Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

religions

2020-04-19 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
religions
Votey panel for religions
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

The comic presents a taxonomy of theological positions, each represented by a different character (depicted as colored circles with faces). It runs through several well-known stances: Theism ("God exists, you want miracles? I got miracles!"), Atheism ("God does not exist"), Deism ("Oh hell, I'll just kick off the universe and leave"), Agnosticism ("Screw it, I'm just going to be snarky on the internet again"), Apathetic Theism ("God exists, but we only get a universe with no longer-interesting miracles... so God is in no useful way distinct from no God"), and what it labels "Avocado Theism" ("God exists and maybe sometimes does little things that only interfere once in a while to give you a fleeting connection to the divine feeling").

The final panel introduces "Lemon" -- represented by a lemon -- whose position is: "Oh cool, I'm a tool. It's not a religion, it's just me." This undercuts all the grand theological frameworks by having an object that simply acknowledges what it is without any theological pretension whatsoever.

The Humor

The humor comes from the increasingly strained and specific theological positions, each one more convoluted and hedged than the last. "Avocado Theism" is already an absurd invention -- a theology where God only occasionally does tiny, barely noticeable things. The escalating specificity parodies how theological and philosophical debates can splinter into ever-finer distinctions that start to feel meaningless. The lemon at the end serves as a comedic deflation: after all this elaborate philosophizing about the nature of God, the simplest "position" is just being an object that doesn't care. It satirizes the human tendency to over-complicate questions of meaning and existence.

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