I ran across this on a linguistics blog. Their interest was in the origin of the phrases, "Blackjack. No tagbacks" in the last panel. The consensus was it refers to school yard games where you can't turn around and just tag the tagger in a game of tag. It makes sense in this context. And it's the only thing in the three panels that does make sense. Because if you think through what's being said here, it is the "first mover" argument, so beloved of creationists, flipped on its head and applied to an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic God:
I put it to you: if there were no people, then where did the first God come from?! QED.
Politics
Comments
I'm still young enough to have some memories of my playground days, and I'm pretty sure we used the phrase "No touchbacks" for the purpose you described, so that explanation seems likely.
Posted by: Adrian | July 20, 2008 11:19 AM
Ah, the playground days...we usually said something like "No tagbacks". We never really prefaced it with anything else. But it makes sense.
Posted by: R. Ward | July 20, 2008 12:01 PM
If there were no people the rapture would have occurred, sheesh. Know ye no fundie logic?
Posted by: Niobe | July 20, 2008 2:33 PM
I consider gods to be memes that take on a life of their own. The original purpose gets lost and they become "real" in the sense that they inhabit the brains of humans. Original purposes were probably death denial, hopeful sugar daddy, and explanation for all that humans couldn't understand (note that gods have less to do in this area than in the past). But attributes assigned for these purposes get in conflict with reality. So theologians are hired to massage the memes into whatever shape any particular group wants. But the original meme can make that difficult, thus the theologians must keep on and have good job security.
Posted by: k | July 20, 2008 4:11 PM
Does everyone read LanguageLog these days? Not that I'm complaining.
Posted by: Sili | July 20, 2008 5:16 PM
@ k--
I agree with your sense of how the gods got taken for granted and a priesthood found endless work trying to explain all the new stuff in terms of ancient belief.
As to the ultimate genesis of these gods I've come to favor the notion that our ancestors told their children stories of giants and sky people in order to keep them quiet and orderly during the evening as the cooking fires burned down.
As an aside, those ancient parents most likely sat about the fires looking outward, backs to the warmth. All the better to spy a hungry predator or a pesky neighbor. Which were more immediate concerns than the sky guys but you know kids . . . they just don't pay attention.
Posted by: Crudely Wrott | July 20, 2008 8:52 PM
You know, retrocausality is pretty cool stuff, but I don't think it's applicable to deities, just particle physics...
Posted by: Jared | July 20, 2008 11:25 PM
Crudely Wrott, I do think population control is one of the uses that religion was put to. But early worship was of ancestors not gods. This speaks of me of the basic fear of death (programed to help us stay alive) and denial of death (programed to keep us from going crazy since we perhaps alone of all creatures knows we will die).
Starting with primitive cultures there are extensive and quite fanciful stories of how the gods created things - we spring from god's semem, unrine along with being fashioned from earth depending on the primitive culture (I include the primitive nomads that gave us jehovah in this group)
Still you have a point. Even today some parent threaten their children with "behave of the cops will get you".
Which if any came first I don't know, but the meme was useful and retained and then took on a life of its own. So in a sense the gods are real. However they disappear when the meme is abandoned for memes NEED humans to survive.
Posted by: K | July 22, 2008 5:11 AM
Tangential, but I was wondering:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7b/Lung_cancer_US_distribution.gif/300px-Lung_cancer_US_distribution.gif
anything come to mind from that when reading this?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/22/AR2008072201295.html
July 22, 2008
Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors ofHealthDay:
Study Examining High Cancer Incidence in U.S. South
Researchers plan to recruit 90,000 people in 12 Southern states in an effort to learn why the South has become the cancer belt of the United States ... Brain cancer and lung cancer are among those that disproportionately affect people living in the South.
"When you look at a map of brain cancer incidence in the United States the Southeast just lights up in red," Dr. Reid Thompson, of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville said in a news release.
------
What could it be??
Posted by: Hank Roberts | July 22, 2008 5:22 PM
Hank, yes it could, too much prayer could be the cause.....
OTOH too much hate and racism could be the cause
OTOH could be the water
Posted by: K | July 22, 2008 7:48 PM
What's so amazing? Dirac created positrons.
Posted by: Kaleberg | July 25, 2008 11:14 PM