I had a debate with Oskari Kuusela about this. He thought the cartoon showed how stupid religion is. I had the opposite reaction, and thought it showed how deep it is, or can be. I think my reply to Oskari failed to make something important explicit—something that seemed obvious to me when I first replied, but I think is not obvious. Here is what I want to say:
The debate about how we see, even when we recognize we are looking at the same thing, is not a silly debate. Take humans for example. A human being can be seen in different ways. They can be seen as the crown of creation, or as hell (Sartre: "Hell is other people"), or as each a world unto themselves. There are also reductive, demeaning, ways of seeing humans—as food, as mere man-power, as ‘bags of mostly water.’ (This way of looking is reminiscent of Hume’s claim in “On Suicide”: “It would be no crime in me to divert the Nile or Danube from its course, were I able to effect such purposes. Where is then the crime of turning a few ounces of blood from their natural channel?”) But the point is that it is possible to look this way too, to see in this way too. And so the debate about what and how to see can be immensely important.
Religion--at least in the best meaning of the term--takes that debate seriously. Oskari’s reaction seems to me to downplay the importance of this debate, almost flattening it. I still stand behind the rest of what I wrote.