Wednesday, February 11, 2009

It ain't Bible

Religious people continue to amuse me and sometimes baffle me.

Whether it's the Pope being asked to resign over lifting the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying priest, or the Reverend Ted Haggard making talk-show rounds hawking a book about his sexual sins, the behavior of godly men often provides a chuckle.

But it's the fundamentalist Christians who often make me do a double-take.

A few days ago I was driving along a highway in north Georgia, the buckle of the Bible-belt. I came up behind a late-1990's lavender-colored pickup truck.

Attached to the rear of the truck were two large white vinyl magnets. One of them bore a representation of the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. I couldn't read the wording over the tablets.

I had no trouble reading the other magnet, though. Emblazoned in huge block letters, it said:

IF IT AIN'T KING JAMES
IT AIN'T BIBLE


Eventually, I passed the truck, and couldn't resist checking out the driver. Long blond hair was all I could see. Just as I was thinking, "Aha, a young woman caught up in a Christian cult!," the driver turned, revealing a thin, 50-something year old man with a cheesy pencil-thin blonde mustache of the type I haven't seen since the 1970s. He looked more like an aging hippie than he did a "mountain man."

After I passed him, the incongruities increased again. The front of the truck bore a license plate painted with what I always considered a Catholic symbol: the bleeding heart of Jesus.

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6 comments:

  1. Dear Brother Widow's Son,

    It is useless to try to understand religious people and their antics. The King Jame's Bible was only one in a long line of translations.

    What a stupid statement for this brain-dead individual to make. Members of the Nestorian Church use the Peshitta translation, which is in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. But I guess that "ain't the bible".

    I am glad that we have religious freedom in America, the price that we pay for that freedom is seeing charlatans fleecing people and, in the case of mainstream religions, the blind leading the blind.

    It still amazes me that an individual can be a doctor, scientist, lawyer, educator, etc., and still hold on to beliefs that fly in the face of reason and logic. Self induced double-think.

    Someone could start a religion that teaches that the Roman Gods live now on Jupiter and some fool would believe it. Some need a crutch to deal with reality. Just another form of escape such as drugs.

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  2. I LONG FOR THE DAYS OF FREEDOM FROM RELIGION

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  3. 2BC,

    You are one wild and crazy guy!

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  4. "We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us -- how we can take it, what we do with it -- and that is what really counts in the end."
    -- Joseph Fort Newton

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  5. It is all the result of Just Being Human......in our ongoing effort to support religious freedom in America, you will inadvertently find the highs and the lows.
    It is what it is.
    You can't buy that kind of entertainment tho' - So enjoy!

    ReplyDelete

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