Passing the Vibe

According to the Catch The Fire Ministries blog:

Dr Jackson from the USA encouraged the Body of Christ in Australia to trust in the Lord as our Shepherd! (Psalm 23) Many were mightily touched by the prophetic Word from the Lord and the presence of God! Pastor Daniel also received his Honorary Doctorate of Divinity Degree from St Thomas Christian College in Jacksonville, Florida, USA. Dr Jackson officially conferred this degree on him and then pronounced, “from today you shall now be called Dr Daniel Nalliah.” At this point the whole crowd erupted in a standing ovation of highly emotional shouts of joy and praise to God!

Then the lovely wife and beautiful children of Dr Daniel joined hands with him, along with his sister and her husband who had travelled all the way from Sri Lanka for this very special day, to thank their Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for this wonderful honour. With tears of joy, Dr Daniel shared, “I do not deserve this. It is nothing but the grace of God. I thank you all for standing together with us as a family and ministry. I know for sure that we can reclaim Australia for Jesus. We cannot let another generation pass by. I believe that we in this generation will see the promises of God and His prophetic destiny for our nation of Australia fulfilled in this Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.”

Now, I don’t totally disregard Danny’s words in the above. “I do not deserve this.” – There’s a statement I have no problem with.

This man, legitimate winner of such awards as the Gold Ernie for most sexist public utterance of 2009, and Best Sideshow Barker, Mount Ainslie Circus, thinks he’s got a doctorate.

Now, whoa a minute while we go over some preamble to the ceremony…

• Is this Jackson fellow a doctor, as in actual Ph.D, earned by writing a proper dissertation and bestowed by a reputable university? It’s uncertain. Zamekio Jackson seems to spend a lot of time bestowing honorary Ph.Ds throughout the States. Danny’s is only special in that it involved overseas travel.
• “The Guest speaker Dr. Jackson from the USA is a mighty man of God who is the president of an International Bible College and oversees 348 churches across America. He is a man of prayer who has experienced many mighty miracles as he travels across the nations to minister the Word of God.” – Catch The Fire blog, 24 Jan 2010… but Groupsects blog got to the bottom of the Jackson empire of 300 churches to find “Basically Zamekio has set up his own (unaccredited) college and denomination and if you cough-up the fees you and your church can join too. It’s a business, including the usual lucrative speaking circuit scenario, not a ‘ministerial oversight’ situation. At best, this is a misrepresentation by Nalliah.”
• And the college bestowing this honorary degree that Danny seems keen to trade upon? “

I’ve spent several weeks digging into this ‘College’ and nothing about it checks out at all.

Thanks to Google maps Street View you can cross check the addresses of facilities and none of them match up.

Where there’s supposed to be a college campus, there’s just a row of houses. Where there’s meant to be a church, there are empty shops. Or the address given simply doesn’t exist.” – Groupsects

Chasing myself up here, but I just did some research via Google Maps and Street View on the “college” that’s awarding Danny “Cash In On The Fire Ministries” Nalliah an honorary doctorate (which he better not start treating like a real one)… “Google Maps Link to St Thomas Christian College – 1624 Edgewood Avenue West, Jacksonville, FL, United States” shows a tinpot couple of houses and a parking lot.

The 570 Ellis Rd S, Jacksonville address shows a building the size of a small-town hardware store (about 50 car parks), next to the Mental Health Center.

6507 West Beaver Street, Jacksonville, the “Seminary and Graduate School”, appears to be an abandoned petrol station. - Black, in the AFA forums

The address listed for the accrediting institution (the ‘Southeastern Association of Christian Colleges’), 402 Tabernacle Rd, Ehrhardt, SC does not exist.

There is no ‘Tabernacle Rd’ in Ehrhardt, South Carolina.

This forum post sheds more light.

“Hmmm, St. Thomas Christian College and Theological Seminary? Hmmm, accredited by the Southeastern Association of Christian Colleges (a play off of the legitimate Southern Association of Colleges and Schools). It is funny that in the “schools” information pages it even gets the name of the bogus accrediting body wrong on a 2nd page about accreditation (it is also grammatically incorrect with regard to case, etc.) LOLOL This place is a serious diploma mill. The name of the “college” itself is a rip-off of the name of the legitimate St. Thomas University of Miami Gardens, Florida (which is a Catholic college, run by the Augustinian Friars).”

Ah, St Thomas, ever dubious!

So, basically, somebody who may not be a doctor, from a university that isn’t really a university, confers a degree that isn’t actually a degree on Danny.

How should he now be styled? Fortunately, I remember the mail-order catalogues from Fyshwick, back in my younger days. The answer is simple:

Danny Nalliah is The New Non-Doctor!

PS: The Great South Land Of The Holy Spirit is actually the Island Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu: it was never Australia. Check this out! Is this Pentefundacostal scholarship in bloom?

Postcards to say something: 010

An old friend, Anonymous Trad, sent me this. Like the lovely folk songs Mr Trad has been providing for a number of years now, the origin of this picture is shrouded in mystery.

As you look, observe the layers of meaning: an artist’s work is stolen and made into an image by people working to make an image, and somebody has come along and added yet another layer of meaning to the image.

And as for the big chairs? Takes a lot of chutzpah.

Postcards from our friends: 001

Thanks to our friends who contribute postcards and comments: here’s the first few in an ongoing series.

We promise they won’t jump all over your screen or choke the household bandwidth like the other guys. (Also, contains no hot chips!)

More to come, and a big welcome to Gee Suss’s brother Mo Suss, who’s joing the Legion editorial cadre.

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.