I like cartoons, doodles and sketches. I like to think I have a decent taste in what constitutes funny, particularly when it comes to cartoon strips that occasionally deal with the intellectual. I devour Calvin and Hobbes, get lost in the Far Side and chill out with Pogo. I’ll even recommend ‘A Lesson Is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible‘ for anyone who has not read it yet. It’s a short series, but as gorgeous as it is hilarious and thought provoking.

But I’m not going to look at good cartoons. Nah, I’m going to have fun analysing, mocking and revising bad cartoons. And since Ray ‘Banana-man‘ Comfort recently came out with his hit mockumentary ‘Evolution Vs. God‘, I thought it would be fun to start with a little comic series included on his site called ‘The Primates‘. It is an odd couple sort of strip featuring a dim witted sheeptheist and probably the most accurate portrayal of a pseudo intellectual militant atheist strawman. Spot on.

Even the title is funny! “The Primates” is trying to be mocking, but it’s about as mocking as saying ‘You’re a mammal!’ or ‘Your epidermis is showing!’

The Evolution Vs God web site states “Please send these around the world.” Well, okay. If you insist! Let’s start:

The Deconstruction

“If we say God doesn’t exist, but we secretly know he does, are we hypocrites?”

Yes. Kinda obvious?

However the conditional presented is treated not as a hypothetical but as a statement of actuality, as implied by the ‘You think too much’ statement by our resident strawman intellectual. Yes, if you say one thing but secretly believe the opposite you are a hypocrite. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Let’s look at some possibilities of what the author meant.

1. The atheist knows there is no god and is flat out lying.

How do we prove this? Well, unless we actually catch this kind of conversation amongst atheists, we’ll have to use some other way to prove this. But how. What evidence can we use to prove atheists are lying out of their ass? You guessed it! Revealed knowledge! Let’s look at the motivation for lying, shall we?

1a. The devil is controlling him!

We can find this in the Book of Mormon’s treatise on atheism in Alma 30:9-60. Read the whole story, it’s great. But if you don’t want to read the whole thing, just skip down to verse 53:

53 But behold, the devil hath deceived me; for he appeared unto me in the form of an angel, and said unto me: Go and reclaim this people, for they have all gone astray after an unknown God. And he said unto me: There is no God; yea, and he taught me that which I should say. And I have taught his words; and I taught them because they were pleasing unto the carnal mind; and I taught them, even until I had much success, insomuch that I verily believed that they were true; and for this cause I withstood the truth, even until I have brought this great curse upon me.

Don’t worry, the story has a happy ending. The ‘atheist’ Korihor gets a sign from god and believes again. But is dragged to hell anyway.

1b. The atheist just wants to sin, so he says he doesn’t believe in God to not be accountable.

I hear this often. Basically it’s saying that atheists are mentally retarded. Seriously, that’s the only possible explanation, because if they knew a god existed to whom they had to answer, how would saying they don’t believe make them not accountable? Unless the god they know exists isn’t omniscient and can’t see into the hearts of men.

1c. Atheists just hate God and want everyone to burn.

Well, that is a possibility. And I can’t say there aren’t any hypocritical ‘atheists’ that lie to defy God and drag down as many souls to burn in hell forever with them. But unless we find something like a ‘secret’ document from an atheist group showing that their real purpose is to undermine others, we can’t really show this to be true. And even if we did, well, that would only show that that group of atheists were that way.

2. The atheist knows in his subconscious that there is a god but does not realise it consciously.

I don’t even know how this is supposed to make sense. The subconscious does not know, it feels. But we know our intuition is sometimes wrong. We might believe something based on our feelings, but how is that knowledge? We can use our intuition to help guide our search for the truth, but an unsubstantiated claim that we know, for a fact, that something is true in our subconscious makes no sense.

Did I miss anything? Please comment if you think of another point to add here!

The Revision

If you feel something is true, but don’t test it, the thing you feel to be true could very well NOT be true. Particularly if you go by faith. Ya know, that thing claiming to be evidence in leu of actual evidence. Or as Tim Michin said:

“Love without evidence is… stalking.”

So, for those who claim *others* know God exists, but base that claim on a book they didn’t write, does that make them hypocrites or liars? Though that’s actually a false dichotomy. They could be delusional, or they *could* even be right, just without sufficient evidence to back them up. I’d ask for other possibilities, but perhaps we shouldn’t discuss other possibilities. That’s thinking too much.

Next —> [ Not Ha Ha Funny – Sure as Hell ]