The Ryno Pen

[This is as promised for my friend Parilous.
Readers of the old blog may recognise parts of this, but stick around:
there's lots of added goodness in this year's model.]

Your choice of Invisible Friends is all yours. Number, shape, name and rules of play are yours to choose: they always have been, and always will be. You can even make them visible if you like, but remember, it’s your game, and if somebody else chooses not to see Harvey, then that’s their game. This kind of stuff is always at arm’s length from hard science: that is why it’s faith.

Can we agree to leave the belief stuff: whether Harvey is there or not, how Harvey looks, and what Harvey says to you in particular, out of this? I’m dealing with people matters here. You’d be pulling a fairly strenuous eisegetical stretch to get a solid, in-context, biblical support for the social phenomena mentioned here.

I have very little faith in people. The more trust they demand, the less it seems they deserve.

Some of the worst, it seems, operate in the same circles where Invisible Friends are expected to do things contrary to the laws of physics, trends of economics, or even the limits of fevered imagination. And Fundie Mentalist churches are petri dishes for the spores of this particular culture infection.

I have personally seen:
The Laughing And Falling Down thing,
The Predicted End Of Civilisation As We Know It (date and event-list provided: BTW, we’re already either damned or taken up!)¹,
The Heeeeeeeeeeeeeealer, and
The Apparition Of Amazing Gold-Dust.

It is the latter of these I will deal with here. If the whim takes me, I’ll do all or some of the others in posts to follow.

¹ Sorry about all the links, this one really burns my butt, as we got yanked out of a very interesting lecture-cum-argument to see the guy.

NOW READ ON, as they used to say in the Mandrake comics.

Around 1999, I am now somewhat abashed to admit that I was a Fundie Mentalist. Not only was I attending a happy-clapper church (maybe I was hoping that some of the stuff these people seemed to be experiencing would rub off or something similar), but I had entered fulltime study for their ministry. at least I got a reasonable grounding in theology: something many of their pulpit stars and most of their adherents seem to have missed out on.

As it is with multi-level marketing, line-dancing and garage bands, so it seems to be with the “spiritual excitement” of charismatic churches. The idea that the others believe in whatever is supposed to be happening not only buoys up the confidence of the participant, but the risk of exclusion from the Good Feeling (or fear of the disapproval of the In Crowd) prevents doubt (or at least mentioning doubt) and reinforces the impression that Everybody’s Doin’ It (thanks to Irving Berlin).

Your humble bloggist is hard to involve in crowd-excitement stuff, by virtue of being fairly blind to non-verbal cues. I eventually made the jump to glossolalia, but then I could eventually learn to juggle, too. There would not be a fervent, encouraging, senior church person standing there urging me to “make silly noises and sometimes it happens” with juggling: perhaps I need a better illustration.

Anyhow, the miraculous stuff is usually associated with out-of-towners, especially the ones far enough out to come from overseas. It’s like IT consultants, where the outside guy can say bloody near anything he likes, and still be counting the huge fees in his far-away office when everything Goes To Custard.

Anyway, not long after the Laughing And Falling Down Thing had peaked and faded, a wave of alleged apparitions of God The Jeweller began. Locally, reports started to filter in of people having fillings, or entire teeth, replaced miraculously with GOLD. Now, it was always FOAF stuff: nobody actually came back to out city from BigConferenceInCapital gnashing a set of AuChoppers™. Then the Gold-Dust Thing actually happened. I saw it at our church with my own eyes.

Thing is, it generally happened to the same people who got warm, friendly, Charismatic hugs from the younger teen girls who were often denied Tarty Whore Makeup, but loved…

wearing Golden Glitter Dust!