I got these pamphlets in the mail yesterday. People send me Bible tracts all the time — who needs to think when you’ve got Jack Chick to give you a Hallmark shortcut? — and I usually just flip through them and toss them. But these were weird. One was about a Ken Ham-like preacher ranting that God wanted you stupid and ignorant and receptive to his message; another was all about the necessarily literal truth of the first book of Genesis, and that the whole rest of the Bible falls apart if you don’t accept it; and the other one is about how Jesus was a failure, since almost everyone goes to Hell, and only the elect few get to join him on his motorcycle to heaven. They were evil Poes.
Apparently, you’re supposed to distribute these at bus stations and truck stops and other places more typically associated with cheap Jesusy crap. I could see how someone might pick these up and confuse them with genuine believer baloney. I’m going to have to keep my eyes open for Christians sincerely spouting the mockery from the True Bible Church.
(Watches the KS video these guys put out.)
Ugh! Can we PLEASE stop with the “Jesus Preached Love” bullshit. The way I read The Bible, Jesus’ supposed “love” came across in same way that L. Ron Hubbard’s or Marshall Applewhite “loved” their followers. Throw in the versus about “turning a man against his father, a daughter against her mother…” and leaving ones family to follow him, and you’ve got makings of a creepy cult that would have ended very bad. That is, if they didn’t get an infusion of money and power from Constantine.
If he existed at all, I got a feeling Jesus was probably more like Charles Manson than Ghandi.
Oh, so very nearly there!
As if we need more litter on the streets. That’s what all but certainly happens to normal Bible tracts; would be evangelists leave them on buses and so forth, and they are promptly ignored by pretty much everyone, or get tossed back where they came from. These will likely meet the same fate.
Jack Chick is world-famous both with believers and non-believers. Here is a parody website: http://www.weirdcrap.com/chick/ He is the Garry Trudeau of assholes!
Well said! That was exactly the argument I was attempting to advance a couple of threads back. As I pointed out there, not many people are aware that Jesus actually tells his followers to kill people. ( Mark 7, Matthew 15. ) Or more accurately, he chastizes Philistines for their hypocrisy, for not killing people for violating Mosaic law.
That’s how crazy our World is: that most people ignore such straightforward facts.
( Actually I’ve got to add, I’m not very keen on Ghandhi either.)
Fundies say this often. They hate education in general and college in particular and say so often, i.e. Rick Satanorum. They know educated and intelligent people are likely to leave the religion.
Bible colleges like NoLiberty U. etc. are glorifed baby sitting services for children who don’t grow up and also dating arenas to maintain endogamy. If you are Southern Baptist, your nightmare is your kid marrying a Yankee Episcopalian.
Standard fundie xian god babble. Ken Ham says this often.
The first two tracts can’t be parodies.
This one is. Xians say god is all powerful, omniscient, and omni-good.
Of course, the evidence is that god/jesus were incompetent failures. The all powerful all knowing god created Eden and things went wrong almost immediately. And today, the vast majority of the world’s population…aren’t even xians!!!
Xians only make up 28% of the world’s population and xianity itself is hopelessly split into 42,000 factions. No one knows what the Real True One Cult is.
But I think this drastic claim is true; even if Ken Ham said it. The fact that so many millions of Christians pretend otherwise makes it seem unlikely, but these people are highly trained at believing things that don’t make sense.
Here’s a specific example, not to do with the six days of Creation gumpf, but something simpler and more straightforward: Quite clearly, the details of the flood and Noah’s ark are among the most extreme instances of drivel in the Bible. A rational and well-educated modern human being might be able to argue that the miracles of the Gospel narratives might be real. After all, if there is a God, he presumably would be able to do all that funky shit. So why not acknowledge the possibility, just theoretically, that they actually happened? I mean, Clarke’s Third Law and all that; etc etc.
But the Noah’s ark episode is a fairy story. It was obviously generated by or for people with a literally childish conception of what the World is like. Now we’ve got way beyond that point, it’s not to be taken seriously. Even if you believe there is a God who could have made it happen, the whole thing is completely ridiculous.
Unfortunately for Christians, Jesus of Nazerath did.
‘ “But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,
And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.” ‘
–Matthew 24:37-41King James Version (KJV)
And that is why we should acknowledge that fundamentalists are more logical in their beliefs than liberal or progressive Christians. Not logical at all, of course, but logical to the extent that at least their nonsense is internally coherent. The only way to be a rationally coherent Christian, or I should say the nearest it’s possible to get to being a rationally coherent Christian ( which, to repeat, isn’t very close ), is to go for the whole shooting match, including some formulation whereby the Creation myth can be accepted as a verbatim account of what actually happened. If you throw out the Garden of Eden, you certainly have to throw out the Flood, and that means Jesus was wrong.
It’s uncomfortable acknowledging that, because it raises questions about human rationality in general, when the beliefs of the well-educated and sophisticated Christians are less logically coherent than red-neck Creationism, but I think if we are interested in understanding how human beings thing about their World, and how they don’t think about it, we need to admit that this is the case
White males in suits have been swarming the public bus routes the past week, leaving chick tracts everywhere. I only had to raise my voice once at a bus stop, it’s posted no loitering no soliciting you can’t read a sign? Your handing out junk and soliciting, need a police officer to explain it? They tend to stay away from any stop I’m waiting at unless I get my cell phone out and take pictures of them. Then they scramble for change to get on the bus and ride a few blocks before getting back off. I did have the amusement of hearing a woman try to chastise an older non-white male for running them off at another bus stop. She tried to tell him how harmless they were. Chicken Heads. I’ve never heard them called Chicken Heads before. He told her “Chicken Heads want your money and for you to be a slave again. They want you to be lazy and waste your life. They aren’t harmless.” Made my day better.