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Online Cartoonist Finds Financial Success Offline
destinyland writes "The first collection of Perry Bible Fellowship comics has racked up pre-sales of $300,000 due to its huge online following. Within seven weeks the volume required a third printing. Ironically, the 25-year-old cartoonist speculates people would rather read his arty comics in a book than on a computer screen, and warns that 'There's something wonderful, and soon-to-be mythic, about the printed page...' He also explains the strange anti-censorship crusade in high school that earned him an FBI record!"
Faith in the bible doesn't require "proof". Supplying proof that it's a myth is possible, but worthless to people who demand it.
What you meant to type, if you're defending on bible terms, is "poof".
What is necessary in an argument about whether the bible's stories of relentless supernatural events as explained by an epoch (or more) of primitive, aggressive and hypocritical people are true is even the tiniest proof that it's not a myth. If you're not impressed by just making stuff up according to voices in your head, that is.
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Any time.
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I'm holding a copy of the bible in my hands. I think you'll find there's more facts supporting the existence of the bible then against it.
No, I said "even the tiniest proof" that the bible isn't a myth is necessary if we were going to argue. But of course the tiniest proof is not sufficient. Proof that a star appeared as described in the bible (even though you offered proof of something unlike what's described as "a star") isn't even proof that the bible is not a myth. You could just as well point at the Earth, which is also mentioned in the bible, or the Egyptian pyramids, or Jerusalem as a whole, or even irrefutable records of a "Mary and Joseph of Egypt, with newborn Jesus of Bethlehem" etc, which obviously don't prove the mythical parts of the bible's story. You know, the miraculous parts (and I'm not talking about whether Jesus' DNA doesn't match Joseph's).
But all that, as I've been saying, is precisely opposite the point of the bible: faith. You fell for it by acting like proof of the myth is important compared to the faith it would destroy.
I can never get enough of faithy people hungering for scientific things like proof that someone rose from the dead, or was both merely human and infinitely divine, in trade for the more valuable faith that such proof would destroy. It's like someone revealed Santa was Dad carelessly to you way back when, and y'all still demand not just the presents, but also the suit and beard, and that he now actually come down the chimney, and not kiss Mommy.
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I use Canon EOS film and digital bodies with a range of lenses, plus a point and shoot for take-to-the-pub/allow-children-to-use convenience.
Now, if I compare the film prints from a consumer lab with the digital output, I know I'll have a whole bunch more detail in the digital images, even in JPEG. However, when I compare large-ish format (10x8s and up) hand prints I've made with care from b/w negs I've developed, film *just* edges it. I've not compared RAW output, mind.
If I compare those same prints with digital images taken with duff lenses (read: any non-SLR digicam), then all the megapixels in the world won't make the difference. But consumer advertising can't package improved lens quality into a nice feature headline (other than Sony's "Carl Zeiss Lens" which doesn't tell me a *great* deal), so no-one cares.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
I've had many a religious discussion with my judeo-christian friends and I hear the same thing that you said, "They're either stupid, insane, or lying. None of which is a desirable quality."
...except they use Jesus as the example. As in: he was either a) a liar b) a lunatic or c) the real thing.
And they phrase it as if there are no other choices. I hear this argument come up a lot and usually I have to refrain from giving my opinion. They seem to forget that not only were there plenty of charlatans back then....but people were even stupider than they are now from a "we understand the world" standpoint.
I think your just plain wrong.
I'm a religious person, it doesn't mean that I believe every word written in the bible. You are confusing Christianity with religion which is plain wrong. There are religions that don't even believe in a god. How does your logic work there?
I've always considered atheists to be religious, they seem to religiously believe that their is nothing in the universe and that the universe appeared by some miraculous event that no one can explain. Takes a lot of faith if you ask me.
I've seen atheists be bigots and hate mongers I don't think this has to do with religion as much as that people are just dicks to one another and if they can blame it on something besides themselves they will. This hurts people who actually have those beliefs because those good peoples reputations are ruined by association. I have a lot of Christian friends that I was close with in high school, I no longer share their same belief but they still associate with me and I with them. We have many great debates about things, mainly because we are open minded but share different thoughts. The obviously never were racist because we had friends of multiple backgrounds, even some that were outspoken atheists.
This idea that people in religions are not open minded is crazy, people in general are not open minded, look at your comments bundling all religion into Christianity. Also putting a subgroup like the KKK into Christianity is moronic. Just because a hate group pretends to share a religious value with someone doesn't make everyone in that religion a hate monger.
I think I'm a good person I believe in Deism, I am religious and I'm not a racist or closed minded. I also don't believe that someone has to be brainwashed or crazy to believe in something. You have to be a pretty lonely person to believe in nothing(and by believing in nothing I don't mean atheism because I do believe they believe in something just not in a god).
Frankly I find your comments to be very close minded and closer to the akin of the KKK. You generalize people of any faith to be the same. You think them of lesser quality and you see them as "waste of skin." I see that as a huge hole in your logic.
Why can't people just be open minded and get along.
Doonesbury is a front for Al-Qaeda. But Opus has a pretty mild political perspective as best I can tell.
Your question was just a troll. Because it's obvious you didn't even read my answer.
If you read it, you'd see that I'm not claiming some exclusive province of "knowing the unknowable" that no one else can know. As I detailed, some knowledge is not provable. It's a class of knowledge that is metaphysical, so it cannot be proven. But it can be known by faith, even if any given faith-derived knowledge is probably wrong. But some probably isn't. And faith is the only way to know it.
Look, if you don't want to know whether there's experience after death, or whether prayers have any delocalized effect, or whether there's a moral behavior code beyond arbitary human constructs, and how any/all of that works (if indeed it does), that's your problem. But don't come to me with empty talk about "educated guesses", when you won't even bother trying to learn something you asked about, by reading my answer to your question.
Especially when even proof depends on principles of falsifiability and consistency, which are themselves articles of faith, as easily revealed when evaluated in their own terms. You're welcome to your own ignorance, but don't pretend that it's somehow knowledge, that you have and I don't.
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I've always considered atheists to be religious,
You mean 100% atheists yes? Christians for instance are 99% atheists - there are hundreds of gods they do not believe in. Why is it so hard to understand that people can not believe in one more god than they do?
they seem to religiously believe that their is nothing in the universe and that the universe appeared by some miraculous event that no one can explain
Er, ever hear of the Big Bang theory? As good an explanation as science (not this strawman "atheism" you refer to) can come up with at present. You mean scientists looking for possible explanations is more religious than taking a fairy-tale non-answer provided by a nomadic tribe thousands of years ago as the truth?
We're not playing word games. We're talking about the only way to know metaphysics. You can assert there's no chance Christianity would have survived with "trivially falsifiable claims", but that's a straw man that I never said. What shows even that strawman is nothing but your assertion is that you'd have to concede the same about other religions that are as old as, and older than, Christianity, and plenty that are younger, about which the same can be said, but
The bible indeed has much in common with other myths, including various ones popular among early Christians but out of sight for the last 3/4 or more of their history, even if you're referring to just the New Testament. It's far from the only messiah myth, the only martyr myth. The Osiris cycle, well known throughout the region that first believed the Christian bible, is a blueprint for the mortal divine sacrificed to rise again and take the blessed followers along with him. The list goes on and on.
So I don't know just what "evidence" and myths you've been studying the past decades, and how you've magically found "all the other evidence" from a couple millennia ago, but it doesn't really matter. You clearly are using some other way of knowing these things than proof. That's your faith, your business, but you're not going to fool me just by using the words with which we accurately describe factual knowledge.
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No, you're just bound up in your book in the typically circular reasoning of people of "faith" who aren't so good as people of "proof", even in recognizing the limits of proof.
You have no more ability to prove that Osiris did not rise from the dead than you can prove that Jesus did. Unless you call "proof" the words written in records that survive today as hearsay. There's larger amounts of evidence for longer times supporting Osiris' claims than Jesus'. But the point is that Osiris' story predates Jesus', as do so many others prefiguring bible stories. If anyone was a copycat, it was whoever retold Osiris' story with Jesus' name edited in. You're not going to convince me you're an expert in ancient evidence when you evidently believe that Jesus' life predated the Osiris myth that was still popular in the Egypt that Jesus' parents reportedly lived in, though it was already old by then.
Just because your documents talk about faith in a way that doesn't benefit from, say, logical positivism's universally accurate distinctions between science and metaphysics, doesn't mean that they're talking about experience in a way that contradicts me. See, this is how actual arguments about reality, not about authority, work. I'm not talking about whether your documents describe faith differently. If you can show me how the existence of an omnipotent god is disprovable, therefore not a matter of "faith" as I described it, then you've got something. If all you've got is impressing me that a traditional story on paper, you don't have anything speaking about facts. You've got a story that could be a matter of belief, because its claims could be disproven if you were there in person. But until you talk about the actual subject I'm talking about, knowing that which cannot be disproven (however unreliable the knowledge), you're playing word games by calling something else faith that is so only in an archaism, a semantic trick.
Amazingly, the only way you know that there was anyone there at the time to actually have the direct experience that constitutes actual proof is that you read it in a book. A book produced by 2000 years of political power based on the book. Millennia of more or less absolute power by an emperor on Earth representing the heaven he needed the book to say he represented. So unless you've got a god's honest "miracle" like a 2000 year old apostle who can replace reduce faith (merely accepting something unprovable) with some belief (that they can't prove they experienced it 2000 years ago, but at least I'd be accepting it from someone who might have an actual experienced fact), then fact has nothing to do with what you can offer at this time.
Using your definition of factual knowledge and proof, I'd like you to prove to me that Abraham Lincoln was a real person. I accept that he was, because our ways of knowing facts require quite a great deal of acceptance of facts that could possibly be proven with enough technology (eg. I could have an extremely powerful telescope, and point it at a very shiny object 75 light years away, and actually see a tall US politician signing his name and making speeches, or never see him appear where Lincoln appeared, such as at the White House or Ford's Theatre), which makes his existence a matter of fact (however true or false), But even if I trained the scope on Jerusalem's reflection in a 1000 light year distant object, I still couldn't disprove an omnipotent god, because everything that allegedly happened could be produced by a trick I could expose, or some high (though ultimately limited) tech. Or even appear to happen "naturally", but still without possibly disproving an omnipotent god, who could be just powerful enough to arrange "natural" explanations of everything that allegedly happened.
All of which, as I said, misses the point of faith. The faith that I'm talking about. If your belief in god, along with the reported miracles, is defined by the purely mundane, non-supernatural nature of that entity and its physical manifestations, then y
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That's where you claimed that the Osiris myth was a copy of the Jesus myth. Yet the Osiris myth predated the Jesus myth. Of course you'll disagree, with some semantics, or maybe just some more circular references where you cite today's bible to prove today's bible. You don't even seem to understand that in fact Lincoln's existence, while it can be readily accepted, cannot be proven the way that your existence can be proven, but could be proven in a way that god's existence cannot be proven.
You've been doing this "for decades". Yet your defense is the most trivially dismissed. You will perfectly obviously learn nothing from my further efforts in more detail of what's already made clear, and is pretty simple anyway. And I certainly cannot learn anything from more exposure to your kind of representations that pass for "scholarship", but ceased being convincing as such towards the late Middle Ages.
We're done here. Maybe we'll meet again - who knows?
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It's not the complete argument about faith. It's just a narrow explanation of faith's vulnerability to proof, which suggests that Scientology is a con, because it's talk about aliens is all testable, falsifiable. Scientology's very claims that it's not "supernatural" are precisely why it's not really a church, but just a science fiction fanclub (with tax exemptions and annoyingly cute nerds).
A more complete argument about faith points out that faith must always yield to proof. But proof has limits that leave faith the only way to know some knowledge that is not fact, but could still be very important. Scientology is a way of knowing that someone's a kook, or just willing to lie about their soul to get a tax break (and maybe spite their shrink).
You want "metaphysics" that validates Scientology? Now you're talking about Intelligent Design.
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