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Contributions of the World's Religions

By bushwells on November 14, 2006.

...according to the Most Great Prophet of Pain, Tim Krieder.

Go to the Pain archives via the link above to...

October 4, 2006 - Contributions of the World's Religions (Part I): Christianity for wholesome TV programming and burning witches and Islam for angry chanting and those excellent bean pies.

October 18, 2006 - Contributions of the World's Religions (Part II): Judaism for pastrami and unsurpassed fashion sense.

November 1, 2006 - Contributions of the World's Religions (Part IV): Hinduism for the most f*cked up pantheon since the Legion of Doom.

November 8, 2006 - Contributions of the World's Religions (Part V): Buddhism for the only diety (well, technically an icon) whose belly can be rubbed for luck.

Where part III is, well, only Mr. Krieder knows.

Be sure to check out the artist's statements which accompany these. A sampling from Krieder's comment on the Buddhism cartoon:

Readers may be surprised to see how easy I went on the Buddhists. The truth is, I got a soft spot for the Buddhists. It's the only religion based on reason and insight rather than faith. It makes sense. It's the one that was beginning to appeal to me back when I was a teenager and had lost interest in Christianity but had not yet been distracted by girls and drink. I like that they're the only religion that can seem to resolve a theological dispute without resorting to torture, pogroms, or massacre. The Dalai Lama explains that if they were to find that their metaphysical beliefs were to be contradicted by modern physics, why, they would simply have to alter their beliefs. Contrast this to the undignified and childish behavior of fundamentalist Christians, who are hysterically inventing convoluted explanations for how dinosaur eggs were stored on board the ark or bending over backward to demonstrate that the six days of Creation in Genesis, if you throw in the Doppler shift divided by quantum something-or-other, actually correspond to our Earth days times a trillion. And I will say that my personal experience with Buddhists has been exemplary: a Buddhist friend of mine, having had occasion to feel wronged by me, was neither reproachful nor vindictive; he felt sorry for me. One of my favorite jokes by the late comedian Bill Hicks was about some thuggish good old boys in Alabama who waited for him outside the stage door after one of his stand-up routines. "Hey, buddy, c'mere!" They yelled at him. "We didn't like that joke you told about Christians in there. We're Christians!" "So...?" he said to them, in laconic challenge: "Forgive me."

There's a lot more. Read it. Chew on it. Savor it.

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I like the idea of militant/fundmentalist Buddhism, as well as what you said ibid. I mean, instead of suicide bombers, beheadings, hangings, and burnings, I imagine fundy Buddhists meditating at you all day.

There are schools of Buddhism in Southern China, Indo-China, Sri Lanka and probably Japan that are OK with violence, especially if it is to promote their way of life.