30 thoughts on “Wiley Miller on religion”

  1. Wiley’s doing it all the time.

    Maybe since he dresses it up as cave men (or sometimes Danae Kate & family) it sneaks under the radar of the ultra religious.

    1. Ooh, comment No 1. Staying up way past bedtime has its rewards. 😉

      (1.30 a.m. here…)

      1. That’s the only way I’ve ever made it to #1 too – although with me it’s usually that I can’t sleep, so I’m on here at 4am or something. 🙂

    2. I’ve been wondering if he is getting pushback. Maybe not directly but in the form of LTEs in small town newspapers.

      Or maybe, as you have suggested, they don’t even recognize that they are being ridiculed.

  3. I love Wiley’s digs at ultra-conservative religious thought. Far more palatable to me than Johnny Hart’s pro-religious diatribes during his last decade or so on B.C., a strip I had once enjoyed until it got too knee-jerk conservative.

    1. “Mallard Fillmore,” speaking of conservative cartoons. My local paper has refused to put it in the Op-Ed section, like Doonesbury, though to my mind it is more blatantly political than Doonesbury.

  5. Perfect!
    And I just looked up his Wikipedia page. He’s a VCU product! I spent some time in Richmond in the early ’70s and so cool to think that I was tramping around Richmond at the same time.
    The marvellously wry Jeff MacNelly (Shoe) was the editorial cartoonist for the Richmond News Leader at the same time, too (before he departed for Chicago). Perhaps he had some influence on Wiley?

    1. Just that some who claim to have found The Truth see other truth claimers as apostates, worthy of death.

  8. I think that in fact many religious people would agree with the cartoon. Just they wouldn’t think of it as referring to themselves.

    I visited a religious based care home for handicapped kids the other day (for my work) and they were happily telling me how the kids have to take it in turns to say grace or lead the morning prayer. This is a state supported home — it’s normal here in Germany for such places to be run by the church and payed for by the tax payers.

    They got really angry with me when I politely asked what would happen if a kid didn’t want to do it. It’s such an insular closed society that they’ve never reflected on how divisive their practices are, and how much they use peer group pressure to shut up and exclude non-conformers.

    (Homes like this are one of the last vestiges of church based religion in Germany. That is where all the churchy type personalities assemble and keep their own private little empire going, preying on the innocent. This one was quite old, and had a little display cabinet of artifacts from the old days, and a time line tracing its history. The timeline started in about 1890, but was mysteriously left blank from the 1930s to about 1950. I can’t find any records of its use, but it was in an area of Berlin — Pankow — which was not far from one of the main clinics where the “euthanasia” program was carried out.)

    1. As I was reading I was thinking ‘but what happened here during WWII?’. And yep, my suspicion might have been confirmed.
      Yikes.

      1. When I was in Munich in the early ’80s, I was struck by how plain the entrances to older buildings was. Typically, entrances have some greater degree of architectural embellishment vs. the rest of the building, but if anything it was the opposite. I concluded (or at least it’s my hypothesis) that the voids are where the swastikas over the entrances were; those were removed and never replaced with anything.

    2. Your first sentence is what I would have said – religious people tend to be only able to see faults in the religion of others and not recognize the same faults in their own. I wonder if it’s part of the self-preservation instinct?

  9. Everyone knows it is true. The sad part is how a particular believer can relativize their situation as morally and ontologically above there others. “Mine is the perfect faith…your is indeed one of many false faiths.”

  11. It’s no problem “get(ting) away with this stuff”, plenty of religious people know plenty of other religious people who are nuts.

  12. “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”-Jonathon Swift

    1. This was supposed to be a response to the question of how Wiley gets away with it.

  14. The nest to last panel:

    “You throw me yours, then I’ll show you mine.”

    “Okay, catch.”

    is implied.

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