It’s the only way to interpret this rather ominous newspaper ad.
Except, right, it’s Easter, that weekend when the death-cult celebrates involuntary sacrifice and grisly torture methods.
It’s all OK, because maybe their victims of slow murder will pop back up and be alive again, despite the fact that in two thousand years of repeated trials with billions of participants, it’s never happened, not once, other than the occasional apocryphal hallucination.
Maybe the cross is intended to kill zombie lies?
You know, Democrats are muslim atheists who are pedophiles who eat their victims”.
No, wait, it is the other side who would like to kill zombie lies, not Real Christians (TM).
Maybe it’s a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon. Only it’s a Christian version, where Buffy is a guy, and is played by Kirk Cameron or Kevin Sorbo.
so, the Russian warship was supposedly carrying a piece of the “true cross.”
think it’ll rise again?
https://www.businessinsider.com/sunk-russia-warship-may-have-carried-holy-relic-on-board-2022-4
So Jesus walks into a hotel with four nails and asks “can you put me up for the night?”
Another Kirk fought the antichrist in a 1977 film, which was marginally better than the Sorbo/Cameron stuff.
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Maybe they are hoping to fight off Lucy, the secular super-heroine of another film (the McGuffin of that film is ridicilous, but not worse than for Matrix). I liked how she basically morphed into a secular deity at the end.
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Lightbulb moment! They have watched one of the Nigerian “Vultures of Horror” films, and realised they need a mixture of West African folk religion and crucifixes to fight off the demons!
(thank you, God Awful Movies)
The original Xian symbol was a fish, because of the abbreviation that was Ichtys.
So the Scottish fish-slap
-dance (seen in the documentary “Monthy Python”) was originally a christian ritual, possibly dating back to the Picts.
Re@ 6
A weapon for life? Bring a chemically preserved halibut, big enough to provide a good punch!
Not vampires but close.
Tomorrow is Zombie Uprising day also known as Easter.
Odd factoid.
The fundie xians hate Easter. Or at least they hate the word “Easter”.
Easter is named after the Pagan goddess of spring and fertility, Eostre, as the xians once again, stole another Pagan holiday.
They usually call Easter, Resurrection Sunday instead.
A few years ago, the local fundie churches handed out white cardboard lawn signs that invited everyone to “Resurrection Sunday” services. They looked really tacky. Fortunately they weren’t very durable and never appeared the next year.
It never made sense to me that the festival of “happy dead guy on a stick” is referred to by Christians as “Good” Friday. And tomorrow, they’ll celebrate the rise of Zombie Jesus, which (according to the book of Matthew) also caused the zombie uprising. https://youtu.be/jldnqyC_L_0?t=130
If Kentuckians apply those things to their best possible use, they’ll need to elect new Senators afterwards.
Speaking of Kentucky: I know I’m a late-comer to this, but I discovered the Old Gods Of Appalachia podcast. It’s a fantastic blend of folk and cosmic horror. I highly recommend it!
raven @8:
Saying that they ‘stole’ a pagan holiday is a misunderstanding. Christian Easter derives from Jewish Passover, and was being celebrated long before the Anglo-Saxons were converted. The link to Ēostre, according to Bede, is that the month of celebration (what we now call April) was called Ēosturmōnaþ by the Anglo-Saxons.
Of course, Passover itself could be a theft, or repurposing, of a pagan Canaanite spring rite or festival…
FWIW its also Passover and Ramadan all simultaneously this year.
@ birgerjohansson : Halibut good enough for Jehovah?
Who, erm, presumably could magic up all the fish he wanted if he wanted anyhow so .. yeah, the old “why does gawd need a halibut / starship” issues arises again..
PS. How do you serve people a helping of “fasting” as the poster suggests I wonder?
Akira MacKenzie @ 11
I must check out this podcast!
During one of her travels, Granny Weatherwax passed through a vampire-haunted region. Her pet Greebo (who looked a lot like the organism at the enclosed link) promptly decided that there was only place for one top predator in the nwighborhood.
https://youtu.be/Qv692XJ3SN0
Rob Grigjanis@12,
Also worth noting that it’s only in English and German among the major European languages that the festival has a name reminiscent of Eostre (in German it’s Ostern). In all the others it appears to be derived indirectly from the Jewish Pesach (Passover in English), The Christian festival was established by the mid-2nd century, long before English, or even Germans, were Christianised.
KG @16: It’s also worth noting that the religious profile of Britain before the Germanic settlement/invasion was a mosaic of Roman, pagan Celtic, Mithraic and Christian (and probably other cults). So if, in a given location, a festival of Ēostre was established by the Anglo-Saxons, that in itself would almost certainly have been a replacement of (or addition to) an earlier Spring festival celebrated there (perhaps even the Christian version).
“Resurrection Day” sounds like a zombie movie or maybe a Buffy/Angel episode (I know it’s not quite “Resurrection Sunday”–that just sounds dumb to me).
KG@16 That’s a great point and I hadn’t thought about it. Growing up Catholic, I was well-acquainted with the Paschal candle as well as other uses of the term. And I’m sure if I keep an eye open, I will see “Felices Pascuas” written on signs where I live now (though I have to admit I never really noticed).
What is Pagan about Easter, besides its name are the traditions we are all familiar with.
The deepest roots of Easter are certainly Passover, which is when jesus was (supposedly) killed and resurrected.
So where do the rabbits, the Easter bunny, the colored eggs, Easter baskets, the flowers, and so on come from? Not from the Middle East. They are Pagan.
Odd fact. Rabbits are mentioned in the bible but not often.
They are not kosher.
StevoR@13 Maybe this needs a special name, like the “Abrahamic Trifecta”.
A lot of fundies really hate Easter. They say not to celebrate it and call it Pagan**.
Of course, what they mean is that the real holiday is…Resurrection Sunday. You can find this all over Google search. Here is one.
I wouldn’t bother with the link. It would just be fundie xian god babble and fundie xian websites have a lot of malware on them.
**A point in its favor, IMO.
Akira MacKenzie @ 11
“Old Gods in Appalachia”
Wow, that was dark.
One of the least venal operators seems to be “the Boy” as he/it is some kind of vigilante.
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-If you are familiar with John Connolly’s “Charlie Parker” novels (80% hard-boiled thrillers with a bit of dark humor, 20% cosmic horror) he would be compareable with the collector (lower-case “c”. Everything about the collector is lower-case, as he strives to not attract attention).
While technically being on the side of good, he is not someone you would want to invite to lunch. Charlie Parker and his semi-retired killer friends are quite charming by comparison.
OGiA takes place in the early 20th century, the Charlie Parker novels in late 20th, early 21th centuries.
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It would be fun to have some small crossover; Parker et al certainly spent a lot of time stomping on bad old things they ran across in New England.
For an example, I would recommend Connolly’s “The Wolf In Winter” – a plot derived from the English “Green Man” concept. Nature worship is not always a good thing.
“A Time of Torment” is also about a cult on the East Coast, thriving for centuries at the cost of others. And these are among the most normal baddies. Well-written and original, which is more than you can say about most urban gothic.
raven @19:
There’s a lot of speculation there.
https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/04/ostara-and-the-hare/
So it’s not even established that such a goddess was worshipped by the Anglo-Saxons, never mind her supposed link to hares, rabbits and eggs.
I remember Pandas Thumb back when it had a “bathroom wall” for free-for-all mostly religious discussions that was frequented by ‘FL’, an evangelical minister.
What I gleaned from all this was that contrary to my (raised Catholic) understanding that Christian religions at least agreed on the Resurrection as the most import article of faith, there was a certain branch that believed the big deal was the crucifixion itself as “penal substitutionary atonement.” I.e., whether “He is Risen” is mostly besides the point. The main thing is that God punished his son out of some sort of necessary balance of justice. You can ignore everything else, but you have to believe in PSA.
I got the impression that if I could show up in a time machine, say with modern weaponry and cow the centurions into stopping the whole thing, then FL would be right there in his time machine saying “No! This horrible.” The magic wouldn’t work, and probably he’d nail Jesus to the cross himself just to make good and sure it happened right on schedule. Like a “demon apocalypse” Joss Whedon style.
Not to assign any privilege to my own birth religion, but the whole thing strikes me as a weird death cult. That and the fixation on Noah’s Ark. I just don’t get any of it.
PaulBC @ 24
An effective meme- or in this case, meme complex- does not have to be logical. It has to be emotionally appealing, to the level that it can compete with rival meme complexes, and preferally replace them.
The Roman Empire supplied the necessary substrate. There were many other Christian belief traditions, and many other religions with strong similarities but the version that won during the Council of Nicaea was both successful spreading through the minds of the rubes, and appealing to the Roman rulers.
Any version version with a stronger enphasis on equality would have failed the latter criterion.
PaulBC @ 24
A Christianity 2.0 wanting to last in well-educated times should downplay PSA and reject the Noah BS as old testament tradition, on a par with talking snakes.
As the NT is the important stuff, most of the embarrassing stuff in the OT can be put aside.
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Islam 2.0 would have to reject the idea the koran should be read literally – This is much harder as Mr. M stated over and over again it should be interpreted literally. This will doom islam to a future living inside the heads of mostly low-educated people.
Fun fact: the closest thing to vampires in Chinese folk lore do not suck blood, but the life force, Chi, sorta like the aliens in the second Stargate TV series.
And they move by jumping with their feet held close together. The last part makes them the opposite of telegenic.
A Hong Kong outfit tried to make a film about them titled “Vampire Robot”. It was not successful.
@ 22
There will be more heroic characters forthcoming, particularly the Walker sisters.
@ 27
Ah yes, the Jiangshi, better known as the hopping vampires because rigor mortis has only left the the ability to jump around as their means of locomotion.
Jesus Saves!
Proving once again that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest!
raven @19
I thought they were kosher because they consumed their cecal feces.
Speaking of chocolate bunnies being tortured into laying eggs, the tradition here in France, les cloches de Pâques, is all the cult’s bells, on the Thursday, fly off to Rome to be lectured / leered / laughed-at by teh popeye-sans-ye, and then return on the Sunday. Hence, the bells are silent on “good” Friday until a loud barrage on the Sunday. During the return flight, the bells bomb children with chocolate eggs.
Only this year, at least locally, something seems to have gone wrong (or there’s more to the story than I am aware of): The local bells did not stop ringing, and I’ve yet to hear the barrage. Dunno about the chocolate bombing, but it’s quite warm at the moment (where I am in S.France), so they’d probably melt.
Except, obviously, for the chocolate bit, this tradition apparently dates back to c.7th century.