Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Well, tomorrow is my sister's birthday. It's also supposed to be the end of the world. That being the case, I've decided to put off doing my timesheets until Monday. Just in case. To be a bit more specific, tomorrow is Judgement Day (according to those in the know), a.k.a, the Rapture, when around 3 million of the Elect will be taken up to heaven, leaving the rest of us behind...just like in those "Left Behind" novels. It's always struck me as a bit presumptuous to assume one is part of the Elect. I'm actually sort of looking forward to seeing someone with one of those " In Case of the Rapture, This Car Will Be Unmanned ," bumper stickers driving around on the day after, so I can say, "Hey, asshole, what happened? Soul Train pull out of the station without you?" Now, I'll be the first to admit I won't be on that first flight out. No doubt I'll be undergoing some torment of the damned, but at least I'll be rid of ...

The whole culture war over Christmas can be neatly illustrated by the running edit battles going on in the Wikipedia entry for " Christmas Tree " where one side writes about the pagan origins of the Christmas tree, and the other immediately edits them out. This has been going on for weeks . Check for all the edits labeled for "Pre-Christian roots." This is a little like how Winston Smith spent his days in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. Don't like the truth? Edit it. Then your truth is the truth. I came about this because I'd researched the history of the Christmas Tree and found reference to the pagan origins in Wikipedia, then went back a week later only to find them gone. The hand of God may be invisible but some of his/her bone-headed followers are leaving fingerprints behind.

For some years I worked in advertising. Among the many blots on my soul was the fact that I pimped Christmas and the Baby Jesus to sell worthless shit. Now I discover, thanks to Bill O'Reilly, I was doing the Lord's Work. Now that it's December, Fox News and its various reptilian talking heads are once again hard at work promoting the War On Christmas . Bill O'Reilly kicked off this holiday tradition a few years back. It's like the Right Wing's Charlie Brown Christmas -- they trot it out every year since they know it's a surefire ratings booster. It's most visible form is flogging various retailers who choose to say "Holiday Sale" instead of "Christmas Sale." This strikes me as odd. I have a hard time seeing how using the label "Christmas" as a marketing tie-in is promoting the beliefs of Christendom. If anything, it serves to further secularize a Holiday/HolyDay already weighted down with a vast collection of warmed over ...

The holidays are upon us. Actually they were upon us sometime before Halloween: Santa now mingles freely with Dracula and Naughty Nurse, and visions of sugar plums are replaced by 20 count bags of mini-Snickers bars. I'm bracing myself for our latest holiday tradition, the bombastic pronouncements about the " War on Christmas ." For the past several years, self-anointed protectors of Christmas  have been creating lists of which retailers are naughty or nice. This seems to boil down to who says "Holiday" in their advertising instead of "Christmas." On the Naughty list have been such Satanic organizations as Sears, Wal-Mart, Target, The Gap, Banana Republic, Home Depot. This year's Naughty and Nice list has been helpfully compiled by the American Family Association of Tupelo, Mississippi. You may recall the American Family Association , led by the Reverand Donald Wildmon, from their previous name, the National Federation for Decency . The...

A short history lesson, courtesy of Wikipedia. The Freikorps were nationalistic organizations primarily composed of disaffected, disenchanted and angry German combat veterans who believed that their government had betrayed Germany and sold them out... The Freikorps were in opposition to the new Weimar Republic. The SA [Stormtroopers/Brownshirts] evolved out of the remnants of the Freikorps movement. During the 1920s and 1930s, the SA functioned as a private militia that Hitler used to intimidate rivals and disrupt the meetings of competing political parties. Sound familiar?

This just in, courtesy of Slashdot . Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary right here in Fort Worth, is offering courses in "Intelligent Design," which require, as part of the classwork, that students make 10 posts to "hostile" websites. Slashdot correctly characterizes this as " trolling ." The courses are taught by William Dembski , a "research professor in philosophy" at the Seminary. Read the Wikipedia article on Dembski -- it's quite revealing. Before joining SWBTS, Dembski suckled at the teat of the Discovery Institute , a well-known anti-evolution think tank. Can you even call a place like that a "think tank?" Mathematician David H. Wolpert has described Dembski's work as "written in jello." How do you research philosophy? This sure as hell isn't science. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary , once a respected institution, furthers its journey to complete laughing stock and public embarra...

Once again I must thank the Whited Sepulchre for bringing this to my attention (I'll try not to shamelessly rip him off). University of the Cumberlands , a Southern Baptist affiliated college in Kentucky has caught wind of the fact that Broadway Baptist (where Whited Sepulchre and my heresies are tolerated) has been ex-communicated from the Southern Baptist Convention for insufficient hatred of gay folks. University of the Cumberlands was to host the Broadway youth choir for part of their summer choir tour. That was last week. According to Whited Sepulchre (who is unusually well-connected) and legitimate news sources , a Cumberlands spokesperson called, days away from the choir's departure, with the news the choir would no longer be welcome . As part of their trip, the youth were to perform mission work with Mountain Outreach , a UC program that builds housing for poor in the Appalachians. The Mountain Outreach web site says "In keeping with the tradition of the progra...

I met up with the Whited Sepulchre , my fellow former Southern Baptist , and drank a beer in public at a place where men and women openly smoked cigars together. We briefly discussed whether we should dance together but neither of us had a quarter for the jukebox (besides, cigar breath -- ugh). Sunday I'll be at Broadway Baptist wearing a shirt a made of mixed fibers and listening to a woman minister preach. I feel so liberated.

My friend and sometimes sparring partner the Whited Sepulchre alerted me to the fact that Broadway Baptist Church of Ft. Worth, where my heresies are tolerated, has been given the boot by the Southern Baptist Convention. The nominal reason was because we tolerated homosexuals in our midst. Well, la-dee-dah. There was great huffing and puffing from Louisville, Kentucky, the scene of the crime. "The church was in effect saying that it was OK to have members who are open homosexuals," said a member of the Executive Committee. Shocking. The truth is, the SBC has been pissed at us for quite a while. Broadway, if I may venture an opinion, stopped caring years ago. The only things keeping us in the convention at all were the desire to accommodate Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary faculty members who needed to be at a church in good standing (whoops) and the presence of a dwindling number of older members who nursed a sentimental attachment to what the SBC used to be befo...

In the wake of the assassination of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, Fox News mouthpiece Bill O'Reilly demonstrates he is utterly without shame. There must surely be no evil so great as the commoditization of hate for profit. Time magazine has an article about extremism and the anti-abortion movement.

The city of Lynchburg, Virginia, home to the first commercial cigarette rolling machine and first mass market over-the-counter enema, is also home to Liberty University , founded by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1971. Recently Liberty University created a bit of a stir when the ruling powers that be informed the LU College Democrats that they were no longer a recognized campus organization. Said an email from the Vice President of Student Affairs , Mark Hine, " The Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine (supports abortion, federal funding of abortion, advocates repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, promotes the 'LGBT' agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.)" He later added, “We are in no way attempting to stifle free speech.” The university has no trouble with the College Republicans. One other bit of Lynchburg's past: according to Wiki...