In the News, Week of Oct. 7, 2007
The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:
SUNDAY
From the NY Times on religious flexibility:
THOU SHALT NOT KILL, EXCEPT IN A POPULAR VIDEO GAME AT CHURCH
Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo.
Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.
—Jesus fucking Christ down from the cross, man, don’t teenagers have it hard enough already? I mean, fuck me running, it’s bad enough it’s so difficult and expensive to get into a good college nowadays, and now even Hell is going to be made more exclusive? What are you going to do, raise the bar on SAT scores for hell? Put higher interest rates on loans to afford hell?
“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”
—My own take is you can’t. And there’s no reason you couldn’t charge for the alcohol and the movies, because they’d be tax free since churches are, so they’d be cheap. It’s been pretty well shown that people generally have no problem paying for the things they really want. So once you have them all shit-faced, depressed, and craving sex they can’t have, whammo, bring Jesus into the picture and your pews will overfloweth.
In one letter to parents, Mr. Barbour wrote that God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.”
“Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”
—And I’ll bet there’s a catch-and-release policy, isn’t there?
—Scot Crawford