Tag Archives: Christianity

Fun

Frosty the Snowman

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It’s Christmas, so I thought I should come up with a suitably Grinchy post for the season. Since everyone already knows that Jesus wasn’t actually born any time even near this time of year, I thought I’d point out a little known fact about another icon of Christmas. The opening lyrics of this particular Christmas song should be familiar enough to everyone:

Frosty the Snowman
Was a jolly happy soul
With a corncob pipe and a button nose
And his eyes made out of coal.

Frosty the Snowman
May the children laugh and play
And were they surprised when before their eyes
He came to life that day.

There must have been some magic
In that old silk hat they found
For when they placed it on his head
He began to dance around.

The interesting fact about this song, first released by Gene Autry in the 1950s, is that the original idea wasn’t for it to be about Christmas at all. In the 1970s, one of the song’s writers, Walter Rollins, confessed in an interview in Life magazine, that it was supposed to be about the consequences of a nuclear winter, with the snowman being brought to life amidst the radioactive fallout and the dreams of children of a world without war. Sounds sinister doesn’t it? Unfortunately the producers ultimately decided that a more childish version of the song would have more commercial value.

A pity because the original version of the song would be just the perfect thing to have on while I play Fallout 3 on Christmas day.

Fun, Religion

Does this look like a burning cross to you?

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This picture has been making the rounds on the Internet. It’s a product being sold by the American Family Association for Christmas: a cross with lights on it. Unfortunately for the AFA quite a lot of people think that it looks like a burning cross, with all the Ku Klux Klan baggage that entails.

Personally it does look like a burning cross to me, and I think the AFA must be pretty dense not to realize how negative a message it might imply, but, hey, decide for yourself.

Fun, Religion

Bible Advisory

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Came across this funny image of the Bible on QT3 a while back. I’m not too sure where it was originally from though. The thing about humour is that in order for the joke to work, it needs a grain of truth in it.

Anyway, I know I haven’t been writing much for my own blog lately. I think I’ve written more and more interesting stuff as comments on other people’s blogs and on LYN than on here.

In other news, check out this article in Slate magazine, “Does Religion Make You Nice?”. It’s not very kind on atheism, but makes a fair point about the importance of building communities.

Games

Shout-out in The Witcher

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I noticed a sarcastic shout-out to a popular novel while playing The Witcher the other day, so I saved a screenshot of it. The full text as follows:

This was popularized by Bronze Dan and begins with a convoluted theory about the derivation of the word Grail. A few tortuous pages in, we learn the Holy Grail is actually Sang-Real, which in the elder tongue denotes royal, “hallowed blood.”

I’ll leave it to the reader to notice which book is being alluded to.

I’ve just finished the game last night. The ending was a real shocker. Dramatically powerful, yes, but also painfully cruel to the player. Look out for a full write-up soon. In the meantime, I’m playing the two downloadable adventures for it, The Price of Neutrality and Side Effects, available from the official site of the game.

Religion

Christians Praying to Golden Calf

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I love the wonderful, wonderful irony in this. Apparently a large group of Christians organized a mass prayer at banks, stock markets and other financial institutions all over the world to ask for God’s intercession into the current financial mess. Here’s an excerpt from the original call to prayer as reported by the Christian Broadcasting Network:

For these and other reasons Cindy is calling for a Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008. They are calling for prayer for the stock markets, banks, and financial institutions of the world on the date the stock market crashed in 1929. They are meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, and its 12 principal branches around the US that day.

“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said.  “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”

The photo above, taken from Wonkette, is of the said group praying at the aforementioned bull statue on Wall Street. The irony is obvious to anyone with even a passing knowlege of the Bible since the bull statue on Wall Street is a huge golden bull, and instantly brings to mind the story of the Golden Calf from the book of Exodus. As the Wikipedia entry indicates, one interpretation of the story, apart from the more obvious one as an example of the sin of idolatry, is that it was intended as a Biblical criticism on the pursuit of material wealth. A double irony indeed.

I can only guess that these Christians haven’t been reading the Bible much.

Religion

Church of England apologizes to Charles Darwin

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Well, the title says it all. I guess a late apology is better than none. It’s worth noting that the opposition to Darwin’s theory by the Church of England generated one of the famous public debates in history, the 1860 Oxford evolution debate. As the Wikipedia entry notes, the most famous line was:

The debate is best remembered today for a heated exchange in which Wilberforce supposedly asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey. Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. The encounter is often known as the Huxley-Wilberforce debate or the Wilberforce-Huxley debate.

Anyway, regardless of how heartfelt this apology is, I doubt that it’s to change anyone’s mind on anything. The Church of England is already taking a lot of heat for its liberal stance on homosexuality and this apology won’t help it gain any more credibility with the Asian and African Anglican churches.

Religion

The Sanctity of Symbols

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Just a quick post to draw attention to a recent blog post by PZ Myers that’s been making the rounds lately. Here’s a summary of the story so far:

A student at the University of Central Florida, Webster Cook, attended a Catholic Mass on the 29th June, and after accepting a Communion wafer, believed by Catholics to be sacred and a piece of the flesh of Jesus Christ after being consecrated, pocketed it instead of consuming it immediately as he was required to do under the usual rules. His claimed reason for doing so was so that he could show the wafer to a friend.

This relatively innocuous action managed to turn into a huge firestorm, with Catholics calling on him to be expelled. In response, PZ Myers posted in his blog that he would desecrate a wafer, and he did so, by nailing a cross on it to a stack of pages from the Qu’ran and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and then throwing the whole thing into the trash. The point of including Dawkins’ book is of course to demonstrate that nothing is sacred. It’s just a cracker and the pages are just papers, but as PZ Myers learned and as you can read in his blog, that’s enough provocation for some people to threaten to kill Myers’ son as well as Myers himself.