Editing this work by George Bellows and seeing the words "Doggy Girl" under a picture of Jesus was one step too Dada for my tastes, causing me to fall backwards into the ether where all stories exist, and slurping up the most surreal. In unrelated news, I’m looking for a commissioner specialising in anthropomorphic canines. I can pay you in wishes and prayers.
While the evidence for the existence of Jesus is wanting at most, not helped at all by a billion people treating him like their imaginary friend as opposed to finding joy in reality, the boy’s always useful to illustrate some point that’s familiar to Western audiences, helped along by about two thousand years of brainwashing, and which is almost certain to be irrelevant in a thousand years or so when the new civilisation comes along and creates another cult for the sheeple to fawn over.
“Oh, sheeple. This sounds like somebody who knows what they’re on about…” and then you walk away from the discourse which was too spicy for you to handle. What do I know about religion? Well, I did read the Quran once, and then stopped when it suggested I beat my wife for disobeying me. I also read some part of the Bible, and I don’t know when I stopped, but it must have been around the time where the author advocated Young Earth Creationism. Sheesh! How did this nutjob ever get published?
But there is one stance where the author and I have the same viewpoint, in addition to the point about slavery: “Thou shalt not kill”. While the author has shown arrogance by using the informal “thou” instead of the formal “you”, assuming that they are better than the reader, I can agree that not murdering fellow man is, on the whole, a decent thing. Unless it’s your slave. Bitch better behave if they don’t wanna be stoned.
So Spiders Georg here wrote up a little cartoon around the same time as the United States government was conscripting about a million people to fight in World War I, a war in which nobody won anything and Germany got fucked and that’s how we got the Nazis. The magazine this cartoon was published in ended up being banned from the New York Subway for “irreligion”. It was then put on trial for the obstruction of enlistment and recruitment. The United States is a nation that prides itself on freedom of speech. There is no Abu Ghriab. The Army did nothing wrong.
I discount the opinions of everyone who follows a religion, for if they dedicate themselves to a worldview that can be dismantled with the simplest of experiments (plus fourty–nine more) and hold onto that worldview, then they have chosen the path of ignorance, the path of least resistance, and the path chooses to ignore two thousand years of human progress for the sake of sheepishly holding onto something that aims to reverse that progress. Simply put, religion is how you explain the world to stupid people.
But I’m a fan of the comic above. It was drawn well, dives directly into the heart of the Statesian populace with no regard for life, and ends up using the values of that populace against them in a truly brutal way. For a government to be infested with Christian values, no matter how secular it says it is, and for it to go against those values for the sake of sending young men in a war they had no real reason to join, is certainly something the government would have wanted censored.
(my country is also awful in the secular area. there are still government–run Christian schools in Ontario, and this isn’t mentioning whatever the fuck is going on with Québec)
And if I or what anybody else says offends you… don’t be mad. It’s just cheap fiction, after all.
Date: 2017–02–26. Size: 6,666 bytes. Colours: 3.
Upscaled Dimensions: 348×644. Original Dimensions: 174×322.