The Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, North Carolina plans to celebrate Halloween by (what else?) burning copies of non-KJV Bible Versions.
Hey, look! It’s the guy from our Fundamentalist Website of the Week on June 17th! Interesting to find out from the news report that the church has a total of 14 members.
Thanks to Bo for the link
Anyone else see the grand irony in a church with “Amazing Grace” in the name doing something like this? 451 Baptist Church is a little more like it. Hmm, maybe they have firehoses and call themselves “fireman.”
Not fair to the firemen: even Montag and Beatty knew Ecclesiastes by heart (with Montag actually getting the message).
Augh! Couldn’t they at least find something else to burn? Something that would be less… oh, I don’t know, sacrilegious? At least a pagan ritual manual? Cosmo magazine, maybe?
This makes me ill. Someone needs to get punch square in the face. No wonder people think Christians are backwards…some of us are! Ugh!
I have never fully understood these book burnings. If you end up burning just one bible of every version listed your going to hit around 20 or so books. If each of these books cost, lets say $15, thats $300, and that is on the low side. This is also not including music or other books being burned by Christian authors.
Here is the thing, they are planning on this being an annual thing right? So my real question is not how much cash is being burnt, but rather how much is being spent to refill their stockpile for next year? In other words how much of the churches budget is going towards buying books they consider Satanic?
Don’t they realize that by buying these books they are actually helping to print more, even if they burn the ones they buy? They are giving more support by book burnings then if they had never even bought the books…
Did they just never think about it, or am I missing something?
If this church and the one in AZ with the crazy, cussing preacher merged, there would still be less than 20 members total.
And if those two combined with Westboro ‘Baptist’ ‘Church’ they’d still be under 100.
lol@Mark
And yet they chastise the rest of us for not ‘winning souls’
Maybe they will make marshmallow men that look like Joel Osteen (or any other preacher they despise) and symbolically roast him over the flames.
It can merge with the other harvest night festivities. The winner of the bobbing for “apples that are labeled with verses taken out of the apostate Bible versions” can roast a marshmallow man of Calvin.
I’ve never taken any hallucinogens but I’d imagine what you’re describing there, Lizzy would be something I might see if I did.
So Hard to believe that folks that claim that they are christian go about burning the Word of God. Why not burn c opies of nude mags etc. Maybe some Playboys !!
While its true that in Acts they burned copies of their pagan books, they did NOT burn copies of the word of God.
In Acts it was the owners of the books themselves who initiated the burning as a sign of repentance and counting the cost (they were quite expensive). It wasn’t a ritual mandated by the early church as this appears to be. I wonder who’s more pagan?
Yes, this is stupid. But the question is, where does this fit on the stupid scale? I was going to nominate it for first position, but given Darrell’s ability to discover these gems, I suspect there are some even better nominees awaiting revelation.
This is what happens when a bad idea (KJO) turns rancid. Someone be sure to notify the media; we would not want them to miss this bold statement of the truths that the martyrs died to proclaim or miss this opportunity make us all look foolish.
Man, and I was going to nominate this one this evening when I perused my RSS feeds. Still, I think this is a great idea. Because, you know, people are flocking to solid churches in droves nowadays. I know a lot of pastors have been trying to figure out a way to deal with church over-population, and this seems as good an idea as any. There’s such a glut of Christians these days that something has to be done to stem the tide of new converts, and a Bible church burning Bibles seems to be the best way to confuse things for converts-to-be.
Shame his site is down. His hosting provider (whose front page is hideous in the same vein as all the other FWOTWs that we’ve seen) has “suspended” him. Remains to be seen if they suspended him because he’s batcrap insane or whether he requested he be suspended so as not to have to deal with all the people who should be calling and emailing him to point out his, um, genius.
Or maybe he just didn’t pay the bill, the offering plate being a little empty with only 14 members in the congregation. 😕
I’d be ok with burning copies of “The Audacity of Hope”.
So would Obama, as long as you buy them first.
I think I speak for all authors when I say, please, please burn my book. Just pay for it in cash first.
Mounty is right! His site is suspended! Guess that’s whatcha get for being a heretic! Although I would imagine the punishment should be worse…
And I like Lizzy’s idea! They might as well add more effigies, marshmallow or not! Add to the fun occasion! Then you could eat your favorite “false Christian”!!
looks like their website is down. bummer.
Why don’t they put them in the hands of people without bible….wouldn’t that make more sense than KJV or nothing ?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Not if you’re a hyper-KJVO-fundamentalist, Cindy.
I think that our suspender-wearing preacher was surprised his site was suspended. Not quite the publicity he bargained for, I reckon.
If you count the church has 14 members, and 4 of them are Grizzards, that means only probably 5 people (not including children) are adult members of his church. That makes me laugh.
I can no longer contain myself. I try to limit the frequency with which I use words like “idiotic,” but this Grizzard guy takes the cake on idiocy. The ignorance, the blind zeal, the weird reverence for a man-produced translation and the ugly way it manifests itself–it all upsets me deeply. Is this the zenith of two millenia of Christianity in the West?
And J. Leslie makes a good point. How exactly does one acquire the proscribed objects for a book burning without feeding the machine that’s producing the objects in the first place? Would people like Grizzard advocate theft for the greater good of destroying a perceived evil?
I live in SC, and this guy has been getting a LOT of media publicity. Words escape me to describe how I feel…so I’ll just make an appropriate noise instead. AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH. **tears hair out**
Their site is back up again.
Now would be a great time to read through their Index of Ungodly Athletes.
Thanks, Steve, for bringing up this page again. I was just looking at the Tom Brady section of the Ungodly Athletes page, and realized I am ungodly. He points out that Tom Brady has an unwed child. Hmmmmm—-so do I; actually, I have two.
Is it really ungodly to be unwed when you’re still a child? Should everyone be married at birth?
Wow! So do I! One of whom doesn’t know her left from her right; the other has it figured out, but not yet how to tie the shoes. 😉
Of course the whole notion of an age of consent is alien to these folks. The whole notion of *consent* is alien to these folks!
I have one wed, one betrothed, and and one unwed.
I have no idea where that puts me in the grand scheme of godliness. In my little picture, though, the engaged daughter is the second, so I have learned my role. “Yes, that looks nice. Here is another check.”
He must be a Laker fan because there is no mention of Kobe Bryant. And Plaxico should be on there…not for carrying a gun, but for going to a nightclub.
Must be a Braves fan, too, because Chipper Jones isn’t on there and he’s rather notorious for a marriage-ending Hooters incident.
Why include Shoeless Joe? Do the research and anyone can see that he didn’t throw the series.
True, but he still took the money and kept his mouth shut about the fix.
“Shoeless Joe Jackson is probably on the list for not wearing wing-tip shoes.
If you read the foreword, he goes on a rant about what to do away with. Alcohol/drinking/bars/sales/making of alcohol/etc. being one such rant. Apparently he never had an American History class in high school which said and showed how the Prohibition DIDN’T work. Haha
It’s overall funny to read this guy’s “logic”, if you wanna call it that.
And I’m curious as how to this guy knows all the athletes that were in Playboy…Ok, I’m not curious, it’s just creepy.
And did anyone else read the one on Bill McCartney!? Is this guy so blind as to say the Bible never mentions unity among believers! Sad…Especially how he instantly assimilates Mormons, Atheists, etc in Christianity…
Could this guy NOT spend more time developing this website of his, and maybe do, ya know, some more soul-winning! 😛
Although the Braylon Edwards one made me laugh…
Ron, funny. LOL Of the many things that struck me as absurd on this list was the including a sport star that played 100 years ago.
Nathan, I wondered the same thing about the Playboy athletes. How does he know?
Fox News picks up the story…
I’m laughing my brains out at the ungodly athletes! A lot of the athletes on there are sinners by association (married to a former Playboy Playmate) but for Michael Vick, this was all that was written:
Michael Vick filed Chapter 11 bankrupcy, jailed and over $10 million in debt.
And the publishers of those Bibles you are burning would like to thank you for generating more business for them. You’ve made it so there are less Bibles to be purchased second-hand. Now we have to go and buy brand new ones, producing even more income for publishers. What kind of logic is this?
Time to resurrect this. 😀 I see on his website (which is finally back up) that the book burning was a “success” despite the rain and being held indoors and not actually burning anything per se, more like tearing and cutting pages, and come to think of it since it was a closed event (no sense inviting the community to see what God’s doing, eh?) there was no media coverage inside the church so who knows what really happened anyway? Good thing I decided not to go up. Would have been a boring night and a waste of four hours worth of gas.
Yet another example of extreme fundy inbreeding gone horribly, horribly awry.
What really disturbed me, was when I visited their web site they were bragging about what a success the event was and how they had prayed for rain to keep the protestor and media turnout low. These folks used Acts 19:19 to justify burning these books, where the Verse talks about those who had used the curious arts were burning their books… this group in NC seemed to be bragging about using curious arts to bring about the burning of books they disapprove of. What these wahoo’s were doing had nothing to do with what is presented in Acts 19 and more to so with some type of weird IFB witchcraft.
Taking text out of context is intellectually dishonest and lends itself to cult type practices. This is clearly the culmination of the anti-intellectualism that is so pervasive (especially) in the Independent Fundamental movement here in America. The rusted buckle of the Bible belt is becoming more and more a tragic comedy and less and less about biblical Christianity.
What is to guarantee that we in America won’t undergo the same fate of other countries, that of having our Bibles, all versions, taken away and outlawed. I have wondered how folks such as these would then react if, after years of depending on memorized passages of the Word, they stumble upon a NIV that was not confiscated. Would they fall on their faces and praise God …or look for another match?
They would carry the matches with them. Ready to use.
You’d think they’d keep their Ungodly Athletes page up to date. I just went to see what they got wrong/left dormant:
Adam Archuleta is long out of the NFL, Chris Henry’s dead, the webmaster confused Chad Joh…er, Ochocinco with Javon Walker,
Also, I’ve heard a lot about the Petty family’s faith, so for now I’m willing to guess that cheating quote is old.
If anyone, ANYONE else did this you just know the Fundies would be raising high holy hell about it (pun fully intended).
FWIW, I’m guessing we all have a Fundy book or two (or five) we’d gladly chuck into the pile.
Just had a flashback to a program I saw on 1930’s Germany