Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 9–On Gnostics and quality assurance
Wow, did every punchline I write include an obscenity?
One of my poetry professors mentioned Gnostics a bunch, and that’s where the factoid this comic is based around came from. I don’t really know much about Gnostics, but jokes about things I don’t really know much about is going to be kind of be a theme. Particularly once I started farming random Wikipedia pages for ideas. My understanding is that the Gnostics looked at the two different versions of the creation at the beginning of Genesis and came to the conclusion that the first version of creation was merely an idea that God had. But then this other dude called the Demiurge came along and stole the idea and actually made the universe. The God that shows up in the Adam and Eve story (the second version of the story) is this Demiurge. Actually, when you read that part of the bible from that perspective it makes a certain kind of sense–the portrayal of God in those two parts of the Bible is very different. Anyway, the Demiurge is a real dick, thereby explaining why there’s so much bad in the world. Stuff’s messed up because the creator of the universe is working against the true divine will.
The first draft of this comic tried to explain a lot more of this, and was oriented around a comparison between the botching of God’s plan and something to do with his own manufacture from (presumably) some kind of plan. But there was just no way I would fit all the info I needed into the comic itself. Since I associate any conversation about Gnosticism with pretentiousness, I salvaged the basic idea and put together this joke. It kind of makes the jump between panels one and two a bit of a non sequitur, but I’m not sure how I’d fix it.
Check out the comic itself past the cut:
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June 15th, 2007 at 1:09 am
I’ve recently decided that when it comes to religion, I’m diagnostic.
I’m trying to figure out how it all works.