2012-03-25
Explanation
This comic imagines God as a statistician who has been looking at aggregate data without examining the distribution. A priest asks the classic theological question: "God... why do bad things happen to good people?" God responds cheerfully: "The average person has a solid life and it'''s been getting better almost every year since the beginning." When the priest pushes back -- "Sure, but... wait, are you just taking average human welfare without checking the individual variance?" -- God'''s expression changes dramatically as he exclaims "HOLY SHIT."
God then frantically reviews the data, reacting with increasing horror: "Oh man! Ah! Wow! 100,000 years of... wow!" and "Oh jeez. Oh holy shit Africa. Ohh shit, the Jews." The implication is that God has been monitoring humanity'''s well-being using only the mean, never once looking at the variance or the experiences of specific populations who have suffered enormously. In the final panel, labeled "Later...," the priest sits at a desk and delivers the familiar theological cop-out: "The Lord works in mysterious ways."
The comic is a brilliant intersection of statistics and theology. It uses the well-known statistical error of relying on averages without examining variance or distribution to explain the problem of evil. If God only tracked mean welfare, he would miss genocides, famines, and systemic oppression of specific groups. The references to Africa and Jewish people point to some of history'''s most devastating patterns of suffering. The punchline -- the priest falling back on "mysterious ways" -- suggests that even after discovering the truth, institutional religion opts for vague platitudes over honest reckoning.
The votey shows someone telling God "Don'''t look up '''tsunami'''" while God begins "What'''s a ts-- HOLY SHIT" -- extending the joke that God keeps discovering more horrors the deeper he digs into the data.