Putting the ‘Fun’ in ‘Fundamentalism’
So, who here has interesting or entertaining stories about dealing with religious kooks of one variety or another? Did your parents join a cult? Have you gotten into a heated and serious argument with a fundamentalist only to find out to your embarrassment that they were actually schizophrenic? Were you ever forced to go to one of those “Gay Cure” camps? Did your religious friends put a bucket of holy water above the door and keep a priest or pastor handy so that they could baptize you when you walked in? Ever find a Chick Tract rolled up inside a condom? Any Catholics out there ever need the Heimlich because you choked on the communion wafer?
Well, I want to hear about it.
The best, most amusing (and most believable — and trust me, I’ll probably be able to smell bullshit when I read it) stories will be featured as posts (with all due credit, of course, plus a link to your website if you have one or a sketch of your favorite pony or whatever you want to accompany it). And, as with FMyLife and other such sites, don’t be offended if your story doesn’t make the cut.
For right now, e-mail them to me using the “Contact” page over on the left (or if you have an account on the site, log in and submit them as posts) — I’ll try to have some kind of form up by the end of the week.
Tell your friends. Seriously this time. I know some of you actually are, and I really appreciate it, but you other guys… it takes thirty seconds. Only slightly more time than it takes to *cough ahem* click an ad on the side of the page and then close the browser window *choke cough ahem*.
Speaking of telling your friends, only TWO MORE DAYS to the END OF MAY 5TH, the HOG CALL DEADLINE. I’m still 249,879 Twitter followers away from my goal! Let’s get on this shit!
Jabberwock
May 4th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
America’s Funniest Fundamentalist Christian Videos?
May 4th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Sadly, the only story I have in this regard is not even mine, and is pretty boring at that: just my dad and the dad of one of my friends talking, when the friend’s dad basically asserted that evolution required more faith to believe in than creationism. Whoop-de-flippin’-do.
May 5th, 2009 at 7:10 am
Not a really a story, but a whole anthology of different tales. I don’t know if any of them were really funny or anything. They all involve my last years of school — when I was fourteen, my family and I emigrated, and the only school we could find in the lcoal area that was decent enough was a Christian school — a CLOSED BRETHREN school.
Look them up. They’re the worst form of Christians imaginable. Believe you me.
That’s all I’m saying for now, but I’ll have more on it.
May 5th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
I was born again in my teens, and God let me be undone and learn to think again when I went to college. I consider this positive proof He has a sense of humor.
May 6th, 2009 at 5:12 am
The most annoying “religious kooks” I’ve encountered have been the representatives of “secular cults” like EST and Scientology — both of which somehow brainwashed people into advertising their expensive scams.
May 6th, 2009 at 6:58 am
I could probably dig up a few stories, I spent grades 6 to 12 in northern Utah, I was 1 out of maybe 4 or 5 non-mormons in my school of 1,500. Got kind of bad my senior year when someone caught on to my evil ways and told the school seminary teachers (yes they teach mormonism in public schools in Utah) about me so I was hounded by them, trying to talk me into skipping my other classes so I could sit in on their lectures. It just seems like some part of that should be illegal.
May 6th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
I’ve had most of my fun with secular cults, but they probably don’t count, so here’s a rag of mine from March 2008 about a group of people who never sin. Ever. http://fenris.furtopia.org/soulwinners.html
May 6th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Have you ever heard of Christian Gnosis? I have this old book (sort of, it’s from 89) about a “congress” that happened, and it describes a lot of weird rituals, mantras/expressions and “teachings about spiritual progression”. I don’t think that this qualifies as “fundie” material, there’s only a few excerpts that might seem too harsh (like the one who discourages adoption and fornication), other than that the whole thing is pretty tame. Anyway, the content is hilarious, you would think it’s some kind of joke if nobody told you. All pages are filled with “INVERENTIAL PEACE, BROTHERS!”, “Venerable master”, and long and incomprehensible babbling about mountains/circles/cycles/random objects. It’s all in portuguese, but if you’re interested I can translate some parts for you.
Just for the sake of it, here’s a small preview:
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/1781/whatamd.jpg
“AE GAE GUF GUF GUF”
Seriously, the whole book is more or less like this.
May 7th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Thankfully, most of the Christians in my life are the respectful kind who realize I’m an adult who can make spiritual decisions on my own — although my parents are evangelical presbyterians, and when I first informed them that I’d given up the Christian faith, my mother’s response was “I will pray that you’ll find the truth.” I told her I appreciated that she cared enough to want to pray for me, but that her prayer had already been answered, as I’d found the truths that made sense to me.
P.S. I found your site by accident, looking for criticisms of Chick tracts, and your dissections are absolutely hilarious. It takes a special brand of satirist who can include references to Ren and Stimpy, Invader ZIM, Duran Duran, TMBG, and Pink Floyd when discussing fundamentalist Christianity — and to employ proper spelling and grammar while doing it. You really should consider marrying me. I bake killer peanut butter cookies.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I was raised catholic, and I must say it’s near impossible to choke on the communion wafer, it melts instantly on your tongue. (And it tastes great actually).
A funny story about the communion though, I once heard of a priest who was allergic to gluten, so the nuns had to make special gluten-free communion wafer for him :p
I guess the bible never says Jesus contained gluten.
May 8th, 2009 at 1:11 am
I was a Baha’i for five weeks. They have special feasts where outsiders aren’t welcome – if one shows up, it becomes a Unity Feast. They promote gender equality and a one world government – and want it to be ruled by men. When I asked ‘Why?’ I was told ‘The reason would become apparent in time’. Yeah, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, it was pretty bloody apparent to me it was outright misogyny!
I’ve spoken to Mor(m)ons and got told that the Native Americans were the lost tribe of Israel or some garbage like that.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are scared to meet my mum: she tells them that she’s a Spiritualist, and you can see the fire on their tracks outta there!
I’ve found Chick Tracts and had a good laugh over them.
May 8th, 2009 at 5:40 am
@Me
It bloody well is illegal Teachers cannot use the school to evangelize to student that is abso-fucking-lutly illegal, it violates separation of church and state but then again the Mormons own Utah so I’m not that surprised by this.
May 8th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
You can read my funny fundie story here. It involves someone trying to perform an exorcism on me in a moving vehicle while he was driving.
May 8th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Communion wafers are actually required by Vatican decree to contain some gluten, but low-gluten wafers are acceptable.
Anyway, my story isn’t very interesting or funny, I don’t think. After my sister’s fiance committed suicide, she had a mental breakdown, ran off and joined a cult, and eventually married a 60-year-old faith healer who claims, among other things, to have helped amputees grow limbs back. That’s about it.
http://www.johnmellor.org/
That’s the dude’s website, if you’re curious. Highlight: “The local witch doctors were astounded by the miracles that God did amongst them”. The fact that he unironically uses the term “witch doctors” is all you really need to know about him.
May 10th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Speaking of Chick tracts, guess who’s been busy lately?
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1048/1048_01.asp?wpc=1048_01.asp&wpp=a
Reading this, you truly appreciate the fact that Chick is really old. I mean, really.
Old Guy: “He wants to steal the most valuable thing you’ve got.”
College-looking girl” *Gasp* “My iPod?
Come to think of it, I’m surprised he knew to put the “i” in lowercase. But seriously, who talks like that? I’m that age, and even the most dramatic of my friends don’t act like that. Well, one or two does, but no one cares about them.
May 10th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
any of you who have been to, or known anybody who’s been to, the University of Arkansas (yeah yeah, i know) should have heard of he whom we Razorbacks call Moses. He stands out there in front of either the library or Old Main every day and bible-thumps to the passing college students. One of his favourite rants is the “SoWhority” girls one. He singled me out one day cause of my long man-hair.
http://www.uark.edu/studorg/freepres/editorials/02222001_moses.htm
for those curious
May 11th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
16: Oddly, I like this editorial. Whenever the Soulwinners come to the University of Houston, there’s going to be a column in the paper the next day advocating censorship.
Then again, whenever ANYTHING mildly offensive happens at the University of Houston calls for censorship follow soon after. Face it, most of us college students are whiny. Good move for U. Ark.
May 12th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Long time lurker of EtJ, had to put this one event on.
I am a sad person. I am obsessed with the franchise of video games known as Sonic the Hedgehog. The one that fell into obscurity years ago? That one.
Anyway, there was a debate on a particular forum about what races the particular characters were (e.g. The Japanese see Sonic as Australain. That sort of race). One user then talked about using ‘Mobians’ (a term for the unofficial beings of the non-canon comics…irrelevant, really) to group them all due to it being too wordy to list all the species. I asked them why they didn’t just use ‘animals’. They told me that it wouldn’t give any grouping for the humans. I, forgetting that religious kooks are very much prevalent, mistakingly pointed out that humans are animals, and that they’re related to the chimpanzee family. I’ll quote the next post, because paraphrasing does no justice;
“Now hold on there, that is not true we are not related to apes stop going by the darwen theries its all lies. We are made in gods image if you think god is an ape then I’m going to kill you.”
This then spawned another two pages of arguments over Creationism vs Evolution, and got another heated debate thread of 10+ pages opened up in another part of the forum.
…Oops. Even fictional franchises aren’t safe. The irony. There was another thread in the very same forum ABOUT SONIC PRACTICING RELIGION, and it stayed completely calm, even with mocking references to Christianity in it.
May 13th, 2009 at 4:21 am
@The Luigian: Heh, well, I’m by no means discouraging people from going out and getting into arguments with fundamentalists and videotaping it.
@Linhasxoc: Yeah, it happens. Though, I’m sure the contextual specifics could be amusing if there was a transcript. I guess that’s part of the problem with this concept: There’s too much boilerplate, one-line stupidity, because most everything these people can do is parrot back some “clever” little expression they read on a bumper sticker when pressed to defend their perspective. (e.g. “Well, God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” or whatever.)
@Felis: They do seem goofy. Do you have any specific tales to relate?
@Panda Rosa: Well, if there is a God, hopefully he does in fact have a sense of humor instead of being the angry, judgmental, petty little douchebag depicted in the literal narratives of most religious literature and whose attributes are emphasized cheerily by fundamentalists of any flavor, as though they somehow think that their jealous, petty, wrathful God loves people who derive schadenfreude from others’ damnation so much that he’s not going to just fling them into the pit with everyone else.
@Zombie: Oh, yeah, Scientologists are pretty much the worst. What’s fun is to talk really loudly with your friends whenever you pass one of the little “personality test” booths about Lord Xenu, and L. Ron Hubbard’s founding a cult on a dare, basically.
@Me: Which brings me to Mormonism, which is basically the predecessor to Scientology. Oh yeah, God lives on the planet Kolob and will give every faithful couple an asteroid to fill up with their offspring. And the original inhabitants of America were all white people! And… the whole thing is just a pile of silliness, grafted like some tumor-riddled, unidentifiable, purposeless organ onto the already disease-ridden, goofy-assed, schizophrenic body of much of Judeo-Christian faith.
@Fenris: I’ll check it out. Not sure if I’m going to do a kind of round-up post or if I’ll post them individually. Also, I might set up a kind of submission form that I can moderate routinely as a separate page, and pick out highlights for the front page, but I’m not sure.
@SR92: Goofy. I don’t think it really qualifies as “fundie” either, but Christianity-derived cults are pretty interesting too. Anyway, bizarre… thanks for sharing, and I’m definitely interested in some translations.
@d: Yeah, it’s always fun when people pray for you for just about anything, really… David Cross has a great bit about it. Something like: “Oh, you’re going to pray for me? Awesome! ‘Cause I was gonna go and fuck this girl… great that you have the whole ‘praying’ thing covered for me, though. Thanks!”
But praying for you to “find the truth” is even better, in part because it implies this complete inability to perform self-examination. Like, I don’t know “the truth” and I know I don’t know. There are some things in the universe that it’s currently impossible for the human mind to comprehend. Hell, we didn’t even know about atoms, really, until the last few centuries. And that’s the whole point, and the whole thrill, really, is seeking the truth, this never-ending journey — not just sitting back once you find something you like and going “yep, this is it, I have ALL the answers! I don’t even need evidence — I’ve got it all figured out.” There’s a fundamental misunderstanding, there, about the nature of reality, and it’s sad when people do that because it’s like reading The Little Engine That Could, putting the book down when you’re finished and saying “welp, I’m quitting school and never reading again — I think I’ve gotten everything I’m going to get out of this venture.”
Anyway, thanks for all the compliments. Mail me some cookies and we’ll talk.
@Fishy: Yeah, I guess. I was raised Catholic, too, but it’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten about their dissolution rate and such. They DO taste pretty good, though. Wine’s a little too sweet. And the whole transubstantiation thing is about as goofy as it gets.
@Renaissance Blonde: Baha’i are about as goofy as any other faith, really, and misogyny runs pretty deep throughout all our culture, sadly.
Jehovah’s Witnesses seem like they’re a lot of fun to mess around with, but none of them ever visit. I’d totally welcome them in and then try to convince them to join my cult.
@BrandonL337: Was going to say the same thing, but then I thought “Well, Utah…”
@The Cynic Sage: I’ll check it out, thanks!
@LM: Really? I had no idea the Vatican actually had a whole decree about what the communion wafers could/could not contain. What’s amusing is that if transubstantiation really WAS real, then they wouldn’t have to worry at all about food allergies because it would magically become the body of Jesus and all that. I find that priest’s lack of faith disturbing.
But yeah, it’s fun to think that if the Catholic version of God was real, he’d be damning people for having food allergies and diabetes and such. It’s like “Welp, I made you that way, but FUCK YOU!”
@Linhasxoc: Yeah, I know. I’ll probably do that one sometime soon. Right now, I’ve been throwing together a relatively quick Dissection of The Thing, in between writing the pilot for a TV show that I’m going to be submitting to the NYTVF, and writing sketches, and writing two novels, and doing work, and… gyah. I think I’m biting off more than I can chew, but whatever — I’ll just eat it up and spit it out and do it my way and such.
@dingo: Pretty sure there’s a guy like that on every college campus. One of my regrets is not arguing with the one who’d come to MTU the one semester I attended. I wonder what leads these people to believe that screaming derision is going to gain them followers between the ages of, like, 18 and 28.
@Fenris: Yeah, I agree: Freedom of speech is an absolute, even if it’s ridiculous nutjobs screaming about how “fags will burn in hell” or whatever. (Which is certainly good news to British smokers worried about the flammability of nicotine in their afterlives, I’m sure.)
@Taxi Driver-Dermy: Yeah, so where do anthropomorphic, talking hedgehogs fit into God’s grand scheme?
But yeah, it’s always really pathetic when people are incapable of grasping the fact that humans are, in fact, animals. I mean, what, we just have all the same components right down to the microscopic level, and at that microscopic level, our building blocks bear a 99% resemblance to a species of primate, but we’re somehow not even remotely close to being anything animal because some book said that we were “made in God’s image” (which begs the question, why would an omnipotent being need DNA, lungs, fingers, etc?) and that somehow renders false the gigantic and undeniable mountains of evidence?
One fucking book gets written, and the writers claim they were “inspired by God”, and for the next couple millennia, you’ve got these assholes running around saying that observable evidence is not, in fact, observable evidence. But why didn’t God just make the world exactly the way they all seem to think he wants us to believe it is? Bleh.
Anyway, thanks for all the comments, everyone. I’ll look over the stories you’ve linked and mentioned and such and make some posts. And maybe I’ll throw together a submission form that probably nobody will ever use, over at secularsavior.com or something.
May 13th, 2009 at 4:27 am
P.S. I’m very disappointed in you all for not getting more riled up about Hog Call 2009. I’m only at about 132 followers on Twitter.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Yo, Jabberwock.
Sorry for not responding earlier.
One example of my school days was a friend of mine: he found this obscure little webcomic called (I think) Exterminatus Now or something, basically a sort of Sonic fan comic.
He went on the forums, for whatever reason, and decided to speak with one of the admins/comic authors about the origins of life, under the name “lankywolf”.
Really.
This got him into a heap of trouble with said admin, who had a real temper. Now, being about fourteen, I wanted to stay as part of the “in crowd”, so I kept up the facade of being a good little Christian boy. Now, one day when I was round his house for a visit, my friend (let’s call him Nathan) asked me to go on the site and continue this huge debate he was having (he gave me the password to his user account!). He was going away for a week with no access to the internet, you see.
I decided to, just for the hell of it. The result was a continuous stream of posts as long as this comment, with quote after quote from previous posts, regarding all sorts of issues such as the Big Bang, Creationism, Jesus, God’s morality, etc., etc., etc., etc, etc., to the point where I got him banned.
On his pleading/insistence, I went back — with a new account — no less then FIVE times, resulting in so many angry comments from the admins and users that the site was effectively running like an IRC chat.
This caused the forum to crash, and they had to take the forums down for a week and clear everything up.
In short, I was an unknowing ‘epic troll’, for a so-called friend, who turned out to be jsut as two-faced as all the other ‘Christian friends’ I had at that horrid little shitstain of a school.
Still, trolling sounds fun. Might go back and do it again, if I ever found the site.
May 13th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
There is a quote I like from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Even those of us who attempt to be as open-minded as possible are guilty of this sometimes; I think in my mother’s case, she wanted to pray for me less because she felt I hadn’t the capacity for self-examination than that it was the only way she knew how to “support” me with her limited world-view.
The implications I got from her statement were more along the lines of “OK, you go and have your pagan or atheistic phase, but if I keep praying for you eventually you’ll come to realize that Christ is lord and you’ll come back to the faith”. This is why I simply thanked her and went on my merry way, continuing my quest without arguing her about it.
It was a tough moment for me, though. I know she was trying to say she cares about me, but it did sting as it was a belittlement of my intellectual and spiritual curiosity. Sigh.
….You think I’m kidding? My friends all think I put crack in the cookies I bake. (of course, with all of these evangelicals coming and going in our house all the time, who really knows what that is in the sugar bowl?) I could win you over with a few, I think.
May 15th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I’ve had a lot of weird experiences with religious fanatics, but this one happened to my parents.
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, my parents grasped at any religious straw that came their way. People tried to exorcise the demons of cancer out of her and made her drink some kind of blessed water at a time when she could barely swallow. But the most memorable such incident was the shrine that the Catholics built in our living room.
I came home one day to find some strangers in our apartment, carefully laying a large white towel over my parents’ entertainment centre. On that, they propped a huge framed picture of Jesus with colored rays of light streaming out of his chest like he was a Care Bear. To his left, on top of one of the big speakers, went a picture of some saint and a glum-looking Virgin Mary was on the right.
The Catholics arranged two rosaries, one red and one blue, before the pictures and lit a candle before Jesus. We were then told that a candle had to be kept burning constantly there. I wanted to ask what would happen if the candle went out, but my parents were very big on my not contradicting or offending religious people in any way, so I didn’t even get to rearrange the rosaries in a pentagram shape after the Catholics left.
After about three days of the shrine taking pride of place in the room, my parents had enough of checking the candle and not being able to use their entertainment centre, so they took the whole caboodle down and we watched Only Fools and Horses.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:39 am
I went to a Christian Camp and on the first day, to a room full of fairly liberal Christians [most believe in evolution, big bang, etc] they made a speech on how animals who care for each other disprove “Darwinism” and how atheists will go to hell.
On the same camp, one guy who brought condoms was sent home, and they called his parents. He was 17.
May 16th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Dear God.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
@Felis: No worries. Thanks for the story. Though, it’d be more interesting if you could find details (like posting history on the forums) so that we could see why exactly everyone got so riled up.
@d.: I wasn’t doubting you, I was trying to get you to mail me cookies.
About your mom, I meant that it implied that she was incapable of self-examination, not that she thought you were. That is, that she was confident she found the answer, found the truth, when she basically just stopped looking as soon as she discovered something she liked and found comforting, declaring it “the truth”.
I know what you mean, though. And that definitely must have been hard to deal with the simultaneous expression of love and total dismissiveness of your needs and desires and such.
@Marian: Hahaha, I love that it was important up to the point where it interfered with using the entertainment center. And honestly, I don’t really understand why they couldn’t have set it up, say, on a small card table or something. Why arbitrarily render an appliance useless?
Definitely goofy. Thanks for the story!
@J Daly: Hah, well, it’s pretty much guaranteed that anyone who thinks that evolution can be “disproved” by pointing to animals giving a shit about each other (because obviously it’s not evolutionarily advantageous for a species to actively work to maintain and preserve itself) is going to have a really goofy, unrealistic perspective on human sexuality and a number of other issues as well. Still, depressing. Compounded of course by the infantilization of a 17-year-old who is equally capable of making his own decisions as an 18-year-old. Bleh. Thanks for the story.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:08 am
J: I’ll have a rummage ’round and see what I can find.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I made some of my cookies last night when I couldn’t sleep, and my insomnia-addled brain deformed them
They were unfit for even my pet rat, who turned her nose up at them.I suppose that means I am doomed.
Oh, I gotcha. Well, I find that’s true of most people I meet, or so it seems. Complacency is far more comfortable than curiosity, and people would much rather simply be told something that makes them feel better about life than be forced to question, to doubt, to wonder.
Another interesting story, not necessarily fundamentalist Christian related, but that was the tone of what happened…I have a fondness for handmade plush, and I saw a listing on Etsy for custom orders being available in a shop I’d always wanted to order from. Since June’s coming up and I’m pansexual, I wanted to commission a “pride” plush with a rainbow flag on its belly (actually six plushes with the flag, one in each colour of the rainbow). I convo’ed the person and she wrote back telling me she was “trying to stay away from controversial topics” in the things she sold. She listed “gay rights” alongside “abortion”. I balked at this. Firstly, how is “gay pride” tantamount to “gay rights” debates? How is dressing a plush with a rainbow flag going to bring controversy and politics into your Etsy store? I didn’t really get it, but I wrote her back saying I’d compromise and we could nix the flag but I’d still buy from her, because after all they’re her creations and if she’s not comfortable with it for whatever reason, whether I believe it’s bigoted or not, I can’t fault her for being honest. I’d move my business someplace else, but I like her work and think her plush is very cute and it’s exactly what I want. :/ Sigh.
Okay, back to my writing. I’m attempting to prove that Spongebob Squarepants is a better role model than Jesus, based upon the principle that he embodies the seven holy virtues almost perfectly in opposition with the other characters in the show which are caricatures of the seven deadly sins. Yes, I do have too much time on my hands, why do you ask?
May 26th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Question. Does it have to be a Fundie story? I’m currently involved in an ongoing debate with a Christian (a normal Christian) about whether God is malignant or not. It’s not hilarious, but if nothing else, it makes for a very interesting read.
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Yeah. I haven’t had it, but my friend has. Her father the a die-hard fundementalist. The best think I have heard from her has to be the time when she was ill at church to which her father told her it was because she had demons in her soul. Just because she reads fantasy books.
(note, my friend does not live with her dad. And for good reason)
June 5th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I was raised in a fundie church by a fundie mom (still is). Wow, I feel like I could fill a book. Ever see the movie “Jesus Camp”? Most people watch in horror. I watched in “oh ya, I remember that.”
1. My mom flipping out and running around the house dabbing all the walls with olive oil (”annointing” it b/c she was mad about something.
2. My mom’s friend coming to the house, and upon seeing our stuffed “My Pet Monster,” saying “I have ‘My Pet Jesus’” and casting demons out of the stuffed animal. Yes, the stuffed animal.
3. While my brother was at church camp as a 10-year-old, he faced his own Gitmo. He was literally kept up until 3 a.m., until he finally succumb to the pressure and became “saved.”
4. Said mom’s friend from No. 2 went to the stage during a service in the midst of the 1984 presidential election. A few days before, Walter Mondale had wiped the floor with Ronald Reagan in a debate. This woman explained that the reason this happened was people were sticking Reagan voodoo dolls with pins. I guess they quit before election night.
5. As my brother likes to note, my mom is the only person we’ve ever heard use the term “Jesus” and “mother fucker” in the same sentence (and not as “Jesus mother fucker,” more in “you need to get with Jesus, mother fucker.”
June 8th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
RE: Alex
I think the intent is to keep this strictly fundie-related, but your comment leaves me far too intrigued to let it slip by. I’d *love* for you to share your experiences.
By the way, I’m currently trying to slog my way through Tim LaHaye’s _Mind Siege_, not because I was handed the book and told to read it, but because I felt I needed something with which to “sharpen my claws”. Turns out I may have killed off a few brain-cells in the process instead; hopefully, these were optional brain-cells.
June 10th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
I have an extended email debate with a fairly fundamentalist individual I ran into on a forum. In a way I feel bad about it because she saw it as a battle for my soul and I saw it as an exercise in critical thinking.
It was hilarious, though.
June 13th, 2009 at 3:37 am
I drew a picture of Barney the Purple Dinosaur in bondage gear, leather underwear, whip, etc. My friend took it home, where her super-fundie, televangelist-supporting mom discovered it.
My friend laughingly reported the next day, “My mom said you’re sick and she’s going to pray for you.”
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:32 am
I went to a fundamental Baptist church camp over the summer a few years ago (quite a while back now… it had to be at least 5 or 6 years, I’m 18 now.) Anyway, the summers here in New York can get very hot and humid and to deal with that I brought a large amount of shorts. Well, apparently, that was a no-no there, despite the fact that it wasn’t listed in the rules, and I had several councilors tell me I had to wear pants without any particular explination. But one night at the evening church service the Preacher was going over what “CAMP” meant (”C”hrist centered was the first one) and as he started to get off topic and rant he yelled, “I hear some people are complaining that they can’t wear shorts; do you know why you can’t wear shorts? Because God delighteth not in the legs of a man!”(By the way, my mother went looking for the verse that he was quoting and found it in Psalms. The full text reads “God delighteth not in the legs of a man… or the legs of horses.” So if you see crazy Baptist ministers running around with really long horse-pants, you’ll know whats going on.)
July 24th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Here is one from my college cafeteria. It was the start of a new term, and I was talking to an old highschool aquaintance. He told me he was taking Astronomy and I joked if he could tell my future. When I said that another person, a friend of my old classmate, spoke up. “Astrology is so stupid, I can’t believe you believe that stuff!” “I don’t” I told him, “It was a joke” However he was already to engrossed in his rant to pay any attention and said “I would explain why it is wrong but you would be to stupid to understand.” Later on in the meal I made another joke about pagan gods which started another rant. “At my church back home in Montana, we burn pagan gods in effigy!”
August 10th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
(Pardon the mega-post: I feel like this needs some explanation before we get into the crazy religious stories.)
In middle school, I couldn’t get a transfer to a non-sucktastic public school because I was too smart and my parents made too much money for me to transfer from my failular local school to a better school. So, since seven years of private schooling had worked well enough for me, my parents decided to send me to another private school rather than send me to the public school with super-low test scores. But here’s the catch: the only private middle/high schools in our city and those neighboring it are religious schools, and we aren’t religious.
But my parents sent me to the local Evangelical school (which was still way the hell on the other side of town) anyway, thinking that– regardless of the religious aspect– it would be a good school. They marketed themselves as a prep school, after all. (Incidentally, those were the easiest years of my academic life.)
So you have me, likely the only kid raised without religion in a school full of super-religious, super-conservative, remarkably homogeneous and narrow-minded students and staff. Can you say, Awkward?
Even more awkward, my eighth grade year, I’d gotten into rock music and vampire novels. I started to wear eyeliner and black pants and read Anne Rice and Goethe’s Faust. Oh, the horror! When I was the prompter for the play that our homeroom was putting on and the drama teacher was bringing me a huge-ass podium and blindingly-green light which I didn’t need, she saw my copy of Anne Rice (the first three volumes of The Vampire Chronicles published in a single edition). She told me that it wasn’t appropriate for school just from looking at the cover, which was just a shadowy figure in a cape and some architecture. (I’m still not sure WHY, exactly, it wasn’t appropriate, but I brought it to school, anyway, and just hid it in my backpack whenever she was around.)
There was one girl who was, quite literally, afraid of me. And I had several girls ask me, “Does your know that you’re reading that?” as if I’d had porno in my hand or something. They’d looked horrified when I’d informed them that she’d purchased it for me. (Speaking of my mother, when she married my dad, she didn’t take his last name. Once when she called the school, she corrected the receptionist on the matter of her name, and the receptionist said, “Oh, so you’re one of THOSE people,” no lie. Can you say, Unprofessional?)
I’ve always had a love of hats, and following the release of Panic! At The Disco’s video “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”, my mother bought me a top hat like the one the vocalist wears in the video. Now she didn’t like me wearing crazy hats because she said that people wouldn’t take me seriously, but she let me wear said top hat on my birthday that year. So that day, I had the kid who had sat in front of me in science turn around and ask me, “What’s with the top hat? Are you getting married? ARE YOU A LESBIAN?” (In retrospect, I should have said something snotty, like, “well, what do you think?” or “does that mean that all the top hat-wearing gentlemen of the nineteenth-century were ALSO lesbians, if a top hat makes one a lesbian?” But instead my friend and I just laughed at him.) Same kid also freaked the hell out over my eyeliner, and even after I left the school for the city’s premier academic public school, my friend reported that he still talked about how I was demon-possessed.
Well, at least I left with tons of outrageous stories and an understanding of Biblical allusions.
August 13th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Damn, Cindy. I wish you’d gone to my Lutheran school with me. We would have raised hell….er, quite literally.
“Are you a lesbian???”
“Why, no. I’m an equal-opportunity pansexual, thank-you-very-much.”