Great stuff – good to see the mockery (I mean “respectful commentary”…) being shared round. Maybe get elephant man back with our regular guys at the same time as one of the occasional visits from Moses, for a round-up of silliness. And has there ever been a role for the ghost of L Ron Hubbard??
The religious spunk wombles in control are just tapping into a vast quantity of human ignorance and insecurity. The mental illness that is manifested in the religious mind is a sociably accepted illness…It shouldn’t be…
is there any religion that doesn’t have discrimination built into it at the very least between ‘believers’ and ‘the ‘inferior out-group’
I have read that the multiple arms of Hindu deities are due to the incorporation of other deities into their iconography
Hotrats, with all the Cannabis sativa growing in the mountains I had assumed that all these multiple arms and flying on peacocks and monkey kings was the result of indulgence on long mountain walks. Not that I saw anything like that on my expeditions. Shame, really…
is there any religion that doesn’t have discrimination built into it at the very least between ‘believers’ and ‘the ‘inferior out-group’
Good point, but that applies to most human institutions. We label other entities, human and non-human, left-handed and right-handed, criminal and law-abiding. I’ve heard the idea that categorization is a fundamental property of language use, which is why object-oriented programming languages are so powerful.
Some of our labels and discrimination / segregation are upheld as being legal while others are not. It’s interesting to see how much discrimination at the moment is being considered legal but in bad taste – and how much is considered in good taste but illegal.
Anyway, I was thrilled to see Ganesh here. I hope to see many other ethereal beings in upcoming strips. The more the merrier!
is there any religion that doesn’t have discrimination built into it?
Succ-inct observation. You are correct – for all religions up to and including atheism. 😀
As far as I can tell, the current state of play is that the Equality Act, 2010 c15 recognises caste as a protected characteristic (pt. 2, s 9(5)). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15
Strange to say, caste is a subsidiary of race, not religion. This part of the Act has to be read in conjunction with Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 (c. 24), ss. 97(2)-(4).
(5) A Minister of the Crown …—
(a) must by order amend this section so as to provide for caste to be an aspect of race;
(b) may by order amend this Act so as to provide for an exception to a provision of this Act to apply, or not to apply, to caste or to apply, or not to apply, to caste in specified circumstances.
ERRA also allows the relevant Secretary of State to carry out reviews of the proposed changes. The result was reported in 2018 at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5b5203f2ed915d0b72e1d319/Caste_in_Great_Britain_and_equality_law-consultation_response.pdf#%5B%7B%22num%22%3A341%2C%22gen%22%3A0%7D%2C%7B%22name%22%3A%22XYZ%22%7D%2C70%2C652%2C0%5D
where it was decided not to include caste in particular and rely on case law. However, the possibility is still there.
Now to the conspiracy theory: what if including caste in equality legislation would be a drawback to a certain section of society as well as a benefit to the obvious discriminated parties? There is a small number of jobs in the UK that are only available to a very restricted sector of the population and are handed down within that group to the disadvantage of the rest of the population. This has been the case for centuries and no-one outside this group, no matter how well qualified, has the opportunity even to apply for the jobs. This restricted caste therefore manages to hold on their privileged positions.
Yes, I am referring to to the Head of State and allied posts.
Paranoid?
As far as I know, the USA does not have any laws against discrimination based on caste, but that kind of discrimination has made the news. “The state of California filed a lawsuit this summer [2020] alleging a type of discrimination not frequently cited in U.S. workplaces: caste discrimination. The case involves an all-Indian team of employees at Cisco Systems’ headquarters in San Jose, but similar complaints are popping up at other companies in the tech sector.” The full story is available at https://www.npr.org/2020/10/14/923736245/caste-arrives-in-silicon-valley . I assume that Americans outside the Indian community don’t know or care much about caste, so if there were a law against discrimination based on caste, I doubt that it would lead to discrimination against Hindus in America.
Ganesha was created directly by Shiva’s laughter. Because Shiva considered Ganesha too alluring, he gave him the head of an elephant and a protruding belly.
Ganesha holds, supports, and guides all other chakras, thereby “governing the forces that propel the wheel of life,” to get the feel of life from one o’clock-tails.
The barmaid has put him on notice for engaging his trunk in amorous pursuits or stealing the nearest guy’s beer nuts. When he gets out of hand it is only necessary to remind him that pachyderms are a matriarchal society. Put that in your spunk trumpet and rumble about it, you cockwomble knob socket with a fire hose nose unleashed on the demigods below you. That’s not a handkerchief in your vest pocket. It’s a tarp.
Seattle banned caste discrimination, so there’s at least one place where there’s legal protection specifically from that. Similar scene – as in San Jose, large numbers of high tech workers imported from the Indian subcontinent.
Elsewhere, it might be possible to make a case for racial discrimination. The usual races involved don’t have a lot of science behind their distinctions, as in physical anthropology.
Just browsing through the wikipedia entry, I find an interesting episode in the British colonial period where they declared certain tribes and castes criminal and automatically subject to incarceration. If I were in India and pushing back against the caste system, I’d go heavy on Britain’s role in the devlelopment of the system in recent history.
The caste system in India goes back at least 2,000 years — there has been little intermarriage along the way, and as a result the castes are genetically quite distinct.
hmmm,
MW: Religion is a personal or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices.
Cam: Religion is the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or any such system of belief and worship. It can also mean an activity that someone is extremely enthusiastic about and does regularly, such as football.
With respect, atheism is definitely a religion. The zealotry on display in-forum only confirms the definitions. 🙂
With respect, although the word may be used this way casually, I don’t think extreme enthusiasm for football counts as being a “religion” in the same sense as Christianity or Islam are religions.
IMO, any closed system of beliefs that explains the world for the believer can fairly be considered a religion, especially if believers treat those beliefs as sacred and see dissent as immoral. For example, in this sense I would consider Communism and its modern descendant Wokeism to be religions, despite the total absence of the supernatural in their doctrines. And in this sense, however fervent, closed minded, and intolerant particular atheists might be, I can’t see atheism as a religion, since the absence of God doesn’t really explain anything.
In my view, religion doesn’t really have to explan anything. For example … if I tell you there’s a group of Siberians who believe their souls go on after corporal death to inhabit trees, that explains nothing, right? Do you need to find out more, before you decide they’re probably afflicted with a religion? If you were to dive into the details of Jainism, same thing, would you be looking for some particular sense in which it explains the world? At a casual glance I’m not sure I see that, but that doesn’t make me wonder if it’s religion.
What’s characteristic about the belief is that it’s absurd. It isn’t just doubtful. No one would believe your articles of religious dogma, except in an “act of faith” – and that’s what makes religion tick. Faith.
Common atheism is simply a lack of any such faith. It’s conceivable that there’s someone out there who is sort of committed to an absurd faith that could be atheist in the sense of rejecting the existence of any deity, but that’s surely the exception.
I am Intolerant of stupidity, litter louts, anybody who hurts children and Manchester City fans (see point 1). I am very intolerant of religions and the religious..oh and Donald Trump and anybody who.thinks he isn’t a crook…
To conflate the figurative use of ‘religion’ as descriptive of a great enthusiasm with its original reference to an organised belief in a diety is nonsense.
I have known people with great enthusiasm for chess, gymnastics, train-spotting, stamp-collecting, horse- racing, carpentry, cricket, scotch whisky and many more, some of which I might or might not share.
Atheism is an absence of belief like the absense of interest in any of the foregoing. To be defined as a ‘non stamp-collector’ or a ‘non-gymnast’ etc would be meaningless and virtually endless. Perhaps if the train-spotters had dominated our history and culture in the way that the godbotherers have we would have a word to define us for our non-participation with the activity – Achoochooer?
A void is not a place.
In fairness, a crusading atheist who believed that religion is the root cause of all the world’s problems and that those problems could all be solved by ridding the world of religion would have a positive belief, not an absence of belief. No god maybe, but arguably a devil.
Rrr, yes I believe it was. A much missed wise man.
JB, that is just specious, I’m afraid.
To pursue and encourage rationality over unfounded magical thinking of course is to have a positive belief but it has absolutely no bearing upon a belief in a god.
To suggest that someone who has no belief in a god actually believes in a ‘devil’ is a contradiction in terms. Devils are as much the creation of the human imagination as are gods.
‘As if we were villains by necessity, fools by
Heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and
Treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards,
Liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of
Planetary influence; and all that we are evil in
By a divine thrusting on; an admirable evasion
Of whoremaster man to lay his goatish
Disposition to the charge of a star!’
(Edmund – King Lear)
There is enough natural ‘evil’ in the human condition without inventing ‘devils’.
(The ‘Mango Mussolini’ currently threatening the safety of the world across the pond was influenced by his equally psychopathic dad, not an imaginary creature with horns.)
Golding in Lord of the Flies showed vividly how devils can be created by fevered minds uncontrolled.
A positive believe in the negative consequences of religions, isn’t really systematic enough to qualify as religion, though. It isn’t faith in some absurd proposition, the proposition is debatable, and as presented it isn’t part of any apparent theology or anything.
The religious numb-nuts have no concept (of living without at least 1 invisible friend) I get a headache trying to think-down to their level of gross ignorance. And yes there are professors who look at waterfalls suddenly get Jesus..butcas soon as that happens they should lose their licence to be considered Intelligent…
Think of a Hindu deity in a devotee’s life as a coordinate system in a physical space – e.g., latitude and longitude on the surface of the Earth. This is an imperfect metaphor, but it illustrates some important things.
Does the coordinate system have any independent existence? No.
Does one believe in coordinate systems? The sentence doesn’t make any sense.
Why have coordinate systems? They help one orient oneself and to navigate.
If there is no mutual respect, and toleration is what a society aspires too, then, hey, tolerate fascism and Trumpism and all such which do not respect you.
Mere toleration is not sustainable and will lead to negative consequences.
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
February 24, 2009
Aye. Surely Hinduism is going win when it kicks off. More gods and all that…
Haven’t they got godesses with many arms? Very useful in some situations? No?ĵ
There is a plausible theory that Hindu. iconography, multiple arms and faces etc, is down to hallucinations caused by malnutrition.
Great stuff – good to see the mockery (I mean “respectful commentary”…) being shared round. Maybe get elephant man back with our regular guys at the same time as one of the occasional visits from Moses, for a round-up of silliness. And has there ever been a role for the ghost of L Ron Hubbard??
But wasn’t Hubbards creation of Scientology, just an example of proving how gullible a vast amount of Sapiens are?
The religious spunk wombles in control are just tapping into a vast quantity of human ignorance and insecurity. The mental illness that is manifested in the religious mind is a sociably accepted illness…It shouldn’t be…
is there any religion that doesn’t have discrimination built into it at the very least between ‘believers’ and ‘the ‘inferior out-group’
I have read that the multiple arms of Hindu deities are due to the incorporation of other deities into their iconography
Hotrats, with all the Cannabis sativa growing in the mountains I had assumed that all these multiple arms and flying on peacocks and monkey kings was the result of indulgence on long mountain walks. Not that I saw anything like that on my expeditions. Shame, really…
Succubus wrote:
Good point, but that applies to most human institutions. We label other entities, human and non-human, left-handed and right-handed, criminal and law-abiding. I’ve heard the idea that categorization is a fundamental property of language use, which is why object-oriented programming languages are so powerful.
Some of our labels and discrimination / segregation are upheld as being legal while others are not. It’s interesting to see how much discrimination at the moment is being considered legal but in bad taste – and how much is considered in good taste but illegal.
Anyway, I was thrilled to see Ganesh here. I hope to see many other ethereal beings in upcoming strips. The more the merrier!
Hotrats: In my experience, no amount of cannabis will produce those kind of hallucinations. The little brown mushrooms on the other hand……..
Succ says:
January 24, 2024 at 5:35 pm
is there any religion that doesn’t have discrimination built into it?
Succ-inct observation. You are correct – for all religions up to and including atheism. 😀
In theory, Ba’hai is nondiscriminatory.
Atheism is obviously NOT a religion you numb-nut…
Can I make a demand for the Flying Spaghetti Monster…I have been touched by its noodly appendage…
As far as I can tell, the current state of play is that the Equality Act, 2010 c15 recognises caste as a protected characteristic (pt. 2, s 9(5)). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15
Strange to say, caste is a subsidiary of race, not religion. This part of the Act has to be read in conjunction with Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 (c. 24), ss. 97(2)-(4).
(5) A Minister of the Crown …—
(a) must by order amend this section so as to provide for caste to be an aspect of race;
(b) may by order amend this Act so as to provide for an exception to a provision of this Act to apply, or not to apply, to caste or to apply, or not to apply, to caste in specified circumstances.
ERRA also allows the relevant Secretary of State to carry out reviews of the proposed changes. The result was reported in 2018 at
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5b5203f2ed915d0b72e1d319/Caste_in_Great_Britain_and_equality_law-consultation_response.pdf#%5B%7B%22num%22%3A341%2C%22gen%22%3A0%7D%2C%7B%22name%22%3A%22XYZ%22%7D%2C70%2C652%2C0%5D
where it was decided not to include caste in particular and rely on case law. However, the possibility is still there.
Now to the conspiracy theory: what if including caste in equality legislation would be a drawback to a certain section of society as well as a benefit to the obvious discriminated parties? There is a small number of jobs in the UK that are only available to a very restricted sector of the population and are handed down within that group to the disadvantage of the rest of the population. This has been the case for centuries and no-one outside this group, no matter how well qualified, has the opportunity even to apply for the jobs. This restricted caste therefore manages to hold on their privileged positions.
Yes, I am referring to to the Head of State and allied posts.
Paranoid?
As far as I know, the USA does not have any laws against discrimination based on caste, but that kind of discrimination has made the news. “The state of California filed a lawsuit this summer [2020] alleging a type of discrimination not frequently cited in U.S. workplaces: caste discrimination. The case involves an all-Indian team of employees at Cisco Systems’ headquarters in San Jose, but similar complaints are popping up at other companies in the tech sector.” The full story is available at https://www.npr.org/2020/10/14/923736245/caste-arrives-in-silicon-valley . I assume that Americans outside the Indian community don’t know or care much about caste, so if there were a law against discrimination based on caste, I doubt that it would lead to discrimination against Hindus in America.
Speaking of Hindus in America, the festival of Holi is becoming mainstream. For example, see https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/03/penn-celebrates-holi-photo-essay
Genuine LOL today
Has Ganesh ever dropped by the pub? I wonder what the barmaid would make of him?
Ganesha was created directly by Shiva’s laughter. Because Shiva considered Ganesha too alluring, he gave him the head of an elephant and a protruding belly.
Ganesha holds, supports, and guides all other chakras, thereby “governing the forces that propel the wheel of life,” to get the feel of life from one o’clock-tails.
The barmaid has put him on notice for engaging his trunk in amorous pursuits or stealing the nearest guy’s beer nuts. When he gets out of hand it is only necessary to remind him that pachyderms are a matriarchal society. Put that in your spunk trumpet and rumble about it, you cockwomble knob socket with a fire hose nose unleashed on the demigods below you. That’s not a handkerchief in your vest pocket. It’s a tarp.
Seattle banned caste discrimination, so there’s at least one place where there’s legal protection specifically from that. Similar scene – as in San Jose, large numbers of high tech workers imported from the Indian subcontinent.
Elsewhere, it might be possible to make a case for racial discrimination. The usual races involved don’t have a lot of science behind their distinctions, as in physical anthropology.
Just browsing through the wikipedia entry, I find an interesting episode in the British colonial period where they declared certain tribes and castes criminal and automatically subject to incarceration. If I were in India and pushing back against the caste system, I’d go heavy on Britain’s role in the devlelopment of the system in recent history.
Ah.That old chestnut. Place A was completely free of descimination until johnny white man appeared…
The caste system in India goes back at least 2,000 years — there has been little intermarriage along the way, and as a result the castes are genetically quite distinct.
David Reich goes into this in Who We Are and How We Got Here. He notes that unlike China, which has “a truly large population” that has been “mixing freely for thousands of years”, India “is composed of a large number of small populations”. (I highly recommend that book BTW).
That’s what I mean, caste populations might be at least as biologically distinct as the typically protected race.
M27, you make up your own chestnuts, you eat them. Bon appetit.
hmmm,
MW: Religion is a personal or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices.
Cam: Religion is the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or any such system of belief and worship. It can also mean an activity that someone is extremely enthusiastic about and does regularly, such as football.
With respect, atheism is definitely a religion. The zealotry on display in-forum only confirms the definitions. 🙂
With respect, although the word may be used this way casually, I don’t think extreme enthusiasm for football counts as being a “religion” in the same sense as Christianity or Islam are religions.
IMO, any closed system of beliefs that explains the world for the believer can fairly be considered a religion, especially if believers treat those beliefs as sacred and see dissent as immoral. For example, in this sense I would consider Communism and its modern descendant Wokeism to be religions, despite the total absence of the supernatural in their doctrines. And in this sense, however fervent, closed minded, and intolerant particular atheists might be, I can’t see atheism as a religion, since the absence of God doesn’t really explain anything.
In my view, religion doesn’t really have to explan anything. For example … if I tell you there’s a group of Siberians who believe their souls go on after corporal death to inhabit trees, that explains nothing, right? Do you need to find out more, before you decide they’re probably afflicted with a religion? If you were to dive into the details of Jainism, same thing, would you be looking for some particular sense in which it explains the world? At a casual glance I’m not sure I see that, but that doesn’t make me wonder if it’s religion.
What’s characteristic about the belief is that it’s absurd. It isn’t just doubtful. No one would believe your articles of religious dogma, except in an “act of faith” – and that’s what makes religion tick. Faith.
Common atheism is simply a lack of any such faith. It’s conceivable that there’s someone out there who is sort of committed to an absurd faith that could be atheist in the sense of rejecting the existence of any deity, but that’s surely the exception.
I am Intolerant of stupidity, litter louts, anybody who hurts children and Manchester City fans (see point 1). I am very intolerant of religions and the religious..oh and Donald Trump and anybody who.thinks he isn’t a crook…
Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Well said.
To conflate the figurative use of ‘religion’ as descriptive of a great enthusiasm with its original reference to an organised belief in a diety is nonsense.
I have known people with great enthusiasm for chess, gymnastics, train-spotting, stamp-collecting, horse- racing, carpentry, cricket, scotch whisky and many more, some of which I might or might not share.
Atheism is an absence of belief like the absense of interest in any of the foregoing. To be defined as a ‘non stamp-collector’ or a ‘non-gymnast’ etc would be meaningless and virtually endless. Perhaps if the train-spotters had dominated our history and culture in the way that the godbotherers have we would have a word to define us for our non-participation with the activity – Achoochooer?
A void is not a place.
Choirboy, wasn’t that the argument Hitch made? Powerful.
In fairness, a crusading atheist who believed that religion is the root cause of all the world’s problems and that those problems could all be solved by ridding the world of religion would have a positive belief, not an absence of belief. No god maybe, but arguably a devil.
Rrr, yes I believe it was. A much missed wise man.
JB, that is just specious, I’m afraid.
To pursue and encourage rationality over unfounded magical thinking of course is to have a positive belief but it has absolutely no bearing upon a belief in a god.
To suggest that someone who has no belief in a god actually believes in a ‘devil’ is a contradiction in terms. Devils are as much the creation of the human imagination as are gods.
‘As if we were villains by necessity, fools by
Heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and
Treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards,
Liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of
Planetary influence; and all that we are evil in
By a divine thrusting on; an admirable evasion
Of whoremaster man to lay his goatish
Disposition to the charge of a star!’
(Edmund – King Lear)
There is enough natural ‘evil’ in the human condition without inventing ‘devils’.
(The ‘Mango Mussolini’ currently threatening the safety of the world across the pond was influenced by his equally psychopathic dad, not an imaginary creature with horns.)
Golding in Lord of the Flies showed vividly how devils can be created by fevered minds uncontrolled.
A positive believe in the negative consequences of religions, isn’t really systematic enough to qualify as religion, though. It isn’t faith in some absurd proposition, the proposition is debatable, and as presented it isn’t part of any apparent theology or anything.
Mango Mussollini…I’m avin that LARGE…
The religious numb-nuts have no concept (of living without at least 1 invisible friend) I get a headache trying to think-down to their level of gross ignorance. And yes there are professors who look at waterfalls suddenly get Jesus..butcas soon as that happens they should lose their licence to be considered Intelligent…
Casteism is left behind in India by the diaspora.
(For example – look up the West Indies).
Leftists trying to bring in caste into the UK are not doing anyone any favors. They are perpetuating caste, not eliminating it.
Think of a Hindu deity in a devotee’s life as a coordinate system in a physical space – e.g., latitude and longitude on the surface of the Earth. This is an imperfect metaphor, but it illustrates some important things.
Does the coordinate system have any independent existence? No.
Does one believe in coordinate systems? The sentence doesn’t make any sense.
Why have coordinate systems? They help one orient oneself and to navigate.
If there is no mutual respect, and toleration is what a society aspires too, then, hey, tolerate fascism and Trumpism and all such which do not respect you.
Mere toleration is not sustainable and will lead to negative consequences.