Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “Rage,” highlights the fracas and violence surrounding the murder of five people, including three rabbis, in a synagogue in East Jerusalem. (Please do not argue that the victims deserved it, for the murder of anyone like that is a bestial act regardless of politics).
And, of course, religion’s solution is ineffectual:
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Technically speaking, the only solution which could work when dealing with faith is magic. Someone is praying to the wrong God for the wrong things and suddenly — poof! — they are touched with divine wisdom. Now they know the real God. They learned through their sensus divinitatus which, for the first time in history, hasn’t just confirmed the deeply-held beliefs of the person who uses it — because it really IS God.
And the whole world lived happily ever after. The End.
You’re finally getting it. Maybe your sensus divinitatus is healing up after all these years.
I think I’ve taken leave of my sensus divinatus.
😀
Or maybe they could spend *all* of their time praying and leave everyone else/each other alone?
There is a wise old saying that you can pray in one hand and do something else in the other and see which one gets full first.
People that would do such a thing as this murder can only be religious fanatics. It is the only reasonable explanation. Who else goes into a church for this?
Tribalism and its emotionally irrational discontents.
Some folks must have caught the Doctor Who Season Finale last week when Earth needed to appoint an emergency President of the Earth, and Doctor Who said
“Don’t pick an American. All he’ll do is start praying”.
I laughed out loud at the praying part.
Freaking brilliant!
I was thinking it would end with “Eradicate gay marriage.” Meh.
It’s too bad Moses wasn’t there for that exchange: I imagine he would give a nervous laugh and change the subject.
It’s a great ending. The only solution the religious figures can think of is to pray even though they could do way more – even appear on toast – with the message to stop murdering.
“Don’t kill. And go easy on the butter!”
….written in butter on the toast!
How long before Glenn Greenwald says that this has nothing to do with religion ?
Prayer – How to do nothing and still think you’re helping.
Unfortunately, for many that is the foregone conclusion; if you have faith you can ignore evidence (or lack thereof)!
Waiting for people to claim this is Israel’s fault for allowing Jewish activitists into the al-Aqsa Mosque. I’ll agree that they shouldn’t have done that because they knew it would be provocative, but what does it say about the conflict that everyone knew that would provoke violence? Why shouldn’t Jews be allowed to pray on the Temple Mount, and why is the Israeli government charged with preventing them from doing so?
None of the perpetrators are “real” Muslims. Islam is a religion of Peace. Whoops! Auto text error. Pieces. That’s why they needed meat cleavers.
This brings up a solution I have never thought of (but I’m sure others have) to just have different religious services at different times at the Temple site/Dome of the rock
Er, is it OK for an atheist to pray (to no one, of course) for people to stop being religious?
Actually, the Jesus & Mo just prior to this one made me laugh:
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2014/11/12/abhor/
Reblogged this on Episyllogism and commented:
Pray harfer!
I tried prayer for decades, it didn’t work.
I slammed the door on the God hypothesis and that did work. It pays to be firm.
The minister I listened to during childhood said,”Don’t close the door on God or you will come to realise too late that the God/heaven/hell thing is real but by then it will be too late, you’ll not be able to get back even though you long to”
Why did it take me so long to think,”If there is no hell then you will have been worrying about nothing, how would the Bible authors know of an unseen supernatural realm when they didn’t predict the essential things that could have been known about the material realm?”
I don’t regret concluding that ‘God’ is a failed hypothesis, an imaginary construct. I wish I had got on the www sooner and read the books of Dan Barker, John W. Loftus, Robert M.Price, C.Dennis McKinsey etc sooner. To me they turn the frightening Babble claims into funny fiction. [See Youtube video, Identifying and Harvesting Wild Thistle on Survival HT channel for an analogy how to chop off the spiny parts of a thistle to get to the nutritious stem. It is the negation of the Babble & Coran which is good]
Hector Avalos in his book,”Fighting words” explains how religion provokes violence by creating imaginary scare resources. Priests make the places in heaven scarce, open only to those who earn a valid ticket.
As a way of reducing religious violence it could help to rewrite the game plan. For peace religious leaders should make the new plan something like:
If there was a loving God then either people would go to a happily ever after or cease to exist at death.
A perfect loving God would not allow a hell to come into existence and if something untoward like that had happened then a God for whom all things were possible would have fixed it as if it had never happened.
If there is no supernatural realm and you put a lot of time & energy into defending the idea that there was a supernatural realm then you will have wasted that investment.
There is an element of hypocrisy in religious leaders standing at the London War Cenotaph when in recent conflicts the texts they endorse have played a large part in causing those deaths. But on the other hand I suppose they show it is possible to stand side by side with people who hold opposing views.
🐾