How Many Theists Are Like This?

Offensive?

Maybe, but if the shoe fits…

Yep it’s written by a Pastor but only in the sense that christians should be working even harder to align themselves in a narrow joy- suppressing way so as to become good god fodder.

You know something? I think this cartoon could apply to lots of different groups, not just Christians. It could even apply to atheists. We live in a very open society in which we can find people like ourselves and build insular self selected little groupthink clubs that keep us from challenging ourselves with worldviews that differ from our own.

I think that’s what the pastor, who drew this, is trying to point out.

Seems to describe the majority of christians that I know here in Texas. Though most of them wouldn’t even think of it this deeply.

The first sentiment about being “Born Xian” is dead accurate for me and my wife. It was a conscious awareness that I could have been “born” Muslim, Jewish or Hindu in some god-forsaken non-jesus country. The rest is complete bunk. I was always very uncomfortable and had to think and read a lot – a lot of Xian lies, that is – in order to keep the faith.

I always recognize Nakedpastor’s toons.

I agree with todd and others that it could apply to any social group. I’m curious though as tyo why a pastor would choose to use “God-forsaken” to describe some other parts of the world. Doesn’t that imply that God has abandoned those nations where people are not hungry, poor, diseased or war torn? Doesn’t that make the Christian god a god of consumerism and sloth?

I made a parody web page about the virgin mary once, in 1996 or so. (In the page, the virgin mary visited a mcdonalds, said a few bland meaningless words at a gas station, and departed in a taxi. There were photos.) I asked some friends of mine who are christian pastors to help me with it… they ended up writing all of the text. We all gave careful attention to making sure it didn’t really say anything, if you really paid attention, because we didn’t want to actually make false religious claims. At the bottom of the page, we put some links to some serious Mary shrines, in case anyone bumbled into our page by accident while looking for religious material.

I used to get hate mail from monks, nuns, and priests about it. They’d tell me I was anti-christian. They’d tell me I was going to rot in hell. I’d write them back and tell them that the page was in fact written by two pastors and that we intended it as a lighthearted parody and that we had thought that it was so over the top that nobody would possibly take it seriously enough to take offense, and then I asked them if the nasty email they sent was really christian of them, whether Jesus would approve of their language and tone, and whether it’s more appropriate for them to speak to me in that manner or to try to teach me by example how to be kind and good. One monk wrote me back a rather sincere apology. Another did not. The priests didn’t reply. The nun wrote me back to say that I was so vile that she was not going to read whatever I wrote to her because she didn’t need to listen to people who are going to hell and she couldn’t believe I had the unmitigated gall to reply.

The Mary shrines we linked to all eventually emailed me to demand (under threat of lawsuit) that I remove the link to their site from my page. I wrote each one back to explain that I had placed the link there in case someone seeking religious material accidentally found my page instead, and that while I had no legal obligation to remove the links (I hadn’t said anything about them, I merely made a list, so they could hardly claim I defamed them) I would do so as a courtesy if they really insisted, but every one of them wrote back to demand that I take the links down anyway. One of them did so politely. I replaced them with links including one about the singer Madonna and another to Virgin Airlines.

Of course, that’s not to even mention the people who would regularly send threats of lawsuits or violence to my web hosting provider, to the point that they finally told me that if I didn’t take the page down they’d close my account. (I moved the page to a different server and closed my account anyway.)

So, I would say it doesn’t matter if the cartoon is offensive, or accurate or not, people will take offense from it regardless because a lot of religious people fly into an insane rage whenever they think anything about their belief may have been questioned.

The very fact it is written by a pastor it reflective of the fact that there are many Christians who are committed to challenging the herd mentality.

Location of birth is the number one indicator of religious affiliation. I occasionally ask Christians what, after their long spiritual journey, made them settle on Christianity. I never get an answer.

it may be to some but it is so true. its more acceptable and easy to be a christian. But what if they lived in someother part of the world?

If only they were as docile as the cartoon suggests. Unfortunately some of them have started to wake up and have begun thrashing around grasping at straws. You know like when a dog wakes up from a nightmare and they start looking for the objects from their imagination in the real world and panic when they’re not there anymore?

I have two of these kinds of Christian “on the go” via email right now—both flinging the usual nonsense around as quickly as they can cut and paste it from some Christian apologetics web site which tries to appear credible by printing ad hominem on physicists and biologists, as if an individual scientists personality is intrinsic to the axiom of their work.

To Leanstrum:
Wow, that conversation with your mother sounds so familiar!

About the comic, I’d like to add my two cents that it’s not surprising that a Christian wrote it; they are often so hard on themselves and each other, and it is necessary to the faith in the sense that there is such an emphasis on the prevalence of sin and the challenge of living righteous lives. The comic emphasizes a sense of relief at convenient belief but recognizing that tendency in oneself produces a deep sense of shame. It’s true that one can get away without thinking hard about one’s beliefs, but usually not for long and the people who take their beliefs most seriously must often struggle with them tremendously.

Oddly, I’ve heard preachers make this argument to convince people to be born-again (that you happen to be Christian probably only be coincidence of birth in a certain part of the world, so you haven’t really chosen your religion).

That cartoon made me remember this old joke from a Jesuit back in highschool:

“What’s the difference between a holy man, and a zealot? The holy man has a sense of humor.”