No, I don't consider religion an excuse. The belief in some punitive hell (which itself is not systematic) is nothing by itself. What makes it creepy is how this hell is populated. And how it is populated depends on ideological factors that are independant from religion. The targets of normative hatred/contempt are the same for religious morons as for secular idiots. And, likewise, good people tend to make similar judgements on similar criteria, whether they believe in an afterlife justice or not.

There are religious and secular homophobes, islamophobes, judeophobes, etc. Just as there are religious and secular decent people. Religion doesn't lower (or increase) my expectations about people's moral judgements, because I saw no correlation between these amongst my religious/atheists friends.

So he has to like gays, Muslims, and Jews to be considered a decent person? What determines that these ideological factors are somehow any worse or better than the next person's?
I can get the hate against him if he started throwing rocks through their windows or yelling at them on the street or something. But if all he's doing is drawing cartoons, then...who cares? Let him believe whatever the heck he wants to believe. You could think people wearing red shirts are the scum of the earth for all I care, just so long as you don't go around stabbing people with red shirts, you're perfectly entitled to fuss about it all you want.

That's a dumb rephrasing. He doesn't have to "like" them. The point is precisely that "gay, jew, muslim" gives zero info on whether a person is good or bad. Chick is a cretin for disliking them by default, but implying that the opposite would be to (as absurdly) "like" them is just a weak rhetorical trick.

And yeah, hate speech (as it's being clumsily called nowadays) is a bad thing, with bad consequences. Racism, prejudice, xenophobia, hostility towards minorities, are realities that don't emerge from nothing. They are culturally transmitted, encouraged, through propaganda and ideological discourses. Politicians, pundits, religious leaders, are equally responsible for that. And Jack Chick was a ravenous militant or all these hateful, ignorant discourses.

As an individual holding these opinions, he'd have been despicable enough. But as a militant vector of them, doing his best to steer society towards his views, he is much worse. I believe he was too ridiculous to be efficient (I suspect his tracts end up more often used ironically than straightforward), but people like him are what keep this planet so painfully backwards, and a lot of innocents pay the price for the diffusion of his worldview and ideology. Be it in the christian, muslim, jewish or secular world.

But...he's just a cartoonist. He's not preaching it in the streets, he's not giving talks on it, he's just drawing cartoons, and exaggerated ones at that.
To me, this seems like the equivalent of hating a political cartoonist just because the guy supports Trump or some similar individual.

So he can't dislike who he chooses and still be a decent person either, then? He has to explicitly dislike only those which the majority of society approves for dislike?

You're like four days old, zeo! You probably think we used chisels and stone tablets back in the 70s and 80s! There's all kinds of stuff you haven't heard of! >.>
[url=We totally used chisels and stone tablets. Basically anything that would produce a powder in white or off-white. Man, the 70s and 80s were memorable. Unless you were there. Then, you mostly just *try* to remember. ][/url]
, or [url=http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/subornation]subornation. Relevant, and previously mentioned.

Subornation is more along the lines of paying somebody to do something which you're entirely aware is against the law, to my knowledge.
Perhaps this really boils down to matter of individual opinion, but to me, so long as he's not telling you to hurt people, I don't really see anything wrong with his cartoons. I don't necessarily agree with some of his ideas, but I'm not going to say he was some horrible individual for writing about them, either. Saying that people's voices deserve to be suppressed if their ideas are controversial or otherwise against the majority is against everything I believe in as an American.

Again I point out the comparison with a political cartoonist who supports a controversial political figure. Maybe somebody thinks Putin is a cool guy. Alright, whatever, you can think Putin's a cool guy and you can think that people should agree with you. Nothing wrong with that. Tell me that if I don't listen to you, Putin's going to destroy America. Yeah, whatever, I don't really have to listen to you on that and you're perfectly entitled to talk about it all you like. Tell me that you're going to kill me if I don't support Putin, and that's where I draw the line.

Well, I chose poorly by going with subornation, so I'm not going to try to salvage that first mistake. Good thing I'm not a lawyer, huh? I thought subornation would also apply to inciting violence, but that's not the case. So I shall rephrase.

Consider some of the controversies about D&D, and the silliness that ensued. Chick tracts were sort of the poster child for the forces that supported bullying or ostracization of the nerds (having been a nerd in the 80s, there were hella other reasons for us to get beaten up and shunned, but this is just about Chick.) Today, when we have trans kids bullied in schools, we call it a social or civil rights issue, and have very little patience for anyone suggesting that, say, gay or trans kids are different and need jesus in their life. Chick was the guy who, for decades, was portraying a small group of slightly outcast people as bad or dangerous. It's not on the level with, say, Brandenburg v. Ohio but it was still a concerted effort by someone to use their popularity to make certain people look badly. And there's no way in the post-civil rights world that you can make such an effort and not know that when you make a certain group a scapegoat, people will be violent toward them; the people in that group will engage in risky behavior.

Don't confuse "controversial or otherwise against the majority" opinions with those of malicious intent. Don't be too quick to defend someone just because what they did was too long ago to matter to you. Chick wouldn't have made my "Top 100 assholes" list at any point in my life, but for a data point of one, I'll say that I knew a lot of kids back then who had a harder time than they needed to have, because they had active imaginations and some people, Chick included, wanted to tamp right down on that. Remember that your rights to swing your fist stop at my nose; just because yours wasn't the nose bloodied, don't be too quick to defend the rights of those who did the swinging.

Hm, it seems perhaps I simply don't know enough about Chick. I'll be honest with you, I've never actually paid that much attention to his anti-"occult" (D&D and other roleplaying games, in this case) comics, which I figured that he only had one or two of at max (if he was going on some large, grand campaign against them, that's news to me). I know there are people out there with that mindset, but I have a hard time seeing anybody who doesn't already share that same mindset to begin with actually taking such a suggestion seriously.

I wasn't aware that this whole anti-D&D thing was really some sort of big, serious issue. I assumed it was some sort of small ordeal by over-concerned parents that always inevitably happens when some new thing the youngsters are into crops up (just look at the history of comic books or pinball machines). If that's what everybody's mad at him for, I suppose I can understand it a bit better now.

Thanks for the rational, calm analysis of it, which is...more than I can say for a lot of people here so far.

Tracts, actually. Tracts that were being distributed. This is mass propaganda. Hilariously lame, but still that's not the same mindset as an editorial in the local church gazette.


No. Racists cannot be racists without being massive assholes. Your point ? "It's just, like, my opinion, mate ?"

Distributed to who, though? People who bought them, which would presumably be churches who are fairly fundamentalist anyways? It's not like there were posters being thrown up in the streets or something.
They can so long as they're not treating others in a lesser manner. I'd be fine with you believing yourself to be superior to me because you're in Switzerland so long as you wouldn't try to get the better of me in a trade because of this belief.

Of course, the majority can't really separate their beliefs from their actions, but my point is that trying to decry him as wrong for what he thought isn't really much better than him decrying D&D players because they're "occultists" or whatever. Then it really does get down to a matter of "My opinion is better than yours!"

The only argument I can see being reasonably made against this guy is the point that OneFiercePuppy made with the whole D&D debacle.

Oh, my sweet summer child. :/

They were distributed in the schools I attended. They were in grocery stores and churches; they were out in front of the town hall and they were at the bowling alley. They were read by parents who - seemingly forgetting that their parents wrung their hands over the devil music of Elvis and the Beatles and railed against comics and television - feared this unknown danger, and then sent to administrators to nip the problem in the bud. They were published in the millions (wikpedia says 800 million published) and brandished like miniature bibles.

Wait...I'm sorry, WHAT? O_o
Are...are you serious? Like, you're not saying this in a mocking/parody way?

Well, criminy. Seems I'm terribly underinformed about this guy. I had no idea he was that influential. America really was this ultra-conservative at one point in time?
I mean, I consider myself a conservative, mind you, but that's to the point of downright propaganda.

Keep in mind that there has been a huge, really almost unimaginably huge, swing in favor of tolerating diversity. When the Chick tracts started being published, we were in a cold war. People still had Joe McCarthy on their lips; you've heard of the Red Scare, surely, but maybe not the Lavender one - where Americans who were different from how Americans were supposed to be were communist threats. We were all getting better, and the Reagan administration really did seem to help a bit, but different was still unequivocally bad. And the people who were the young movers and shakers were molded in the fires of the early days of terror of nuclear devastation, and annealed by the heat of the civil rights movement. If that sounds melodramatic, just understand that I mean that people's headspaces were wildly different than they are today. You know how scary the anti-immigrant, imperialist warmongering of the rightmost right seems today? That was hard center in the 70s. It was the farthest left suggesting such terrifying things as, "maybe we shouldn't just beat the hell out of someone and call them a faggot just because they don't want to make out with the same people we want to?"

So, yeah. Different was bad; it needed to be fixed. Nobody really worried about where you were while you tried to fix this bad different thing.

[url= Chick was really just a symptom, but, you know. People don't go to the doctor because their white blood cell count crosses some arbitrary threshold. They go because there's a symptom that needs fixed. And knowing full well the role he played, Chick took up the banner of that cause. It might not be right to gloat about someone's death. But it's a disservice to the people who've been making the world better for everyone to gloss over all the shitty things that people do in favor of some nebulous notion that everyone should be free to do what they want. I suspect that, ceteris paribus, you take a time machine and grab up Jack and bring him into present day Canada, and he goes right to jail for hate speech. The USA is the only major European-styled culture in the world today, I think, that allows people to just be raging thundercunts and cower behind the excuse of, "well, they haven't made it illegal to say that yet". I'm all about people toughening the fuck up and the whole "An it harm none, do what ye will" thing, but there may be limits to what we should allow in public speech, for the good of all the people who are different.][/url]

You know now. OneFiercePuppy only forgot to specify : worldwide. Translated in 100 languages (you can even find some yanomami ones on its website). I've seen some in Switzerland. Apparently Canada has forbidden them, as hate speech propaganda.

I'm sorry, but popular opinions about D&D worry me a bit less than popular opinions on whole religious identities, sexual orientations, etc. And you should realise that :

1) It's not "an opinion". A toxic, wrong, paranoid belief about a whole arbitrary human category is different from knowledge on the real beliefs, practices and diversities of said category. We're not talking favorite songs, here.

2) Such beliefs impact attitudes and decisions, and further beliefs, in many aspects of life, from empathy and respect, to employment, to geopolitics and other social policies, supported candidates, etc (even perception itself, at a merely cognitive level, gets biased). If you believe that muslims are hellspawns, your attitude towards migration and international protection will be influenced by it, with very real effects on very real people. If you believe that homosexuals belong to hell, the legislation will follow. Our whole society is shaped by our beliefs, knowledges, ignorances. That is why anti-intellectual propaganda is actually nocive. That is why morons aren't harmless. They take decisions, in everyday life, in their work, in their votes, determined by their perceptions of reality. And if they decide that you are a monster on the basis of your identity, you're screwed.

It would be even irrational, from them (and from anyone) to not take their understanding of the world in account at every corner of their lives.

When I worked nights at a grocery store I often heard the janitor complaining that someone used his comics and other propaganda that religious nutballs would leave in the bathroom as toilet paper, which clogged the toilet.

I remember after 9/11 Chick made one about a muslim being beaten to near death until some Jesus humper comes along and tells him Allah is a phony and he'll go to heaven if he comes to Christ who will forgive him for 9/11, or some shit along those lines. This caused a huge stir and a lot of places in my area at the time banned them outright after that. He was also a contributing factor to nerds having a hard time growing up, though that movie with Tom Hanks based around Chick propaganda is pretty hilarious nowadays. I bet he keeps that one off his resume.

People are rightfully annoyed and pissed off with this guy: He was a cancer.