Standards

The Best Of Everything

94 Comments

It’s no secret that fundamentalists think that their specific doctrinal stances on everything from hell to (prayers over) breakfast are the only ones that are correct. But the overactive case of certainty that follows the average fundy is hardly limited to the realms of doctrinal squabbling. In fact for many fundamentalists, being absolutely right and defending their ideas to the death is a way of life no matter what the topic. Absolutism is a way of life.

People who drive smart cars are all Communists. Pepsi drinkers are not just sorely mistaken they are actually victims of a conspiracy to make you eat your own children. Vegetarians (except Bro. Roloff, God rest his soul) may just as well start worshiping Gaia and get it over with. And don’t even get me started on people who have the utter gall to be born French and haven’t yet apologized for it.

So many people in the world are so very wrong. And if you’re ever unsure about that fact just ask your local fundy pastor his opinion on anything from plumbing to NASCAR and you’ll soon find out that it’s not just spiritual things that are absolutely fundamental.

94 thoughts on “The Best Of Everything”

    1. And, for what it’s worth, Darrell’s opinion on this is absolutely, 100% correct!

      2. Not exactly 100% correct. People who like Pepsi, while not being conspiracy victims, do lack taste. Coke is much better. As for the French, they have plenty of other problems, I don’t think we should force an apology out of them – although pity wouldn’t be misplaced.

        Before anyone bitches and whines about my dissing the French, I have considerable French ancestry – and no real respect for the French.

        1. Haha I’ve got a lot of French ancestry too, my last name is French. And yes, we’ve picked fun at them, really don’t know why 😛 (not real life French people, just throughout history)

    2. Priority Post just makes me smile, and I don’t even care that it’s infringing on my clearly defined trademark on using that in comments section of blogs. I’m not responsible for any strongly worded replies in the comments form my 1 of 6 lawyer friend defending to the utmost my claim to a trademark.

  3. At my school, this is one thing that the science department is fighting constantly. There is no critical thinking whatsoever because most of our kids have been raised in the “I’m-right-everyone-else-is-wrong” way of thinking. It is so hard to get them to think outside the box and venture outside of what they know on any given topic. When we started our current science fair project, the whole department got together and brainstormed ways to get the kids out of this mindset so that they could actually learn something and participate in a science fair. It’s like pulling teeth to get these kids to do more than just memorize and swallow information, and I, for one, blame this fundamental attitude.
    Okay, thanks for the rant. And I am never organizing a science fair again as long as I live – it’s too much work! 😀

    1. Instead of always trying to “Think Outside The Box” is it possible to Throw Away The Box…???

    2. I’m afraid the lack of critical thinking is far more widespread in our culture than just among fundies. I don’t think it can be blamed entirely on them. You can see it in the comments to every Yahoo “news” post, or in any interview you like with an Occupy infant, or nearly any college student, actually.

    1. Coincidentally, this is just what formerHACgirl was talking about in the comment above yours. If the martians were fundie kids, they’d still be trying to eat the book.

  6. But my way IS the right way. Unless, of course you have facts. Then I will denigrate your fact source and be right. Still and always.

  7. This IS just like they act! What really adds fun to this mindset is when they try to make YOUR business THEIRS to correct. 👿

  9. This absolutism makes them very unpleasant people to be around. Many of them, instead of being gracious and humble like God commands, are arrogant, rude, and angry and sadly fail to show the fruit of the Spirit in their lives.

    I used to get so angry about so many things. (I didn’t usually express it to others, but I’d get incensed inside about something I saw.) I still have my own convictions and beliefs, but lately I’ve been learning to stay unruffled about things, to not let people who disagree with me bother me.

    It’s such a release to not have to feel angry about everything, to focus on loving God and loving others and save my righteous indignation for TRUE evil, like child abuse.

    1. “It’s such a release to not have to feel angry about everything.” Amen! There are so many real battles out there. Real wrongs that need to be righted. Real victims that need support. Real poverty, real wickedness, real __________. I’m so glad to stop debating about the end times or when musical beats become sinful or when a skirt is too short to be considered modest.

      Love God. Love others. Help widows and orphans. Show justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly with God. This is true religion.

    2. Aaaaaaamen, preach it!

      I think about it like this: when I see someone doing something I don’t agree with, I figure they have a reason for it. Whether religious, upbringing, tradition, whatever. I may not agree with it, I may think it’s incredibly dangerous. But I wouldn’t want someone getting in my face about something I do not see as wrong, so I’m not going to do that to you.

      With exceptions to actual evils, of course (murder, child abuse, etc etc).

    3. Our fundy Ass. Pastor/ Songleader was the quintessential “absolutist”. One Sunday afternoon, I called to let him know that I wouldn’t be in choir practice/ evening service because we were going to my father’s house for his 75th birthday celebration. When I asked to be excused, he said; “I don’t excuse or accuse anybody. It’s the Holy Spirit that does that. All I can say is ‘Duties Don’t Conflict”.

      This was his passive-aggressive way of letting me know that since God knew I had a ‘duty’ to be faithful to choir, it was obvious that attending my dad’s birthday party wasn’t required of me by God, since the aphorism “Duties Don’t Conflict” was as unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians.

      i don’t know where he picked up this gem of a phrase, but he was a Tennessee Temple graduate, so it may have come from Lee Roberson? Anyroad, he was dogmatic about any and everything he espoused.

      Btw, I went to my dad’s house, along with my beloved and kiddos. I know this bothered “the man”, but, as the Pirate King would say, “always act in accordance with the dictates of your conscience, my boy, and chance the consequences!” (Ironically, the subtitle to the Pirates of Penzance is “The Slave of Duty”). God seemed pretty serious about honoring our parents, even more so than loyalty to the choir director…

  11. “… people who have the utter gall to be born French …”

    I think you mean, “utter Gallicism.” 😉

  12. I’m so glad I had a fundy pastor to teach me the fundamentals of truly important things. Like… treasure trolls are really made by a German sex company, Cabbage Patch dolls are given an evil spirit before they leave the factory & Colgate (or was it Crest??) is owned by atheists, so fundy’s don’t use that toothpaste. To think I could’ve brushed my teeth with the poison of non-believers! 🙄 🙄 🙄

    1. Sounds kinda like what the Palestinians do with Israeli products doesn’t it? They would say that Israel put magnets in belt buckles it sells with it’s pants which cause “infertility” which could limit the Arab race in that area! 🙄

    2. The most virulent fundy rumor of this nature that I’m aware of was that a certain consumer-products company was controlled by Satanists and that its logo was really a Satanist emblem. It’s been going on for decades now, and the company ran ads to try to debunk the rumors, but eventually gave up (and stopped using its century-old logo) because any refutation just gave more fuel to the fire. I know the name of this company, and many of you probably do, too, but I’m not mentioning the name here because I don’t want to give any new life to the rumors.

      1. Israel can do no wrong. If Israel deported every Palestinian tomorrow, fundmentalists would support it as the best thing ever! Accordingly, all Arabs (descenants of Esau the preacher said) are pretty much demons whose presence frustrates God’s plan for His people so they deserve whatever abuse Israel/the West heap on them.

      2. The one that combined Art Nouveau, which was big when the company went national, with patriotism, which was also a big deal when the company went national? And the result happened to allude to the number of the original colonies, and also to the illusion that there is a face in the moon?

        Two classic fundamentalist fallacies:

        1. If I think I see it there, it is there. Pattern recognition never leads me astray. Therefore the illusion of a man in the moon means that there IS a man in the moon and because men can’t live on the moon there must be an EVIL SPIRIT on the moon.

        2. Mentioning anything in any way whatsoever is exactly like worshipping it and telling everybody else to worship it too. So anybody who has a picture of the man in the moon must be WORSHIPPING AN EVIL SPIRIT!!!! And COMING AFTER OUR CHILDREN!!!!

        3. Anything that has been used in a bad way once is tainted with contagious evil forever after. Somebody told me that somebody told him that some guy sometime used the number 13 in a Satanist ritual, so if anybody uses the number 13 ever they must be Satanists too.

        4. A story that gets me good and scared and/or riled up trumps all the facts you can bring up, especially if the liar can recite my favorite shibboleths and the truthteller is an outsider. God’s children don’t need to think.

        2. Yeah, yeah, I see what I did there. Seriously, unpacking these fundamentalist freakouts is like going down a rabbit hole that opens on a bear tunnel that opens on a dragon’s cave . . .

        3. No one expects the Fundamentalist Inquisition!

          Our two classic fallacies are excessive reliance on pattern recognition and equating discussion of a subject with its worship … and insistence on supernatural contagion.

          Our three classic fallacies are ….

      3. I’m from the home territory of the company in question, and I’ve refuted the claims of my (sweetly non-fundy) relatives who have helped keep this silly IUL alive. It was originally a riverman’s mark, put on packages to help the delivery of cargo by those who could not read. It appears that a certain company popular with Fundies (I’m not reviving/reanimating this controversy) may have had a hand in starting said rumors.

    1. That’s a great article and I bookmarked it. I only read half of it, but I think that’s where I’m at in my Christian life.

      1. Ok. I finished the article and there was SO much wisdom there. This sums up exactly how I feel in my Christian life since I left the IFB.

        “The trap that many FCs have fallen into is that they try to make the Christian life complicated and rules-based, but that is not love. Love means that I can cast aside all the complicated labyrinth of rules that I’ve tried to come up with and can live freely for Christ. Not that I define how I love Christ – the seeming “rules” in Scripture are Christ’s way of helping me to understand what love for Him should look like. So really, they aren’t rules after all.”

    2. Mag,
      Thanks for the link. I just spent a half hour reading that post. It was excellent. It echoes many things that I have written and said for years.

  15. Of course, everyone believes that the opinions they hold are correct (I’ve never met anyone who didn’t).

    The problem is when something that is clearly not discussed in Scripture is given some kind of spiritual footing, such as the preference for Pepsi over Coke, or pink shirts on guys, or NASCAR, or pro wrestling.

  16. Things you know when you read the KJV:
    Girls were NEVER meant to play football
    Boys that wear pink are gay and/or demon possessed
    Liz Claiborne is a satanist, so don’t buy/wear her brand of clothes
    Hell is a place inside the earth, and if you place a stethoscope on the ground, you can hear the tortured souls making tortured sounds
    History books are all wrong. Real Baptist history started during Jesus’ ministry.
    Unirish music with a beat is evil.
    Barney is gay.
    Teletubbies are of the devil.
    Overindulgence is sin, with the exception of coffee and food.
    Don’t EVER trust a medical test result. Doctors are not on your side. They are underdemons of the demon of Pharma (or was it Parma? Just to be on the safe side, don’t eat any Parmesan cheese!)
    Any Christian worth anything is pro gun ownership.
    Blow them off your lawn!
    Bow your head and repeat after me…oh, you speak Spanish only??..well repeat after me, you might not understand, but God knows….
    Jumpers and culottes are inherently holy garments.
    Suits are worn by members of the mafia, wall street wizards, and holy men of God. Yes, it makes sense, if you’re just spiritual enough to see the logic.
    We are right and therefore NOBODY else has anything real going on in their relationship with God. My, they are his enemies!
    Thou shalt not listen to Taylor Swift. Or Beethoven, he probably was gay. Come on, he played the organ and the piano. He must have been gay.
    The softball team is for the men in the church. The ladies get to cheer on the sideline.
    And finally: we have one mediator, plus one man of God who has a special hotline where God informs him of His will for everyone else.

    1. A fun one to add to your list: the guitar is inherently masculine (read: phallic), so girls should stick to piano. This is what I was told by my former pastor when I volunteered to perform. 🙄

      2. Hey, I’m male and I play the HARP! What is the Fundie theological stance on that?

  17. Two people in a row have mentioned the “pink for guys” thing so I thought I’d mention that according to an article I just read the soft color blue was originally for girls, while the raw steak color pink was for guys.

  18. And of course everything they believe is due to the MOG standing up there every week telling them what to believe. Everything the MOG says is scripture even if he only uses one verse to “proove” it. 🙄

    Our former pastor believed that Jack Hyles wrote the Bible. Well he may as well have. He couldn’t give one sermon in which that name was not mentioned at least once and in worshipful tones, “My pastor, Dr. Jack Hyles said…” 🙄

    I wanted so badly to ask him, and wish I had before we left if he believed Jack Hyles was ever wrong about anything. If during the time he went to HAC, and that wonderful church and heard Jack Hyles preach did he ever say to himself, “I don’t agree with him about that.” Or was everything Hyles said perfect scripture right down the line? I think I already know the answer to this question, and if I had the nerve, I’d have put a finger this close to his nose and called him an idol worshipper to his face. And quoted him one verse that is in the Bible, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” 😈

    Yeah fundies think they’re right about everything. They have the last answer on everything. And if you dare disagree with them, you disagree with God. Right. Even when they say wearing denim is a sin. God knows what verse they get it from. It’s not in the Bible, even in the KJV! 👿

  20. GM stands for “God-made”… You Ford drivers are liberals.
    If you drive a Japanese car, your unAmerican bless Gawd!

    2. I knew a pastor who taught from the pulpit that sugar is “white death.”

      I just needed to overlook the fact that his whole family was obese and mean as Hell.

      Just as long as the rest of us didn’t eat us some white death.

  22. There are many Christians, not just Fundies, that are like this. Not defending fundies. But I’ve had it up to here with people who tell me not to shop at a certain store because it supports _____. Just one instance of my way or highway. Another would be the constant babble about why I should join a man-made-formula Bible study. I prefer to really try to live outside the box. But I’m still searching. So we shall see where this takes me. I try to live and let live though, within the church, because when people butt into my convictions it annoys me. So I try hard not to do the same. If they don’t want to shop somewhere in particular, fine. Just don’t tell me how wrong I am for not doing exactly what you do.

    1. You probably also thought that you could post on SFL without George getting to you, but you were mistaken!

      😉

  25. Martin Luther Jr King was a godless, communist who ruined the absolute perfection of 1950’s America (heard it from the pulpit and read it in my christian school curriculum). In fact, anyone who was opposed to racism was pretty much of the devil.

  27. For conscience sake, you have refrained from mentioning the name. But I don’t have any such qualms.

    It is STARBUCKS!!!

    Believe it or not, Lancaster Baptist Church once sold Starbucks brand coffee on campus and were very proud of it… until Starbucks was blacklisted and Pastor Chappell printed a public recantation of their use of the product in the Baptist Voice.

    To his credit though, it was not because of any purported rumors about the lady on the cup being an image of the Woman Riding the Beast, but because during their “The Way I See it Campaign,” one of the contributors voiced their support for same sex marriages.

    For some time after that, it was only the rebels who dared to walk across campus holding a Starbucks cup.

    1. This was supposed to be in reply to Big Gary’s comment about a certain virulent rumor about an unnamed consumer products company with ties to Satanism.

      Starbucks was just a guess anyway…

      1. I’d Gamble that Starbucks is the wrong answer.

        Even as a kool-aid drinking kid, that rumor seemed pretty pathetic.

        1. Aaah… I am beginning to see the light!

          I will add it to my boycott list immediately.

    2. There’s another one out there that I heard about way before I ever heard of Starbucks! But I won’t say it either.

    3. I think the answer was not Starbucks but two initials with an & between them. :mrgreen:

        2. Ok, I had to check this out on Snopes because I had no idea what y’all are talking about. Would you believe I have no memory of ever seeing the company’s logo? Such a shame.

  28. I see this a lot in atheists too, especially the ones who left Mormonism. Which has a ton of “my way or the highway” fundamentalism going on, but tends to be more boring and corporate than firebreathing and independent.

    If you ask them, most of them didn’t leave Mormonism and become atheists because they realized they didn’t want to be Mormon, realized how women / LGBTs / racial minorities / anyone else was treated by Mormons, or just didn’t see a need for spirituality in their lives. They left because they realized Mormonism wasn’t the One True Church, and (in a nutshell) atheism was.

    I personally feel like someone who’s pursuing Christianity or any other path because they feel like it’s right for them is healthier than someone who’s doing it because they feel like it’s objectively right. Because the degree to which they believe that is the degree that they’re willing to hurt themselves, and often others, for it.

    1. I understand your point, and I am both grieved and horrified by the evils done in the name of pleasing God. However, I am one of those who don’t just think that Christianity is right for me. I believe that salvation is found in Christ alone, that there is a God and that Jesus is the only way to Him. I try to balance my belief in the exclusive claims of Christ with humility, gentleness, and kindness, giving other people the liberty and compassion that I would want for myself, but I firmly adhere to my belief that He is the way, the truth, and the life.

    2. i take that back. the one about sobe is better. who knew that lizards were evil by default?

    3. Oh my, I wonder how my sweet conservative baptist momma (who love frogs and has dozens of them in her apartment) would react to know they’re evil. 😈

  30. I’m curious what the fundies would say about my soft drink of choice . . . I prefer Coke, which they would approve of, but I prefer Coke because it mixes better with rum.

    1. I prefer a cold Co-Cola ’cause it tastes good, and because everyone knows things go better with Coke.

  32. I am a bible believing Christian,and I believe that scripture is pretty straight forward on what pleases God and what does not,so I guess I am a fundamentalist. However humorous you may think these mean spirited “rants” and “agreeing responsive rants” are,it appears that you all wish to justify disobedience to God’s Word in a sort of “misery loves company” style

    1. This seems like a somewhat odd thing to say. I don’t see what you could be talking about, either in the post of the replies. I also agree that the Bible is more than straightforward–it’s crystal clear about what pleases God and what does not. What’s being objected to on this page is people making decisions about areas where God has not spoken, such as Coke vs. Pepsi, and then trying to force that Phariseeism onto others in direct violation of James 4:11-12, which makes it clear that God is not pleased when His people presume, by judging others according to their own invented additions to His Law, to judge Him and His Law as insufficient.

    2. I also agree that Scripture is God’s word and it is the Christian’s greatest resource here on earth regarding God and the things of God.

      The problem is the man-centered additions to God’s word. When a man-made standard is elevated to the place of essential doctrine there is a problem. There is also a problem when Scripture is missused in order to make a point Scripture doesn’t say anything about. (ie proof texting out of context)

      When Scripture is used as a moral billy-club rather than for teaching, correcting bad doctrine and training in true righteousness… then there is a problem. There seems to be this idea in modern Churchianity that the man in the pulpit is superior to the one sitting in the pew. That what the one in the pulpit says is God breathed just because he is in the pulpit. WRONG! When one assumes the position of teacher then they should be questioned and examined twice as much to verify what they are saying lines up with the entire Word of God.

      And that is what we attempt to expose around here.

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