He dined for your sins
I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, but it looks important.
(via TDW and Mike Mitchell’s Tumblr )
I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, but it looks important.
(via TDW and Mike Mitchell’s Tumblr )
Indonesian artist Agan Harahap, who was responsible for the viral images of superheros photoshopped into iconic historical images, has a new project: “Happy Religion.” Harahap photoshops his own face onto Christ’s from well-known classic paintings like Caravaggio’s “The Supper at Emmaus” and “The Entombment of Christ.”
Is it true that Jesus’ face was bearded and long haired, or black and frizzy hair, or maybe even bald, clean-shaven and slanted eyes. For me, it would be much more elegant if I learn to believe in my religion personally and learn to live in harmony with others rather than question the ‘little things’ that could be fatal for the content of my faith and relationship with audiences.
And when each individual can look at religion as a ‘humanist and liquid’ form, I believe the tensions and friction that cause wars and discrimination because of religion will not happen again in future lives.
View more of Agan Harahap’s “Happy Religion.”
(via Nerdcore )
Mondo movie fans, take note: Our friends at Cinefamily, here in Los Angeles are programming another of their weird and wonderful weekend festivals. Focusing on the cheesy paranormal docs and TV shows of the 1970s like In Search Of, the two-day (and night) Phenome-Con 2011 features some outrageous “psychic” fare, that was once surprisingly commonplace in American culture:
In the ‘60s, baby boomers looked for God in a sugar cube, The Beatles seeked enlightenment in India and hippies freaked over Jesus. As the post-summer of love, pre-New Age ‘70s rolled in, it seems everyone went searching for the mysteries of life. Is there a higher power? Is there life after death? Where lies the lost empire of Atlantis? Can plants read your thoughts? How do I bend a fork with my mind? Does yogurt have feelings? Psychic surgery, hypnosis, ESP, UFOs, The Bermuda Triangle—it all held a fascination for Mr. and Mrs. America. It was a Phenomena Phenomenon, if you will. Reflecting these various crazes, a host of “speculative documentaries” quickly cropped up in grindhouses and drive-ins. This weekend, not only will we watch a crop of mind-marinating films, but we’ll also explore pyramid power, mind reading and we’ll search for Bigfoot. Cinefamily invites you to investigate with us the mysteries of our universe—join us for Phenome-Con!
The schedule for Day One, Saturday, March 26:
4:00pm Phenome-Con Saturday Afternoon Party (feat. The Best of “In Search Of…”)
7:30pm-ish The Amazing World Of Ghosts
10:00pm-sh A Bigfoot Celebration (feat. The Legend of Boggy Creek)
Midnight-ish Journey Into The Beyond
2:00am-ish The Devil’s Triangle
Day Two, Sunday March 27:
4:00pm Sunday Afternoon Part feat. more selections from The Best of “In Search Of…”, a casual Sunday patio hang-out, and then it’s time for…
6:00pm-ish The Pyramid
8:00pm Concluding the Phenome-Con will be a special screening and Q&A with director Don Como (hosted by Process Media’s Jodi Wille) featuring his 1978 film, Unknown Powers.
Get tickets at Cinefamily.org
The man of mystery behind Christian Nightmares gives an interesting interview over email to Matthew Paul Turner of Jesus Needs New PR blog
For those of us who had to undergo a fundie detox at some point or another in our lives, the following should ring quite true:
MPT: Can you tell me a little about your childhood as it relates to faith?
CN: Hmm… as it relates to faith… I don’t know if I ever was a true believer, I was just too afraid not to believe. I was completely controlled by fear. So many of the sermons in church ended with, “If you were to walk out of here today and get hit by a car, do you know where you’d spend eternity?” I didn’t know, and it was petrifying! If they were right about this place called Hell—a place of complete and utter darkness, a never-ending lake of fire where lost souls are tortured for all eternity—then I was screwed if I was wrong. I didn’t have the guts to let my chips ride on that one, especially at such a young age. I think I tried to talk myself into believing, and I recited the Sinner’s Prayer, just to be on the safe side. But because in my gut I didn’t really believe, I was constantly doubting myself, and incredibly insecure and anxious. And then the pastor would regularly preach things like, “You say that you’re saved, but are you really saved? Did you really mean it when you asked the Lord into your heart? Are you really living for him?” It totally messed with my head. I’d think to myself, Well, I said the prayer . . . I thought that was all I had to do! I’m pretty sure I believed it in that moment . . . But what if I didn’t? I became really paranoid and terrified of death. And I must have asked Jesus into my heart thousands of times: Before I’d get into a car or on a plane (just in case we got into an accident), and every night before I’d go to bed (just in case, for some reason, I died in my sleep), to name just a few scenarios. It was crazy! But it was very real to me at the time. Needless to say, it didn’t do much to build up my confidence and self-esteem, and it shaped my personality and worldview in some pretty negative ways. It’s taken me years to reverse this, and I’m still not all the way there yet.
MPT: Did your church experiences involve any true-to-life “Christian nightmares”? Care to share a couple?
CN: There was one Good Friday, when I was about 10 or 11-years-old, where I was forced to eat a heaping tablespoon of horseradish to get a better sense of “how much Christ suffered for you on that cross!” It was presented as “the least you can do considering all Jesus did for us!” That was pretty nightmarish, and ended with me hugging a toilet bowl.
I was also petrified of The Rapture, this idea that, at any moment, the Trumpet of the Lord could sound and all of the believers would get wisped up into Heaven, but that I might get Left Behind. Not only was I really scared and depressed by the idea that most of the people I knew might suddenly vanish and I’d be left to fend for myself, but I also thought that if that happened, then I would know that it was all true after all, and that my only chance of joining my friends and family up in Heaven would be to reject the Mark of the Beast, and then probably be beheaded (we’ve all seen those movies in church, right?). I became obsessed with The Rapture, really paranoid about it. There were many times when I thought that it had happened. I’d be talking with my mom in the kitchen or something, then turn around and she’d be gone, and I’d think to my self, Oh my God, this is it—it’s happened! And I’d yell out, “Mom? MOM?!!!” Of course, she’d just gone downstairs to fold laundry or something . . . I can laugh about it now, but I didn’t then.
Read the entire interview at Jesus Needs New PR.
Some people see vast devastation and the human toll, others, like Christian author Tim LaHaye see an opportunity for self-promotion!
Tim LaHaye, the best-selling author of the “Left Behind” series of Bible prophecy novels, was one of many visiting the island of Maui who had to be evacuated to upper floors of the Marriott Hotel today.
He said being caught in the crossfire of the fourth largest earthquake in modern history helped prepare him for two prophecy conferences he was scheduled to address in Hawaii.
“The Bible tells us in Matthew 24 that one of the signs of the last days – one of the birth pangs to occur – is an increase in earthquake activity and intensity,” LaHaye told WND. “We’re seeing that happen here. It’s not just earthquakes, but hurricanes and all kinds of natural disasters.”
Give it a fucking break, asshole! At least for a day or two, huh?
Via (where else?) World Net Daily
Another animated tract from Chick Christian Comics. This is one of Jack Chick’s supposed classics, “Tiny Shoes.”
The message here is incredibly messed up, isn’t it? You’re “wicked,” so God will kill your kid. That’s hardly fair! The kid didn’t do anything.
What a weird “ministry”: Devoting your life to scaring the shit out of gullible, superstitious people, for their own good!
There is an interesting article the New York Times about the fever caused by an upcoming charity auction of some of Eric Clapton’s guitars. “Fever” is the right word apparently, because the desire for these guitars (and other once celebrity-owned fetish items) seems to be somehow socially contagious:
Fortunately, social scientists have been hard at work on the answers. After conducting experiments and interviewing guitar players and collectors, they have just published papers analyzing “celebrity contagion” and “imitative magic,” not to mention “a dynamic cyclical model of fetishization appropriate to an age of mass-production.”
One of their conclusions is that the seemingly illogical yearning for a Clapton relic, even a pseudorelic, stems from an instinct crucial to surviving disasters like the Black Death: the belief that certain properties are contagious, either in a good or a bad way. Another conclusion is that the magical thinking chronicled in “primitive” tribes will affect bids for the Clapton guitars being auctioned at Bonhams in Midtown Manhattan.
Some bidders might rationalize their purchases as good investments, or as objects that are worth having just because they provide pleasant memories and mental associations of someone they admire. But those do not seem to be the chief reasons for buying celebrity memorabilia, according to a team of psychologists at Yale.
The researchers asked people how much they would like to buy objects that had been owned by different celebrities, including popular ones like George Clooney and pariahs like Saddam Hussein. People’s affection for the celebrity did not predict how much value they assigned to the memorabilia — apparently they were not buying it primarily for the pleasant associations.
Nor were they chiefly motivated by the prospect of a profit, as the researchers discovered when they tested people’s eagerness to acquire a celebrity possession that could not be resold. That restriction made people less interested in items owned by villains, but it did not seriously dampen their enthusiasm for relics from their idols.
The most important factor seemed to be the degree of “celebrity contagion.” The Yale team found that a sweater owned by a popular celebrity became more valuable to people if they learned it had actually been worn by their idol. But if the sweater had subsequently been cleaned and sterilized, it seemed less valuable to the fans, apparently because the celebrity’s essence had somehow been removed.
“Our results suggest that physical contact with a celebrity boosts the value of an object, so people will pay extra for a guitar that Eric Clapton played, or even held in his hands,” said Paul Bloom, who did the experiments at Yale along with George E. Newman and Gil Diesendruck.
As someone who was bitten—hard—by the collecting bug, I can certainly attest to the fact that you want that personal touch. And since there have also been various points in my life where I’ve had the money to indulge my mania, I can also tell you that a “collector”—if they’ve got the bank balance necessary to cover the cost—WILL blow it ALL on the right item. Been there, done THAT… and more than once, too.
Had I not gotten married, I’d have continued such behavior probably for the rest of my life. Once I got married, it became harder to justify why I needed to spend $300 on yet another signed William Burroughs first edition! My wife beat the collector out of me!
Below, Derek & The Dominos performing “It’s Too Late” on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970:
The mighty American Jesus blog brings us a new Sarah Palin viral video. Smug secular lefties will mock it. Conservatives will present it as an authentic example of a non-Caucasian’s enthusiasm for SP (and THAT it is!). This could be the start of a brand new bag for Mama Grizzly:
Today is Ash Wednesday- the beginning of the season of Lent. It is a time when we reflect on our own humanity and recognize our need for the Chosen One. To signify this, we use ashes and put the mark of the Chosen One on our foreheads. That mark, of course, is a large capital “P” for Palin! If your pastor/priest tries to draw a cross on you, just expose him as the socialist that he is and find a new church!
We try not to give in to stereotypes here, but if you thought that an African-American lady preacher would be the one to promote Sarah Palin as part of a Biblical prophecy- then kudos to you.
(The first part is a little slow, but things really get going around the 5 minute mark)
Boy do they! Fantastic!
