October 17, 2005
Listen and Do: One for Jesus!
I'm putting the entirety of Listen and Do up on Flickr 10 pages at a time, and I'll be pointing out a highlight or two as I do so. The scans are fairly large jpegs, for anyone who wants to break out their crayons.
So, the text that accompanies the rest of this page says:
Jesus gives us all our money.
He wants us to thank Him for the money.
He asks us to give one out of every 10 pennies.
This money is for God's work.
He wants us to give other money, too.
Jesus gives us everything that we have.
Let us thank Jesus.
I'm mostly okay with the first part (though part of me thinks, if Jesus gives it to us, but wants some for himself, why not keep it in the first place? It seems less, I dunno, rude that way). But it's the "he wants us to give other money, too" that troubles me - that's awfully open-ended, like a friend who's always short on money who says he only needs a hundred bucks, then throws out "or whatever else you wanna give me" after you hand him over that first cool hunny.
I'm glad that a.) I didn't read this as a child and b.) Jesus only seems concerned with money, and not, say, G.I. Joes or Transformers.
Posted by starlen at 8:31 AM | Comments (4)
October 11, 2005
Listen and Do: Man of India
I picked up a children's activity book called "Listen and Do." The copyright date is 1954. I'm planning on scanning the entire thing eventually, but in the meantime, click the image below to see the full page of this particular gem:
Update: I'll be posting the rest of the pages beginning later this week (there are 60-some-odd pages to this thing, so it'll take a bit of time to finish scanning and posting), so check back in or grab a feed, and I promise you won't be disappointed.
Posted by starlen at 9:15 AM | Comments (120)
August 31, 2005
Card-carrying.
My long history of working for the Moral Majority (read: signing up for Falwell's free newsletter) qualifies me as a Charter Member.
Which I'm pretty sure makes me automatically right in anything I say, regardless of whether or not I know anything about what I'm talking about. See that? I've got 'Merica and God on my side. So eat it, punk.
Posted by starlen at 10:52 AM | Comments (1)
July 14, 2005
Pseudo-Science, Part II
I may have let the three people reading this site down with my last Scientology post. Sure, now we know that L Ron Hubbard is generally a poor writer, prone to hyperbole and fits of bizarre homophobia. But that's just nuttiness, you say - where's the pseudo-science?
Well, reader (and other reader, and other reader), let me introduce you to one of the core concepts of Scientology: the engram.
To catch you up to speed, in the event that you don't already know, engrams are the manifestations of the lost souls of the intergalactic war of billions of years ago, caused when the galactic overlord Xenu took his prisoners to Teegeeack (now known simply as "Earth") and then blew them up in volcanoes with hydrogen bombs. Those lost souls now attach themselves to humans, and prevent us from reaching our full potential (by having a film debut at #2 at the box office when it was clearly destined for #1, not dating Katie Holmes, etc).
But, you ask, if one can become Clear by ridding oneself of engrams, this must mean we obtain engrams, right? Or are we just born with them?
It turns out, a little of both. You can open yourself up to engrams as early as while in the womb. The following passage from Dianetics (pp 370 - 371) explains how. (And again, I promise I'm not making any of this up).
Prosurvival Engram
This could be any engram which, by content only, not by any real aid to the individual containing it, pretended to assist survival. Let us take a coitus engram: Mother and Father are engaged in intercourse which, by pressure, is painful to the unborn child and which renders him "unconscious" (common occurence, like morning sickness, usually present in any engram bank). Mother is saying, "Oh , I can't live without it. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. Oh, how nice. Oh, do it again!" and Father is saying, "Come! Come! Oh, you're so good. You're so wonderful! Ahhhh!" Mother's orgasm puts the finishing touch on the "unconsciousness" in the child. Mother says, "It's beautiful." Father, finished now, says, "Get up," meaning she should take a douche (they do not know she is pregnant) and then begins to snore.
Obviously, this is a valuable incident because one "cannot live without it." Furthermore, "it's beautiful," also, "it's wonderful." But it is also extremely painful. It cannot be followed because it has first something which beckons part of the mind back, "Come!" and then, later, tells it to "Get up." Things that are "beautiful" and "wonderful" can cause our patient, not in therapy, to have an orgasm when she looks at beautiful and wonderful things, providing they have been so labeled.
So, what do we learn from this (apart from the fact that L Ron apparently grew up with an abusive dad whom he would try to deal with by peppering references to him all throughout Dianetics)?
We learn that a baby in the womb understands language pretty well (but not well enough to catch a double entendre, or a naughty word!), and is harmed by it in ways that will manifest itself in spontaneous orgasms that can only be cured by thousands and thousands of dollars and e-metering sessions.
Or something like that. I'm still spinning from that last non-sequitir. Pseudo-science!
Posted by starlen at 3:18 AM | Comments (2)
July 12, 2005
Guns = 1, DC Talk = 0
So, according to Bob Jones University's Residence Hall Life page, students are not allowed any pop music, including "Contemporary Christian music" such as "Michael W. Smith, Stephen Curtis Chapman, WOW Worship, and so forth." Further, no TVs or VCRs/DVD players (including a note not to use your laptop's DVD drive to watch movies), no video games, no posters of movie or music stars, and, when in town visiting people, no going to movie theaters or watching films with higher than a G rating.
But your guns? That's cool. At the very bottom of the page, there's this note:
All weapons must be turned in for storage. Trigger locks are required for pistols.
And, oh, yeah, "fireworks are not permitted on campus." Presumably, not even if turned in for storage.
Posted by starlen at 10:28 AM | Comments (2)
