Dilbert on Our Daily Bread: Not What I was Expecting
Scott Adams is one of my favorite authors. I love the Dilbert comic strip, and had owned all of the collections at one time. I also owned all of his hardcover books: The Dilbert Principle, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook, The Dilbert Future, and The Joy of Work. Since money has become more tight, I haven’t made any purchases of either comic collections or Dilbert-themed nonfiction.
Our Daily Bread, for the May 11 edition, quotes Adams from The Dilbert Principle:
When it comes to avoiding work, it is fair to say I studied with the masters. After nine years . . . I learned just about everything there is to know about looking busy without actually being busy.
They used this to point out that Christians are called to a higher standard on the job. According to Ephesians 6:5-8:
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.
We don’t work for our boss. We ultimately work for God. Therefore, our attitude at work should reflect that. This was challenging to me, because my attitude at work seldom reflects that I’m cheerfully working for God rather than for man.
I caught this in someone’s RSS feed, so all I saw was the title (Our Daily Bread: “Dilbert”) and the first few words, which summarize who Scott Adams is. This isn’t the direction that I figured the post would go in. Scott Adams also dabbled in philosophy in his writings. Though he identifies as an atheist, that’s only because there isn’t a label for what he actually believes.
Laid out in the book God’s Debris (which is available for free), it is a very interesting mix of atheism and deism. I recommend it highly.
I figured that it was this fascinating concept that the Daily Bread article would focus on. Boy was I wrong. Maybe one day, I can examine God’s Debris in more detail. And, maybe I can also pick up its sequel, The Religion War.
Share this:
Posted on May 11, 2010, in Heresy, Theology. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
Josiah Concept Ministries 
Hey, doesn’t that passage from Ephesians bother you at least a little? Come on, he’s encouraging slavery. I guess the blacks in my country, Haiti, were wrong to start a revolution 200 years ago. And the same guy speaks against homosexuals, but there he is taken seriously (they will do the same thing in a couple hundred years, they will say “that part of the bible wasn’t to be interpreted literally, it applied to his time”).
Remember that in biblical times, slavery was closer to the employer/employee relationship of today. You’re thinking of the modern incarnation of slavery, where innocents were taken forcibly from their villages and forced to work on plantations under threat of death, which is not condoned by the Bible.
I’ve written about that here, and I’m doing an update of that site here.
So, no, it doesn’t bother me that the passage refers to slavery. The slavery in the Bible is different than modern slavery.