I didn’t forget my blog…
.. I moved!
Now I’m in Manassas, VA, tracking down a job and making it rain on the hoes like I left the sprinklers on all weekend.
I’ll be back soon with the next-level.
Don’t even worry about it.
My blog commentary is liable to blow you.
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WTF?, pt. 8
We’re sensitive to the meaning of icons – irony and the icon are forever in conflict. Desecrating flags, taking silly pictures with park statues, stealing street signs, faking logos, blessing Bibles, playing with incense, wasting luxuries: all alterations on the essential use (or uselessness) of an icon. All remove precious gravity from a thing unseen, be it democracy or history or God, diminishing something that, in the dialectical corpus of a culture, Really Shouldn’t Be Fucked With.
Having gotten past the obligatorily pedantic opening paragraph, we can take it for granted that democratic values have both increased the risk of offended sensitivity to and about icons and provided recourse for their defenders in this next installment of WTF?
Today, Hinduism is distinguished as the oldest and 3rd largest religious system practiced, sort of the preternatural “superstitious pantheism” that we in the West used to take pride in knowing nothing about. Variously considered by us Enlightened folks as either a benighted jungle of oppressive metaphysics of which humanity is still struggling to clear itself, or by neophyte admirers as or a personal door to the center of the soul and the True Religion at the center of our psychology, etc, etc. – the point is about to be that when the ontological object to which a religion is striving is trivialized by a disinterested party, awkwardness ensues.
Religions do well having enemies, but no believer knows what to do when their Everything suddenly seems less relevant to everyone.
Take the case of one Hanuman, the holy man-ape spawn of a God’s kite’s fortuitously-dropped pudding into the hands of a cursed angel-virgin.
Today, his worshippers are up in arms internationally about Sony’s publication of a video game epic that allows players to control Hanuman and forward him through a plot from boyhood to divinity. The game is the first ever developed entirely in India – and to some devout Hindus, it’s the cause of a great controversy.
They find the concept of the video game sacriligious -”very disrespectful, disgraceful and an insult to all those devotees of Lord Hanuman and followers of Hindu dharma,” in the words of protester Vamsi Krishna, whose name alone should be strange enough to us to cost her any sympathy we might have had for her cause.
What Hanuman exactly represents to Hindus is almost incomprehensible to lazy Western observers – he’s not exactly their Jesus or their Odysseus or Beowulf or Abraham, so far as I can tell, so who cares? – but the fact is, portraying him as a playable character in a video game is WTF? worthy is beyond dispute.
There’s no overarching narrative to Hinduism, no canon of things true or relevant to which every Hindu has to take stock in. Everything crucial about the cycle of birth and death, in a sense, ‘revealed’ to everyone through dreams, prayers, meditation, gurus, signs, and self-annihilating philosophies.
This blog doesn’t much concern itself with the propriety of Sony’s game or even the petition of the concerned Hindus to halt the sale of the game. What I’m thinking about here is the generally respected concept of Scripture being an inviolable myth. Hindus are as likely to kill over this as any believers, keep in mind.
Modern secularity doesn’t find it expedient conceive of myth the same way as the Hindus or the Judeo-Christians, blind as it may be to the functional mythos it itself generates. Anything that can stand re-contextualization, irony, is factual, redoubtable, trustworthy enough – everything else is demonstrably stupid or at least fatuous and irrelevant. So we proceed, and ‘progress’ is going to make these Hindus’ protest fall by the wayside indefinitely, of that there should be no doubt.
Having one’s beliefs interpreted and fed back to you can be a very disconcerting experience. Think Buddy Jesus – nobody wants to believe that THAT is what they believe, but at the same time, we’re not quite sure how to do much more than wince and try to look away. Critics of religion, even RELIGIOUS critics of religion, are regarded with deep suspicion when they employ this kind of rhetoric – ‘they can’t really mean their faith if they’re talking like that’, we darkly determine amongst ourselves. And ‘meaning’ is what’s important about icons.
Then again, Left Behind: Eternal Forces did pretty well with us in the US.
As a result, I leave this question up to you: is Jesus himself no longer sacred in American Christianity?
And if not, WTF?
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Tags: Hanuman, hinduism, international, musings, mythology, pantheism, perspectives on religion, video games, WTF?
Religion Being Made Up, 4th ed.
Today, for a twist, we have an ancient case of Religion Being Made Up.
Just so you don’t think propositional “spiritual” nonsense was invented sometime in modernity, here’s a bit from the Gospel of Truth, a post-Jesus Gnostic spinoff work from about 180AD (emphasis added for effect):
“He became a fruit of the knowledge of the Father. It did not, however, cause destruction because it was eaten, but to those who ate it it gave cause to become glad in the discovery, and he discovered them in himself, and they discovered him in themselves, the Father, the perfect one, the one who made the totality, within him is the totality and of him the totality has need. The Father was not jealous. What jealousy indeed (could there be) between himself and his members? It is he who fashioned the totality, and within him is the totality and the totality was in need of him.”
You thought this kind of nonsense only existed on neo-Pagan blogs, Xanga journals and seminaries?
No. You wish. But the resemblance should, I hope, be instructive.
After all, this particular example of much-ado-about-nothing philosophastering is almost 2000 years old. What does that tell us?
There have ALWAYS been flakes. There have always been people who, having tasted our most profound philosophical sophistications, reflexively prefer to it a mouthful of warm bullshit. This should be news to no-one – it’s happened in every major religion. Metaphysical sophistry is almost a proto-religion in that it spontaneously invents itself in almost exactly the same way all over humanity.
The flake is someone who systematically substitutes her own categories of reality so as to evade the critique of peers and deny the primacy of their criteria, claiming to be one of them but effectively removing herself from their jurisdiction of accountability. She accomplishes this by taking some aspect of a shared belief and contorting it to the breaking point, and then trying to reinterpret the whole by way of creative rationalization. This is a sociological subplot in pretty much every religion, and it usually involves the same dramatic boondoggling of established beliefs with esoteric (possibly subscription-based and revenue-generating) generalizations about the world, the future, the spirits, or the All.
What’s awesome is, Jesus was apparently impressive enough that, within a generation, flaky people went ahead and started producing THIS kind of nonsense because they wanted to claim him but didn’t want to be owned by him. People have been counterfeiting Jesus to support their own soft-headed moral equivalences since the very beginning.
Same as now.
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Tags: flakes, gnosticism, history, jesus, paganism, Religion being made up, society, syncretism
One good streaming-documentary service evidently deserves another!
I have no idea how I’ll survive this. Whereas the last site had more obscure and curious documentaries, this one has more of the popular ones we’ve all heard of.
They even have Jesus Camp!
Um, check out their tag cloud:
snuff pornography oklahoma city bombing mass media wildfire australia Johnson & Johnson hotel new world snakes sydney propaganda fundamentalism tsunami Chernobyl meltdown north korea earthquake genetics lsd cancer dwarfism social rich kids sweat shops train crash tornado shell nike memory naomi klein science milton friedman michael moore noam chomsky globalization building collapse richard dawkins faith extremism politics religion corporations plane crash aviation disaster
Snuff films, disaster documentaries, cancer, and Chomsky. ROCK?!
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I like documentaries a lot. I’ll watch Blue Planet anytime it’s on – even if there’s something I’d much rather be doing. For people like me, the following will almost certainly prove to be a complete disaster.
SnagFilms Beta is a streaming-documentary service making hundreds of documentaries on a variety of subjects available for nothing. Why? Because there is a God, and He wants you to watch a documentary about Him.
In their own words:
“SnagFilms is committed to finding the world‘s most compelling documentaries, whether from established heavyweights or first-time filmmakers, and making them available to the wide audience these titles deserve.
SnagFilms.com is a website where you can watch full-length documentary films for free, but we’re also a platform that lets you “snag” a film and put it anywhere on the web. With a library of over 550 films, and rapidly growing, you’re bound to find films that resonate with your interests. We make it easy for you to find a film that shines a light on a cause you care about.”
So thanks for that, SnagFilms. Now we all have access to films about Jewish boxers, 6-year-old Tibetan monastic warriors, and um.. dogs, dogs, dogs, dogs.
Like I wasn’t wasting enough of my life on the Internet already.
As a Web2.0 app, I don’t really see much of a need to have a random streaming documentary widget on your blog, but then again, WordPress.com doesn’t allow us to use JavaScript to begin with. Who knows? Maybe there are teeming millions of potential e-bros out there who are holding out on the ol’ BOE+A because I don’t have any way to stream them non-fiction movies.
That’d be kinda wack.
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Tags: awesome, documentaries, etc, film, free stuff, scholarship, the internet
WTF? pt. 7
By way of the otherwise-noisome Universal Heretic:
Jeshua Cottontail, the Animal Christ.
Indeed.
In the words of POYCPAC’s Jen Lyon, creator and responsibiliatrix for this juicy mess:
“As Easter descends upon us and we bite into our hollow rabbits made of milk chocolate, we should reflect upon what some people call, “The reason for the season” and I call “Your pet’s only chance for salvation.” That desperate look in their eyes is not a hunger for affection. That’s a naked plea for you to save them from the flaming pits of eternal hellfire. Snuggle up and enjoy!!”
Remember, that’s POYKPAC, the people that brought you live coverage of The Ultimate Praying Championship in Jerusalem:
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Tags: easter, easter bunny, post-christianity, stupid, WTF?
The Lenten siege is over!
And thus ends my uneasy truce with heathen living: Christ triumphant has come over the ramparts, risen from the grave and shaken off death and all our sins. What ho! After a long abstemious season, here comes the generous Conqueror, bringing candy and rabbits and Springtime for His loyalist insurgents – so get a cake! Change your shirt! Let us always on this day inaugurate the Christus Victor with a tame afternoon party in His honour!
Today is the biggest holiday of the Christian calendar – if you believe in that kind of thing. If not, you’re “celebrating” Easter the same way you’ll be “rejoicing” in the evangelical miracle of Pentecost: by being all grumpy.
The holidays aren’t a safe time to be a “doubter”. Most everybody’s a little duplicitous about their religion, but around the holidays, the very same idiots and assholes you feel fine distancing yourself from in Ordinary Time are all over you with clammy handshakes and good tidings. And as a doubter, it’s easy to imagine a cruelty being done to you in that moment: that it’s a Day of Obligation and a ‘holiday’ and they’re talking to you but they still don’t like you. What’s the point of being fake?
I sympathize with you.
Let me suggest something else though: those idiots and assholes are trying to be happy because to be happy on Easter is to begin to understand what Easter is. The Resurrection of God, if not a myth, is something monumental, impossible to fully grasp. Catching the holiday spirit is less obscure, but not an unimportant first step to the sharing the wonderment of the empty tomb of a lost loved one, the white-robed stranger’s promise that God wants to meet them in Galilee.
The Easter season is more than a reminder that God wants us to meet Him. The liturgical calendar cuts our lives into God’s time in a curious way: it occasions us to admit that we’re going through our days without giving a crap about His absentee wishes or His loving cliches or our awkward history together. How can we avoid Him without seeming like we’re avoiding Him? Only the holidays can convey us to the source of those wretched impulses. And reluctantly, to what we acknowledge as their Solution.
Getting to meet God means having to encounter a lot of other people we’d rather not meet. And coping with our acid, miserable nature; its a process.
We fake enthusiasm and apologies in real life. At Christmas, but moreso at Easter, we’re obligated to sincerely make an effort to take at least a token ‘meaning’ from something that totally doesn’t run to our taste – the maudlin death and implausible return of our man-God, I mean.
What kind of asshole even wants to acknowledge a “god” who takes away the sins of the world? The kind of asshole that, deep down, wishes he wasn’t such an asshole all the time. By letting us bad Christians stew in our own weirdness around the holidays, God’s doing us, believers and unbelievers both, a gentle favor.
We are not really sorry for how we are with you, God, but we want to be. We want to want to be.
At least, we know we ought to want to want to be. And we do, it’s just..
What? Yeah..happy Easter.
You see, a few of us will have gone deeper into His happy life by Pentecost; some will have patched things up with you and Christ and through following Him become practically different people. Most of us will be anxious to get a little filth back on us after having scrubbed ourselves so clean for the holidays – for us, there’s next year.
Dear World,
You’re right: we don’t really like you and we are feeling the pressure of the holiday obligations. Forgive us though.
Very sincerely,
Your Christian neighbors
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Tags: belief, christian angst, christus victor, days of obligation, easter, he is risen, liturgical calendar, musings, post-christianity
BRB: See you after Easter!
I’m out of town; my brother-in-law is joining the Church this Easter! Fresh WTF’s and all that hot business will return after the Triduum. Until then, enjoy this tuxedo’d Jesus as a reminder that, though He is Risen Indeed, we remain a corny and ridiculous cult all the same. Good luck with your Easter celebrations: your disturbing Passion plays, your creepy Scripture oratio, your mindless egg-hunt drama, your liturgical dance extravaganzas. And of course, with family.
Go Christianity!
Peace be upon you, sons of bitches.
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WTF? pt. 6
More amazing Latino-Catholic ambiguity, this time courtesy of Reuters, by way of Religious Freaks:
Ricardo Oyarzun, a fashion designer from notoriously Catholic Chile, has lately debuted a controversial collection of gowns, dresses, and apparently headdresses that strike a vaguely non-sequitur note of familiarity – they look a lot like medieval depictions of the Virgin Mary. A lot a lot.
Oyarzun, for taking the trouble, had been met with the traditional Christian response to having their motifs flouted: “telephone threats and excrement smeared on his doorstep”, per the report.
On the one hand, I think his concept is over-wrought and drearily reminiscent of Univision’s maudlin telenovelas, the heaving breasts of pastoral virgins named Maria notwithstanding – in other words, not a significant departure from the rest of Latin American cultural Christianity. In North America we have our brawny Jesus types, they have their full-figured Mothers of God – that’s just how things get done, right?
Then again, look at her:
I am, however, sold on these photos as a whole being relatively “innocent” in nature: to our detriment, we’ve long connected, waifish, retiring, BLAND women with piety and virtue, when the truth is, there’s really no reason a healthy, alluring sex-panthress might herself not be a paragon of holy chastity – after all, Jesus did command us to be perfect.
Though if she did happen to have a little Whorish in her, well.. Jesus accepted that, too. So much the better for all of us who need that forgiveness.
So while I, sympathizing with the Holy See, find Oyarzun’s models’ sexuality distracting considering the inspiration for their ensembles, I wouldn’t kick them out of the Communion line over it. They’re keeping relatively modest; it’s not their fault these women are completely over-the-top gorgeous.
For the pornographically-minded and the especially devout, I’ve linked to photos of some of the rest of his work: expect the ridiculous. While you’re at it though, Mulde® is a pretty good fashion photographer – check him out, too.
Filed under: WTF?, christianity, religion | 2 Comments
Tags: double-standards, fashion, folk catholicism, madonna/whore, sexuality, south america, virgin mary, WTF?
WTF? pt. 5
My Tiny Jesus: watch a little Jesus report your tweets.
Confess to Him via Twitter.
And, coming soon, the Tiny Jesus blog.
Sacrilege? Just stupid? Someone tell me how to feel.
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Tags: jesus, post-christianity, stupid, suburban jesus, the internet, WTF?
Bizarre things frequently deliver themselves to me in the mail.
Yesterday, the good people at the Church of God – Preparing For The Kingdom of God, who presciently reserved themselves an appropriate domain (www.the-end.com) with which to press their message, sent me a copy of their flagship End Times Raving, 2008: God’s Final Witness. The ChoG-PKG, interestingly enough, claims no affiliation with the other active metonymous denominations, such as the CHoG-Anderson (a Holiness / Evangelist movement) and CHoG-Cleveland, Tennessee (a Pentecostal / Charismatic pre-Mil sect), to say nothing of the CHoG-Prophecy, the CH0G-In Christ, inc., the Restored Church of God, the Global Church of God, the Living Church of God, the Church of God with Signs Following, or say, the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church of God of the Americas.
The book is work of, as “End Time Prophet of the God of Abraham” Robert Weinland warns us repeatedly, Apocalyptic stature; and, as the back jacket photo of him attests – composed, bald headed, stoical, in a black suit, reclined in a tufted-leather chair with a decorative globe at his side – he’s a Serious Fellow. These aren’t the ravings of a lithium-addled homeless proselyte, he’s reassuring us. The cover, al least, hints at being both earnest and reasonable, or at least cognizant of it’s precarious social position going forward – Mr. Weinland wants, from the outset, to guarantee us that his warning comes to us from the calm of the study, not the streets.
So, it’s with no surprise that the Prophet Weinland spends most of the first chapter attempting to convince the reader that, even while tens of thousands of prophets have predicted the End of All Things and gone over the millennia, he alone has the truth, and the truth is really true this time. He even takes pains to disconnect himself from other people predicting that these are the End Times:
“Today, people are making the same kind of claims s others have done for centuries; but this time they just “happen” to be right that this is the end… there has been a marked increase in popularity and interest in end-times predictions and the growing willingness of “religious types” to make more pronouncements. But all of them are wrong in their conclusions, except for one coincidental truth – this is the end-time.”
He goes on to call his competition “obnoxious religious opportunists” and claims that “throughout the centuries, people have been lied to about God”, setting the tone for the rest of a galling epistle of crazy, rare for it’s occasional near misses with self-awareness.
Those of you familiar with The Slacktivist Fred Clark’s breathtaking analysis of the Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ opus-apocalypse-cash machine Left Behind know what’s to come in God’s Final Witness: delicious irony, shameless self-promotion, and disingenuous argumentation by the hectare. Prophet Rob is unafraid to lay it on thick for the sake of the Church Militant – less so for the 250 million slated to die in America alone to satiate the Savior’s bloodlust, according to his estimate. Keep that in mind.
“Do you get tired of lies? Do you recognize how many lies you are constantly being told?”, he asks. “Lying is the outcome of people being right in their own eyes and stubbornly holding to their own viewpoint, regardless of the evidence to the contrary.” Sympathizing with an audience I can’t quite identify, he finds that “religion is the greatest cause of suffering and evil in the world”, and attributes this to sectarianism, finding doctrinal differences to mutually exclude one another’s truth claims.
“Are all these religious groups throughout the world worshipping the same God? NO!”, he points out, before warming up the tautological singularity that’s going to define the rest of the book and his whole claim to prophethood. “Their very beliefs and doctrines represent different teachings about God. All of them cannot be true. If they were all true, they would be in agreement with each other.”
This is a vortex of awful reasoning remarkable for what ancient observations about the nature of the faith it disincludes: to the Prophet Rob, religion of necessity has no humanistic component, is not a reply to culture, and versimilarity is always heterodoxy in disguise – never a pragmatic or convergent evolution of ideas. Any collusion is pollution, in his ideology. The idiomatic constitution of religion in history is, unsurprisingly, not on his radar – as a prophet whose license to prophesy depends on a childlike hermeneutic, buttressed by the most naive philosophy of history, any introspection about his role as Prophet would come at too steep a price So naturally, he refuses the validity of any theological inspection of his prevarications. After all, how could Mr. Weinland be a true prophet of God unless he could, after pointing out that “the more you learn about the differences in doctrines within Christianity, as well as their origins, the more lies and deception you will discover”, glibly rejoin: “So what is the truth? This book is the truth!” – having in between maligned Catholicism, Sunday Sabbath, and the Trinity as “paganism”. If you’re a Prophet, it’s really you against The World.
“If something is not fully of God, then it is not of God, and it is not true!”, he asserts, his italics highlighting an unleavened qualification if there ever was one.
The book dissolves from here on into the standard tropes of Cold War-era apocalypses: histrionics about the EU and the possibility of a united Europe, a lecture on the Seven Seals, the 144,000, America-centrism (typically of prophet-types, 9/11 is more prophetically significant in Weinland’s almanac than a thousand Rwandan genocides could ever be) and a preoccupation with demons in politics.
Also, he shares the same tendency to make bizarre asides as his ‘false’ cohorts, and as a result of all the parentheticals, the book at times betrays itself to be the palimpsest of fretting and insecurity you’d suspect from a guy claiming to be Prophet of God. And like his cohorts, he’s given to anachronism, at one point taking the time to chide a god nobody’s prayed to in thousands of years. His sense of mischief is almost endearing as he paraphrases an ancient prophet: “perhaps Baal was on a journey or sleeping and needing to be awakened; or maybe he was away somewhere relieving himself (an expression used for going to the toilet).” Having no insight or battle of his own, the modern End Times prophet relies on the heroics of his Biblical forebears for what self-justification he can sophisticate. Therefore, we get as much Amos, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Daniel as we can stand, enslaved to construct basically the same case in “God’s Final Witness” as anywhere else, despite Mr. Weinland’s protestations to the contrary. The US will die, hurricanes and tornadoes will stalk the countryside, and “indeed, God will make it clear who is the true power over both the revived Europe and the Catholic Church – it is Satan (Rev. 9:11).” By the time he throws in NATO and Russia, we’ve really heard it all before.
Eric Pervuhkin, "Simon Peter and Simon Magus"
He keeps it fresh by suggesting, based on a completely obscure verse, that a magician named Simon Magus is the founder of what we know today as traditional Christianity, and declares that true Christians are the minority of ‘Elohim’ (he translates the word to mean ‘family of God’) inaugurated under the only-partially wrong teachings of Herbert W. Armstrong – Evidently, the God of Robert Weinland really is a jealous God!
As is usually the case for self-described prophets. Bob Jones spent some time in a mental institution. His own mentor, Herbert Armstrong (who founded the Worldwide Church of God) himself was accused of (and allegedly confessed to) incest. Lonnie Frisbee was a closet gay. Peter Popoff was a fraud and a magician. Even Jack van Impe eventually gave up and embraced Catholicism. Exclusive esoterics is a tough business.
But the justice of God is simple. God wants to punish us. He certainly wasn’t afraid to punish Jesus because of us. No,we too owe him our blood expiation for our sins – sin killed Jesus, and now it’s the inevitable holy getback. The message of the latter-day Christian prophet is one of annihlation: in Weinland’s estimation, the only way for things to ever get right is that most of the world should die horrible deaths at the hands of a merciless Divinity, and his asshole remnant should inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. The Gospel for the prostitutes, the wretches, the tax collectors and the prodgical: the soteriological hope of sinners is really a grand Satanic conspiracy to draw people away from the True Church, letting them soften in their dirt before the triumphant arrival of God’s great punishing combine. That’s the message here: we have to heed the Prophet Weinland in order to be saved from God.
He’s going to lay us low. And destroy us. The Prophet Weinland promised.
God hates us. No matter what he says in the Bible, the God of this Prophet hates us. He hates mankind for fucking up his theology, for not making sense of signs, for “refusing to accept responsibility for his own actions“. According to Weinland, we corrupted the Passover, Pentecost, the Last Supper, and pretended to have souls when we have no such thing – God intends to annihlate sinners (losers, really) utterly, so their last experiences are their agonic deaths during His cataclysm. Then, almost poetically considering the scarring ultra-violence Weinland’s preached so far, they are just forgotten by God, unlike the few, who are “like a computer hard drive or memory chip… whose spirit essence returns to God.. [to be] placed in a new body to live once again.”
What’s the difference between authentic Revalation and confused bullshit again?
If you’re interested, you can get a print copy of this book yourself for free from the promotional website. There’s also a .pdf available. Why not ask for two? The fate of the world is at stake.
Filed under: Religion being made up, christianity, musings | 4 Comments
Tags: church of god, demons, dispensationalism, elect, end times, eschatology, musings, old time religion, prophesy, rapture, revelation, sects, stupid
WTF?, pt. 4
Check out this awesome racist-ass book I found in the bookstore of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary!
A picture really does say a thousand words about the oceans of Evangelical prejudice between some Christians and any kind of non-racist, non-culturally autistic reality.
In case it still isn’t quite clear to you what you’re looking at, the book is an evangelical primer on Muslims called the CAMEL TRAINING MANUAL. The back cover describes how you’ll learn to rhetorically whip a camel (a Muslim) until he comes to believe in Jesus, outlining a ‘method’ that, properly wielded, supposedly can’t fail to overawe.
Pretty good find for my first time visiting the campus, huh?
I did not, unfortunately, have the spare loot to actually leave the store with this book; but, if you’re in Wake Forest, it’s on sale! Don’t miss this chance to own another classic Evangelical catastrophe before it goes out of print! With that title, his book can only promise to be even worse that it seems.
Based on the criticism of others even within the Baptist apologetics community, it is.
Kevin Greeson of the SBC International Missions Board – South Asia, you are some kind of a douche. And your brother is, too.
The level of guileless, insouciant, giddy bigotry behind the titular premise of this ‘apologetic’ work really goes beyond comment. Put this to good use and shame a Good Evangelical Christian Buddy with it; let him die inside a little on behalf of his co-religionists; then quote Isaiah 50:7 at him in the form of a question – any question that comes to mind.
Dear Evangelical Christianity,
…Really?
Love,
the world.
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Tags: apologetics, baptists, camel jockeys, camel training manual, camels, evangelicalism, evangelism, islam, racism, southern baptist theological seminary, towelheads, WTF?
Dowsing for churches.
There are 9 Baptist churches within 3.5 miles of my house.
That means I’m in what could be called a heavily-churched area; there are easily another 9 non-Baptist churches within the same radius. 18 churches, most serving, I’d guess, anywhere from 25 to 400+ people every week. Not bad, for living in what used to be the middle-of-nowhere.
Thing is, many of these churches are rather ancient, and some quite poor, with little weedy yards filled with old broken headstones marking the graves of old pastors, founders, congregants – these are wounded country churches that recall autumn no matter what time of year it is, churches that will be scraped off the map certainly during this generation.
I’m going to visit one of those churches this weekend, I hope, to see what I find.
The Internet makes discovering weird and decrepit churches easier than ever. You can use Google Maps to find the out-of-the-way ones, or Church Cloud to find churches that are looking for you. Either way, the history of local religion is within reach.
Just make sure to find out before hand what to wear.
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Tags: baptists, church finder, churches, etc, evangelical decline, internet
I wish I went to a more prestigious university sometimes.
I would have loved to have been a preppie, Ivy League tool for a couple of years. I would have been perfect for that job.
It didn’t happen for me, but thanks to Academic Earth, I’m one step closer to being able to claim a pre-eminent intellectual lineage and on my way to a Petigree haute Douchebag of my own.
This site archives video footage from the classrooms of dozens of the West’s best lecturers, all available for free. Watch some of the most reputed (for better or worse) teaching minds in all their beardo glory, bullshitting millions of dollars worth of students at a time on topics philosophical, medical, and everything in between. Want to hear a Yale yuppie drone on about death for a whole 24-part series? I do! How does a few dozen hours of Programming Methodology sound to you, courtesy of an Indian genius and Stanford University? Good? Great!
Best of all, it’s free!
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Tags: awesome, etc, ivy league, scholarship, the internet
WTF?, pt. 3
Black Jesus Answers Your Stupid Ass, vol. 1
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Tags: awesome, black jesus, the hustle, the internet, WTF?
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