TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has six panels. All of the panels take place in a blue sky with fluffy white clouds.

PANEL 1

A human man, with a beard and a flannel shirt, is standing on a cloud, looking up at God, who is on another, higher cloud. (And is also much larger physically than the human guy). God is drawn in the traditional way: He has a thick white beard and is wearing white robes, and there’s a halo behind His head.

God is grinning and spreading His hands wide in a welcoming manner.

GOD: Hi there, I’m God! Good news! Because I’m so infinitely loving, good and merciful, you get to go to Heaven!

MAN: Okay!

PANEL 2

A close up of God, who as Nadine draws Him has very pretty eyes. He is smiling and pressing his palms together and looking in the direction of the off-panel human.

GOD: But if you don’t love me, I’ll throw you into a lake of burning sulfur where you’ll be tormented day and night forever!

PANEL 3

God smiles down beatifically at the human, who has raised a finger to make a point.

MAN: But… That’s horrible! And it doesn’t make sense! A good god wouldn’t torture people forever!

PANEL 4

A close up of God, with a wailing expression, as He presses the back of His hand to His forehead. He is dissolving into ash, and has already disappeared from the upper chest down.

GOD: Gasp! By pointing out a paradox you’ve defeated me! Now I must turn into ash and die like in that Marvel movie!

PANEL 5

Nothing is left of God but a pyramid-shaped pile of black ash (the ash pile has a halo behind it). In the foreground, the human has mildly surprised body language, and is rubbing the back of his neck with one hand.

MAN: Um…

PANEL 6

God, a merry expression on his face, has reappeared whole on His cloud. He’s crouching down and pointing at the human. Lightning shoots out of God’s finger, engulfing the human and instantly turning the human into a black, charred, and surprised looking skeleton.

GOD: I’m kidding! Have fun suffering in the abyss forever, loser! Hah hah!

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

Chicken fat is an obsolete cartoonists’ expression for unimportant but entertaining details the cartoonist slips into the cartoon.

In this cartoon, in panel one, on the lower left, we can see a little dog sniffing at the cloud it’s standing on. The dog is wearing white robs and has a halo and white feathery wings.

We can’t see the cloud the dog is standing on again until panel five. In this panel, the dog is gone, but there’s a yellow puddle on the cloud where the dog was.

Source.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
    4·
    4 months ago

    That is an interpretation of these passages of the bible, and yet tales are told in which Adonai is surprised, when his own minions turn against Him, and rather than fixing that flaw, He smites them. Even the tale of the flood is the big oops where He decided this build is a wash and has to preload a prior version (which indicates He cannot just go back to the moment the pattern deviated from the intended plan and remove the wing-flapping butterfly that started the problem.)

    To be fair, I don’t know what the scholarly consensus is on those specific passages (although the bible teems with literary hyperbole) but the consensus is as a whole, the Bible is not univocal, not inerrant and not divinely inspired. When it is applied, it is attributed what meaning is useful to a given era to lend authority to the ideology of the time.

    Of course, if Adonai was omni-x, that would make Him responsible for all the drama in the Bible and beyond. He could put an end to runaway industrialism and war profiteering as He could to volcanic winters and famine, as he could to every case of myiasis or Hantavirus hemorrhagic fever or bone cancer. And that implies He chooses not to create a world with regard to the immense suffering of the life on it, which makes Him, as Epicurus noted, malevolent, at least to His creations.