The omnipotent and omniscient Lord of the Universe, Creator of All, charged with the detonation of supernovae, the majestic movement of whole galaxies, the grand march of all of history and all of time, spoke.
New Kensington resident Joey Salvati, 39, a father of two, was in the shower about a month ago when he first heard God speak to him about the matter. Whether it was an external or internal voice, he wasn’t sure. He tried to ignore it, but it kept coming back, day after day, until he realized he had to do something about it. The message was for Salvati to make wooden paddles for corporal punishment and give them to parents who need help disciplining their children.
God was undistracted by the need to maintain vast weather systems around the planet, or the pleas of billions of prayers, and gave Mr Salvati explicit, detailed instructions. His focus must be awesome.
The first suggestion is for parents to calibrate the force of their swing by testing it on themselves. “There is only one way to measure effectively –swat yourself on the rump and adjust your swing appropriately,” the instructions explain. Also on the site are suggested punishment guidelines. The minimum, one spank, is called for when the child is disrespectful. The maximum, five spanks, is called for when the child does something more serious such as endangering someone’s safety or is caught using drugs. Salvati said he did not research the subject or consult parenting experts before launching the site. He is instructing parents with the guidelines he said God gave to him.
You can read God’s guidelines. He seems to be a very detail-oriented guy who’s willing to explain things patiently to random people in their showers, but I sure wish he’d get his priorities straight. Rather than instructing people in how many times they should spank their children, how about a few hints on curing cancer or developing more efficient batteries or the whereabouts of a serial killer? You know, something useful, and that we could actually confirm? It’s always these mundane trivialities, rather than anything that actually helps people.
Funny, because G-d called me yesterday while watering the plants and told me that Bush Co. has got to go and Rove is more dangerous that Eve with an apple.
Oh He would, you see, except that evil atheists have taken over research laboratories, and we’ve hardened our hearts against His wisdom.
He has to reveal His Godly Hints for Curing Cancer to True Believers outside of the research world.
I just think that there is something kinky about a god who talks to a naked guy about spanking.
So, God likes to see small children beaten. Good to know. Maybe next time he joins a man in the shower, good ol’ Yahweh Elohim will confess to killing puppies.
On a side note, I wonder how likely “calibrating” a pain instrument on an adult will lead to underestimating the amount of pain a child will feel. Whether the “mechanical pain threshold” increases with age is a bit of a fuzzy question, and a quick literature search doesn’t reveal anything definitive, but the idea that the MPTh does increase as we get older seems at least moderately well supported. (It’s also consistent with my personal, anecdotal experience: I’m much less rough-and-tumble than I was as an elementary schooler, but I bet I handle my cuts and scrapes with a trifle more dignity now.) If “parents to calibrate the force of their swing by testing it on themselves”, I’m pretty sure that a fair fraction of the time, they’re hurting their children worse than they anticipated.
Perhaps the paddles could be adapted to smack some sense into heads like Egnor’s. His latest excursion into egnorance is as mind-boggling as the first one. Clearly he is not making progress…
The mechanics of spanking yourself are completely different to those of walloping a child. Unless, of course, you hold said child across your rump while you do so…
Either way, you’re not going to get a reasonable approximation. Rather calibrate on someone else’s child by monitoring the volume and pitch of the screams.
Way to go G*d…Let us all know how to discipline our children with wooden paddles (you couldn’t make it up, could you?), but don’t find Madeline Mc Cann..whose parents just went to see the Pope for crumbs sake!
Just for the record…I have never left MY kids alone at that age whilst I ‘popped off to have a meal’..let alone hit them with a lump of wood…but then again I’m a godless immoral atheist destined to ‘burn in hell’.
and I love comment #3…!!!!
The first suggestion is for parents to calibrate the force of their swing by testing it on themselves.
The “Gil Thorpe” comic strip had some useful tips. Image and commentary at: http://joshreads.com/?p=997
All the cool kids ( http://joshreads.com/?p=1082 ) are imitating him already. No divine intervention needed, thankyouverymuch.
Albatrossity:
Wow, I’m actually a little frightened to click the link you provide. It’s like riding that first hill on a roller coaster.
jerith:
Good point. I don’t think I could deliver a blow of the same strength with my arm bent back around as I could with a normal, striking motion.
I’d prescribe Haldol, myself.
More seriously, this seems more likely to be a matter of incipient schizophrenia rather than normal religious zeal. While I understand the desire to expose and ridicule fundamentalist thinking, schizophrenic delusions and hallucinations also often have strong religious themes (e.g., Andrea Yates). Unless one wants to argue that mainstream religious beliefs are identical to schizophrenia, I think it is useful to separate these phenomena.
????How strange. Why do the culties get off on beating up their kids?
Is this so they will grow up twisted and stupid?
Does it work? Maybe the Kansas troll of a thousand IDs and 3 thoughts can chime in. After all, there is something drastically wrong with him and maybe it was Freud and not Mendel.
Where’s the proof that this raises healthy moral kids?
Where’s the proof that the God who spoke to this guy is anything but his hallucination/delusion?
Where are the other people who heard God’s new discipline commandment or epiphany?
Where’s the common sense that this is reprehensible and immoral and probably would lead to child abuse?
And yet, you know that if it’s at an Internet site without some more reasonable comment or for those who believe in revalation…it may well be seen by some as the “truth.” People look for what they already believe.
Even skeptics (***!!? aaaagh), but at least we should eat our words if proven wrong.
That settles it. God is engaged on a mission to make these people look like idiots. He has had enough of them claiming to speak the almighty himself, so he has undertaken to actually talk to them giving silly messages so that they reap scorn and ridicule on themselves. Either that, or he makes them gay.
Poetic justice, so to speak.
It’s not necessarily that mainstream religions are identical to schizophrenia. Rather, it’s more likely that either (a) damaged minds of the sort that accept religious nonsense also are susceptible to schizophrenia, or (b) acceptance of religion actually damages the mind such that it is more susceptible to schizophrenia.
In either case, I agree that we need to separate medical problems from religious delusion. At least the first seems somewhat treatable in many cases.
It really freaks me out that the paddles all have “Love Joey” stamped on them. Um, ok. Also, that he advocates having the child fill out an appointment slip with the date and time of the punishment and the infraction. Talk about screwing with a child’s head.
Why is it that if you hear god talking to you when taking a shower you start up a business catering to the S&M crowd but if you heard an alien you would be considered mentally ill.
(Just in case anyone thinks this person may not be catering to the S&M crowd, I know someone who claims to own a business selling leather goods to equistrians. Get him down the pub and he will happily admit that over half his sales of whips and harnesses are to people into S&M)
Who needs a kid to calibrate on? I mean, Gawd gave you a spouse, so you can calibrate on each other….um, I really don’t like where this is going.
Get off your high horse, Blake, the guy has obviously done his homework.
*reads article again*
Oh wait. He didn’t. Well, I’m sure the Big Man knows what he’s dictating.
“Anyone who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad.”
Didn’t “Son of Sam” hear voices telling him to do things as well. Seems like a mental disorder to me…
Why do the culties get off on beating up their kids?
Alice Miller has a great deal to say on the subject. Boiling my limited understanding of her work down to a pithy sentence or two, the basic gist is that kids who are abused (and I’d regard this as abuse) by their parents tend to absolve them by interalising the idea that they deserved it. Rather than becoming critical of authority, they venerate it, which makes them much more prone to becoming (or remaining) cultists. Then, when they grow up and have kids of their own, they tend to take out the inevitable issues this causes on their own kids. Cruelty like this is a self-replicating meme and very closely linked to authoritarianism – which is why the fundies are so big on it.
I find spanking kids as incomprehensible as neonatal circumcision: Both are forms of abuse, based on ancient superstitions. In civilized societies both should have been declared illegal a long time ago.
Specifically though, what’s really weird about spanking is this attempt to calibrate the force of the swing. It’s obviously an attempt by the beaters to distinguish themselves as “enlightened spankers” and not abusers.
But here’s the thing: From personal experience as a kid who was regularly struck by parents, teachers and priests, and from a particularly rough boot camp experience later in the military, I know that hitting that does not produce unbearable pain, is, well, bearable and therefore useless. Consequently, once a kid figures out that he can withstand calibrated striking, it becomes a price he’s willing to pay for whatever trespass tempts him. That’s exactly what I did. Hence, if the beater is determined to control his kids, he will have to calibrate beating upwards and upwards.
Starting any sort of corporal punishment will inescapably become useless as a controlling mechanism or it will evolve to just plain old abuse.
___________________________
Hmm,
Maybe he was sharing the shower with his wife, then realized that publicly sharing a discussion with his wife about paddling may give people the wrong impression.
Certainly it’s much less lascivious to imagine God sharing a shower.
Or is it?
News flash: God wants you to hit children. Gives detailed instructions.
Cure for cancer, world peace, ignored.
Oh, but he’s already given us that. Didn’t seem to work out too well.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1981151,00.html
I thought stoning was the punishment God proscribed for disrespectful children, not one measly whap on the bum.
You’d think if God had such specific rules for raising children he might have written it down a long time ago in some sort of big book of religious rules.
God obviously got a wrong number. We all know he’s spending all his time looking after Kent Hovind these days.
RE Eamon’s post No. 17 :-
http://christiandomesticdiscipline.com/Home.html
’nuff said ?
God told me to take a 4-pound sledgehammer to the head of every adult who beats children.
I though God wanted parents to use rods on their children or just stone them outright? He must be getting soft in His old age. Then again this may be one of these Abraham moments when you raise the paddle and an angel shows up and says “Just kidding”.
God for you, the ultimate prankster.
Speaking of God in your shower why does God have to be an old white guy and not a hot young woman? If God showed up as a hot young woman while I was in the shower that would convince me to stop being an atheist.
I’d be willing to worship Natalie Portman.
Or Jennifer Connelly.
Or Scarlett Johansson.
I suppose that makes me a polytheist.
Yes, I’ve seen this website before. Nice, huh?
I notice that there’s no “swat” amounts stipulated for premarital sex. Well, if we don’t talk about it, kids won’t do it. Right.
Read “Bible Based Baby Beating” (or as much of it as you can stand — I couldn’t make it all the way through).
If you go to his website, you can see that he’s giving these things away for free! Perhaps we should all request one (though we do pay $5.75 S&H) to waste his resources. I’m sure they have alternate uses (fly swatter, backup canoe oar, firewood, etc.).
Wanted: single female test subjects for evaluating kinetically applied stimulus/response disciplinary technique. No financial benefit, only the pleasure of true altruism. We must, MUST think of the children. Vigorously. And often.
Err … previous post should have read “single ADULT females …”
Joey has broken a cardinal rule-
“What happens at the HellFire Club. Stays at the HellFire Club”
Kook.
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 –
If a man have a stubborn and unruly child, who will not hear the commandments of his father or mother, and being corrected, slighteth obedience:
They shall take him and bring him to the ancients of the city, and to the gate of judgment,
And shall say to them: This our son is rebellious and stubborn, he slighteth hearing our admonitions, he giveth himself to revelling, and to debauchery and banquetings:
The people of the city shall stone him: and he shall die, that you may take away the evil out of the midst of you…
Not paddles. Rocks.
Well, that’s one of those continuum things, isn’t it? You can draw the line wherever you want, but you’re going to have people moving back and forth across it anyway.
I suspect that if we could go back in a time machine we’d find a lot of schizophrenics founding and contributing to religions. Normal people don’t usually have visions while they’re just going about their business walking to Damascus or whatever.
Someone else’s mental illness + Rationalizations + Spin = Religion? Worth looking into, at least.
Didn’t God (in the form of George Burns) first appear to John Denver while he was taking a shower in the film “Oh, God!”?
“The first suggestion is for parents to calibrate the force of their swing by testing it on themselves.”
Someone should tell these parents that this calibration process is best accomplished using a loaded handgun pointed at the temple, not a paddle.
Interestingly, Salvati’s hijinx were recently brought to the media’s attention by Susan Lawrence, a homeschooling mom who’s also helped to put the makers of the “Wee Wacker” and “The Rod,” two other child-abuse tools, out of business. (The original Salvati article dates from 2002; the one about Lawrence’s anti-child abuse activism was published Monday.)
Aren’t we just supposed to pray away the cancer?
I guess Salvati could hear God in the shower since his antenna was out. I should try it while climbing a tall mountain, where the reception, I am sure, is better than in Joey’s shower.
We have a winner!
Straw man argument.
Who cares?
You know, we had these in Catholic school, back in the 1960s when I was growing up. The staff members called it the “Fireboard”, because it made your rear feel like it was on fire.
I don’t remember anyone actually getting the fireboard. I think it was used more as a threat than anything else. But my parents liked the idea, so my dad built one (and never used it).
Pretty bad, now that I think about it.
What God told this person is inconsistent with God’s inspired work, the Bible. We are supposed to stone for insolence, so God tells this person to use paddles instead?
Getting soft in His old age.
Dang, I hate religion. Just another control mechanism.
Just think: The all-powerful, all-wise, all-loving God has no patience for backtalking children, and just can’t figure out a better design so people are less prone to diabetes.
That’s really awesome.
Finally, a moral and religious basis for publicly beating people who use their cell phones while driving.
God spoke to me this morning, but it was in Aramaic.
And in chapter two Joey takes a hot bath and God gives him the instructions for building a crucifix for when the little tykes really start to sass you back.
You can read God’s guidelines. He seems to be a very detail-oriented guy who’s willing to explain things patiently to random people in their showers, but I sure wish he’d get his priorities straight.
He seems? detail oriented guy? He’d get His priorities.
You don’t acknowledge the possibility of a female or trans-gender Diety?
This won’t do, Prof Myers, this won’t do.
Mr. Salvati’s kids appear to be woried, doubtless not for the first time, that Dad will be seen as a loon.
If you can stomach reading the feedback comments, it seems that most of the postings had misspellings, incorrect grammar, run-on sentences, multiple postings, or some combination of them all. Evidently, the only people willing to post are those who have little composition or English skills, but they do know how to beat kids!
He at least seems to be emphasizing that the spanking shouldn’t hurt the child, but then what exactly is this form of “punishment” supposed to do?
Oh wait, I get it. In another article he says he used the paddle on his son, to which his son told the reporter he’d be less likely to do whatever he’d done wrong because he’d been so embarrassed by it.
Sorry Joey, but I find punishing your child through humiliation just as morally repugnant as punishing them with pain. Either way you run the risk of producing an adult who cannot resolve conflict without beating (or browbeating) someone into submission.
What a fool! Everybody knows that stoning to death is the punishment decreed by God, as reported by William Einwechter in the January 1999 issue of the Chalcedon Report.
Actually, to be fair, Einwechter conceded in a later article (in another publication) that more modern means of killing may be used, even though the Bible specifies stoning. How’s that for liberal interpretation?
The troubling thing is that this apparent trend of corporeal punishment of children is perfectly consistent with progressing right-wing agenda overall; it is ideal for raising children with authoritarian personalities. The submissive/dominating relationship between parent and a child is reflected in all right-wing Christian relationships, notably their relationship with their God and their (ideal) government.
Cure cancer? Pray away cancer? Without cancer and similar afflictions, how the hell is god supposed to lay his divine judgement on sinners? Or wait, I mean, how is he supposed to provide the faithful with soul-strengthening trials? Or… oh never mind…
Multiple posts have suggested that dictating paddling instead of stoning suggests god’s getting, “soft in his old age”. Add to that that he’s been senescent for quite a while. Is god on his/her/its way out? What will the funeral be like?
It’s weird. Today while I was in the shower God spoke to me and told me you should not paddle your children. Now what are we supposed to do?
Wouldn’t it really be a lot more sensible for the parents of disobedient children to pray for their kids’ behavior to improve? Leave the whole punishment thing in God’s hands? At the very least, you’d expect God could stop by while the kids are in the shower and give them a stern lecture, or something.
Granted that God sometimes has odd ideas about what constitutes appropriate punishment.
I was in the shower today and God told me to paddle with my children….
Anyone know where I can buy a canoe? or would a row-boat be allowed? (is that still paddling?)
May I suggest some phenothiazines, such as thorazine or vesprin for this nut? Or a benzodiazepine?
gex wrote:
Just because some disembodied voice is floating around claiming to be God and giving people advice on what to do with children’s behinds doesn’t mean that disembodied voice is really God. Ask more questions, I say. If this supposed God can’t appear before you looking like Morgan Freeman or George Burns it’s obviously not really God. You should at least get a burning bush.
Don’t settle for cheap substitutes, demand signs and wonders.
Salvati, father of two grown children, said his idea to make 2-foot-long paddles and give them away came to him during his normal prayer time in the shower in 2002.
“It came, ‘Make paddles. Give them away,'” he said. “I blew it off. The fourth time, it came real hard.”
Was he praying or wanking?!
Is Alan Rickman an approved intermediatary (The Alanis Morissette avatar of God obviously can’t speak and pass along messages)
Or are you saying this was an example of a false god?
I wonder if that’s why there have been so few female prophets….
[ducks and runs for cover]
Ah. I loved the movie Dogma, with its simple, heartwarming message, which was quite simply this: Alanis Morissette’s voice can make your head explode.
And here’s something for all you polytheists out there.
Paddles?
How does he know it was Yahweh? Maybe it was Charon.
You can bet that Fred Phelps will be holding up offensive signs.
RE Eamon’s post No. 17 :-
http://christiandomesticdiscipline.com/Home.html
’nuff said ?
*urk* More like toooo much information.
And their taste in “intimates” is….an odd mix of boring and kinky (and not in a good way, either). But especially in this area, YMMV.
Re: 71
ooooohhhh… Yerk!
And why is the tag Loving Wife Spanking in a Christian Marriage (my emphasis)
Obviously another indication that Xian guys need to dominate to get their rocks off…
Eamon – the bible may forbid me to spank my (hypothetical) husband, but I don’t see where it says I can’t give him a good swift kick in the delicate parts.
mcmillan: if Alan Rickman appears in my shower, I’ll paddle anything he tells me to.
I wonder what this God-person who wants children spanked thinks of more enlightened countries where physical abuse of children is (shockingly) actually viewed as physical abuse, and therefore punishable by law.
Why is it that when disembodied voices speak to these folks and claim to be God, they believe the voice?
I mean, if it were Satan do you think he’d really go “Hullo there Joey Salvati, this is Satan, the Adversary, Master of the Pit and Lord of Darkness. You should beat your children regularly. And hand out free paddles so that other folks can beat their children regularly too.”
Nope. Satan would be smart enough to lie about it, one would think. You know, pretend to be God, convince the bugger to do something that makes the world a bit more of an evil place. Why do they never give Satan enough credit for this sort of thing? Is there some rule about Satan having to tell you the truth – like the one where if you ask someone if he’s a cop he has to tell you?
(Seriously, if they guy is hearing voices and isn’t just a huckster peddling his paddles, I hope he gets some help. Voices in the head are not a symptom of something minor, and the next thing you know we could be reading about a murder/suicide involving this guy and his poor family.)
Punishments on the ass from Yahweh.
http://thestubborncurmudgeon.blogspot.com
RUGOSSA- actually the bible recommends disciplining naughty wives like you. Why doesn’t Joey follow this and hand out “rods” for “wayward women” and “fools” as Proverbs prescribes? Because he know that society now holds a double standard that it’s ok to beat children, but not women or criminals? Yet crimes by women and fools like Paris Hilton and DUI cause more harm than little children!
The man is obviously mentally ill.
People need to meditate in an envionment that is conducive to a healthy spritual lifestyle- in a church, in the woods, in a park, in a quiet room. The surroundings influence the person’s ideas and the ways that they interpret (or distort) their inner thoughts.
What kind of emotional/ecstatic experiences do people usually have in a hot shower? What was his emotional mindset in the hot shower when he had his strange inspiration to ritually beat children on their private areas?
He stated:
“I blew it off. The fourth time, it came real hard.”
And yes, the detailed ritualized punishment slips and self-beatings are mentally sick too.