1003: "Hitler and Eve"

[EpicanicusStrikes]

If having sex with your mother is offensive than it can't possibly be moral.
Better yet. Tell me WHY you would never have sex with your mother. Is it social? Is it some sort of inner moral standards? Is it because you are told not to?

Actually it's because she's really fat.

[SlyReaper]

oh, I feel like leaving. I just know that this will be a huge bash on Christianity.
Abandoning thread...

Aww diddums, does someone dislike having his views challenged?

[Grog]

Just wanted to say that morality related to relatives (wow I see what I did there) is defined by languages. If you have word for cousin, than in your society is not morally allowed to have sex with them. One exemple is brillantly discussed in d "Don't sleep! There are Snakes" by Daniel Everett, where I can find the qupte: "Anthropologists have long believed that the more complex the kinship system, the more likely it is that there will be kinship-based restrictions on whom to marry, wichi relative to live close to or with, and so on. But the inverse necessarily holds [...]"
In fact he notices that in a small amazonian tribe, not having words for cousins or half-brothers, marriage and sex with them was socially accepted; and only the coupling parents-childs and between full siblings where disregarded. In other hands, if we ideally grow up in a society that doesn't have names for mother and father, there would be no problem to have sex with them. It is just a matter of language, it has nothing to do with religion or genetics. Of course at the beginning they probably notice that having sex with relatives caused bad/weak offspring, and therefore they started to names relatives, so that you could avoid bad progenies. So the morality is born with the names to identificate bad companions, it didn't existed before.

[roderik]

... unlike Adam and Eve themselves, of whom it is written:

Oh give me a clone,
of my own flesh and bone,
with the Y-chromosome changed to X...

There is a difference.
It is still God's creation.
Whereas when we clone it is not.

And this makes any difference because?
Is a "god's creation" somehow different or better than any other creation?

[musicgeek]

Cain: "Damn it, Abel gets EVERYTHING!"

I don't care who y'are, that's pretty funny right thar. [/Larry the Cable Guy voice]

As a few others have said, it seems to me that in addition to tweaking the homophobic holy rollers, Randall is riffing on the Literalist account of Genesis and the implications for population of the earth. As Drummond points out in Inherit the Wind:

Drummond: (reading from the Bible) "And Cain knew his wife." Where the hell'd she come from?
Brady: Who?
Drummond: Mrs. Cain. Cain's wife. Figure somone pulled off another creation in the next county?

And no, this isn't a bash at Christianity - I'm actually a lay minister (couldn't they come up with a better name for that?) at my church.

[MonkeyBoy]

Go eat a live banana slug.

Fallacious...

Possibly, I guess, if you really licked it up and down and worked it in and out of your mouth first.

Oh wait, you said... Never mind.

[babble]

This might go slightly off topic, but even though i agree with you on your slug example and what you said before, i DO would let police search my house just like that, because i have nothing to hide. If i trust in the goverment, which at the moment i do(enough to trust police at least) i see no reason why not. Privacy? Those police guys are some random fellas you never see again, and they search houses on a weekly basis, do you really think they care about your hidden sex toys to tell all your friends and the internet about it just to emberass you? Oh please. Heck, i would even let them monitor me 24/7, because i really do have nothing to hide and they would just get bored watching some random nobodys life who is a as good as a person can be(which is not really hard to be)

'at the moment' being the key phrase. What happens when the rules change, and someone arbitrarily decides that your 'good' life is dangerous? you might realise the importance of the privacy rights you've happily flung aside because you trusted a temporary system. honestly, haven't you read 1984? or come to that, any 20th-century history at all?

[Uzh]

... unlike Adam and Eve themselves, of whom it is written:

Oh give me a clone,
of my own flesh and bone,
with the Y-chromosome changed to X...

There is a difference.
It is still God's creation.
Whereas when we clone it is not.

I tried to hum this in the same tune - it wouldn't fit.

"... but he loved his mother!"

Thank you for this quote. All through the time after someone first mentioned Oedipus I hummed _this_, just interrupted by the "Home On The Range" above...

Now, I'm not considered about Adam and Eve, but with Noah and his immediate family at that time there already like had been some strange stuff going, considering the other gods and such...

Especially the story about Noah (drunken, naked) in the barn, if I remember correctly. A story they forgot to tell us in sunday school when we painted the arch...

[radtea]

Just wanted to say that morality related to relatives (wow I see what I did there) is defined by languages... In other hands, if we ideally grow up in a society that doesn't have names for mother and father, there would be no problem to have sex with them. It is just a matter of language, it has nothing to do with religion or genetics.

You've over-stated and over-simplified considerably, and extended your conclusion beyond your data in a most unscientific way. Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment, and you've used the data to generate an idea (that societies with no named category for "parent/child" and "full sibling" would have no issues with sex between the same) and treated that idea--which is intriguing and plausible--as if was a conclusion rather than a hypothesis. Until you observe or experiment and test it, it remains a hypothesis.

Furthermore, this is important because we know of cases where people who were not full siblings but raised as such didn't have sex with each other: kids raised on the same kibbutz in Israel typically behave toward each other as full siblings.

Further-further-more: why do names for family relations matter but not other kinds of relations? Although there's a counter-argument to be made that in at least some named non-familial relations (lawyer/client, doctor/patient) we do indeed have sexual restrictions...

In any case, fascinating observation, and thanks for the thoughts it has stimulated!

[elasto]

Although there's a counter-argument to be made that in at least some named non-familial relations (lawyer/client, doctor/patient) we do indeed have sexual restrictions...

The key to it is when one party has some form of authority over the other: There's a significant danger the sex act will have been coerced rather than truly being consensual.

Other examples would be teacher-student and step-parent-step-child even if all involved are beyond the age of consent.

[tyboy]

When I first read this the Abel as son of A&E didn't occur to me and I thought it was just an infidelity joke. It was funnier like that.

The most important books for Christian faith are the Gospels. The synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and especially Luke) are written as eyewitness reports. They are not fiction, at least not in a modern sense, though they could of course be lies or exaggerated, or the apostles might have been brilliantly deceived.

The gospels can't agree with each other, never mind historical fact.

I recommend you do some reading outside the gospels to discover:

1. There is no historical record of any census that would cause the the Holy Family to travel to Bethlehem, it's a fiction to "prove" that Jesus was born of of house of David in the city of David.

2. Many of the historical figures said to coexist in the gospels lived years apart, with no overlap in their careers

There are many other inconsistencies, not to mention that basically all of the gospels were written well after the fact, supposedly based on a different source (referred to as the Q source, "Q" for "quaestio", given that no-one knows who it was or if it even exists).

They certainly aren't eyewitness accounts (though they're written to sound like they are -- another deception), and they're just the ones that the church selected from hundreds and edited to suit their needs.

Seriously, the Gospels are as much tripe as the Old testament, which itself is massively factually inaccurate, and not a "tribal history" to be taken as "largely" historical.

That doesn't necessarily mean that they were fictions in the modern sense of the word. Although I would argue that if they are lies then that would fall under the category of fiction in the modern sense. For that matter I think "brilliant" deception is quite a stretch. They were written long after the events they describe and are from a time when written records of events were far less impressive than they are today. I can only imagine people back then had a considerably less effective BS filter for things that violate natural law. As a result the writers could have easily been writing what they saw as more or less history using what sources they had and still be so far off the mark (Markan priority pun?) that their value as a description of actual events is basically nothing.


Privacy covers the gap between the will of the majority and morality/ethics as well as the gap representative democracy can create between the actions of the government and the will of the majority.

[John E.]

Have sex with your mother. Right now.

I was adopted, so I've got no idea where she is or if she is even still alive. But if she was hot and up for it, yeah, I'd do it.

[PolakoVoador]

Comic "making fun" of the Bible, troll trying to derail discussion completly, people still managed to have intelligent debates and argumentations. Fate in humanity restored.

That's why I love XKCD threads.


PS.: and as usual, learned something new, the Westermarck effect.

[ut_icedragon]

So after comic 1000, the gloves come off and the lines are crossed?

I'll give him points for being bold, but this one made me uncomfortable.

Welcome to the new xkcd, LOL.

[eran_rathan]

Oedipus Rex, Oedipus Rex,
You're the one no-one suspects:
Killed yer Pa, married yer ma -
They don't even do that in Arkansas!

[AvatarIII]

Have sex with your mother. Right now.

I was adopted, so I've got no idea where she is or if she is even still alive. But if she was hot and up for it, yeah, I'd do it.

in that case, your adopted mother would be the one you should have sex with, to reitterate things that have already been posted earlier in this thread, due to GSA, and lack of Westermarck effect, you would probably be unusually attracted to your biological mother, and have no psychological barriers standing in your way.

[JetstreamGW]

Cain: "Damn it, Abel gets EVERYTHING!"

I don't care who y'are, that's pretty funny right thar. [/Larry the Cable Guy voice]

As a few others have said, it seems to me that in addition to tweaking the homophobic holy rollers, Randall is riffing on the Literalist account of Genesis and the implications for population of the earth. As Drummond points out in Inherit the Wind:

Drummond: (reading from the Bible) "And Cain knew his wife." Where the hell'd she come from?
Brady: Who?
Drummond: Mrs. Cain. Cain's wife. Figure somone pulled off another creation in the next county?

And no, this isn't a bash at Christianity - I'm actually a lay minister (couldn't they come up with a better name for that?) at my church.

My favorite response to that argument there (and the one that pisses people off real hard) is "yeah, someone did pull off another creation in the next county. God is often referred to as the 'highest of holies' or 'one above all.' Doesn't mean there can't be OTHER deities, he's just BETTER than they are."

[Tag]

Just wanted to say that morality related to relatives (wow I see what I did there) is defined by languages... In other hands, if we ideally grow up in a society that doesn't have names for mother and father, there would be no problem to have sex with them. It is just a matter of language, it has nothing to do with religion or genetics.

You've over-stated and over-simplified considerably, and extended your conclusion beyond your data in a most unscientific way. Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment, and you've used the data to generate an idea (that societies with no named category for "parent/child" and "full sibling" would have no issues with sex between the same) and treated that idea--which is intriguing and plausible--as if was a conclusion rather than a hypothesis. Until you observe or experiment and test it, it remains a hypothesis.

Furthermore, this is important because we know of cases where people who were not full siblings but raised as such didn't have sex with each other: kids raised on the same kibbutz in Israel typically behave toward each other as full siblings.

Also worth noting that counting first-cousin relationships as unacceptable 'incest' is far from universal even in the recent past in English-speaking countries, despite there always having been a word for cousin. As has been noted, Darwin married his first cousin; my great-great (I think) grandparents were also first cousins (with the same surname), and one of the major plots of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is the heroine's pursuit of her first cousin Edmund; it seems to have become less acceptable towards the end of the 19th century. In the US, cousin marriage is legal in 20 states, and legal under certain circumstances in another six. People probably remember the controversy when Jerry Lee Lewis married his cousin - but that was probably mostly because he was 22 and she was 13.....

The Westermarck effect, as has been said, seems to be the biggest issue. (I don't think I'd have any serious issue with a relationship with any of my cousins, as we grew up totally separately; though I can't say I've thought about it too hard.)

[benonai]

Originally I was offended by this comic assuming a poorly thought out reach of an incest joke mocking the Old Testament. I say "poorly thought out reach" because there are so many other cases of incest in Genesis that who needs to make up something between Eve and her tragically murdered son?

Upon someone pointing out the "Adam and Steve" connection I realized the comic is making fun of a rather poor and in poor taste argument against homosexuality.

If someone wants to bring up the image of "Adam and Steve" why can't someone else bring up "Abel and Eve"?

"It's not funny if I have to explain it" (but also not offensive once explained).

[TheRaptorFence]

Does....does anyone want to enjoy the comic? Please....I'm all alone....

And also, as a pastoral ministries major with a literalist interpretation of Genesis I found this pretty funny. Don't know why people have to take it so hard. A good riot. As for the...argument I will be willing to list a literalist interpretation that doesn't sound like troll trash for those who give a care, but then again troll-slaying is more fun to do and watch.

[FrobozzWizard]

As a fan of Greek tragedy, I'm sad to say that this comic gave me the sudden urge to gouge my eyes out. Thanks a bundle, Sophocles!

[jacksonliam91]

Oh, would you Abel 'n' Eve it?

Beat me to the cockney rhyming slag reference
"I don't Adam and Eve It!"

[Ideas sleep furiously.]

Well done Randall.
That's all.

[PolakoVoador]

The Westermarck effect, as has been said, seems to be the biggest issue. (I don't think I'd have any serious issue with a relationship with any of my cousins, as we grew up totally separately; though I can't say I've thought about it too hard.)

My case would be the complete opposite. I've grow up really close do my cousins, so Westermarck effect hits hard.

Does....does anyone want to enjoy the comic? Please....I'm all alone....

Not alone, I really liked it too

[cellocgw]

Yeah, well,... Adam should have stayed with Lilith in the first place.

[Maurog]

By the way, we probably have genetic problems from incest because it's a taboo for so many generations, not the other way around (or it's a reinforcing cycle). If incest was acceptable and widespread in early humans, the danger genes causing problems would be weeded out eventually, and it would become much safer. Just like it happened in cats.

[AvatarIII]

By the way, we probably have genetic problems from incest because it's a taboo for so many generations, not the other way around (or it's a reinforcing cycle). If incest was acceptable and widespread in early humans, the danger genes causing problems would be weeded out eventually, and it would become much safer. Just like it happened in cats.

incest between cousins was always quite common up until relatively recently, you would have thought that that would have weeded out a lot of the bad genes

[drakmon]

...you would probably be shocked to find that you are interested in your, say, 17th cousin.

Funny story... my wife and I have been doing a ton of genealogical research for the past year and found out over Christmas vacation that we have a common ancestor roughly 600 years back. We're ~21st cousins.

See? This is why you should compare genealogies with your potential mate prior to mating!

I also found out that a couple of my ancestors married their mothers and had children. 1000 years ago, but still... icky.

[Maurog]

Hmm, the real test is comparing the probability of genetic diseases in cousin marriages between some demographic which does it all the time, and some demographic known to oppose it vehemently.

Kinda makes me wish there was some sort of easy access global data repository like in sci-fi movies.

[AvatarIII]

...you would probably be shocked to find that you are interested in your, say, 17th cousin.

Funny story... my wife and I have been doing a ton of genealogical research for the past year and found out over Christmas vacation that we have a common ancestor roughly 600 years back. We're ~21st cousins.

See? This is why you should compare genealogies with your potential mate prior to mating!

I also found out that a couple of my ancestors married their mothers and had children. 1000 years ago, but still... icky.

wow, that's some good researching, a lot of my family trees stop dead, due to the blitz in London destroying a LOT of historical records.

Hmm, the real test is comparing the probability of genetic diseases in cousin marriages between some demographic which does it all the time, and some demographic known to oppose it vehemently.

Kinda makes me wish there was some sort of easy access global data repository like in sci-fi movies.

I'm not sure of any cultures that opposed cousin marriages to be honest. it would be interesting to find out.

in the absence of global data repository, some way to view and document the past would be nice.

[doogly]

Also, I'm Christian, and I don't hold that part of the Bible to be literal. In defense of those who do, I'd like to point out that it's not stated by whom Adam's kids had kids. God may have created other humans as well, or may have designed them so that incest was not a problem for the first $n$ generations, or whatever.

Also also, Abel isn't recorded to have had any kids. But yeah, I get it, "Seth and Eve" doesn't sound like "Adam and Eve".

I suppoooooose... but I was a little disappointed that they made the joke with the wrong son.

[drakmon]

...you would probably be shocked to find that you are interested in your, say, 17th cousin.

Funny story... my wife and I have been doing a ton of genealogical research for the past year and found out over Christmas vacation that we have a common ancestor roughly 600 years back. We're ~21st cousins.

See? This is why you should compare genealogies with your potential mate prior to mating!

I also found out that a couple of my ancestors married their mothers and had children. 1000 years ago, but still... icky.

wow, that's some good researching, a lot of my family trees stop dead, due to the blitz in London destroying a LOT of historical records.

That's rough. For whatever reason a lot of our records survived (quite a few in England). We've managed to trace back definitively to William the Conqueror''s invasion in most cases where the records are good. In one case (related to the viking Earls of the Orkney Islands) we can go back even farther... to the point where the only documentation is stories like Beowulf or Norse sagas (Ynglingatal). If you believe everything you read, my wife and I can trace our line of descent through our common ancestor all the way back to Freyr, and from Freyr to Odin.

Odin's children, together at last!

[AvatarIII]

Also, I'm Christian, and I don't hold that part of the Bible to be literal. In defense of those who do, I'd like to point out that it's not stated by whom Adam's kids had kids. God may have created other humans as well, or may have designed them so that incest was not a problem for the first $n$ generations, or whatever.

Also also, Abel isn't recorded to have had any kids. But yeah, I get it, "Seth and Eve" doesn't sound like "Adam and Eve".

I suppoooooose... but I was a little disappointed that they made the joke with the wrong son.

you never know, maybe this event was the motive for Cain's murder of his brother.

"you slept with mum? how could you! you must die!"

[invalidsyntax]

I'm back. Time to prove a point:

I stand here right now and challenge every single atheist/agnostic in this thread to prove to me that incest is moral.

Who gets to define 'moral'?

Have sex with your mother. Right now.
Come back to me once you have done it, and tell me that you were brave enough to do this thing that just CAN'T POSSIBLY be immoral.

My mom is dead, you a--hole!!

On that note however, is necrophilia immoral?

[PolakoVoador]

Also, I'm Christian, and I don't hold that part of the Bible to be literal. In defense of those who do, I'd like to point out that it's not stated by whom Adam's kids had kids. God may have created other humans as well, or may have designed them so that incest was not a problem for the first $n$ generations, or whatever.

Also also, Abel isn't recorded to have had any kids. But yeah, I get it, "Seth and Eve" doesn't sound like "Adam and Eve".

I suppoooooose... but I was a little disappointed that they made the joke with the wrong son.

you never know, maybe this event was the motive for Cain's murder of his brother.

"you slept with mum? how could you! you must die!"

That's quite a good theory, if you ask me.

[Fire Brns]

I didn't particularly enjoy this one. Not because I am Christian but because I have heard it a million times, I've considered it too. The alt txt was funny, i'll give randal that.

Three things did peeve me, 4 now because the word peeve peeves me:
1. We have Christians not being able to take a joke, or not explaining why they don't enjoy it.
2. We have Hardcore Athiest clapping like seals at any criticism of religion.
3. Nearly everyone in this thread is a narcisist insisting that everyone else is a narcicist.
4. The word peeve.

Now I believe both evolution and creationism simultaneously call it a "schrodingers cat" or "doublethink" if you like but neither have direct proof disprooving the other. (I had someone posit that god let satan fake the fossil record to challenge creationism, so just remember how many theories are out there.) Either way neither affect me enough that I need to decide.

Incest; either through evolution or creationism incest would have had to happen. Creationism has already been argued seven ways to sunday so I will move on to the other one. For most of history we had maybe a few million people spread over 6 continents +100s of tiny islands, incest was necessary since there were so few of us. As I remember one of the earliest human settlement Jericho was quite small reproduction between cousins would have happened often, throughout history either social classes or being in small towns perpetuated incest. Why do you think we have so many different possible genetic diseases? Like purebreed dogs the result of inbreeding has messed up every single race in some way or another.

morality front: the face of incest is "pervert uncle raping his neice or nephew" so that's a major no no along with the pedophilia no no. There is a difference between that and two adult falling in love to find out they are brother and sister later. I would rather the people argue over incest's morality posit conditions for or against instead of quite hilariously and intentionally saying "your mom".

Edit: several posts while I was writing this, at least one made my historical point on incest.

[morik]

I'm back. Time to prove a point:

I stand here right now and challenge every single atheist/agnostic in this thread to prove to me that incest is moral.

Who gets to define 'moral'?

Have sex with your mother. Right now.
Come back to me once you have done it, and tell me that you were brave enough to do this thing that just CAN'T POSSIBLY be immoral.

Just because someone believes something is moral doesn't mean they want to do it...

Is it immoral to want to have no friends, live alone, and eat nothing but bread and water for the rest of your life?

If you claim it is not immoral, can I prove you wrong by challenging you to go do it, and if you refuse, saying I have thus proved that it is immoral to live that way? I think not.

[osdieckd]

I'm having trouble understanding why this topic (other than the Christian vs non-Christian trolling) is controversial. Take morality out of it and run with the "literal bible" and Cain had to sleep with SOMEONE to propagate the species. Even if you run with other biblical texts, Cain slept with his sister. If you run without the other texts he slept with his mother. Or his brother did. Someone slept with their mother or sister.

And the alt-text was AWESOME. I'll throw a troll out there... would YOU rather your son be gay or sleep with your wife?

[doogly]

2. We have Hardcore Athiest clapping like seals at any criticism of religion.

Really?

Also, that's not what Schrodinger's Cat means.

[AutoHawk]

I am an agnostic, I think. More like I don't think there's anything out there, but that it would be really beautiful if there was.

That being said, I always find it interesting that anti-Christians fall back upon Biblical contradictions, especially in the Gospels, to denounce Biblical authority. All well and good, but there were Christians before the Gospels were written. If Jesus existed, the Gospels were written around the time when the last of his contemporaries would have been dead or failing. They have been dated to around the fall of the second temple in 70 CE and onward, at time of upheaval (of Jews and Jewish Christians) in the Roman Empire. They have whole coin sets (of the time) commemorating the Roman triumph over Jewish ideologies, even though there were bigger, badder nations to be conquered.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that that's kind of important when you realize that Jews and Jewish Christians felt they needed something to rally around.

That being said, the Gospels are also speculated to have been taken from the dictations of oral tradition. It is no wonder stories are slightly different. We have a whole game revolving around oral tradition and it's mutations, called Telephone.

That's kind of tangent-y.

ON ANOTHER NOTE

I'm also confused as to why incest is not ever brought up (it seems) in relation to European nobility. I'm not sure if the string of hemophilia in the royal families is due to incest or not, but isn't it recessive?