No specific issue this time, this week’s strip breaks from previous weeks by allowing Fetch to be more active with the world around us. Still snarky, but much more engaged. In this case, a street preacher seemed like a good foil. After all, how would a demon respond to one of the many you can encounter in downtown Portland, OR, or any other city in the United States?
With scripture, of course. The old saying that “even the devil can quote scripture” — or, to be more precise, the passage from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice:
“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”
— applies here. Yet in practice I often wonder who in the exchange is playing the Devil’s role, who is the False Prophet, and who is the True Warrior, Prophet, Savior, etc. Your average street preacher is probably quite sincere, and comes by his faith honestly; but most of us would probably say he is fooling himself, and is spreading falsehood in spite of himself — if not hate, violence and other horrible things. Quite a few of these guys are pretty homophobic, say all sorts of nasty things to people who are just trying to live their lives.
Things get more complicated when you extend the metaphor to our political theater. But that’s a thought for another time. Meanwhile, I should probably cite these scriptural passages. Er, that, too, is for another time.
Discussion ¬