TOM THE DANCING BUG: God-Man, in "The Seeds of Discontent!"

God-Man Commandeth that you visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and that you do Follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER.

• [Truman Ash]

  Christian beliefs are such easy targets. For those who want to poke fun, it is as simple as making some dig, giggling with self satisfaction and getting on with your life. So brave. How about you take on “Mighty Muhammad”? I suppose I am a Christian of comfort. I visit church for the two big events and don’t think much more about it. However, for millions of people, their religion gives them the strength to go on or face challenges that otherwise might have overwhelmed them. I will continue to believe that you all have the right to make fun of whatever you like. But I also reserve the right to think less of you for the way you do it and your apparent desire to only take a poke at those that will not poke back.

  • [robdobbs]

    You say you’re not a good Cristian… so you’re only slightly  offended? 

    Which makes sense because a great Christian probably would have just turned the other cheek. Then where would we be? 

  • [Sean Mangan]

    He’s poking fun at the inconsistencies present in the current debate about contraceptives.
    If Rick Santorum was muslim, the Mighty Muhammad comic would be exactly the same. What’s your point?

    • [blueelm]

      I believe his criticism was something along the lines of  ”everything done in the name of my religion is beyond reproach”

  • [Ashen Victor]

     I don`t know if you are a troll or just it´s the burden of sheer ignorance but God-man is the super hero god of Christians, Jews and Muslims.

    Just because they call Spiderman “El Hombre Araña”  in spanish  speaking countries  doesn’t make them two different  superheroes.

    • [Richard Arnatt]

      I think “the burden of sheer ignorance” is a beautiful put-down as well as a beautiful turn of phrase. No doubt I will be using that a lot in the future!

  • [Daneel]

    More to your taste?

     http://www.jesusandmo.net/

  • [Bhupinder Singh]

    How can you say that the god in this comic is Christian god? Comic doesn’t specify it. 

  • [Jon Bakos]

    “those that will not poke back.”  Rick Santorum has got to be one of the most aggressively hateful politicians I’ve ever seen.  He’s ‘poking back’ pretty darn hard.

  • [SamSam]

    If you think that “God-man” and ”Mighty Muhammad” are at all equivalent that you need to learn about what Islam is. Here’s a hint: Muhammad is a man, while “God-man” is (presumably, though it never says this) the god of all three major Semetic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

    Maybe if the comic had been about “Awesome Abraham” your comparison might have made a tiny bit of sense?

    • [Navin_Johnson]

       ”Awesome Abraham”

      lol.  C’mon creative Boing Boingers and skilled shoopers, I really want to see this!

      • [Artor]

        I’m looking forward to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. That sounds like an Awesome Abraham!

        • [SumAnon]

          FDR: American Badass looked even better

  • [Nonentity]

     ‘How about you take on “Mighty Muhammad”?’

    Or, in other words, “why are you picking on my beliefs, when you could be picking on the beliefs I want to pick on instead?”

    Which rather blunts the later “those that will not poke back” bit of your post.

  • [RJ]

    Here, let me translate that into plain terms:

    “I’m not actually a Christian, but I play one at church twice a year. It keeps my self-righteousness topped-off and compensates for shortcomings elsewhere in my life. Anyway, I just want you guys to know I think less of you for making fun of some people’s over-simplified interpretation of religion. I’d try to defend that idiotic interpretation, but I’m far too passive-aggressive to try that.”

    • [Antinous / Moderator]

      OMG! You’re David Cameron?

  • [Joel Phillips]

    There’s nothing about Christianity in the cartoon.  There’s criticism of an idea held by a few Christian sects and some Jewish ones and some Muslim ones and, for all I know, a sub-branch of Pastafarianism (the Pennetration cult?).  

    • [joeposts]

      It’s pretty much in line with the Catholic Church I’m familiar with. I used to believe all kinds of crazy bullshit – Truman Ash is right; some Christian beliefs are easy targets. Because they are extremely stupid.

      Catholic sex ed = being told that condoms break 20% of the time, being told birth control meds cause abortions, and to round it off, having a creepy chaplain tell the girls that offering blowjobs to their “blue-balled” boyfriend instead of intercourse is the best way to Stay Abstinent and Remain Pure, since God doesn’t have to intervene if the semen is in your digestive tract, and the boys won’t take no for an answer anyways.

      It really helped me develop a healthy attitude towards sex. :-|

      • [Jerril]

         He said WHAT about blowjobs? @.@

        Aaaagh creepy creepy

      • [Joel Phillips]

        Truman’s right that some Christian beliefs are easy targets, but he’s wrong to interpret this cartoon as being anti-Christian (and even more wrong to suggest that it’s not being anti-Muslim).  It’s being anti-idiotic-religious-ideas; in this case, the idiotic idea is one held by significant parts of each of the 3 main Abrahamic religions.  

      • [Joel Phillips]

        … and did the Chaplain offer to let them practice on him?

        • [joeposts]

          Heh, no, but the gym teacher did. He got arrested.

          That wasn’t the worst – it’s semi-OT, but here’s a creepy tidbit:

          Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, there were priests that my parents warned me and my sister about – we were never to be alone with them, because they were suspected pedophiles. One of them was the priest at our parish … as soon as he arrived we got pulled out of Sunday school and started going to a different Church. He was eventually arrested, but not before ruining some young lives. That was the closest call for me personally, but he was one of several locally known pedo priests. There’s a priest now on trial for the crimes he committed forty years ago. Everybody knew who the victims were, but nothing was ever done – the victims had to fight the Church mostly alone, not easy in a region that’s about 80% Catholic.

          It’s sick to me that so many people knew about the abuse but helped cover it up by ignoring it. So yeah, not much sympathy for the Worlds Biggest Most Important Religion. But at the same time being a product of a religious upbringing does let me relate to religious people, which always puts me in a bind in discussions like these, because I want to defend and attack all sides, lol.

      • [Mantissa128]

         Blowjobs don’t count:
        http://oglaf.com/immaculate-city/2/

        NSFW.

  • [ill lich]

     ”Christian beliefs are such easy targets.”

    Yup, they sure are.  That in and of itself proves something.

    • [thecleaninglady]

      “Christian beliefs are such easy targets.”

      Yes, and that’s why the Church persecuted, jailed, tortured, maimed, burned and otherwise killed millions of people who dared to speak against such ridiculousness being presented as reality.

      • [grumble-bum]

         I’m no historian, but I think it’s more accurate to say that various political powers, co-mingled with the dominant strain of religion at various times, persecuted millions of people who mostly held to differing political/religious ideas.  They weren’t speaking against ridiculousness, but in favor of their own flavor.

        I strongly doubt that the majority of stake-burnings involved suppressed athiests/rationalists.

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          They weren’t speaking against ridiculousness, but in favor of their own flavor.

          Their own flavor consisted, in many cases, of de-centralized, non-repressive, non-misogynist faith. Many heretical creeds were simply not violent and hate-filled like the Catholic Church. You might want to read up on the Cathars for a start.

        • [Wreckrob8]

          I thought the oppression started straight after Jesus fucked off.

  • [Petzl]

    First, playing the martyr worked 2000 years ago when Christians actually were martyrs.  It’s somewhat less effective nowadays.

    Next, it is always amazing when Christians play the Muslim card.  Does it work when an older sibling stamps his feet and complains about a younger, less responsible sibling, “He can do it, why can’t I do it?”  Do you really want to go there, when what you’re intimating is, “I wish I could violently attack you people like they do.”

    Finally, we– you, I, and the comic strip creator– live in a majoritarian Christian, Western society.  You parody what you live and what you have to live through.  If burquas and sharia and Muhammed (blessings and peace be upon him) were the norm here, you’d see a lot more burqua/sharia/Muhammed-oriented parody.  We do not, however.  We blessedly live in a society where religions merely lobby against birth control and abortion restrictions (evangelicals and catholics), where religions merely molest the young (catholics), marry off child brides (fundamentalist mormons), and seek to weaken our science curricula to invalidate evolution and a 4.3 billion year-old Earth (evangelicals again– sorry).

    • [IsoTop]

      We  should be all feel blessed that parodying/criticizing  the majority religion has no life threatening consequences in this part of the world (yet).

      • [Anon_Mahna]

        http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildhunt/2012/01/north-carolina-pagan-receives-death-threat-after-challenging-bible-distribution.html

        The nuts get close. 

  • [thecleaninglady]

    For millions of people, it is not “their religion,” but a religion they were indoctrinated in without consent, in order to establish belief patterns of serving and obeying an elite.

    “Christian,” in the spirit of the true teaching ascribed to Christ, would mean that you live with love as your main guiding force. 

    “Thinking less” of others is definitely non-Christian. So the moment you harbor anything which is not love, you are not a Christian any more. In other words, being Christian is a function of how you are in the moment, not what you believe.

    Someone following a religious dogma can be easily offended, very much like someone favoring a political party or a sports team. Someone living the spirit of the teaching is completely untouchable, because they are sourcing their being inside, in their own divinity/relationship with the divine. 

    Which direct relationship religion tries to destroy as the first step of indoctrination, because it could not exist in its presence.

    • [Anon_Mahna]

       I’m fond of the quote attributed to Garrison Keillor “Going to church on Sunday does not make you a Christian any more than going into a garage makes you a car.”

    • [Wreckrob8]

      Sourcing their being inside? What the fuck does that mean? Christians are neurotic, they have suppressed/repressed all sense of self – they proclaim the freedom of the individual, but the individual is a mess of psychological contradictions you can never resolve. How you can source anything when you haven’t the slightest idea what is coming from inside or outside your head beats me. Hence psychiatrists now come to the rather depressing conclusion that they cannot understand neurosis and therefore neurosis cannot be understood. Bollocks. But they are at least right in suggesting that neurosis prevents schizophrenia. Lousy fucking choice if you ask me. Sourcing their being inside is psychobabble.

      • [thecleaninglady]

        “Sourcing their being inside is psychobabble. ”

        It is, until one experiences it for real. And anyone who tries to sell it is a scammer.

  • [petertrepan]

    Hi, Truman. I’m a non-Christian, and I used to be sore at being a second-class citizen in my own country until I realized that God was generic. The god in “In God we Trust,” the god in “One Nation Under God,” the god that one must believe in or be banned from office in eight states — is not really Jehovah. Because if it were, that would violate the “no religious test” clause of the Constitution.
    So I’m happy now, because it appears I’m not really a second-class citizen after all. And you should be happy, too.  ”God” in the comic is just a generic god. Not really the Christian god, but the same kind of generic god that politicians sprinkle liberally into every speech without violating separation of church and state or inferring that Christians are the only real citizens. So I’m not really a second-class citizen, and this comic isn’t really making fun of Christianity. :)

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    My son displays a general garment and you claim it’s cut to your fit?  What a fascinating revelation.

    • [Coolhappymax]

      Do not mistake my son for a child.

  • [Artor]

    There are plenty of cartoons that make fun of Mohammed as well. You can Google them if that’s what you want to read.

  • [lecti]

    For such an easy target, they sure enjoy relegating non-Christians to second-class citizenship by any means possible!

  • [Dan Hibiki]

     Same god last time I checked.

  • [donniebnyc]

    “However, for millions of people, their religion gives them the strength to go on or face challenges that otherwise might have overwhelmed them.”

    So if we did away with the organization responsible for decades of enabling and protecting pedophiles and causing hundreds of thousands of children to be born with aids by spreading lies and misinformation in Africa and elsewhere, the worst outcome would be that those “millions of people” would be forced to find a way to cope with life that doesn’t involve ancient mythology.

    Sounds like a great deal to me. 

• [Matthew Harris]

  Oh, ick.

• [Cowicide]

  Thank you, God!

• [Incipient Madness]

  I’m hoping that was at least two different couples God Man was intervening with today. Condom + spermicide can make sense, but add an IUD and you’ve got overkill.

  • [SamSam]

    It’s also a pretty weird IUD with walls that have to be broken, and apparently it’s before the spermicide, so it’s all a little confusing to me.

  • [Incipient Madness]

     Of course,  if we did have a combo of condom, spermicide, and IUD and God Man took measures to assure a pregnancy, it’s perfectly consistent with The Bible. Sarah, Elizabeth, and Mary all had children against the odds.

• [Navin_Johnson]

  Gee, I just don’t get it?  Is the comic picking on Abrahamic  religions or is it lampooning something that’s been all over the news lately?
  Sorry, you see, I live on the same deserted island as Truman.

• [andres vidau]

  God-Man RULES.

• [ill lich]

  News Flash: untold millions of sperm die everyday, whether you have sex or masturbate or do nothing.  They die just sitting there waiting to be ejaculated.  Skin cells die, blood cells die, sperm cells die. 

  Second News Flash: egg cells die too (duh!), in fact a good number of *fertilized* eggs get flushed out with menstrual flow anyway, never attaching to the uterine wall, never developing.  If God (or God Man) were so opposed to abortion, then why does He cause it to happen?

  • [joeposts]

    ‘Cos God is a prankster. Hence those dinosaur bones!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jim_HBj7Bdk

• [bbonyx]

  “However, for millions of people, their religion gives them the strength to go on or face challenges that otherwise might have overwhelmed them”

  Incorrect. The strength was in them (and you.. and me) already. Thinking you need fairy tale, invisible friend hand holding is the entire problem, and one only does oneself a disservice and sells themselves short thinking they do not possess everything they need internally. Saying it is only with the help of spuriously-perceived outside intervention is how religion usurps the strengths people already possess. Buy hey, sell yourself short, it’s only your life, after all.

  • [thecleaninglady]

    Exactly, religion found a way to install its representatives as middle men between people and their own strength and divinity. And we can see how much profit, power and influence its representatives gained from this sleigh of hand and the tremendous costs in wars, persecution, poverty & ignorance it brought to the world.

• [MrJM]

  Bottom line: God loves the jizz.

  • [Felton / Moderator]

    Every sperm is sacred…

• [Ito Kagehisa]

  I enjoyed the comic, as usual, but for some reason I’m hungry for enoki now.

• [CSBD]

  I think one of the other “issues” being ignored most of the time is that the Christian Right “leadership” and politicians are super concerned about what happens in the bedroom and are fighting to end contraception and a womans right to choose if/when/how often they get pregnant and if they want to have the kid.
  Those same politicians and religious leaders could care less about what happens to the child following birth.  They especially don’t care if the parent(s) can or are willing to care for the child or if the child will starve or freeze to death in a dumpster (after the fact they will be shocked and outraged of course).
  They really don’t give a rats ass until that child grows up enough to have kids of their own.

  The only time they even pretend to care is for a brief window when they need votes or in the case of a religious leader if they need an air conditioned dog house or perhaps hush money due to their proclivity for child molestation (its not a crime, its just a sin as far as they are concerned) 

  • [RedShirt77]

     You missed the link about Christians sending gay kids to torture camps, to clear up their problems.  They care, just not in a good way.

• [Matthew Jones]

  I’d like to see God’s take on the Plan B pill.

• [IsoTop]

  Coming soon to a pharmacy near you: Trojan Brand condoms with spermicide and act of God resistant latex, able to withstand Big Bang-category forces.

  (small print: not responsible for amputations resulting from irremovable condoms due to ill-fit from inappropriate size)

• [ryuchi]

  Wow, you should see Wachwskies’ “The Story of God”, then this one would look to you like Disney production.

• [grumble-bum]

  Dear Antinous / Moderator,

  I must admit to being a bit baffled that my reply to thecleaninglady was deemed worthier of correction than her/his original comment.

  I suppose I could have written a lengthy disclaimer about how some heretical faiths in history have been more relatively progressive than the dominant faiths of the time.  However, the comment I was replying to certainly seemed to read as a statement that all people persecuted in the name of religion were literal non-believers, not the alternate-believers that you & I both mention.  In that context, I fail to see why I warranted chiding.

  In the broader context, I see that thecleaninglady perhaps has a more nuanced view of matters spiritual than I had initially assumed, so perhaps I owe her/him an apology for jumping to the conclusion that s/he was simply a modern Angry Athiest.

  • [thecleaninglady]

    Thank you. Written form carries no nuance. 

    I am angry at the church/organized religion. Raping children’s bodies and minds, conditioning them to rape and violate others, to perceive cruelty as love, creating a planetary scale multi-generational Stockholm syndrome pattern of relationships in hell, creating hell on earth for millions of people, all while being filthy rich and appropriating all positive traits of humanity is not OK in my book.

    The fact that awesome people get indoctrinated, too, is not an indication of the church being “good.”

    By “church” I mean all religious institutions that bring their institutional interest before the interest and well-being of people. 

    Including the religion of money.

• [Teller]

  In other news: “String theory is dazzling but unverified. There’s zero proof that it’s true. Yet, like fringe cranks, string theorists labor away, unencumbered by reality…” http://theamericanscholar.org/fields-apart/