62 thoughts on “Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ The Big Reward”

  2. Mo is describing religion as a strictly quid pro quo transaction between the believer and God. He believer gives God strict obedience, and in turn God gives the believer eternal life filled with goodies. The values usually touted as “spiritual” (love, compassion, patience, generosity etc.) are nowhere to be found.

    2. Heaven as spiritual as the penis that never bends (from Al Sutri) but of course removed from utube since!

      https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/islamic-heaven-a-penis-that-never-bends/

      Source I found a while ago

      Al-Suyuti (died 1505 ), Koranic commentator and polymath. He wrote: “Each time we sleep with a houri we find her virgin. Besides, the penis of the Elected never softens. The erection is eternal; the sensation that you feel each time you make love is utterly delicious and out of this world and were you to experience it in this world you would faint. Each chosen one [ie Muslim] will marry seventy [sic] houris, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetising vaginas.”

      1. Clearly the guy hasn’t thought stuff through. There are people suffering from prolonged erections here on earth, and they don’t consider it pleasurable.

        I also wonder if someone has informed all those devout muslim women that are so concerned with covering themselves up, that they will become prostitutes in heaven.
        And the part about them becoming virgins every time is clearly meant to punish those muslim women. I suppose Allah truly hates women so why should they worship such a god if they will end up in hell anyway.

        1. From my reading of the Koran, I have inferred that the virgins are some sort of angels or plain 3D illusions but by no means real women. Apparently prophet Mohamed hadn’t very high opinion of marriage, so he rewards good men with two platoons of perfect virgins, and good women with the opportunity to stand quietly in some corner and not be bothered by sex anymore.

          2. Aaaargh!! I just made up that website name off the top of my head. I was NOT expecting WP to autocomplete it and imbed it as a link!!!

            My embarrassed apologies to PCC and everybody here!

            8-(

            cr

          3. So all we need is a fatwa that mujahedeens need not prove their virtue, should skip the beheadings and go directly to the virgins without even dying first :-).

    3. He is, but I think his characterization is spot on for a number of sects. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all have sects that take a formalistic approach to religion. Follow the five pillars and you’re good with Allah. Get a goy to turn on the lights on Saturday, and you’re good with Yahweh. Get baptized, go to confession, take communion, and you’re good with God.

      The concept that God throws out the rulebook and simply looks into your heart to discern sincere faith…well probably lots of sects in all three religions have said that to some extent. But only to paste over some of the obvious ethical problems with strict formalism – they never really wanted it to be the focus. I think this sort of religious anti-formalism only became truly mainstream with the Protestant revolution and their declaration of sola fides.

      1. However, I admit that the “trade” concept of religion had some social function: apart from rules such as the ban on neuro-muscular activity on Saturdays, there was “Thou shalt not kill”. If God throws out the rulebook and replaces it with totally arbitrary “grace”, every gangster and (non-crusader, non-ISIS) murderer has a reason to think that by the grace of God he will go to Heaven after all. Like the slave trader who composed the song “Amazing grace”.

        1. Well that is the promise of christian religions. Yeshue died for your sins and all you have to do is accept that and you too can have “eternal life” with him in paradise. Doesn’t matter how evil you’ve been before that. As someone once told Dirty Duck – “there’s hope for the vilest, Mr Duck”. That slave trader was just cashing in on that doGly IOU.

  3. Seems to me it’s lampooning legalistic religion; religion that is all about dotting Is, crossing Ts, *not* crossing Is, and *not* dotting Ts. Mundane rule following. The ironic thing is that practitioners of this kind of religion still want to claim that the simple fact that they believe in a god means they’ve cornered the market on all things “spiritual”: awe, beauty, fulfillment, etc, while atheists are dead-inside automatons.

    1. I took it a little differently. Not i and t, but having all your decisions made for you so you don’t have to think. Not only mundane stuff, but the need sometimes for suicide bombing and beheading. Maybe I need more coffee. “Another Fog Lifter please.”

      1. I think we’re both describing the same basic thing. Requiring that all Is be dotted on pain of hell is having all your thinking done for you. But you’re right, I should’ve left room for non-mundane rules. I think the word I was really looking for is “facile”.

        1. Surely the principal point that is being made is that if you follow the religious rules you are going to get for eternity all the pleasures that the despised, sexually liberated and ‘spiritual’ hippies got in life… so that religious morality, with its ‘rules’, is a hypocritical farce.

  4. I think they’re trying to communicate the numinosity of the spiritual experience, as opposed to the stark certainty of the knowledge of the religious experience.
    When my schizophrenic friend takes another attack (his necessary dosage of medications occasionally varies by a factor of “several” in a matter of days, which can rob him of his mental control faster than his stomach can absorb another tablet, as I understand it), he describes his experience of “the voices” as giving him absolute commands which must be obeyed, and then adds, “like when you have a religious experience”. Well, never having had either a schizophrenic attack, or a religious experience, I can’t comment on the subjective or objective nature of such experiences. But my friend has had both experiences, and says they are at last very similar.
    From an outside perspective, the outcomes of such experiences (total certainty, bizarre and otherwise incomprehensible behaviour) do seem very similar.
    It might be slightly amusing to nail a religious apologist to a tree and put the branding iron to them to find out how they can tell the difference between schizophrenia and a “religious experience”.
    Meanwhile, I’m off to visit my friend on the locked wards.

    2. Ive heard schizophrenic voices/visions and mystic religious experiences can be similar.
      Usually schizophrenia has nasty consequences for the individual but traditionalist, especially aggressive, misogynist, expansionary/evangelical and eternal heaven/hell type religions brainwash and oppress billions.

    3. As I understand it the “spiritual but not religious” category doesn’t necessarily preclude mystical experiences which endow the believer with absolute commands and absolute certainty. The distinction is between organized religion — and supernatural beliefs which are self-selected (or directly received through God/Spirit.)

      So you could have a Lutheran who assents to religious doctrine but mostly thinks of God as Beauty and Love — and a Spiritual-But-Not-Religious fanatic who KNOWS that cosmic consciousness has consequences. Of course, the deepity nature of the term “spirituality” mucks it up, so that materialist atheist reductionists can be considered “spiritual” under certain definitions.

      My guess is that believers can only tell the difference between schizophrenia and a religious experience in retrospect. It’s like the pseudo-wise advice to “follow your intuition” when you’re genuinely conflicted between options. Which one is the voice of your inner insight? The one you wish you had done — or are glad you have done — after the results are in. A schizophrenic experience is different than a religious experience if it turns out that it really was God after all.

      Which is a crappy heuristic.

      1. I suppose spirituality is also deep emotional satisfaction that comes at times from self internalised belief – whether of the organised religion variety or personal mystical sort. I think one can also have such experience from life generally – there’s an infinite amount to know and theres so much chance and uncertainty in life to give a feeling of awe or of satisfaction in whats achieved. Religion is one particular mode of delivering spirituality (or non spirituality), mystic meditation within a religious tradition or new age style deepities without a tradition another, and non religious and not anti science spirituality yet another

  5. I think he’s saying that religion is an ideology & there is really nothing spiritual about it.

    2. The title is always a word in the strip dialogue but not necessarily the most obvious (from my point of view) word.

      The author presumably has greater insight into the meaning of the strip than I.

      1. I get the impression the author has constrained the titles to being unique, as much as possible, as well.

  7. Perhaps he is in a sly way commenting on the ‘people of faith’ bollocks that the religious use to gang up on non-believers? But there are plenty who believe in something but it is all very wooly as they do not want to think of a god as a punisher, only as a lovey-dovey.

  8. And since God isn’t talking directly to us, his will and the supposed holy writings containing his rules, are interpreted by men claiming to act in God’s name. How very convenient. Blasphemy laws are just laws protecting companies from customers and non-customers lampooning their imaginary product.

  9. I think it is exposing the argument of some theists that, although they believe in a specific deity, the book that he/she dictated/inspired is not to be taken literally. I’ve always found that argument to be very weak. If a perfect deity dictated/inspired a text, why would he/she put in a great number of rules that really weren’t intended to be followed and at the same time indicate that there would be severe punishment for not following them?

  11. Damn straight! I don’t care about the state of the world, but I want those 72 virgins when I die.

    1. Dead virgins must be massively cloned once they get to heaven and then redistributed around.

        1. The message is follow the rules of the religion to get reward or punishment; don’t presume to fund fulfilment or spirituality outside it – only the religion can offer this after the rules are fulfilled.

      2. Nah. Old Catholic nuns who were hateful to their charges in life go to hell to serve as houris to jihadists who all go to hell.

        Satan appreciates the symmetry.

      3. My impression is that the virgins are non-human entities created or employed specifically to reward the male believers in the afterlife.

    2. It has been suggested that virgin is a mistranslation and what was intended was delicious white grapes.

      Don’t hold your breath when you die because either way, virgins or grapes, they lied.

        1. All the virgins are named Susan?

          I guess I just don’t understand religion any more…

  13. Re unpleasantness to Ashra Nomani on this by the regressives and conservative Muslims alike – is like Greens frequent capitulation to bully victim tactics.

    For example
    Sweden’s Green Party hit by Religious row – Al Jazeera News 27 April 2016
    http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/sweden-green-party-infiltrated-islamists-160426130534157.html

    Says the Greens party there has been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood supporters – including Yasri Khan, who ran for the party’s executive board, refused to shake the hand of a female Swedish TV reporter saying it was too “intimate”. He later withdrew his candidacy, but said “I think the Greens party needs to work on their inclusive values. How do you combine diversity and religion within an ethnocentric and prejudiced idea of gender equality?”
    Then there was Housing Minister Mehmet Kaplan who has resigned after came to light he had recently dined with Turkish extremist nationalist and Islamist group the Grey Wolves. At other times he has compared the treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.

  14. Let me take a stab at explaining what I think the joke is.

    “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual” is spouted by people who like the woo and fell-good nonsense but want to dissociate themselves from the hell-fire and rigidity. Mo eschews the feel-good woo for the rigidity and the hell-fire.

    So the joke does formally work as a reversal. Not too funny to me as I find vague “spiritual” as noxious as conventional religoion — both are just piety.

    1. I think the cartoon is clever. Seems to me even the very rigid and prescriptive Religions allow a sub tradition that is more mystical. In both Sunni and Shia Islam there are the Sufis – who have some mystical rites and belief in god as Oneness and approaching god as love. Theres quite a variety in approach to doctrine amongst sufis, but they tend to be rather more compassionate in their interpretation. However the Sufis subscribe to the Quran and hadiths and sharia law – they just don’t buy the predestination bit which orthodox sunnis believe – i.e. god determines before the person is born whether or not they will go to heaven or hell. They are a bit less fussy about some of the rituals, and sometimes more tolerant.

      Christianity and other religions also had a mystic tradition of ascetics (e.g. hermits, wandering monks) who could have mystical revelations and do their own thing so long as it appeared to be totally devoted to god and wasn’t political – or at least not in a way threatening the religion. So no articulate reasonable ideas please and lots of physical privation, praying, meditating, preaching etc.)

      Predestination is also the doctrine of St Augustine which Catholic church subscribed to for a long time, and Lutherans still do.

      Then as Eric mentioned within Christianity there’s the difference in emphasis in orthodox religions between works and faith, tho actually the very traditionalist versions require both. Orthodox spirituality requires subscription to the religions community – and its punishments for non conformance in this world and the next.

      1. I think that you will find that Catholic theology points definitely towards predestination as being true – though the Church is rather coy about publicly ‘subscribing’ to it as doctrine.

  15. Here’s another cartoon published today that might be of interest to all you science fans. Dilbert is asked if he ever marvels at the “miracle” of consciousness, and he sweeps the issue aside as just boring old evolution.

    I’d say that’s a rather offensive characterization of the general attitude of scientists toward nature.

    1. Well, the punchline cracked me up.

      I don’t think that was characterising scientists, I think it was reflecting on Dilbert’s character (and why he could never get a date).

      Btw Dilbert isn’t a scientist, he’s a software engineer / programmer I think.

      cr

  16. I think of myself as a strict materialist; it’s rather disturbing to discover that I could still qualify as ‘religious’.

  19. Hate to be that guy, but this “Jesus and Mo” cartoon misrepresents Islam.

    In the cartoon, ‘Mo’ (i.e. Muhammad) states:

    “In Islam it’s all helpfully laid out in black and white, what’s forbidden, whats permitted, and what’s compulsory.”

    This is actually not true at all. Once one begins to take the time to study Islam, one finds that Islam appears to require, command or forbid one thing, but when you look up the details, it says the opposite. Like a mirage in the sands of Arabia, in Islam, nothing is as it seems.

    It is emphatically NOT the case that in Islam, all is laid out in black and white, what is forbidden, what’s permitted, and what’s compulsory.

    The Moroccan convert from Islam to Christianity, Brother Rachid, who runs METV, a network that broadcasts Christian proseltyzation in Arabic from Cyprus to the Middle East and North Africa puts it like this (I paraphrase from memory): “Islam is like a market that advertises one thing on its billboard, but when you go in, you find that what’s inside is not like what was advertised on the billboard.”

    In Islam, a concept has been developed, based on Qur’an 2:173 and other verses called “darura”, or necessity. Q 2:173 reads like this:

    “He has only forbidden to you dead animals, blood, the flesh of swine, and that which has been dedicated to other than Allah. But whoever is forced by necessity, neither desiring [it] nor transgressing [its limit], there is no sin upon him. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.”

    ​ – Qur’an 2:173, Sahih International translation

    This term ‘necessity’, in the classical Arabic: darura, has been expanded into a canonical Islamic doctrine. The great Islamologist Bernard Lewis puts it like this:

    “They were further helped in this by another principle laid down by the jurists, that of darura, necessity. Even in the Qur’an there are verses that sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly permit, on ground of necessity, what would otherwise be forbidden. As developed by jurists, the principle of necessity applied in two forms. The first, relating to individuals, deals with the dire constraints under which a person might find himself. A Muslim, may for example, eat pork or carrion rather than starve to death. A seafarer my throw another seafarer’s goods into the sea if their boat is overladen and about to sink. In the second sense, necessity no longer refers to individual constraint but, rather, to the exigencies of social and economic -and some would ad political – life. But the principle of darura has limits. For the individual, these are clear and unquivocal: Thus for example, to save his life, a Muslim may eat pork…”

    Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, p 45

    https://books.google.com/books?id=yUWwl9cl6ogC&lpg=PA54&vq=darura&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q&f=false
    ​
    In many circumstances, the consumption of bacon is obligatory for Muslims. That may sound preposterous, but that is what the major academic scholars of Islam tell us, in the authoritative Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, considered to be the standard reference work on Islam, written by academic scholars of Islam, for academic scholars of Islam.

    Here is part of the entry on darura, which tells us that eating pork is considered obligatory in many circumstances for Muslims. That is to say, Islam not only recommends, but outright commands Muslims to consume pork, depending on the circumstance:

    a) In what concerns prohibitions of a religious character (the prohibition against eating pork or dead animals, or against drinking blood or other liquids regarded as impure, for example), it is admitted without difference between the Schools, that necessity legitimizes the non-observance of these rules. It follows—and this is the opinion which has prevailed in doctrine—that one is even obliged to disregard them in a case of danger.

    Entry on DARURA, ​Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, Volume 2 C-G, p 163

    https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=E641880779F3274B!201&authkey=!AFFIVwfXI2MgmU4&ithint=file%2cpdf

    ​As the entry reports:

    The Kur’ān contains numerous verses which, directly or indirectly, legitimize on grounds of necessity certain acts which in principle are forbidden (II, 168; V, 5; VI, 119; XVI, 116). Ibn Nudiaym derived from this a maxim which became famous: al-darūrāt tubīh al-mahzūrāt, which the Ottoman Madjalla (art. 21) reproduced literally and which may be translated: “Necessity makes lawful that which is forbidden”. The effects of the state of necessity of which the writers here fixed the conditions and limits, are more or less drastic according to the domain of fikh in which they occur.
    ​
    In Islam, necessity makes lawful that which is forbidden. Thus, when Mo says in the cartoon that “it’s all helpfully laid out in black and white, what’s forbidden, whats permitted, and what’s compulsory”, this is a falsehood about Islam.

    In Islam, what is forbidden can be made lawful, or even obligatory, depending on the circumstance, according to the principle of darura.

    This principle allows Muslims to deceive non-Muslims about their intentions. You may eat dinner with a Muslim, and see him take a glass of wine and mistakenly think “this means that he’s not really interested in imposing Sharia law”, not realizing that the principle of darura permits him to drink wine, or even obliges him to do so, if he views himself as being in danger.

    If he, for example, lives deep behind what his religion tells him is enemy lines, he may view himself as being in a war zone, and thus feel himself to be in danger, surrounded by enemy Infidels. Thus, according to darura, he may take a glass of wine, and the Infidels he’s eating with, unaware of darura, think “oh he’s not devout”, while privately he is.

        1. Don’t know about the management, but I read it all. It seems valid, but repetitive – I think you could have trimmed it to about 1/3 of its length without losing anything.

          cr

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