This cartoon is another collaboration with awesome cartoonist Nadine Scholtes.
One odd thing about being an atheist, as many atheists have pointed out, is that although we disbelieve in all gods, many of us extra disbelieve in a particular God – whichever God was dominant where we grew up.
In my case, even though I’m Jewish, the God I extra disbelieve in isn’t the Old Testament God – although I disbelieve in him too – but the mainstream American Christian God, the God of sending people to Hell if they haven’t gotten the good word and repented and sent in money and voted pro-life.
(And as I wrote the above paragraph I wondered if this would have been a better cartoon if I’d asked Nadine to draw Jesus instead of God. Aaargh. Too late now.)
There are other versions of Christianity, of course, many far kinder; and other religions than Christianity, as well. But mainline and evangelical Christianity has a power in American culture and politics that no other religion here can claim.
The mainstream Christian notion of Hell is simply incompatible with anything I can view as good. I’ve read many apologetics for it, none of which I’ve found persuasive, but the most common and the least convincing is what I think of as the “Job argument.” In the Book of Job, God has a bet on with the Devil, and as part of the bet God lets the Devil destroy Job’s life and kill Job’s family. When Job suggests this is unfair, God replies “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much.” The implication being that because God is so much bigger and smarter than us, we can’t possibly judge if what God does is just or not.
But this amounts to “might is right,” or perhaps “might and incomprehensible is right.” It suggests that we should worship and obey not because God is good, but just because God is God and has incomprehensible reasons for whatever God does. I can’t accept that.
Although I’ve thought these things for decades, the immediate inspiration for this cartoon was hearing a fascinating episode of This American Life called “Heretics,” which tells “the story of Reverend Carlton Pearson. Pearson, who died last year, was a rising star in the evangelical movement when he cast aside the idea of hell and, with it, everything he’d worked for over his entire life.”
Pearson was expelled from his church in 2004 because he just couldn’t reconcile his understanding of God with the existence of hell. And for a while, it seemed he’d lose everything. But he eventually joined the Unitarians and as far as anyone can tell had no regrets.
I’m an atheist and Pearson wasn’t, but I still have to admire his fortitude. Anyhow, if you enjoy listening to podcasts, I recommend this one.
If you prefer more political cartoons than this, don’t worry – the next couple I’ve got lined up are more overtly political! :-)
In the last couple of weeks, trying to find new outlets now that Xwitter has arbitrarily decided my cartoons are porn, I’ve been posting cartoons on Reddit and Dailykos. Reddit is organized into millions of sub-forums, called subreddits, each of which has its own editorial standards. And so I’ve been experiencing rejection – often for what seems to me to be arbitrary reasons (like the “politicalhumor” subreddit deciding that a cartoon about racism wasn’t sufficiently political).
It’s reminded me of how much I appreciate what my Patreon does for me – it gives me the freedom to to make cartoons about all sorts of subjects, without being subject to the whims and tastes of editors if I want to make a living. So those of you who support the Patreon, thank you all so much for that! You’re giving me a freedom that few political cartoonists have ever had.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has six panels. All of the panels take place in a blue sky with fluffy white clouds.
PANEL 1
A human man, with a beard and a flannel shirt, is standing on a cloud, looking up at God, who is on another, higher cloud. (And is also much larger physically than the human guy). God is drawn in the traditional way: He has a thick white beard and is wearing white robes, and there’s a halo behind His head.
God is grinning and spreading His hands wide in a welcoming manner.
GOD: Hi there, I’m God! Good news! Because I’m so infinitely loving, good and merciful, you get to go to Heaven!
MAN: Okay!
PANEL 2
A close up of God, who as Nadine draws Him has very pretty eyes. He is smiling and pressing his palms together and looking in the direction of the off-panel human.
GOD: But if you don’t love me, I’ll throw you into a lake of burning sulfur where you’ll be tormented day and night forever!
PANEL 3
God smiles down beatifically at the human, who has raised a finger to make a point.
MAN: But… That’s horrible! And it doesn’t make sense! A good god wouldn’t torture people forever!
PANEL 4
A close up of God, with a wailing expression, as He presses the back of His hand to His forehead. He is dissolving into ash, and has already disappeared from the upper chest down.
GOD: Gasp! By pointing out a paradox you’ve defeated me! Now I must turn into ash and die like in that Marvel movie!
PANEL 5
Nothing is left of God but a pyramid-shaped pile of black ash (the ash pile has a halo behind it). In the foreground, the human has mildly surprised body language, and is rubbing the back of his neck with one hand.
MAN: Um…
PANEL 6
God, a merry expression on his face, has reappeared whole on His cloud. He’s crouching down and pointing at the human. Lightning shoots out of God’s finger, engulfing the human and instantly turning the human into a black, charred, and surprised looking skeleton.
GOD: I’m kidding! Have fun suffering in the abyss forever, loser! Hah hah!
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
Chicken fat is an obsolete cartoonists’ expression for unimportant but entertaining details the cartoonist slips into the cartoon.
In this cartoon, in panel one, on the lower left, we can see a little dog sniffing at the cloud it’s standing on. The dog is wearing white robs and has a halo and white feathery wings.
We can’t see the cloud the dog is standing on again until panel five. In this panel, the dog is gone, but there’s a yellow puddle on the cloud where the dog was.
> “One odd thing about being an atheist, as many atheists have pointed out, is that although we disbelieve in all gods, most of us extra disbelieve in a particular God – whichever God was dominant where we grew up.”
This is just silly. If you’re truly an atheist — meaning that you believe that all beliefs in any god whatsoever is simply misguided nonsense — why do you waste your time straining your brain analyzing the ridiculous fantasy characteristics of “whichever God was dominant where [you] grew up”?
Do you also do critical thinking about how faulty other people’s ideas about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are?
Most of my beliefs were developed in opposition to the Catholic faith I was raised in.
I believe the Pope would like a word. Seriously, all our right-wing Supreme Court justices are Catholic. The power of the Catholic Church in the northeastern U.S. (where I grew up and spent my 20’s) is much greater than evangelical Christianity, but often pulling in the same regressive directions. The Catholic church also quietly controls the hospital systems in many places across the U.S..
I agree. But, the best “counter-argument” that I’ve encountered was the second volume in Doris Lessing’s Canopos in Argos series, the Marriage of Zones 3, 4 and 5. “Counter-argument” is in quotes, because it isn’t really an argument at all, but a narrative in which we see people doing what their gods tell them to do, even though they don’t want to, and it is sometimes horrible, but there really is a bigger reason which they start to understand by the end. Again, it didn’t convice me. But, within that invented world it made sense.
Speaking as someone who is an atheist, and grew up in a country where Eastern Orthodox Christianity still had a presence, I do not disbelieve in any god more than in any other.
Sometimes, I will ironically call upon Gök Tengri, a deity that has not been worshiped in Bulgaria for more than a millennium. Any other deities, I view completely, totally and utterly equally.
———–
In my opinion, if you particularly disbelieve in a specific deity, you are not exactly an atheist.
I think that we need clarification on what “extra disbelieving” is.
Personally, I didn’t take the phrase literally, but rather as a facetious or self-deprecating way of describing the negative emotion attached to reacting against childhood indoctrination.
We can disbelieve in all gods, but there’s little or no emotion attached to their religious indoctrination … except for the one we grew up with.
… in my opinion.
After some time of considering myself an atheist I realized I really definitely was when I noticed that if I somehow knew that I was wrong, that there were gods or at least one god and that some religious tradition that exists or existed on earth at some point was essentially correct, I’d have no idea at all which one it was. The Christian god that I grew up vaguely associating with the “real” religion sounds no more probable to me than Thor or Kali or the Five Gods of Chalion at this point in my life.
Incidentally, the other day I dropped something and muttered “Zarquon” as in the great prophet Zarquon in the HGTG series. So maybe the gods I specifically don’t believe in are the overtly fictional ones.
That’s pretty much how I meant it, except that I think I’d say “cultural indoctrination” rather than “childhood indoctrination,” although obviously there’s a huge amount of overlap there.
“most of us extra disbelieve in a particular God – whichever God was dominant where we grew up.””
Speak for yourself.
Frankly I find this a very Americocentric idea of atheism, that assumes that the default is to grow up in a strongly religious community, and that atheism must be a reaction against something, that can only exist as a defensive ideological enclave within a sea of religious belief.
I was raised by atheists in an atheist community and I refuse to be erased as some kind of exception.
Fair point, Avvaaa. I’ve changed “most” to “many” in that sentence.
I’m religious (Anglican) and I *definitely* do not believe in hell (as an afterlife destination for some people based on how they acted while alive). and none of the religious people I know believe in it either, because they are either belong to other religions (not christian), or they’re people I know from church
I actually live in a part of north america that has a really high percentage of people with no spiritual and/or religious beliefs, so my church participation (as limited as it is post-pandemic) is something I don’t have in common with any friends my age (thirties)
I also don’t know that belief in hell is that prevalent among mainline (non-evengelical, non-charismatic) protestant denominations. but I’m also not in the US, so it might be different there than here
also, while sacremental christianity resonates with me most deeply for cultural (i.e. childhood exposure) reasons, to whatever extent I believe in god (it differs depending on the day), I don’t think I “extra” believe in the trinity more than other traditions of encountering the divine
I feel so bad for the dog! What happened to them?!?
The dog, having done its doggie business, just wandered or flew off and is fine. :-)
Does the dog peeing imply that peeing is a joy for dogs and thus something that exists in Heaven? The chicken fat has theological implications…
Yes! But, additionally, during its life that was a very evil cloud. From the cloud’s perspective, the dog is a demon tormenting it.
That’s a relief to hear!
Now on to less important things, like what you get when you flip the word “dog” around.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether I still would have become atheist so quickly if I’d grown up in a religion without the problem of evil. One of my earliest memories was getting an internel organ removed. I had no idea what the fuck an “adenoid” was, just that apparently I needed them taken out and that it was a very unpleasant experience. (Side note: Oddly enough, no Republican has sever told me children shouldn’t get “irreversible life-changing surgery” like an adenoidechtomy).
So I was expected to believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent god who couldn’t do something as simple as make me not need surgery. Even to a toddler this didn’t make sense, and by age seven I was pretty sure that such a god couldn’t exist.
But what if I had been brought up in a different culture, one where the dominant religion doesn’t feature an “omnipotent” or “omnibenevolent” god? Could I have been convinced of the existence of, say, Zeus? No one has yet convinced me he exists, but no one has ever seriously tried. Certainly not during formative years of my childhood.
A counterargument is that in some sense, I did grow up with a religion with a non-omnipotent and non-omnibenevolent god.
I realized pretty young that for either of the two denominations we switched between (Reformed and Conservative Judaism) to make any sense, there really needed to be two different “god” characters:
a)The “Reformed and Conservative Jewish God” is claimed by their supporters to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.
b)The “Torah God” is not claimed to be any of those “omni” things by his authors.
These two characters have to be different, because the things their authors say about them have almost nothing in common. Hence, the question of whether they exist needs to be considered independently.
As mentioned above, I couldn’t believe in the Reformed and Conservative Jewish God because of the problem of evil. The Torah God doesn’t have the problem of evil, but he does have another problem. When I was a kid, I privatly said the Shema with one word changed: I said אֶפֶס instead of אֶחָד. If the Torah God existed he would be so offended by such a change that he’d probably kill me and a whole bunch of other people because he’s a total asshole that way. But he didn’t, which I take as a pretty strong hint that he probably doesn’t exist.
(Side note: I think Orthodox Jewish God probably qualifies as a third character, distinct from the other two characters mentioned above. No one in my childhood tried to convince me of the existence of Orthodox Jewish God, but I quite frequently pass Chabad proselytizers on my way to and from work and lunch).
So if I had been brought up in a society that tried to convince me to believe in Zeus et el, would I have fallen for it? Maybe, or maybe I would have found some other inconsistency that would have lead me to atheism anyways.
They say heaven and hell are all a matter of perspective…
I was never thankful for dorm security except when someone sent the Lubavitcher at me. Those guts are persistent but dorm security was consistent.
I think I first read Catch-22 in my freshman year of college, over 50 years ago, and this passage has always stuck with me.
@Duncan
I think Yossarian and the authors of the Bible would agree that signing someone else’s name to something you wrote can be fun.