Get with the 21st Century, Strib!


This is an annoying thing about newspapers: I discover browsing through yesterdays paper at the coffee shop that there is an excellent editorial cartoonist at the Star Tribune — he had a surprisingly anti-religious cartoon in the 11 June newspaper. I get online to look it up, and discover that the Star Tribune effectively buries everything other than the today’s newspaper, so I can’t find it! Can anyone out there help me out? It’s by L.K. Hanson, 11 June, on page A13 of the Opinion section — I’m looking forward to the outraged letters to the editor that will follow.

I can find examples of Hanson’s work on the web, but I wanted this specific cartoon…although it’s true that the more of his work I see, the more I like it. So why does the Strib make it so hard to see it?


Found, on Hanson’s Facebook page!

I like it.

Comments

  1. truthspeaker says

    You went to the Star Tribune’s website? Just consider yourself fortunate the advertising didn’t induce a seizure and the comment system didn’t spread malware to your PC. Their site makes it look like they accepted the lowest bid they got for web design, then fired that guy and hired the publisher’s 14-year-old nephew.

  2. throwaway says

    I bet a tenner the angry letters will Godwin (or the Stalin/Pol Pot equivalent.) Having been an atheist for so long, these things get predictable, so are there any newer suckers atheists willing to take this bet?

  3. montyburns says

    Not so sure religion accounts for more deaths than tyrannies. As Steven Pinker points out in his book, “The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, pg.674, “The most destructive eruptions of the past half millenium were fueled not by resources but by ideologies, such as religion, revolution, nationalism, fascism, and communism.” Religion is only one of these ideologies.

  4. NitricAcid says

    @Throwaway#4

    You’re more likely to get a taker if you offer odds on whether or not the fundy will include Hitler along with Stalin and Pol Pot as examples of “atheists who killed billions”.

  5. Menyambal --- Sambal's sockpuppet says

    montyburns, I once had a Chinese gentleman tell me that Communism was a religion. He’d grown up in China, and he gave several examples in support. I’ve never found any reason to disagree with him, and many reasons to agree. It may be non-supernatural, but it has scriptures and rituals and saints and all, and statements of belief.

  6. Sili says

    It may be non-supernatural

    I’m not overly familiar with Marx, but from the way DDMFM tells it, his ‘philosophy’ is very much supernatural.

  7. Gnumann says

    I’m not overly familiar with Marx

    I’m not too good on the Chinese communist party, but I would go out on a limb and say: Neither is the Chinese communist party – at least not in practice.

    I’ve never found any reason to disagree with him, and many reasons to agree.

    A sufficiently rigorous definition of the term “religion” might suffice. If you substitute “religion” for “cult” though…

  8. 'Tis Himself says

    I’m not overly familiar with Marx, but from the way DDMFM tells it, his ‘philosophy’ is very much supernatural.

    Marx was originally trained as a philosopher, gaining a PhD in philosophy from the University of Berlin. Das Kapital, while mainly an economics book, also considers various questions in political and historical philosophy.

    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses Marx’s writings.

    With regard to religion, Marx fully accepted [Ludwig] Feuerbach’s claim in opposition to traditional theology that human beings had created God in their own image; indeed a view that long pre-dated Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s distinctive contribution was to argue that worshipping God diverted human beings from enjoying their own human powers. While accepting much of Feuerbach’s account Marx’s criticizes Feuerbach on the grounds that he has failed to understand why people fall into religious alienation and so is unable to explain how it can be transcended. Marx’s explanation is that religion is a response to alienation in material life, and therefore cannot be removed until human material life is emancipated, at which point religion will wither away. Precisely what it is about material life that creates religion is not set out with complete clarity.