I am a huge fan of Jesus and Mo (and donate a small amount monthly to help keep it going), but I have to say that today’s strip seems to have fallen down a tad, for I think it doesn’t accurately portray the accusations leveled at atheists by religionists.
Perhaps I’m being picayune dissecting a comic strip, but the first panel exaggerates the religious accusations, which are that atheists think that the world would be better without religion—not perfect. Perhaps some atheist-bashers accuse us of saying that a world without religion would be perfect, but I’m not aware of such accusations. Nor am I aware of any atheists who have claimed that!
The second panel is the most accurate, although again the accusation is usually not that science and technology are intrinsically good, but that we want the world to be run according to science, marginalizing the humanities, morality, and so on. (The reality, of course, is that most of us see science and technology as a method—the only method—that can help humanity with most of its physical, environmental, and medical ills. But methods themselves are not “moral” or “immoral”.)
Re the third panel: the accusation is usually that our use of logic and reason is a “faith” like religionists’ faith in God, Jesus, and so on. (This is an issue I take up in The Albatross). Few if any religionists claim that the “faith in reason and logic is “fanatical and dangerous.” (My response to both claims that even making those arguments uses reason and logic!)
The fourth panel is of course on the mark. But there’s no need to misrepresent the accusations against atheism to make the point that they’re exaggerated and misleading.
Really? I think I’ve heard some form of the “you think that all problems are caused by religion” charge a million times!
Yes, it’s not what we (gnu atheists, broadly), claim, but it is what (some) religiosos think we claim.
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My thought too, I seem to have heard the bones of these comments a lot. Also agree with Ant’s comment (and indeed with that of Torbjörn below re exaggeration – and you won’t believe how proud I am that the umlaut worked!)
When I were nobbut a wee lad, one of my more sarcastic teachers would describe this as the “four million American housewives can’t be wrong” argument, in reference for an advertising campaign which used some-such slogan to advertise toilet paper, or something equally consideration-worthy. (Actually, with 165 people on board and a sewage pump in pieces down the port-side access corridor, this is a topic … ummm … accumulating in people’s minds. And in the crappers.) It’s a poor argument on so many levels, not least of them the opinion of anyone trying to sell a different brand of toilet paper.
Four million American housewives can be wrong, and hearing a form of a charge a million times does not necessarily make the charge true.
A charge that is considerably more likely to be true is that “many atheists think that a large number of the world’s more serious problems are caused by religion”. But that would attract less shock-horror reaction, so isn’t used in rabble-rousing tub thumping.
I, for example, would not consider blaming religion for Celtic winning 7-nil against Rangers last night. But I would blame many of the murders and grievous-bodily-harm assaults after the match on the religion-fuelled hatred of one bunch of soccer fans against another.
I would agree with you on the specifics in each point but aren’t these two characters – Jesus – N- Mo usually exaggerated in their discussions and misunderstandings of things in general. It’s may be part of the standard characters.
In any case – today’s world it is dangerous work.
Actually, I don’t think these two characters are usually exaggerated. The author’s favorite technique is to simply make them more direct, clearer. He juxtaposes the hypocrisies and contradictions by piecing them together without as many intervening distractions – but they just about as bad as religionists really are.
I agree. They have stepped a half step out of character. I still love them.
Yes, I was going to make the same point.
Exaggeration is funny and efficient for comedy… =D
I would like a clarification on the methods statement. Perhaps I misunderstand the term method. Example, multiple ways to study frostbite: freeze people’s fingers in a lab, test said subjects and fingers. Freeze animal’s appendages, test animal’s physical reactions. Use some sort of computer simulation, no pain to humans or animals. Perhaps a bad example… Medical research is an avenue where different methods of research could be considered “immoral”. Like the Tuskegee experiment with syphilis or terrible experiments done by Nazi “doctors”. Then again, I might be picking gnat shit out of pepper with this one…
Say what?
Uhg. Two methods of reproduction in humans: Rape or consensual intercourse. I consider them both methods of reproduction. Is one more “moral” than the other? Or am I using the word method incorrectly???
I think you are thinking more narrowly then Jerry’s meaning. The scientific method writ large goes something like “start with unexplained phenomena. Pose hypothesis to explain them. Take data to test hypothesis. Revise hypothesis or pose new one as needed. Repeat until you have an explanation of the phemonena of the accuracy you desire.”
What you’re talking about are different ways of doing one of those steps (taking data to test hypothesis). Yes, different methods of doing that can be immoral. But the overall method is neither moral nor immoral.
Method: one word, two meanings. The “scientific method” is a system, the end of which excluding humans’ cognitive and perceptual biases from analysis-making, which you describe quite well. The other use of the word “method” describes the means of generating data (measuring outcomes), which are component parts of experimentation.
Whether the ends justify the means is a value judgment of right and wrong with a whole spectrum of grays in between – for example, testing medicines against placebo controls on sick people with their informed consent might be okay under some circumstances, wheras infecting healthy people without their consent to observe the effects of the disease is criminal. The scientific might be equally applied, but the difference in methods of experimentation is huge.
Where I’m confused is how this all relates to the comic strip … ?
Because Jerry mentioned “the method” in his commentary …
I think “methodology” better fits the second sense… ?
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Ah, I see now! Right, its being the “only” method, etc. now the thread makes sense.
And yes, I figured methodology was a more apt term at a couple of points in my dissertation but I wasn’t sure on the finer point, and also everyone else was using “method” interchangeably. If you hadn’t noticed, the conflation of meanings of certain words (belief, evidence, theory) is a particular peeve of mine. This particular thread is not so bad because it seems everyone is well-intentioned, but I thought the method vs method – ie, methodology – muddle was worth noting.
Now if I could just get the thoughts off my chest in about 1/3 the numbers of words … ;0)
“’Cos you know, sometimes words have two meanings.”
That’s a bugbear in my work; nearly every technical term is heavily overloaded and hence ambiguous making life fraught for clients – even regulators use the same terms to mean different things!
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I think a case can be made that methods based on sound epistemology are intrinsically better, morally superior, and more likely to enhance well-being than methods based on unsound epistemology.
I suppose you could argue that it’s still not the method that’s moral or immoral, but the use of the method to govern one’s behavior or set social policy. But that seems like pointless hair-splitting if there’s no circumstance in which unsound methods would be morally preferable.
I would not say these are mischaracterizations (of the charges leveled…). Rather, they are a subset. This strip could be a hundred panels long because we get exactly those complaint variants shown in the strip, we get exactly those complaint variants you talk about Jerry, and we probably get many more too.
Perhaps if you don’t stray into the less salubrious internet comment sections this strip might seem exaggerated, but I have definitely seen all of those arguments before. John Haught, Reza Aslan and people like that have to be a bit more precise and moderate in their language than say, SkUmAtHeIsTs82 or cleanse_the_west_inshallah.
The fourth panel invalidates the statements in the first three panels, so I feel no analysis of the three are needed except that they are fabrications.
Same here. Jesus and Mo are doing to the views of atheists exactly what they accuse atheists of doing to them. They’ve just spent three panels being the hypocrites they accuse atheists of being in the fourth.
That’s how I read it too.
That’s exactly how I read it. Yes, the accusations made by Jesus & Mo in the first three panels and the conclusions reached in the fourth panel were all false, and the barmaid correctly pointed that out. But that was the point of the comic strip! I see nothing here that an atheist should find objectionable.
Picayune! I love it, thank you for a new word. There is one every few days that really stands out, making me study it. Do you spend some time with a thesaurus when writing here, or do words like ‘picayune’ come easily from being well read?
All through reading, and when I see a word I’ve never known (Hitchens uses a lot of those), I look it up.
I’ve gotten lost in dictionaries before. Pull it off the shelf to look up a word I’ve come across in the book I’m reading, and an hour later it is time to start cooking dinner and I never made it back to the book.
A dictionary? What is that? Is it something like Google search?
I know. But I like books!
I do too and have probably read 150 books on my Kindle in the last five years. 😁
Heard the word many times but could never spell it without looking up.
I just now discovered that my laptop will tell me the definition of a highlighted word if I two finger click on it.
I can almost hear the ‘tut’-ting in the corridors of the Institute of Cretin Research : “Gosh-darned college perfessers : they’ll accept the Argument From Authority from a gosh-danged dict-ion-ery, but they won’t accept it from us. Whut in the tarnation is wrong with thems?”
Faith in logic and reason is justified. They have proven themselves. It was logic and reason that allowed us to work out that slavery and torture were wrong. You will find no prohibition on either in the Bible, and Christian societies considered both to be perfectly acceptable, until the Enlightenment. Sure, certain Christians adopted these new humanitarian views and incorporated them into their faith, but their faith did not originate them, and many Christians opposed the abolition of slavery, torture, and cruel forms of execution.
‘You can’t trust reason’ is one of the most common calumnies I hear from believers who think they’re sophisticated. I think they read a lot of Plantinga, or they read a lot of apologists who themselves read Plantinga, as it’s Plantinga who makes that strange, muddle-headed evolutionary argument against trusting reason.
If I recall, William Lane Craig also does a version of “presuppositionalism”, which has to be one of the most self-foot shooting moves ever.
A better word for that, IMO, is “trust”. Trust in science has been earned by observation of how effective it is. Faith, on the other hand, is offered in the absence of such evidence. I don’t have faith in science, but I trust it.
Absolutely. Trust in science and affirmation of its effectiveness. To me, the word faith means believe without evidence. It’s a weasel word.
Lucky you.
I’ve been told every one of those comments essentially verbatim over the last couple of decades calling out theists on their nonsense.
I read it as Jesus and Mo are Misrepresenting Secular ideas to achieve their goals and therefore they are the hypocrites.
I agree that’s the joke.
I wasn’t following Jerry’s point until I got to the last sentence: there’s no need to misrepresent the accusations against atheism to make the point that they’re exaggerated and misleading – and then the light came on.
So the point is well taken, but, to your point, I don’t doubt the artist knows exactly what he is doing and the absurdity of the characters’ assertions makes for the irony and delight of the punch line.
It’s interesting to hear that so many commenters have been on the receiving end of the first straw man especially. Wow.
I think you have the right take.
Of course, many religions themselves have some sot of variation on the theme of ultimate perfection once every last soul has been saved. It’s not at all surprising that some religionists would, honestly or otherwise, assume that the “religion” of atheism has the same article of faith.
b&
Religions generally, it seems, are based on some notion of ultimate perfection. If nothing else, just a notion to compare to common everyday depravity.
I’d suggest atheism’s only candidate for ultimate perfection would be the no-god idea, but then logically we’d have to give it a probability of truth. Maybe ultimately, perfectly, probably, true.
Until somebody can pony up a coherent definition of the term, “god,” that resembles the incoherent definitions the theists themselves know and love, I don’t see any need to hedge.
b&
Let me take a stab at the definition:
A dog loves you unconditionally, a god is one you love unconditionally.
Can I haz Nobel now?
I love it.
Just yesterday, in another comment thread. Verbatim:
“Atheists aren’t the gentle little creatures of night time fairy tales you’d like for us to believe they are.”
I called that a straw-man. He doubled-down:
“Hardly a Strawman. That’s what all you Atheists are trying to push on us. You would love for us to believe that the world would be much better off if there were no more Theists and you guys ran the show instead”
“we want the world to be run … marginalizing the humanities”
Wait, what?
Yup. I’m afraid Jerry’s irony detector needs a service 😉
The last panel makes it crystal clear that the cartoon is about NOT representing views accurately. I don’t understand the criticism at all. But it’s entirely possible that I’ve gotten so much irony in my life that I can no longer discern the good from bad versions of it.
Actually, that’s not an overblown claim at all. On a Facebook philosophy group I admin, there are frequent posts to that effect.
Isn’t the point of the cartoon that Mo and Jesus are misrepresenting the views of atheists? If Mo’s line in the first panel was “you are so naive to think that if you get rid of religion the World would be better”, it would not be a misrepresentation of the views of many atheists. A lot of us do think the World would be better.
As it stands, the line is a straw man. Is it one that theists use? Well it has been used against me in the past but infrequently. A more frequent line is to challenge me on my supposed (by the theist) belief that religion is responsible for all the World’s evils.