Here Rubin Bolling, creator of Tom the Dancing Bug, gives pictorial life to John Loftus’s Outsider Test for Faith:
I’m not quite sure about the penultimate panel. First, claiming that “religion is obviously not genetic” conflates two propositions: humans have a hard-wired desire to believe in deities, or humans have a hard-wired desire to believe in specific deities and specific religions tenets. More important, given that—as we know from Loftus and others—one’s religion depends almost entirely on where and by whom one was raised (the denial of proposition #2), why is it surprising that identical twins don’t diverge in faith quite often? Such divergence is unexpected under both religious and cultural hypotheses, since identical twins share both genes and environments. Am I missing something, or is the comic misguided?
h/t: Mark
I think that, by deliberately missing the obvious “cultural hypothesis”, the comic is poking fun at the whole idea of attributing religion to babies. Very Dawkinsesque.
Yes I thought that too and the talking head in the penultimate panel is highlighting the absurdity.
Agreed.
I fourth the motion.
Yes, the “neonatal theologist” (LOL) is the one missing the point he himself just made.
I thought that the author was expressing biting sarcasm through the penultimate panel, so i agree too with this motion.
(i interpreted the remark about religion not being genetic as purely and absurdly literal, i.e. two Christian parents would produce Christian children if it were. This also follows from the first panels).
I’m not a biologist but couldn’t it happen that if each parent had a recessive Hindu gene they could produce a Hindu baby?
I suspect this may be the case, which would explain why christianity is the dominant religion. In the minds of christians, that is.
It’s possible that the penultimate panel is meant to be read as “since we have now learned that religion is not genetic (though this is what we previously thought) …”
The cartoonist is mocking the idea that there are “Christian” babies and “Hindu” babies who have presumably inherited some sort of essence from their parents. Since the birth of genetically identical twins shows that this “inheritance” isn’t true — and the faithful don’t think religion is about indoctrination or reason (or there would not be Christian babies in the first place) — that now leaves random chance as the cause of one’s religious birthright.
Yeah, that’s how I read it.
I think you’re missing that this is an echo of Richard Dawkins’ comments about calling children “Muslim”, “Catholic”, “Lutheran”, etc.
Yes, that’s the way I took it, too.
I think the cartoon really underscores the idea that the only reason babies born in Mississippi grow up christian, and babies born in Bombay grow up hindu is because that is what they’re taught. It has nothing to do with evaluating evidence or, shiva forbid, truth.
Echoing others – I don’t see this as an “Outsider Test” but rather a Dawkinsonian illustration of labeling of children as if they had any understanding of the issues (eg: a Keynsian child or a Christian child).
The joke throughout is taking the dumb arguments by religious apologists seriously (like the proposition that children are making a free choice in their religious beliefs). So the penultimate panel isn’t talking about any genetic predisposition to religion in general but imagining that the reason Christian parents tend to have Christian children has nothing to do with indoctrination or culture. If Christianity isn’t genetic, it’s a gosh-darn mystery why it seems to run in the family!
Glad JAC posted the comic. I briefly toyed with the idea of emailing it but I figured that hundreds of other well-wishers were already doing that for me 🙂
I understand the confusion expressed in the comic. As we know, the religion of a child is determined by which God gets to the fertilization event first and has the opportunity to ensoul the body. Normally with identical twins the initial glob would be ensouled once. As the egg divides, we end up with two individuals and one soul. God would have to intervene again to ensure that a second soul was provided. Now in this scenario, the time of the splitting is uncertain and there is chance for another God to sneak in with a glowing finger(presumably while the mom is sound asleep). Why would the first God be caught off guard like that? I guess even Gods are only human.
Don’t forget that some gods have more arms than others and so could sneak in some soul with one hand while they are grappling with someone else’s god who was deficient in that particular arms race.
In the first chapter of Christianity Is Not Great, Loftus refers to The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True. He states – “All that believers must do is test their religious faith from the perspective of an outsider.” They must do this with the same level of skepticism they already use when examining other religions they reject.
He goes on to say Christian believers need to ask themselves if they would accept any other religion that had such a terrible track record.
I’m just guessing but maybe the couple in the cartoon have failed to do this.
“It will be difficult for Samantha growing up a normal white child in an affluent Portland suburb…yet Hindu.”
But not as difficult as it would be were it, say, Birmingham, or Biloxi, or Brownsville, or…
I thought that was normal for Portland? Obviously, she’ll file for legal emancipation at 15 in anticipation of abandoning Lake O for a shared room in the Hawthorne District, but even so.
Oh, definitely. 😉
It was no doubt part of her reincarnation karma that landed her in (or at least close to) Portland in the first place.
The confusion rests in religion. It wants to be two things. It wants to be an explanation for everything, the objective truth of the universe which is knowable through both revelation and reason. It also wants to be an identity, like nation or race or culture.
Those two things clash. When you try to put them together, they won’t fit. Oh, it’s convenient on the surface, as an immunizing strategy. Anyone who argues against the truth of religion is now a type of bigot. And a superficial ‘harmony’ can be achieved among the faithful if everyone just agrees to treat religious differences like differences in lifestyles, food, or preferences. Embrace diversity.
Go any deeper than that, however, and start to address religious beliefs as important and definitely non-trivial truth claims and you’re stuck. Now the religious people become the ‘bigots,’ with nations, races, and cultures who “think different” about God suddenly turning into nations, races, and cultures who “think wrong” about God.
Did God thoughtfully place the intractable and unsalvageable into particular parts of the globe? If YOU had been born into a different religion, would you have inherently known it was wrong and been guided to seek out a missionary and convert? Why aren’t they? Why don’t they?
The less the details matter, the less religion matters as a whole. Eventually the “many-paths God” turns into one more metaphor on the path towards truth.
But if the details DO matter, they’re stuck. What it comes down to then is a belief that people find God through ESP, an extra-sensory perception which not only guides them to god-in-general, it will inevitably guide the open-minded and emotionally-receptive to the arms of a loving God and the True Doctrine He wants all His people to know about and receive.
And God placed the damned in other places, communities and families which deny Him, knowing what they’d do anyway, given what they are.
Paraphrasing the penultimate panel:
Since we know (an individual’s specific) religion is not a heritable trait, it’s surprising we don’t see more babies who emerge from the womb as adherents of a completely different religion from their parents.
It is poking fun at theists who insist the religion they belong to is not a geographical accident, and at the idea that an infant could even be said to be an adherent of a religion.
I see now this has been covered.
By everybody.
Groupthink. You know how those atheists are, always basing what they have to say on reason and fact. No wonder so few of them are baptists…
I suspect humans are hard-wired to
1) think teleologically (a sense of purpose to things)
2) think anthropomorphically (faces in the clouds- attribute intention)
3) seek out positive parental figures- or sometimes any parental figure will do.
4) have an Einsteinian ‘religious’ sensibility of awe and wonder
These many many other factors !*combine*! to form religion, but these same traits can in principle be combined and configured in other ways.
Just as the creationist’s favorite organ, the bacterial flagellum now works as a propellant but is now known to have once functioned as a secretion aid, just so these same traits that now create religion may recombine to form something different in our cultural future.
I think your second point is particularly important. My three year old son always asked questions such as, “Who put that there?” if he finds a rock or a tree branch on the ground. So we may be genetically wired to attribute things to entities, which is often discussed when talking about our ancestors who were better off mistakenly attributing the wind to a malicious predator than making the mistake in reverse.
This type of thinking can lead to attributing intelligent agents where it is unnecessary to do so, but the odds are extraordinarily thin that any child would grow up to attribute causes in alignment with any existing religion. They would make up their own explanations as every religion has or they’d stumble onto the method for empirically verifying causes as science does. It is no coincidence that there have been numerous scientific discoveries made independently but there has yet to ever be a case of two independent religions with the exact same set of tenets arising at the same time (or hell, even at different times).
The penultimate panel does have a truth when it comes to what flavour your religion, when the doctor claims, ‘just luck I guess’
but it turns into a black comic for the mother going by her final bubble.. which is humorous.
Confusion, mystery, contradiction, tragedy.. that about sums up religion.
The contradiction being in the 2nd panel (genes being involved at conception and embryo development) and the penultimate panel, when the Doc declares that religion is not genetic.
The rest is self evident.
Never mind the Presbyterian/Hindu babies. I’m more impressed by the Dayak Deconstructional Relativist!
Yeah, you just don’t meet a whole lot of those folks…
Agree with all those defending the penultimate panel (as a sort of reductio to the religious position). It fits with the rest of the panels just fine.
Having said that, I think everything past the first panel beats on the horse a bit. The first panel portrays the fundamental absurdity; all others are commentary. 🙂
I feel like Bolling must have just read the following quote from The God Delusion before drawing this cartoon:
“I never tire of drawing attention to society’s tacit acceptance of the labeling of small children with the religious opinions of their parents. Atheists need to raise their own consciousness of the anomaly: religious opinion is the one kind of parental opinion that — by almost universal consent — can be fastened upon children who are, in truth, too young to know what their opinion really is. There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents. Seize every opportunity to ram it home.”
I see it as poking fun at the idea that religion is some how genetic. As opposed to environmental since they are only babies.
I admit I fall on the side of the impulse for elements that from religion is basic to the bulk of humanity. With the requisite outliers on the extreme ends.
Meaning that religion at its heart is part of Evolution and as long as it is useful to survival it will remain. And Atheists etc will be on the periphery. The irony is thick with the idea of it. To me the only explanation.