Real Life Covers Real Life

It'd been a long time since I'd read Greg Dean's Real Life -- a webcomic that oddly enough, has very little connection to reality.  For crying out loud, it has a guy who reconfigures space-time within a localized field to make a small room several thousand square feet in altered space and travels light-years in seconds by warping the fabric of reality, and all in all, defying the laws of physics.

It does include a few instances of real life, of course...  The protagonists of Greg and Liz got married in the comic the same day the cartoonist got married in reality, and similarly so with Liz's pregnancy in the comic.  Then again, some of them were just plain off the wall, and then you realized that you knew a person just like that.  One of the oldest comics in the series (and also one of the earliest in color) involved Greg snacking on sticks of butter that had been dipped in melted butter...  I think it was a silly joke to signify his lack of cooking skills, but yet, I knew someone who actually did that.

Anyway, I got around to reading up on several of the comics that I'd missed, and went back through them, and ran across this one that really hit the bullseye.

No Armageddon, and nobody offered me a Mercedes...

Below are Garry Trudeau's series of Doonesbury comics relating to Armageddon.  These are in order from 16th of May to the 21st...  the final day before only the damned remain to face months of abominable horrors.  What's particularly nice about this, as is often the case with Doonesbury, is that the character who represents the fundamentalist nutjob is not really an exaggeration.  Many of the people who believe in the rapture already gave up all their stuff, wiped out their savings, and cashed out every investment they had, and stopped paying any of their bills, on account of their outright certainty that the apocalypse would come crashing down.  Not only are they certain that their claimant end would come, but that they would be the ones raptured away, because they have been washed clear of their sins while everyone else will and deserves fully to be damned to hell.  How very nice of them.  And so humble, too.

What adds to the hilarity of this is the depiction of the non-believer who somehow knew more about the scripture than the batshit insane religious crazy, and was actually competent enough to debate him in it.  It's a common conception among theists that atheists do not accept religion because their understanding of it is very shallow.  The reality is quite the opposite.  It's often because we do know it all that we don't buy it.  We have enough of an understanding of religion to understand what is so wrong with it.  And we tend to know it well enough that we can make a fool out of the average theist even if we were to make the same assumptions that they do.

How beautiful irony can be sometimes.  I have to say, though, that if any such idiot signed his car or some other valuable asset over to me "knowing" that I'd be one of the damned who would remain behind while he/she would be raptured...  you can bet I'd take it, and never give it back when they come to realize that their "knowledge" was complete garbage.  You'd deserve it for being the idiot that you are and for committing the unpardonable crime of having faith.