Where is the humor within our religions? Reworked for adults

To my fellow adult humans

I don’t want to bash or have anybody else bash a persons religious beliefs.I changed the wording to reflect within and not about a specific religion. I refere to christian theology only because it seems to be the most prevalent here. but the questions below apply to all earthly religions.
Where is the humor within your religion? Is humor the only trait that separates us humans from the other species here on Earth? Do amimals laugh? Is laughter found in the bible somewhere or any spiritual scripture? Can one be happy and never laugh? By Christian theology is laughter a sin. Is laughter/ humor a part of joy? Will there be laughter in your heaven/ afterlife? Is intelligence a requirement to have humor or is it the other way around? Why do we laugh? What are the causes of laughter and are they sinful? Do the deities you worship laugh? Is your heaven really heaven without laughter? Was laughter a gift from you god or his nemesis? And where does the term Fun come in to play, in the afterlife that most religious peoples spend their entire life trying to gain access to? Is your definition of fun outlawed in the afterlife? Please share you thoughts and the humor you found within your belief system.
Thanks
John
Thanks Jay for the passage quote. Borderline humor/sarcasim maybe. Can you provide any more text that can cause a belly laugh if not why not?
I hope this wasn’t a mistake.

From my point of view, having a religion where you’re allowed to be happy all the time would just end up being self defeating. People would learn to enjoy their lives and would have no real need for a church. They could just take the structure that brings them that joy and go on about their lives. A theme of constant guilt or original sin or a life of imperfection is much better in retaining membership. You convince everyone that they have some sort of disease that can only have a chance of being cured by way of walking through the doors of your institution. And as it is with any disease people will gladly surrender their time and money in exchange for the cure. Fortunately for the institution the cure cannot be obtained. Ever. So people keep coming back.

This is not to say that religious people cannot laugh or enjoy their religious lives, but the overall structure must be serious and dire in tone otherwise there would be no point. It would just be a community of people, you don’t need religion to achieve that. Just football, beer and dead animals on an open fire.

Well, sure.
I can produce more.

Here’s one from Numbers:
We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. Num: 11:5
This is quite obviously a joke.
Specifically, a hyperbole mixed with sarcasm.
A slave in Egypt wouldn’t be served a rich man’s meal like that. It’s a joke in hyperbolic form pointing out that what they never even had in Egypt was better than what they had now (the manna from their god).
(Keeping in mind that whether we accept that Hebrew’s were ever slaves in Egypt or not, the text is written as if such were true.)

A good chuckle is in Luke 11:
And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’
Get that image in your head fully.
There is a guy in his abode, with his family and animals (which lived indoors at night in the lower part of the dwelling, if available) having a hollering conversation through the door of his abode with his friend that is constantly rapping away at his door.
Hebrew peoples would have found that to be funny back then in similar fashion to a Charlie Chaplin film style of slapstick.

Acts 12 has an entertaining Greek theater moment that I’ve always thought entertaining, but would have been much more funny back during it’s time.
13 Peter knocked at the outer entrance, and a servant named Rhoda came to answer the door. 14 When she recognized Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed she ran back without opening it and exclaimed, “Peter is at the door!”
15 “You’re out of your mind,” they told her. When she kept insisting that it was so, they said, “It must be his angel.”
16 But Peter kept on knocking, and when they opened the door and saw him, they were astonished.

I’m sorry, but get that image in your head.
It’s quite akin to the nanny in Romeo and Juliet.

Here you have Peter standing outside and the servant, which is fully allowed to open doors, just leaves the door shut after yelling out in joy and runs back to everyone else.
Then everyone else argues for a while, still leaving Peter outside, until they FINALLY decide - hey…let’s open the door and see!

That’s good humor in the Greek theater style of literature.

Hell, we’ve seen this same move countless times over in comedies in a number of revamps.

Kings 1 has an interesting one that only pops up when you go to the Hebrew.
Essentially, there is a wording going on that is quite funny…
In the Hebrew you get:
It came noon; to mock, Elijah spoke, “Call out in a voice loudly for your god, he is either thinking deeply, withdrew to a private place, or is away somewhere. Maybe he’s sleeping and will awake.”

The funny part about this is that the word שִׂיג is a word that was euphemistically used for the suggestion of going to the bathroom “to withdraw (most commonly privately)”.

So, think about that for a moment.
That’s a pretty good taunt.
Hey call louder, maybe he’s thinking too hard, going to the bathroom, or gone…Maybe he’s sleeping because your god needs sleep unlike mine; yell a bit louder why don’t you.

Basically most primary functions of being human were just listed as reasons their god may not be answering.
You have to think, you have to relieve yourself, you have to travel, and you have to sleep.
The only thing he could have added to that list would have been eating, but then again, they were bringing their god food to entice him to show himself so that would be an odd mention, but makes perfect sense why this list was thrown out there.
If your god needs to eat, well, I’ll assume they are like men then…maybe he’s pissing?

There’s lots of little nuggets all through the Bible like this, but you really have to spend a considerable time paying attention to the context to see them in there…and by that point, it may no longer be funny. :wink:

Emmm… telling only the punchline to a joke is emm… well… kind of missing the punch. :-s

Hey, I gave the text line numbers. Folks can read the rest. =P

:sunglasses:

The problem I have with such things is that I read them very differently than most.
The meaning that I get isn’t humorous in nature, but more wisdom oriented, “moral to the story” stuff.
Boring to the playful heart.
O well.

Both exist at once in such texts by intention.

I’m with No-Body, one could not live in fear of one’s God if one is laughing at him/her/it.