I love SMBC, and he’s probably crazier than I am. So that’s a nice choice and a wonderful reference.
Interesting comic, did he rip off the oatmeal, or the other way around? Possibly this thing is true enough they arrived there separately, but that seems a stretch.
Update: Turns out the Oatmeal comic was suggested by a reader, and an inadvertent rip off of the comic you posted, the story is in the link I posted, but beneath the comic itself, never mind.
There’s a 'mea culpa’ at the bottom of the Oatmeal strip.
[quote=“Electras0l, post:155, topic:49670”]
This is exactly the sort of thinking that continues the ‘culture war’ [/quote]
South Carolina was talking about a Civil War before the Constitution was even signed, they started the Civil War, as soon as the Civil war was over they were talking about the next Civil War and it continues to this day. I blame that sort of thing more.
[quote=“Electras0l, post:155, topic:49670”]and keeps a great many who would like to be more progressive or tolerant in their politics voting and thinking in step with with the Right/Republican/FauxNews side of American politics.[/quote] I seriously doubt that
[quote=“Electras0l, post:155, topic:49670”]Calling me names and implying I’m a homophobic racist,
[/quote]Nobody here did anything like that. Does that happen to you a lot?
After which his god will listen and send in a sheriff - by god’s will the pastor’s cousin - with his boys in blue who give you a taste of the batons and haul you in front of the judge - by god’s will the pastor’s brother, who unleashes the god’s wrath upon you.
Don’t misunderestimate the power of the South.
Hypothesis: it is just because the Earth was installed by a redneck god who couldn’t read the “this side up” sign.
FTFY, you’re welcome.
The church’s facebook page was deleted after they realized that the comments on this topic were just going to keep a’comin with no hope of deleting them all.
Supposedly the Hasbrouck Heights PD is on the case. This guy is hopefully sunk.
I also assumed this was in the south. Nope - New Jersey. And NORTHERN New Jersey, at that!
Hey now, everyone knows QLD is Australia’s deep south! 
I suspect( hope ) that Pastor McPunchy was engaging in some hyperbole. Either way it seems like a messed up way to make a point about the Prince of Peace.
I seem to recall that he said he was youth leader… I suppose that it is possible that this behavior took place when he himself was a youth???
Those sheep are a bunch of liars!
It also seems like we should add in a
Proposition 2.5: A perfect god does not allow his pastors to beat kids.
So either there isn’t a god or this guy isn’t worshiping him.
They seem to fragment even more readily, however…
It’s unclear in the verses if they’re talking about actually decorated tree or a religious icon that’s just made of decorated wood. (The Yule tree being a Northern European thing they wouldn’t have been aware of.) Seems like it might be a reference to a symbolic representation of God’s wife, Asherah. So not so much a competing religion as part of that religion that got edited out, later. Although it’s true that Christmas and Easter (and pretty much every other “Christian” holiday) were pre-existing, i.e. pagan, festivals that when Christianity spread to those areas, they came up with Christian justifications for, even though they kept all the pagan trappings and names (in the case of Easter and Yule). Since the existing holidays were usually tied to solstices and significant agricultural dates, you had different holidays in different parts of Europe that landed on roughly the same dates that got assimilated under one Christian holiday - e.g. Saturnalia, Yule, etc. became Christmas.
On top of all that you mention, you had a polytheistic culture that spawned a monotheistic religious tradition that conflated multiple deities of the polytheistic tradition into one. So you had multiple influences that made up the polytheistic religion, and multiple influences in the process of becoming monotheistic and afterwards. Which is how you had Moses telling his people to venerate a Vedic snake god who ended up becoming conflated with Jesus (and the snake in the garden of Eden) in certain Christian traditions.
It’s amazing how tangled these things become - you could probably write (someone probably already has, come to think of it) a rather thick tome just on Santa Claus, and the various Christian influences, pagan influences and modern commercial influences. This despite the fact that given his name is just a corruption of Saint Nicholas, and you’d expect it to be a pretty straight derivation, it really isn’t at all.
Awesome! This could only be better if this guy had a costume and his own comic book.
Hence the ‘magic’.
If you have any further difficulty with the English language, I’m here to help.
The people who just lost a lot of weight without even dieting.
If children are able to think for themselves, and to live without fear, then his form of religion and “morality”, and control will become extinct.
