Introduction ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock

The Bible in a nutshell. How the world began, how sin entered the world, and why we must trust Jesus. Why is it completely unfathomable that God could be both a creator and a liar? I wasn’t aware these were mutually exclusive. This is an extremely simple one that’s mostly pictures and just the regular Bible Story boilerplate.

Cover / Page 1 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Huh, it’s not often the cover art on a Chick Tract is actually relatively pleasing.

Page 2 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	*toss* “Eh, the hell with the universe.” Or, like, “where am I gonna put all this crap? Meh, *toss*, that corner’s fine.” I’m picturing some kind of giant space Native American quietly weeping as God drives by in his space-cloud SUV and tosses all this stuff out the window. The Earth, Moon, Sol, and the random enormous distant star that I’m guessing is maybe Polaris: All the same size! I also like how the Earth looks exactly like it does today. Continental Drift? What’s that? You know, Chick really ought to write a science book. To be sold, of course, under “humor”.

Page 3 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	So, man evolving via processes we can observe in a species even between one generation and the next and logically extrapolate over the course of millions of years is bullshit, but God magically throwing man together out of some dirt is totally believable. Tell me again why these people should have any say at all in educational policymaking. Right here, we have the answer to the Tract’s titular question, by the way: It’s “liar”. See, Genesis 2:17 says, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Unless God was speaking metaphorically, which is an interpretation fundamentalists are nearly always unwilling to believe, then this is an untrue statement. Even if he was talking about “you’ll be changed into a decaying form, one in which you’ll be capable of death”, that still doesn’t mean they “surely die” on that day. Was it really much of a choice? Given that man hadn’t at that point eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, could God really expect him to, y’know, make an informed and calculated decision?

Page 4 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	I think “fellowship” might be some kind of sexual innuendo. And I like that God can create evil, do evil, allow evil, but he can’t hang out with it, for some reason. The implication, here, seems to be that man (Adam) had to choose between “evil” (eating the apple from Eve) and “good” (not eating the apple), as though Eve doesn’t count as mankind, and her falling to the snake’s temptation was a given, due to her nature, or something. Like, it’s the man who makes the decisions around here. There are also a couple other troubling implications: Intelligence is evil, and disobeying a fascist liar control freak who wants to arbitrarily limit you is evil. Meaning, of course, that unquestioning ignorance and a blind subservience to anyone who claims to represent God is good. Gee, you think maybe it could be personally advantageous to me to claim to be a representative of an angry God? Why, it’s such a great idea, I’m surprised nobody’s ever had it before. Say what you will about hell — at least they have tornadoes that wipe your ass for you.

Page 5 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	If God was so pissy about mankind turning away from him, why didn’t he just lay down his thumb and crunch everyone up as soon as Cain killed Abel, and just start the whole thing all over again, maybe putting that tree he didn’t want them to get at on a higher shelf? The first Olympic games must have been great. You’ve got the Slap Fight, the Sword-Toss-Into-Some-Other-Guy’s-Chest, and the hundred-meter Hop-On-One-Foot-While-Carrying-a-Woman.

Page 6 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	So “total, arbitrary subservience” is “good” and “insubordination, regardless of context” is “bad”. None of this makes sense, by the way. According to Biblical logic, because Jesus had yet to be born, it wouldn’t have been possible for anyone to have gone to heaven anyway. What would be the point of obeying God if all he was going to do in the end was toss you into hell so you could be tortured forever regardless of what you did? “Obey me! You, uh, you don’t really get anything out of it, and in the end I’m going to burn you forever, but, uh, if you obey me, you’ll… um… well… it’ll just be really nice of you, okay?”

Page 7 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Giant prophets, at least ten times taller than their tallest buildings. “Aw, dammit, I spilled my chocolate milk.” *SLURRPPP* “NOBODY TOUCH IT!” *SLURP* “It’s MINE!” *SLURRLLLURRP*

Page 8 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	So animal sacrifice is a good thing. Or…? “OH MY GOD, SOMEONE, HELP! SOMEONE LIT MY MOM’S CASKET ON FIRE!”

Page 9 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Hey, what the… where the hell did these enormous stairs come from? Were these always here?” So there was a “God the Son” before Jesus was born? Why? What was he called before then? This is such a confusing and contrived story that even the angels don’t know what the fuck.

Page 10 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Space clouds! Whee! Look out — here comes Jeffy. “Her name was Mary, and she squeezed giant beetles until they puked into large bowls.”

Page 11 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	. . . Way too easy.

Page 12 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	So far, this is all definitely so much easier a way to forgive than just saying, y’know, “I forgive you”.

Page 13 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Coochie coochie coo! You ticklish? Eh? Eh? You ticklish?” This is the first time I’ve ever seen Jesus depicted as a balding, middle-aged Jewish man. Jesus is Michael Gross, apparently. There are a lot of people “no one [can] find fault or sin in”. Why is this relevant? I thought the problem was the unavoidable and undetectable Original Sin. It’s… I have no idea what’s going on in the middle of the second panel. Is Jesus wearing a black hood and riding a giant flaming frog?

Page 14 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Man, tattoos were really hardcore back then. “…separation from God”? So God… was separated from God. I think the bank metaphor falls a little flat. “Deposited in an overdrawn account”? What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? The concluding paragraph here seems to skip a few steps. It starts with a “thus”, but I don’t see how this could be a logical conclusion to anything else that’s been said to this point.

Page 15 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Wow, so you’re saying the Bible had some level of plot consistency? How entirely unexpected in a piece of narrative literature! I really don’t know what this is supposed to prove. “The Bible said that a bunch of things would happen, and then later on the Bible said that a bunch of those things did happen!” I wonder if two thousand years from now, people are going to watch The Matrix, and then end up ontologically impressed that, at the end of the movie, he actually turns out to be The One. It’d “prove” just as much.

Page 16 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Dude, close your fucking robe,” grumbled Satan. “Really didn’t need to see that. Wow, did that ever defeat me.” And on his way up, he blasted all his disciples with a beam of cloud-parting radiation.

Page 17 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Now, are we supposed to be able to make out anything that’s going on in this image? What’s with all the headless people wandering around? Bleh, fuck it. Moving on…

Page 18 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Hee! I always love these. *fling* “Waaaaaaaggghhh!” And then, we can imagine, the inevitable clattering thuds, like swinging a sack full of knees into a marble wall. What about the people who serve neither? Does lack of servitude of one necessarily imply servitude of the other?

Page 19 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Oh, stop groveling.” Oh goody. I, for one, am just bursting at the seams to spend the rest of my life being an uptight, morally condescending asshole, just so that I can spend the rest of eternity with a bunch of people just like me, where I can presumably continue to never have any fun, even though it’s supposedly “paradise”. I mean, if you take everything that fundamentalists consider “a sin”, and combine it all with the idea that apparently “God doesn’t allow sin into heaven”, is heaven really paradise, or is it just continued servitude and arbitrary rejection of pleasure and amusement? What’s the motivational factor, here, for people to convert? What’s there in heaven to want, for someone who actually enjoys sex or gluttony or whatever else? Call me crazy, but “abandon everything you like in order to be just like us, so that you can continue to be just like us forever” doesn’t strike me as the strongest of selling points.

Page 20 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Hahahaha, a Catholic priest with a sign saying “GOD IS DEAD”. Why? Did I miss something? Do Catholics generally think God is dead? Chick really doesn’t understand the concept of secularism, does he? It’s just like with The Last Generation; it’s like he’s completely incapable of fathoming the idea of lack of religious beliefs. To him, people either believe in his version of Christianity, or they believe in some magic Paga-Wicca-Satanic quasi-voodoo nature goddess or something. Or, they believe in Christianity, but they believe it doesn’t exist. Or they believe in Jesus, but they’re willfully siding against him to align themselves with evil. The entire premise, here, even, is specious: It’s not a matter of God being a liar (which presumes that God exists and implies a willful rejection in spite of this), it’s a matter of just not buying into the idea at all.

Page 21 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Blah blah blah, Pascal’s Wager. If I’m wrong, and there really is an enormous, omnipotent, unobservable bee that sits in the center of the sun and controls every atom in the universe with its infinite arms, then I’ll die and be kicked in the face by a mule for the rest of time. So I’d better believe! I have everything to gain and nothing to lose! Didn’t even feel like illustrating this one, did you, Jack?

Page 22 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Or this, for that matter. So if Jesus created the universe, and the only reason for the Jesus part of God to really need to exist is to save mankind from Original Sin, then wasn’t Original Sin a foregone conclusion right from the start? And if so, why is God getting all pissy over it? And why’s he blaming us? And continuing the whole secular thing, why would this be “the most important decision” to someone who doesn’t believe in any of this and subsequently doesn’t care? Appealing to our sense of “importance” regarding this decision isn’t going to work, because we consider the entire question rather irrelevant.

Conclusion ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock

I’m sorry — the further I got into this one, the more it felt like Jack wasn’t even trying. Based on the numbering for this one — 0005 — I’m guessing it was probably an earlier Tract, which could explain its lackadaisical feel. (Though, strangely, the art seems almost better in this one.) It’s almost entirely devoid of any of the usual Chickanery, and even though it’s the expectable level of ridiculous, it just seems… half-assed. Usually, the image-heavy ones are better and more fun to mock, but this one just left me feeling kinda empty. So, sorry if it’s not the usual fare. Next week’s will be better. Tune in then, and bring a friend.

Further Reading ⇑