900: Religions
| Religions |
| But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6±2. Title text: But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6±2. |
Explanation
This comic is a reference to the increasing coverage of the prediction by Harold Camping that the Rapture will be on May 21, 2011. The Rapture is the event prophesied in the Bible in which Christians believe that {Christ will return to Earth and take all true believers up to Heaven.
The first frame is a reference to raptors in Jurassic Park, if you haven't seen it, the raptor dinosaurs get much more dangerous once they learn how to open doors. Cueball mishears Megan, which is why he thinks she said "Raptors" instead of "Rapture".
In the 2nd frame, Cueball references three major religions. Christian and church for Christianity, Mosque for Islam and Rabbi for Judaism.
The 3rd frame is a math joke in which Megan references error bars which are used on graphs to indicate the uncertainty. So, Megan believes in one God (monotheism), as she says in the comic. But if she is still trying to find the error bars, she is uncertain if there could be many more Gods as well.
The image text is a supposed excerpt from the holy text of experimental monotheism. Corinthians is a real book of the Christian Bible.
Transcript
- [Cueball and Megan talking]
- Megan: So are you worried about the rapture?
- Cueball: No, unless it figures out how to open dorrs/
- Megan: I said rapture.
- Cueball: Oh, I'm not really into that. I'm the kind of christian who only goes to church on christmas and easter, and then spends the other 363 days at the mosque.
- Megan: ... I don't think that's a thing.
- Cueball: Our rabbi swears it's legit.
- Cueball: What religion are you?
- Megan: Experimentalist Monotheism.
- Cueball: Which is?
- Megan: We believe there's one god, but we're trying to find error bars on the number.
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Where's the experimental evidence that there is actually a god? Davidy²²[talk] 02:01, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
- Consider who is proposing such an experiment. QED. 184.66.160.91 03:10, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
Subjectivism is the provenance of earth-scientists and the devout. But god preserve us from the devout earth-scientists. (That's the thing about god, he's the only one who can get the monkey off your back.) I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 21:04, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
- I'm sure you can find not one but several definitions of god with experimental evidence. Of course, this says more about how vague definitions of god are that about the god. -- Hkmaly (talk) 00:06, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
Oddly considering Paul was Jewish (as was Jesus) most Christian versions of the bible have slanted their beliefs to allow a comma after the word father in the verse quoted. Just found out that so do Unitarian bibles. Does Jewish have commas?
- With a large "if I'm remembering right" first... The relevant book of the Bible was written in Greek. They didn't even put spaces between words, much less use punctuation, but why would that make it strange for commas to be used in English translations?173.245.50.174 17:47, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
The play on the quote in the comic is that it is plus or minus Jesus as god in that verse. Rather a loaded quote from a trained lawyer!
PPS: IANAL. I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 21:04, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
- Assuming you mean the quote from Corinthians, that's in the New Testament only. Jews don't have that book at all.--199.27.133.131 02:19, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
While all three of these are Abrahamic religions, and as such have some overlap in their beliefs and texts, combining them all into one religion would be far from a simple process….
I dunno, it seems to have worked for the Orange Catholics in Dune. -- KarMann (talk) 11:38, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
- Messianic Judaism is a thing, so Judaism and Christianity have already been combined. So really, you just need to figure out how to combine Messianic Judaism and Islam. Now, basically every follower of any Abrahamic religion will inevitably consider the hybrid religion to be heretical... 172.71.150.67 20:24, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
Reminds of me the First Amalgated Church from Futurama... "Dearly liked, here we are, gathered before one or more gods or fewer." 172.71.158.25 03:14, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
No mainstream christian denominations "follow such a doctrine", because that's not a doctrine, it's heresy. (although, "mainstream" (mainline) christian denominations have many heretical churches these days)172.70.214.133 18:37, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
