[0116] Jesus Of Nazareth
└ posted on Monday, 30 November 2009, by Novil
- Woo: That’s this Christian cross, isn’t it? Do you believe in God?
- Sandra: Oh, I’m not sure if there is really a “God”. But Jesus was definitely a swell guy!
- Sandra: He cared for the outcasts and sick, made his fellow men forgive others their sins and preached that violence mustn’t be answered with violence.
- Woo: Wow, cool.
- Sandra: If he lived today all those religious nutjobs would call him a socialist hippie and send him death threats.
![[0116] Jesus Of Nazareth](/comics/2009-11-30-[0116]-jesus-of-nazareth.png "[0116] Jesus Of Nazareth")
The punchline to this strip made me laugh, and yes, I do think it’s true. The only thing that bothers me is that I’m seeing hypocrisy, intolerance, and generalizations from both “ends” of the spectrum, and the people in the “middle” – kind, caring, moral people (to which being religious has never, nor does it currently hold the patent on) are trying to dodge the crap being thrown from the extremists that do believe in a higher power (not just Christianity, but any organized religion) and the extremists that do not believe in a higher power (hint: extremist means what it’s always meant – but after reading some of the comments here, I believe I have to quickly clarify – this doesn’t refer to the average Joe/Jane who doesn’t go out of his way to ridicule(jokes are jokes, funny is funny, and the line can be debated, but the intent of some people is clear)/attack/”shove opinions/beliefs down the throat of others”). For those who say the latter are somehow justified, I think that’s just plain sad and definitely hypocritical.
To parrott other comments – so true! I remember that Thomas Jefferson even took all the supernatural elements out of the Bible that had to do with the life of Jesus and what you had left is the good works and regard for the poor. To think some folks now are considering doing the opposite – taking out the “do unto others” and injecting more consumerist language.
Chip Uni:
I’m not sure what you’re saying. Someone asked him what to do to be “good”, and Jesus told him what to do.
He was not forcing anyone to do anything. He was not some kind of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich, ensuring wealth would be redistributed. He asked people to give of themselves.
Figures, the comments on religion get everyone riled up. People are strange.
@Novil
point nicely put. =]
This is all there is.
If anybody does not like it, s/he is absolutely NOT forced to read, enjoy or like it.
I, personally, found this strip amusing, and that’s my point.
I just want to say I don’t too much of a problem with the strip, even if I don’t agree that most of the death threats would come from right wingers. After all, Jesus said he was the only way into heaven, and that’s terribly politically incorrect. He’d be burned at the stake for being terribly, terribly intolerant of their left wing feelings.
I mostly have a problem with the potshot you took with your first post here in the comments. Way to be “controversial”.
I was really under the impression this comic was supposed to be light and fun. It’s a young girl and a talking raccoon, for crying out loud. Could you please start a parallel comic that can contain all your talking points? Most people try to AVOID isolating their viewers.
This strip only pokes fun at those who CLAIM to be Christian. Like most of the so-called Christians that I know, their life style shows they truly do not follow Jesus. Unless you count goofy emails that DARE you to forward it.
I’m a real nutjob Christian. I believe Jesus is God in the flesh. I believe in the literal 6-day creation by God. I believe the Bible. I hate the modern day church, because it is a business which has very little to do with the Bible.
I don’t find this one strip insulting. It’s more of an semi-accurate observation rather than a ha-ha funny.
I’m a Christian myself, and I agree with the point of the comic with out taking any offense at all.
On a similar note, here’s a quote that I feel pertains to the comic:
“A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultry, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a Speaker for the Dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I’m going to tell you.)
The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him, the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. “Is there anyone here,” he says to them, “who has not desired another man’s wife, another woman’s husband?”
They murmer and say, “We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.”
The rabbi says, “Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.” He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, “Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he’ll know I’m his loyal servant.”
So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, “Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.”
The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.
As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones.
“Nor am I without sin,” he says to the people. “But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.”
So the women died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.
The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.”
-Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead(book)
SWicked —
> I’m not sure what you’re saying. Someone asked him what to do to be “good”, and Jesus told him what to do.
No, SWicked. That’s not what the rich man asked.
@PrairieGhost:
And you are misinterpreting my comment oÔ
No offence. I’m just confused why you came up with that…
Honestly… I have no idea XD’
you need to chill 😉
Oh, sorry PrairieGhost!
I just found the one with the same Nickname as I have above you…
(I was the first one way way up… I haven’t seen the second one cause the comment is hidden)
never mind…
“Note to myself: think of a better nickname…” *sigh* >_>’
@Unclever:
I would be curious as to how much the distribution of said tithe would cost, and how much that would ’tilt the scales’, so to speak. Not everybody has digital bank accounts, after all.
The same problem befalls most ‘solve world hunger’ plans–we can grow it, we just can’t get it to where it’s needed in time. Logistics on a global scale is a staggeringly difficult problem.
@Tahvohck:
I love that quote, and the book it’s from. Not so much the later ones in the series–Scott Card kind of goes into strange territory, but Speaker is excellent.
On the comic: I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Sandra holds this particular view, although I wonder if having her adopt a soft agnostic stance is intentional to make her as easy as possible for the widest audience to relate to, or to minimize the collective pool that disagrees with her.
Me, I’m a gelatin-atheist. I’m not a hard atheist, who will run around declaring there is no such thing as God with absolute certainty. Nor am I quite a soft atheist (also known as agnostic), who thinks any religion is equally likely to be true. I’m a gelatin-atheist–I doubt there is a higher power, but I’m not exactly going to Vegas with that conviction. If push comes to shove and someone tells me “NAME A CATEGORY” all Jeopardy-style, I’d probably say I’m an agnostic.
As an inobservant-but-guilty-about-it jew who at least avoids pork, you’re all missing the point. The point is not that “Jesus was a socialist”(unlikely, since the philosophical groundwork for the Marxist analysis of history that socialism is based on had not yet been laid). It’s simply that many of the members of Christan churches who claim to be the staunchest defenders of Christianity in the public forum disagree with major ideals propounded in the document they by all rights ought to uphold. It should be noted that this is not unique to Christianity but merely more obvious owing to the prominence of politicized Christianity. It should be noted, incidentally that it’s possible to overstate how distinctive Jesus was in the context of his time; there were a number of would-be Messiahs in Judea at the time and the emphasis on ethical concerns over temple ritual is an essential feature of Pharisaic Judaism(and the reason it was the only branch to survive the destruction of the second temple).
Isn’t that pretty much exactly what happened to him? Religious nutjobs took offense to what he said and had him killed.
I’m reminded of the line from the introduction to The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“…one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.”
I believe that Jesus is the son of God :D! But I do wonder, would Sandra be right about this? If she is correct, that would be very sad :(.
Hmph.. after reading all these comments, I think she is .
This comic doesn’t work.
If Jesus wasn’t God, then he was a nut. And if he wasn’t God, how did he heal anyone, or forgive sins? If he wasn’t God then he was a lair and a lunatic.
That said, I think he was God. And am not trying to offend anyone.
Looks like the punchline flew right over some people’s heads.
Mort: the beef of complainants is that there’s not so much a ‘punchline’ to this comic as a ‘slap in the face’. It’s strawmanning, it paints with an extremely broad brush (no matter how much Powree’s apologists in earlier comments have insisted that it’s only talking about extremism, “religious nutjobs” is an undiscriminating and obnoxious generalisation), and it puts words in people’s mouths.
It’s also not very funny. It even loses the humour of “ironic subtext” because it laboriously and ponderously spells out the author’s situation.
“REMINDS ME WHY I HATE MOST PEOPLE ” like the strip just hate the people that complained. The majority of anything is bad, the majority of people are worse then anything have fun with that note. And please for the love of god try to think about what you “people” type before everyone that can think for them selves turns around and punches you in the face.
Jesus really was an alright guy!
Ha ha ha, I got a good laugh out of this one. I admire this comic’s balls to take on touchy subjects and question authority. 🙂
What’s funny is how “all those religious nutjobs” is interpreted by different people. This is a very generic statement that leaves the meaning open to the reader, for instance what if “those nutjobs” were of some other religion besides Christianity? In essence, this is a fill-in-the-blank statement.
What makes this comic great is that is goes beyond the “safe” boundaries of the standard boring “Newspaper funny” and makes you think.
lol
S’all good, Someone v. 2.0 😉
As a Swiss guy, I can hardly express just how true that statement is.
(If you don’t know why, check the vote we had this weekend.)
At least the christian churches around all got it right this time and reprimanded us for that particular vote. Including the pope himself.
Religion; talk about a sensitive nerve to irritate.
I’ve not seen such use of the thumb rating system, before.
Oh, and agree with every word in today’s strip.
He also told his followers to get themselves swords, and to sell their cloak if they didn’t have one…
and drove a mob of moneylenders out of the temple with a whip….. and told people straight out that he did not bring peace, but a sword, and that his words would set brother against brother and father against son… not that he advocated violence in the least, but that he knew it was a violent world (who else would know better?) and that his followers would have to defend themselves against a terrible and violent world.
He may have been peaceful, but he was not a pacifist.
@ novil/powree, don’t be afraid to talk about touchy issues in this strip, they are expressions of who sandra and woo are, just as sandra and woo are expressions of you. What you want to avoid is for this strip to only be about those issues all of the time. In the same way, most normal people spend some time thinking about politics and talking about thier faith, but not all of it. And please handle it with humor :). And i would argue that that diagram in the first comment is flawed. There’s something. . .different to what Jesus preached. Not “order” in the sense of the word, but not “chaos” either. Maybe “upside down”?
Why do people get so annoyed with PERSONAL belief used toward satyrical ends? Can’t them just admire the work of art? You don’t get smart retorts on Dante’s Divine Comedy…
Laugh a little, people… sheesh. This is entertainment, innocent and desired by thousands of people at the least.
@BK.. Well-spoken. The Pharisees were largely the ones who pushed for Jesus’s death, and were the instrument God used to bring about the ultimate scarifice, so to speak.
Part of it was that Jesus spoke out against them because they were concerned more about religion and looking good for others, and were obstacles to many kinds of social justice (a commonly found theme in the Old Testament as well). There were a number of other factors as well, which makes the events of that time a bit more complicated, but there’s not enough space to go into all that.
Yes, the Gospel (“Good News”) is about more than simply correcting social injustices. It has eternity in mind as a primary focus. Nonetheless, the Bible does make it clear that aiding the needy on this side of eternity is our responsibility.
@Random – You would be correct. Jesus was God in the flesh. However, I doubt it enters into the punchline itself, and certainly I don’t look to webcomics for my theology. A movie/documentary title I heard which would go along with this is “Lord, Save Me From Your Followers”.
Also, it may very well be possible that some of the things some of the characters may say or do may not reflect the author’s personal beliefs. I highly doubt Powree would approve of setting random fires just to watch the glow, for instance, and yet Larisa is a character in this strip.
Irony is a bitch, ain’t it?
@A Concerned Citizen
tl;dr
Interesting fellow, that Jesus guy. Made a whip and drove the money-changers from the Temple. Wasn’t afraid to call a sin a sin. Said it was okay to carry a weapon to defend yourself. Cast out demons. Performed miracles. Healed the sick. He came to preach The Good News to the poor–not just those with small bank accounts–but the poor in spirit, the downtrodden. Yet liberation theology seems to make him into a sort of resistance fighter.
He taught to regard God as Father. The feminists seem to have a problem with that.
This strip is actually pretty funny XD The truth hurts. Honestly, Jesus was Chaotic Good. If you look at his life, he was a prankster (I mean, come on, taking the dirty water that was used for cleaning people’s feet and turning it into wine? How awesomely prank-ish is that?) Jesus was a great person and he lived a wonderful, happy, and fun life. Christians nowadays try to make things that are fun and make them immoral. Jesus was rich (proving you can have money and still be a Christian), he pranked people and had fun (proving you CAN have fun and still be a Christian), and the biggest thing of all…HE DIDN’T COME TO FORM A RELIGION, JUST TO GIVE PEOPLE A WAY TO HEAVEN. Christians made a religion, Christians made rules, and Christians ruined it for a lot of people. Also, he hung out with sinners, so you can hang out with non-Christians and still be a Christian.
Anyway, I’m done ranting. Also, as a note, I found this comic just today and read through the archive. Great job, keep up the good work, and don’t let anyone else tell you different. This is a great comic.
Waaaow commentspam. I echo Mort.
So, still pushing forward with the “gentle controversy” initiative here 😀 It’s one way to get known I suppose. And oddly, I can’t help but agree here… no particular religious leanings expressed (either here or in daily life), but as a role model you could do worse than Jesus H. Christ-Josephson, Nazarene Carpenter.
There’s a Chrisitian Union advent countdown calendar poster put up on a noticeboard (or more accurately over the whole board 😉 in one of the buildings where I work. The square for 7th Dec caught my eye — two anthro hearts, one looking sad, the other comforting it, caption “What does it mean to live a Christ-like life?”. The particular wording seems odd – not “Christian”, but “Christ-like”, almost like they’re trying to emphasise the philosophy and distance the idea from what the church has become.
The conclusion I personally came to was that to live a Christ like existence, you’ve got to be a chilled out rock star. Be born out of wedlock into poverty. Get divine inspiration. Go out and spread your word to anyone who’ll give you the time of day. “All you need is love”, and money can’t buy it, nor the satisfaction that you can’t get none of on earth but awaits you in heaven, should you live right enough to earn the right to climb the true stairway and knock on that door. Get yourself some groupies. Be cool. Spread the love and what wealth your fame brings. Fight the man.
Then be killed before you’re 40, in such a spectacularly gruesome way that people remember it for thousands of years, and pernicious rumours are sparked that actually, you ain’t dead…
Now if that isn’t rock, what isn’t?
(Not to mention the totally metal beard and the ability to get an epic party started with just a few jugs of water, some bread and fish…. keeping your party trick of driving your mule ACROSS the swimming pool for when things are flagging. The good die young do they not …… and leave great-looking corpses)
Oh yah… and I forgot….
Chilled most of the time, and good for a story or two, but not afraid to kick ass when needs be, if confronted by bad dudes who are TOTALLY taking liberties with others’ good faith. Walk softly and carry a deceptively heavy staff.
Emily:
good point on the “didn’t come to form a religion” thing. The feeling you can get from a lot of the new testament was that – “follow me” exhortations aside – that Mr JHC’s main intent was to try and de-corrupt early judaism and get said religion and its people back on track. Born and died a jew after all. Then he has to go and get himself martyred and suddenly a load of people are deciding he is himself enough of a holy figure to stand in place of, or even higher than, Abraham and the like. It’s hard to tell even if “son of God” may have originally just been an honorific that then got twisted to mean something more literal 😉
After all, as even my staunchly atheist father attests, there’s more actual evidence of his existence and life’s work than for quite a few other promient people in the Roman Empire. Debate the divinity side all you like but whatever the outcome, there are some grains of truth to all the stories.
And maybe there’s a lot more truth in Life Of Brian than it would first seem (and why it hits close enough to home that a lot of places banned it, even though the pythons went out of their way to make it “no, it’s NOT The Life of Jesus, just some random schlub who lived around the same time”)… perhaps it was all a big accident… just a kickass lay preacher trying to put a few things to rights, and suddenly everything gets WAAAAY out of hand.
I am heartened by the fact that most of the comments are intelligent and supportive, and the ones that are just people wanting to get offended at anything and everything are quickly buried by thumbs-down.
Let me say it again, though I know the ones that need to see it aren’t paying attention. If you see “religious nutjobs” and think, “how dare they say that about me!?” then you have just made yourself the nutjob. When we talk about “religious nutjobs”, we’re talking about fools like Fred Phelps, who honestly believes all the hardships in our country are due to our tolerance of homosexuals, and the fools on TV this year who were telling parents not to let their kids go trick-or-treating because “demons live in the candy” or the people who honestly believe Obama is the antichrist. If you’re getting offended by someone talking about nutjobs, then you’re either a nutjob yourself, or you are just looking for something to be mad about, which isn’t any better and is certainly not Christlike.
Let’s recap, shall we? This comic is about: how some people will claim to follow Christ, then behave in a very un-Christlike way. It is NOT–let me repeat that, NOT–about everyone who is Christian being a nutjob. If you honestly believe the comic is a slap at all Christians, then you’re trying way to hard to find something to be mad at, and you need to take a deep breath, count to ten, and step away from the internet. Mkay. We got that cleared up? Great.
Those are some well-thought-out closing words by PrairieGhost and I think it’s for the best of all of us when I’m closing the comment section for this strip now.