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March 21st, 2012
Who’s that nodding at the back? Ratzinger? Get a grip lad, it’s supposed to be satire.
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I’ve had that very conversation on the forum of our local paper.
Nice view! Is that Skiddaw in the background?
Yes, the sad part is that many will agree with them and not see the joke. Good one, Author. Again. Don’t really know how you do it.
@DH – thanks!
@Bob T – Arthur’s Seat.
Brilliant once again 🙂
The future of what passes for humanity
Is an engineered form of insanity
The politically correct
Continuously object
Turning the world to insipid banality.
Brilliant!
@Nassar I think the word you are looking for is “bananity”. It won’t make any more sense but at least it will rhyme.
Lovely bit of role reversal. Nice one.
The 145 or so puff pieces lining the sidebar of the DM article – more than tripling the length of the Web page, each and every one some pointless, irrelevant celebrity gossip – suggest that “gay marriage” isn’t actually the biggest threat to society. (Or any threat at all, of course.)
(Irony quotes around “gay marriage” because there’s nothing specifically “gay” about it if two men or two women want to get married. It’s simply marriage. Same deal. Not much point to egalitarian legislation if the proposed terminology constantly belies the goal.)
“Mr Cameron’s ministers have assured the churches that same-sex marriage will be permitted only through civil ceremonies, and churches will not be forced to celebrate gay marriages.”
Well, that’s a relief. Because every sane person was sure that when marital privileges are extended to all, those who aren’t interested in any particular aspect are going to be forced to take part. Y’know, just like Sunday School or Mass.
Ridiculous. That’s not even a slippery slope argument. It’s a slippery cane being employed for deliberate pratfalls on a perfectly level, even, high-traction surface. (Like someone purposely slipping on a casino floor to win damages against the owner.) I’d call it a Banana Peel argument. You can’t argue “dire consequences” if you’re just making them up off the top of your head with no regard to the actual cause-and-effect involved.
The religious organizations – and those in charge of them – get more comical with each passing month. Those that seek to rationalize and soothe the wounded religious egos while trying to make real-world progress just get more tragic.
I wonder how my parents’ divorce in 1995 was prescient of gay marriage ruining it for everyone 10 years later (in Canada) ??? 😐 Gotta watch your back– and your fronts– with the gay folk: they’re a tricky lot.
Srsly, how do people think like this?
I agree with Darwin Harmless…. well said, my friend.
The guy in the funny hat hides behind his bigotry by pretending he’s defending children. Meanwhile, he does nothing about his priests raping young children. How does Ratz sleep at night?
Author, once again you’ve condensed all of the bigotry and double-speak into four frames of brilliance. Bravo!
Darwin Harmless, “@Nassar I think the word you are looking for is “bananity”. It won’t make any more sense but at least it will rhyme.”
I damn near choked on my coffee reading that, what didn’t get sucked into my lungs exploded from my nose. What where we saying the other day about sarcasm being an art form?
@durham669
He can’t miss, don’t matter what he do, he can’t miss.
Don’t matter if he do two opposites things, both are correct. Every dictator can sleep with a thing called “Infallibility” and with people believe in this weird thing(don’t laugh in “believe in weird thing”, I know they are theist).
Oi, Mo, I hope you’ve never accused anyone of Islamophobia, chum!
As for Ratzinger – he can explain about those boys castrated in the Netherlands in the 1950s – the ones who reported being molested by a priest.
And who cares about society as they know it anyway? Their vision of society is sick, muddled, emotionally opportunist and cruel, insensitive and arrogant. My ten cents.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2012/03/were-here-to-help-you/
“bananity”
har!
That last thing in the previous comic.
Never mind.
Holy Shi’ite! They live in Edinburgh? Amazing! I live next to the mosque, I probably bump into Mo now and again, how about that.
Peter Harris says:
March 22, 2012 at 9:48 am
Holy Shi’ite! They live in Edinburgh? Amazing!
Of course they live in Edinburgh. It’s so Jesus doesn’t have too far to travel to see his great (x 800, assuming 4 generations per century since he did / didn’t die on the cross) grandkids. Haven’t you seen the Gospel of The DaVinci Code?
@durham669: I’m not sure it’s correct that Ratzy did *nothing* about his priests raping children.
He did worse than that. He covered up their crimes and enabled them to continue.
So, yeah. Your point stands.
Machigai, Author’s got a gremlin or two playing with the site. If you’re not seeing the latest comments (in which case this may be a waste of time) just do a ‘test’ post and the missing comments will appear.
Brother Daniel & durham669; which is why Dawkins so accurately referred to him as a ‘leering old villain in a frock’.
@Gordon. Whats the problem with castration? Sex is just a social construct which we can make go away with a collosal shared game of “lets pretend”. Evolution stopped at the neck–or in this case–the balls, and doesnt apply to humans anyway cos we are special and magic. Or so I have been told. Repeatedly. By morons.
Author, not sure if you do requests, but its worth asking if you have a strip sketching creationism? Or perhaps you can direct me towards one in the archive.
I met my first real live creationist last weekend. It has taken a while for some of the guff I listened to with polite incredulity to sink in.
I’ve even got some homework to do!
WalterWalcarpit, if you have a spare couple of hours it’s well worth clicking the ‘First’ link under the cartoon and reading the whole story so far; I’m sure there are some gentle swipes at creationists contained within Authors hallowed works, but even if I’ve just – unintentionally – made that last bit up, it’ll still be the most fun you could have with your clothes on 🙂
On the subject of creationism, I’ve discovered that I have something in common with PZ Myers; neither of us can resist creationist pamphlets and books, and to date have I’ve amassed quite a sizeable collection of the things. Honestly, they’re so piss-your-pants funny that it’s worth keeping your eyes open for a few.
The level of ignorance on display is staggering; they all claim to offer evidence that evolution isn’t the answer to complexity – complete with the ‘evolution’s just a theory’ chestnut – but all they give is the same-old same-old; personal incredulity; irreducible complexity; not enough time for evolution to happen since God got his modelling clay out of the cupboard; no intermediate species (show me the squidephants); if we came from monkeys then why are there still monkeys, etc. etc.
And it’s all backed up with a mix of carefully mined quotes from the real scientists and lengthy tracts of nonsense from their own ‘experts’ (though they never actually get around to saying just what they are experts in), and they all end with a variant of ‘So now we can see why evolution is false, the truth is blindingly obvious; Goddidit’.
Yes, of course it’s nonsense, but when they claim to refute all of the evidence for evolution since Darwin in just 40 or-so pages, consisting mainly of a few lines of badly written text, and with the rest (usually the majority) of each page taken up with pictures of those animals that are deemed just too pretty or complex to have come about by ‘chance’, it really is irresistably funny nonsense.
One of my favourite nonsensical ‘arguments’ so far read something like;
“Let’s take a look at the humming bird. See how it’s beak is precisely shaped to fit inside the incredibly deep and narrow flower which is it’s ONLY source of food, just as the humming bird is the ONLY way the flower has of reproducing. Ask yourself, how could evolution have slowly shaped the beak (or the flower, whichever the evolutionists claim came first) to it’s current state of perfection over millions of years as Darwin and his disciples (disciples! ooh, get them!) claim? The poor birds would have starved to death having to wait for evolution to enable them to reach the nectar, just as the flower would die out for lack of a carrier for it’s pollen, so both bird and flower would have died out as species before they’d even got a foothold on life.
“But they didn’t die out, did they? We know this because they’re still here. So as we have now proven that they couldn’t have gradually evolved seperately, much less had the incredible good fortune to find each other despite the vastness of our planet, how did they become such a perfect fit, totally reliant on each other? Doesn’t it make more sense to say that both bird and flower were precision engineered from blueprints drawn up by a benevolent Creator?
“What more by way of evidence could even the most obtuse evolutionary scientist ask for? They cannot deny that this pairing – just one of millions of similar examples worldwide we could have used – is the perfect example of efficiency in design, created by a designer for maximum benefit to both species without the profligate waste and suffering demanded by their own poorly thought out ‘theory’, and if they do continue to deny the fact of creation then they are simply lying, both to themselves and to the hapless souls they teach their empty hypothesis to”
It’s comedy gold, folks. I implore you, if ever you come across one of these booklets, go ahead and read it.
@Acolyte of sagan
Its like trying to teach a chicken to paint arguing with these guys,funny but pointless. They attempt to use science to disprove science to prove it was magic, nutters.
@Walter – if you type “evolution” into the search-box in the sidebar, you’ll fined over a dozen strips on the topic.
Gays should be allowed to marry, if for no other reason than they can experience what it’s like to give away a house and a half of everything you own. Or maybe that’s just in California……
AoS, forgive me for being off topic and late to the party, but I have just read the last few comments on the previous thread. In the true spirit of pedantry I have to correct your correction of Free Foxe’s use of ‘hokey pokey’. Half the world uses ‘hokey pokey’ rather than ‘hokey cokey’. Last time I bothered to look it up, no one was sure of the origin of the phrase; please correct me if you know. Certainly, here in Australia, ‘pokey’ seems to be the norm.
Author, surely Walter will ‘find’ without being being ‘fined’? 🙂
Mary2, I must admit that I have never heard the term ‘hokey pokey’. ‘Hocus Pocus’ refers to general mysticism, the Hokey Cokey is a party dance, and ‘Okey Dokey’ means ‘OK’, whilst ‘pokey’ on it’s own is a derogatory term normally applied to small or cramped rooms or homes.
I’m always happy to stand corrected, so if you wouldn’t mind elaborating I’d be interested in knowing the context in which ‘Hokey Pokey’ is used over there.*
*A pedantic aside; I know that Australia is a pretty big landmass, but ‘half the world’?
Acolyte of Sagan, to save hijacking this thread, I recommend you read the first sentence of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokey_pokey.
Oh dear lord. These are our MPs. It’s incredible.
http://www.totalpolitics.com/blog/314662/mps-plea-to-overturn-and39god-can-healand39-ad-ban.thtml
@Acolyte of Sagan I’ve never heard of Hokey Cokey. I do no that Hokey Pokey is the party dance in Canada, where I learned to dance it while turning myself around.
AoS – at least as far as “half the English-speaking world,” mary2 may be quite on target. I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the States who knows the term “Hokey Cokey,” whereas “Hokey Pokey” is the term used for a monotonously repetitive party dance (your mileage may vary, especially if you’re under the age of ten or have kids!).
Linguistic biases are always interesting – we all tend to have default blinders on, positive that the way we know a term is the “real” version. Since all language just develops and grows through use – not necessarily arbitrarily, but certainly nearly unpredictably – there’s no “real” version in the long run, just different versions with different rates and regions of usage.
Said with affectionate pedantry by a bloke in the States still grappling with where and when to say soda, pop, coke, and soft drink. 🙂
Well, you live and learn. Thanks all, especially to Kakapo for the link. A little further down the page is a claim that the dance originated from the Latin Mass. Is there anything they won’t claim as their own?
GE, your refreshing drink confusion is pretty easy for an English-English (as opposed to an American-Eng or Australian-Eng) speaker to clarify; add co2 to water, you get soda; add a flavour to soda and it’s pop; a non-carbonated, flavoured water – or fruit juice – is a soft drink; and coke is the stuff from Bolivia that turns perfectly normal people into insufferable arseholes at parties.
If you grew up in the UK, it’s hokey-cokey. Which is, QED, the correct version. And just to prove it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbUWw8PJf1M
@GE: an obligatory link to the great Pop versus Soda map:
http://popvssoda.com/
Beggars Belief, I’ve just looked at the link you gave. Holy Shit! All that ignorance in so short a missive, a feat hitherto only managed by the writers of the Creationist pamphlets I mentioned earlier. Every line of that letter merits ridicule, but I think that just one line from it says all that’s needed about the intelligence – or lack thereof – of Gary Streeter;
“I would be the first to accept that prayed for people do not always get healed, but sometimes they do.”
Still, it’s good to see at least one public body finally levelling the playing field by pointing out that the Church has to play by the same rules as the rest of us; even if it is only in advertising, it’s a welcome start.
I’ve always liked that map, Brother Daniel! Have linked to it myself, on occasion.
Though I may need to rewrite some of my personal lexicon to capture the simple and intuitive breakdown AoS supplied. It won’t help much here in the States, but it’ll be good to know when I get back to London (hopefully sooner than later).
Beggars Belief – that is one disheartening link. I’d say: if they’re willing to submit their deity for clinical trials, have at it. Otherwise, no explicit claims (“any sickness”??) they can’t back up. (Of course, I suspect they would still have no claims they can back up after clinical trials. I’m just giving them an “open-minded” response. When they chicken out – “our faith doesn’t need proof” – or fail the trials – “he works in mysterious ways” – then I guess that’s that.)
Thanks Kakapo (a New Zealander, I guess) for the link. Links are beyond my technical expertise (as is the Hokey Pokey)!
As for the pop/soda debate, here everything that has no alcohol, is not served hot and is not pure water can just be called soft drink.
GE, in John Diamond’s excellent book ‘Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations’ – a planned ‘uncomplimentary look at complemantary medicine’ of which only 6 chapters were written before his death from cancer – he talks about the scientific testing of ‘alternative’ therapies.
Ray Hyman, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Oregan and a CSICOP colleague of Dawkins, was involved in running properly controlled double-blind testing of ‘kinesiology’. After analysis of the data collected during the trials showed conclusively that the treatment tested had absolutely no effect on the subjects whatsoever, the ‘alternative therapist’ (an un-named leading chiropractor)whose methods it were that had just impressively failed, remained undaunted, telling Hyman;
“You see, that is why we never do double-blind testing anymore. It never works”!
A classic example of denial, methinks. When their so-called therapies fail controlled tests, they brazenly state that it’s the tests that have failed, not their quack remedies, because all that the testing proves is that ‘science doesn’t know everything’. You can bet your last bottle of homeopathic magic water that if the results came out in favour of their quackery, they’d be shouting it from the rooftops.
Exactly right, AoS. I’m all too familiar with Hyman’s takedown of Gary Schwartz, a man who admitted to never using more than single-blind testing (after first declaring his studies were double-blinded, and some have claimed they were “triple-blinded” – sitter, subject and evaluator?).
Interestingly, Schwartz is the guy who claimed his testing was not just double-blinded, but “double-deceased.” He said that a dead woman (Susy Smith) participated in the experiments as an “hypothesized co-investigator.”
In other words, the guy used his premise that the afterlife exists and we can communicate with the deceased to provide a “control” in experiments meant to prove his hypothesis that the afterlife exists and we can communicate with the deceased. And he claimed he knew the control was in place because he thought it into place. In his head.
It’s all so stupefyingly risible.
It’s not hard to see why claimants like the “god heals” contingent invariably back out of testing or complain about it. To paraphrase Colbert: Reality has a scientific bias.
Charlatans the lot of ’em. I blame it all on Lily the Pink.*
*Under 40’s, ask a grown-up 🙂
“You see, that is why we never do double-blind testing anymore. It never works”!
Thus convincingly disproving the long held anthropological theory that intelligence precedes the ability to speak.
Author, thanks for the evolutionary link. There are some absolute gems in there. Real LOL crackers. If only I had had “Tiny” up my sleeve the other night.
I shall try random searches from time to time – I will be sure to let you know if i find a google whack.
I trust you won’t mind if I use your fora for some resources. Though it will be a fine piece of timing to allow space for your comic post to be discussed yet preempt the inevitable hijacking this site inspires.
‘Hijacking’ was entirely the wrong word to describe the fantastic journeys into language that happen here.
Did the pope go to the beach when he was in Cuba? Any pics of him in a bathing suit and a mitre?
An argument that seems to be blocked by the reality filters in religionists: no man who is exclusively homosexual will breed so allowing them to get together in pairs takes two at a time out of the gene pool. Being tolerant and accepting them is the best way to get rid of them rapidly and effectively and most of all humanely.
Sure, their example of loving, quiet, peaceful and harmonious family life might be attractive to some as an example of how to live and so *could* lead to homosexuality looking like a viable lifestyle but the same reasoning and sentiment goes for *heterosexual* families. If “normal” marriages are so wonderful surely only the truly rare person would prefer a “perverse” one, given both examples and given a free choice? And , as mentioned, those rare strange people would slowly become extinct if left alone.
All of which leads to: if the god-squads really hate homosexuals they should *encourage* same-sex marriages with all their might.
But logic never was their strong suit.