Odds and Ends

Defending To the Death

112 Comments

I have it on good authority that if you take the number of pages in this book and multiply it by the number of smokestacks on the titanic and then divide that number by the total number saved on the day of Pentecost that you have entirely too much time on your hands.

112 thoughts on “Defending To the Death”

      2. If you count the fake smokestack, the answer is 1.60666… Oh, no! That number contains 666! If you only count the three actual working smokestacks, the answer is 1.205, a much better number!

    4. Ugh. I downloaded it, read some sentences, then apologized to my phone and proceeded to delete it. What rubbish!

    1. Her work has pretty much been going downhill ever since that epic fingerpainting in preschool.

      1. As in, why would you read any of her works and form an opinion of which is better or worse? Why read them at all?

        1. I think she makes an important and valid point in her other works that not only are the supporting texts of the modern versions suspect at best, but that the theological bias of the revision committees gives a host of Bible translations that in their word choices use a lot of oddly New Age terminology.
          But I also think, specifically in this book, she takes one of her pet theories (the superiority of the english language) and tries to stretch it over the skin of her previous efforts.
          Her writing style is sort of hard to take sometimes, and her research isn’t the most solid thing ever. In some places I found that she cherry picked her quotes to make her point at the expense of the whole quote.
          In other words, she did everything her opponents do.

        2. I read this, from Wikipedia and wondered why as well.
          ”Gail Anne Riplinger is an American writer and speaker known for her advocacy of the King James Only movement and denunciation of all other Bible translations and the Christians who use them.”
          That’s enough for me.

        3. I think calling what she has done “research” would be akin to calling what my lawnmower does “surgery.”

        4. Michael Alford: There are far better defenders of the KJV – GA Riplinger is utterly unreliable.

          She claims that her author name “GA Riplinger” refers to “God And Riplinger” and that God dictated her books to her, and that she was merely a scribe. (this is true of “The New Age Versions” at least)

          She also, famously, lied about her previous marriages until proof was brought out.

        5. ‘She claims that her author name ā€œGA Riplingerā€ refers to ā€œGod And Riplingerā€ and that God dictated her books to her, and that she was merely a scribe.’

          Wow. That makes God a worse writer than I ever imagined.

      2. Michael, one does not have to read the entire thing to know it is junk. And one does not have to read junk. One has a choice.

        On the other hand, I would consider some fundy works to be well written, even though I discovered later they were a pack of lies. It is a pity I believed them at the time.

        And there are quite a few things I have read in the past that weren’t done very well, but I read them in order to critique. But a thousand pages of junk would be far beyond my ability to stomach.

        1. The old saying is, “You don’t have to eat the whole apple to know that it’s rotten.”

  6. I was going to make a snarky comment about the hovertext, but bit of thinking through showed that every single health emergency that’s happened in a church I was connected to that had a Wednesday night service actually happened during a Sunday morning service. Sole exception was a case of elderly overheating at a church picnic.

    Including the one illness that if I’m remembering right was eventually fatal.

    1. Medical issues like chest pain/heart issues more commonly present in the morning. Its a thing. Perhaps partly because of the increase in catecholamine-induced platelet aggregation and increased serum concentrations of plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) that occur after awakening.

      2. Ooooooh, I would love to see how Gail Riplinger would show that Captain Solo’s comment above is actually coded in the KJV, but ONLY in the KJV.

        Love it, I tell you!

    2. I ruptured a bronchial artery in Wednesday night service once if that counts for anything…

      I mean…I didn’t die… But I could have…

      1. I had a baby during Wed evening prayer meeting, I was at the hospital but I probably SHOULD have been in the prayer meeting.

        1. Miriam, you backslider, bless your heart, if you’d had enough faith and a more submissive spirit, you could have overcome those contractions and gracefully sailed through prayer meeting! Since fundies don’t do penance, you’ll just have to make an extra covered dish for every potluck this coming year.

        2. Apparently, although I cannot confirm this, my language was not befitting a prayer meeting.

    3. I always love the hovertexts, but living in South Carolina, this one made me a little uncomfortable. I think we’re all aware of what happened at a Wednesday night bible study at a church in Charleston earlier this summer.

      1. I said “for” as in “nobody died to defend the idea that we should have Wednesday night services at the hands of people who are opposed to them on principle.”

        The terrible events in South Carolina didn’t even cross my mind. šŸ™

  7. “Noone [sic] ever died for the printing of an NIV…” What does that even mean? Throughout history probably many people died for the printing of other books. Does that make those books sacred?

    1. Besides, maybe God’s grace and protection is on the printers of the NIV šŸ™‚

      1. YES!!!

        Fundies are a bit into prosperity gospel thinking, aren’t they? If you are doing well, God has blessed. If you are not, God is trying to tell you something.

        Wonder what he was trying to tell the martyrs?

        2. My fund you aunt and uncle cry poverty all the time. Had to sell their motor home. Now they are traveling around in a conversion van thing. Her comment on FB – God is so good!

          I asked my mom, where in the hell they got the money for it.

        3. So true. Struggling to get past that idea myself after having it drilled into my head for so long. And the fundies so loudly preach against the prosperity gospel…

          There was no reply available on Strangely Warmed’s post, but I’m pretty sure I know his aunt and uncle. Weird, small world.

        4. Not so much prosperity gospel, but success and pragmatism — so many IFB see how Jack Hyles was hailed for the “great” numerical success and use the same yardstick – that good numbers mean that God is blessing — or, sometimes, just pragmatic — if it works, it is good.

      2. When I was at Union Theological Seminary in NYC in the late 60’s, I was in a class that met around a large table which had been used by the committee to produced the RSV.

        I guess that condemns me to Hell.

    2. If people having died makes a book more authentic and blessed, then “The Satanic Verses” is a sacred book.
      So is “Charlie Hebdo” magazine.

    3. I don’t think anyone ever died for the KJV either, though I could be wrong. Maybe during the English Civil War, since the Puritans were partial to the Geneva Bible.

      1. See, that’s what I was thinking. Tyndale and Hus, the names most commonly (at least in my mind) associated with dying for trying to get the Bible to the people, didn’t die for the KJV.

        Ugh. How I despise KJV-onlyism. I really want to like people and think the best of them and get along with them, but people who tout this divisive and untrue nonsense make me want to call them an idiot to their face.

    4. I’m not a mind reader, but I suspect that author was referring to the historical fact that people were often persecuted for mere possession of an English- Bible in Catholic-dominated countries.

      2. Which Anglophone countries were Catholic-dominated after 1611?

        There may have been some, but I can’t think of any, except for Ireland, but Ireland was ruled by the UK until the 1920s.

    6. That is an interesting qualification, isn’t it? Its not a true inspired translation unless someone died to bring it to you.

  8. And yet again I must point out how ferociously Fundies will argue that a woman should not teach men about the Scriptures – unless it is Gail Riplinger, home economist.

    1. Yeah, I’m a non-fundy and I wondered about that. Does she have some kind of dispensation to teach?

      1. She has the best qualifications of all. She tells Fundies what they already believe.

  9. Who is it he thinks died for the KJV exactly? Persecution of translating into the vernacular was for versions preceding the KJV. As they love to point out the KJV was an Authorized translation, not one in rebellion to authority.

    1. Dear RobM:

      Methinks Tyndale would agree…

      ‘…many moo beleved because of his awne wordes [Joh 4:41].

      Christian Socialist

    3. I should’ve read the whole thread before writing my comment above.

      This is what I immediately thought.

  11. Dear SLF Reader:

    You’ve never shoved a canon-cracker up your butt and lit it … so why would you buy and read this book?

    Christian Socialist

      1. I’m not familiar with the term ‘canon-cracker’. Is it something eaten with soup or a device that cracks canons, or cracks butts…?

    2. A canon-cracker? A canon is a church law in the RC and Episcopal churches.

      So, a canon-cracker must be a way to break a church rule.

      Or maybe a canon-cracker is a kind of saltine.

      Since “canon” is a title given to someone who works for a bishop, maybe that’s the meaning.

      The mind boggles.

        1. Canon is when you get information directly from the Harry Potter books or from the mouth of JK Rowling. Non-Canon is when you are silly enough to get your info from the movie or from fan fiction or fan theories.

  12. Tuck this little gem away. Gail is a multiple divorcee. Just have your phone ready so you can get a pic of a flabbergasted Fundy.

    1. Some morally-bankrupt supposed Christians really excuse sins in themselves (or those they support) that they judge others for. The very words of Christ teach us that this is wrong, foolish, hypocritical, even evil.

      While we are all susceptible to tribalism, integrity and common sense demand that we hold ourselves to the same standards that we require of others; in addition, the Gospel requires that we love others: we don’t just passively refrain from condemning others, but we actively extend grace, forgiveness, and compassion to them, knowing God in Christ has forgiven us.

      Anyone who reveres Riplinger while snubbing divorced people in their own church (as often happens in the IFB) is an arrant hypocrite.

      1. Ah, yes. The all-too-common “Fine for me, but not for thee.” I had perfectly valid, understandable, extremely godly REASONS! You’re just a hell-bound sinner.

        1. You have to start out with a measure of reverence to be able to find any of her points “interesting”.

    2. Since they overlook that she is a “mere woman” teaching men, the fact she has been divorced twice shouldn’t be too hard to ignore.

      1. I read a review of one of her books where the reviewer didn’t address the issue of her research or even provide an analysis of her thesis, but made sure they included a link to her divorce papers, because, you know, that’s classy.

        1. I agree that such a “review” is worthless, but there are many decent reviews of the errors in her books.

          I used to really admire her work, until I found out what a poor job she did.

      2. Wasn’t it Jack Schaap who said it’d be a cold day in hell before he got his theology from a woman….in reference to Riplinger?

        1. Schaap said it, but he didn’t say it specifically about Gail Riplinger (on the occasion I’m thinking of).

        2. Unlike Schaap, I read lots of books by women, but I’m not very interested in reading a thousand-page tome by someone who is an inept scholar, a wackadoo conspiracy theorist, and a terrible writer.

    1. Especially if the person is “canon to the ordinary.” (It is a common title in many Episcopal dioceses.)

      We even have honorary canons, just like IFBs have honorary doctors.

  14. I found a review — also by a fundamentalist KJV-onlier — that took great offense at Kiplinger’s defending heretics, and all that. Evidently there are factions in the KJV-only universe that are vying for dominance.

    1. I have found that fundieland is built entirely on factions and factions of factions. Positively fractal in nature.

    2. All history is the story of competing conspiracies. Even in such a narrow faction, apparently. May I humbly suggest an edit? KJV-Only cul de sac might be a little more realistic than KJV-O universe. Up to you.

  15. This book is over 1000 pages long.

    If I am going to read 1000 pages by any Christian author, they will have to be written by Saint Augustine.

    1. I’m not sure I could handle a full thousand pages of Augustine. I think my copy of Confessions is maybe 600.

      Now, if we’re not constraining this to theological works, I’d like to know what’s so wrong with Lord Of The Rings because that’s definitely over a thousand pages by a Christian author and the slower bits of the Appendices are better writing then what little I read of that pdf.

      1. Tolkien was Catholic. That’s a major issue for some fundies. Also, the whole storyline is rather troubling. The disparate views in the xian world regarding Tolkien and CS Lewis – among other things – always bothered me because I couldn’t understand why there was a conflict. I was looking for everything to be black and white. What I’m discovering now is that there’s very little that can be put neatly in the boxes of right and wrong that fundies love so much.

    2. Well, I could have named a number of authors, but if Gail Riplinger is pretending to write theology, Augustine actually does it. I would read a thousand pages by Dostoyevsky. I am considering doing so by David Foster Wallace.

      1. I got through Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_ for the second time not too long ago. Advice: read it for the history, not for the plot. Apparently war is not only Hell, it is frequently boring.

        1. I love that book. The war is the backdrop that pushes the characters around (and Tolstoy did original research in order to get the details right), but the story as I see it centers on Pierre’s spiritual search. Tolstoy’s introduction (where he despairs of explaining the causes of war, which only seems to make a kind of sense in retrospect) hints at this theological dimension.

    3. If I had to do something like that, it wouldn’t be St. Augustine; I’d start with Julian of Norwich, who was a lot more encouraging about life, and follow with Margery Kempe, for the laughs and the history, and to make up the page count.

      2. I read the entire 14 novel series (jolts a prequel our two) of the series My Robert Jordan called “The Wheel of Time.” Each novel is around 1,000 pages. I consider it time well spent. This book? I downloaded it, but I probably went read it. I’m in the 6th book of the series “The 39 Clues.” They are children’s books, but I find them more in depth than Riplinger’s works!

  17. I’ve never seen such an interestingly creative mix of logical fallacies, grammatical errors, erratic referencing and bad formatting in all my life.

    1. That would make a good blurb for the book jacket:
      “I’ve never seen such an interestingly creative mix … in all my life.”
      — Last True Whig

    1. I think her ears are too far apart.
      A two-dimensional head would leave plenty of room for her mental equipment.

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