Strange things are afoot...

Like most of you, I bounded to my computer first thing Friday morning in the hopes of watching the Preaching Your Funeral ding-dongs deliver their promised pre-death eulogy (and burning in effigy) of Brian Sapient from the Rational Response Squad. I rather suspect from their "press release" declaring him to be one of the world's most wicked atheists that they've maybe seen a couple of videos of him on YouTube or perhaps they encountered him in the list of atheists on Wikipedia. They didn't seem to have a lot of specifics on him that you couldn't get from 5 minutes on the RRS website. Maybe they just saw the Rational Response Squad easily deal with Ray Comfort on Nightline a couple of years ago.

Much to my dismay the video wasn't uploaded to YouTube this morning as promised! In fact, I went to their website only to be redirected to some tripe-filled blog about "apostate churches". (Hey man, is your pastor...biblical?) Could it be that PYF is gone? Their main website is still up, and that blog looks like their handiwork, but PYF is apparently gone. A few of the subdirectories on the preachingyourfuneral.com url are still working, so maybe they're just prettying up their hatred for later. Weird.

If you actually wanted to get your daily dose of redneck Christian hatred you could still look at their KingofTerrors.com website. It's the standard eschatology crap you've seen a million times and it isn't nearly as amusing without the hook of a burning dummy with a celebrity's face taped to it. I promise, you've seen it all before - how to protest not-Christian-enough churches, how gay folks wanna eat your kids, and the keys to a great marriage as presented by a guy with no wedding ring. There's also a handy dandy list of companies that are "homosexual supporters". The Gap? Who would've ever suspected?

Also, if you want to get a rise out of these guys, leave them a YouTube comment about how it's weird to you that an unmarried man devotes so much of his free time to talking about homosexuals. That pushes their buttons real quick. I tried it.

Anyway, I'm not sure what's up here. These fellas haven't made much of an attempt to not be as flamboyantly hateful as possible, so I'm not sure why they would've bothered to take down their crazy funeral site. I'm bothered by these guys primarily because they apparently exist in my neck of the woods - they're apparently based in Henderson, Kentucky.

By the way, even though they don't seem too intent on giving their names out, the nasally preacher from the funeral videos is "pastor" Jeff Butler. I haven't seen him call himself by name on any of his videos or his sites, but he's introduced by that name on the marriage video. I've asked him repeatedly on the comments for his YouTube videos whether or not he actually has any theological training - he has not responded to that, but his utterly unsophisticated arguments against, say, the entire field of biblical textual criticism leave me with the impression that he's making it up as he goes along. I've also found a record of him speaking before the Interim Joint Committee on the Judiciary in Henderson, KY urging the local government to institute the death penalty for drug crimes (because China does it) and to urge the legislature to "stop homosexual activity". I'm not kidding.

Sounds like a real swell guy. Website or not, it doesn't thrill me to have crazies like this in my own backyard.

The argument from total non-sequitur...?

I knew a couple of guys throughout middle- and high school who were really into Jesus. No, like really into Jesus. During college one of them entered China under false pretenses to evangelize while pretending to teach kids English - that's how into Jesus they were. They were nice guys and good friends, but they were probably the first really, really, really Baptist guys I ever met. They were the first people to ever relate to me, among other things, how "Dungeons and Dragons" is supposed to be evil.

They also introduced me to the Power Team.

At the time I wasn't used to the apologetic arguments typically made by Christians, I had essentially no grasp on Biblical criticism, and in general my interest in religion was nil. I was also like 14. I was already beginning to view my parents' Catholicism as hokey (Oh, that's something else these guys introduced me to - Catholics as non-Christians.) and I guess my two friends decided they were going to save my soul by giving me a flier for an upcoming performance of (dun-du-da-duh!) the Power Team!

Nope, that's not Hulk Hogan teamed up with the Macho Man (That's the Mega Powers, and as you'll recall they exploded at Wrestlemania V.) The Power Team is in fact a group of 19 (or so) really big dudes. Humongous even. They have lung capacities so mighty that they can explode a rubber hot water bottle by blowing it up like a balloon, forearms big enough to shear telephone books in twain, and heads hard enough to leap safely through huge blocks of ice. I know that because I'm watching them do it right now. What sets these guys apart from other really big dudes is that these really big dudes are, like my friends, really into Jesus.

Even as a kid, something about these guys bugged me just from looking at the flier, which was pretty much like this. What in the hell do really big, possibly juiced up, guys with swords have to do with whether or not the Bible is the inerrant word of God? What exactly does a guy being able to run through an outstretched 2 x 4 (or not) have to do with the veracity of his theological claims? Does it really make any difference? Or is it maybe the case that these gigantic guys come stampeding in to "upbeat Christian music", break a bunch of stuff, and then ask stupid teenagers to accept their God while they're still digesting the fact that one of these dudes just bench-pressed a tree trunk while laying on another guy who was laying on a bed of nails?

I didn't end up going to see the Power Team with my buddies. Something about it was just so absurd and hokey that even my feebly non-skeptical 14 year-old mind resisted it. I knew deep down that I wouldn't trust a guy to teach me math because he was great at basketball, and that same part of me was just slightly too on the ball to allow myself to be converted by a handful of buff guys based solely on their ability to lift heavy things and wreak destruction upon various breakables. The whole thing left me with a lot of nascent questions which, at the time, I couldn't quite form into really solids lines of thought.

Maybe, just maybe, seeing some guys perform admirable feats of strength lowers your resistance to detecting the silliness of the message that follows. Maybe their alleged "20% Salvation Response" rate (which is ambivalently portrayed on their website as maybe conversions and maybe increases in donations) is an artifact of catering to a predominantly Evangelical Christian audience to begin with. Indeed, perhaps the Power Team is really just for Evangelical folks who want to see a stunt show but can't bring themselves to watch worldly entertainment like "American Gladiators" or "Mortal Kombat Live". And perhaps, just perhaps, the tales on their site of mass religious conversions of, say, 57 of the Detroit Tigers (Are there really 57 people on a baseball team?) were something more along the lines of some of the players publicly affirming their religious affiliation in front of a supportive audience rather than accepted Christianity anew. I'll also have to try and get in touch with Chuck Norris to ask him if the Power Team was solely responsible for his "acceptance of Jesus", as they claim.

One way or another, I'm just not at all convinced that the strongest argument (or even a coherent argument) for Evangelical Christianity is going to be made by, well, the strongest Evangelical Christians.

Conversely, maybe if Sam Harris could bend a crowbar with his bare hands there would be more atheists. Or not.

Glosso-what...?

Glossolalia isn’t a word you hear very often, but if you happen to hang out with many people of the charismatic Christian bent you’ve likely heard it referred to as “the gift of tongues”. Charismatic Christians apparently believe that sometimes God imbues them with certain supernatural powers, kind of like the X-Men. Among these are the discernment of demons and spirits, prophecy, healing, and the inability to realize that their inner monologue is still them.

In recent months the good ol’ Southern Baptists, based in my own hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, have been going through an internal schism about the prospect of some Southern Baptists speaking in tongues. (They’ve elected to call it a “personal prayer language”.) According to some surveys, about half of the SB higher-ups believe that making speaking in tongues is something that really happens, while about the same amount of leaders say that speaking in tongues used to happen, but doesn’t anymore because God let people invent Babelfish.com. (See an article discussing the conflict here.)

Interestingly, all of this goes on (and on, and on) despite the fact that biblical glossolalia refers to the speaking of a language that everyone hears as their own native tongue and can therefore understand, whereas modern glossolalia is neither intelligible nor a language of any kind. My link here is to the article on SkepticWiki, but those readers with access to JSTOR may wish to read the definitive study on the subject Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism by William J. Samarin. He found that glossolalia is simply a random, largely unstructured spewing of syllables from the speaker’s own language.

Speaking in tongues is to some extent something that happens when people of a certain bent reach a peak of emotional fervor. They might be Christians, they might be voodoo priests, they might be my best pal Josh. Yeah, that’s right, Skippy the Skeptic’s best friend speaks in tongues. All the time.

I guess you’re wondering why I’d hang out with a religious fundie, but I don’t. See, my friend Josh speaks in tongues while playing videogames. Seriously. When faced with a difficult game, Josh actually begins to go out of his head with rage. I got to witness this firsthand over the weekend as we sat around playing “Punch-Out” on the Wii’s virtual console. “Punch-Out” was a boxing game for the original Nintendo and is generally considered to be one of the hardest games ever. I myself have never gotten past the middle of the game, while Josh routinely makes it to the last tier of boxers before being smote down by the Sandman or Super Macho Man. On Saturday it was Super Macho Man who set him off. Super Macho Man is the last boxer before Mr. Dream, the game’s fearsome boss, and he kicks ass. (Originally the boss was Mike Tyson, but after his star was tarnished by his bizarre personal life, Nintendo removed him from the game.)

It started off as swearing after the first loss, then worked its way up to sputtering fury after the second, but then he actually went into some kind of crazy rapture. He bellowed forth a litany of syllables obviously taken from cuss words, but nothing he got out is quite intelligible. It’s as though he some how managed to roar pure, unadulterated anger. It wasn’t helped at all by the fact that he can’t throw the Wii controller across the room because it’s strapped to his wrist.

One day I hope to upload a video of Josh’s incredible gift of tongues for all the world to see, but for now I urge you to get on Youtube and look for some videos of people speaking in tongues. (Try almost any clip from "Jesus Camp") I think you'll see for yourself what I'm talking about.