I Stand Alone on the Word of God...

I've read the Bible. Seriously. From cover to cover. Admittedly, I might have skimmed over the begats to get to the good stuff, but I have actually read from Genesis to Revelation. I don't claim to be an expert, but I am pretty goddamn good at answering Bible questions on Jeopardy.

And having read it, I'm privy to a number of things that many Christians seem to have missed. For example, I know that Jesus commanded his disciples to hate their parents, wives, children, brothers, sisters, and themselves (Luke 14:26). I remember a particularly troubling story where a bunch of kids were making fun of Elisha's bald spot, and God retaliated by sending a couple of bears to slaughter them (2 Kings 2:24). And I recall God threatening to corrupt the seed of the Judah priests and smear shit on their faces (Malachi 2:3).

Since a lot of Christians haven't actually *read* the book on which they've based their entire lives, they have no idea this stuff is in there. They yammer on and on about how the Bible is the literal and unerring word of God "because it says so, right there in the Bible!" But when you bring up the miracle where Jesus pulled money out of a fish (Matthew 17:26) or that story of a prostitute who lusted after men with genitals like donkeys and emissions like horses (Ezekiel 23:20), they just look at you like you've lost your mind. And when you finally show it to them, they'll just claim that you're taking it out of context or that you somehow lack the ability to truly understand because you insist on thinking with your brain instead of your heart.

(And while we're on the subject, if one more Christian tries to tell me that the expression "God helps those who help themselves" comes from the Bible, I'm going to call Jesus collect and have Him revoke your salvation.)

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One Bible story that used to bother me to no end comes from Exodus. Moses has just seen the burning bush, and is on his way back to Egypt with his wife Zipporah and infant son to confront Pharaoh. And then, this happens:

And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let them go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision. (Exodus 4:24-26).

I *eventually* figured out that Moses had forgotten to circumcise his son, which had apparently pissed God off. Even knowing that, it's still a creepy story. But I remember reading this passage when I was 12 years old, and thinking WHAT THE FUCK?

When I was working at Brinker back in 1997, I brought up this particular Bible verse to my friend Dave. Dave is a Mormon but, more importantly, he's smart and he has a sense of humor. I once tried to turn him from his sinning Mormon ways by giving him this Jack Chick tract, but Dave clung stubbornly to his faith. He's nothing if not devout.

Anyway, I mentioned this verse to Dave as an example of the weird, creepy stuff that people forget is in the Bible. And of course, Dave thought I was making it up. So we went to my computer, hopped on Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet, and looked it up.

I'll never forget that moment. Dave just shook his head, laughing. "I've never read that before. I had no idea it was in there."

My officemate Brenda said, "You shouldn't ever argue religion with Irby. He really knows the Bible."

For some reason, this filled me with pride. I was actually beaming when I said, "Why, thank you."

Then Brenda added, "Of course, the Devil can quote scripture to suit his purposes."

Jack Chick Halloween Special - Part 2

In case you missed Part 1, just scroll down and read it you lazy bastard!

Jack Chick has spent the last 40 years putting the "mental" back into "fundamental" with his hateful little comic book tracts. These "Chick Tracts" rail against all the things that are wrong with the world: Catholics, hippies, rock music, astrology, evolution, etc. But for some reason, the one item that rides at the top of God's shit list is Halloween. Why? Well, the reasons are so myriad and insane that it would take several pamphlets to enumerate them. Fortunately for us, Cap'n Jack has set out to do just that, which brings us to the second entry in his crazy-ass parade...

Boo! (1991)
Like the much touted "War on Christmas," Jack Chick believes that the true meaning of Halloween has been lost amidst all the secular hijinks and commercialism. You see, when kids put on those Batman costumes and wander from house to house asking for candy, they are actually reenacting an ancient ritual where druids used to put on Batman costumes and wander from house to house asking for children and virgins.

Our story opens with Charlie, a high school student in his mid-30s, renting out a campground for the annual Salem High School Halloween party. And the name of this campground is... wait for it... Camp Basil Bub! Haw, haw, haw! Our middle-aged high school student gets a hell of a deal on the place because just one year ago, 13 people were... MURDERED! And despite the fact that the killer was riddled with bullets and still got away, Charlie gets right to planning the evening's festivities. You know, music... snacks... sacrificing a live cat at midnight. And as the honking high school students drive away, a sinister figure with a pumpkin head and a pet snake suddenly realizes that he forgot his chainsaw.



Midnight comes, and things are getting mighty wild at Charlie's Halloween party. The three or four people who showed up are gathered around an altar for the cat sacrifice when, suddenly, the pumpkin-headed man bursts into the cabin WITH HIS CHAINSAW! So apparently he went home and got it, thus neatly wrapping up what could have been a storyline left dangling for years. Take a lesson, writers of Lost!



Anyway, the pumpkin-headed killer dices up everybody at the party except for one guy, and a mouse and a cat, all of whom flee the grisly scene. Apparently, the sole survivor calls the police, and one of the deputies interrupts the Chief, who is using black magic to levitate a coffee cup when he gets the news of the massacre.



Forty minutes later, the Chief and his sombreroed federales have emptied their guns into the pumpkin-headed killer, who removes his mask and reveals himself to be... SATAN! The sight of the effete Prince of Darkness proves too much for one of the deputies, who lapses into an Irish brogue as he flees.



Satan makes his way to "the village" and, for nefarious reasons we mere mortals may never understand, decides to cap off an evening of slaughter by scaring a Christian. He crouches outside the window of the "Village Church" and peers inside at Joey, a fine young man who apparently spends many an evening praying until after midnight. So what was Joey praying for? No idea. I think he was pissed that he didn't get invited to the Salem High Halloween party, so he asked God to send an unstoppable killer to hack up Charlie and his friends with a chainsaw...

As Joey makes his way home from his marathon prayer session, the devil jumps out and tries to scare him. But Joey's faith in the Lord is strong! He rebukes Satan, who literally runs for the hills while shouting swear words that are apparently best left to the imagination. Joey defiantly shakes his fist and tells the devil that he hates him *and* his lousy birthday!



The next day, a clearly shaken Joey goes to see his pastor, which seems like a reasonable course of action once you've had a personal run-in with the Hoary Master of the Netherworld. I mean, let's face it. Once you've come face to face with the very embodiment of evil, you're going to have some questions of a very spiritual nature.

What Joey wants to know is if Halloween is really Satan's birthday.



"Of course not, you retard," the pastor almost replies. He then launches into the standard Jack Chick diatribe about druids and human sacrifice. Now, this kind of bothers me because early on in the story, the devil himself referred to Halloween as his birthday. Why would he lie about something like that? I swear, sometimes Satan can be such a bastard!

Anyway, the Insane-o-meter gets cranked up to 11 as the pastor explains Satan's plot to Joey. Satan uses Halloween to trick little kids into becoming werewolves and witches, and then they commit human sacrifice, which God really hates. Not because it's murder, but because it makes a mockery of the crucifixion, which Satan is trying to keep you from hearing about. And THAT, Pastor Moe Howard informs us, is his trick.



I can't help but be disappointed with Chick at this point. Usually he puts a lot of thought into his conspiracy theories. I mean, he's concocted a secret history of the world involving lost Israeli tribes, the Illuminati, the European Union, the Lincoln assassination, the liberal media, and the Catholic Church. That's batshit crazy writ large, my friend! But what do we get for Satan and Halloween? Some half-assed attempt to connect a bunch of unrelated dots. Let's face it. This "wicked scheme" is even lamer than Joker's attempt to conquer Gotham City by becoming King of the Surfers.

So that's pretty much it for Boo! In an epilogue of sorts, we see that Joey managed to scare the devil back to Hell by talking smack about his birthday. Whimsically dressed in his pumpkin head, Satan laughs good-naturedly as a tormented soul shakes his fist from damnation's flame and calls him a rat.



Powerful stuff.

Next: A kid dies tragically on Halloween night, and a Sunday School teacher comforts his friends by assuring them that he's burning in Hell. Don't miss Happy Halloween!

Jack Chick Halloween Special - Part 1

For those of you who don't know, Jack Chick is a freaky, FREAKY cartoonist who writes these little comic book tracts that rail against Satanists, gays, evolution, Muslims, liberals, rock music, Freemasons, Dungeons & Dragons, Catholics, Mormons, and basically any form of Christianity that differs from his extreme fundamentalism. In fact, the basic tenet of Chick's faith seems to be that God is a capricious asshole who is just *itching* for an excuse to cast your sinning ass into Hell.

But of all these pressing issues, the one that really seems to get up Chick's ass with cleats on is Halloween. Our man Jack has devoted no less than five of his "Chick Tracts" to exposing Halloween as a vast Satanic conspiracy concocted by druids and pagans to sacrifice small children and boost the sales of tiny Snickers bars.

The Trick (1986)
The first of Chick's Halloween oeuvre is The Trick. This one opens with a coven of diabolical witches hatching their evil scheme to sacrifice children to the devil by poisoning Halloween candy. However, it turns out that this year's Halloween drive has a dual purpose. Membership is down in Club Satan. Apparently role playing games and rock music just aren't bringing in the numbers like they used to, so the witches are also going to put curses on the treats to gain recruits.



On Halloween night, little Johnny Dexter and his friends, Jerry and Susie, go out trick or treating without realizing they are on a collision course with the kind of horrific tragedy that could only be pulled out of the ass of a fundamentalist Christian like Chick. Their neighbor Brenda, who is in league with the forces of evil, gives them all some tainted treats. Johnny dies from eating the poisoned candy, while Jerry ends up in the hospital with cuts in his mouth. Susie also gets sick from eating one of the cursed treats, but manages to recover. And then, irony of ironies, Sister Charity (who masterminded the whole messy caper) has a heart attack and dies while watching the tragedy unfold on the news. And she finds herself in Hell, where the devil taunts her by laughing like Z.Z. Top.



You're probably thinking to yourself at this point, "Thank God this whole sordid tale is over." Well, if so, you're a retard because Jack Chick is just warming up! Remember little Jerry and Susie, who survived the wicked Halloween treats? Well, they've gone from sweet and obedient to unmanageable little monsters who no longer want to go to Sunday School. (In other words, normal children.) Their parents are at wit's end, trying to figure out how to handle their wicked little hellspawn. And Brenda, whom nobody suspects is an undercover agent of Beelzebub, is trying to convince them that it's all just a harmless phase that all kids go through.

But Brenda's plans are undone by the arrival of Becky, a former witch who now serves Jesus. Yes, having turned her back on the dark conspiracy of witchcraft and Satanism, Becky now travels the nation and fights her evil former cohorts with the power of... well, God and the Bible and stuff. Upon meeting Becky, Brenda immediately smells an evangelical rat. And once Becky starts letting loose with the TRUTH behind Halloween, Brenda's suspicions are confirmed.



Becky spins a sordid tale of ancient druids and child sacrifice that Chick *claims* is straight from the pages of The Two Babylons, a pamphlet written by Scottish theologian Alexander Hislop in 1853. However, I suspect most of Chick's information actually came from repeated viewings of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. We learn that the druids were actually part of an ancient protection racket who would go door to door and demand children and virgins from families in exchange for protecting them from the forces of evil. Any families that didn't cough up would end up with a Star of David inscribed on their door, because apparently the Jews were in on it too. And then, someone would die!



Brenda tries to defuse Becky's devil stories by laughing them off as superstition. At first, the parents of the tainted demon kids fall for Brenda's line of reasoning and dismiss Becky's allegations. But then, Becky explains to them that the only reason her stories sound asinine and unbelievable is because IT'S ALL A PART OF SATAN'S PLAN TO TRICK PEOPLE INTO NOT BELIEVING IN HIM! And then, while the parents are scrambling to find the socks that just got blown the hell off their feet, Becky brings it on home and tells them that only the power of Jesus will snap those little misbehaving carpet apes into shape. As Becky leads them in prayer, Brenda vents her frustration by swearing in some goddamn moon man language.



Next: Jack Chick's Boo! rips on Halloween and horror movies, and isn't afraid to use stacks of dead teenagers to bring you closer to the Lord.

Fun with Jack Chick #10

Fun with Jack Chick #9

I didn't make any changes to this one. I just thought it was funny that this Jack Chick tract was the story of a man reading a Jack Chick tract. But I guess it's that kind of self-promotion that has helped Mr. Chick build his funnybook ministry into a hate-spewing empire...

(Actually, now that I think about it, this makes about as much sense as believing the Bible is the literal and unerring word of God because "it says so, right there in the Bible!")

Fun with Jack Chick #8

Fun with Jack Chick #7

Fun with Jack Chick #6

Fun with Jack Chick #5

Okay, I didn't make any changes to this one. All I can say is, "Ewwwww!"

Fun with Jack Chick #4

Fun with Jack Chick #3

Fun with Jack Chick #2

Fun with Jack Chick #1