With Christmas coming up what do you get the fundamentalist who has everything? Get them the prestige of a title they know they deserve with an honorary doctorate from SFL!
SFL is happy to announce the opening of Old Paths Baptist University where the curriculum consists of this blog and a doctorate can be had merely for the asking. (Yes, I know Big Gary is offering them too but I didn’t steal the idea from him, honest. This one has been in the works for a while. Besides, can you really ever have too many honorary doctorates?)
Recipients of this degree will have just as much right to call themselves “Doctor” as 89.3% of fundamentalists who bear that title.
Simply download the PowerPoint file, edit the name and field of study and print as many as you want. Congratulations on your new title!
(If that sounds like too much bother, I can also offer to print and mail a degree on your behalf to the person of your choice for the cost of materials and postage. E-mail me for details.)
No matter what indignity, embarrassment, or outrage may be afflicted upon the fundamentalist youngster the rejoinder from his elders and betters is always the same: “it builds character.”
What exactly is this character that we build by learning subservience to a vast and ever-growing body of arcane rules? Which virtue springs from self-inflicted penury due to poor educational choices compounded by the greed of a ministry who will not pay an honest wage? What goodness comes with the constant lessons of self-doubt and self-loathing?
The Lord requires that a man do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly but never that he prostitute his own soul liberty and good sense for the sake of putting another man’s foot upon his neck and calling it “character building.” To be sure, of all of the lessons that fundamentalism teaches perhaps none is greater than this: there is no inherent virtue in being ill-used of others.
Is a capacity for denying grace to one’s self and others truly a measure of Christian character? Perhaps “Christian caricature” would be a term more fitting.
In an attempt to make life a little easier on their incoming freshman, Bob Jones University decreed that the newbies should wear a pin for the first week or so of the semester to let everyone know that they were to be given lenience with crimes such as being tardy to class.
So to convey to the world that this was the person’s 1st week at Bob Jones, they of course designed their pin to read:
There just aren’t enough facepalms in the world to do this justice.
