Today’s new Jesus and Mo, called “egg,” uses the Cadbury egg fracas as a platform to explain the many “mysteries” (i.e., incoherent claims) about the Crucifixion. I myself have never understood the Trinity, or why the sacrifice of Jesus somehow redeemed the sins of everyone else. But hey, it’s religion, Jake!
Why would anyone believe this stuff when you can just have another flood.
Or better yet, a beer.
I was listening to BBC Radio 2 last Sunday when they have a broadcast of vaguely religious ‘modern music’ and a few interviews (not all Christian but certainly Believers). They had a Bishop on who when asked about the significance of Easter Eggs could only burble on about the eggs symbolising new life.
No informed history, and no mention of pagan celebrations of spring. No mention of how sickly sweet Cadbury’s Creme Eggs are either.
Any mention of how little chocolate there is in UK chocolate-flavoured vegetable fat and sugar confections (to use their more accurate description)?
I’ve given up eating UK “chocolate”. Only Belgian or Swiss for me from now on!
How right you are, Brits will eat anything if enough sugar is added.
Lindt plain chocolate with at lease 70% cocoa is the only way to go.
There is hope, Green & Black’s do a decent bar, and there are some independents. Admittedly, Cadbury’s is awful, but it could be worse. It could be Hershey’s.
Lindt do a nice bar.
Definitely, but it’s not a British product as far as I know.
Brilliant. “Disrespectful neologisms and irrelevant confectionary” is my new motto.
The trinity has characteristics of an egg laid by a committee dealing with controversy. It has to be some kind of compromise. Maybe there were camps holding out for God as a holy spirit(mystics), and those wanting a father figure, and those needing a big brother and chief sacrificial lamb. After arguing for days the committee members started to fatigue and went for a flimsy “all threee” just to get home for the week end.
Actually, that’s pretty much what happened. They argued for weeks about whether there was a trinity or not. Only Greek speakers were allowed to attend as it was thought no other language could handle the complexity of the arguments. They eventually voted, but the votes were all burnt and it was announced that the trinity was doctrine (in reality because that’s what the most powerful clerics wanted).
It sounds so … so … transcendent when you explain it that way.
I like that: “the Trinity – god designed by a committee”.
My understanding is that it was a desperate compromise to resolve an ineluctable paradox.
On the one hand they wanted to keep the Hebrew Scriptures (“OT”), including the 10 Commandments, which firmly say “No other gods but me”, so as not to alienate the Jews.
On the other, they wanted to keep the Greek Scriptures (“NT”), which firmly say that the mortal (and fairly friendly) human Jesus is God, who clearly wasn’t about when the Father (a much darker character) gave Moses the tablets.
I guess that once they’d done that, it was in for a penny, in for a point, and they thought they might as well throw in the Holy Ghost to appease the Gnostics and all those who believe that God is in us all.
Reading rickflick’s post again, we fundamentally agree.
The first balloon of that panel is also polysyllabic humour, but accurate, setting us up for the bathos, and hence funny.
Whoops! ^That isn’t where I meant to post that.
^in for a pound
Your ‘point’ is well made. 😎
Unfortunately, like with many resolutions of paradoxes, the solution is no better.
(Cf. “Revenge liar” paradoxes.)
…and since we are being polite about J’s delemia, as we say downunder,
Jesus you ARE an egg!
Egg=foolish or silly, soft in the head for those not familiar with the term.
An unfertilized egg…don’t forget.
IMO this Jesus ‘n’ Mo is one of the funniest I’ve seen.
Parody on John 3v16, For God so loved the old world that he never told them about the cocoa beans of the New World in case humans would put the sugar cane of East Asia with the cocao beans of the Americas and make sinfully indulgent chocolate.
Alternatively maybe he just didn’t think that Mesoamerican foods such as mole and tejate were something Old World inhabitants would enjoy.
The joke about Easter eggs is that the creators of Jesus made his followers wait an extra 1492 or so years until they could taste chocolate. It shows that the authors of the scriptures had no supernatural knowledge about our material world. It didn’t even dawn on them that there could be out lying continents to spread their myths to.
Was Jesus the guy who hid the Easter eggs from the children, never let on that they even existed and it was only by good old human greed for land and precious metals that the chocolate eggs were ever found.
Roll the myths down the hill and let them break into pieces
The jesus story is ludicrous. Even as a kid in Sunday school I couldn’t believe it and went along only because the adults around me all took it so seriously and reverentially. I should have given it a horse laugh.
lol
Honestly I think this is the best Jesus and Mo strip ever.
For those of you who like obscure big words, the second panel is a brilliant example of aposiopesis.
https://literarydevices.net/aposiopesis/
And also, bathos.
Brilliant cartoon, by the way. The best J&M yet.
cr
The first balloon of that panel is also polysyllabic humour, but accurate, setting us up for the bathos, and hence funny.
I can’t even…
So, am I the only one who’s teeth curled and tongue dried imagining a yummy mouth full of bitter beer and Sickly Cadbury’s Creme Egg(TM)?
And happy Cruciversary everyone.;)
CS Lewis correctly observes in “Mere Christianity” that the Bible is very vague on why the death and/or resurrection of Jesus is saving and then claims it may not matter. But to American fundamentalists it matters enormouslt. The “substitution theory of the atonement” is one of the original 5 fundamentals that defined fundamentalism even though it kicked in about 1000 years after Jesus.
It is certainly the most morally incoherent and just plain wicked of all the viewpoints ever offered but has been basic to classical conservative Western Christianity for a thousand years.
It is notably absent from Lewis Narnia books.
Not that different, really, from the good old sacrifice thing that most heathen religions misguidedly practised.
cr
Indeed, and the worst of them all, the Abraham and Isaac story, hints that they hadn’t long emerged from human sacrifice as a regular thing.
just echoing what others said, this is the best J & Mo yet.
At least Jesus didn’t try to complete or act out an answer to Dan Barker’s “Easter Challenge”!
So, why is today called “Good” Friday? All the shops are shut, can’t buy anything, such as, beer, can’t get my puncture fixed. Should call it “Useless Friday”.
Not good now, not then. Seems to me it wasn’t much fun for anyone involved, really.
Except maybe for Barabbas, I suppose he would have to reckon it pretty good to have beaten the rap. But I get the impression his opinion probably doesn’t count.
cr