have y’all ever had communion bread that was just so….nasty? like i know we have to suffer as christians, but do we really need to have whole wheat bread as the body of christ?
my old church used hawaiian bread. my standards are high
Some old housemates of mine were Syrian Orthodox. At their church different members of the church took turns baking the bread that would be consecrated for the Eucharist. This was all well and good until one woman baked raisin bread. This led to the memorable occasion of a rather flustered priest, who had not seen the bread until that moment, declaring, “This – except for the raisins – is the Body of Christ.”
EXCEPT FOR THE RAISINS omg
Raisins are just dried grapes though, and wine is his blood so really its like a two in one shampoo & conditioner except with jesus
like a two in one shampoo & conditioner except with jesus
Mormons have some kind of list of which houses NOT to stop at; they will pass you by when they are out doing their missionary thing.
From the corner window, I saw two young guys in the white shirts and the ties walking up the block towards my sidewalk. Then they passed by and went up to the next house.
I assume it’s because I engaged the last pair of Mormon missionaries with questions: why no one ever told them the truth about old Joe Smith who was a conman arrested twice in New York before he invented Mormonism, why a supposed divinely-inspired text would be full of untruths about Native Americans, how old Joe Smith’s doctrine of religious polygamy was an attempt to bamboozle people who thought he was immoral for marrying several young girls …
I also assume they reported my questions back to their mission leader and he (well, it would be a he, wouldn’t it, knowing Mormon views of women in leadership) must have put my address on a no-go list to avoid the chance that I might contaminate the faith of a future Mormon.
Poor kids. They are lied to their whole lives. Poor me, I missed my chance to enlighten a couple of ‘em.
LOL They absolutely do X your house. My dad was a shift worker and they once woke him up about 30 minutes after he’d gone to bed. He answered the door, naked as the day he was born and furious, and threatened to strangle them all with their ties. They never ever returned–and my parents lived in that house for 25 years.
oh lord what a great story! Glad I wasn’t there to see it, though 🍑
Piling on:
I lived for a while in a communal household with a bunch of people who rescued animals, and for a while we had this incredibly sweet Burmese python named Dolores that we were caring for. She rebounded from neglect very quickly and was basically a joyful and energetic bundle of sunshine, but she’d had mites and they were hard to get rid of. Treatment includes coating the snake with olive oil and waiting an hour, which causes the mites to suffocate. Now, it’s not a good idea to put an eleven-foot long greased snake into a glass habitat, so the best bet was to hold her for the hour. This was a formidable task, as Dolores weighed almost seventy pounds, but as i am a robust and muscular individual i stripped down to my underpants, picked up Dolores, and went about my business in a very slippery and greasy way (i was test-fitting new fangs for halloween).
Which was when the mormons stopped by. My housemates had seen them from the front windows, which was why they insisted i answer the door.
Me, befanged, mohawked, tattooed, pierced, greased, naked except for a ripped and sagging pair of drawers and an enthusiastic and friendly seventy-pound oily snake: hi!
Dolores, who was really having such an awesome day: new friends? yes? hello? you have treats?
Mormons: sorry wrong house. (they actually turned whiter i did not think that would have been possible)
Me (to housemates): keep an eye out for the assembly of god folks, okay? we might as well do this right.
One of my SCA buddies was dressed to go to an event when the Mormons knocked. He answered the door in his black, hooded cloak, long knife strapped on, and then looked back and called, “Brothers! The sacrifices have arrived!”
As you might imagine, those were the last Mormons he ever saw at that house.
Not as dramatic as the above stories, but my stepdad was once moving into a 2nd story apartment and the Mormons dropped by. My stepdad, always on the hunt for an opportunity to be “a cheap bastard,” asked if they’d help him move his couch up the staircase. To their credit, they did help move the couch … but strangely enough he never got visited by the Mormons ever again after that day.
Wasn’t present for this as it happened before my birth, but it’s something of a family legend.
It was springtime during the years where my grandfather was making a go at being a farmer again, post retirement from the telephone company. Part of this was raising goats, so there were many baby goats bouncing around.
My grandparents had also just gotten a load of gravel delivered with the intent of covering the driveway with it. That hadn’t happened yet but the family children had leveled off a sort of plateau in the big pile while playing.
Enter the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
My mom was tasked with restraining Grandma’s gangster dogs, Clyde, Mugsy, and Ralph who were all offering to chase off the intruders very vocally. This landed my mom a front row seat for what went down next.
Grandma Sharon listens to the whole pitch very enthusiastically, smiling and nodding along. Eventually they get to the end and ask if she would like to attend services with them.
“Oh we’d love to,” she replied with her best, most innocent of smiles. “And in return we’d like you to come worship with us! We’re sacrificing a goat to Diana at the full moon!” And she swept her arm out to point at the impromptu rock pile alter.
As my mom says, “never saw two people leave so fast. And they never came back.”
Alas, I was never willing to do more than just explain I had a morman relative, was pagan, had read the book, and had no interest in converting. But should you want to be taken off the list, Mormons are told not to talk to people that have no interest in converting and are inclined to debate Christian theory, Mormonism, or really anything that might inspire doubt in the missionaries.
Onetime a couple of LDS missionaries came to my flat and I… don’t think I was that weird at them? I think I was wearing a blue & white vintage batik kaftan and maybe the place lowkey smelled of weed, but I was hyperfocused on comparative religion that month so I opened the door like “OMG are you guys Mormons? That’s awesome! I’ve been hoping you’d show up I want to know all about your religion and I didn’t know how to get in touch with you! Can I have a copy of your book? Do you want to come in?!” and they gave me a copy of their book (I never did get around to reading it), made an appointment to come back another day, and apparently blacklisted my place on the spot because I never saw them again.
Which was frankly a little bit rude of them.
so a former roommate had (British?) penal orange overalls, from dressing as Nathan from Misfits for Dragoncon one year, as an excuse to shout profanity. after the con, he wore the thing as pjs pretty often, and answered the door to greet a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in it at least once.
my roommate @decoplusboco usually talks to missionaries because comparative religion fan i guess
the one time i answered the door for someone who wanted to talk to me about jesus, it went something like
them: Hi! We noticed you moved in recently! Have you thought about attending [some church]
me, standing on a skull doormat, wearing all black with a prominent ankh ring: uhhhh no i. i wasnt thinking about that.
this is not counting the multiple times i thought girls were hitting on me at work when i was a barista and they were actually leading up to inviting me to church or telling me about jesus. you’d think this wouldn’t be an easy thing to mix up but
look, when a girl slides you a napkin with her number and “Call me! 🙂 “ written on it, i dont think im out of line in assuming she’s flirting. AND YET.
My mother got our house X’d when I was a kid. She accepted their free copy of the book of Mormon. They saw a plump little lady. She invited them to come back for tea a week later.
That was all the time she needed to read it and make a list of every theological and other contradiction in it. She took those poor guys apart.
People thought my mother had a degree in education or music because she was a music teacher. Or they thought she didn’t have one at all because of her appearance and manner.
What my mother actually had…
…was a degree in theology.
This wasn’t the only time she weaponized it against what she used to call “evan-jellyfish”
have to reblog for “evanjellyfish”
Thanks everyone for the wonderful and inspirational stories. As an atheist person who had to pass today by the humongous, empty, brand new and pristine Mormon church with a pristine never used basketball court (Ecuadorians are crazy about basketball…)*** and will see Jehowa Witnesses waiting for the catch of the day at the town plaza tomorrow, I appreciate this deeply.
*** Why the church existence irritates the shit out of me? Because I live across a school; kids in the communities up in the mountains wake up at 4:30am, to make it to school on foot or a bike. A small school bus or two… never mind.
Jehovah’s Witnesses: Have you heard the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Me, in full Roman gear, ready to go to an event: Yes…
Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are clearly very inobservant: Great! Would you be interested in joining us for a service?
Water is a good offering. Olive oil is a good offering. Flowers are a good offering. Written poetry is a good offering. Singing is a good offering. Milk is a good offering. Drawing is a good offering. Wine is a good offering. Candles are a good offering. Incense is a good offering.
The ancient Greeks used what they had around them as offerings, use what you have around you. Yes, the luxurious offerings are great to give, but many of you have asked us what you can do for offerings when you’re short on money. Use what you have around you. Be creative, or just offer some water. You have options and no limits to give an offering.
This reminds me of the story where a wealthy magistrate gave a sizable offering to Apollo and beamingly asked him, “pray tell me, who is the most pious man alive?” He was expecting the answer to be about him. But Apollo instead answered, “That peasant over there who offered me a handful of barley”
My mom said that today in church her pastor said in the sermon that Jesus told us to help the poor, and taking money away from public schools to give to charter schools only widens the gap between the rich and the poor. She then added that Jesus spoke against adultery and lust and would not have approved of bragging about sexually assaulting women. According to my mom, people got up and walked out.
The pastor also started the sermon by noting that she’d heard of another minister who read the entirety of the Sermon on the Mount at the pulpit, to be told by the so-called Christian parishioners after the service that it was offensive and they didn’t agree.
The Sermon on the Mount is straight up the words of Jesus.
I recently read an article that said, hypocritical Christians in America don’t actually worship Jesus. They worship America, and even then, it’s a very specific, self-centered idea of America.
YES. EXACTLY.
My mom’s church talks almost every Sunday about how Christians are called to welcome strangers and foreigners and does tons of stuff to help refugees because HELLO, IT’S RIGHT THERE. IN THE RED TEXT, NO LESS.
I don’t believe everything they believe, but I REALLY like those people.
What a lot of these people are is idolators.
Not in terms of the realness or unrealness of who they worship, but in terms of how they’ve warped their focus away from the reality and turned it towards a fantasy of their own construction.
By definition, an idol is an image with no god behind it.
What they have done is taken the idea of Jesus and created a false image of him, nothing like the reality, to carry around in their back pocket, or to wave around on signs, and pull out and shove in people’s faces to justify all manner of unChristlike behavior.
It is a “worship” that is fundamentally self-centered rather than deity-centered, wherein the deity in question is more of a pocketbook get-out-of-jail-free card than directive to live by, and more of a status symbol than a guiding light.
That people will, without a shred of self-awareness, rest themselves assured that Jesus would want them to tip their waitress with a Jesus pamphlet made to look like folded-up money (to take only one example out of many) is the ultimate dismissal of everything the original stood for.
There is a line in the Bible about Jesus meeting his false worshipers and saying “I do not know you.” It seems like plenty of so-called Christians have beaten him to the punch with how quick they are to say they don’t know him.
A lot of churches and organizations in America that call themselves Christian churches are in fact Christianist cults. They no more represent Christianity than Daesh represents Islam. In addition to the usual nonsense of so-called Christians being pro-war, anti-immigrant, racist, and so forth, there are a lot of sects/movements that are just completely toxic and not Christian at all, even though they use that label. If you are Christian and want to have some fucking nightmares, google “christian dominionist,” or “prosperity gospel.”
Still think this is the most realistic diagram of the difference between the theological Jesus and the Comfortable Reinterpretation of Jesus.
American Christianity is, at this point, like the Cult of the Emperor in ancient Rome, which is simultaneously both ironic and appropriate given the history involved
Matthew Shepard, the young gay man brutally killed on a chilly night in Wyoming 20 years ago this month, was finally laid to rest at Washington National Cathedral on Friday. A reflective, music-filled service offered stark contrast to the anti-gay protests that marred his funeral two decades ago.
The public remembrance at the filled 4,000-seat cathedral was led by the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, and the Right Rev. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church. After, his ashes were interred at the cathedral’s crypt in a private family ceremony.
Robinson was emotional throughout the public ceremony, tearfully addressing the large crowd. “For Matthew to come back to church,” he said, “is a remarkable step forward.”
He extended a particular welcome to attendees who are LGBT, saying, “Many of you have been hurt by your own religious communities, and I want to welcome you back.”
Shepard’s parents’ requested that their sons ashes be interred at the cathedral after 20 years of reluctance. They feared his gravesite would be desecrated.
so exodus says that aaron stretched out his hand over the waters and the frog came up and covered the land of egypt and while english translators usually render “frog” as “frogs,” today at shul the rabbi challenged us to consider whether it could in fact have been one giant frog so we spent literally forty-five minutes arguing about whether there were swarms of frogs from the beginning or rather a single monstrous godzilla frog that split into multiple frogs once people started trying to destroy it and the congregation got so worked up that even after we’d sung aleinu and were heading out of the sanctuary people were still excitedly debating the moral implications of one frog versus many so what i’m trying to say is @judaism never change
Steel Phoenix Studios 