The Gaming Den

There is a difference between being a bad person and being a crazy person who is nevertheless genuinely trying to help people. Jack Chick fell into the latter catagory, most certainly. His beliefs were orthogonal to reality, but his tracts were written with altruistic intent.

Jack Chick was indeed a crazy person. The real evil are the people around him who enabled this crazy shit to go on. Schizophrenic people who people non-factual things and say offensive stuff are to be pitied, not reviled. People who reinforce a schizophrenic person's paralogical framework and them exploit them for cheap labor are fucking disgusting.

The fact that Chick Tracts got distributed to places where you have seen them means that there was a network of people who didn't share Jack Chick's personal insanity who nonetheless shipped those things around because they wanted to push propaganda around to grow their "team." That is fucked up.

-Username17

As someone who grew up having dinner with both religious crazy and schizophrenic crazy once a week, I can tell you that Jack Chick's ramblings about satanic conspiracies reminds me more of the former than the latter. He's a racist, hyperreligious old man who thinks Satan is behind everything he doesn't like. I know the type. They're depressingly normal. Their minds work just fine, they just don't want to use them on certain topics.

There is definitely a very complicated argument to have about to what extent people are ethically responsible for their own self-delusion and gullibility - but really, very few people actually think they are the bad guys and down that road you start having to argue about whether or not the KKK are fucking evil or just really, really wrong about things. I mean, in their worldview black people actually are "dangerous savages," incapable of ethics, rationality, or civilized behavior - wolves who happen to be able to speak our language, and are all the more dangerous for it. If they were actually right, a lot of the bullshit they want to do would make sense. But they're wrong, and they're not just wrong - they're the fucking bad guys. They are evil.

At the end of the day, most people are operating from a set of good intentions, and they end up on the wrong side purely as the result of circumstance or some depressingly inconsequentual character flaw. 'There but for the grace of God go I,' and all that. You can either accept that or go debilitatingly relativist about it all. I like calling people shitheads too much to take all that many marks off for good intentions.

Chick Tracts with Black people are the best ones tho'




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"So the visions version has a leopard hunting a chimp, what should we print for Portal?"

DSM wrote:There is definitely a very complicated argument to have about to what extent people are ethically responsible for their own self-delusion and gullibility - but really, very few people actually think they are the bad guys and down that road you start having to argue about whether or not the KKK are fucking evil or just really, really wrong about things. I mean, in their worldview black people actually are "dangerous savages," incapable of ethics, rationality, or civilized behavior - wolves who happen to be able to speak our language, and are all the more dangerous for it. If they were actually right, a lot of the bullshit they want to do would make sense. But they're wrong, and they're not just wrong - they're the fucking bad guys. They are evil.

Granted. But Jack Chick literally believed that the Vatican has a vast database full of details on every protestant in the world because the Earth is a vast panopticon with the Papacy as chief spymaster. That's pretty casebook paranoid delusions, to be honest. Jack Chick should have gotten help. Instead he had people willing to reinforce his delusions so that he would be an organ grinder monkey working for peanuts until the day he died.

The whole thing is just immensely sad. And the fact that he was a deeply unpleasant person who genuinely hated vast swathes of the republic doesn't change the fact that a more compasionate society would not have left him to toil in those conditions. True mental health cases are not often pleasant to be around.

-Username17

I'm a bit curious about it, is there any correlation between having racist, homophobic or sexist delusions and actually being homophobic, racist or sexist ?

What a bizarre question.

Lokamayadon wrote:I'm a bit curious about it, is there any correlation between having racist, homophobic or sexist delusions and actually being homophobic, racist or sexist ?

Obviously yes?

If you have racist delusions, that almost certainly makes you racist. Because you have delusions that make you think perplexingly racist things and take inexplicably racist actions. And so on and so forth with homophobic and sexist delusions.

Correlation doesn't necessarily flow both ways (it is distantly possible that being racist actually anti-correlates with having delusions, due to the fact that wealthy people tend to be more racist and have better mental healthcare than average, or some reasoning like that) but it definitely correlates in one direction here.

Lokamayadon wrote:I'm a bit curious about it, is there any correlation between having racist, homophobic or sexist delusions and actually being homophobic, racist or sexist ?

It's always those sanctity of marriage Republicans that get caught with their pants down in a bathroom stall trying to solicit gay sex from an undercover cop.

hyzmarca wrote:

https://twitter.com/nihilist_arbys/stat ... 3633205248

'No Deity' is four steps above atheism. I'm not sure what the cartoonist thought atheism meant. I know he apparently thought the virgin birth and resurrection weren't miracles.

I like that he's so deluded he thinks that no deity is above no resurrection, because he's unaware that no one who doesn't believe in god takes the resurrection seriously on any level.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:'No Deity' is four steps above atheism. I'm not sure what the cartoonist thought atheism meant.

Leaving the rest of that illustration aside... there's an old joke about a distraught mother pleading with her kid, "I can understand not believing in God, but being an atheist?!".

For many out there, religion is overwhelmingly a societal thing. Say the right words, be at the right gatherings, hold the right opinions, all necessary steps in the elaborate dance of social hierarchy. Whether or not you believe any of magical sky fairy stuff is strictly secondary to being in the right group. So having a kid come out and proclaim themselves an atheist, or gay, or dating a member of the wrong race/creed/class are all kinda the same thing: socially disruptive for them and the rest of their family.

There's been a social distinction between 'not believing in God' and 'being an atheist' for a long-ass time. And that distinction is one of maintaining appearances: the atheist doesn't.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

'No Deity' is four steps above atheism. I'm not sure what the cartoonist thought atheism meant. I know he apparently thought the virgin birth and resurrection weren't miracles.

Kaelik wrote:I like that he's so deluded he thinks that no deity is above no resurrection, because he's unaware that no one who doesn't believe in god takes the resurrection seriously on any level.

In this case, "no deity"refers to the divinity of Jesus and can be taken to mean that belief that Jesus was merely a man (as Islam has it) or that he's merely a demigod. The latter belief would fall under Arianism, a Christian heresy that believes that God the Son was created and subordinate to God the Father, rather than being eternal, uncreated, and co-equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Now, if Jesus was merely a demigod, or even just a very important man, it's still possible for him to die for everyone's sins and be resurrected, just much less likely.

And all the 'Christians' who don't believe the Bible is inerrant aren't real Christians?

So I suppose all the True Christians believe that you can control the coloration of unborn sheep by putting colored sticks in front of their mothers.

There are no real christians, if you make that dependent on how closely they follow their written version of "simon says".
No, not even Westboro Baptists.

hyzmarca wrote: In this case, "no deity"refers to the divinity of Jesus and can be taken to mean that belief that Jesus was merely a man (as Islam has it) or that he's merely a demigod. The latter belief would fall under Arianism, a Christian heresy that believes that God the Son was created and subordinate to God the Father, rather than being eternal, uncreated, and co-equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Now, if Jesus was merely a demigod, or even just a very important man, it's still possible for him to die for everyone's sins and be resurrected, just much less likely.

Well, that makes way more sense. I was wondering about No Atonement, without a deity what would you even be atoning for and who's absolving you?

schpeelah wrote:Well, that makes way more sense. I was wondering about No Atonement, without a deity what would you even be atoning for and who's absolving you?

"Atonement" here refers to Christ dying for your sins. The important context for this picture is that it's about a split within the US protestants. That's why "atheism" is below every other step. A faction within the church was arguing that literal interpretation of the Bible is impossible in the 20th century, that there was no virgin birth, that there will be no literal second comming. To translate into english, the steps below "No miracles" go like this:
-Christ did not come from virgin birth
-Christ wasn't a god
-Christ didn't die for our sins
-Christ didn't rise from the dead
-Jehovah may not exist
-Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria

Don't forget, the current pope himself said that the one true god is not a magician with a magic wand. Also that the Bing Bang and theory of Evolution are more correct than the bible's Genesis "man crafted from clay right away, and woman second".

I think the label 'Atheism' in that comic really means Openly A-religious. As long as people belong to the church and pay lip service, in some people's minds, that's a step up from openly saying the faith is ludicrous.

The first step might have been the same for me but I don't think the rest followed in that order. But since I ended up at Ignosticism I guess I took a different staircase.

Blade wrote:The first step might have been the same for me but I don't think the rest followed in that order. But since I ended up at Ignosticism I guess I took a different staircase.

Ignosticism is just a pretentious category of atheism for people who think that whining about definitions makes them more reasonable then those filthy regular people who just don't believe in nonsense.

Spoiler alert, if all the definitions of something are incoherent, then you don't believe in the thing that isn't defined, and also, you are still wrong because it still matters whether you believe in the incoherent definition.