Jeezoidism doesn’t seem to suffer much from body movement demands from the Deity. The only thing I can remember is being chastised by nuns for not giving a quick head-bow when I used the word “Jesus.” That word came up endlessly in our discussions.
We were supposed to think the mantra “Jesus Mary and Joseph” often in our free time and of course nod on the first of the two J-words. Each time you’d get thirty days indulgence off the length of your sentence in Purgatory.
This is actually an Islamic imitation of a famous purification ritual still practiced in some parts of the UK. You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out, your left foot in, and you shake it all about…
I doubt that Islam has anything on traditional Judaism in the OC department. It seems to have been a thing in that part of the world (India included, but not China or Southeast Asia). We are extremely lucky that the early Christians came up with a convenient dodge that allowed them to rationalize dumping all that!
I am sorry to say this Author, but the islamic rulebook on how to take a dump is far funnier than this strip. To be fair, that is a pretty high bar to clear.
Article has: “In Paradise we will not have to relieve ourselves. Instead we will perspire and even the perspiration will be beautifully scented like musk. Subhanallah!” I wonder whether people will have to relieve themselves in the earthly paradise as envisioned by Jehovah’s Witnesses for example (they have only 144,000 folk going to heaven). Their artwork indicates prodigious consumption of fresh fruit in ‘the new system’, so you can see where I’m coming from. Maybe something to enquire about at their literature carts.
If the JWs only allow a thousand gross believers into Heaven then all the places must have gone by now. Or, if there is a new candidate, does one of the previously elected get shoved off the cart? Which seems unfair. The JWs who call here seem upset by the question. I also ask, “What happened in 1975?” Perhaps I only get learners.
Reminds me of an event in the mid 1960 when I was at Letterman Army Medical Center. A Turkish sailor was brought to our ER with a staph infection of his hand. We needed to admit him for emergency surgery to drain the abscess. He was petrified because the ship doc had said nothing was wrong and he would be disobeying orders if we admitted him. Also, this was his “cleanse” hand for use after bathroom. We contacted the ship captain who ordered him to remain in the hospital. To add to the fun, the sailor was the ship cook. Can you imagine the fun of a ship full of sailors with staph food poisoning on a submarine? By the way, the nurses had to cleanse him so as to preserve his right hand for eating. Fun days.
@Vanity Unfair
Long ago I used to have fun discussing with JW’s. From one of them I learned that they believe that when you die, you are dead. They, just as well as we. But… when all humans that ever lived have died, Jehova will take his high hat out, puts the names of all people who were good JWs in it and draws the winners.
The winners will be resurrected from their graves and the rest will just stay as dead as they were. So no Eternal BBQ or fun like that for the losers, they will just stay dead.
The winners will, after resurrection, live eternally here on Earth, which Jehova will have reconstructed for them as paradise. And, because there is no conciousness when you are dead, for the winners it will seem to be instantaniously after the moment they died.
This gave me the ideal excuse to shake off JWs: I tell them that, if they are right, I will die and stay dead after that. When I am right, I will die and stay dead after that and I have no problem whatsoever with that. But at least I have a life before I die!
I have never seen a JW who did not give up after that argument 🙂
Here is Dr. Birx’s reaction when President Trump asks his science advisor to study using UV light on the human body and injecting disinfectant to fight the coronavirus.
Turn on sound (speaker symbol at bottom right) and go full screen. Aghast is the best word to describe Dr. Birx’s reaction. Maybe appalled or dismayed or shocked or afraid or horrified or distraught or distressed or agog. Definitely bewildered and disapproving. https://twitter.com/i/status/1253482576699969537
Good for external use to prevent the *spread* of the virus.
Not good to treat someone who is already infected.
Is Trump really dim enough not to understand the distinction?
I wonder if he heard of this & misunderstood. https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/can-uv-light-fight-spread-influenza
Another question: UVA is safer outside the body (than B or C), but our lungs and trachea don’t have the same uv protection our skin does. Is it really safe to be blasting it at high intensity in there?
Given that a man already died ingesting chloroquine phosphate after Trump talked about “…chloroquine…hydroxyl chloroquine”, I rather expect we will be hearing on Monday that a few different people have shown up at emergency rooms after huffing Lysol. Or injecting it.
I really don’t want to speculate about how people who adulate reality TV stars will go about shining UV light inside their bodies.
This is way past facepalm and firmly into ‘bang head on desk until I am no longer capable of doing so’ territory.
67 days until Virginia decriminalizes weed. SO not sure I can hold out that long
Well, on the plus side, the average intelligence level of the population will go up if people who are stupid enough to inject bleach are eliminated. Same goes for relidiots who keep congregating, they will be hit harder by the virus, the biggest idiots (not Trump, alas) will die and the population as a whole will be (a bit) more intelligent than before. Darwin wins again!
Correction: ‘hydroxychloroquine’ ; not ‘hydroxyl chloroquine’.
Apologies for that. Ironically, part of my point was that actual facts matter, and there I went and spread misinformation.
@Vanity Unfair Re the 144,000 “heavenly class/anointed/Memorial partakers”. This quote is enlightening as to how the JW leadership regard those (beside themselves) who self-identify as such: “Memorial partakers. This is the number of baptized individuals who partake of the emblems at the Memorial worldwide. Does this total represent the number of anointed ones on earth? Not necessarily. A number of factors – including past religious belief or even mental or emotional imbalance – might cause some to assume mistakenly that they have the heavenly calling. We thus have no way of knowing the exact number of anointed ones on earth; nor do we need to know. The Governing Body does not keep a list of all partakers for it does not maintain a global network of anointed ones.” – The Watchtower, 15 Aug 2011, p22.
As for the 1975 fiasco, the leadership subsequently made an apology for its error in heavily touting this year as the end of the world: “The brothers … appreciated the candor of this … talk, which acknowledged the Society’s responsibility for some of the disappointment a number felt regarding 1975.” – 1980 Yearbook, pp30-31.
@Gargleblaster to enlarge on what you’ve written: JWs teach that people who’ve died without knowledge of God’s will (as they define it), will receive a resurrection, although they say they cannot know whether certain wicked people will or not be resurrected. Those not doing so include Judas – and they indicate that those others who wilfully do what is bad after knowing God’s will, will not. This appears to be an allusion to their own apostates. Once resurrected, everyone will have to satisfy Jehovah that they are obedient throughout the thousand-year millennium of the earthly paradise and then pass one final eliminator to gain everlasting life when Satan and his demons are unleashed for a spell to do their worst for one last time before the final extermination of all disobedient ones.
so, Mr. Flynn, the Jehovah’s Witless lot think you can, maybe, possibly, with luck get into their exclusive Top Tier Dining Room even if you ain’t a JW-er yourself and even if you’ve never heard of Jehovah? So why do they bother us with all that pamphleteering and door-stepping?
Isn’t that “spreading the news” reducing our chances of winning the god lottery? Aren’t they being criminally irresponsible by telling us about the choice we have to be good little soldiers or evil scunners?
Or could that be their aim? If they let us know and we still prefer not to be good-guys, then they increase the small, minuscule odds of them, themselves being picked for the good seats.
That smacks of evil selfishness but maybe evil selfishness can be excused so long as they are “good”.
The extra test during the reign of the good snakey guy, Santa, on Earth seems like a weird, tacked-on bit hanging over from some other tiny cult but gods are often demented half-wits who don’t understand nor follow their own rules so I guess this shouldn’t surprise us.
Still, if Satan knows, for a fact and if he always has done that he’s going to eventually get blattered why the Hell would he bother? I wouldn’t. I’d just have a fucking huge party in Pandemonium and avoid all of that “ruling on the Earth” fiasco.
Satan ain’t terribly clever for an Adversary. Which, on thinking about it, probably makes him way smarter than the eventual winner. It’s a low bar to pass.
tinkling think — The JWs are “spreading the news” because they believe that’s what Big J wants them to do. This isn’t something they decide for themselves! If you really believe in The Man Upstairs, you follow his orders even if they don’t make sense to you, because you are an ignorant speck of dust and he’s Him.
Given the premise (He exists!), this actually makes perfect sense! It can be fun to mock believers and call them stupid, but it’s not something you should actually believe. Most of them aren’t stupid at all; they are in fact reasoning logically from premises that (at least from our own supremely enlightened point of view) are factually incorrect. And they defend those premises using a cognitive superpower that is part of the common heritage of all mankind: motivated reasoning. If you imagine that you never do this, well, you are fooling yourself. (And probably doing it really, really well!)
@ tinkling think Yes, JWs do believe that only they will survive Armageddon – this is clear from their literature – although they tend to shy away from being explicit about this in conversation. Those who have already died prior to Armageddon and without knowledge of Jehovah’s commands will be resurrected (though perhaps not real bad eggs, they’re unclear on this) and get to have a crack at attaining everlasting life. I agree, it would seem to be advantageous for people to die without knowledge of Jehovah, so that they can experience resurrection to the earthly paradise and then know for sure who rules the roost on this planet, rather than live in a world of still-competing claims and plumping for the wrong (or no) religion. Jehovah has however ordained that “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” – Matthew 24:14. My JW teacher used to quote Luke 19:40 to say that if they didn’t preach the gospel then the stones would cry out. I always thought they ought really to leave it to the stones as their testimony would be so much more compelling.
In Saudi Arabia flogging is flagging,
and cases of caning are waning.
But they still are bemoaning
beheading and stoning,
a sign their compassion is lagging.
jb, A man with tiny, soft hands, a poorly-arranged, obviously tinted comb-over and a belly two metres thick which he tries to hide by leaning forwards used your “motivated reasoning” in an attempt to appear wise, clever and reasonable. He came up with the idea of washing your lungs with Dettol to clean them of the Winnie’s Flu virus. Almost everyone with an I.Q. larger than that of a flatworm derided him as utterly stupid and the idea as cretinous. Their reason for doing so was simple, he is utterly stupid and it is a cretinous idea. [Note to The Public: do NOT inject disinfectant as this will kill you.]
That example does not mean that the ineducably religious are also all desperately short of intellectual firepower, of course but it does rather put a dampener on the idea that writing fifteen fifty-thousand page volumes of Theology in an attempt to prove the existence of fairies and vampires is ether a credit to your wit, a successful use of a life or some sort of positive contribution to Humanity just because the writer used “motivated reasoning”.
In short, judging the JWits as being irredeemably dumb is a little harsh and a huge generalisation but it ain’t as bad as taking them seriously and thereby wasting our lives by thinking about their lackwittery. [Okay, that wasn’t really short but it was shorter than I could have been. 🙂 ]
Dismissing it all as cruft is a life-affirming move. Dismissing all religion as deadly cruft is a life-affirming move. It saves time, effort and energies better spent looking for the perfect bacon sarnie, a very good beer or a good but not too good woman.
Mr. Flynn, I, too would love to have the stones cry out. That would be a fine thing to witness. I have heard the hissing of the incoming sea on rocky beaches and I have heard the crashing and grinding of stones obeying gravity’s call as they re-arrange the landscape in a landslip but a crying out of silica would be beautiful. Also awesome and quite eery.
I’m not entirely sure what I would make of such an event. It would certainly be among the more numinous occurrences in my life.
Even should it have a perfectly reasonable piezo-phonic explanation. Like seismic lights.
I don’t suppose there’s any chance of having the J’Wits hold their peace due to Winnie’s Flu long enough for the stones to get the message? It would be awesome.
Note: I’m not totally opposed to all religion. When religion was all about feeding Ra the best bits of the donkey, kissing up to Athena [because she is wise, reasonable, very pretty and so exceedingly intelligent – truly the bestest of the Pantheon] so she would have a quiet talk with Poseidon about the day’s catch and the avoidance of boat-sinking storms and burning paper meals to please the household Lares and Penates, it was all fine and good and everyone could be happy with their very own pantheons of Jupiters kicking Ptah’s arses and suchlike shenanigans. The cults of nice gods who only request a few goats every so often are cool and should be encouraged as they distract us from the drudgery of Real Life, provide something to do on a rainy Tuesday and maybe, just possibly might be real enough to intercede with the growing of food, babies, towns and stuff. [Though even the more devout Sethist probably didn’t expect much by way of positive intervention as reward for his devotions. Those guys weren’t that gullible.]
Gods like those are nice and we need more of them. Their religions are basically just hero-worship of the Old Folks in Elder Days and can be interesting, exciting and the sources of endless movies, songs and comics. [Also, Disney, merchandising opportunities!] [Four thousand million Hindu avatary things. Just think of the rows and rows of action figures!]
What we do not need, ever, is any sort of god that tells us how to live, how and what and who to love or what we can make jokes about. We definitely don’t need one to tell us how to toilet. We have the W.H.O. and a baldy fat man doing that. [Remember, folks, listen verycarefully to the President with the big tummy, write down everything he says then never, ever do any of it because he’s a prancing poltroon.]
We should bring back the happy gods like Dagda and Odin and their immense, complex families.
Well, jb, I never said the sacrificial victims were always deliriously ecstatic about it only that in the main, on the whole, in general and on any average day the gods didn’t demand killing people over using the wrong hand to eat with.
Which reminds me, I’m rather fucked. I’m a lefty. I eat with the sinister digits. I do watch my hands wash each other first, of course.
The problem that all historians have is that without a time machine most history before the age if mass media is mostly guesswork based on archeology…any textual works could in fact be myth. Who knows if some pagans willingly accepted sacrafice and suffering….we have to assume some did since some modern humans seem to be death accepting, especially religious nut jobs…
I am suddenly reminded of a story by Terry Pratchett in which a young woman was rescued from being sacrificed and took it very badly. After years of staying home and preserving her virginity while others were out having a good time, she had been really looking forward to having tea with the Moon Goddess, and now her big chance had been snatched away from her!
Oozoid [near the top], there would not be “other people’s muck” to step in should the conveniences have dedicated cleaners who tidy up after the leakers, spillers and those with poor aim.
If the floors are clean, walking on them with bare feet is cool.
[SPOILERS] for all of those writing, typing and living in early 2020, a spoiler from December 2021: we are still being plagued by your version of SARS/Coronavirus Disease and are still suffering from restrictions though the new “vaccines” are wonderful.
Sorry, but 2022 does not look likely to be the end of it.
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
May 22, 2024
So the left foot is right and the right foot is sinister, gauche and left behind?
Yep, that sounds like a dogma.
First, you put your shoes on your head. Then with your bare feet you step in other people’s yuck. Can’t think of a better way of spreading covid-19.
Wow. Poor Mohammedans.
Jeezoidism doesn’t seem to suffer much from body movement demands from the Deity. The only thing I can remember is being chastised by nuns for not giving a quick head-bow when I used the word “Jesus.” That word came up endlessly in our discussions.
We were supposed to think the mantra “Jesus Mary and Joseph” often in our free time and of course nod on the first of the two J-words. Each time you’d get thirty days indulgence off the length of your sentence in Purgatory.
This is actually an Islamic imitation of a famous purification ritual still practiced in some parts of the UK. You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out, your left foot in, and you shake it all about…
@hotrats: how much you have to shake your foot about depends what you put it in, of course.
Ritual. It’s as much a part of human/social existence as belief is. (They often go hand in hand.)
Canine-human interaction is based on ritual, too.
You put your right leg in
Your right leg out
In, out, in, out
You shake it all about
I believe those are the rules
Oh, hotrats – if only I’d scrolled down before posting the exact same joke.
You snooze, you lose, I guess. 🙁
I doubt that Islam has anything on traditional Judaism in the OC department. It seems to have been a thing in that part of the world (India included, but not China or Southeast Asia). We are extremely lucky that the early Christians came up with a convenient dodge that allowed them to rationalize dumping all that!
Another winner!
I am sorry to say this Author, but the islamic rulebook on how to take a dump is far funnier than this strip. To be fair, that is a pretty high bar to clear.
Article has: “In Paradise we will not have to relieve ourselves. Instead we will perspire and even the perspiration will be beautifully scented like musk. Subhanallah!” I wonder whether people will have to relieve themselves in the earthly paradise as envisioned by Jehovah’s Witnesses for example (they have only 144,000 folk going to heaven). Their artwork indicates prodigious consumption of fresh fruit in ‘the new system’, so you can see where I’m coming from. Maybe something to enquire about at their literature carts.
If the JWs only allow a thousand gross believers into Heaven then all the places must have gone by now. Or, if there is a new candidate, does one of the previously elected get shoved off the cart? Which seems unfair. The JWs who call here seem upset by the question. I also ask, “What happened in 1975?” Perhaps I only get learners.
Bruce–please share so that people’s deeply held sincere beliefs about how god cares about monkey turds can be appropriately heckled and mocked.
Reminds me of an event in the mid 1960 when I was at Letterman Army Medical Center. A Turkish sailor was brought to our ER with a staph infection of his hand. We needed to admit him for emergency surgery to drain the abscess. He was petrified because the ship doc had said nothing was wrong and he would be disobeying orders if we admitted him. Also, this was his “cleanse” hand for use after bathroom. We contacted the ship captain who ordered him to remain in the hospital. To add to the fun, the sailor was the ship cook. Can you imagine the fun of a ship full of sailors with staph food poisoning on a submarine? By the way, the nurses had to cleanse him so as to preserve his right hand for eating. Fun days.
“Turn the page, wash your hands.
You turn the page…you wash your hands.”
A funny line from a children’s cartoon that somehow manages to sum up Mo’s OCD like a charm.
@Vanity Unfair
Long ago I used to have fun discussing with JW’s. From one of them I learned that they believe that when you die, you are dead. They, just as well as we. But… when all humans that ever lived have died, Jehova will take his high hat out, puts the names of all people who were good JWs in it and draws the winners.
The winners will be resurrected from their graves and the rest will just stay as dead as they were. So no Eternal BBQ or fun like that for the losers, they will just stay dead.
The winners will, after resurrection, live eternally here on Earth, which Jehova will have reconstructed for them as paradise. And, because there is no conciousness when you are dead, for the winners it will seem to be instantaniously after the moment they died.
This gave me the ideal excuse to shake off JWs: I tell them that, if they are right, I will die and stay dead after that. When I am right, I will die and stay dead after that and I have no problem whatsoever with that. But at least I have a life before I die!
I have never seen a JW who did not give up after that argument 🙂
Here is Dr. Birx’s reaction when President Trump asks his science advisor to study using UV light on the human body and injecting disinfectant to fight the coronavirus.
Turn on sound (speaker symbol at bottom right) and go full screen. Aghast is the best word to describe Dr. Birx’s reaction. Maybe appalled or dismayed or shocked or afraid or horrified or distraught or distressed or agog. Definitely bewildered and disapproving.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1253482576699969537
Good for external use to prevent the *spread* of the virus.
Not good to treat someone who is already infected.
Is Trump really dim enough not to understand the distinction?
I wonder if he heard of this & misunderstood.
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/can-uv-light-fight-spread-influenza
Another question: UVA is safer outside the body (than B or C), but our lungs and trachea don’t have the same uv protection our skin does. Is it really safe to be blasting it at high intensity in there?
Given that a man already died ingesting chloroquine phosphate after Trump talked about “…chloroquine…hydroxyl chloroquine”, I rather expect we will be hearing on Monday that a few different people have shown up at emergency rooms after huffing Lysol. Or injecting it.
I really don’t want to speculate about how people who adulate reality TV stars will go about shining UV light inside their bodies.
This is way past facepalm and firmly into ‘bang head on desk until I am no longer capable of doing so’ territory.
67 days until Virginia decriminalizes weed. SO not sure I can hold out that long
Well, on the plus side, the average intelligence level of the population will go up if people who are stupid enough to inject bleach are eliminated. Same goes for relidiots who keep congregating, they will be hit harder by the virus, the biggest idiots (not Trump, alas) will die and the population as a whole will be (a bit) more intelligent than before. Darwin wins again!
Correction: ‘hydroxychloroquine’ ; not ‘hydroxyl chloroquine’.
Apologies for that. Ironically, part of my point was that actual facts matter, and there I went and spread misinformation.
Thankfully, I do not occupy the bully pulpit.
@Vanity Unfair Re the 144,000 “heavenly class/anointed/Memorial partakers”. This quote is enlightening as to how the JW leadership regard those (beside themselves) who self-identify as such: “Memorial partakers. This is the number of baptized individuals who partake of the emblems at the Memorial worldwide. Does this total represent the number of anointed ones on earth? Not necessarily. A number of factors – including past religious belief or even mental or emotional imbalance – might cause some to assume mistakenly that they have the heavenly calling. We thus have no way of knowing the exact number of anointed ones on earth; nor do we need to know. The Governing Body does not keep a list of all partakers for it does not maintain a global network of anointed ones.” – The Watchtower, 15 Aug 2011, p22.
As for the 1975 fiasco, the leadership subsequently made an apology for its error in heavily touting this year as the end of the world: “The brothers … appreciated the candor of this … talk, which acknowledged the Society’s responsibility for some of the disappointment a number felt regarding 1975.” – 1980 Yearbook, pp30-31.
@Gargleblaster to enlarge on what you’ve written: JWs teach that people who’ve died without knowledge of God’s will (as they define it), will receive a resurrection, although they say they cannot know whether certain wicked people will or not be resurrected. Those not doing so include Judas – and they indicate that those others who wilfully do what is bad after knowing God’s will, will not. This appears to be an allusion to their own apostates. Once resurrected, everyone will have to satisfy Jehovah that they are obedient throughout the thousand-year millennium of the earthly paradise and then pass one final eliminator to gain everlasting life when Satan and his demons are unleashed for a spell to do their worst for one last time before the final extermination of all disobedient ones.
so, Mr. Flynn, the Jehovah’s Witless lot think you can, maybe, possibly, with luck get into their exclusive Top Tier Dining Room even if you ain’t a JW-er yourself and even if you’ve never heard of Jehovah? So why do they bother us with all that pamphleteering and door-stepping?
Isn’t that “spreading the news” reducing our chances of winning the god lottery? Aren’t they being criminally irresponsible by telling us about the choice we have to be good little soldiers or evil scunners?
Or could that be their aim? If they let us know and we still prefer not to be good-guys, then they increase the small, minuscule odds of them, themselves being picked for the good seats.
That smacks of evil selfishness but maybe evil selfishness can be excused so long as they are “good”.
The extra test during the reign of the good snakey guy, Santa, on Earth seems like a weird, tacked-on bit hanging over from some other tiny cult but gods are often demented half-wits who don’t understand nor follow their own rules so I guess this shouldn’t surprise us.
Still, if Satan knows, for a fact and if he always has done that he’s going to eventually get blattered why the Hell would he bother? I wouldn’t. I’d just have a fucking huge party in Pandemonium and avoid all of that “ruling on the Earth” fiasco.
Satan ain’t terribly clever for an Adversary. Which, on thinking about it, probably makes him way smarter than the eventual winner. It’s a low bar to pass.
tinkling think — The JWs are “spreading the news” because they believe that’s what Big J wants them to do. This isn’t something they decide for themselves! If you really believe in The Man Upstairs, you follow his orders even if they don’t make sense to you, because you are an ignorant speck of dust and he’s Him.
Given the premise (He exists!), this actually makes perfect sense! It can be fun to mock believers and call them stupid, but it’s not something you should actually believe. Most of them aren’t stupid at all; they are in fact reasoning logically from premises that (at least from our own supremely enlightened point of view) are factually incorrect. And they defend those premises using a cognitive superpower that is part of the common heritage of all mankind: motivated reasoning. If you imagine that you never do this, well, you are fooling yourself. (And probably doing it really, really well!)
@ tinkling think Yes, JWs do believe that only they will survive Armageddon – this is clear from their literature – although they tend to shy away from being explicit about this in conversation. Those who have already died prior to Armageddon and without knowledge of Jehovah’s commands will be resurrected (though perhaps not real bad eggs, they’re unclear on this) and get to have a crack at attaining everlasting life. I agree, it would seem to be advantageous for people to die without knowledge of Jehovah, so that they can experience resurrection to the earthly paradise and then know for sure who rules the roost on this planet, rather than live in a world of still-competing claims and plumping for the wrong (or no) religion. Jehovah has however ordained that “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” – Matthew 24:14. My JW teacher used to quote Luke 19:40 to say that if they didn’t preach the gospel then the stones would cry out. I always thought they ought really to leave it to the stones as their testimony would be so much more compelling.
In Saudi Arabia flogging is flagging,
and cases of caning are waning.
But they still are bemoaning
beheading and stoning,
a sign their compassion is lagging.
jb, A man with tiny, soft hands, a poorly-arranged, obviously tinted comb-over and a belly two metres thick which he tries to hide by leaning forwards used your “motivated reasoning” in an attempt to appear wise, clever and reasonable. He came up with the idea of washing your lungs with Dettol to clean them of the Winnie’s Flu virus. Almost everyone with an I.Q. larger than that of a flatworm derided him as utterly stupid and the idea as cretinous. Their reason for doing so was simple, he is utterly stupid and it is a cretinous idea. [Note to The Public: do NOT inject disinfectant as this will kill you.]
That example does not mean that the ineducably religious are also all desperately short of intellectual firepower, of course but it does rather put a dampener on the idea that writing fifteen fifty-thousand page volumes of Theology in an attempt to prove the existence of fairies and vampires is ether a credit to your wit, a successful use of a life or some sort of positive contribution to Humanity just because the writer used “motivated reasoning”.
In short, judging the JWits as being irredeemably dumb is a little harsh and a huge generalisation but it ain’t as bad as taking them seriously and thereby wasting our lives by thinking about their lackwittery. [Okay, that wasn’t really short but it was shorter than I could have been. 🙂 ]
Dismissing it all as cruft is a life-affirming move. Dismissing all religion as deadly cruft is a life-affirming move. It saves time, effort and energies better spent looking for the perfect bacon sarnie, a very good beer or a good but not too good woman.
Mr. Flynn, I, too would love to have the stones cry out. That would be a fine thing to witness. I have heard the hissing of the incoming sea on rocky beaches and I have heard the crashing and grinding of stones obeying gravity’s call as they re-arrange the landscape in a landslip but a crying out of silica would be beautiful. Also awesome and quite eery.
I’m not entirely sure what I would make of such an event. It would certainly be among the more numinous occurrences in my life.
Even should it have a perfectly reasonable piezo-phonic explanation. Like seismic lights.
I don’t suppose there’s any chance of having the J’Wits hold their peace due to Winnie’s Flu long enough for the stones to get the message? It would be awesome.
Note: I’m not totally opposed to all religion. When religion was all about feeding Ra the best bits of the donkey, kissing up to Athena [because she is wise, reasonable, very pretty and so exceedingly intelligent – truly the bestest of the Pantheon] so she would have a quiet talk with Poseidon about the day’s catch and the avoidance of boat-sinking storms and burning paper meals to please the household Lares and Penates, it was all fine and good and everyone could be happy with their very own pantheons of Jupiters kicking Ptah’s arses and suchlike shenanigans. The cults of nice gods who only request a few goats every so often are cool and should be encouraged as they distract us from the drudgery of Real Life, provide something to do on a rainy Tuesday and maybe, just possibly might be real enough to intercede with the growing of food, babies, towns and stuff. [Though even the more devout Sethist probably didn’t expect much by way of positive intervention as reward for his devotions. Those guys weren’t that gullible.]
Gods like those are nice and we need more of them. Their religions are basically just hero-worship of the Old Folks in Elder Days and can be interesting, exciting and the sources of endless movies, songs and comics. [Also, Disney, merchandising opportunities!] [Four thousand million Hindu avatary things. Just think of the rows and rows of action figures!]
What we do not need, ever, is any sort of god that tells us how to live, how and what and who to love or what we can make jokes about. We definitely don’t need one to tell us how to toilet. We have the W.H.O. and a baldy fat man doing that. [Remember, folks, listen verycarefully to the President with the big tummy, write down everything he says then never, ever do any of it because he’s a prancing poltroon.]
We should bring back the happy gods like Dagda and Odin and their immense, complex families.
We need a new Snorri.
Ah yes, happy, happy gods.
Well, jb, I never said the sacrificial victims were always deliriously ecstatic about it only that in the main, on the whole, in general and on any average day the gods didn’t demand killing people over using the wrong hand to eat with.
Which reminds me, I’m rather fucked. I’m a lefty. I eat with the sinister digits. I do watch my hands wash each other first, of course.
The problem that all historians have is that without a time machine most history before the age if mass media is mostly guesswork based on archeology…any textual works could in fact be myth. Who knows if some pagans willingly accepted sacrafice and suffering….we have to assume some did since some modern humans seem to be death accepting, especially religious nut jobs…
I am suddenly reminded of a story by Terry Pratchett in which a young woman was rescued from being sacrificed and took it very badly. After years of staying home and preserving her virginity while others were out having a good time, she had been really looking forward to having tea with the Moon Goddess, and now her big chance had been snatched away from her!
Oozoid [near the top], there would not be “other people’s muck” to step in should the conveniences have dedicated cleaners who tidy up after the leakers, spillers and those with poor aim.
If the floors are clean, walking on them with bare feet is cool.
[SPOILERS] for all of those writing, typing and living in early 2020, a spoiler from December 2021: we are still being plagued by your version of SARS/Coronavirus Disease and are still suffering from restrictions though the new “vaccines” are wonderful.
Sorry, but 2022 does not look likely to be the end of it.
I did say “[SPOILERS]”. 🙁
Have as nice a 2020 as was possible.