Case Study 3! Roy Wong

The media that I chose for this case study is another religious comic that I found on the Internet. The site I found it at is http://www.pontius.com/worship.html, titled “Cartoons with Christian Themes”. The first time that I looked at this comic, I found that the message that it was trying to send was serious and true, yet funny. Also, the author managed to create an opposing question to a question that is frequently asked by a lot of people. Which is essentially a reflection of our world for us to look at, and these are the reasons why I’ve decided to use this piece for my case study.

This website provides varies numbers of these religious comic, and the main character of them is a little weird looking person named Pontius. This chosen piece starts off with Pontius sitting on a rock asking his friend why God allows poverty, famine, and injustice when he can do something about it. Then his friend on the side curiously asks Pontius, “what stopping you”? Then with a surprised look on Pontius face he answered, “I’m afraid God might ask me the same question”.

In this well written and drawn comic, a popular question among human beings was being asked by Pontius, why does God let tragedies happen when he can do something about it? We’ll take some of the events of the new millennium for example, like the 9/11 incident. Many have probably asked why would God allowed this tragedy, and took away live of thousands. As well as letting family members of the casualties suffer mental breakdowns. This is absolutely a good question to go against most the religions in the world, however, the author of this comic made a very good point in this comic by showing the reason why Pontius didn’t ask God this question after all. The point is that why won’t we humans ask ourselves that question before blaming it on God?

Basically this comic is telling us that we humans are the root of all tragedies. We totally have the ability to prevent all these from happening, but in the end we chose not to. As a result, tragedies happen and people start to blame the higher power for all these without thinking whether or not the problem came from them. As a person gets older, his/her mind would be more and more corrupted by this material world, and would result in selfishness and all of other sinful actions. In another word, humans always think for themselves before thinking for others. When it comes to mistakes their mind would almost try its best to blame others before taking their own selves into consideration. This totally shows selfishness and the corrupted minds of all people as they grow up. Also people’s mind becomes cold and non-loving, that is why you would rarely see adults cry or apologize for their mistakes toward their children and others.

As we put ourselves into God’s position, we can feel the frustration that God has to deal with all the time. With the example above, it is equivalent to the feeling of someone blaming you for a mistake that he/she made themselves. Imagine if you put yourself into this position, how frustrated would you feel, and how angry you would be having the person not realizing that he/she was wrong. However, our almighty God is humble; he never gave up on us even after all we have done, and that’s what touched me the most.