In the new Jesus and Mo strip, the artist reveals that “Mo has big news!”. The strip’s title is “Stir,” and the explanation is “It’s the best method He could come up with at the time.”
I have to say that I don’t fully get this one. But in many things I’m clueless, so perhaps readers can explain.
sub
It’s a comment about the original coming of Jesus (if there was one), which didn’t leave much trace in history until decades after, when a few people decided to write about it (and not that much trace until a Roman emperor decided to become a Christian centuries later).
If Jesus had wanted to make a stir he could have gone to Rome and be sure to have been noticed.
The camel trader is referring to Mo rather than Jesus.
I read it as being a reflection on how Allan (pbuh) got the news of his (her?) final Revelation out to the world, through the person of a trader in Saudi.
But Mo must be on a wind up – isn’t it very explicit that Mo is the final prophet? There’s at least one sept of Islam which differs from the rest on that point, and in consequence are being raped into non-existence by ISIS as we speak.
Mo is the final prophet, but Jesus’ second coming marks the End Times. Jesus was the second to last prophet. Why allah sends Jesus and not Mohammed, I have no idea.
Jesus doesn’t have 80 houris occupying his time in heaven, so I guess his calendar is a bit more open.
My guess would be …
Marketing, or as it is called by sociologists of religion, syncretism. I.e., borrowing stuff from other religions in competetion to make the transition easier, etc.
The last time Allah decided to spread the word he did it via a small time trader in the Middle East, who got to pass it on over generations. The irony is that Mo can pass the word to his small time trader instantly via a product of applied science.
One take on it, anyway. Sort of reminds me of Superstar: “Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication”
I agree – the point is the irony of coming off as deeply traditional but seeing no contradiction in using a cellphone in the process.
It’s a cute comic, but it misses the reality which is that xtians have a prophecy of how Jesus is coming back and it won’t be a stealthy return. I usually like this comic but I’m always disappointed when atheists don’t do their homework. If you’re going to try to show the absurdity of xtian ideas, you have to be accurate.
It reminds me of when my nephew thought he’d found the one best evidence that evolution was wrong because giraffes exist. Apparently, they have a special organ without which their long necks would kill them. He figured the first giraffe would die when it took it first drink of water. Ergo, no more giraffes.
Of course, that is not how evolution works and he came off looking like a complete moron. Do your homework before you attack someone’s position. Xtian ideas are absurd, but they have their own ‘logic’, not to mention escape hatches, and, if you’re going to do battle against them, you better understand it all.
I’m pretty sure you’ve missed the point of the comic on the second coming thing. It’s poking fun at the idea that Really Important News – like the idea that God has a new prophet, or that there is a plan of salvation for all mankind which includes the eventual not so stealthy return of Jesus – would be spread to humankind through the medium of a backward Middle Eastern religion. It doesn’t suggest that the second coming itself would be stealthy.
Exactly.
Well put.
If God wanted everyone to be aware of the significance of X religion, then why didn’t he wait a couple of thousand years and do something definitive? Christians have had to dance around this one with excuses since the very beginning. The Bible was written from a very small perspective.
He’s Jesus. His father spoke with a booming voice from the clouds to announce his arrival, and he himself beamed back up to the Heavens after his zombification. Does it really make sense that he should do so in an obscure war-torn backwater of the empire, and that nobody should bother to write any of it down until after the complete and utter destruction of the civil infrastructure where this took place?
Why didn’t Jesus do his entire schtick in Rome in front of the Emperor?
And, for that matter, if he can manage all that miraculous stuff way back when…why isn’t he holding weekly press conferences today?
b&
Yes.
That’s the way I took it, too.
If the Lord loves everyone, you’d think He’d have been more egalitarian about getting His message out, rather than send His Son to a largely illiterate backwater of the Roman Empire. He waited at least a 100,000 years after the dawn of modern man to send The Kid; why not wait a couple thousand more and get the message out by mass media?
And if the gospels are so important, why didn’t Jesus write them down Himself, the way other leading moral philosophers have? At the least, He could have picked up a thirteenth apostle among the scribes of Pharisees or Sadducees — someone who could have kept some written notes — instead of leaving things to hit-or-miss word-of-mouth for most of the First Century?
I think you need to read it again. The whole comic is referring to the second coming of Jesus and ends by suggesting he (God) is going to get the word out a slow inefficient manner. The prophecy says their will be trumpets, great loud noises, everyone on earth will know simultaneously. It what they believe and it renders the comic kind of meaningless.
As I said, if you want to make fun of what someone believes, you need to understand what they believe or you come off looking like a moron. Maybe you’re used to that.
It’s not that he “didn’t do his homework”; it’s more that you missed the point! It’s the whole issue of choosing the least reliable way of transmitting vitally important information to humanity.
Exactly. It’s a point about God’s curiously local and inefficient methods of delivering supposedly urgent and universal news to mankind.
I’ve always wondered why, if Christ was truly intended as savior for all mankind, God didn’t simultaneously deploy angels to every corner of the globe to deliver the good news to everybody at once. What purpose could it possibly have served God to leave entire continents worth of people ignorant of the gospel for ~1500 years?
And the same of course applies to Islam, and any other religion that claim universality. If the Quran was truly God’s revelation to all mankind, why did he deliver it in such a way that so many people around the world would be ignorant of it for so long? What good does that do them, or Him?
Christians have all sorts of end times nonsense. Most of them have said “fuck the bible and what it says” a long long time ago.
I was reading about Jesus’ secong coming just the other day. He would come back in the lifetime of his followers. That’s why Jesus said to his followers to leave everything behind and trust God. Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 16-17:
“16 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”
Note the ‘we who are still alive.’ During the 2nd and 3rd century it became clear that the passage of time had exposed Jesus and Paul as false prophets. The third century Greek philospher Porhpyry wrote:
“And there is more to Paul’s lying: He very clearly says, ‘We who are alive.’ For it is now three hundred years since he said this and nobody—not Paul and not anyone else—has been caught up in the air.”
And the knowledge that a false apocalyptic prophecy is the basis of Christianity exposes apologetics as pure deceit. Apologetics is the attempt to cover the tracks of false prophets and liars with even more lies, deceit and ‘reinterpretations.’ The truth is that no theologian can tell you with certainty when Jesus will come, if He will come at all. Apparantly, Mohammed fell for the apologetics and recasted this false prophecy as divine revelation in his own arab version of the Abrahamic God.
That makes sense.
Thanks. In the oldest gospels (mark and matthew) you can find similar statements by Jesus himself. In the oldest gospel John, dated somewhere in the early 2nd century, these kinds of prophecies about the kingdom of God are much less abundant. Clearly, faith in the second coming was ebbing away during that period.
Thank you very much for adding this info to the discussion, Dutchie. Every interesting.
I just realized I made a mistake. John is ofcourse the earliest gospel.
Huh? Methinks you’re crossing your wires.
Mark is the earliest, followed relatively closely by Matthew. Luke (and Acts) came next, and John much, much later.
b&
You’re right. I should have said John is the youngest instead of the earliest. Sorry.
When it comes to communicating with humanity, the gods — any and all of them — have a perfect record of speaking directly into the brains of crazy nobodies in the middle of nowhere.
Why don’t the gods at least have official Twitter accounts? And would it be too much to ask for them to hold a press conference every now and again?
Even the most minor of political candidates do a better job of “getting the word out” than the gods do.
b&
Even if a god or gods had press conferences then how would the believers, or even the rest of us, know that they truly were gods and not advanced space aliens? Jerry has said that if Jesus wrote his name in stars then that might convince him (Jerry). But that is trivially just(!) a matter of moving matter about for advanced aliens. It’s not against the laws of physics. There is only one test that can prove a god to be truly a god and one which not even advanced aliens can pass. Here I’m assuming that advanced aliens cannot do what is not allowed by the laws of physics but that a god can. So the test is this : in the double slit experiment instead of the usual pattern of interference write your name! Of course it would have to be rigorously controlled so as to prevent cheating.
…and you would be able to rule out the possibility that the god / alien in question wasn’t playing with your perception, such as with a Star Trek-style holodeck…how, exactly?
But you’re on the right path; you just need to take it to its conclusion.
The defining feature of a god — any god, take your pick — is the ability to do something truly impossible. Not merely very impressive, but actually, really, can’t-ever-even-in-principle-happen impossible. And it is essential, of the utmost importance, that there not be any loopholes that could allow anybody to ever go ahead and do the impossible anyway.
And the reason that’s non-negotiable…is because that’s how the gods establish their bona fides. You know it’s a god if what it does is something impossible, really and truly. But, of course, the god itself has no trouble doing the impossible…
…because the god only ever does the impossible in the stories told about the god.
But if it were possible for whatever-it-is to be done, then somebody else could come along and do the seemingly-but-not-really impossible…and, in so doing, usurp the authority of the god.
And that’s what it all comes down to, because the gods themselves are the inventions of the priests and other conmen, and the priests derive all their authority by speaking on behalf of the gods. So, if the priests can convince you that their gods really can do the impossible…well, then who’re you to question the authority of such an imposing figure? Or, for that matter, the authority of the god’s duly appointed official representative?
Incidentally, it’s also worth noting that even a god with as many powers as you might wish to throw at it would also be unable, even in principle, to rule out the possibility that it itself was being hoodwinked by a sufficiently powerful super-duper god-of-gods. It’s one of many true hard limits, real impossibilities, that no amount of theological handwaving can jump over — yet another reason why any claims of “my god is bigger than your god” can be instantly dismissed with prejudice.
b&
Those are all excellent points and I agree with you. All I was saying is that the double slit experiment is such a gold standard of an experiment that only a god capable of doing the impossible could mess with the expected outcome. I would get the James Randi foundation to run the experiment to safeguard against any nefarious interference in the running of the experiment . I’m sure they could work out a good protocol!
…and how would even Randi rule out the possibility that he himself is trapped in the Matrix? Or that his tinfoil hat has slipped and aliens are now controlling his thoughts with their mind rays? Or that he’s the proverbial philosophical brain in a vat?
b&
You have changed my mind about this issue. The problems you mention are insurmountable. There can be no test we can do to scrutinise a god’s claim that they are a god. But since there are NO gods anyway we don’t have to worry so much!
Yes — and, take it one step further.
Assume you have a purported god, performing all sorts of impossible feats. Even creating all of existence ex nihlio and moving upon the face of the waters and what-not.
How is that god supposed to rule out the possibility that it itself is but a minor bit player in Alice’s Red King’s Dream?
And if even the all-powerful gods are powerless to fathom the ultimate nature of reality, of what sense does it make to call them all-powerful or godly?
b&
Related:
http://mormonstories.org/julie-rowe-preppers/
Hitchens, in his usual eloquent way, captures most of the points in this short clip http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5sEcBzxoMB8
I recently heard that Salmonellosis wiped out all of the trader’s camels. He now lives in Northern Germany, a refugee and apostate now learning what evolution is and how there’s a microscopic world he never imagined existed.
I thought it was making a mockery of the claim by some Christians it is the end days and the world is ending in a few days if not weeks
Forget news of the second “coming;” I want to know why Jesus didn’t teach people to wash their hands to prevent illness.
God does it the way Mo suggests to be sure that there is no evidence to contradict the faith of the true believer. When the hand of god touches his prophets he leaves no fingerprints.
I think I need to lie down….
I once asked a conservative Muslim online why, if the Quran was truly intended to be a universal book for all mankind, God chose to reveal it in such a way that so many people in so many parts of the world would be ignorant of its existence for so long.
The answer he gave me was something along the lines of: “a miracle such as simultaneous worldwide revelation would have been too obvious a proof, and would have undermined the need for faith.”
In other words: God wants us to believe in him, but he does not want us to believe in him for good reasons, apparently.
Really?
You need this cartoon explained..?
I guess I am always surprised when people don’t get all the references to stuff.
In fact, even angry supportive comments that ask ‘why didn’t he deploy angels’ and ‘why not do it in Rome’ etc etc seem to miss the point…the cartoon just said all that in four concise panels…leave it at that…don’t explain the joke, it just sucks the life out of it.
(Yes, I haven’t taken my chill pills this morning, or had a coffee yet, so am grumpy as all get out…. See! I just explained my mood – should have left it at the angry rant…oh no, I’m caught in an endless loop…)
I haven’t noticed your nom de plume here before. German and French in one portmanteau. Are you fluent in all three? Are we talking Charles de Gaulle or Jimmy Durante dimensions?
Well, I AM taller lying down…
“Grandma, what an uber nez you have”
“All the better to sniff out religious bulldust, my child.”
Necessary, n’est pas?
or Nez pas…
Slouching toward Bethlehem…
“I don’t slouch, I have excellent posture!”
– Satan