noted
December 22nd, 2011
Still sad about the death of Hitchens. Best just keep making stupid jokes, I suppose.
Peace and blessings to all J&M readers.
Latest book…
Random oldie…
August 22, 2012-
- NICE T-SHIRT (Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable lust). Currently unavailable.
Please do keep going!
Typo in box 3, it should be “They are supposed to be of divine…” instead of “They are supposed to of divine…”
The irony is that nobody is more guilty of quote mining the bible/koran/torah than those who preach from it, conveniently picking, as they do, only the paragraphs which support what they wish to preach and totally ignoring the rest.
Great strip, author! Kudos to you.
There is missing a “be” in the third panel.
Brilliant, even with, or is that without, the missing “be”. A great example of selective listening. I had to go back to figure out how he managed to get that out of the barmaid’s statement. And there’s it is, plain as the nose on my face. “Your god’s real.”. Never thought the barmaid would say that. 🙂
Thanks for the typo-alerts. Fixed it now, but it may take an hour or so for the change to filter through the various caches I’ve set up.
Panel three is a clear case of “to be or not to be”.
Brilliant, one of the funniest for a while, particularly as it is generally the theists, not the atheists, who delight in quotemining, as we see here. With the bible, there is no need to take quotes out of context to make them sound stupid or vile.
Just noticed, are Jesus & Mo on summertime?
Have a cool Yule, everybody!
The problem with quoting words
Is they’re individual literary turds
Chickens win races
By flying in their oponents faces
This trick panders to infantile nerds.
Jon is right. Both sides quote mine. It’s just that the believers quote mine for the stuff that makes their side look good. It’s like pointing out Al Capone gave money to charity while ignoring his criminal activities.
Finding wisdom in the Bible (or Qu’ran) is a bit like sifting through a chemical toilet and proclaiming “Oh, Look! Corn!”. Is it really worth eating?
@Justin Zimmer
Great succinct mental image
The comments are nearly as good as the cartoon. I get much pleasure from both. Keep up the good work.
Why do we never see the barmaid? She has so much bottle that I’m becoming convinced she’s a spirit, though at the moment I’ve only got 40% proof.
Happy Birthday for sunday, Jesus. I hope Mo’s bought you something special.
Note to pedants: Yes, I know that he wasn’t really born on Christmas day, yadda, yadda,yadda.
Peace, love, and a large dose of rationality to you all.
When dealing with Bible thumpers, I’ve successfully pointed out that, if one is willing to cut and paste enough, one can make a phone book say anything one wants. Usually shuts ’em up pretty good.
Merry Saturnalia & a Happy Winter Solstice to all!
Fantastic! Really excellent this week. I’m pissing myself at my desk…
@Justin Zimmer – Lovely image! I’m going to use that one.
The Bible isn’t the Word Of God(TM), it isn’t even entertaining fiction. Is actually rather dull and (ironically) uninspired. For my money, when I want good mythology, I read The Iliad and The Odyssey. They are at least entertaining.
@Acolyte of Sagan:
Poor Jesus, he don’t even know what day is your real birthday.
What kind of bad parents change a birthday to match in another festivity?
“Let’s start at the beginning, Genesis chapter one tells us that God created everything in a week. Well, that’s obviously true and literal. How do we know? Because it disproves evolution which happens to be a godless blasphemy.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3POEuxG2Rnk
“Why do we never see the barmaid?”
Because the barmaid is actually the cartoonist.
Excellent! As always… 😀
“Gary Kleppe says:
December 23, 2011 at 5:15 pm
“Why do we never see the barmaid?”
Because the barmaid is actually the cartoonist”
Surely she could use a body double, just like Mo does. Maybe a job for Katie Price or Paris Hilton. Now there’d be a fatwah we could all take pleasure in!
Barmaid (peace be upon her) missed a chance here. Why didn’t she just play the boys at their own out-of-context game and simply agree that scripture is indeed a ‘meaningful HOLE’ – a black one; it’s where the truth vanishes, never to be seen again.
Got to now, so as they say round these parts; “Merry Syphillis and a happy Gonorrhea to you all”.
Hurrah. It grates when people claim these holy books are good moral guidance. No one could possibly derive valid meaning from them if they didn’t already know it. They’re a word search puzzle of morality. A jumbled mess of nonsense out of which you can pick advice if you know what you’re looking for.
Rationality has many faces. Every so often I think I catch a glimpse of the Barmaid in my mirror. I look and suddenly FLASH! I think I see her and then she’s gone! Just like that. But most of the time I see my own face. Not so exciting, that. Well, to my Mom. Prospero New Year.
Oooh. Hope that last one doesn’t fall foul of the no sexism policy… How about this:
A woman walks in to a pub and asks the barman for a double entendre… So he gives her one..
I’ll get my coat
Keep the barmaid invisble, artist. No picture could do her justice.
One could also make the case for: “Divine origin… can only be described as clumsy”.
Case of the Dunning-Kruger effect here, surely? Because you don’t understand the Bible as a whole, you assume it doesn’t make sense as a whole, which prevents you from studying further 😉
John, glirble splorch bi nurgle nurgly blarkle.
You may think what I just said doesn’t make sense, but it would if you read the other 32,767 pages.
Would PZ’s “The Courtier’s Reply” be useful to the discussion?
Mathew 22:36-40
Taking what they want to hear. Also, what’s with the barmaid’s new speech bubbles?
AoS, 23/12/2011: The “real” Jesus wasn’t born at all as he is entirely fictional even if loosely based on a bunch of real wandering minstrels so Good Author’s slightly more fictional one can have any birthday the Authorial soul decides to give him. That the Author has often called this Season “Jesus’s pretend birthday” is moot. Probably. Mostly. Maybe.
Alverant at 22/12/2011: Mr. Capone did do lots of charitable work and, by all contemporaneous accounts, he did most of them just for the altruism of it and because he could afford them. No, that doesn’t make him a nice person but it does show that even some truly evil bastards can do nice things. The usual example of this truism is that even a certain Austrian liked dogs, whereas a recent President of USofA seemingly did not.
Humans are, in general, not all one thing. Like cocktails, they tend to be complex mixtures of odd bits. Most of them.
Some of them.
Oh, wait, this one is ten years old and I’m replying to things. I really, truly must stop doing that.
If anyone has survived, if there’s still electricity, Internet access and a working box where you are, may I wish you a very merry Christmas, happy lots of new years and the best of every holiday your people celebrate.
Though, if none of the previous are so it’s a little bit in vain, isn’t it? 🙂