The Ryno Pen

The usual disclaimer applies. You can go and believe your beliefs, and you’re welcome to them. This post is about people being stupid, not mocking any deity at all. (Come to think of it, the same mistake often gets made about Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: the people who can’t make that distinction look like complete tossers too.)

Incidentally, the Deity Of Choice for today is Agrona - a case of nominative determinism if ever there was one.

Anyway, on we go to…

Father’s Little Helpers

Ever tried to help the old man out and made a complete dog’s breakfast of it? You know, like pulling on the shoots to make his beans grow quicker, that sort of thing? You’re not alone. There are (supposed) Christian (alleged) adults, with firm-if-unbiblical ideas of What God Wants, and interesting ways of going about achieving their God’s Will.

1. Run For Your Life, It’s The Interceptors!

I was doing a stint in production for a Christian broadcast station when this took place. We had our studios in one location, and admin offices in another. Since Australian religious broadcasting is licensed on a “community” basis, it can’t overtly preach or proselytise (so spend yer evangelical money elsewhere, kids!) and must announce all its advertisements as “sponsorships”, the number, length and nature of which are strictly controlled.

Your humble blogonaut was a (completely unpaid) maker of adverts sponsorship spots, so there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing between studio and admin building. There were Board Of Management members, broadcast techies and what-ho, but I hardly ever ran across them. It was mostly me and the console, with occasional voice talent needing all the usual stuff:

• Record Me
• This 30 Second Spot Is 40 Seconds Long
• Now Take All The Extra Words Out Of My Script For Me
• Record Me Again
• Sorry, Let’s Try That Again
• You Can Edit The Smoker’s Cough Out, Can’t You?
• I’ve Always Wheezed. Gerald Could Fix It, Can’t You?
• I Need LOTS of Bottom End!
• You Can Edit Something Out Of That If They Change The Script, Yeah?

I endured the constant interference of Twitchy Smoking AppleMac Guy (who once managed to get himself into about SIX INCHES of space between my kneecaps and the console in a TINY sound booth when I tried to ignore him), and put up with The Dozy Bear, a PAID Management Type, who spent most of its tenure in “Intensive Prayer In The Spirit”, aka Sleeping And Letting Paperwork Pile Up, until it was given a ticket out on health grounds.

Apart from the admin, techie and governance types, there were those who took this War Between Heaven And Hell thing very seriously indeed. Did you know that the particular brand of God patronised by some extreme fundie types NEEDS all this fervent prayer from frantic gangs of praying people, specifying what he is to do, or nothing gets done?

Enter…. The Intercessors! Now the first time SwampRat The Announcer mentioned this lot, you could hear the “Compression, Bottom-end Boost and Stereo Thickener” effect kick in, and he wasn’t near a mike at the time.

What they loosed stayed loosed, and what they got a sour on was toast! It didn’t need to make sense either… frequently it didn’t.

There was the time one of this august gathering decided there was a Big Bad Spiritual Blockage over the little house of station admin. Murder Most Foul, she declared, had been done in that very backyard, some sixty or seventy years earlier. Apparently this had to be Gotten Rid Of….

Now just hang on one cotton-picking moment! I managed to stay awake for most of the theology lessons in college, and might have read a book or two, and I don’t see this Casting Creepy-Crawlies Out Of Inanimate Objects stuff anywhere.

What possible good does it do God or people? What horrors might transpire (even if this alleged-but-hitherto-undiscovered murder was real) if it was left untouched by this spiritual hit squad?

It’s got to be full of Ezekiel’s Personal Barbecue Charcoal, that’s what I reckon.

I left not long after, and to Twitchy’s delight, the next poor sap was a smoker!

=====================

2. Fat Momma!

This happened at Pastor Softie’s church (see also here).

There was yet another big hoo-ha on, this time with a visiting person (always the way), facilitating a workshop on Discovering Spiritual Gifts/ Prophetic Power/ Something Else Like That… (sorry, they all seem to blend into one amorphous lump of excitable stuff after a while).

One of the people from the previous anecdote was present. We were told lots of stuff that drew on Just A Little Bit Of Bible here and there. (For example: “…let thy head lack no ointment.” Ecclesiastes 9:8 - and so some nutjob, ignoring the bit about “Let thy garments be always white…“, or that the passage may have been intended poetically, tears off and gets liberally Brylcreemed. You know where that sort of partial-but-literal stuff can lead, don’t you. Ask this guy’s descendants what happens to Out-Of-Context Bible Literalists.

Anyhow, the excitement was palpable. I tried hard to have something happen, like you attempt pooping when the ol’ works are stuck. No dice.

Not so a certain large man. He rolled on the floor, groaning and moaning horribly. His paunch was rather swollen on any given day, but it seemed to be paining him particularly badly. (Could this be why I came up with the acute constipation metaphor in the previous paragraph?)

On his back, legs in the air, the Big Man HOWLED and hyperventilated.

Stirrups position!

Oh, explained the Woo-Woo Expert. Big Fella is Birthing Something In the Spirit!

Yet again, I couldn’t find a cohesive passage of bible to explain this bit of theatre. I’d be more inclined to believe in a God Of Mimes.

At least we didn’t wind up with the tail end of Acts 1:18 - “His belly burst open and all his insides came out.”

Gak.

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3. Name Your Weapon.

MORIARTY: Sapristi Doodle, Caramba le Ponk. You insult the knees of mon King mon Royalle de France. I challenge you to a seething duel. Name your weapon!

GRYTPYPE: I name my weapon Bazil. Now you name yours.
_______________The Goon Show - The Spy, or Who is Pink Oboe? (Series 9, Episode 11)

Exorcisms have at least some biblical background. Been there, and (reluctantly, also very unexpectedly) done that. Please, no jokes about whether the victim gets repossessed if they miss a collection payment.

Okay, possibly a “Person asks, God acts” scenario is feasible (where $GOD > 0), but why the insistence on theatrics? Softie’s church again, and this time, the Man Of Sponge himself is hard at work, “cutting off in the Spirit” this thing and that.

See the Grown Man wielding the Big Wooden Sword. See the Funny Ritual. Hear the Words Spoken. Try to find the words and actions in your bible and Fail Utterly.

Makes plaster statues and incense look positively, um, dare I say, “orthodox”, don’t it?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 1:02 am and is filed under charismatic churches, ex-charismatic, ex-church, fundamentalism, religion, ritual, spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.