Nice one author! It is probably fair to say that terrorists are all mentally ill but so are most believers (at various degrees). On another note, I would love you to do something on the fashionable Burkini before the end of the summer as it seems to be making a huge sensation on European beaches. The Guardian recently published a paper giving 5 GOOD (yes you hear me) reasons to wear it. I am kinda tired of being told it’s just a wet suit…
I like this one. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it seems to me that Moses in the comic often acts as a stand-in for secular leftists who are just as devout in their own way as any traditional fundamentalist. And I do like it that Jesus and Mo every once in a while get to be the voices of common sense — it makes the comic seem a little more balanced.
Moses is in the mode of most religious types…see what he wants to see and ignore anything, facts included, if they don’t match his vision. Religion probably has a place in society, but not this form. Go Jesus and Mo…but only in countering the Moses-mode!
When I was very young, I thought Science was a good answer to religion. I had some arguments with several priests. Nothing ever resulted from those. In a way, it is a truth that I was as fixedly against theism as they were for it. The only difference being that I was slightly willing to change my mind if a deity stood before me and offered proof. Not very, but slightly.
When I was a young adult, Mormons and JW’s and other wierdos used to arrive at my front door to recruit me. I had lovely discussions with some of them. None of them, however, convinced me of the reasonableness of their fairy tales.
I never burnt anyone at the stake for not having the same lack of faith as myself. I have never tortured someone to confess their lack of faith (though it could be interesting to try that on “devout” priests and popes). I have never even tried to convert anyone. I pretty much don’t care what anyone believes.
What I do care about is enforcement of belief.
You can believe that Jupiter is a giant greenhouse full of fruits and nuts, like the Internet but bigger, so long as that does not stop you from voting funds for a Galileo II or Juno-5.
You can believe all life is sacred, as do the Buddhists so long as that does not stop you from researching new anti-fungals, anti-microbials and anti-virals.
And you can believe that your daddy in the sky wants you to concuss yourself twelve times each day while waggling your bum in the air and using your farts to propel you towards a large brick, so long as that does not drive you to insist that I take you even the littlest bit seriously.
“They believe they are inhabited by the souls of deep-fried aliens and they hold soup cans to get rid of them. I should care what they think?”
It is time we treated all religion, from the worship of TV actors in Soap Operas and footballers to the weird guys in dresses and funny hats as a joke not as a social force to be taken seriously.
They should not be protected in any way. They should never have tax-exempt status. They should be mocked, ridiculed and otherwise generally ignored.
Their time has passed.
It is time we grew up, became adults, stood tall as Real Men …
… and inherited the stars.
re ‘using your farts to propel you towards a large brick’
they would be stuck there all day if they did because as I understand it
every time they do so they have to start the prayer again
also gives rise to another important question
given the earth is a sphere there must exist a circle on it where facing mecca in either direction is the same distance – in such a location any muslim prayer would be as ‘blasphemous’ as ‘devout’
Has any Musselman ever been in orbit? That would present interesting issues of timing and orientation.
Maybe they have an equatorial mount and a star-following drive attached to the ship, sort of like amateur telescopes only weirder.
What would an Arabic mission to Mars do? Or one to Eros? Even the days on those aren’t “real” deity-ordained days like the ones Granpaw used to make. Orientating towards the Big Brick would take some gymnastics and could involve an equatorial mount, several tracking drives and pointing your head directly through the planet.
I wonder if they have conversion ephemerides?
It would be far easier for any future explorers who travelled past Saturn, all they would need to do is stand up and nod towards Sol. Earth isn’t ever very far from her in visual angle.
Though from M31 a nod towards the Milky Way galaxy would encompass the entire star cloud so would Daddy accept that as “close enough”?
Imagine New(95) Earth in a distant galaxy with half of the population standing on their heads every couple of hours. We’d best pick one with a low surface gravity or they’ll need chiropractors.
Meanwhile, if a ship is battering through the vacuum at relativistic velocities, say a speed where the Tau factor means one day of theirs is about a million years back home (I know, but bearing with me is funnier)- so they can actually get to M31 to be silly in it – do they need to pray 1,826,250,000 times per their-day? Or would they just catch up when they slow down to a more sane velocity? Does cloud daddy spook know about Relativity? Can it track relativistic ships? Would it care or could it let some slip?
Would they point towards the relativistic image of where they see the Earth or to some calculated point on the squashed-up cosmos where she “really” is? I know such a question is meaningless to a merely human mind, or even to mine, but perhaps it matters to a fussy deity who worries about his pets seeing a naked teat.
We really should solve these and many other issues brought up by offworld activities for the sake of their poor, little souls. We wouldn’t want them to be damned just because we made a mistake in our Vesta to Earth ephemerides, would we?
Justin Case, Mo’ isn’t a real Muslim, he’s an actor [who may or may not be of any religion] but even were he the real one somehow reincarnated [isn’t that blasphemy?] he may well not support a schism from his bit of Islam.
More Muslims are killed by Muslims than were ever killed in all of the crusades. They may hate us but they really, really hate each other, too.
It’s a fair question as to whether they hate other heretic Muslims more or less than they do Israelis.
I wonder whether we could measure it?
And what we’d do with the numbers?
Anyone have a spare hateometer handy?
I just thought of a real funny … there are falling rocks, Asteroids, Minor Planets, Dwarf Planets out there that tumble on three axes simultaneously and do so at quite surprisingly high angular rates.
Orientation and timing on one of those would be … interesting.
“Local day” would not be a term with any realistic meaning.
A clever lad, came up with this
It would be a shame to miss
So I copied here
Very accurate, to steer
Liberals who muslims, want to kiss.
It’s like a bad Monty Python sketch:
“We did this because our holy texts exhort us to to do it.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Wait, what? Yes we did…”
“No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”
“WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit
Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans,
blasphemers, and disbelievers.”
“No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so.”
“Huh!? Who are you to tell us we’re not true Muslims!? Islam is
literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the
truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It
is our very reason for being.”
“Nope. We created you. We
installed a social and economic system that alienates and
disenfranchises you, and that’s why you did this. We’re sorry.”
“What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in
the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians – disenfranchisement
doesn’t even enter into it!”
“Listen, it’s our fault. We don’t blame you for feeling unwelcome and lashing out.”
“Seriously, stop taking credit for this! We worked really hard to pull
this off, and we’re not going to let you take it away from us.”
“No, we nourished your extremism. We accept full blame.”
“OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across”.
Whoever wrote this is a genius, Thanks for sharing. It wasn’t me.
This might interest a few of us. One down, several thousand million to go.
Though there is historical precedent for suspecting that this may not be a “final solution” to him. some bloke called Ghandi was jailed once, as was a nice, young gentleman called Adolf. Both of those went on to rule empires. Popping a perp in the pokey is no guarantee of his being silenced forever.
Our very own friend, Ophelia, has a nice comment on this news though she does seem to miss a point that the ‘Murkins take great pains over: free speech means we get to hear everyone no matter how odious and insane they may be.
Any restriction, even blasphemy and libel laws, is a total destruction of the concept of “free”.
Jailing that vermin is not protecting us. It is denying us the right and the opportunity to tell him loudly and repeatedly that he is a venomous little shite-shaped cretin. In public and to his face.
Jailing him for “the” is as daft and draconian and evil as jailing a witless fool for tweeting a “bomb threat”.
We should be allowed to hear him, his victims (“followers”) should be allowed to her him but they and we should be allowed to hear us, too.
We should be given tax-free status, legal protections and a herd of cops between us and the Islamics when we use a megaphone to scream at their mosques that there are no gods and that their “religion” is a lie and a fraud. That is “free speech” and equality and multiculturalism and tolerance.
Silencing the anti-theist while supporting and condoning and even paying supporters of ISIS and Boko Haram and Westboro and Rabbis is theocracy in action.
And unfair.
No, jailing us, too is not fair, either. That just compounds the State’s crime.
The idea of the USA’s First Amendment was that all ideas should have an equal platform and that Darwinism should eliminate the daftest. That is also the idea behind England’s “free speech” and sense of fairness.
But it depends, utterly on the platforms being equal.
Giving churches special privileges is wrong in every way.
And, as cretin Choudary has shown, and as he will show when he makes a deal, is released in a couple of weeks then reneges on his promise, prisoners are imbued with almost mystical auras when released.
I’d be willing to offer up a small wager that he’s back ranting about our destruction before 2017.
Probably on his own C4 weekly daily show.
Gyroscopic prayer mats on space ships would be a problem for muslims
but given the quran declares that the earth is flat
and given that space flight requires prediction for accurate arrival and only mo is allowed to predict
it follows that space flight is ‘haram’ for muslims
another option is to disperse the atoms of the kaba meteor fragment so that they are spread across the entire planet or better still throughout the solar system
thus making directional ‘prayer’ pointless
[ignoring the fact that prayer is pointless to start with]
Personally I think that daesh is wonderful
it does three things for the improvement of humanity
1. it encourages hardcore oxygen wasters to blow themselves up -thus ridding the world of their presence
2. It is encouraging moderate and borderline muslims to be disillusioned with the hatefilled core message of islam
3. it does a marvellous job of siphoning off all the fundie vermin and garbage out of western society to a place where they can be legally exterminated without consideration for their human rights
Pink Squirrel, dropping the big brick onto Sol would solve the orientation issue. The solar wind would disperse it throughout the system and, eventually, the galaxy. By the time humans got to M31, the black brick could even have been splashed over the Local Group.
Even if it were not, the faithful could always pretend it had been.
Pretending things that are absurd are also true is a skill they require.
Prayer is never useless. There have been studies showing that a small detrimental effect is sometimes present when patients are informed that they are prayed over. Scientific, repeatable studies. It is a tiny effect but even a tiny effect that harms the faithful is all to the good.
No study has ever shown any significant beneficial effect of prayer, whether the patient was informed of the praying or not and no matter what if any faith the patient had.
That tells me that people knowing they are being prayed for give up struggling to get better and rely on the benefits of their invisible daddy, a strategy doomed to failure as there are no gods.
Still, we should constantly remind priests, popes, rabbis, imams and other perverts that they are being prayed for in the hope that it hastens their removal from society.
Doing good for the species by way of doing evil to individuals under colour of helping them. That’s so cool.
On your assertion that Islamic mass murder is evolution in action and thereby good for the species in the long term might I mention that the buggers are raping everything with an orifice, from babies to goats and that they probably breed far faster than war can reduce their population.
Even thought they much prefer the rear ends of camels, young males and when none of those are available, women, they do accidentally find the wrong entry point occasionally, somehow, as evidenced by the rampant herds of Muslims everywhere.
If theistic fuckwittery is genetically inheritable rather than culturally we need to irradiate their gonads massively before they get to the fertile women.
If it is nurture not nature we only need to let them all kill each other before the pop-ups reach school-ages.
That only takes disinformation propaganda techniques.
Last night Wikipedia led me to the article on “Shabbat clocks” which turn lights on and off using a timer. “Shlomo Auerbach notes that in certain timers, which are designed with a peg that must be removed in one notch and reinserted in a second notch, it is prohibited to reset when a light will turn on, even if the action will occur later than planned, because reinserting the peg in the second notch constitutes programming a light to turn on when, until that instant, the light would not have turned on at all because the peg had been removed.[41] He did not comment on the case where a spare peg is available to be inserted in the second notch before removal of the first.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_on_Shabbat#Shabbat_clocks
Then I read loner-too’s analysis of how a Muslim astronaut could figure out which direction to pray in.
I was all set to write something snarky when I realized…
The kind of thinking involved in praying toward Mecca, Shabbat timers, and concurrency control is absolutely necessary to modern technology. If thousands of software engineers hadn’t done it, and gotten it mostly right, you would not be able to read these words.
Clarification: even if a small object, for example an otherwise useless black brick, were dropped onto Sol it would disperse quite thoroughly through the ecliptic and beyond. The solar wind would blast much of it “straight up” from the point of near-impact but the twisting, rotating, leaky solar magnetic fields would scatter the individual atoms across a vast region.
The solar wind flows like a spiral out towards the heliopause where it rams against the interstellar medium to form a large bubble.
This bubble is not solid, it leaks into the galaxy which, itself, leaks into the gases of the Local Group of galaxies which leak into the intergalactic medium.
So it is well within the realm of possibility that a few atoms of any random comet, rock or falling big brick that tries to intersect Sol could theoretically end up several galactic diameters from the Sun. Given time enough.
There is a lot of vacuum to cover in such a scenario but even tiny, little bricks have many, many atoms and some would be accelerated to near lightspeed.
So, if Muslims want to ensure they can always and forever pray to their holy heap of rock they should support ESA/JAXA/JPL/NASA with loads of funding to create a missile capable of doing the deed.
But I’d be surprised if any of their priests saw the ineffable logic of this idea. Though it is, I modestly admit, a stroke of utter genius.
Point of information, Mr. Phoenix, don’t some hospitals and other Israeli places hire goyim, kaffer or whatever infidels are called to do the peg insertions, lift-button pushes and other “work” that ultra-orthodox Jews won’t on the Sabbath?
Or was that typical anti-semitic propaganda I picked up somewhere?
pink squirrel
“given the earth is a sphere there must exist a circle on it where facing mecca in either direction is the same distance – in such a location any muslim prayer would be as ‘blasphemous’ as ‘devout’”
Or you could be on a boat at a certain point among the Tuamotu Archipelago & any direction would be toward Mecca.
re
ultra-orthodox Jews won’t on the Sabbath?
or any other day of the week -as such would interfere with rocking back and forth in prayer [ according to u tube videos about them]
Well, yes and no. The individuals that lead IS(IS|L)? probably are indeed motivated by a desire to kill all the infidels. But if not for western foreign policy, they’d just be a handful of kooks. The reason groups like them can attract a significant following is because they’re seen as the only ones capable of standing up to the foreigners that have spent the past several decades bombing them and arming maniacs and dictators in their part of the world.
Pink Squirrel, you reminded me of a thing. When I was very much younger than I am now, I had a friend who was interested in woo-woo stuff. He had loads of books, which I read. Some of them were on astral projection. A couple suggested that one could loosen one’s “astral body” and teach it to disengage from the meat by rocking back and forth for a while every day.
I don’t remember my friend ever managing to astrally project but I lost touch several millennia ago so maybe he taught the technique to the UOJ’s?
Mr. Kleppe, if not for the West and the “Commies” one-upping each other by selling guns to the savages, and places like South Africa making the odd bob on the side those nut-jobs wouldn’t even be a poor joke. They’d be harmless.
Our leaders made them dangerous. Those same leaders that repeatedly enact laws restricting our freedoms in a pretence of protecting us from the creatures they, themselves, made.
Our leaders created the monsters, fed them, armed them, built their countries out of sand and camel stools and aimed them at us.
Then they attack us in the name of defeating them.
Which, of course, our leaders will never let happen for they need Daesh and Boko and the other bogeymen.
Daesh can win for they dont care about tomorrow. We can’t.
They are going to kill us all.
that one could loosen one’s “astral body”
I recall a new age book or pamphlet on this which seemed to indicate that astral projection was best achieved during REM sleep
we need to irradiate their gonads massively before they get to the fertile women
given they are operating in the area of Iraq – which just happens to have been bequeathed 700 tonnes of depleted uranium dust by America
then it made already be an ongoing project
Pink Squirrel, I do know that M31 is the closest large Grand Design spiral galaxy to the one most of us are living in. It’s an obvious target for a Diaspora once this place gets a little crowded and it is relatively easy to get to.
Well, compared to some others it is.
It’s just sitting there. If a star-spanning culture is going to aim for anything outside of our galaxy M31 is so bloody obvious.
The same thing works in reverse, of course. From M31 our little star cloud is the loveliest, most obvious thing to aim at.
Of course, some tribes, cultures, people will go for the littler, more obscure star clouds and even for individual floaty stars so they can hide or get away from the Big Companies but M31 and the Milky Way (we really, really need a better name for our galaxy) are like the great Cities.
Indeed, one would expect to see a stream of Travellers flowing both ways already. Assuming alien life is possible. That we don’t is interesting.
Depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, the high-energy bits have been extracted for purposes other than being shot at humans. Granite is more deadly than depleted uranium. It’s not really a good way of inducing mutation in protoplasm.
It is a heavy, dense metal so it is a good way of introducing holes in protoplasm. DU bullets are good ammo, for certain values of “good”.
loner-too, given the way Tony Perkins’ mind works, I wouldn’t be surprised if he thinks God is punishing him with the flood because he hasn’t done enough to stop abortion and gay marriage 🙁 . I’m reminded of an episode of the TV series Babylon 5, in which G’Kar is asked, “What is truth, and what is God?” ( https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Meditations_on_the_Abyss )
two cents’ worth, I honestly can not understand that mindset. I don’t grasp how it can possibly matter who or what a mammal attaches itself to. I’ve seen photographic images of cats cuddling rabbits, ducklings, Rotty-dogs and Alsatians. I’ve seen humans hug horses. I truly don’t understand why anyone would have a problem with two girls cuddling, or two men.
Okay, there’s a line in a book [one line, once in one book] telling us that male homosex is a naughty thing but the same book tells us thousands and thousands and millions of times to dash babies heads against rocks and we have, for the most part, stopped obeying that one.
We have, petty much, started to ignore almost everything in that book. So why should we bother with the one, single, solitary instance of homophobia?
We might as well fix the sicle-obol exchange rate to five to one because it says that in their book.
I don’t see rabid exchange-rate fixers burning people to death and throwing them off buildings to preserve the value of five for sicles to obols so why are they so hot and bothered about another instruction among the many millions in their book?
Do they build all of their temples according to instruction?
Do they … ah, to the non-real hells with it. They aren’t going to listen so why bother?
Were we religious, I would be preaching to the choir. 🙂
I wish there was a way to get it all to just stop!.
Without the religious we wouldn’t need all those Snoopers’ Charter laws enabling the spooks, or the rings of steel or the CCTV cameras or the pseudo-security of the gate-rapists at airports and increasingly everywhere else.
We would be far more free had there never been Muslims and Christians and Jews.
Of course, it is now too late. Even were the islamics to lay down their guns, bombs and knives and convert to the Light of Reason the laws and the T.S.A.’s would stay.
Politicians never give up a control mechanism. Nor do cops.
Fucking theist cunts are why we can never have anything nice.
This might interest a few. It seems that the menopause is designed by Evolution to provide us with females old enough to know how to find the local Post Office. Repositories of arcane knowledge and experience.
And why is this possibly interesting, I don’t hear anyone ask?
Well, now we have books, maps, street signs and Mapquest, we no longer have a use for those elderly crones, do we?
I have a small, modest proposal.
And before you all scream at me for being a barbarian, look at what we have as a Prime Minister.
re
Without the religious we wouldn’t need all those Snoopers’ Charter laws enabling the spooks, or the rings of steel or the CCTV cameras or the pseudo-security of the gate-rapists at airports and increasingly everywhere else.
despite sharing your opinion of religion in general – I think that religion is an excuse not a reason for the items you mention
“There have been studies showing that a small detrimental effect is sometimes present when patients are informed that they are prayed over. Scientific, repeatable studies.” To emulate Wikipedia comments on poorly written articles: Which studies? Citation needed.
You continue: “That tells me that people knowing they are being prayed for give up struggling to get better and rely on the benefits of their invisible daddy” This is a supposition and not a necessary logical conclusion. Firstly, what was the state of the dying individuals: conscious, delirious, suffering, calm, compos mentis, etc. Secondly, were the dying themselves religious, agnostic or atheist? If atheist, another interpretation could be that upon hearing the prayers they gave up in despair of the human race ever becoming logical; or they got so angry at the praying that they it brought on a heart attack.
Please, let us leave generalized, unsubstantiated claims together with concomitant dubious conclusions to the theists – they have a talent for that kind of thing.
Michael, that’s too much like work, old pal. You are totally correct and I was entirely and completely wrong.
It won’t happen again. That is a generalisation you can rely on.
Pink Squirrel, you, too are right.
It’s been nice.
Just as avery small parting gift to my friend,Micheal, here’s a couple of for and against links cited as requested.
Not that I’ve researched very thoroughly, nor have I worked in the field. Nor, I must admit, have I ever prayed to anything for anything.
I have never seen the point.
So you can probably assume correctly that I have a bias against the power of prayer.
I have Pru Freedad this a couple of times but I happily accept any typographicals that have not been killed without mercy.
… and, my friend Michael, when I do [a tiny bit of] the work it is moderated out of reality.
It is probably a good thing.
Nothing I cold contribute was ever worth anything anyway.
Instead of shouting “Allah Allakbar”, if they shouted “This has nothing to do with Islam! This has nothing to do with Islam” while chopping into people with axes, or crushing children beneath the wheels of trucks. It would help dispel confusion.
Hey, Loner-too, what’s with all the gloom? I found your posts entertaining; I just had to pick up on the wooly bits. And anyway, it’s not a comedian’s job to worry about wooliness. Keep them coming.
Ms. Handbasket, the Takbir is “Fuck you!”, “Up yours” or “Sod this for a fucking game of fucking soldiers, you fucking fucks!” in Arabic. Like “Grok” and “Cree”, it is an all-purpose phrase that means “I am annoyed, frustrated, pissed-off or overjoyed at all those pretty flames.” or just about anything else one loads the phrase with.
That it also means “My daddy can beat up your daddy, nyah, nyah, nyanyanyah.” is coincidental.
The Arabs only get to read one book. They don’t get to read of the adventures of Klono or Odin or Dirk Gently. They don’t get to watch “Stargate S-1” or “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer”. They are culturally impoverished to a degree not even matched by the savages in the deepest jungle in New Guinea. Their vocabulary is severely constrained by their lack of reading material and other cultural feeds. Their vocabulary of invective is similarly constrained. They essentially only have the one curse word, curse phrase.
Poor dears. They really need to read more Stephen King. His books have a curse word in just about every sentence.
Michael, why the gloom? Bad day, bad month, bad decade. Thank you for the appreciation but you were right. My thinking needs years of training before anything it produces is fit for public consumption. I need to go back to Arisia for Second Stage classes.
Pink Squirrel, if my net worth to the world is greater than that of the more populated religions and nothing more it still may be zero. They are in sum a detriment to the species, to all species, I had thought that I could be of benefit to the cosmos and its peoples. I can’t, I amn’t, I’m not good enough.
You are so very much brighter and more magnificent than me.
Author, than you for finding a re-appearing my list-of-links for Michael. And very, very much thanks for the comic. You are a great boon and benefit to us, and you are also very funny.
Take care. Hugs and kisses.
Buy Barmaid one from me. She’s nice.
The ISS orbits the earth every 92 minutes. So, using a 92 minute day, that means a rug bumper would need to pray 78 times in a 24 hour period. Picking a direction would be damned near impossible. They would be so busy praying, they would miss Mo flying by on his winged unicorn.
Thanks, Loner-too, for the links. I’ve finally got round to reading them. Interesting stuff. One conclusion seems to be that if you tell sick people they are the object of general prayer they start believing they must be really ill and anxiety has its inevitable detrimental effect. However, informing people they are being prayed for isn’t a test of the power of prayer at all; if prayer has any power it should work regardless of the prayee’s knowledge. Of course, people who do pray are like gambling addicts – no matter ho many times they lose they still think their lucky rabbit’s foot or holy medal will come up with the goods the next time.
prayer is surely a way round Pascal’s wager
have each religion perform the same amount of ‘prayer’ and which ever religion produces the best positive or least negative results can be said to be the ‘one true faith’ while if none of them show a discernable statistical difference then it would prove that either ‘god’ doesn’t exist or that it exists but has no interest or opinion in or of ‘prayer’
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
Jesus and Mo cartoons are wonderfully funny and true. Richard Dawkins
Jesus and Mo make the world a better place, bless their little hearts. Ophelia Benson
In a world defined by outrage and offence and liberal spinelessness, Jesus and Mo is a treasure, whose value we should never fail to recognize. Read them. Laugh. And think. Kenan Malik
The brilliant, celebrated, freaking hilarious atheist comic strip ... Greta Christina
...rays of sanity in a befuddled world. Keri Hulme
The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available... Malise Ruthven
J & Mo is the funniest and most consistently thought-provoking cartoon strip on the Net. In a saner world, it would run in a major newspaper. Nelson Jones, Heresy Corner
Consistently amusing, frequently thought-provoking and often heart-warming. New Humanist
Jesus & Mo is one of the most wonderful things on the internet.. JT Eberhard
Wittily captures much of the absurdity of religious apologetics. Mano Singham
I love jesusandmo.net cartoons - witty and sharp! Katha Pollitt
Often hilarious, frequently wry, these cartoons do what all the best cartoons do: they tell the truth through humour. Terry Sanderson, NSS President
...a wonderfully acid British cartoonist... Nick Cohen
I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and
any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly Richard Stallman
...empowering, important and deeply progressive, not to mention hilarious... Council of Ex-Muslims
June 17, 2015
Spot on!
Hit the nail on the head Author … again.
I’d love for the Barmaid to get involved in this particular conversation.
In the last panel, the tap looks like a menorah. Very clever, Author!
They’re all mentally disturbed. Nothing to do with religion. Er…
Nice one author! It is probably fair to say that terrorists are all mentally ill but so are most believers (at various degrees). On another note, I would love you to do something on the fashionable Burkini before the end of the summer as it seems to be making a huge sensation on European beaches. The Guardian recently published a paper giving 5 GOOD (yes you hear me) reasons to wear it. I am kinda tired of being told it’s just a wet suit…
I like this one. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it seems to me that Moses in the comic often acts as a stand-in for secular leftists who are just as devout in their own way as any traditional fundamentalist. And I do like it that Jesus and Mo every once in a while get to be the voices of common sense — it makes the comic seem a little more balanced.
Moses is in the mode of most religious types…see what he wants to see and ignore anything, facts included, if they don’t match his vision. Religion probably has a place in society, but not this form. Go Jesus and Mo…but only in countering the Moses-mode!
@ corrected
When I was very young, I thought Science was a good answer to religion. I had some arguments with several priests. Nothing ever resulted from those. In a way, it is a truth that I was as fixedly against theism as they were for it. The only difference being that I was slightly willing to change my mind if a deity stood before me and offered proof. Not very, but slightly.
When I was a young adult, Mormons and JW’s and other wierdos used to arrive at my front door to recruit me. I had lovely discussions with some of them. None of them, however, convinced me of the reasonableness of their fairy tales.
I never burnt anyone at the stake for not having the same lack of faith as myself. I have never tortured someone to confess their lack of faith (though it could be interesting to try that on “devout” priests and popes). I have never even tried to convert anyone. I pretty much don’t care what anyone believes.
What I do care about is enforcement of belief.
You can believe that Jupiter is a giant greenhouse full of fruits and nuts, like the Internet but bigger, so long as that does not stop you from voting funds for a Galileo II or Juno-5.
You can believe all life is sacred, as do the Buddhists so long as that does not stop you from researching new anti-fungals, anti-microbials and anti-virals.
And you can believe that your daddy in the sky wants you to concuss yourself twelve times each day while waggling your bum in the air and using your farts to propel you towards a large brick, so long as that does not drive you to insist that I take you even the littlest bit seriously.
“They believe they are inhabited by the souls of deep-fried aliens and they hold soup cans to get rid of them. I should care what they think?”
It is time we treated all religion, from the worship of TV actors in Soap Operas and footballers to the weird guys in dresses and funny hats as a joke not as a social force to be taken seriously.
They should not be protected in any way. They should never have tax-exempt status. They should be mocked, ridiculed and otherwise generally ignored.
Their time has passed.
It is time we grew up, became adults, stood tall as Real Men …
… and inherited the stars.
the principle of taqiyya in action
terrorism has no religion
does not indicate or prove that
religion has no terrorism
From Pink Squirrel: “the principle of taqiyya in action”
Who? Me?
I doubt it. I don’t have that subroutine.
Hell, I don’t even believe in Physics. I just use it ‘cos it mostly works.
And, yes, I know I’m inconsistent. It’s a bonus part of my personality.
re ‘using your farts to propel you towards a large brick’
they would be stuck there all day if they did because as I understand it
every time they do so they have to start the prayer again
also gives rise to another important question
given the earth is a sphere there must exist a circle on it where facing mecca in either direction is the same distance – in such a location any muslim prayer would be as ‘blasphemous’ as ‘devout’
From Pink Squirrel: “the principle of taqiyya in action”
Who? Me?
No the cartoon at the top
“… cartoon …”? We get a cartoon, too? That’s ever so cool!
And WOW!
I’m not sure why Moses is defending ISIS, and not Mo. Excellent commentary, in any case.
Has any Musselman ever been in orbit? That would present interesting issues of timing and orientation.
Maybe they have an equatorial mount and a star-following drive attached to the ship, sort of like amateur telescopes only weirder.
What would an Arabic mission to Mars do? Or one to Eros? Even the days on those aren’t “real” deity-ordained days like the ones Granpaw used to make. Orientating towards the Big Brick would take some gymnastics and could involve an equatorial mount, several tracking drives and pointing your head directly through the planet.
I wonder if they have conversion ephemerides?
It would be far easier for any future explorers who travelled past Saturn, all they would need to do is stand up and nod towards Sol. Earth isn’t ever very far from her in visual angle.
Though from M31 a nod towards the Milky Way galaxy would encompass the entire star cloud so would Daddy accept that as “close enough”?
Imagine New(95) Earth in a distant galaxy with half of the population standing on their heads every couple of hours. We’d best pick one with a low surface gravity or they’ll need chiropractors.
Meanwhile, if a ship is battering through the vacuum at relativistic velocities, say a speed where the Tau factor means one day of theirs is about a million years back home (I know, but bearing with me is funnier)- so they can actually get to M31 to be silly in it – do they need to pray 1,826,250,000 times per their-day? Or would they just catch up when they slow down to a more sane velocity? Does cloud daddy spook know about Relativity? Can it track relativistic ships? Would it care or could it let some slip?
Would they point towards the relativistic image of where they see the Earth or to some calculated point on the squashed-up cosmos where she “really” is? I know such a question is meaningless to a merely human mind, or even to mine, but perhaps it matters to a fussy deity who worries about his pets seeing a naked teat.
We really should solve these and many other issues brought up by offworld activities for the sake of their poor, little souls. We wouldn’t want them to be damned just because we made a mistake in our Vesta to Earth ephemerides, would we?
Justin Case, Mo’ isn’t a real Muslim, he’s an actor [who may or may not be of any religion] but even were he the real one somehow reincarnated [isn’t that blasphemy?] he may well not support a schism from his bit of Islam.
More Muslims are killed by Muslims than were ever killed in all of the crusades. They may hate us but they really, really hate each other, too.
It’s a fair question as to whether they hate other heretic Muslims more or less than they do Israelis.
I wonder whether we could measure it?
And what we’d do with the numbers?
Anyone have a spare hateometer handy?
I just thought of a real funny … there are falling rocks, Asteroids, Minor Planets, Dwarf Planets out there that tumble on three axes simultaneously and do so at quite surprisingly high angular rates.
Orientation and timing on one of those would be … interesting.
“Local day” would not be a term with any realistic meaning.
A clever lad, came up with this
It would be a shame to miss
So I copied here
Very accurate, to steer
Liberals who muslims, want to kiss.
It’s like a bad Monty Python sketch:
“We did this because our holy texts exhort us to to do it.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Wait, what? Yes we did…”
“No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”
“WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit
Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans,
blasphemers, and disbelievers.”
“No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so.”
“Huh!? Who are you to tell us we’re not true Muslims!? Islam is
literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the
truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It
is our very reason for being.”
“Nope. We created you. We
installed a social and economic system that alienates and
disenfranchises you, and that’s why you did this. We’re sorry.”
“What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in
the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians – disenfranchisement
doesn’t even enter into it!”
“Listen, it’s our fault. We don’t blame you for feeling unwelcome and lashing out.”
“Seriously, stop taking credit for this! We worked really hard to pull
this off, and we’re not going to let you take it away from us.”
“No, we nourished your extremism. We accept full blame.”
“OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across”.
Whoever wrote this is a genius, Thanks for sharing. It wasn’t me.
This might interest a few of us. One down, several thousand million to go.
Though there is historical precedent for suspecting that this may not be a “final solution” to him. some bloke called Ghandi was jailed once, as was a nice, young gentleman called Adolf. Both of those went on to rule empires. Popping a perp in the pokey is no guarantee of his being silenced forever.
Our very own friend, Ophelia, has a nice comment on this news though she does seem to miss a point that the ‘Murkins take great pains over: free speech means we get to hear everyone no matter how odious and insane they may be.
Any restriction, even blasphemy and libel laws, is a total destruction of the concept of “free”.
Jailing that vermin is not protecting us. It is denying us the right and the opportunity to tell him loudly and repeatedly that he is a venomous little shite-shaped cretin. In public and to his face.
Jailing him for “the” is as daft and draconian and evil as jailing a witless fool for tweeting a “bomb threat”.
We should be allowed to hear him, his victims (“followers”) should be allowed to her him but they and we should be allowed to hear us, too.
We should be given tax-free status, legal protections and a herd of cops between us and the Islamics when we use a megaphone to scream at their mosques that there are no gods and that their “religion” is a lie and a fraud.
That is “free speech” and equality and multiculturalism and tolerance.
Silencing the anti-theist while supporting and condoning and even paying supporters of ISIS and Boko Haram and Westboro and Rabbis is theocracy in action.
And unfair.
No, jailing us, too is not fair, either. That just compounds the State’s crime.
The idea of the USA’s First Amendment was that all ideas should have an equal platform and that Darwinism should eliminate the daftest. That is also the idea behind England’s “free speech” and sense of fairness.
But it depends, utterly on the platforms being equal.
Giving churches special privileges is wrong in every way.
And, as cretin Choudary has shown, and as he will show when he makes a deal, is released in a couple of weeks then reneges on his promise, prisoners are imbued with almost mystical auras when released.
I’d be willing to offer up a small wager that he’s back ranting about our destruction before 2017.
Probably on his own C4
weeklydaily show.It was helpful of IS to spell it out so clearly.
Gyroscopic prayer mats on space ships would be a problem for muslims
but given the quran declares that the earth is flat
and given that space flight requires prediction for accurate arrival and only mo is allowed to predict
it follows that space flight is ‘haram’ for muslims
another option is to disperse the atoms of the kaba meteor fragment so that they are spread across the entire planet or better still throughout the solar system
thus making directional ‘prayer’ pointless
[ignoring the fact that prayer is pointless to start with]
re: cartoon
Good one, but obvious, i.e. the blind defending (leading?) the blind…
Personally I think that daesh is wonderful
it does three things for the improvement of humanity
1. it encourages hardcore oxygen wasters to blow themselves up -thus ridding the world of their presence
2. It is encouraging moderate and borderline muslims to be disillusioned with the hatefilled core message of islam
3. it does a marvellous job of siphoning off all the fundie vermin and garbage out of western society to a place where they can be legally exterminated without consideration for their human rights
Justin Case says:
I’m not sure why Moses is defending ISIS, and not Mo
numbers 31:14 to 18 explains why
Pink Squirrel, dropping the big brick onto Sol would solve the orientation issue. The solar wind would disperse it throughout the system and, eventually, the galaxy. By the time humans got to M31, the black brick could even have been splashed over the Local Group.
Even if it were not, the faithful could always pretend it had been.
Pretending things that are absurd are also true is a skill they require.
Prayer is never useless. There have been studies showing that a small detrimental effect is sometimes present when patients are informed that they are prayed over. Scientific, repeatable studies. It is a tiny effect but even a tiny effect that harms the faithful is all to the good.
No study has ever shown any significant beneficial effect of prayer, whether the patient was informed of the praying or not and no matter what if any faith the patient had.
That tells me that people knowing they are being prayed for give up struggling to get better and rely on the benefits of their invisible daddy, a strategy doomed to failure as there are no gods.
Still, we should constantly remind priests, popes, rabbis, imams and other perverts that they are being prayed for in the hope that it hastens their removal from society.
Doing good for the species by way of doing evil to individuals under colour of helping them. That’s so cool.
On your assertion that Islamic mass murder is evolution in action and thereby good for the species in the long term might I mention that the buggers are raping everything with an orifice, from babies to goats and that they probably breed far faster than war can reduce their population.
Even thought they much prefer the rear ends of camels, young males and when none of those are available, women, they do accidentally find the wrong entry point occasionally, somehow, as evidenced by the rampant herds of Muslims everywhere.
If theistic fuckwittery is genetically inheritable rather than culturally we need to irradiate their gonads massively before they get to the fertile women.
If it is nurture not nature we only need to let them all kill each other before the pop-ups reach school-ages.
That only takes disinformation propaganda techniques.
True story:
Last night Wikipedia led me to the article on “Shabbat clocks” which turn lights on and off using a timer. “Shlomo Auerbach notes that in certain timers, which are designed with a peg that must be removed in one notch and reinserted in a second notch, it is prohibited to reset when a light will turn on, even if the action will occur later than planned, because reinserting the peg in the second notch constitutes programming a light to turn on when, until that instant, the light would not have turned on at all because the peg had been removed.[41] He did not comment on the case where a spare peg is available to be inserted in the second notch before removal of the first.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_on_Shabbat#Shabbat_clocks
Then I read loner-too’s analysis of how a Muslim astronaut could figure out which direction to pray in.
I was all set to write something snarky when I realized…
I’m an embedded software engineer. They pay me to do exactly this kind of thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrency_control
The kind of thinking involved in praying toward Mecca, Shabbat timers, and concurrency control is absolutely necessary to modern technology. If thousands of software engineers hadn’t done it, and gotten it mostly right, you would not be able to read these words.
Clarification: even if a small object, for example an otherwise useless black brick, were dropped onto Sol it would disperse quite thoroughly through the ecliptic and beyond. The solar wind would blast much of it “straight up” from the point of near-impact but the twisting, rotating, leaky solar magnetic fields would scatter the individual atoms across a vast region.
The solar wind flows like a spiral out towards the heliopause where it rams against the interstellar medium to form a large bubble.
This bubble is not solid, it leaks into the galaxy which, itself, leaks into the gases of the Local Group of galaxies which leak into the intergalactic medium.
So it is well within the realm of possibility that a few atoms of any random comet, rock or falling big brick that tries to intersect Sol could theoretically end up several galactic diameters from the Sun. Given time enough.
There is a lot of vacuum to cover in such a scenario but even tiny, little bricks have many, many atoms and some would be accelerated to near lightspeed.
So, if Muslims want to ensure they can always and forever pray to their holy heap of rock they should support ESA/JAXA/JPL/NASA with loads of funding to create a missile capable of doing the deed.
But I’d be surprised if any of their priests saw the ineffable logic of this idea. Though it is, I modestly admit, a stroke of utter genius.
There is, apparently, a whole heap of leaking going on in this cosmos. Anyone know a good plumber?
Mr. Phoenix, you are not only very bright you are also absolutely correct.
But I was funnier.
Even if not by very much.
Point of information, Mr. Phoenix, don’t some hospitals and other Israeli places hire goyim, kaffer or whatever infidels are called to do the peg insertions, lift-button pushes and other “work” that ultra-orthodox Jews won’t on the Sabbath?
Or was that typical anti-semitic propaganda I picked up somewhere?
pink squirrel
“given the earth is a sphere there must exist a circle on it where facing mecca in either direction is the same distance – in such a location any muslim prayer would be as ‘blasphemous’ as ‘devout’”
Or you could be on a boat at a certain point among the Tuamotu Archipelago & any direction would be toward Mecca.
the antipodes of mecca- would that not count as the inverse of ‘holy’ – and therefore satanic in muslim eyes
re
ultra-orthodox Jews won’t on the Sabbath?
or any other day of the week -as such would interfere with rocking back and forth in prayer [ according to u tube videos about them]
Well, yes and no. The individuals that lead IS(IS|L)? probably are indeed motivated by a desire to kill all the infidels. But if not for western foreign policy, they’d just be a handful of kooks. The reason groups like them can attract a significant following is because they’re seen as the only ones capable of standing up to the foreigners that have spent the past several decades bombing them and arming maniacs and dictators in their part of the world.
Pink Squirrel, you reminded me of a thing. When I was very much younger than I am now, I had a friend who was interested in woo-woo stuff. He had loads of books, which I read. Some of them were on astral projection. A couple suggested that one could loosen one’s “astral body” and teach it to disengage from the meat by rocking back and forth for a while every day.
I don’t remember my friend ever managing to astrally project but I lost touch several millennia ago so maybe he taught the technique to the UOJ’s?
Mr. Kleppe, if not for the West and the “Commies” one-upping each other by selling guns to the savages, and places like South Africa making the odd bob on the side those nut-jobs wouldn’t even be a poor joke. They’d be harmless.
Our leaders made them dangerous. Those same leaders that repeatedly enact laws restricting our freedoms in a pretence of protecting us from the creatures they, themselves, made.
Our leaders created the monsters, fed them, armed them, built their countries out of sand and camel stools and aimed them at us.
Then they attack us in the name of defeating them.
Which, of course, our leaders will never let happen for they need Daesh and Boko and the other bogeymen.
Daesh can win for they dont care about tomorrow. We can’t.
They are going to kill us all.
To the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9OcG5A788Q
that one could loosen one’s “astral body”
I recall a new age book or pamphlet on this which seemed to indicate that astral projection was best achieved during REM sleep
Loner too says ‘By the time humans got to M31’
why M31 out of the billions of galaxies to choose from?
– do you know something the rest of us don’t?
we need to irradiate their gonads massively before they get to the fertile women
given they are operating in the area of Iraq – which just happens to have been bequeathed 700 tonnes of depleted uranium dust by America
then it made already be an ongoing project
Pink Squirrel, I do know that M31 is the closest large Grand Design spiral galaxy to the one most of us are living in. It’s an obvious target for a Diaspora once this place gets a little crowded and it is relatively easy to get to.
Well, compared to some others it is.
It’s just sitting there. If a star-spanning culture is going to aim for anything outside of our galaxy M31 is so bloody obvious.
The same thing works in reverse, of course. From M31 our little star cloud is the loveliest, most obvious thing to aim at.
Of course, some tribes, cultures, people will go for the littler, more obscure star clouds and even for individual floaty stars so they can hide or get away from the Big Companies but M31 and the Milky Way (we really, really need a better name for our galaxy) are like the great Cities.
Indeed, one would expect to see a stream of Travellers flowing both ways already. Assuming alien life is possible. That we don’t is interesting.
Depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, the high-energy bits have been extracted for purposes other than being shot at humans. Granite is more deadly than depleted uranium. It’s not really a good way of inducing mutation in protoplasm.
It is a heavy, dense metal so it is a good way of introducing holes in protoplasm. DU bullets are good ammo, for certain values of “good”.
Freefox, you have a valid point.
“… a few of our cars flooded …”.
A “few” of their cars.
What ever happened to humbleness, poverty and all those nice things?
loner-too, given the way Tony Perkins’ mind works, I wouldn’t be surprised if he thinks God is punishing him with the flood because he hasn’t done enough to stop abortion and gay marriage 🙁 . I’m reminded of an episode of the TV series Babylon 5, in which G’Kar is asked, “What is truth, and what is God?” ( https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Meditations_on_the_Abyss )
Also, poverty, chastity, and obedience are requirements for Roman Catholic clergy, and for the clergy of some other Christian sects, but most of the fundamentalist Christian clergy I’ve heard of are focused on the prosperity gospel ( http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/christianity/2009/03/the-problem-for-the-prosperity-gospel.aspxseem )
two cents’ worth, I honestly can not understand that mindset. I don’t grasp how it can possibly matter who or what a mammal attaches itself to. I’ve seen photographic images of cats cuddling rabbits, ducklings, Rotty-dogs and Alsatians. I’ve seen humans hug horses. I truly don’t understand why anyone would have a problem with two girls cuddling, or two men.
Okay, there’s a line in a book [one line, once in one book] telling us that male homosex is a naughty thing but the same book tells us thousands and thousands and millions of times to dash babies heads against rocks and we have, for the most part, stopped obeying that one.
We have, petty much, started to ignore almost everything in that book. So why should we bother with the one, single, solitary instance of homophobia?
We might as well fix the sicle-obol exchange rate to five to one because it says that in their book.
I don’t see rabid exchange-rate fixers burning people to death and throwing them off buildings to preserve the value of five for sicles to obols so why are they so hot and bothered about another instruction among the many millions in their book?
Do they build all of their temples according to instruction?
Do they … ah, to the non-real hells with it. They aren’t going to listen so why bother?
Were we religious, I would be preaching to the choir. 🙂
I wish there was a way to get it all to just stop!.
Without the religious we wouldn’t need all those Snoopers’ Charter laws enabling the spooks, or the rings of steel or the CCTV cameras or the pseudo-security of the gate-rapists at airports and increasingly everywhere else.
We would be far more free had there never been Muslims and Christians and Jews.
Of course, it is now too late. Even were the islamics to lay down their guns, bombs and knives and convert to the Light of Reason the laws and the T.S.A.’s would stay.
Politicians never give up a control mechanism. Nor do cops.
Fucking theist cunts are why we can never have anything nice.
This might interest a few. It seems that the menopause is designed by Evolution to provide us with females old enough to know how to find the local Post Office. Repositories of arcane knowledge and experience.
And why is this possibly interesting, I don’t hear anyone ask?
Well, now we have books, maps, street signs and Mapquest, we no longer have a use for those elderly crones, do we?
I have a small, modest proposal.
And before you all scream at me for being a barbarian, look at what we have as a Prime Minister.
re
Without the religious we wouldn’t need all those Snoopers’ Charter laws enabling the spooks, or the rings of steel or the CCTV cameras or the pseudo-security of the gate-rapists at airports and increasingly everywhere else.
despite sharing your opinion of religion in general – I think that religion is an excuse not a reason for the items you mention
loner-too, you say:
“There have been studies showing that a small detrimental effect is sometimes present when patients are informed that they are prayed over. Scientific, repeatable studies.” To emulate Wikipedia comments on poorly written articles: Which studies? Citation needed.
You continue: “That tells me that people knowing they are being prayed for give up struggling to get better and rely on the benefits of their invisible daddy” This is a supposition and not a necessary logical conclusion. Firstly, what was the state of the dying individuals: conscious, delirious, suffering, calm, compos mentis, etc. Secondly, were the dying themselves religious, agnostic or atheist? If atheist, another interpretation could be that upon hearing the prayers they gave up in despair of the human race ever becoming logical; or they got so angry at the praying that they it brought on a heart attack.
Please, let us leave generalized, unsubstantiated claims together with concomitant dubious conclusions to the theists – they have a talent for that kind of thing.
Well, by that token, when Trump says he represents America, we have to accept that he’s right.
Michael, that’s too much like work, old pal. You are totally correct and I was entirely and completely wrong.
It won’t happen again. That is a generalisation you can rely on.
Pink Squirrel, you, too are right.
It’s been nice.
Just as avery small parting gift to my friend,Micheal, here’s a couple of for and against links cited as requested.
Not that I’ve researched very thoroughly, nor have I worked in the field. Nor, I must admit, have I ever prayed to anything for anything.
I have never seen the point.
So you can probably assume correctly that I have a bias against the power of prayer.
I have Pru Freedad this a couple of times but I happily accept any typographicals that have not been killed without mercy.
… and, my friend Michael, when I do [a tiny bit of] the work it is moderated out of reality.
It is probably a good thing.
Nothing I cold contribute was ever worth anything anyway.
loner- too, even if nothing you contribute was ever worth anything -it would still be a greater contribution to humanity than religion has ever been
Instead of shouting “Allah Allakbar”, if they shouted “This has nothing to do with Islam! This has nothing to do with Islam” while chopping into people with axes, or crushing children beneath the wheels of trucks. It would help dispel confusion.
Hey, Loner-too, what’s with all the gloom? I found your posts entertaining; I just had to pick up on the wooly bits. And anyway, it’s not a comedian’s job to worry about wooliness. Keep them coming.
Ms. Handbasket, the Takbir is “Fuck you!”, “Up yours” or “Sod this for a fucking game of fucking soldiers, you fucking fucks!” in Arabic. Like “Grok” and “Cree”, it is an all-purpose phrase that means “I am annoyed, frustrated, pissed-off or overjoyed at all those pretty flames.” or just about anything else one loads the phrase with.
That it also means “My daddy can beat up your daddy, nyah, nyah, nyanyanyah.” is coincidental.
The Arabs only get to read one book. They don’t get to read of the adventures of Klono or Odin or Dirk Gently. They don’t get to watch “Stargate S-1” or “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer”. They are culturally impoverished to a degree not even matched by the savages in the deepest jungle in New Guinea. Their vocabulary is severely constrained by their lack of reading material and other cultural feeds. Their vocabulary of invective is similarly constrained. They essentially only have the one curse word, curse phrase.
Poor dears. They really need to read more Stephen King. His books have a curse word in just about every sentence.
Michael, why the gloom? Bad day, bad month, bad decade. Thank you for the appreciation but you were right. My thinking needs years of training before anything it produces is fit for public consumption. I need to go back to Arisia for Second Stage classes.
Pink Squirrel, if my net worth to the world is greater than that of the more populated religions and nothing more it still may be zero. They are in sum a detriment to the species, to all species, I had thought that I could be of benefit to the cosmos and its peoples. I can’t, I amn’t, I’m not good enough.
You are so very much brighter and more magnificent than me.
Author, than you for finding a re-appearing my list-of-links for Michael. And very, very much thanks for the comic. You are a great boon and benefit to us, and you are also very funny.
Take care. Hugs and kisses.
Buy Barmaid one from me. She’s nice.
The ISS orbits the earth every 92 minutes. So, using a 92 minute day, that means a rug bumper would need to pray 78 times in a 24 hour period. Picking a direction would be damned near impossible. They would be so busy praying, they would miss Mo flying by on his winged unicorn.
Thanks, Loner-too, for the links. I’ve finally got round to reading them. Interesting stuff. One conclusion seems to be that if you tell sick people they are the object of general prayer they start believing they must be really ill and anxiety has its inevitable detrimental effect. However, informing people they are being prayed for isn’t a test of the power of prayer at all; if prayer has any power it should work regardless of the prayee’s knowledge. Of course, people who do pray are like gambling addicts – no matter ho many times they lose they still think their lucky rabbit’s foot or holy medal will come up with the goods the next time.
prayer is surely a way round Pascal’s wager
have each religion perform the same amount of ‘prayer’ and which ever religion produces the best positive or least negative results can be said to be the ‘one true faith’ while if none of them show a discernable statistical difference then it would prove that either ‘god’ doesn’t exist or that it exists but has no interest or opinion in or of ‘prayer’