In the new Jesus and Mo strip, called “Whoa,” the barmaid compares modern-day versions of Christianity and Islam, and judges Islam as palpably worse for humanity. In that she agrees with Richard Dawkins, though not with those sophists who simply cannot admit that one religion can have more pernicious effects on the modern world than another.
The artists’s comment in the post: “It is worse.”
x
The link to “those sophists” goes to a page about Israel and humanitarian aid for Gaza. I can see there is a connection, but it’s not a direct one.
Jesus scores a win with “your religion is worse than mine.”
In this instalment of Jesus and Mo , I missed a reference to Judaism. The point the cartoon makes is much weakened in the addressees of the criticism by sparing Judaism, as no Muslim in the West will fail to see the missing third sister religion. Because of what it lead to in Germany, namely, demonization and the holocaust, criticism of Judaism has become anathema in polite Western circles, while searing criticism of both traditional Christianity and Islam are pretty standard fare. But Islam and Judaism are more similar to each other than to Christianity. They are both religions with theocratic religious law as their centerpiece, including a lot of stuff that counts as misogynist by current standards, and with major currents that still revere and practice that law, and who never really get delegitimized by its less extremist currents. I live close to a Salafist mosque now, and the outward similarities, including behavioral, to ultra orthodox Judaism are striking. Both religions/cultures as a whole have not renounced the violent stuff their traditions contain. After 7-10, Netanyahu invoked Yehoshua bin Nun, in whose footsteps Israeli soldiers supposedly stand, and who was lot, but a lot worse than the armies of the early Muslim conquerors who only subjugated and assimilated the people they conquered, while the Biblical Israelites according to the Masoretic text killed off the previous inhabitants of the territories they invaded to the last man, woman, and child because their God told them to. Traditional Judaism became rather quietist/pacifist after the destruction of the second temple, due to having to keep a low profile and not being in a position of power for so long, but Zionism was a conscious attempt to break with that quietist/pacifist diaspora version of the tradition. The chauvinist element has always been strong in Judaism anyway. I love many parts of the Jewish tradition, including Halakhah and Halakhic learning, I accept the atrocious bits from the iron age as documents of the moral state of humanity at the time and as part of the cultural canon of all of us here in West Eurasia, and there were never any terrorists hiding in the Chabad Schuls in my city (different from the Salafist mosques), but still…
“…but Christianity DEVELOPED.” It sure did. And it Diversified. And some diversification s branched in odd directions.
Like in movies, where you don’t actually see the knife being plunged into the victim, the cartoonist deftly avoids putting the barmaid on line for actually saying which one is worse.
The answer to Mo’s question is in the last frame and on the wall, as in, it’s all…
We was baited by the authors in this one, I bet no one needed to hear the barmaid answer…
One of the better J ‘n’ Ms ;o)
I agree.