Postcards to say something: 006

Real estate, motorcycles, flash cars, Lear jets: use of the church’s this or that (even the this or that which was especially purchased for your use). The anointing greases the palm.

God wants you to have more money. (Actually, Bob McGuire can keep the poor people as long as the archbishop gets the Money!)

It’s a great lurk. The blokes in Acts, who used to serve in distributing to the needy, have been replaced by those who are ready to see their own wants as “needs”, and see to them pretty swiftly.

Government slaves to work on your house? No problem!

And if you’re the shepherd, who gets to say how you spend the wool-cheque, or tell you off for taking a ewe or little lamb to keep you warm at night?

No wonder the campaign points away from the churches, while trying to get people to connect with those churches. You’d be mad to point out the truth.

Postcards to say something: 005

Oh, you’d believe god works in the stirrings of the regal codpiece, his blunders to perform? Church and state in a marriage of  convenience for convenience of marriage? If it wasn’t so equal-opportunity, what with the occasional atheist or agnostic among the  bishops and archbishops, we’d be wondering what was going on.

There are rumours the sherry aficionado group took power in a bloodless coup some time during the Beatles era.

Postcards to say something: 004

Like the families and lovers of characters in TV detective dramas are always getting killed. arrested and so forth, it seems that hanging around with Jeebus will get you into all kinds of trouble. That car accident that killed half-a-dozen, “and God spared me”…. hey, doesn’t that mean he was a complete turd-croquette to the other six?

Or maybe shit just happens, and we think we’re important. What do you think, O Unique and Preshus Snowflake? (This is a rhetorical question.)

Chalk One Up For Jeebus The Graffitist, or “Postcards From The Dull Edge”

So, what’s new in the game of promoting Jeebus without mentioning bibles, churches, and all the other cultural and literary baggage that would normally be associated with this figure (who is, after all, a product of bibles and churches)?

There’s postcards… in which people express their gratitude for hot chips, termite mounds, poorly-cropped photos of people making faces, Ferraris, and dogs. Lots of dogs. I’m fairly sure the chips were made by Spiros Papathanassiou, from spuds grown by Bert Fernackerpan. As for the Ferrari… does one of them fit through the eye of a needle?

Top marks, anyway, to the team who are still trying to draw the fire away from the bad bits about Jeebus’s followers by making him all that much more nebulous.  The control over at that site is more rigid than we practice here: after all, we do let the occasional gripe or pretending-to-be-atheism-curious post in here from christians. But on the site of the Farceur, the (six-figure) Sum, and the Holy Post(card), there’s no chance of thanking anybody for herpes, genocide, deformed babies or jock itch.

We reserve the right, at any time, to refuse or remove any material from the Site for any reason in our absolute discretion, including without limitation where the material is considered obscene, offensive, inappropriate, blasphemous, or infringing upon the rights of any third party.

And of course, you don’t own it any more once it’s up there. Somewhere an ad agency creative is laughing, while Jeebus’s zealous people do his or her work, in their own intent-but-often-inept way. I loved the one that had still managed to maintain its “insert your text here” template.

But, just in case you’re wondering why our toothy little friend is grinning, he’s seen that postcards are not the bottom of the barrel…

In the spirit of Mr Eternity, Arthur Stace who wrote the word Eternity in chalk on the streets of Sydney for many years, the Eternity Chalk Challenge wants church youth groups across NSW to write ‘Eternity’ on as many streets as they can.

The Challenge will run from 1-7 October 2009 in conjunction with the Jesus. All about life campaign running on TV and other media. The Challenge is a unique, fun opportunity for young people across NSW to do something special in the holidays, for a great purpose.

The youth group that scores the most points in the Eternity Chalk Challenge will win an amazing weekend away at the stunning Youthworks Port Hacking camp complex in Sydney.

A fantastic prize will be awarded to the most creative expression of ‘Eternity’ chalked on the pavement.

The prize for the most creative expression of ‘Eternity’ in chalk is a free overseas Mission Immersion trip sponsored by Jesus. All about life.

The individual prize is open to anyone aged 16 or over who is a member of a youth group registered for the Challenge.

I hope the minions of Jeebus keep it legal. It would also be a shame if they inspired others to edit, add, erase or parody the chalkings…

Meanwhile, there are plenty of things christians could be up to, quietly. And some of them are, probably. Shame about the guys with the bullhorn and the billboard.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

There. Some of you thought I couldn’t spell it. But I have it.

In particular, big props to Bob McGuire.  Bob is so christlike, the establishment (as personified by one Archbishop, ironically surnamed “Hart”) apparently want him gone.

Now, there is no “caritas” in the Archbishopric(sp?): none of your “The poor and street kids of St Kilda need not fear, as here’s what we’re doing to carry on this vital work.” Priorities don’t seem to take the poor and oppressed into account when there’s turbulent priests to be ridded of..

Just, out of the blue…

“It’s the archbishop. I’ll be there in 20 minutes.” I didn’t have time to think or call for help.

Luckily, Judy, the office manager, was present to take notes.

By the time he left, I was feeling 90 years of age, not 75, the age of statutory senility.

He gave me two dates for compliance. One was my birthday. He expects a letter of resignation. The other is a month later. He expects me to vacate the premises.

No good whingeing about lack of courtesy or respect for a senior field officer.

Power makes some people less restrained than they naturally are. Jesus warned about power, especially among his disciples.

I hope Bob’s Foundation can carry on: from what I have been able to see, it’s not church-controlled.

You know, if there were more Bob McGuires and less Denis Harts, Benny Hinns and Jim Wallaces, christianity itself might have a fighting chance of being respected.

Can you tell the management of most major christian organisations from the Pharisees without a field guide?

As another little, old, bald guy once put it:

LATE ADD: It’s apparently about Bob spending money on the poor. Well, that is just so un-Catholic: what was he thinking?

We’re Here Because We’re Here

There are people wondering why this site’s here. I’m sometimes one of them, but then I wasn’t the questionable genius who decided that it would be a great idea to hire some atheist ad-man (Angus Kinnaird of FutureBrand) to advertise church, with the brief that all the *existing* parts of christianity: church, bible and religion – should be left out of the picture.

Here’s a link to an earlier post on the subject:  – the lengths gone to are extraordinary.

So, once the creepy pedos, pastors who take comforting the flock a bit too literally, conmen, outright thieves, frauds (hi, Fake Cancer Pastor!), all the negative connotations of church and the unreliable bible, are taken out, what’s left?

Jesus. It’s very hard to pin anything on a character who’s been dead roughly 2000 years, and whose life has been rewritten by everybody from Paul through the sneaky revisionists whose grubby fingerprints can be seen in the Codex Sinaiticus. He doesn’t give interviews. He is the sizzle: no matter how lousy the steak may be, and how bad the risk of dodgy belly after-effects, the meaningless hissing noise is hard to beat.

A good ad-man can accentuate the positive. Indeed, labelling is often the first thing to be examined, and Truth can be an early casualty in the war for consumer attention.

Labels. Surely you remember a few of the classics like “Work Choices“, “Clean Feed“, “Better, Fairer PBS“… and of course there was no choice, improvement or clarification implied anywhere but the title. So it is with the “Jesus, All About Life” campaign.

A fictional persona, based on a guy who isn’t alive, being pushed as relevant to people who are? No, that’s not the big irony.

The Big Irony is that anybody who responds to the campaign gets… no, not Jesus. (The Trade Practices guys would have a field day when JC failed to materialise.)

No, what the eager respondent gets is… you guessed it: immediately seized upon by the very same churches the campaign is careful to avoid mentioning, with a fair chance of Brother Kidd-Fondle or Pastor Brown-Envelope being on staff. Then the process begins of indoctrinating the hapless newcomer with the bible that was sort-of-omitted from this ad campaign run by… that’s right: The Bible Society!

The answer, then, is that the title “Jesus: All About Lies” was quicker than “Jesus: All About Dodgy Advertising” or “Churches And Bibles: It’s What They Dare Not Mention“.

It’s right up there with buying a laptop on EBay and getting a box of rocks in the mail.

McJeebus – the Sappy Meal pick ‘n’ choose menu

Ever tried to stand on a stair that wasn’t there? Swiped at an optical illusion and (of course) missed?

If you have, you’ll be part-way to identifying with somebody I know. As a good, skeptical atheist person, my friend has been known to reply with questions and doubt, when buzzed by the whiny mosquitoes of constant evangelising. Indeed, my friend decided to put in some serious work on deprogramming…

…my younger sister. The irony is that she has the information. To her credit she has watched almost all of my atheist DVDs including ‘How the earth began’ and still chooses to believe in her god. Her faith seems impenetrable.

… Her attraction to Christianity is that she feels it provides answers to the randomness of life; it provides consolation and hope. She enjoys the warm of fuzzy of a sky daddy looking out for her. It helps her deal with death and believes it gives her moral guidance.

… Any anomaly I raise with her she may concede but ultimately puts it down to unquestionable faith. “I don’t have the answers but that doesn’t stop me from believing.”

Her church is youth based, Hillsong in its style, lots of singing and praise. It fills her needs to be loved and to extend love to others. It seems details are unimportant. Trying to discuss religion with her is like shadow boxing; an exercise in frustration. So I don’t bother. As long as the idea of god serves a purpose, she’ll hold onto the delusion.

At McJeebus™, the Church Of All Spirit, No Substance, we don’t mind if you ditch the pickle: bins are provided. Straight to the sundae every Sunday? No wucking Mc Jeebus™ Flurries!

It doesn’t really matter what the young footsoldier of Corporate Jesus believes. They don’t have to do more than the old Kenneth Hagin Cop-Out -  ‘The Bible says it, I believe it and that settles it!’ – for that matter, they don’t need to know more Bible than a couple of soundbites such as you might find in a Darlene Zschech song. Certainly contextual reading is out of style. In the age of Twitter, it seems Jesus’s frontliners only need to be twits.

As long as the collections keep coming in, the recruiting happens (come on, how many kids/young adults go to Youth Alight or Plastic Shakers or any of the Jesus Lite™ MoshPits for the noise and proximity of potential jigginess? Lots, I bet!) and the Merch keeps selling, things are good.

Need footsoldiers for a demonstration of numbers, signatures for a development application (sign twice, it’s extra nice!), “volunteers” for those lucrative symposium/conference/rally/merch opportunity occasions? Just keep the excitement flowing, and hordes of young’uns will stack your chairs, stuff your envelopes, carry your (notes and cheques only, please) holey-bottomed collection buckets.

There’s a certain comfort for the management when questions aren’t asked. The members who are just there for the “Ooh! Ponies!” feeling don’t have a foundation to rock. By the time the Holy Spirit Of Endorphins™ has stopped stimulating them, they’re either settled-in as regular tithers (and breeders of NextGen McJeebus™ Consumers) and will sit quietly, or used-up, and should be swept aside for fresh meat. You don’t get to sit too long in Mickey Dee’s if you’re not buying, and woe betide the blow-ins who just want to use the dunnies.

If you’ve gotten this far down the page and haven’t blown an artery, you’re probably an atheist or agnostic. Good. Here’s some advice: don’t bother with the McJeebus Happy-Mealers. You won’t convince ‘em of anything while they’re too busy chasing the sugar rush. Don’t waste your time: you can come back when they’re older and knackered from a constant diet of rubbish. They’ll eventually be out of the drive-thru: as Tanya Levin says of one of these churches: “There is a 50 per cent turnover every five years. Hillsong is renowned for having a very big back door.”

After pap like that, a diet of stone-ground skepticism will probably be very welcome.

Pascal’s All-Day Sucker.

Anybody who’s been “witnessed to” by a christian of any intellect at all, is probably aware of Pascal’s Wager.

Good ol’ Blaise Pascal, mathematical French guy, provided this little mind-bender, and it’s been a handy leading edge to many a wedge of witness ever since.

Oh, you don’t need to prove there’s a god, it goes. Just hedge your bets.  If you follow my simple gambling system, says Pascal, you cannot lose…

1. Believe there’s no god and die believing there’s no god. If there’s no god, End of story – No Gain, No Loss.
2. Believe there’s a god and die believing there’s a god. If there’s no god, End of story – No Gain, No Loss.
3. Believe there’s no god and die believing there’s no god. If there’s a god, Endless Pain and Nasty People With Pitchforks. Never mind that they’re not in the bible.
4. Believe there’s a god and die believing there’s a god. If there’s a god, Jackpot, grab a harp and get ready for a forever of being good.

Now, like many a racing system, there is a bit of flawed thinking going on. Like the tout who has you mentally counting your winnings, the whole shebang concentrates on Happy Endings.

Please forgive me for wandering, but this reminds me of the olden days.

There was an old trick that got tried time and again at my boarding school: new boys would be told not to stoke up on sausages, because this dinnertime there would be as much ice-cream, jelly and custard as the lads could eat, due to some mysterious malfunction in the kitchen freezers.

Of course, the greedy little blighters would often eat one sausage, or none, out of their three. The older lads would say, “Oh well, if you don’t want those…” and wolf down the discarded snags.

Guess what? Dessert was a small serving of Indescribable Hard Slice in a small pool of watery custard, as always.

And we were speaking of sweets, weren’t we? Well, what about this for a revised “wager” – Pascal’s All-Day Sucker:

1. Believe there’s no god, live life like it’s all there is, and die believing there’s no god. If there’s no god, End of story – Life lived, No Loss.
2. Believe there’s a god and die believing there’s a god. If there’s no god, and you’ve been holding back on living (a big “Hi!” to all our celibate clergy) and spent your entire life praying, tithing and annoying people about your religion, it’s still end of story – No Gain, and a complete loss of a life.

If the absence of other possibilities annoys you, perhaps I could interest you in this wonderful scheme where I bless all your money overnight in my Secret Holy Place. Results are guaranteed!

The church as slave labour exploiter

From the blog of Paul Neville, QLD National Party Member For Hinkler, 22 JUL 2007:

The latest Work for the Dole project to finish in Bundaberg has produced winning results for participants – 12 have left to undertake full-time work, 38 have left to take up part-time work and 7 have gone on to further study.

Local Federal Member Paul Neville was thrilled with the outcome, and will congratulate participants at today’s graduation ceremony for the WFTD activity ‘A Real Edge’.

“Apart from helping all those people find some paid employment, the activity has also produced results for the Bundaberg community,” Mr Neville said.

“Participants chose from a wide variety of positions, including administration, furniture restoration, construction, retail, IT, childcare, warehouse and truck offsider, animal care, tourist information and recycling,” he said.

“From that, a whole range of projects were completed, such as the refurbishment of the Church Manse at the Christian Outreach Centre, the replacement of greenhouse shade cloth and rebuilding of soil boxes at the Burnett Council Depot, and the replacement of stable roofing at Bundaberg Show Grounds as well as improved services for many other community organisations.”

— Yep, right: fixing up a minister’s residence for a church!

Have a look in Google Maps at the place. It ain’t a tiny property.