Nobody doubts that music is powerful stuff. It can delight you or sadden you or (if accompanied by the right set of words) make you want to buy large amounts of laundry detergent.
Fundamentalists take this principle even one step further by proclaiming that unless used in Southern Gospel music, placing the beat anywhere but the 1st and 3rd note causes involuntary muscle movement that results in dancing, pregnancy, dyed green hair, and referring to ones father as “my old man.”
What’s more these “unnatural” rhythms cause your body’s normal function to break down causing the heart to beat at an unnatural pace. Even house plants (who at last check don’t have hearts) will shrivel up and die if exposed to these awful “rock” beats — especially if you’re too busy dancing and getting pregnant to water them.
Putting the beat on the 2 and 4 causes the body to release endorphins which are also what moths secrete when they want to have sex. No…wait, those are called pheromones. Anyway, endorphins are something chemical and most likely something more or less like heroin which accounts for why these awful beats are so popular even if they do make the listener’s heart beat in unnatural ways.
It’s a wonder anyone survives a trip to to supermarket…
Johnny the Baptist is a self-proclaimed “serminator” and “Born Again Devils Fighter.”
His pitch for his services as revivalist extraordinaire is made thus:
Why have fire cracker revivals when you can have Dynamite! How are you going to have a Hot Revival using Preachers that are as cold as a cast iron commode and you wonder why people don’t want to sit through fives nites. Call Bro Johnny
Be sure to check out his book “Revival Sermons That Will Fire You Up or Get You Fired” and his theme song.
(Warning, turn down your speakers when you click for they will be overtaken by a very strange voice intro).
Missionary stories are a great source of apocryphal illustrations…
A missionary came back from Africa and went to some churches that had supported him.
At one of them, he told of how at one point, he had camped in the jungle overnight.
The next day he came into the nearest village, where the people came out to greet him in fear.
They told him that they had heard he was on his way, so the night before, they had gone out to kill him and steal his money and medicine. But as they approached his camp, they saw that his tent was surrounded by twenty-six armed guards. They asked him where those guard were.
“I don’t have any guards.”
But the people continued to insist that they had seen them.
At this point in the story, a man jumps up and says, “Can you remember the date that that happened?”
The missionary tells him.
“Well,” the man says, “that morning I was playing golf and felt this over-powering need to pray for you. In fact, I called into church and had them put you on the prayer chain. I wonder how many people here got that message and prayed for this missionary?”
The missionary was moved to tears as 26 men in the congregation stood up.
No matter how far to the right a group of fundamentalists may be, they will invariably be able to find a group even further off the map than they are to point to as the ‘real crazy’ fundamentalists. Whether it be dress codes, music standards, or theological vagaries, there’s always someone else who’s so much nuttier that by comparison even strict fundies look downright moderate.
Question a fundy about their rantings against Harry Potter books and they’ll point you to folks who don’t read anything but Christian fiction. They in turn will point you to a group who only allow their children to read approved biographies of missionaries. And even they will no doubt be able to dredge up some remaining Abecedarians to prove that by comparison allowing reading at all proves that one is reasonable and normal.
Compared to all that, just cutting out Harry Potter seems downright ecumenical. In the land of the full-bore crazies the only slightly unusual man is king.
