Tag Archives: Slacktivist

Not that I watch Monday Night Football, either

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Slacktivist Fred Clark, as ever, draws an apt comparison:

This suggests that anyone who hopes to become an ethical person would be better off watching football on television every Monday night than attending worship at a Southern Baptist church every Sunday morning. Monday Night Football might not make you a better person, but the Southern Baptist Convention has long employed an “ethics” spokesman who seems determined to make you a worse one.

Actually, now that I think of it, much of what I like about the Slacktivist is his apparently limitless ability re-frame Christianist bigotry as a failure to behave by standards of basic human decency. Jesus said of simple courtesy, “even the pagans can do that.” Fred Clark says, “Hey, folks? The pagans are doing it better.” ◼

Left Behind movie: as bad as the book

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Someone has, for reasons upon which I will not speculate, uploaded the entirety of the film adaptation of apocolypti-porn blockbuster Left Behind to YouTube. Which is as good as an invitation to slacktivist Fred Clark, who’s already eviscerated the book. A brief sample:

This is why NORAD doesn’t let foreigners with satellite-broadcasting equipment just wander in to their central command. You shout something, some botanist translates it for them, and the next thing you know your military secrets are being broadcast to the entire world by some hack reporter who acts like you’d just sat down with him for an interview.

Reading Left Behind with brain engaged

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Slacktivist is a lefty Christian blogger who, among other things, is reading Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s apocoly-porn Left Behind and posting periodical reactions. (Full disclosure: in high school, I worked at a Christian bookstore that did brisk trade in LB and its multifarious sequels, which approached the Second Coming like Achilles chasing the tortoise. I still feel kinda icky about that.) But back on topic, Slacktivist hits the nail on the head w/r/t LaHaye and Jenkins’s theology:

Their Antichrist is an anti-christ, an anti-messiah, in the sense that he is a false liberator who brings slavery. But where Carpathia chooses to pursue power, those who oppose him do the same. L&J’s version of the evil beast will be defeated, ultimately, not by the lamb, but by the good beast. In Left Behind, good triumphs over evil not because it is intrinsically different, but because it is simply more powerful. God has a bigger gun than the devil.

Needless to say, I’m going to have to keep following this one.