Unless you are in New Zealand where it’s already the 21. Well, well, New Zealand is still with us! So that means either Kiwis are all athiests and going to Hell or GASP! the Rapture is another hoax. This highlights a glaring flaw (among many) that Harold Camping (the un-utterable fool that started this current end-of-the-world stupidity) seems to have overlooked. May 21 starts at different times through the world. His time table is very US centric. Does this mean God is an American?

Oh wait, I’m wrong. According to the Campites, the Rapture starts at 6 pm sharp. But they don’t say which time zone. So does this mean we’ll see a gradual drifting away of people? You know, to ensure there isn’t a huge line up of Evangelicals at the holy gates. Hate to have them get rowdy in the line up.

Another question that is plaguing me, will they go up fully dressed or will they leave their clothes behind? Will we see piles of pants and shirts scattered throughout the city. Does this mean, and my retinas are already burning out with the thought, the long line ups into heaven will be filled with … oh good lord … naked Christians. Will fig leaves be handed out in the line up?

I’ll lay a bet that the Family Radio network employees (the company that is vigorously promoting the May 21 farce) collect their pay cheques today and buy groceries for the week. I’ll also bet not a one of them canceled vacation plans either. I wonder if they think it’s amusing to terrify the sad and the gullible. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a class action lawsuit could be launched to drive the station into the ground. Alas, you can’t sue because people were naive enough to listen to the station. Using phrases like “We have learned that the precise date of the cross was April 1, 33 A.D.” is nothing more than numerology hocus pocus. There is no proof – infallible or other wise. I think Camping pulled the numbers from his ass and is sitting there laughing at his followers. By the way Family Radio should also be sued for mangling reason and the English language. “Another Infallible Proof” doesn’t even approach coherence.

Ah, but you and I know Camping and his band of jackasses will be forgiven for getting the date wrong. All the loyal followers will come up with some excuse as to why the Rapture didn’t happen, and they’ll wait breathlessly for the next drivel from Camping. He predicted the Rapture sometime in the 90s and golly gee, he was wrong. His followers still blindly follow him.

On the positive side, May 21 has created an endless stream of comedy that has kept many of us in stitches all week. Plus after tomorrow, hopefully I can read some of my usual sites without seeing the endless “Will the world end on the 21″ questions.

Zombie Apocalypse is coming – the CDC says so!
The Center for Disease Control ran an article on their blog this week that caused a wee bit of a stir. Well, okay, a big stir. Someone at the CDC has a healthy sense of humour and knows how to get the attention of a young audience. Social Media: Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse talks about preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse and proved so popular the website crashed because of the number of visitors. The point of the story was to hammer home the importance of emergency preparedness but with wicked humour.

Alas, a few people have taken the zombie threat as real – after all the CDC says they exist, so they must. Humour and satire are lost on the terminally gullible. With all this Rapture talk and end of the earth nonsense floating around, it’s a small wonder people haven’t been building zombie shelters for real.

By the way, according to mythology surrounding May 21, when the Rapture occurs, the world will be wracked with a massive earth-wide quake. Since it’s already the 21 on the other side of the world, and no quake has occurred, so I think you can safely assume, neither the second coming nor zombies will occur. Besides, it’s a long weekend here in Canada and nothing will get in the way of the first offical BBQ weekend holiday – not even Zombie Jesus.

I have to admit, this was a good one. The letter about your Japanese relief foundation was quite well done. No seriously, this is a compliment! It looked good, had the right tone, seemed sincere, and the charity number was a nice touch. The plea from the nuns was heart rending – a real show stopper!

HOWEVER….

… it’s earthquake not quark.

Hugs ‘n contempt

Catpaw

Wow! what an thought ! What a concept ! Lovely .. Amazing …

Context is always good, but thanks for the giggle anyway.

Wonder how this sells to the religious right? After all he is marrying a female so that should be cool with them.

…. now if he’d fallen for a cat, I may have understood.

“This website article shows how well you comprehend and know this subject.”
What subject? You mean the article I wrote about general stupidity? Well that’s where you left your comment. I’m not sure if he was saying I’m an expert in stupidity or I’m stupid. Double edged sword! Oh Gods of Irony, thank you for serving that one up on a platter.

But the spammer who is near and dear to my heart is the one who turbo spams his idea about making a fortune by spamming mobile phones:

“Hey all, i want to share with you a brand new method to making money online that is HUGE and very easy to make money. It’s [insert most recent con job here]. There are more than 5 billion mobile phones in the world and just over 1.8 billion people use the internet [cool, an endless supply of humans to really annoy]. This website give you great details information on how you can get into [pissing off your potential customers, and while I'm ranting, is it so difficult to construct a coherent sentence?] and get a slice of your share. I personally made just over $1100 with this system just YESTERDAY! and on average make $500-$1200 per day [heh heh heh yea.. right]. It’s very easy and anyone can do it [well this is obvious, any monkey with a keyboard can spam]. Take a quick look at their video for more info, some really good stuff guys.”

I have a one word response to this: bullshit. Or is that two words bull shit… no no.. it’s definitely one word – bullshit. Yes, you to can turn a budding business into a pariah in a couple easy lessons. Send me $2 via Paypal and I’ll send you instructions on how to do this. Also note, it’s generally a good idea to have a fairly decent looking website and one that doesn’t vanish and pop up on a new server every week. It must be hard wearing out your welcome so quickly and getting the boot from your server.

I’m very disappointed though. So far Mr Crabby Pants Spammer, who left me the snotty message about 2 weeks ago, hasn’t been back. Do you think I hurt his feelings? I can but hope.

Now colour me a cynic, but I sniff more to this than many of the main stream news outlets are reporting. This is being chocked up to deep rooted bigotry and American fear of Islam. I see a man who spotted an opportunity to increase his paranoid flock numbers so he can have a bigger following idolizing his every utterance.

If Jones pulls this stunt off and the mosque is moved think of how much power he will have, how large his congregation will grow because people will view him as a hero. If he doesn’t succeed and the book burning goes ahead, he will give those in the US who are being held hostage by their fears, a way of venting their terror and again, his following grows. Win-win situation for him. Everyone else looses.

Terry Jones is not a hero, as some are saying, he’s a garden variety opportunist who runs a cult. Okay there, I’ve used the “c” word. There is even a Facebook page that supports him, which thankfully doesn’t have a lot of followers. If the looming image of a book burning doesn’t terrify you, then you need a reality check. These people are mistaking freedom of speech for hate mongering. I have no doubts Jones believes everything he is preaching. I have every faith in the fact he hates Muslims, gays, everyone who stands up to him… in short the world at large. His following hovers around 100 people, and is seizing the chance to increase it. People like this love nothing more than having people hang on their every word, trembling in fear at the impending apocalypse and coughing up hard earned money to the church to ensure their passage to heaven.

Jones was booted out of his previous church in Germany, about a year ago. He was pastor for the Christian Community of Cologne until sometime in 2009 when he was forced to leave under a cloud of accusations of dipping into the church funds and his extreme radicalism in regards to Islam. His own daughter speaks out against his behaviour:

Jones’ daughter, Emma Jones, who still lives in Germany, was one of those accusing her father and stepmother of wrongdoing. Emma Jones had broken with the church, calling it a “cult” that “forced us with oppression to be obedient.”

“They used mental violence. They’d say, ‘If you’re not obedient, God will punish you,’ ” Emma Jones told The Gainesville Sun. Other former church members in Florida and Germany also described Jones’ style as abusive and cult-like.

Terry Jones led a cult in Germany article.

Radio Deutsche Welle reports leaders of the Christian Community asked him to leave because the focus of his sermons was becoming more Terry Jones centric and less about being a good Christian. In short, he was pushing his own cult of personality agenda over teachings of Christ. How extreme did his preachings become? Check this out:

Jones became increasingly radical as the years went by, former associates say. At one point he wanted to help a homosexual member to “pray away his sins.” Later he began to increasingly target Islam in his sermons. A congregation member reported that some members were afraid to attend services because they expected to be attacked by Muslims.

Der Sterm reported local Cologne authorities sniffed around the church when he allegedly dabbled in faith healing. He was accused of trying to organise nurses to encourage ill patients to stop their medical treatment and rely on prayer instead.

German authorities investigated the church and Jones, as well, for it’s fund raising activities. He had his congregation collect furniture and sell it for a profit. On the surface, this sounds innocent, until you realise this is a tax exempt organisation running a business (one geared to make a profit) out of the shell of a not for profit church. To make matters worse, he was also accused of using church money for his own expenses. You can’t do that if you have tax-exempt status. At one point, the church’s tax status was suspended. It has since been reinstated, but there was enough of a cloud over this that disturbed the Cologne authorities enough to launch the investigation in the first place.

The German church does not talk about this shady past. They simply say it was a parting of the ways based on a disagreement over his style of leadership. There is a much darker story, one I’m sure they are tired of and want nothing more to do with.

Jones is doing the same thing in Florida. The Dove Church runs a used furniture store (they call it “vintage furniture”), has an Ebay store to flog the items, uses the free labour of the congregation to sell the items (at a profit). Local Florida authorities are said to be interested in whether ALL the money goes to the church or whether some of it is funneled elsewhere. There in lies the problem. If you run a not-for-profit organisation, you cannot keep any of the money. The store is being run from church property, using congregation for free labour and claiming the money raised is “used to support Christian Organizations such as the Lisa Jones House in Gainesville, Florida, which helps those in need with things like bread, clothing, food, and furniture.” When you find members of the Dove Church have to rely on the local food bank for food, you wonder just how much of the church’s 1.6 million dollar value is actually going to help anyone outside of Jones and his closed circle. This is what he was accused of doing in Germany. Let’s hear from Jone’s daughter said about this:

Emma Jones, who still lives in Cologne after breaking with her parents and the church, said TS and Company, which first was established in Germany in 2004 by Terry and Sylvia Jones, fed the private coffers of her father and stepmother in Cologne.

Emma Jones and Heinz Koop – a former church elder in Germany – say church members confronted Terry and Sylvia Jones with an itemized list of alleged abuses such as a car purchased by the church for their son, salaries paid by the church for TS and Company employees and donated furniture that was sold for profit.
Gainsville Sun newspaper – A look at the Dove World Outreach

There were also allegations Jones use minors to sell the furniture, with them working up to 12 hours a day in the furniture store. His current church is pretty much a closed book when it comes to the internal workings. The basic problem when looking into groups like this, is the fact fear plays a strong role in keeping people quiet. The fear of hell and damnation is a powerful motivator.

The story gets a bit muddled when you start looking into the church’s financial situation. On the one hand the church is tax-exempt, then it is claimed TS and Company pays taxes, but it uses church members for free labour and they use church property to work from. There is no clear division between church and business. What makes this all murkier is the home in Slidell, La., he purchased in January 2007 for $303,900 and a condo in Paradise Island Towers Condo on Treasure Island, Florida along with 6 other properties worth more than $650,000. Just how much money does the furniture business make during an economic downturn? This is a small church, and reportedly a small business but that’s a lot of cash floating around.

If you want to see deeper into Pastor Jone’s mind, look at the manual he distributes to the (few) students who attend the Dove academy. I don’t know about the rest of you, but before I send anyone off to study at an academy/school, I’d demand a modicum of literacy from those in charge. The rulebook is a rambling, occasionally incoherent and frightening look into the minds behind the church. I just love a manual that has a great big honking typo on the first page:

” The goal of the Academy is for each student to develop a stabile lifestyle of Discipline in order to become a strong apostolic Fife Fold Minister in our Apostolic Ministry System.”

I guess the good pastor’s computers don’t use spell check. Who needs stability when you have brimstone burning in your soul! I understand the odd typo or occasional mangled sentence. We all have brain dead moments. But seriously! This is supposed to be a manual distributed by school leaders!! Literacy and coherence is not optional. I’m not sure what the Fife Fold Minister is by the way. I suspect it’s a typo as well and should read Five Fold Minister, but given the ramblings coming out of this organisation, it could be a Fife. Anything in quotes is taken verbatim from the manual – the typos and grammatical errors are not mine.

Spell check can’t solve the problem with this next section:
“If for any reason a student missed receiving the homework, and failed the test the next day, this is not an excuse.”

Section 5 deals with food:
“Sweets, cake and things like that are not allowed” Ohhh… shucks cancel my membership. Give up my apple pie and chocolate cake? Only from my cold, dead hands. This explains a lot about Jones. I have a philosophy – there is nothing that can’t be made better by a cup of tea and chocolate cake.

“No eating out in restaurants” – it’s difficult to control a person’s thinking if they are exposed to the outside world.

“Students will be put on the scale once a week to follow the tendency. Each student received his weight goal, that must be reached, otherwise this category is failed”. This paragraph could be labeled “epic fail”. I keep wandering back to “the tendency”. Are you confused as well? Tendency to eat? Tendency to be human?

There is a section on cleanliness. Now I don’t object to making your students shower. I just can’t stop laughing at the way it’s put: “Mouth, sweat areas, hair, feet hands.” That’s the entire line. I’m assuming he meant it to be included in the section on having regular showers, but it just hangs there. “Sweat areas”? That is going into my list of amusing things to ponder when I’m stuck underground on the subway.

Now we move into the creepy domain dealing with section 6. Family and relationships.
“- During Academy you are not allowed to visit family members or friends, or receiving visits. This time is giving God and the student is supposed to spend all his time to study, practice and grow on order to become a true and faithful Minister.
- Family occasions like weddings, funerals or Birthdays are no exception to this rule.
- No phone calls. Exceptions can be made under certain circumstances but only after receiving permission.”
Total isolation from your support network – there’s that “c” word rearing it’s nasty head again.

I’m going to go to hell for this one but… “Singles are not allowed to have romantic relationships to the opposite sex.” Hmm does seems discriminatory – gays can have a relationship but … oh wait… I forgot… Dove Church hates gays too so I guess they assume there will be no gays there. Also Pastor Jones, if you read this, for the love of God it should read “Singles are not allowed to have romantic relationships” full stop. Or if you insist, “Singles are not allowed to have romantic relationships WITH the opposite sex.” Sorry, a grammatical breakdown moment there. It won’t happen again.

“In order to obey God, we have to leave the family behind! Jesus said: those who are doing the will of God are my family.” Again, isolation, the key component of all good cults. Mix this with a fire and brimstone condemnation of the world being at the “Gates of Hell”, hatred of any group that doesn’t meet with your approval and bingo. The Dove Church’s motto could be “bring me your fearful, your terrified. Bring me your tired and meek so that I may use them.”

The tenor of politics south of the border has created fertile ground for Jones and his ilk. What is sad, is the fact I’m not surprised by the call to burn books (whether it’s the Qur’an, Harry Potter or Peter Rabbit is irelevant). What truely saddens me is I am surprised this hasn’t happened sooner. When you have “news” channels such as Fox, mainstream politicians like Palin and the Teaparty screaming at the top of their lungs that it’s all the liberals’ fault for everything wrong in the world and we need to have a new revolution to put things back to right (read back to fundamentalist faith built in their own image), and calling for a new holy war to purge the nation of everything they fear, how can we be shocked when someone like Pastor Jones snatches his 15 minutes of fame away from them.

Nice con job Mr Jones. What stunt will you pull next to steal the spotlight?

You can read the manual a the Smoking Gun

____

Correction: When I did the original research for this article, Dove World Outreach membership was pegged at around 100 people. Since that time, estimates have been adjusted down to about 50 members.