Postcards to say something: 024 – Insert Thirty Pieces Of Silver After The Beep

If you hold your prayers up to your ear, you hear your own heartbeat….

Postcards to say something: 023 – Nothing Of Substance

Suddenly I could see why the skywriting was so totally emblematic of the whole campaign!

Congratulate yourselves, guys. It’s a do-nothing feel-good for those already in the churches, and it’s going to appeal to the marshmallow-headed vibe chasers who want a four-song sandwich and a salved conscience.

Spot on!

And the poor, you shall always have with you, unless the poor fuckers starve while you’re busy with the banners and the skywriting. – Gospel According to Black.

Postcards to say something 018 – Mercy Killing

To all those who spoke out against those blame-the-victim, exorcism-driven exploiters of damaged young women, ironically known as Mercy Ministries, Thanks.

Especially, kudos to  Sean the Blogonaut, whose tenacious pursuit of the truth has followed the path of twisty little redefinitions and disavowals, and John from Against Biblical Counselling, who may have hit on a plausible reason why Nancy Alcorn’s enterprise concentrates heavily on eating disorders and homosexuality.

And to the ex-Mercy survivors, the hope that this brings some comfort. The power to succeed is yours.

No thanks at all to the christians who suspected something was amiss, but wouldn’t speak out because that would be “letting the side down”.

The job’s not finished yet. There are still charlatans doing damage to the already-damaged, dealing in a hoodoo world of demons, “spiritual warfare” and other unverifiable hooey, often to the increase of their own wealth and prestige. (You can test this one for yourself by taking notes and see who does well out of exorcisms: the victims are rarely permanently better, but the “practitioners” do quite well indeed.) Jesus may not have answers, but these slick witchdoctors do.

Postcards to say something: 013 – The Mammonary Glands

Giving the theologians a rest, and letting the economists loose for a moment. The Purple Economy would be a good jumping-in point.

Money for anybody’s good works may be justified, but tax exemptions, subsidies and other breaks, for the purpose of spreading the brain-virus further? It’s so patently dishonest, the first thing that one sees is generally apologists yawping about the “good works”.

Would churches be prepared to let all charities be subject to the same rules for funding and taxation, and “charities” to be defined in a way that didn’t include proselytising?

Would the carpetbagging Hinn-jet and the Houston family property portfolio, for example, suffer under such arrangements?

What of the property portfolios of some of the more “traditional” churches, asset-rich with dwindling, ageing congregations?

How much would actual charities like the Bob McGuire Foundation be able to disburse if there was a tie between funding and works?

Well, let your mind boggle… nobody’s lifting the veil of secrecy from that one while there’s a buck to be salted away or diverted to propaganda purposes.

Postcards to say something: 012

There is nothing more annoying than hearing the same tired “proofs” and having, yet again, to tell yet another zealot that, no, that one has been disproved, discredited, or (worst of all!) that even those Answers in Genesis guys are sidling away from that particular argument as it makes its wielder look silly.

Now I’m prepared to allow that many of our faith-afflicted readers cannot tell the difference between a site set up to comment on the “Jeebus – Don’t Say Anything About The Churches (but really that’s what we’re plugging)” campaign and an attack on their religion, person, and loved ones… after all, most of the great christian thinkers are dead, and the new lot don’t seem keen to read their writings… but I reserve the right to delete your unapproved comment if it doesn’t deal, even obliquely, with one of these:
∙ the JAAL campaign;
∙ actual content of a post here;
∙ something of even nugatory interest;
∙ other devious christian selling tactics.

Oh: unless it’s worthy of comment due to egregious stupidity. (Hi, “bob” from Burwood!)

Those Missing $240 “All About Life” Banners…

A plausible theory for the disappearance of those bits of $240 Babble Society merchandise? An indicator of the way things might have been if Jesus was all about the lives that don’t have too many hot chips because it’s cold in the dumpster?

It makes you think… so quickly, think of something nice, like birds in pants.

If the big banner out front is down, the church might see the street, and that would never do, would it?

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 to say something: 007

Licensed to feel ill…

Looks like the fluffy bunny and kitty will have the legally-sanctioned hatred of the church to deal with in Victoria. (Let Sean the Blogonaut tell you about it.)

Scrapings from the comment bin

Golly, it must be one of those Jungian synchronicity things… I was preparing a visual response (above) to one of the many comments that just don’t make it, and a colleague was replying by mail to the same member of Generation SuperficialBook™.

Here’s what he had to say:

I guess another mod deleted your comment to save you from looking like an idiot for not actually reading content on the pages posts, but just looking at pictures, then judging us on that.

What drives me personally, is that christians continually force themselves to have more rights than others. They also fight basic concepts of science, where humanity has to deal with people who believe bronze age concepts of the earth, and push it into our schools. Religion has a status above and beyond any secular group doing the same thing. Our children are brought up in a world where your bigotry is continually being reinforced as moralistic.

YOUR religion pushes itself and tries to tell OTHERS what to do. You invade our laws and try and tell women what they can do with their bodies, their lives, you say who people can love and show commitment to, you actively stop secular parents from being able to have their children taught ANYTHING while your kids get brainwashed by scripture. You hypocrite.

Have a read of some of these articles, then come back and post something that doesn’t make you look like an uneducated bigot cheers!

Thanks to my colleague Gee Suss.

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.