suffering-4
Explanation
This comic plays on the intersection of theology and philosophy of religion. In the first panel, a character says they've been thinking of converting to a more spiritual life, and another responds enthusiastically, asking if they're going to take up religion. The first character clarifies they mean something about the self being a construct.
The joke unfolds across the panels: a character argues that "all religious traditions were created by beings who were suffering" and that religion is fundamentally "a self-help project." The punchline comes in the final panel, where someone twists this reasoning into a darkly circular conclusion -- if the self is not real, and religions are self-help, then the suffering that motivated religion is also not real, making the whole enterprise paradoxically unnecessary.
The humor mechanism is a reductio ad absurdum applied to both New Age spirituality and organized religion simultaneously. By taking the "the self is an illusion" premise from Buddhist-influenced pop spirituality and combining it with a functionalist view of religion as self-help, the comic arrives at the absurd conclusion that undermines both positions. It satirizes how people cherry-pick philosophical concepts from different traditions without noticing that the ideas, taken together, can be mutually contradictory. This is a classic SMBC move -- using logical rigor to expose the inconsistencies of casual philosophical positions.