Apologetics and Comic Books

[Mr. Neil]

For me, it's almost impossible to not see a parallel between the modern mythology medium (cartoons and comics) and religious texts. They share many of the same absurdities, the same errors, and the same impossibilities.

 

For example, you might have the same two events take place in more than one comic. When the two events appear in Batman, they may only be a few days apart from each other, but when the same two events appear in Superman, they may be weeks or months apart.

 

Errors of this kind happen even when you have more than one book about the same character. You may have a character who is a committed lover under the pen of one author but a confirmed bachlor when penned by another. Sometimes the character is almost an entirely different character, behaving differently in different books.

 

These are more common than you might think. These happen so often that DC Comics stages a "house cleaning" every few years or so, in which alternate realities are crushed, different versions of the same character are condensed into one, timeline slips are explained away as universal anomolies, and when it's all over, nobody remembers anything about it.

 

If you're a comicbook fan, you're probably familiar with this sort of thing if you've ever read the Crisis On Infinite Earths saga or Zero Hour. This sort of stunt is done to appear as though it's a thrill for fans, but it's actually just the comic company admitting that they've fucked up and are now trying to harmonize their comic universe, which will then only naturally fuck itself up again. It's an unavoidable consenequence of having many, many authors trying to write a series of stories that are all somehow supposed to fit together.

 

Of course, the attempts to patch up all the errors in a comic book is almost as absurd as the errors themselves, often invoking a villain who can manipulate time and space as the explanation for why everything got so fucked up in the first place. The idea seems to be that things becomes so surreal that the restored normality at the end appears as though the universe has returned to sanity.

 

While Christian apologetics are equally as absurd, they don't have the luxery of a multiple universe crunch to explain away all of the errors. Instead, their left with the laughable task of trying to make the Gospels fit together, which is sort of par with trying to make all of Bruce Timm's DC superhero cartoons (Batman, Superman, Batman Beyond, Justice League, and Teen Titans) fit into a tenable chronology; that is to say, it's utterly impossible.

 

Believe me, I've tried. I'm a huge cartoon fan, and I've been trying to figure out Timm's chronology for years. If you're at all familiar with any of these series, I suggest trying to figure out which Robin (Tim Drake or Dick Grayson) appears in Teen Titans, or try to pin down exactly at what point the Joker dies. It's absolutely and irrecoverably fucked.

 

But we accept that there are unreparable errors in cartoons and comics. It's okay to give up and just accept that they are flawed but enjoyable. But again, this is a luxery that Christians don't have. They're stuck trying to figure out exactly what happened following Jesus' baptism. Or better yet, why Jesus was baptized at all!

 

They have to deal with insanity such as Jesus declaring that one of his twelve deciples, Judas, betraying him, and then having the resurrected Jesus appearing before the twelve later in the chronology.

 

How is a guy walking on water any less sane than a character who can shoot rays out of his eyes. If the explanation is that God can do anything, how is that any more tenable than saying that Jesus had the Infinity Gauntlet?

 

The point here is that the Bible is no less insane than the stuff you can pick up at the comic shop, yet we understand why the comic universes are insane, and this should give us enough inference to deduce why the Bible itself is insane. When trying to harmonize a comicbook, one will find himself using the same strenuous methodology that apologists unwittingly use.

 

Sometimes I think that the best way to deconvert a Christian is to expose them to something that is very much like the faith in which they believe, and yet not as scary in which to find inconsistancies and errors. Perhaps when a person is able to detect fairly obvious errors in something like a comicbook, they'll be able to detect the very same obvious errors that occur in a holy text.

 

Just a thought.

[Kuroikaze]

hmmm....there might be some truth to that considering how much anime I started watching during my deconversion.

[Vixentrox]

The bible is the Xtian comic book. Heck, the old ones were beuatifully illustrated.

[indoctrinated]

For me, it's almost impossible to not see a parallel between the modern mythology medium (cartoons and comics) and religious texts.  They share many of the same absurdities, the same errors, and the same impossibilities.

 

 

Just a thought.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

It's a very illuminating thought.

 

The point about many different authors, for instance. Most people don't realise that is true of the Bible too! So of course it's impossible to harmonise! And in the case of the Bible you have to account for the fact that different authors put a spin on what they wrote depending on their particular religious or political agenda. This varied enormously between books and even between parts of books. And yet Christians try to read it as if it was one uniform book instead of a collection of edited and re-edited sources.

 

 

Once one starts reading or studying the Bble as one would do any other literature the problems aren't problems, just interesting cultural and literary observations. But of course one has to give up the idea that God wrote it or that it is inerrant.

 

Sometimes the problem is that people compartmentalise their lives and so don't read the Bible like they would any other book. With some people though, I wonder whether they just don't read much else at all, and so just cannot pick up on things like that.

 

Thanks for the insight!

[Eponymic]

It's a very illuminating thought.

 

The point about many different authors, for instance. Most people don't realise that is true of the Bible too! So of course it's impossible to harmonise!  And in the case of the Bible you have to account for the fact that different authors put a spin on what they wrote depending on their particular religious or political agenda. This varied enormously between books and even between parts of books. And yet Christians try to read it as if it was one uniform book instead of a collection of edited and re-edited sources.

 

Very true. In fact the probelm goes even further because not only is it different authors, but they are plagurizing from a wide variety of mythological & religious sources.

[white_raven23]

Cain vs. Abel #1 in mint condition must be worth serious money by now.

[Amethyst]

Yes, there are similarities. One of the things I noticed when I was first questioning is that comic book characters, like Superman, are just exaggerated human beings in a way. So is Biblegod, only more so. The Greek and Roman gods were this way also. They were larger than life humans whose conflicts occured on a cosmic scale, rather than just a global scale. I think they were really the comic book characters of their time.

[Fweethawt]

Cain vs. Abel #1 in mint condition must be worth serious money by now.

 

Especially if it's bagged and boarded!

 

 

 

 

On a serious note: I don't remember there being any point in history where large groups of people ran around killing each other because the didn't believe the right things about Superman.

[Sokudo Ningyou]

Thanks for reminding me how badly Marvel has screwed the pooch on its continuity. X-Men for the past ten years has given me such a fucking headache....even Claremont has forgotten his own work! If a writer who penned the characters for over a decade can't recall his own ideas, then expecting people to know the truth behind a myth several centuries after the fact is insane. Simplistic but true. It's like the old classroom experiment: the teacher tells one student a story, then has them pass it on. By the end, the story has changed so much, and gained so many absurdities, it barely resembles the original, if at all.

 

And on a different note, I always do enjoy the "God Loves, Man Kills" graphic novel as a rather accurate summarization of how Christian fanatics can go too far. Granted, it's mutants instead of non-Christians that are being targeted, but it's the same standard. Christian love is quite fucked up.

[quicksand]

The Robotech canon has so many similarities with the Bible. Separate stories from separate and distinct anime series merged into one (sold to American's as Robotech), several different writers, and many attempts to harmonize the whole story. Failing of course - but which fans like myself accept.

 

Also, has anyone ever read the introduction to the Lord of the Rings by Tolkien's Son? In it he documents how his time is spent trying to rut out errors of spelling and meaning that were either intentionally made by well-meaning typesetters (back in the day, typesetters actually set blocks of type by hand in a matrix before it was jogged up on a press) or by J.R.R. himself accidently in its first edition.

 

Unless God wrote the Bible personally, an inerrent bible is fooey. And inspiration? Yeah, well, if I remember there is this little thing of sin to overcome. At least Joseph Smith's had his holy writ descend from the heavens on golden tablets from God's FedEx.

 

Christians don't even have that to brag out.