism.
Also in Bristol, the Bristol Diocesan synod passed vote of no confidence in CofE vote to not allow women priests. The Uni CU might get a visit from their bishop to buck-up their ideas!
@kev_s:
No wish to ‘shoot you down’ over your grammar – no shame in being unsure – but your use of ‘pedantism’ rather than ‘pedantry’ gets you both barrels at close range from UPOTWA.
As for the poor apostophe, the rule exists because we use terminal (s) to mark plurals and terminal (‘s) for possesives. If something is both plural and possesive, rather than doubling them (s’s), the second s is dropped (s’).
So it all depends whether NBH means one cult, or all of them. If he means one cult, the apostrophe should come before the s (cult’s = cult+’s). If all of them, the apostrophe moves to show that the s is plural (cults’ = cults+’).
“We respect those of our members who hold strong Biblical convictions in this area and seek to find the most practical way of expressing this inclusivity.”
See, it’s all done for the sake of respect and inclusivity. Shame on you for discriminating against the seriously held religious viepoints of those who still hold strong Biblical convictions in this area. It seems that bigots is the one group in society that it’s still OK to discriminate against. Bigots are the new jews! (Thanks author, that is still my very most favorite J&M line ever).
hotrats: In the US, it is becoming more common to write the “s’s” for a plural possessive, at least when not under the authority of prescriptivist grammar teachers. I don’t think this is a matter of education, but a rejection of an otherwise pretty dumb special case. Like so many language things, one adjusts one’s usage according to the social context.
For example, “The blogs’s background images are ugly”. The spoken version ends with the sound from the beginning of the word zed, but spoken twice, either with a glottal stop (blogz z) or a very brief e sound (blogz ez).
@Mark S.
If people are now saying ‘blogzez’ for plural possesive, then it is not a ‘pretty dumb special case’ that is being rejected, but a useful distinction. The ‘zez’-pronounced ending indicates either plural or possession for a word that ends in s in the the singular (like bus or kiss), with the apostrophe showing which when written.
Using it for plural possesives is just a childish error, and its social context is a lack of education that leads to ignorance of linguistic structure; nobody else is going to ‘adjust their usage’ and dumb down their speech like this.
You obviously disagree, but maintining useful conventions that make meaning more precise is not prescriptivism, but education. It is not prescriptivist to correct ‘I talks’ or ‘he talk’, just reflective of the structure of English.
Mark S, surely the second ‘s’ is unneccessary in your example? ‘The blog’s background..’ should suffice, unless you’re referring to multiple blogs, in which case it’s ‘The blogs’ background..’. Both ways, the pronunciation is as it looks, so no need for the ‘-ez’ on the end.
But let’s not get bogged down arguing the subtleties of the language whilst there’s still religion to mock.
Innit!
AoS:
Quite right. In the sage words of Vic Reeves, I couldn’t let it lie. On with the mockery.
Or as the Americans would say, “I couldn’t let it lay” ;-). Bit of a chicken and egg situation, by the sound of it.
So the married ones can talk but the single ones can’t. Sounds like the worst of both worlds to me….
(c) Sid James 1974
🙂
I think that I’ve uncovered the ultimate in Christian misogeny. Against my better judgment I have just read The Prophesied end-Time by Ronald Weisland. It’s a jumbled, confused mess of a book full of tortured interpretation of scripture, very repetitive and, to be honest, both hilarious and frightening. Hilarious for obvious reasons, frightening because it makes one realise that there really are people who think that way (billions are prophesised to die in scenes of unimaginable horror,and this jerk is salivating at the thought, calling it ‘Good News’!). Anyway, despite all of that, the misogeny I mentioned does indeed come straight from the Bible without need of Mr. Weisland’s unique interpretation.
You are all familiar I’m sure with the End-Timers’ claim that 144,000 humans are to be spared God’s wrath and will rule Earth, with Jesus being the ‘King of Kings’, and that this 144,000 will be drawn from people who have lived at any point of the 6000 years that humans have existed on Earth (Weisland’s claim, not mine!). You may also be aware that the 144,000 (the more I hear that number, the more I’m reminded of the mini-series ((Stephen King?)) The 4400, but I digress..) will not be resurrected physically but spiritually, and so will rule on Earth for eternity. The rest of us, every single human that ever lived, will be bought before God 1000 years after End-Time and given the choice to either live ‘in God’ – but only as the boring old ‘meat sock’ physical being that we already are – or to be dead for ever. Hey, don’t blame me, I didn’t make this shit up! Anyway, I’ll bet that what you didn’t know is that the 144,000 will, on God’s direct order, be exclusively male. Oh, and exclusively virgins. It’s true I tell you, it’s in t’Bible!
Revelations describes the 144,000 as those “…which were redeemed from the earth. Theses are they who were not defiled with women; for they are virgins….These were redeemed from among men. Rev. 3-4. (emphasis mine).
With love from Acolyte of Sagan. Reading this shit so you don’t have to!
Whoops, fucked up a bit on the italics there. Please, Author, can we have an edit facility?
Acolyte
So it’s OK if they have been defiled with men?
btw can the non-spamming atheists just affirm rather than swearing?
Did this fix the italics leaing into other comments?
We can swear by Almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster. I’d be happy to swear by the dragon in Carl Sagan’s garage.
@AoS I fixed it. I don’t like comment editors because they increase load time.
@richardelgure – No, sorry. You have to swear.
That dragon is my father 🙂
Richard, you asked “So it’s OK if they have been defiled with men?”
Oooooh noooo! He’s very specific about that. Homosexuality and adultery are, according to God’s End-Time prophet Weisland, perversions in the sight of the LORD (he really does capitalise LORD every single time in his book), and will not be allowed after End-Time. But on the bright side, the gays and philanderers do get a chance to repent at the end of the first 1000 years that Jesus and the 144,000 (great name for a band, support act for Jesus and the Mary Chain, perhaps) resurrected spirits rule the world, and call every single human who has ever lived to come before God to either repent or stay dead.
Author, not to grumble, but have you really not yet had enough of newcomers thinking they are the first to wittily ask if they can affirm instead of swearing? There seems to be one almost every week…
I’m curious about its true function though; what spammer worth the name wouldn’t lie on principle? Surely you can edit posts with impunity, regardless of the sworn testimony?
For all the good it seems to do, it might as well be labeled ‘Yes, I actually do want the ‘Submit Comment’ button to actually do what it actually says.’
Hotrats, I’m guessing that the purpose of ticking the ‘not a spammer’ box is to foil ‘spambots’, those automated spam-delivery systems that patrol the web and latch onto unprotected sites and fora, pretty much the same as those feckin’ annoying letter/number jumbles that are often hard enough for a human to read. I think I’d rather just tick a box than have to go through the whole ‘Love, can you see what this letter’s supposed to be? It’s either a one or a seven. I’ll try seven. SHIT!” performance every time I post a comment.
@hotrats – AoS is right. It blocks the bots. Very well, in fact. It’s the best anti-spam plugin for WordPress I have ever used.
Aos:
Well that is fair enough, in which case, ‘I am not a spambot, obviously.’ would do, and the affirming gag could take well-deserved retirement.
I agree Captchas are a drag (especially the ones without ‘reload’), I even once had a truly sadistic one – in Hebrew.
Finished! I’ve read every strip from the beginning of time, including most comments! And many links in the comments. Took almost a year, I think (don’t quite remember when I first discovered J&M).
Congratulations, Tomas! Your certificate is in the post.
@ Author.
I am not a fucking spammer. Or, as a Liverpudlian might say, I am not a spam-fucking-bot, either. There … I swore, didn’t I.
Well, fff… All the serious commentary had been done to death before I’d even read the strip.
Tomas, If you memorise them you could become a hafiz of J&M.
Only 144,000? So it’s 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, I suppose. Clearly the primitive iron-age mind couldn’t cope with the idea of seven-and-a-half billion people in Canada and Iceland and Tasmania and Wales and Guernsey and Tahiti and all those bloody scientists in Antarctica and… So God couldn’t cope with a heaven big enough for all his human creation. Parochial, antisocial bugger. Ain’t dat de troof.
Ophelia quotes:
.
“We respect those of our members who hold strong Biblical convictions in this area”
.
But why?
.
“and seek to find the most practical way of expressing this inclusivity.”‘
.
Ah-ha. A practical way to include antisocial morons. So why behave sociably towards the antisocial? Is it because we are nice and therefore nice to the people who aren’t nice? And, assuming that christians are 50% female, who decides? And why?
Beechnut, according to Weisland the concept of ‘Heaven’ as commonly understood is wrong. Only the Boss, His Son (same person, possibly schizophrenic) and the Host of Angels are allowed into Heaven itself. All the resurrected ‘spirits’ that make up the 144,000 will rule on Earth with the Father-Son. All the billions of people who’ve ever lived will be resurrected in physical form – as long as they repent, of course – on Earth, which of course still suggests that the desert ramblers seriously underestimated just how many people have ever lived, and just how small this planet actually is. So, no Heaven above, just Heaven-on-Earth, which incidentally sounds remarkably like it should be a village in the Chilterns.
Just don’t get me started on how he blatantly asserted that the Bble clearly shows that the End-Time will begin specifically with the almost-complete destruction of the USA, Canada (obviously! Well, the man had an agenda), Britain and Australia, because all native English-speaking peoples are descended from the one tribe, the Judeans. My first thought was “English-speaking? That’s the Americans safe”. My next was “What a load of bollocks”!
Here Moses is speaking in the same way:
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2007/05/02/jihad/
Oh, right, Acolyte. Many thanks. Obviously I shall remember to refer to Weisland on all such matters in the future. He obviously knows. Heaven-on-Earth, eh? Perhaps he’s been talking to the Nac Mac Feegle. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Well, in the book of his I mentioned above, he claims to be pretty much the only person on Earth to know the true meaning of what’s written in the Bible. Because, er, God told him at the same time He made him one of the two real, genuine, honest to Him End-Time prophets. The man is as nuttier than squirrel shit. Have a quick google for his name; even the other (false, according to you-know-who) churches openly take the piss.
I’m very sad tonight. Sir Patrick Moore, possibly the most influential and universally respected astronomer of the 20th Century and a personal hero of mine, died today aged 93. His maps of the lunar surface, all hand-drawn by him at the telescope, were so accurate that NASA used them to direct the final Apollo mission to its landing site.
Goodnight Sir Patrick.
In the US, it is becoming more common to write the “s’s” for a plural possessive, at least when not under the authority of prescriptivist grammar teachers. I don’t think this is a matter of education, but a rejection of an otherwise pretty dumb special case. Like so many language things, one adjusts one’s usage according to the social context.
@Mark S
What part of the US would this be, then? Certainly nowhere I know of and it most certainly is a matter of education. No American with a half-decent one would consider “blogs’s” to be correct. The only time it is considered acceptable to use the apostrophe-s construction with a word ending in ‘s’ is with a proper name; i.e., “Gene Simmons’s tongue is abnormally long.”
Amen to AoS for his tribute Patrick Moore, a great British eccentric and quite literally a giant of astronomy – in his later years he bore a striking resemblance to Mr Creosote, with his shoulders apparently starting behind his ears, and his belt buckle well out of reach.
In former days, he was also one hell of a xylophone player, but his most lasting contribution, after stimulating two generations of astronomers, will probably be the modern non-innuendo pronunciation of Uranus (YOORunus not yerANus).
Thanks for that, Hotrats. I met him once, thirty or more years ago; I’m not exactly a short-arse but you’re right, he was a giant, and with a personality to match. His enthusiasm for astronomy – especially the Moon – equalled his stature, which is why the forty-minute talk he was giving when I met him actually lasted for over two hours, and that was before the informal chat afterwards.
I’ll say almost the same about him as he said about Sagan; he was a very dear man (he called Sagan a ‘very dear friend’), and I shall miss him very much.
Oh good grief…as a Bristol Uni alumnus, I hope the union hits them with the biggest clue-bat it can find.
A gem from the linguist David Crystal:
An elderly judge in the High Court apologised from the bench that he had left the only copy of his judgement at home in Devon, and the court would have to adjourn, as it would take a day to have it posted up to London.
“Fax it up, my Lord,” offered a helpful barrister.
“Yes,” replied the judge, “it does, rather.”
My definition proposal for “atheist”, in Wiki Portal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Atheism
@JZ-M interesting read and I think others on this forum might have more to say. However I would suggest that in the sentence “According to the Spanish philosopher Jesús Zamora-Bonilla, the term ‘atheist’ should not be defined as ‘someone believing that God does not exist’, but as ‘someone suspecting that God does not exist’, whereas an agnostic would be someone believing that both options have more or less the same probability” too much weight is afforded to that opinion by the words ‘according to’ and ‘should’.
And I wondered who this philosopher was anyway?
Please, tell us more about this Jesús Zamora-Bonilla.
I thought Portal Atheism was believing that the cake *is* a lie.
Some people are born into cultures that claim that there is cake but those blessed with critical thinking quickly come to realise that the total absence of evidence for cake should correctly result in cake disbelief.
Late to this I know but I always think its a useful thought experiment when you read a story like this, to then substitute the word “woman” for “Black Person” and then see how it reads.
You shouldn’t need to do that to make it shocking but it does rather underline the disgusting nature of the bigotry involved.
Wow – I didn’t expect such religious fervor over minor grammar. 🙂
Seriously, though: There is no such thing as “correct grammar”. There is only “currently popular convention”. If you deviate too far from popular convention, people who are familiar with the current conventions cannot understand you, but if you deviate only a little, people still know what you mean.
If you are the only one to deviate, you are uneducated. If you have many friends who deviate in the same way you do, you speak a minor dialect. If you have enough friends to form a country and make other people people use your dialect, you speak a important major dialect. See, for example, US and UK English. 🙂
If your dialect drifts away from others enough, it may eventually become a new language. For example, if you are too “uneducated” to speak proper medieval French, your descendants may be speaking English in 500 years.
Montana Wildhack: I live in the mid-atlantic region. The effect I was describing is most visible in informal settings like email.
hotrats: The dumb special case I was referring to is this: The rule is that you indicate possessive by writing ‘s after a word and pronouncing an additional trailing z sound — except when you don’t because the word already ends with an s, in which case you write only ‘ and speak the plural and singular with identical sounds — except when you don’t follow the exception because it is a name — except when you don’t follow the exception to the exception because the name is Jesus or Moses. It seems unnecessarily complicated, and I consider any complicated rule that serves no useful purpose other than to castigate people who fuck up the details to be a “dumb rule”.
Can I use the “Those are my beliefs, and you have to respect that” line now? 🙂
Mark, that’s probably the best use of the ‘my beliefs’ line that I’ve heard. Sadly, it still gets the same response as when the religidiots use it; namely, you can do it if you want, but don’t expect me to agree.
@Mark S
You seem to be unable to appreciate the distinction between making proscriptive rules, and recognising conventional usage.
The varieties of pronunciation and spelling in indicating possessives, which you reject as ‘dumb’ and ‘without purpose’, are the result of a historical process that began with the replacement of an unpronounced ‘e’ in the written possessive case (bookes), with an apostrophe (book’s). Written language proceeds in tandem with speech, and the written conventions mirror speech patterns that have, over the years, come to maxmise comprehension of ambiguous terminal ‘s’, with possession taking preference to number. In speech, ‘the dogs dinner’ makes possession clear; in writing, the apostrophe also clarifies number, making the statement more precise.
All conventions, whether in grammar, religion or philosophy, are ‘unneccessarily complicated’ by nature, because they are creating pathways through what would otherwise be chaotic. In grammar, the conventions are not stern commandments made by a bunch of small-minded academics, but reflect the wealth and variety of usage in different contexts, and our attempts to make them communicate as clearly as possible.
When we say ‘The white houses had flags’, houses is pronounced ‘-ziz’. But in ‘The White House’s flagpole’ it is pronounced ‘-sez’; the apostrophe is the written equivalent of the altered pronunciation. It maintains the distinction between plural and possession that speech has lost, and to reintroduce the redundant duplicate -s- in speech (as in your -blogs’s- in an earlier post) just invites confusion with the existing exception for names (Bloggs’s).
Elaborating the rule in one long sentence and chasing down exceptions to exceptions, which can be done to almost any grammatical convention, is cheap mockery, and your claim that such conventions exist to ‘castigate people who fuck up the details’ is the perennial whine of the lazy student, ignorant of the linguistic wealth that the convention has created, and too proud to master its nuances. This is no more a trend in grammar than failing your exams is a trend in education.
And BTW if you want respect for your beliefs, boy have you come to the wrong site.
You’ve far more patience than I, hotrats. Probably why I never became a teacher.
As far as I’m concerned, when the majority of Americans can’t even pronounce ‘laboratory’ properly – and if Saint Sagan had a fault it was this – then there’s no chance with the subtleties. Lovely people of course, but as stubborn as Democrats when it comes to using the beautiul language.
Damn, almost forgot to ask Mark S; you live in the mid-Atlantic area? Isn’t that the Ridge? 😉
hotrats: I believe I began my remarks by observing some signs that conventional usage is changing.
The “respect my beliefs” line is meant to be a joke. It alludes to a common theme in Jesus and Mo. It is also about the weakest argument possible, because it goes both ways — if I ask you to respect my beliefs, you are equally justified in asking me to respect yours. I like to use the argument that “I’m offended by people asking me to respect Christianity, so they should not do that”.
AoS: No, the other “mid-atlantic” region, though there is another ridge a few hundred miles west of here. The geology is not as spectacular, but it’s easier to get to. 🙂