Great strip, Author. Yet again. I almost get tired of saying it, but never tired of your punch lines. You keep topping yourself, though not in the sense of the word I just heard in “Educating Rita”. Strange language you Brits speak.
Really?
It’s that simple?
If only I’d known. I wouldn’t have ended up being told by a Christian that, “On the day you kneel before Him, years of avoiding the evidence there is will seem foolish”
He didn’t say what I’d be expected to do once I’d knelt in front of “Him” or indeed what “Him” would be doing to me, once I’d knelt in front of “Him”.
I have some horrid suspicions, seeing as the Christian God, made a “mini-Him” that wandered round Eden, all alone & naked – before EVENTUALLY “Him”making a woman for Adam (Adam had to name all the animals first – I know – boring job, I’d have called them all Dave).
I hope “Him” as washed it first..
For those of you who don’t get the email from Author, here is a quote from it:
You may notice the return of the “Help J&M pay their hosting fees” button in the r/h column. This is because our current host – the magnificent
nearlyfreespeech.net – have changed their billing system to make it fairer for
sites which don’t use up many resources. Unfortunately, J&M is not one of those
sites, and our monthly bill has increased substantially – so if you have a few
bucks spare to throw into our hosting account, that would be much appreciated.
Just try to imagine life without J&M. You know what you have to do.
Conversely, if the story of Adam and Eve is true, seems to me that they must have arrived knowing a fully developed language from Day One. How convenient.
And, if we did indeed begin from just two people on this entire planet, there was no one around to WRITE DOWN the story of Adam and Eve. I wonder, at what point did someone take it upon himself to start jotting down all this history? Has that answer ever been provided? I’d be curious to learn how long it took to develop an alphabet and teach people to read.
Thanks, Author, your subtlety never ceases to amaze. Donation made (I appreciate that you made the default amount modest–it was nice to select a higher amount for a change).
@Ophelia – I know, I know. But jesusandmo.net is too precious to me! Besides, the generosity of J&M readers is boundless, so I don’t really have to pay anything for the hosting.
Thank you tkreference, HaggisForBrains and durham669 for your kind donations.
Re the RSS feed – i know it’s still a problem. I am taking it seriously, because J&M is blocked in some countries, and the RSS feed is the only way readers there can see the strip. Unfortunately, the only person I know who can fix it is very busy just now.
Great cartoon! Iām reminded of a bumper sticker that I have seen. āGod doesnāt believe in Atheists!ā There are a couple of different ways that Christians can interpret that sticker to be true. I read it as true because there would have to be an existent god before said god would be capable of believing anything.
Thanks HaggisForBrains. Too busy appreciating the comic to see the ‘Help pay’, so I needed the prompt. It’s more than worth it. I’ve only just found you all and am still discovering/investigating linked sites. Keep going Author.
Adam and Eve /did/ exist. There is/was a single known human female ancestor, and a single known human male ancestor. It’s just a bit unfortunate for the charming Just-so story in Genesis that ‘Eve’ predates ‘Adam’ by several tens of thousands of years. ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ is one of the magic phrases to search for if you want to know more.
As I understand things there would not be enough genetic diversity to account for our population. Also remember that after Cain killed Able he went to the land of Nod and found himself a wife. Never have been able to get a decent answer from any xtian.
I’ve read in several comments that some readers were having trouble getting to J & M. The following URL goes straight there from Firefox running under GNU/Linux Fedora 17 O/S
Peter says: ” Nice! ācourse you could get there by just doing what liberal xtians do, āI donāt believe in the O.T.”
Many liberal Christians do their best to overlook the O.T. (saying it either doesn’t apply or is simply metaphor) but I often wonder how they get around what was said by Jesus in the New Testament:
āFor if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?ā – John 5:46-47
@Herm:
I think you miss the point with Paul. While Jesus & Mo share only the argumentation with the Barmaid (either Evolution is true or scripture), Paul shares the starting point of the debate with his addressees (Jesus did resurrect -> cp Verse 20). From there, he argues why this logically leads to acknowledging that there is also a resurrection of the dead. Paul is not so naive to talk to nonbelievers here, he writes to the church of Corinth. Paul does not seek to convince nonbelievers with such an argumentation, as Jesus and Mo try. Paul just seeks to explain to fellow Christians that you can’t have one without the other.
today marks an important point in my family. my 10yr old son, entirely of his own reasoning, came to the conclusion that god isn’t real, and that in fact there is nothign of the sort.
He came to this conclusoin because:
A) the beliefs of past cultures are regarded as untrue (and in the future peoplewill say: in the 21st century they believed this and that, how silly)
B) it’s unlikely that there is someone jut sitting thre saying “i protect you, my children”
AoS:
Don’t be too hard on Nassar; his command of English is so poor that it is often not just ambiguous, but opaque. I have no idea what he’s getting at in this ‘limerick’, he could be mocking evolution, but he could just as well be trying to say that J&M (or whoever he means by ‘this brilliant crew’) acknowledge evolution, and people who believe in ID have goo for brains. As written, it is ‘intelligent designs’ – whatever they are – that have the brains, which is nonsensical.
Also, I think ‘all there is to know about Intelligent Design’ should at least include the words ‘fraudulent’ and ‘creationism’ somewhere. ID is not an empty container, it is a jar of toxic waste. All you have done here is put a blank label on it.
Hotrats, the point I was trying to make was that I.D. is a concept so flimsy that one can see straight through it.
I need to find a way to wobble that fence he’s sitting on.
Darwin Harmless says:
January 23, 2013 at 12:45 pm
“..You keep topping yourself, though not in the sense of the word I just heard in āEducating Ritaā. Strange language you Brits speak.”
Bally colonials! I suppose you think that having a steaming faggot or two for lunch, before retiring to a quiet corner to suck on a fag, is something you’d see in an X-rated movie. š
I wonder if the guy with his promotional shirt on knows how well many Germans understand English. For the non-German speakers, Lies! is the imperative of the verb lesen, to read.
Darwin Harmless
“You keep topping yourself, though not in the sense of the word I just heard in āEducating Ritaā. Strange language you Brits speak.”
Coming from someone who’d think nothing of “patting on the fanny” that’s a bit rich!
Hotrats, FYI here is a quote from NBH from over two years ago (“Shine”):
Nassar Ben Houdja says:
October 4, 2010 at 2:50 pm
What is the point of presenting evidence derived from logic, reason or faith that the recipient denies automatically? There are a lot of things that one has to figure out for oneself, such as, every discussion does not have to end in a conversion.
Poor command of English – I think not! I think he is playing games with us.
Thanks, HFB. I’ve been saying that for aeons. Well, either that he’s playing, or he has a split personality: one is the Nassar who composed the poem above, the other being the Nassar who wrote this;
“Nassar Ben Houdja says:
February 1, 2011 at 3:30 pm
Prejudice can be the trigger
To problems that just get bigger
Those who canāt get along
Around here donāt belong
Their absence is better we figure.”
I’d have gone with ‘only’ rather than ‘just’ in the second line, but other than that, it could have been written by a different person, so disimilar it is to his poor attempt of yesterday.
“….before retiring to a quiet corner to suck on a fag, is something youād see in an X-rated movie.”
Of course, with the way attitudes to cigarette smoking are going, that might well be true in the UK as well soon… š
I’ve always liked the story that Dave Allen used to tell – he reckons he went into an art shop in the US, and asked for a rubber, and further explained that he wanted one of the plastic type that come to bits when you use them…
Good call, Martin. We smokers are the new pariahs, reviled by even the most liberal-minded of people (including at least one of our own esteemed regulars).
“Benny says:
January 24, 2013 at 10:20 am
@Herm:
I think you miss the point with Paul..[he].. just seeks to explain to fellow Christians that you canāt have one without the other.”
Benny, that’s exactly the point of this cartoon: if Adam and Eve never existed then everything that followed is wrong. Both believers and non-believers agree that ‘you can’t have one without the other’, the difference being that believers think that it confirms their beliefs (as in ‘god is real because it says so in the Bible: the Bible is correct because it is the word of god: I know it’s the word of god because i says so in the Bible….’ or ‘A&E is true because Christianity, Christianity is true because A&E..”).
Nice to see that, by describing Paul as “not so naive to talk to nonbelievers” you realise that his arguments will not stand up to a little honest scrutiny.
Robert Anton Wilson once said that we owe it to ourselves to thoroughly exhaust the possibilities of an explanation based on ‘cock up’, before reaching for one based on ‘conspiracy’, because a true conspiracy is by definition undetectable, wheras the robustness of the ‘cock up’ model of history has been empirically confirmed.
There could be a number of explanations for the disjunction between NBH’s early and current posts, such as early ones keeping to simple ideas, prose being easier to correct than poetry, presence or absence of help, diminishing mental powers, khat abuse, etc.
I really don’t think he is ‘acting dumb’ to confuse or provoke – he seems to be trying to convey points that are just too subtle and abstruse for his limited grammar and vocabulary. Surely, if he were any kind of devious troll, he would now be making himself more understandable, rather than less – why would he go to such trouble to make his meaning unclear?
From odd clues like obsolete idiom and overuse of the ‘-ing’ verb form, my impression is of an Indian English speaker, who probably has a good working knowledge of the day-to-day English he encounters, but is simply out of his depth with J&M’s mixture of philosophic, metaphysical and highly idiomatic language, with the added self-imposed burden of forcing humour and rhyme.
If you think NBH is misrepresenting himself, it is not enough to point out his inconsistencies, which could have numerous reasons – you have to address why he should go to such lengths to deceive us, and offer some evidence of a hidden agenda, or indeed any agenda. It is quite rare for his meaning to be clear enough to identify a point of view, let alone a provocation.
Ah bugger, this site doesn’t strip HTML from comments. That paragraph should read:
Basically, you have <p>, <a> <p>and <img> HTML tags mixed in with the XML rather than being enclosed in a [[CDATA]] block. They appear in between the XML <description> and <content:encoded> tags. This might be whatās causing most RSS readers to ignore the image. If you move that wee section in between the <content:encoded> and </content:encoded> tags then all should work. This will involve a little fiddling in the RSS template in your CMS backend.
Hotrats, he may just be very dedicated to his game, just like god / allah / whatever else they call their deities, are dedicated to their games of hide and seek.
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
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Brilliant as always!
Great strip, Author. Yet again. I almost get tired of saying it, but never tired of your punch lines. You keep topping yourself, though not in the sense of the word I just heard in “Educating Rita”. Strange language you Brits speak.
St Paul got there too, in 1 Corinthians 15:13-16, but didn’t quite take the next step…
I am sorry Author, but I still cannot see the comic strips in Feedly.
Really?
It’s that simple?
If only I’d known. I wouldn’t have ended up being told by a Christian that, “On the day you kneel before Him, years of avoiding the evidence there is will seem foolish”
He didn’t say what I’d be expected to do once I’d knelt in front of “Him” or indeed what “Him” would be doing to me, once I’d knelt in front of “Him”.
I have some horrid suspicions, seeing as the Christian God, made a “mini-Him” that wandered round Eden, all alone & naked – before EVENTUALLY “Him”making a woman for Adam (Adam had to name all the animals first – I know – boring job, I’d have called them all Dave).
I hope “Him” as washed it first..
I’m not seeing them in Google Reader, either — but click-through works just fine.
Excellent.
For those of you who don’t get the email from Author, here is a quote from it:
Just try to imagine life without J&M. You know what you have to do.
Conversely, if the story of Adam and Eve is true, seems to me that they must have arrived knowing a fully developed language from Day One. How convenient.
And, if we did indeed begin from just two people on this entire planet, there was no one around to WRITE DOWN the story of Adam and Eve. I wonder, at what point did someone take it upon himself to start jotting down all this history? Has that answer ever been provided? I’d be curious to learn how long it took to develop an alphabet and teach people to read.
Perfect! Still too bad that only the barmaid gets it.
Thanks, Author, your subtlety never ceases to amaze. Donation made (I appreciate that you made the default amount modest–it was nice to select a higher amount for a change).
I look forward to their next conversation…
You know, Author dear, there are sites that would actually pay you, as opposed to you paying them.
š
Nice! ‘course you could get there by just doing what liberal xtians do, “I don’t believe in the O.T.”
HaggisForBrains says: “Just try to imagine life without J&M. You know what you have to do.”
Thanks for the reminder, I haven’t donated in awhile. Life, without J&M? No thanks.
@Ophelia – I know, I know. But jesusandmo.net is too precious to me! Besides, the generosity of J&M readers is boundless, so I don’t really have to pay anything for the hosting.
Thank you tkreference, HaggisForBrains and durham669 for your kind donations.
Re the RSS feed – i know it’s still a problem. I am taking it seriously, because J&M is blocked in some countries, and the RSS feed is the only way readers there can see the strip. Unfortunately, the only person I know who can fix it is very busy just now.
Great cartoon! Iām reminded of a bumper sticker that I have seen. āGod doesnāt believe in Atheists!ā There are a couple of different ways that Christians can interpret that sticker to be true. I read it as true because there would have to be an existent god before said god would be capable of believing anything.
Thanks HaggisForBrains. Too busy appreciating the comic to see the ‘Help pay’, so I needed the prompt. It’s more than worth it. I’ve only just found you all and am still discovering/investigating linked sites. Keep going Author.
Evolution, life from primordial stew
Presents this brilliant crew.
Intelligent designs
Follow the same lines
Their brains made of protoplasmic goo.
Adam and Eve /did/ exist. There is/was a single known human female ancestor, and a single known human male ancestor. It’s just a bit unfortunate for the charming Just-so story in Genesis that ‘Eve’ predates ‘Adam’ by several tens of thousands of years. ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ is one of the magic phrases to search for if you want to know more.
… Eve must have been /such/ a cradle-snatcher…
Author: one of your best, IMO.
As I understand things there would not be enough genetic diversity to account for our population. Also remember that after Cain killed Able he went to the land of Nod and found himself a wife. Never have been able to get a decent answer from any xtian.
I’ve read in several comments that some readers were having trouble getting to J & M. The following URL goes straight there from Firefox running under GNU/Linux Fedora 17 O/S
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/jesusandmo
Peter says: ” Nice! ācourse you could get there by just doing what liberal xtians do, āI donāt believe in the O.T.”
Many liberal Christians do their best to overlook the O.T. (saying it either doesn’t apply or is simply metaphor) but I often wonder how they get around what was said by Jesus in the New Testament:
āFor if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?ā – John 5:46-47
Nassar, old fruit, I’m about to teach you all there is to know about Intelligent Design. Ready? Here goes:
Is that clear enough?
@durham669
And Matthew 1:17-18
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
That’s actually Matthew 5:17-18
@Herm:
I think you miss the point with Paul. While Jesus & Mo share only the argumentation with the Barmaid (either Evolution is true or scripture), Paul shares the starting point of the debate with his addressees (Jesus did resurrect -> cp Verse 20). From there, he argues why this logically leads to acknowledging that there is also a resurrection of the dead. Paul is not so naive to talk to nonbelievers here, he writes to the church of Corinth. Paul does not seek to convince nonbelievers with such an argumentation, as Jesus and Mo try. Paul just seeks to explain to fellow Christians that you can’t have one without the other.
Hope this lead to some clarification.
God bless
funny strip š
today marks an important point in my family. my 10yr old son, entirely of his own reasoning, came to the conclusion that god isn’t real, and that in fact there is nothign of the sort.
He came to this conclusoin because:
A) the beliefs of past cultures are regarded as untrue (and in the future peoplewill say: in the 21st century they believed this and that, how silly)
B) it’s unlikely that there is someone jut sitting thre saying “i protect you, my children”
i was beaming wiht pride. š
Darwin Harmless – you wait till a Brit asks you what time you want to be knocked up in the morning.
frannyy – a proud day for you indeed š
AoS:
Don’t be too hard on Nassar; his command of English is so poor that it is often not just ambiguous, but opaque. I have no idea what he’s getting at in this ‘limerick’, he could be mocking evolution, but he could just as well be trying to say that J&M (or whoever he means by ‘this brilliant crew’) acknowledge evolution, and people who believe in ID have goo for brains. As written, it is ‘intelligent designs’ – whatever they are – that have the brains, which is nonsensical.
Also, I think ‘all there is to know about Intelligent Design’ should at least include the words ‘fraudulent’ and ‘creationism’ somewhere. ID is not an empty container, it is a jar of toxic waste. All you have done here is put a blank label on it.
Hotrats, the point I was trying to make was that I.D. is a concept so flimsy that one can see straight through it.
I need to find a way to wobble that fence he’s sitting on.
Darwin Harmless says:
January 23, 2013 at 12:45 pm
“..You keep topping yourself, though not in the sense of the word I just heard in āEducating Ritaā. Strange language you Brits speak.”
Bally colonials! I suppose you think that having a steaming faggot or two for lunch, before retiring to a quiet corner to suck on a fag, is something you’d see in an X-rated movie. š
You could add to the confusion with, ‘All the more enjoyable for being completely pissed at the time’.
I saw this on the Freethinker site posted by Stephen Mynett it’s too good not to share.
I should add that it is nice to know the salafists in Germany have a sense of humour as the picture from this article about them giving out free korans shows: http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article106568682/Korandruck-gestoppt-Geschaeftsfuehrer-gefeuert.html
I wonder if the guy with his promotional shirt on knows how well many Germans understand English. For the non-German speakers, Lies! is the imperative of the verb lesen, to read.
Darwin Harmless
“You keep topping yourself, though not in the sense of the word I just heard in āEducating Ritaā. Strange language you Brits speak.”
Coming from someone who’d think nothing of “patting on the fanny” that’s a bit rich!
Hotrats, FYI here is a quote from NBH from over two years ago (“Shine”):
Poor command of English – I think not! I think he is playing games with us.
Thanks, HFB. I’ve been saying that for aeons. Well, either that he’s playing, or he has a split personality: one is the Nassar who composed the poem above, the other being the Nassar who wrote this;
“Nassar Ben Houdja says:
February 1, 2011 at 3:30 pm
Prejudice can be the trigger
To problems that just get bigger
Those who canāt get along
Around here donāt belong
Their absence is better we figure.”
I’d have gone with ‘only’ rather than ‘just’ in the second line, but other than that, it could have been written by a different person, so disimilar it is to his poor attempt of yesterday.
J & M is banned in some countries? But why? Is laughing outlawed?
No, steeve, just commom sense š
“….before retiring to a quiet corner to suck on a fag, is something youād see in an X-rated movie.”
Of course, with the way attitudes to cigarette smoking are going, that might well be true in the UK as well soon… š
I’ve always liked the story that Dave Allen used to tell – he reckons he went into an art shop in the US, and asked for a rubber, and further explained that he wanted one of the plastic type that come to bits when you use them…
rss not working here, using google reader.
Good call, Martin. We smokers are the new pariahs, reviled by even the most liberal-minded of people (including at least one of our own esteemed regulars).
“Benny says:
January 24, 2013 at 10:20 am
@Herm:
I think you miss the point with Paul..[he].. just seeks to explain to fellow Christians that you canāt have one without the other.”
Benny, that’s exactly the point of this cartoon: if Adam and Eve never existed then everything that followed is wrong. Both believers and non-believers agree that ‘you can’t have one without the other’, the difference being that believers think that it confirms their beliefs (as in ‘god is real because it says so in the Bible: the Bible is correct because it is the word of god: I know it’s the word of god because i says so in the Bible….’ or ‘A&E is true because Christianity, Christianity is true because A&E..”).
Nice to see that, by describing Paul as “not so naive to talk to nonbelievers” you realise that his arguments will not stand up to a little honest scrutiny.
HFB and AoS:
Robert Anton Wilson once said that we owe it to ourselves to thoroughly exhaust the possibilities of an explanation based on ‘cock up’, before reaching for one based on ‘conspiracy’, because a true conspiracy is by definition undetectable, wheras the robustness of the ‘cock up’ model of history has been empirically confirmed.
There could be a number of explanations for the disjunction between NBH’s early and current posts, such as early ones keeping to simple ideas, prose being easier to correct than poetry, presence or absence of help, diminishing mental powers, khat abuse, etc.
I really don’t think he is ‘acting dumb’ to confuse or provoke – he seems to be trying to convey points that are just too subtle and abstruse for his limited grammar and vocabulary. Surely, if he were any kind of devious troll, he would now be making himself more understandable, rather than less – why would he go to such trouble to make his meaning unclear?
From odd clues like obsolete idiom and overuse of the ‘-ing’ verb form, my impression is of an Indian English speaker, who probably has a good working knowledge of the day-to-day English he encounters, but is simply out of his depth with J&M’s mixture of philosophic, metaphysical and highly idiomatic language, with the added self-imposed burden of forcing humour and rhyme.
If you think NBH is misrepresenting himself, it is not enough to point out his inconsistencies, which could have numerous reasons – you have to address why he should go to such lengths to deceive us, and offer some evidence of a hidden agenda, or indeed any agenda. It is quite rare for his meaning to be clear enough to identify a point of view, let alone a provocation.
Hi Author,
Re: RSS. It looks as if your RSS feed is not quite well-formed enough:
http://validator.w3.org/appc/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jesusandmo.net%2Ffeed%2F
Basically, you have , and HTML tags mixed in with the XML rather than being enclosed in a [[CDATA]] block. . They appear in between the XML and tags. This might be what’s causing most RSS readers to ignore the image. If you move that wee section into the tags then all should work. This will involve a little fiddling in the RSS template in your CMS backend.
Hope this helps!
Ah bugger, this site doesn’t strip HTML from comments. That paragraph should read:
Basically, you have <p>, <a> <p>and <img> HTML tags mixed in with the XML rather than being enclosed in a [[CDATA]] block. They appear in between the XML <description> and <content:encoded> tags. This might be whatās causing most RSS readers to ignore the image. If you move that wee section in between the <content:encoded> and </content:encoded> tags then all should work. This will involve a little fiddling in the RSS template in your CMS backend.
@John – thanks. Those are the line we’re working along at the mo.
Hotrats, he may just be very dedicated to his game, just like god / allah / whatever else they call their deities, are dedicated to their games of hide and seek.
Well the feed validates but the image is still not in the description.