Amen indeed.
Category: [Religion & esoterica]
Physician, heal thyself
Fascinating viewing from the Holy Koolaid channel. I don’t think I’d heard of Jack Coe until now, and certainly didn’t know anything about him and his somewhat short life story, and, well, I’m sure I’ve said before that I don’t like celebrating people’s deaths, but Coe deserved something bad to happen to him. And what happened was not only bad, it had multiple elements of irony to it; it was the sort of death that, if I were inclined to believe in that sort of thing, I’d have considered it a sign that God was kind of pissed at me for the sort of life I’d lived. And frankly, I’m ten years older than he was when he died, and with all my issues I look a lot better at 48 than he did in his mid/late 30s…
Terror Thomas
The downside (OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh; Amy’s pretty great really) of having a friend who’s very left-wing but otherwise a good Catholic is that, when she bites back at some idiot on Twitter, I am thereby exposed to that idiot when I otherwise might not have been. There’s so many idiots I already can’t avoid cos everyone talks about them (hi Elon), but my friends all have their own specialty idiots on top of those. And oy but this one was a particular goon…
I don’t know much or indeed anything about Thomas Merton other than him being a prominent Catholic of decades past, and as an avowed non-Catholic (or indeed religionist of any sort) I consider his “heresy” meaningless. That said, I understand where Michelle’s coming from; after all, any time I see a major religious figure realising that people are good, even the ones from other religions, and that social justice is actually a better thing than social injustice, the first thing I want to do is puke vehemently over their grave. Common fucking decency towards other people, even the ones who aren’t like you, what an appalling thing…
Yes, Jordan, I suppose it is
So Jordan B. Peterson has been having a somewhat baffling argument with the Pope of all people on Twitter about the true nature of Christianity, which is… something. The whole thing began with this tweet from old Frank:
Jurr Durr, of course, is so allergic to the very concept of social justice that he sharply corrected the Pope on that point:
…and if you want to see some of the responses to that, George Takei has a bunch.
Of course, if you’ve read 12 Rules for Blah-de-Fucking-Blah at all, then you’ll know that compassion is very far from being Jordan’s strong suit, and I think that’s true on a broad societal level as well as the personal level. If nothing else, Frank’s tweet expresses a noble sentiment (how well the Church has lived up to it is a matter for another time, perhaps); the fact that Jordibles finds the idea so unacceptable says much about him.
The weird thing is that he’s refusing to let the matter go, too; he’s had a few posts up now taking digs at Frank, including with this poll:
Even the poor should set their houses in perfect order first, I suppose. The poll, incidentally, led to the somewhat bizarre pair of tweets I began with; Jordan helpfully clarified that the “goats” thing was a reference to something about sheep and goats in Matthew chapter 25, which I suppose demonstrates that he remembers more about Matthew than me (the percentage of goats grew to 31 in the end, evidently). But I just found those two tweets so silly on the face of it that I couldn’t resist taking them out of context (and goats are a change from lobsters)…
Oh, and the Pope hasn’t replied to any of Jordan’s nonsense. I mean, he never replies to anyone on Twitter, but him not replying to Jordan is somehow funnier than usual. At what point do you suppose he’ll finally realise Frank’s not playing and the whole argument has been completely one-sided?
Panic in the schools of Colorado
We’ve been in the “last moments” for nearly 2000 years now, I’m not sure how much difference this’ll make. After School Satan Club is a project by The Satanic Temple, who I’m not a big fan of though I do enjoy certain of their stunts including this, which people like whoever wrote the above are freaking out about for some reason. Personally I can’t help but feel that if God can be defeated by the handful of edgy schoolkids that are likely to take advantage of this thing, he probably deserves to be…
Words have consequences
One of the funniest stories I’ve seen lately is this one:
“Jesus” here is apparently claiming he’s done no such thing, and I get the impression that the whole “crucifixion” thing was actually meant as a joke, and no one really seems to be taking him seriously, treating him as lunatic or liar rather than Lord. Still, it must be said, if you’re going to go around telling people you’re Jesus, getting crucified and coming back from the dead would certainly be the best way of proving it. Much more so than the miracle of turning water into tea, which is something that technically even I can do on a daily basis…
Jesus: the most dangerous game
I know Americans can be weird about both religion and guns, but this one really perplexes me with what it may or may not be trying to say. Why would Christians be shooting at Jesus? Are you expected to shoot and kill your own deer for lunch? Are the pumpkins Jesus-shaped or deer-shaped, and why are they being shot at? Who even made this? Near as I can find, “FBC MV” is these people, but I don’t see a men’s ministry as such on their site. That said, I also see that not all their ministries run the whole year round, so maybe the men’s ministry does the same thing… just waiting for that time of the year just after Halloween when the Christs are ripe and plump and make for the best sport, unlike other months when they’re kind of stringy and past their peak…
Kent Hovind got whacked
Kent Hovind is one of the worst people I’ve ever heard of, and one of a limited number of people I’d describe as actually evil. I don’t use that word casually, either, but I do think this article adequately describes why I make an exception for him. He’s a dreadful human being in a way that I don’t think even his counterparts Ken Ham and Ray Comfort are. All of them are grifters and all of them are wrong about young Earth creationism, obviously, and the anti-science message all of them push is harmful, and so are a bunch of other things they say and do, but to the best of my knowledge neither Ham nor Comfort quite qualify for the “evil” tag in the way Hovind does.
I discovered Kunt Koresh (I think that was an Aron Ra-ism) in the course of exploring atheism on Youtube, don’t quite remember how; this would’ve been about 2016, I suppose, just after he got out of jail where he’d been for several years and was starting to make his grotesque presence known again. The instance of the child drowning on his property was the first really major new thing I heard against him (and his insistence that the child’s family were, you know, OK with the boy meeting an untimely death at his unsafe theme park has always angered me; what must have he have done to those poor people to convince them not to sue the living shit out of him?); the evident pedophile Hovind is accused of sheltering is another more recent story, and as for why he might be doing that… well, that’s something we can only speculate about. But he does have some track record of associating with abominable people, e.g. Jim Bob Duggar, who notably covered up his own son’s misbehaviour on that front…
Telephone to glory?
Something a bit curious I found on Tumblr, via Cory Doctorow. When I first looked at it I misunderstood it as some sort of telemarketing for Jesus type of deal (and wondered how many of the 70,000 individuals on the back cover were happy to have their day interrupted by Harold trying to palm God off onto them in the middle of dinner), but then I realised it was actually one of those things people call into… and how did they get people to do that? Well, as I found by a little extra research, by being ever so slightly deceptive…
More than a year ago a Seventh-day Adventist layman visited me in my office in Atlanta to interest me in purchasing a Code-a-phone. Now a Code-a-phone is a telephone answering machine capable of giving as much as a three-minute message and also capable of receiving and recording a message from one who calls. This layman suggested that it might be possible to give Bible studies over the telephone. […] Arrangements were made, the telephone line was installed, the machine was delivered to the office, and I recorded the first message. […] We called a newspaper and put the ad in the personal column of its classified section: “DO YOU NEED ADVICE? DIAL 288-1666.”
https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1967/11/the-magic-of-telephone-evangelism
I suppose telling people upfront that “this ad has been placed by a cranky 19th-century semi-cult” might’ve put people off, and this vague enough to be meaningless thing might at least have attracted some people’s curiosity. Which, according to Harold in the above article, it did:
Of the 650 people who called the first week of operation more than 100 gave their name and mailing address. In just a few weeks our line was so busy all day long that we installed a second telephone and a second answering machine. In another few weeks the two machines were so busy we needed a third, then a fourth. Our four Code-a-phones are now giving our two-and-a-half-minute message twenty-four hours every day and are receiving names and addresses by the hundreds […]
In about eight months 80,000 have called and listened to our daily program in the city of Atlanta. Of that number 11,500 have given their name and mailing address to receive our free Bible course. You can readily see that this is a way by which the masses can be reached on an individual basis.
Which, however, is an awful lot more people not doing that, and I do wonder just how unhappy some people would’ve been having called this mysterious phone number only to find Adventism at the other end. At least Harold acknowledges that sort of thing did happen, but that doesn’t make it any better; I presume, too, that they still made money off the 70,000-odd they didn’t succeed in selling their thing to, cos I daresay that phone call wasn’t free… I feel weirdly sure the money the Adventists would’ve made from this thing mattered more than the 11,500 people they got addresses from (wonder how many of the latter actually persisted with them afterwards)…
2 Passion 2 Christ
Apparently the Passion of the Christ sequel we were threatened with a few years ago is finally about to happen… I recall it was supposed to come out in 2021 but I presume a certain worldwide pandemic got in the way until now, assuming of course that it is in fact happening (I don’t know if it’s actually confirmed or not). Either way, the news has inspired a string of possible titles for the film as you can see in the article I linked (I quoted my own favourite in the post title), which further inspired this:
I rewatched the original Passion a few years ago, having not watched it since the day of its release in 2004, and where I didn’t like it on that first viewing, I hated it on that rewatch. It’s pornography by and for an anti-Semitic ghoul, and seeing Jason’s post above moaning about the mockery really let me know where he is as a fucking idiot. Mel Gibson knew exactly what he did, and I’m disinclined to forgive him for it.
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