Hmm, that is a pretty insightful point. On the other hand, I think most people I know who are religious are the sort who can appreciate self-deprecating humour themselves -- they might think it's funny for taking an absurd premise to its logical conclusion.

What suggests to me that this author is trying to paint atheism in a negative light is quite straightforwardly "score one for atheism." It doesn't really have a hint of irony to me. I think the author clearly thinks atheism just isn't cool anymore.

So you're saying you should just let people believe and leave them be? /s

Me when I try and pet a cat but they run away.

With how sad and empty my geriatric mother's life is, the last thing I'm going to do is take away her imaginary friend.

I don't know that my parents were ever the kind of person that bitched about paying taxes. They might have privately, but i don't remember it ever being a big deal. Me, I understand that my taxes are too low for what I expect the gov't to be doing.

And you're exactly right about the social experience. One of the enormous struggles for atheists has been building a community. Churches fill that need, even though they cause real harms in other ways. If you go to a church, it's easy to meet people and make friends when you move to a new community. If you don't, well, good luck because you're going to need it.

But they already grew up with it. Finding a different subjective meaning to replace an existing one is what's hard.

Which shows he would have been better off living in the Matrix considering how badly he reacted to leaving it.

Ah, I see your point now; this is basically just like how the author was making the point that refrigerator stores have an annoying way of trying to sell people butthole pictures in this comic:

Your comment was the only one calling for the termination of the pursuit of deeper meaning in the comic, which is an anti-intellectual stance.

I have no desire to terminate anything. For someone going to so much trouble to express how much you care about the importance of intellectual discussion, you are working extremely hard to avoid engaging your intellect when it comes to my comments.

Depends on whether or not their beliefs harm themselves or others.

Your original comment reads

DEAR LORD PEOPLE, SOMETIMES THERE IS NOT A DEEPER MESSAGE AND IT'S JUST A DUMB JOKE!

It's pretty blankly a thought terminating cliché without your later clarification, same as the noteable "The curtains were fucking blue" meme. Even with your clarification, you are now bringing up yet another one of the comics to try and show there is no deeper substance to find from these comics, which I disagree.

With most of these comics, the author does enjoy using absurd humor. But they do still have some grounding in real things. The first example you give is poking fun at taking the saying 'you can do anything you set your mind to' and the second is a joke about dual-businesses, with the premise being, generically, a business with one service that's normal and another service that's something almost no one is going to request.

There's still some interesting things within that you can get from looking closer at them, even when they're absurd by nature. Again, let people have their hobbies. Don't try to make people feel like fools for picking silly comics apart.

Isn’t it better to be right than to be happy?

First of all, no it isn't. If you think it is, please explain why.

Also,
Is that a decision that you would want someone else to make for you?

If not, why do you want to make that decision for other people?

To be sure, my comment was absolutely a dumb cliché! If your response to it was to feel like a fool, though, then that's on you.

That wasn't my personal experience from the comment. I simply recognised it as anti-intellectual virtue signalling and didn't want that to go unchallenged. It just seemed very clear that the intent of your comment was to belittle those picking the comic apart.

That seems incredibly silly; why on earth should I care about whether random people on the Internet think I have superior virtue or not? I am too busy making sure that they recognize my superior sense of humor!

I don't think naturalism negates our collective community, but it does mean it is up to us to navigate an instinct for small tribes. Once we took up advanced agriculture and stopped migrating, we built large societies. And since then we have been contending with subversives who favor their own smaller sects over the good of the community, and they are very good at subverting larger systems for their personal gain.

Most theistic paradigms insist that there are higher powers to assist us when we confront existential threats (such as the climate crisis). Naturalism is one of the paradigms (not the only one) that confronts that there are no safety nets or training wheels. The human species can die out without the assurance of self-sustaining off-world colonies, and there are no higher powers to care or even notice. (Again, not to say they don't exist, but we've looked hard and been unable to detect them.)

Human society may, possibly in the face of the Trump regime, finally take class consciousness and community-focused governance seriously on a large scale. (There have been smaller scale examples.)

However, this isn't the first time we've thought about it and been subverted by established political power. Rather historically, often just after a bout of tyranny, societal collapse and its consequential horrors, we decide as firmly as we can that this time we're going to do it right! and then it gets diluted and subverted within even thirty years.

So to address the matter of uniting our collective community in a global cooperative effort: It's going to take a sociological miracle. We need to discover some new method, invent some new technology that enables all of us, even Trump, Musk, Vought and Thiel to recognize that every one of our fellow 343 million Americans (or 8 billion plus fellow humans) is, as Jesus put it, our neighbor who we should regard equally, that the worst renegade and the most wretched transient deserve the same benefits and treatment as themselves. And then this new thing needs to be resistant to efforts to subvert it.

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal imagined such a gimmick, though I can't locate the specific comic. In it a point system is invented, and it's noted that people are nice for the points rather than for a sincere interest in community, but the system works, so it doesn't matter much.)

And we need to do it soon. We're running out of water, and the global average temperature is now at levels where experts warned us could prove a challenge to responders even at the national scale as hurricanes and wildfires rampage across the planet. The unlucky ones will survive until the global famine.

Naturalistic philosophy doesn't say we can't navigate our way to a community-driven society that acknowledges the least of us deserve a comfy life and we should mind the environment, rather, it only acknowledges that if we don't we risk human extinction, and if we die out, there's nothing watching out for us. The greatest cosmic horrir: throughout the universe not even a fraction of a fuck will be given as all of our culture, all of our ideas and works will be reduced to another geological layer on a speck orbiting a spark.

And a lot of people are not prepared to confront this.

Nonsense. I don't believe in any divine entity, which is the definition of theism. Moreover, my "faith" isn't predicated on any actions in the world. It's a musing about the universe. A hopeful fantasy that I think is worth wanting. But it's not a gospel for how you ought to live in the world. That's why organised religions are a toxic force in the world overall, and we should never shy away from criticising them.

And that's great so long as it's a source of comfort and not dread. The fear of God and hellfire is real. We need people who carry faiths to recognize that this is by definition an uncertainty for which no real evidence exists, when it comes to consequences in the real world. Maybe that's a contradiction to some, but it doesn't need to be.

No, incorrect definitions are never sufficient. That is just making up stuff

It is not. Those are, roughly, what those words mean. I could use more precise ones, but this isn't a serious philosophical discussion with serious people so the effort would be wasted.

Substitute whichever words you prefer, there's a difference between an individual's personal belief in a higher power, and the institution which exploits that belief to oppress. Half-baked semantic objections do not make you clever. Engage with the content of the argument.