artwork by David Hayward
Really Bad Vacation Ideas
Are you tired and stressed from the rigors of fundyland? Doesn’t a vacation sound wonderful? Well, have we got a deal for you! Sign up for the West Coast Baptist Alaska Cruise and you can spend seven days on a floating Bible conference complete with preaching by David Gibbs and R.B. Ouellette! What could possibly be better than that?
This is the ship we’ll be taking. Be sure to check out our Jonah emergency plan in case of bad weather. (Chances are the lot won’t fall to you, so don’t worry too much)
These are the deck chairs you won’t be using. In face we’ll probably lock them up somewhere to make room for the outdoor mourners bench. Leave your bathing suit. Bring your Bible.
Here’s the shipboard entertainment. Sea sickness will seem like a welcome relief.
And of course, who can have a real vacation without being preached at incessantly? It’s not as if you could have stayed home and heard preaching like this just about any old week.
Yes, all this can be yours for the low, low price of $2,995. Or as it’s known in the Christian Education community: six months pay. But really can you put a monetary value on the blessing you’ll receive from being harangued on the high seas, blasted on the bounding main, and demonized on the deep blue sea?
One thing is for sure, you’ll remember this trip for a lifetime.
Free Download of Churched by Matthew Paul Turner
Here’s something I think a lot of you may enjoy. You can now get a free download of Churched, Matthew Paul Turner’s story of his life in fundyland:
Free is good. I like free.
Means To An End
It is an underlying theme in fundamentalism that very little in this present world can be enjoyed for its own sake unless an explicit attempt is made to connect it up to some higher spiritual purpose. Whether you eat or drink or whatsoever you do…make sure everyone knows that you’re only using it as a means to some righteous end. We wouldn’t want people to think that we engage in idle frivolity.
See that brilliant sunset with its colors and hues? Don’t just be still and meditate on its beauty, immediately distract everyone by sermonizing endlessly about how such splendor could not be the result of a cosmic Big Bang. Be proclaiming.
Taking a vacation to the mountains or the shore? Not only should you be sure to take gospel tracts you must also be careful to bring back photo documentation of you passing them to other beleaguered vacationers lest someone accuse you of not redeeming the time. Be working.
Enjoying a Bach sonata or a Monet landscape? It’s the perfect opportunity to hold a lecture on the decline of art in society as a sign of the end times. Be lecturing.
Nothing can merely be enjoyed as God’s good gift without explicit goals of evangelization, indoctrination, procreation, or separation being constantly brought to bear. It is all but impossible for a fundamentalist to merely be.
Fundy Fiction
Although fundy sermon illustrations may contain any amount of cartoonish death, gore, and sins of multiple varieties, the rest of fundyland fiction tends to be of the extremely anemic variety. The basic problem with fundy fiction is that everyone acts like a fundy. Every character from the hero, to his ever-so-chaste love interest, to the bank robbing villain with the black mustache follow a rigid code of conduct that includes the following rules:
– Nobody ever swears using actual swear words. If someone does swear it’s always a bad guy and they get by with merely yelling “I’M SWEARING NOW!” Even this must be kept to a minimum.
– Shooting people is allowed (this is America, after all!), however, before anyone dies of a gunshot wound they must first receive the plan of salvation, pray the sinners prayer, rejoice in their new found faith, write a five page letter to their mother letting her know that they died a Christian, and then sing a hymn as they gracefully expire with the joy of Jesus on their face.
– Rape, child abuse, and other such unpleasant things don’t exist. Also, there are no gay people anywhere in the entire world.
– If the hero is forced to enter a bar or drinking establishment he’ll order milk. (Straight up. On the Rocks. With a Twist.) Any person who dares to even sip the demon rum must immediately become a drunk and end up living in the gutter as a warning to others. In keeping with realism, the trip from first sip to gutter takes approximately 6.8 minutes. Even faster if music and dancing are involved.
– It’s ok to have gaping plot holes. These can be easily resolved using a series of unlikely coincidences which can easily be made acceptable by having some character label them Divine Providence. “So, we found little Johnny a transplant kidney in a cooler that someone left in Lost and Found and then stumbled over a buried pirate treasure to pay for his operation….isn’t God good?”
– Someone must do a complete Romans Road presentation to someone else no matter how much this strains the dialog and pacing. “You know, as we’re here perched on top of this speeding train trying to defuse a nuclear bomb, I can’t help but wondering if we died today if you know for sure where you’ll spend eternity. Here, hold my wire cutters whilst I dig out my New Testament…”
– Everybody but the Designated Sinner in the plot must get a happy ending. Everyone gets saved. The hero gets the girl (they may even get to kiss once they’ve been married for a few months). The Designated Sinner gets his comeuppance but then will likely repent in dust and ashes and will end up becoming a missionary to the Congo once he’s done serving his twenty-five-to-life.