I did fine without this for years.
on December 16, 2017 at 12:01 amcompletely extricating oneself from their childhood religion, especially one that was all-encompassing, might be kind of like pulling off one’s own arm
sometimes i still binge old rich mullins songs on youtube at 4am
Title of the strip is missing the word “four”
Originally posted:
April 5, 2003
The bible is magically attached to her hand. Where the bible goes, she goes.
Did the Man In The Tan Jacket give it to her?
So, if she throws it really hard, can she fly like Thor?
Yeah, but she never does because it’s easier to just use her jetpack.
I kinda hope Joyce actually reads the bible without her previous religious preconceptions and finally sees all the weird and fucked up shit that’s in it.
Real, True Christians®: The Bible is the infallible and perfect word of God revealed to humans through divine inspiration
Me, a fake Christian: The Bible contains a book of sex poems, several recipes, and a story about a guy who got mad at a tree
Where are the recipes?
Apparently someone actually wrote a book collecting them: http://cookingwiththebible.com/
For some reason, they seem to have omitted Ezekiel 4:9-13.
Okay, I have to question the physics here. Throwing an object that isn’t all that massive, and then promptly being able to spin on a dime, dive to catch it (and it has to have a lot of lateral motion for a dive to even be necessary), and fall FASTER than it is? The only way for that to work is if Joyce has superhuman speed and refle-…
….
…. I’ll just show myself out.
Actually, it isn’t that hard. Note, she’s throwing it UP and over her shoulder. All she had to do was pivot and launch herself laterally to intercept it on the way down.
… yeah, I’m overthinking this.
I had an unusual experience with shedding my childhood religion, because I started rethinking things at age 12 (puberty made me keenly aware that I was transgender, and I’d already been kind of taken with the idea of being ‘turned into a girl’ somehow prior to that), then it broke down entirely at age 14.
There were a bunch of factors:
– I was homeschooled in a way where I had no peer group and barely saw anyone besides my mom and dad most days, so there wasn’t much of a social life to lose.
– The social life I got instead was by going on the internet to forums and chat rooms related to video games- which I started doing in secret at age 11 because I was forbidden to go to chat rooms, but my interest outweighed the relatively weak warnings they’d given. (Not sure how I pushed through to this conclusion so early, I was pretty young.) The result was seeing a bunch of people of different religions and philosophies arguing all sorts of things but also the inevitable realization that some non-christians were nice (and some christians were jerks), undermining my parents’ claim that christians had some sort of monopoly on not being jerks.
– The trans thing I already mentioned. And when I started tentatively feeling out how my parents felt about it, the reaction was so bad (my mother threatened to beat me once, and in later years she claims she doesn’t remember it) that I became even more secretive around them.
– All my grandparents died by or around then.
– At age 13 I started getting into a relationship with someone who had severe mental issues and then the next year when I was 14, according to their friends who went to the same forum, that person killed themselves after a big nasty fight and a breakdown in job and housing prospects. This was a big ‘prayer is useless’ experience for me.
– My parents had gone to church when I was a small child, but stopped from the time I was about 8 to 14 because we moved to a different town and they started taking care of my ailing grandfather fulltime until he passed away, and then the took a while to find a church they liked.
– When they did find a church they liked, it seemed super fakey and plasticy and terrible to me. They were big on televangelism-style ‘slain in the spirit’ sorts of stuff.
And that’s how I pretty much became an atheist-leaning agnostic at age 14. Fast forward to age 18 when I moved the heck away from Texas and never looked back, and the result is a much easier time severing my childhood religion than most.
I’m pretty sure that’s atypical though, as most trans people I’ve met only seem to figure things out in their 20s, as do many religion-changing people. I think public school (and the lack of experiences with death) makes for a whole different context than what I experienced.
I’ve always loved the visuals in this strip.
Ditto.
I always likened it more to ripping the foundation out of a house, but I like the arm thing because it’s more visceral.
Also, for me it’s old Newsboys albums (pre-worship phase).